Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon in his spacesuit, photographed by Neil Armstrong in July 1969
Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, Apollo 11, 1969
Marked Baikonur

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The space race

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 and sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961. The United States landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969, and in 1975 American and Soviet spacecraft docked in orbit.

Place
Baikonur · Cape Canaveral · Houston · The Sea of TranquillityThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
Neil Armstrong, NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeNo human had left the Earth.

  1. ISputnik
  2. IIGagarin
  3. IIIValentina Tereshkova
  4. IVThe human computers
  5. VApollo 11
  6. VIApollo–Soyuz

AfterPeople had walked on the Moon.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Sergei Korolev
  • Yuri Gagarin
  • Valentina Tereshkova
  • Katherine Johnson
  • Neil Armstrong
  • Buzz Aldrin

Objects

  • Sputnik 1
  • Moon rock
  • The Apollo guidance computer

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1957 to 1975. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?