The Space Race: How We Actually Reached the Moon

The Space Race is remembered as a single image: a man in a white suit stepping onto the Moon in 1969. Getting there took about twelve years, two superpowers, and a series of firsts that were mostly not American.

The Soviets went first, repeatedly

The starting gun was Sputnik 1 in 1957 — the first artificial satellite, a metal sphere the size of a beach ball that did little more than beep. It was enough to terrify the United States, because the rocket that lifted it could reach anywhere.

The Soviets kept getting there first. First animal in orbit: Laika, a dog, in 1957. First human in space: Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. First woman in space: Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. By the time the US caught up, it was losing a race it had assumed it would lead — which is precisely why President Kennedy pointed everything at the Moon, a target far enough away that America might get there first.

Apollo 11

In July 1969, Apollo 11 carried three men to the Moon. Neil Armstrong was the first to step onto the surface, followed by Buzz Aldrin. The third, Michael Collins, never landed — he orbited alone in the command module, which is one of the great quiz traps: name the third astronaut, and most people cannot.

Two facts people misremember. "The Eagle has landed" was the landing; "one small step for man" was the walk, hours later. And only twelve people have ever walked on the Moon, all of them between 1969 and 1972. No one has been back since.

The myths

• The waving flag. There is no wind on the Moon. The flag looks rippled because a horizontal rod holds its top edge out, and the creases from being folded never fell out.
• The "million-dollar space pen". NASA did not spend a fortune inventing a pen that writes in zero gravity while the Soviets "just used a pencil". Early astronauts did use pencils; the Fisher Space Pen was developed privately, at the inventor's own expense, and later bought cheaply by both sides.
• The landing was faked. It was not. Among much other evidence, the missions left retroreflectors on the surface that scientists still bounce lasers off today to measure the Earth-Moon distance.

The people behind the rockets

The astronauts got the parades, but the arithmetic that put them on the right trajectory was done by others — among them Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician whose calculations were trusted enough that John Glenn reportedly asked her to check the computer's numbers before his own flight. For decades her name was left out of the story entirely.

Even Apollo 13, the mission that never landed, belongs here: an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon, and the crew were brought home alive through improvisation on the ground and in the capsule. "Houston, we've had a problem" is the line — present tense "have" is the misquote — and the rescue is arguably a greater achievement than the landing it replaced.

The Space Race is full of these: a famous headline in front, and a more interesting, more crowded true story just behind it. Which, as ever, is where the best questions come from.