In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a satellite about 22 inches in diameter, into orbit around the earth. The successful launch astonished and alarmed U.S. scientists, who had misled the American public into believing that the United States would be first in space. The success of the Soviet mission prompted many U.S. citizens to panic. Not only did they conjure up vague visions of Soviet satellites launching missiles at U.S. cities, but they began to doubt the technological superiority of the United States. The New Republic warned that Sputnik was "proof of the fact that the Soviet Union has gained a commanding lead in certain vital sectors of the race for world scientific and technological supremacy" (Divine, p. xv).
During his presidential campaign of 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy capitalized on this distress by reprimanding his opponent Richard Nixon, who had served as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, for having "allowed" the Soviets to lead the quest into space (Breuer, p. 2). In a dramatic confrontation with Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev, Nixon had once responded, "You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we are ahead of you in color television" (Nixon in Breuer, p.
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