In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Space Program was on a role.

They launched the first satellite into space.

They launched the first man and woman into space, and they conducted the first space walk.

Then around 1966 1966 everything changed. The momentum they had

ground to a halt and the Americans quickly surpassed them in the space race.

What happened? Learn more about Sergei Coralev, the most important Russian you probably have never heard of,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. There was probably nothing more emblematic of the Cold War than the space race.

It was a peaceful competition where the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to show

that their system was superior

through accomplishments in spaceflight. It was a competition that at least at first

the Soviets had a commanding lead. They managed to launch the first artificial satellite into orbit,

Sputnik 1 in October of 1957.

They launched the first living thing into orbit, a dog named Lika just a month later.

The dog, unfortunately, went on a planned one-way trip. In 1961,

Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space when he made an orbit of the

Earth and safely returned. Valentina Terreshkova became the first woman in space when she

orbited the Earth 48 times in 1963. In 1965, Alexi Leonov became the first

human to exit a space capsule and conduct a spacewalk. These were all very impressive

accomplishments, even more so when viewed through the lens of the Cold War and the space race.

In these first years of the space race, the United States constantly found themselves coming up second and getting one upped by the Soviets.

The American Space Program was extremely open, including all of their successes and failures.

The brains behind the American Space Program was a German rocket engineer named Werner

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