5.+Finish+Line

Finish Line! Though many Americans felt that Neil Armstrong's historic walk on the moon in 1969 served as the unoffical end to the space race, this is highly debatable. Cold War tensions between the U.S and Soviet governments still remained high, though the U.S.S.R abandoned their ambitions of sending men to the moon following Apollo 11's success. To this date, no Russian has ever set foot on the moon. However, after six years and a staggering five more Apollo manned missions to the moon, American government's willingness to provide massive budgets to NASA began to wane. Then, on July 17, 1975, the most symbolic and climactic event of the space race occured. The ASTP Apollo spacecraft (unofficially dubbed Apollo 18 and the last of the Apollo rockets) docked in space with the Russian space station Soyuz 19. While the mission certainly entailed some scientific experimentation, most notably an artificial eclipse created by Apollo blocking out the sun to allow Soyuz to take photographs, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was a predominantly public relations oriented project. Once the space stations had docked, the two crews greeted each other by exchanging flags, eating together and speaking together in each other's languages. After nearly two days of joint docking, the spacecrafts separated and returned to earth. While the experiment did not yield much of scientific merit, it served as a symbol that Cold War tensions were waning. While the Soviet Union was the first nation to enter space and America was first to put a man on the moon, in the end it can be argued that both nations won the space race, as its zenith was a joint operation between both crews. media type="youtube" key="yeFEBi-vzk4" height="229" width="311" align="left"media type="youtube" key="5xjaYSLWYOc" height="236" width="323" align="right"