ABSTRACT
The Space Age as a historical era coincided with the Cold War, and that is no coincidence. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the successful launch and orbits of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the rst person in space in 1961, American astronauts landing and walking on the Moon in 1969, the various space stations and space transportation systems developed thereafter, and other Space Age events happened in the context of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, allies of these two superpowers, and the unaligned (Third World) nations whose allegiance both sides sought (Figure 11.1). The Space Age, de ned by space travel, continued after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 1986, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,
and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it continued without the direction and funding of the military imperative of the Cold War space rivalry and without the popular and political support of earlier times. There were, however, more nations seeking international stature and scienti c and technical development through space programs.
