History RaeTold

The Space Race; or, Everything is About Dicks Do Not @ Me on This 

Before we begin, it’s only fair to give full disclosure: I hate space. It’s too big, we don’t know what it’s doing up there, and nobody knows where it’s been. It genuinely makes no sense to me why we keep going up there, where there’s no oxygen and probably aliens much like the film Aliens (the second one, not the first one), and people die All. The. Time. Like, Jesus Christ guys, did nobody else watch the documentary Gravity? Fuck me. It’s a literal airless void. Makes no sense. It’s also closer to London than Yorkshire, which is fucking terrifying. It’s too close. Back the fuck off, space.

That being said, let’s talk some motherfucking space shall we.

In the late 50s and early 60s, America and the USSR were At War. But not at regular war, with guns and explosions and death and whatnot. No, this was the kind of passive aggressive war you have with your downstairs neighbour who REFUSES to clean the communal area even though most of the mess is hers and so you refuse to too because it’s not exactly fair that you’re always doing it and she was literally complaining that you never do it even though you’re the only one who does do it and now you’re both clearly waiting for the other to break and clean it but you will not break you will never break because you are in the right and it’s only going to take her five minutes why does it have to be such a big deal GOD LINDSAY.

Look, I might be having some issues with my downstairs neighbour. I don’t want to talk about it.

So the USSR and the US were at the kind of war where they just glared at each other and sent spies over to each other’s countries and wrote mean stuff about each other in the papers, but didn’t actually, like… do anything. The primary reason they never did anything was because, at this point, both nations had nuclear weapons, which had been provisionally tested on roughly 200,000 Japanese civilians a few years previously and had proved fairly devastating. And so they knew that if they nuked the other country, they’d get nuked right back and everyone on the planet would fucking die. Which seemed a little extreme. So instead, they just sat there, sending over spies and building bigger and bigger rockets but not really doing anything with them besides waving them around. Men, amirite?

Despite their big, hard rockets, then, both sides were feeling somewhat impotent. How were they supposed to prove that they had the most powerful, throbbing rocket if they weren’t even able to shoot them?

I’ll tell you how. By setting off some different rockets into space.

In 1955 the US was like “HEY GUYS HEY GUESS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO SEND SOME SHIT INTO THE SKY” and so the USSR was like “YEAH WELL GUESS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO SEND SOME SHIT UP TOO BUT GUESS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO SEND BIGGER SHIT AND IT’S GOING TO GO THERE FIRST”. And so began the Space Race.

First things first, they had to put some rules in place. They signed a treaty which had hilarious conditions like “don’t put weapons of mass destruction on the moon” and “you can’t own the moon, it isn’t yours” and “if you break space you have to fix it”. Which all seems fairly elementary, but you just fucking know someone would do something idiotic if you didn’t explicitly tell them not to. It’s like children, except they have nuclear warheads.

Russia got the first win of the race, sending up a satellite called Sputnik, which looked like those things you get given in church as a kid where you put some Liquorice Allsorts on cocktail sticks and stuck them in an orange and set it on fire (you all went to Church of Scotland as kids so this all makes sense, right?). A few months later, the US launched their own satellite called Explorer. 1-0 to the Russians.

After a while, they started firing living things into space. They started with flies, and then mice, and then some monkeys, and eventually a little Russian dog called Laika, who was the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Sadly, there was never a plan for Laika’s return, and she died from stress only a few hours into the flight, because human beings are the fucking worst and the robot revolution can’t come soon enough. So… I guess that’s 2-0 to the Russians, but you know what? They don’t get that point. Minus 100 points for killing Laika, you bastards.

After that, more dogs and a chimp called Ham and some rabbits all went into spaceuntil finally, in 1961, a 26-year-old Russian cosmonaut (which is the much cooler Russian term for astronaut) called Yuri Gagarin went all the way up into space all by himself. Twenty fucking six, guys, and he was the first human to leave the planet. I’m twenty six. What have I done? Fucking nothing. Emailed you bastards about Wikipedia articles I’ve read. I’m a disappointment to myself and my people.

Less than a month later, an American called Alan Shepard made it into space but who’s ever heard of him? Too little, too late Alan. 3-0 to the Russians. Don’t think I’ve forgiven you for that bullshit with the dog, though.

