In the summer of 1968, officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were worried about the accelerating space race with the Soviet Union and whether the United States could keep up. By the end of July that year, the Soviets had launched forty-five rockets into space; America managed half that. The Central Intelligence Agency warned that the Soviets were restarting their Soyuz spacecraft program and were close to making an attempt to orbit the moon. Meanwhile, technical problems plagued the US’s Apollo program. Prospects for meeting John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s looked grim.
NASA met the challenge of a fast-moving space race by speeding it up even further than many thought possible. The accelerationist strategy won out. By December, Apollo 8 circled the moon. Seven months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left footprints on the Sea of Tranquility. The Soviets never made it.
