Patrick Blog 2

By Patrick Fuller, Byrd Center Student Intern

In the decades following World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union went from being allied against Nazi Germany, to being bitter enemies. Throughout the Cold War, which ensued from 1947 until 1991, technological superiority was critical to maintaining an advantage over the opponent. While Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia were among the most hotly contested regions of the globe during the Cold War, there was one more contested frontier which remained unexplored: space.
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To keep his constituents informed, Senator Robert C. Byrd began writing a regular weekly news column, Byrd’s-Eye View, in 1961. That year, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history as being the first human to fly in space. In Volume 1, No. 16 of the Byrd’s-Eye View, Senator Byrd argued that educational enrichment was necessary if the United States was going to compete with the Soviet Union. After making it clear that the education of young people directly affects the future of the nation, Byrd ended his article with this: “…the price of freedom has never been cheap, and if foregoing some luxuries will spare us tyranny of an arrested society--of ruthless dictatorship and human automation--the price is absurdly cheap!”

Yuri Gagarin’s taste of space in April 1961 brought the Soviet Union one step closer to putting a man on the moon. In August of the same year, Byrd wrote another Byrd’s-Eye View article which explicitly addressed the desire to put a man on the moon, a desire which President John F. Kennedy expressed when he addressed Congress three months earlier, advocating for funds for space exploration. In his column dated August 25, 1961, Senator Byrd wrote, “This serious undertaking has come about none too soon, for our total application to this effort may determine whether we remain a first-rate independent Nation, or become part of a totalitarian form of world government. Russian competition in this direction leaves us no alternative.” Not only did the Soviet Union’s ability to put a man into orbit before the United States make the U.S. look technologically lacking, but it opened another front in the arms race. Senator Byrd argued, as many Americans believed, that if the Soviet Union could launch a person into space, they could likewise launch a nuclear missile into space.

The race to put a man on the moon continued through the end of the decade, appearing in numerous Byrd’s-Eye View columns. Eight years after Kennedy set the goal of putting a man on the moon, it came to fruition with the Apollo 11 mission. On July 16, 1969, NASA launched Apollo 11, with the goal of landing on the moon, exploring its surface, and returning to Earth. Four days after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin conducted the first lunar walk in human history, lasting three hours. Byrd wrote on February 18, 1970, “All Americans were filled with justifiable pride when our countrymen became the first to set foot on the moon…”

​Though the Space Race of the 1960s is often deemed an American victory, it is important to remember that the real victor is unclear. While the United States was the first to put a man on the moon, the Soviets were the first to put a man into orbit, and before that, to launch a satellite into orbit. Nevertheless, the appearance of an American victory was enough to provide the morale boost necessary for the American people to continue socially and militarily fighting the battles of the Cold War, and the fight against communist expansion, an issue that the United States was simultaneously combating head-on in Vietnam.