The superpower competition in spaceflight between the United States and the Soviet Union from roughly 1955 to 1975 — beginning with Sputnik's shock in October 1957, cresting with Neil Armstrong's footstep on the Moon in July 1969, and closing with the Apollo–Soyuz handshake in 1975 — a contest that was simultaneously a proxy of nuclear rivalry, a propaganda battle over which system could master nature, and the founding moment of the technological-managerial state.
In October 1957, a metal sphere the size of a beach ball began circling the Earth every 96 minutes. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds and carried only a radio transmitter. But the rocket that put it there was the same rocket that could carry a nuclear warhead to New York. Within a year, Congress had created NASA, passed the National Defense Education Act, and poured billions into American science. A single beeping satellite remade a superpower's entire relationship to education, technology, and the state. Twelve years later, two Americans walked on the Moon. The Soviet program that had launched the race never sent a cosmonaut beyond Earth's orbit.