Four of America's moonwalkers are still alive: Aldrin (Apollo 11), David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17). That moment really united the human race.Neil Armstrong and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin were the first of 12 human beings who walked on the Moon. The Soviet astronaut Alexei Leonov wrote: ‘Everyone forgot that we were all citizens of different countries on Earth. For all the years of rivalry, the viewing room in Russia burst into huge applause as Neil Armstrong took the first steps. In the end it was of course the Americans who won the race, in 1969, when their astronauts first walked on the Moon. The Luna programme continued and in 1966, the year of Korolev’s death, Luna 9 made the first soft landing on the Moon. In 1963, on Khruschev’s orders, he propelled the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, which enabled the Soviet Union to make propaganda mileage by claiming that under communism women were treated equally to men.Īfter 1961, under President Kennedy, American efforts intensified while the Soviet programme suffered from infighting after Korolev’s death at 59 in 1966, following an operation that went wrong. While the Americans were in disarray, with their space efforts publicly failing (Russian setbacks were kept strictly secret), Korolev went on to put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. It was an astonishing feat of navigation and it was now possible to draw a tentative map of the Moon’s hidden side. Only three weeks later, Luna 3 was launched on October 4th, the second anniversary of Sputnik 1, to swing round the far side of the Moon and send back the first fuzzy pictures of its dark side, which no one had seen before. The only way of annoying him seemed to be by refusing to let him into Disneyland. He lectured Americans on the virtues of communism and the immorality of scantily clothed chorus girls. Luna 2’s success enabled him to appear beaming with rumbustious pride. It seemed clear in the United States that the timing had been heavily influenced by the fact that the Soviet premier, Nikita Khruschev, was due to arrive in the US immediately afterwards, to be welcomed by President Eisenhower. The closest any American probe had come to the Moon at that point was 37,000 miles. The scientific results of Luna 2 were similar to those of Luna 1, but the psychological impact of Luna 2 was profound. The spacecraft had no propulsion system of its own and the third and final stage of its propelling rocket crashed on the moon about half an hour after Luna 2 itself.

It confirmed that the moon had only a tiny radiation field and, so far as could be observed, no radiation belts. It also carried metal pendants which it scattered on the surface on impact, with the hammer and sickle of the USSR on one side and the launch date on the other. It was spherical in shape with antennae sticking out of it and carried instruments for measuring radiation, magnetic fields and meteorites. Luna 2 (Luna is Russian for Moon) weighed 390 kilograms. The total silence meant that Luna had hit its target and there was great jubilation in the control room. Korolev and his people were listening as the signals coming back from the spacecraft suddenly stopped. At just past midnight Moscow time on September 14th it crashed some 240,000 miles away on the Moon not far from the Sea of Tranquillity (perhaps a not entirely appropriate location). Then, on September 12th, 1959 Luna 2 was launched. In January 1959 the spacecraft Luna 1 (which Korolev called Mechta, ‘the Dream’) was launched at the Moon, but missed by around 3,700 miles and went into orbit between the Sun and Mars. More Sputnik missions tested life-support systems and re-entry procedures. Sputnik 2 took the first living creature out into space, a sweet-tempered dog called Laika, though she did not last as long as the Russians pretended. Sputnik 1, the first satellite ever launched, created a sensation in 1957 when it hurtled out into space and orbited the Earth every 96 minutes before falling back into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the 1950s he developed a massive and at the time almost unthinkably powerful rocket, the R-7, which would propel Soviet spacecraft to the Moon. He was a commanding figure who did not suffer fools gladly and his staff treated him almost as a god. Their programme was directed by Sergei Korolev, a brilliant aeronautical engineer and expert on rockets, who had displeased Stalin and spent time in the Gulag in the 1930s. To American astonishment and dismay, the Russians at first took a commanding lead.

The space race between the United States and the Soviet Union brought an engaging touch of science fiction to the Cold War.

First man on the moon