They then started sending up lunar probes which, according to my scientific knowledge of exactly zero, were things that… poked the moon? Yeah that sounds right.

But this was all just a warm-up for the big one: putting a man on the moon. It had to be a man on the moon because women would probably fuck with the gravity by menstruating or some shit and because the 60s were a sexist, dog-killing hellscape. (Fun fact: the engineers who were working on sending the first woman into space gave her ONE HUNDRED TAMPONS for a week-long trip into space because men are idiots and literally not one of them thought to ask a local lady how big a period is).

A bunch of missions went sort of moon-adjacent, and the USSR and USA even almost did a joint moon venture, but then JFK got his head blown off by a CIA conspiracy (true fact, don’t @ me) and the Russians backed out, and it was back to dick-waving and yelling across the Atlantic. 

AND THEN. On 16th July 1969, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Neil Armstrong (who I always get mixed up with Luke Skywalker, don’t ask me why) set foot on the surface of the moon. They were joined on their mission by pilot Michael Collins but nobody gives a shit about him because he just stayed in the command module and took pictures from the sky.

The moon landing was an act of mad fuckery, because, as I mentioned, there is no fucking air in space and we had never landed a spacecraft on another object before. The fuel that was used to lift back off from the moon had also NEVER BEEN TESTED before, because it was a one-use kinda deal, and so Neil and Buzz spent their whole time on the moon with NO IDEA if they could actually get off again. There was even a speech ALREADY WRITTEN for the president in the case of them getting stuck on the moon. I highly recommend you read it because it’s insane. And to make this even more fucking ridiculous, the three astronauts couldn’t afford the life insurance needed to go to the fucking moon where there is no fucking air and probably aliens and so instead they signed a bunch of merch before taking off, so their families could sell it for cash if they died because what the fuck.

When they landed, we are taught that they did two famous things: 1. Planted the American flag (arguably another phallic gesture to add to the acts of dick waving to date), and 2. Said the words “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” (again with the man shit, I am not even going to get started). What they don’t tell you is that they fucked both of these things up hilariously. The “small step” was in fact not a small step, because Neil Armstrong was not used to the moon’s gravity, and so didn’t step manfully onto the moon’s surface, he FUCKING LAUNCHED HIMSELF SIX FEET ACROSS THE MOON. Good work there, Neil. The flag also proved more difficult than planned, because it turns out the moon is a rock and it is not easy to shove a stick into a rock, something which we actually worked out very early on in our evolution when the first monkey tried to shove a stick into a rock and was unsuccessful. They finally managed to get it up (heh), took a quick photo, and then, when launching back off the moon (which they managed without incident, in case you were worried), the blast from the untested fuel knocked it over again. Good work again, lads. You’re doing great.

And then they went to rejoin Michael who was still chilling in the sky, and the three of them hurtled back to Earth, landed in the sea, and got picked up by a helicopter and put in a box (to prevent space-contamination – true fact, Google it). 

Bringing the final score to to 3-1.

And as much as I take the piss, this was actually only a few decades after the Wright bros launched their wee kite plane seven feet along a beach, so it’s pretty fucking incredible that, in that time, flight technology developed enough to take an actual human person to the moon. THE FUCKING MOON. Where not a single human being had ever been before (and not in the way that “not a single human being” had been to various “undiscovered” countries, when it was actually just racism and genocide, but in an actual literal way where NOBODY HAD EVER BEEN THERE BEFORE). It used to take us weeks to cross an ocean, and even then you had a pretty solid chance of death. And they went TO THE MOON. IN THE SKY. 

Not long after the moon landing, the USSR and USA made up, doing a joint space venture where an American ship docked in a Russian ship and the astronauts entered, which is a very heavy-handed and Freudian way to end the Space Race. Then, much in the way of children who are recovering from an afternoon-long argument, they made the International Space Station together. Everything’s sort of cool in the space world nowadays, aside from the lack of air and probable aliens. And now we’re going to Mars and shit. Elon Musk launched a car (penis) into space because he’s blatantly a supervillain. Space travel would be amazing if it wasn’t so horrifying. Science is incredible.

That being said.

It’s still all about dicks.