The Race to Space - Mercury to Apollo

The "Space Race" started in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnic 1, the first manmade satellite, into space on October 4, 1957. The United States's first attempt at putting a satellite into orbit exploded on the launch pad. However, on January 31, 1958, the United States launched Explore1 into orbit.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need for an organized space program. In April of 1958, he started NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administrations) to help America win the race to space.

After several successful satellite launches, Project Mercury was born in 1958. Project Mercury's goal was to put a manned capsule in orbit around the earth. To do this, NASA had to develop powerful rockets that could shoot the spacecraft into space. They also had to figure out how the capsule would land and how to recover it after splashdown. In order to keep track of the crafts, tracking stations were set up around the world.

NASA also had to develop methods of keeping a person alive in space. No one knew how the human body would react to space conditions, so intense medical tests were required to find if the astronauts were healthy enough to fly.

Because space was unexplored, the astronauts had to be ready for anything. They went through very intense training before they could fly. The rocket and capsule that would carry the astronaut into space had to be tested. On December 19, 1960, NASA successfully launched a Mercury capsule on top of a Redstone rocket into space.

The second Mercury flight had a passenger, a 3-year-old chimpanzee. Ham experienced 6 ½ minutes of weightlessness during his 18 minutes of flight. In preforming all of his jobs well, Ham proved that a human could function in space.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy stated that the United States was second in the Space Race. He gave America a hard task: Put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. It would be hard, but America was up to the challenge.