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The World Of The Space Race

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The Beachball That Started a War
On October 4th, 1957 the simple action of launching a beachball-sized hunk of metal into our orbit, reshaped the lives of people in the United States and across the world for the next years to come. This small ball of metal was Sputnik, a Soviet satellite with a radio transmitter inside letting out a small “beeping” sound. This object, as unsophisticated as it was, had the power to set the entire country into panic. To US officials this action not only made it clear that the Soviet superpower of Russia was more technologically advanced, but for all we knew they could be putting nuclear warfare into space. To the US this thought was unbearable, and because of this it would go on to set off a race of the century, the Space Race. A race to put technology into space, a race that would change American life at home and in foreign policy. From changes within the school system, to the Red Scare, life would be changed drastically in the years to come, not only in the U.S, but in Russia as well.
The Cold War was the period of time after World War II, as the conflicts of other countries subsided, the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were bubbling up, threatening to overflow. During the World War II, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Once the war had ended, it used the Soviet troops left behind in these countries to set up puppet regimes. The next threat to the U.S. was China, which became a

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