The Space Race led to some shady alliances between Americans and Nazi scientists

The moment that American astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon is considered defining in the history of humanity — a victory for our species that led to a profound global philosophical and political conversation about mankind's place in the universe, and one in which countries set aside their differences to congratulate the United States for its soaring engineering achievement.

Yet the political decisions that led up to that moment were not nearly as pure of heart. Indeed, the saga of the Space Race, and its culmination in the moon landing, is a story that would perhaps be more inspiring if America hadn't stooped to recruiting former Nazis in order to prevail.

The Space Race was an era when the world's most powerful nations, the United States and its ideological rival the Soviet Union, engaged in a heated competition to see who could make more progress exploring Earth's solar system. A manned mission to the Moon was considered by most to be the marker for "victory." Yet the Space Race that occurred in the quarter-century after the Cold War was significantly different from any analogous space race (such as one involving China) that may exist today.

The reason is simple: In the decades after World War II, most of the world was convinced that if the "wrong" side won the Space Race, humanity would be literally doomed. In a sense, the Space Race is a perfect example of how the science and exploration realms can become political.

Historians have differing opinions about the precise moment when the Space Race began, but the most logical starting point involves a technological breakthrough only tangentially related to space exploration. In August 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first publicly-announced atomic weapon, effectively ending the brief period of America's undisputed technological and military supremacy that had started with the close of World War II in 1945. As a result, Americans became convinced that they were enmeshed in a battle for global dominance against "Communism" (particularly since the Soviet Union had recently engaged in a number of acts of international aggression), one that required extreme measures of all kinds. Whether it was building up a military-industrial complex, rooting out supposed spies in all walks of life, or making sure that Americans were "the best" when compared to their Soviet counterparts, there was no realm immune to the pressures of this new international competition.

The Soviet Union upped the ante on Oct. 4, 1957, when they launched the first artificial object ever to enter Earth's orbit, a satellite known as Sputnik. Perhaps even more ominously, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik using a sophisticated new type of Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile. In effect, the Soviet Union demonstrated with a single one-two punch that it was capable of literally sending satellites over American soil and dangerous missiles into its populated areas.

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Clearly the situation was becoming intolerable from an American vantage point, and by the following year the United States had launched its own satellite (Explorer 1) and formed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In addition to expanding the frontiers of human knowledge, NASA was tasked with two more mundane objectives: Determining how America could establish military supremacy in space, and figuring out how to use satellite technology to spy on the Soviet Union. It took time for America to catch up with the Soviets, however, and the next few milestones were still achieved by the Russia-controlled empire: They launched the first space probe to make contact with the Moon, Luna 2, in 1959, and two years later they sent the first human being to ever enter space with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Finally, in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that America would put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

The United States had a trick up its sleeve, albeit a morally dubious one: A crew of former Nazi engineers and scientists. In a campaign known as Operation Paperclip, the United States aggressively recruited former Nazis who had worked for Adolf Hitler's regime in various scientific projects. Although the Soviet Union eventually began to do the same thing, America had a head start in cultivating Nazis and picked up some crucial names in the fields of rocketry and aeronautics: Adolf Busemann, who would help design faster and safer aircrafts; Arthur Rudolph, who helped develop key systems such as those which ran the Saturn V Moon rocket and the Pershing missile; jet engine engineer Anselm Franz, who helped America develop the T53, the T55, the AGT-1500, and the PLF1A-2; and, most notably, Wernher von Braun, who was the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that made moon missions possible.

Moral qualms aside, from a scientific perspective America's recruitment of Nazi scientists was an undeniable success. On July 20, 1969, the full measure of all America's efforts paid off when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the moon. In that moment, as far as many Americans were concerned, the country "won" the Space Race. It would not be until later years that they grappled with the ethical issues of working with scientists who had directly assisted Hitler; von Braun, for instance, is known to have opportunistically sought and savored the privileges Nazis could give him because of his aristocratic birth, even if there are no indications that he sincerely subscribed to the Nazi ideology.

There are other legacies to the Space Race. Much of the aeronautics technology that exists today would be unimaginable without the massive public investment into research and development that occurred because of the Space Race. Culturally, the Space Race remains iconic in the American experience; the images of Apollo 11 launching the vehicles that would put men on the moon, or of Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on lunar soil, are as widely known as the American flag itself. Politically the Space Race reveals the very origins of US-Russia tensions, which persist today despite the two nations working together now on space issues.