Three weeks later, on May 25, President John F. ShepardвЂ™s suborbital flight lasted just over 15 minutes. A little more than three weeks later, NASA launched astronaut Alan Shepard into space, not on an orbital flight, but on a suborbital trajectory-a flight that goes into space but does not go all the way around Earth. The first human in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who made one orbit around Earth on April 12, 1961, on a flight that lasted 108 minutes. When it began operations in October of 1958, NASA absorbed what had been called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and several other research and military facilities, including the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (the Redstone Arsenal) in Huntsville. In 1958, space exploration activities in the United States were consolidated into a new government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This was for an experiment operated by researcher James Van Allen, which, together with measurements from later satellites, proved the existence of what are now called the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth. One instrument was a Geiger counter for detecting cosmic rays. Explorer carried several instruments into space for conducting science experiments. Army at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the German rocket engineers were led by Wernher von Braun and had developed the German V2 rocket into a more powerful rocket, called the Jupiter C, or Juno.

satellite launch consisted largely of German rocket engineers who had once developed ballistic missiles for Nazi Germany. The United States made two failed attempts to launch a satellite into space before succeeding with a rocket that carried a satellite called Explorer on January 31, 1958. Prior to the launch of Sputnik, the United States had been working on its own capability to launch a satellite. This was Sputnik II, a satellite that carried a living creature, a dog named Laika. Then, a month later, on November 3, 1957, the Soviets achieved an even more impressive space venture. technologies that could endanger Americans, the United States grew worried. The radio beeps could be detected on the ground as the satellite passed overhead, so people all around the world knew that it was really in orbit. After reaching space, Sputnik orbited Earth once every 96 minutes. Carried atop an R7 rocket, the Sputnik satellite was able to send out beeps from a radio transmitter.

This competition came to a head with the launch of Sputnik.

In the U.S.S.R., the rocket designer Sergei Korolev had developed the first ICBM, a rocket called the R7, which would begin the space race. For several years, the two superpowers had been competing to develop missiles, called intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), to carry nuclear weapons between continents. This happened during the period of political hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States known as the Cold War. We human beings have been venturing into space since October 4, 1957, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.

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