Space Race
The success of Sputnik 1 kicked off the space race. NASA

Without the Soviet Union, the U.S. might never have landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. The space race was crucial to America's development as a technological power and -- for the majority of it -- the U.S. was trailing the Soviet Union's vaunted space program. An illustrated booklet by Karlo Kukavicic, published on Papermine, explores the history of the Soviet space program, beginning in the 1930s and ending with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

The Soviet space program began as a wartime developer and manufacturer of rockets. Space exploration began in earnest after the end of World War II when the U.S. and Soviet Union began recruiting German scientists and engineers. Rockets and missiles were still a focus for the Soviet space program, but the country would soon turn its attention to exploration with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. The satellite was the first man-made object to enter Earth's orbit and the Soviet space program would continue to have early success through its Sputnik (satellites and spacecraft_ and Vostok -- human spaceflight -- programs.

Sputnik's success had a massive impact on the American public and sparked the "space age." "Fear the U.S. had fallen behind led U.S. policymakers to accelerate space and weapons programs," the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian writes. "In the late 1950s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted about Soviet technological superiority and growing stockpiles of ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles], so the United States worked simultaneously to develop its own ICBMs to counter what it assumed was a growing stockpile of Soviet missiles directed against the United States."

The Soviet space program laid claim to the first animal in space -- Laika the dog -- and the first human in space -- Yuri Gagarin. Alexei Leonov completed the first spacewalk in 1965. The Soviet Union also reached the moon first -- Luna 2 -- in 1959. By the 1960s, the U.S. began catching up, and the Apollo program solidified America's victory in space. The race to the moon was over, but the Cold War powers continued developing their space programs and eventually would collaborate in 1975 to ease Cold War Tensions.

The history of the Soviet space program can be viewed below.