In reality, the United States wasn’t trailing the Soviet Union quite as badly as it appeared in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. The US Army’s Jupiter-C missile had been tested successfully on several occasions, and the Americans were ahead of the Russians in terms of the systems that guided missiles on their trajectories into space. But President Eisenhower had insisted that the nation’s first foray into space be presented as a peaceful effort, rather than an explicitly military operation that risked triggering a dangerous retaliation by the Soviet Union. The Americans had planned to launch
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