While most people think of the first Space Race as a fight for dominance for America and the Soviet Union, they don’t often think of China. Today China has some presence in space, but not particularly in the 1950s. Because of communist politics, China was at a sort of constraint to participating in the early Space Race. To put this into more perspective, China’s first satellite …show more content…
This was designed for success over the Soviet Union in the long and short term. One-third of the Soviet Union Engineering grads were female, and the United States was struggling with constant racism and sexism. This was also posted in the Washington Post in 1958, “the United States still struggled to find a place for women and Negroes in its science workplace, and in society at large.”
But soon enough black women like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson served as the brains behind the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This one event turned the Space Race into a lead for the United States and shocked the world abroad, especially the society of the United States. This was because these black women, during the civil rights era, served as computers and calculators for the computations of the launch of astronaut John Glenn. Without a doubt, this event seriously helped the civil rights era and those that were hindered within