first space race launching the worlds first satellites

Very good. No dust jacket issued xviii, 214 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Suggested Reading. Index. Foreword by James A. Van Allen. Matt Bille is an author in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is also a naturalist, historian, science writer, and defense consultant. A former Air Force officer, he is the author of over 20 technical publications and articles on space-related topics. He is the lead author of the NASA-published history The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites (2004), a groundbreaking account of the early Space Age. He wrote two books on the world's rarest and least-known animals, Rumors of Existence (1995) and Shadows of Existence (2004), and is working on his third, tentatively titled Seas, Sharks, and Serpents. He has been a freelance contributor to reference books including Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia and the Nature Yearbook of Science & Technology. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and is a member of the History Committee of the American Astronautical Society. The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), for supremacy in spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations that occurred following World War II, enabled by captured German rocket technology and personnel. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority. The Space Race spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned space probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon. The competition began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Unio

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