Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

dominance?
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 the first satellite into orbit as part
of the International Geophysical Year, a
cooperative global science project that
ran from July 1957 to December 1958.