The Space Race
The Space Race was a 20th-century (1955–1972) competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), for supremacy in spaceflight capability. After World War II both the United States and the Soviet Union realized how important rocket research would be to the military. They each recruited the top rocket scientists from Germany to help with their research. Soon both sides were making progress in rocket technology. The Space Race began in 1955 when both countries announced that they would soon be launching satellites into orbit. The Soviets took the US announcement as a challenge and even established a commission whose goal was to beat the US in putting a satellite into space. On October 4, 1957 the Russians placed the first successful satellite into orbit. It was called Sputnik 1. The Russians had taken the lead in the Space Race. The Americans successfully launched their first satellite four months later called the Explorer 1, these events spiraled into what is know as the space race.
Nasa
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958. Since then NASA has conducted many manned and unmanned spaceflight programs throughout its history. Unmanned programs include the launching of the first American artificial satellites into Earth orbit for scientific and communications purposes, and sent scientific probes to explore the planets of the solar system, starting with Venus and Mars, and including "grand tours" of the outer planets. Manned programs include sending the first Americans into low Earth orbit (LEO), winning the Space Race against the Soviet Union by landing twelve men on the Moon from 1969 to 1972 in the Apollo program, developing a semi-reusable LEO Space Shuttle, and developing a LEO space station capability by itself and with the cooperation of several other nations including post-Soviet Russia. Some missions include both manned and unmanned aspects, such as the Galileo probe, which was deployed by astronauts in Earth orbit before being sent unmanned to Jupiter. NASA was the rise too power for the space race during the late 1950's as they were the responce to the Soviet Unions Actions.