How long did the space race last?

The rivalry predates the hardware: both governments had announced plans to orbit a satellite for the International Geophysical Year in 1955, and the contest was already running inside laboratories and design bureaux. What made it public was Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957 — a polished sphere with four whip antennas, beeping on a frequency any radio amateur could tune, which converted a technical programme into a strategic humiliation for Washington and triggered the funding surge that produced NASA the following year.

There are two defensible endings. The first is 20 July 1969, when Apollo 11 landed and the specific objective set by President Kennedy in 1961 was met; by that measure the race ran a few days short of twelve years. The second is July 1975, when an Apollo command module docked with a Soyuz and the two crews exchanged greetings through the hatch, the moment competition was formally replaced by cooperation. That reading gives roughly eighteen years.

Neither date stopped the work. The Soviet Union turned to long-duration stations with Salyut and then Mir, accumulating flight experience the United States lacked for a decade; the Americans built the Shuttle and stayed close to Earth. The habits formed in those years — separate launchers, separate philosophies of automation, separate medical protocols — are still visible aboard the International Space Station, whose two halves are engineered to different rules and were bolted together by organisations that had spent a generation trying to outrun each other.