Space Race Research Paper

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Introduction: The detailed study of space exploration initially took off in the first years of the 1900s, driven by Russian school teacher and mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s innovative research on the use of rockets for spaceflight (The European Space Agency). Eventually, space exploration became a serious objective in the 1950s when the Soviet Union initiated their space research. This occurred with the onset of The Cold War, an ongoing period of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States following World War II. As the two nations emerged as the leading global powers by the end of WWII, suspicions and competition over nuclear weapons shaped the dynamics of the Cold War era. This was a nonviolent ideological war; therefore, …show more content…
This leads to the complex question— is human space travel actually beneficial to society?

The Spur of the Space Race: The first Space Race was spurred in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space: Sputnik. In 1955, the United States of America announced their plan to send the first artificial satellite into space, but the Soviet Union had already been researching and ended up launching one first (Space Race Timeline). According to Captain John Shaw, the Sputnik satellite was a symbol of passing the United States technologically. In the midst of an ideological war, the launch of Sputnik was a milestone that allowed the public to gauge the perceived superiority of the global superpowers. The launch of …show more content…
Over time, humans have benefited from space exploration because it ended in the research that prompted the creation of things such as GPS. These advancements may benefit society, but overall sending humans to space is not beneficial to society because historically the motive to explore beyond earth is skewed and ends in human casualties. The Space Race is an exemplification of this with the launch of Sputnik initiating a race to show superiority between the USSR and the US. This race caused rush work which ended in human lives being lost, such as those in Apollo 1. It is necessary that humans research and develop far more technology before sending our own kind to space to ensure that politics are left out of an endeavor that should be purely scientific. For politics to be excluded from space exploration, there must be a collective agreement among humans to prioritize responsibility and hold politicians accountable, to transform the journey to space from a competition to a collaborative effort between all countries. A limitation of this argument is that political support plays a role in funding space exploration. Inherently, this will not stop, but politicians around the world should collaborate efforts rather than competing against each other to make an even stronger space
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