hen Sergei Korolev and his team of aerospace experts sent Sputnik I into orbit on October 4, 1957, they launched more than a satellite; they launched the space race. Before Sputnik, the Cold War was fought on earth. After Sputnik, even the heavens became a battleground. They became a battleground not so much because "victory" in space promised definite military or scientific rewards--these in fact were secondary objectives--but first and foremost because in the Cold War propaganda war, no achievement by one side could go unmatched by the other without a loss of face.

Ironically, Khrushchev had approved the Sputnik program without much enthusiasm. He was always glad for an opportunity to beat the Americans, but sending a 184-pound object into orbit hardly seemed like the most exciting way to do it. If he was shocked by the tremendous wave of fear, envy, and acclaim that Sputnik triggered, so too was President Eisenhower. Some American experts had warned the President that the first artificial satellite in space would be a propaganda coup on a par with the development of the A-bomb, but Eisenhower had dismissed such warnings as exaggerated. He thought the hysteria triggered by Sputnik was misplaced, all the more so because he knew that the U. S. could easily have been the first to launch a satellite, if it had chosen to do so. Both the Army and the Navy had satellite programs that had been puttering along for several years, but they were never given high priority--until Sputnik. As it was, America did launch its own satellite just four months after Sputnik I, but the damage to its prestige had already been done.

Sputnik came as a shock to the world, and especially to Americans, partly because such an advanced technological feat suggested that Soviet science was advancing more rapidly than the West's. Scientific and technological achievements, in turn, seemed to justify Soviet claims that the Communist Party had produced a superior society. Sputnik, Pravda gloated, proved "the most daring dreams of mankind a reality" could be achieved under communism.

For Americans, the sight of Sputnik overhead in the night sky diminished the sense of invulnerability that being on a continent with oceans on both sides had provided. Just a decade earlier, the United States had possessed a monopoly on atomic weapons. Since then, the Soviets had exploded an A-bomb and an H-bomb. More frighteningly, the ability to launch a satellite was a vivid demonstration of Soviet rocket power, substantiating Soviet claims to have developed ballistic missiles (ICBMs)--which could send atomic bombs to American soil in just thirty minutes.

Despite the resounding public relations triumph it appeared to be at the time, in the long run, Sputnik could be considered a Pyrrhic victory. What the United States did not know--because of the impenetrable veil of secrecy over the Soviet space program--was that achievements like Sputnik were the results of extraordinary bursts of effort. Success was assured only when a project became a top priority and received scarce resources that might have been more usefully diverted to agriculture, industry, or the military. Even then, Soviet scientists often operated under conditions of hardship. In the United States, by contrast, the fears of slipping behind awakened by Sputnik quickly engendered an extraordinarily broad-based, long-term commitment to scientific education and research.

The federal government took on an unprecedented role in education, spending heavily on science and math, and establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with the express purpose of making America the world's leader in space technology and exploration. These American efforts helped lay the ground for its technological superiority in the long term.

In the short term, though, victory in the space race seemed an open question. At the end of 1960, the score was 13 to 33: 13 successful launches for the Soviet Union, 33 for the United States. The Soviets emphasized heavy payloads and "firsts" (first dog in space, first woman in space); the U.S. emphasized smaller satellites with microelectronics and advanced espionage and scientific capabilities. In 1961, the Soviets scored another important "first," sending Yuri Gagarin into space. The Soviet triumph could hardly have come at a worse time for the new Kennedy administration: a mere three days later it was humiliated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which poorly equipped Cuban exiles made a even more poorly executed attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. With American prestige at stake, Kennedy quickly moved to start the Apollo program, which would lead in 1969 to Neil Armstrong's "great step for mankind."

Such was the nature of the Cold War rivalry that the Soviets had virtually no choice but to try to beat the Americans to the moon. Their effort was spearheaded by Sergei Korolev, a brilliant designer and charismatic leader known to the Soviet public only as the "Chief Designer." The man behind the spectacular Soviet successes in space, Korolev was by far the most dominant figure in Soviet rocketry and space exploration. He was the leading force behind the first Soviet ICBM, the first satellite, the first man in space, the first spacewalk. Technical brilliance alone would never have brought him such successes; he also needed agility and cunning to negotiate the intricacies of the Soviet bureaucracy. He was adept at everything from getting proper food supplies for his bleak outpost at Baykonur to winning approval and funding for his projects--often by plying higher-ups with alcohol and misrepresenting his intentions.

Whereas space exploration and the military were kept separate in the United States, in the Soviet Union the two were closely intertwined. For Korolev, whose true passion was space exploration, working on military applications was often a necessary compromise. At the same time, the Soviet military often saw Korolev's space projects as needless and wasteful. Scarce resources, in the view of the generals, were best spent on technology with direct military value, and for this reason they had opposed Sputnik and now opposed the moon mission. Their opposition probably doomed it to failure: defense funds went instead to ballistic missiles and submarine delivery systems, and the moon mission never received the priority it needed in order to beat the massive American effort.

Despite their loss in the moon race, and despite Korolev's death some three years before then, the Soviet Union continued to rack up achievements in space. But the space race was not always a hostile competition: depending on the level of international tension, Soviets and Americans sometimes cooperated in space. In 1963 President Kennedy had proposed that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. pool their efforts in a joint endeavor to reach the moon--an offer that the Soviets (who publicly claimed to be uninterested in a moon landing) quickly rejected. Ten years later, though, improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations during the era of détente created a climate more favorable to cooperation. The outcome was the Apollo-Soyuz "handshake in space" of 1975, when American and Soviet spacecraft linked together in orbit for two days, to applause from around the world. The emphasis on cooperation was, however, short-lived, and by the 1980s the Soviet space station Mir and America's space shuttle program were the main contestants in the battle for space.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the space program, like everything else, rapidly deteriorated. Having lost the Cold War, the Russian government has no incentive to spend the billions required to maintain a world-class space program, and it is in any case preoccupied with stemming more pressing problems like falling living standards, drastic declines in industrial output, and crumbling infrastructure. Korolev's former stronghold at Baykonur is being propped up by Western funding for the international space station, but the Russian space program today contains hardly a hint of its former glory.