The Space Race was an unofficial competition between the United States and the USSR in space exploration and technology, and especially to the race between the two nations to land a human being on the moon in the second half of the 1960s. Many also consider this a race to develop military technology to win the nuclear weapons arms race during the Cold War. Significant events in the Space Race include:

• first artificial satellite - Sputnik 1 (1957, USSR)
• first animal in orbit - Laika - Sputnik 2 (USSR)
• first human in space - Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1 (1961, USSR)
• first orbital flight - Vostok 1 (as above)
• first dual flight (1962, USSR)
• first woman in space - Valentina Tereshkova (1963, USSR)
• first flight with more than one crew member - Voskhod 1 (1964, USSR)
• first spacewalk - Aleksei Leonov on Voskhod 2 (1965, USSR)
• first space rendezvous - Gemini 6/Gemini 7 (1965, USA)
• first space docking - Gemini 8 (1966, USA)
• first spacecraft on moon - Luna 2 (USSR)
• first orbital flight of moon - Apollo 8 (1968, USA)
• first human landing on moon - Apollo 11 (1969, USA)
• first space station - Salyut 1 (1971, USSR)

The Soviets beat the Americans in most firsts, but did not manage to beat them to the moon. Technology and especially aerospace technology advanced greatly during this period. In the sense that it was contested during the 1960s, the space race is usually considered to have been ended by the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975.

In 2003, with the successful manned space flight by China, there has been speculation of a new space race with the United States considering creating a permanent base on the Moon and/or a manned mission to Mars