who was most successful in the space race?

Question

please help!

Answer 1

While the above comment may be true, in regards to the Americans landing the first man on the moon, Russia's Space program has far supassed the United States in succesfully launching sub and orbital vehicles in space.
This is due to their reusable rocket delivery system which has been in place since the beginning of the space race.
The space race, as it had become to be known, was between 1957 and 1975, and began with the russians sending up the first sattelite into space. Sputnik.
Yuri Gagarin was the first human sent into space on April 12, 1961, while Alan Sheppard was the first American on Febuary 20th, 1962.
The first dual-manned flights also originated in the USSR, August 11 - 15, 1962. Soviet Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963 in Vostok 6. Korolev had initially scheduled further Vostok missions of longer duration, but following the announcement of the Apollo Program, Premier Khrushchev demanded more firsts. The first flight with more than one crew member, the USSR's Voskhod 1, a modified version of the Vostok craft, took off on October 12, 1964 carrying Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov. This flight also marked the first occasion on which a crew did not wear spacesuits.

Aleksei Leonov, from Voskhod 2, launched by the USSR on March 18, 1965, carried out the first spacewalk. This mission nearly ended in disaster; Leonov almost failed to return to the capsule and, due to a poor retrorocket fire, the ship landed 1000 miles (1600 km) off target. By this time Khrushchev had left office and the new Soviet leadership would not commit to an all-out lunar landing effort.

This was the opportunity the Americans needed.The first dual-manned flights also originated in the USSR, August 11 - 15, 1962. Soviet Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963 in Vostok 6. Korolev had initially scheduled further Vostok missions of longer duration, but following the announcement of the Apollo Program, Premier Khrushchev demanded more firsts. The first flight with more than one crew member, the USSR's Voskhod 1, a modiAfter the Soviet successes, especially Gagarin's flight, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson looked for an American project that would capture the public’s imagination. The Apollo Program met many of their objectives and promised to defeat arguments from politicians both on the left (who favored social programs) and the right (who favored a more military project). Apollo’s advantages included:

economic benefits to several key states in the next election;
closing the "missile gap" claimed by Kennedy during the 1960 election through dual-use technology;
technical and scientific spin-off benefits
In conversation with NASA’s director, James E. Webb, Kennedy said:

Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the Moon ahead of the Russians... otherwise we shouldn't be spending that kind of money, because I'm not interested in space... The only justification (for the cost) is because we hope to beat the USSR to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.[5]
Kennedy and Johnson managed to swing public opinion: by 1965, 58% of Americans favored Apollo, up from 33% in 1963. After Johnson became President in 1963, his continuing support allowed the program to succeed.

The USSR showed a greater ambivalence about human visits to the Moon. Soviet leader Khrushchev wanted neither "defeat" by another power, nor the expense of such a project. In October 1963 he characterized the USSR as "not at present planning flight by cosmonauts to the Moon", while adding that they had not dropped out of the race. A year passed before the USSR committed itself to a Moon-landing attempt

Kennedy proposed joint programs, such as a Moon landing by Soviet and American astronauts and improved weather-monitoring satellites. Khrushchev, sensing an attempt to steal superior Russian space technology, rejected these ideas. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Space Agency's chief designer who designed the R-7 rocket which sent Sputnik into orbit, had started promoting his Soyuz craft and the N1 launcher rocket that had the capacity for a manned Moon landing. Khrushchev directed Korolev's design bureau to arrange further space firsts by modifying the existing Vostok technology, while a second team started building a completely new launcher and craft, the Proton booster and the Zond, for a manned cislunar flight in 1966. In 1964 the new Soviet leadership gave Korolev the backing for a Moon landing effort and brought all manned projects under his direction. With Korolev's death and the failure of the first Soyuz flight in 1967, the co-ordination of the Soviet Moon landing program quickly unraveled. The Soviets built a landing craft and selected cosmonauts for the mission that would have placed Aleksei Leonov on the Moon's surface, but with the successive launch failures of the N1 booster in 1969, plans for a manned landing suffered first delay and then cancellation
While unmanned Soviet probes had reached the Moon before any U.S. craft, American Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface on 21 July 1969, after landing the previous day. Commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong received backup from command-module pilot Michael Collins and lunar-module pilot Buzz Aldrin in an event watched by over 500 million people around the world. Social commentators widely recognize the lunar landing as one of the defining moments of the 20th century, and Armstrong's words on his first touching the Moon's surface became similarly memorable

Answer 2

Elaine P is right, but there's the military side to consider as well. The US only tested nuclear missiles in outer space after the Soviet Union did, breaking an agreement with the US when they did that. The US managed to beat the Russians because of a stronger economy and better internal organisation, while Russia collapsed in the end.

Answer 3

The USA, of course. No other country has sent people to walk on the moon or machines to work on Mars. Russia (The former Soviet Union) was the first to send a rocket into space (Sputnik, 1957), but America soon caught up with and surpassed that country.