The space race was a competition between Soviet Russia (USSR) and the United States. Each government wanted to show that it was technologically superior and so they started building equipment that would take them to space, and eventually to the moon. This was also a huge push in the creation of ICBM's, or Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. These are missiles loaded with atomic weapons that could be launched into space and would come back down, landing on the enemy and exploding. The first thing to be launched into space was the soviet sattelite, Sputnik 1 in 1957.