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“When Galileo trained his telescope on the skies in 1609, a thin veil was lifted. What had appeared to the human eye for centuries as a decorative dome became a vast universe of real worlds to explore.” (Neal 14).

With the technological advancements of the mid-20th century, humans were finally able to reach beyond this dome. With the development of rockets by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the battle for military supremacy escalated into an arms race, which “became an open contest between capitalism and Communism” (Cadbury ix). The whole world was in awe as it watched these two countries battle for supremacy in space, a conflict known today as the space race.