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Sputnik's Beep to Armstrong's Boot: Twelve Years, Two Empires
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
From Sputnik's first signal in 1957 to Apollo 11's Moon landing in 1969, this episode traces the full arc of the space race — the rival engineers, the fatal fires, and the 900 million people watching. Two superpowers, two scarred visionaries, and twelve years that rewrote what humanity believed was possible.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine. It's past ten in the evening on the east coast of the United States.
Rewind to October fourth, nineteen fifty-seven. A Soviet R-7 rocket lifts from a launch pad in Kazakhstan and carries a polished metal sphere into low Earth orbit.
April twelfth, nineteen sixty-one. Yuri Gagarin climbs into a Vostok capsule and completes one orbit of the Earth in one hundred and eight minutes.
Between Mercury and Apollo, there's a program most people skip over entirely. Ten flights.
Nineteen sixty-seven is the year the space race almost stops. January twenty-seventh.
What Apollo required in purely industrial terms is difficult to fully absorb. At its peak, roughly four hundred thousand people were working on the program across NASA centers and the contractor network.
Apollo eight launches in December nineteen sixty-eight. It's an audacious mission.
Six months later, it's July. Apollo eleven is on its way.
The nine hundred million viewers didn't just watch a technological achievement. They watched the space race reach its singular destination, and in doing so, they watched it change into something it hadn't been before.
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