This is the picture of the International Space Station which appears on the Significance page of the web site.  The International Space Station is the most prominent example of international space collaboration.  Therefore, it is an obvious example of a photograph for this page, which discusses the effects of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

    This website is a database for all of NASA’s mission photographs, and includes over 150 pictures from the Apollo-Soyuz mission alone.  All of the images on The Compromise page came from this database.  

The first picture is a symbolic painting by Bert Winthrop of Rockwell, which shows all of the crew members at the top, the Apollo-Soyuz linked unit in the middle with the mission logo overlayed, and at the bottom, it shows both the United States and the Soviet Union ships taking off.  This image basically wraps all of the symbols of the mission into one picture and provides a nice image with which to start off the page about the mission itself.  

The next image down is a photograph of the crew before launch with the flags of both countries behind the crewmembers.  This image provides a physical portrait of these people as you read about what they accomplished, which is a nice addition to the page.  

Moving down the page, there is the picture of the engineers from both the United Stares and the Soviet Union examining the docking adapter module that helped in linking the two incompatible vehicles together.  This picture shows how not only did the crewmembers work together, but also that scientists and engineers from both the United States and the Soviet Union had to collaborate in order to make the mission a success.

The final series of images on the page show the vehicles the crewmembers traveled in and the final result when the two ships were docked together.  I thought that by providing images of each individual spacecraft as well as of the entire unit, one could see, with the help of the arrows, how the two pieces fit together, which provides a necessary visual image when reading the description of what this mission accomplished.

The majority of the videos came from this webpage, which is timeline of the major events of the space race, with newscast footage from the era of the events.  The webpage covers events from the NBC coverage of Sputnik to the coverage of the building of the International Space Station.

I found this CD-ROM among some books about the space race at my public library.  It contained 149 pictures of space, mostly taken by the Hubble Space telescope, and of various NASA missions, including the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.  I obtained the home page picture, the Hubble Deep Field, from this CD-ROM.  This famous photograph was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1996, and contains over 3000 celestial bodies, most of which are galaxies, like the Milky Way.  Also, the second picture on the Conflict page came from this CD-ROM.  This image is of one of the early NASA projects of the 1950s, when satellites were first being discovered, in the race that Sputnik eventually won.

    This was the picture of Sputnik, the Soviet Union satellite, which appeared on The Conflict page.  The successful launch of Sputnik was an important event because it signified to the American public that the Soviet Union had a stronger space program than the United States, whether it was true or not.  This encouraged the United States to speed their process along even faster, and to try to reach the moon before the Soviet Union space program, so as to obtain the title of being the superior space program.

 

Secondary Sources

This book, unlike all of the others that I read, focused more on the Soviet Union’s side of the race, which provided me with the opportunity to learn a lot more about the Soviet Union and why it wanted so badly to become the strongest superpower in the world.  By reading about the Soviet Union’s point of view, I was able to gain a more balanced picture of the space race, which before was heavily biased towards the United States.  This allowed me to not only understand the topic better, but to also provide a more unbiased account of the events of the space race and the Apollo-Soyuz Test project.

    This book provided an in-depth facts and analysis of the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union in the first race between the two countries, the arms race, which later developed into the space race.  By reading this book, I not only gained a greater understanding of the great tension of the races, but I also learned the details of the races and who were involved as the major players in the race for control of space.

This book provided the eloquent quotes at the top of the Home and Conflict pages.  This book was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum, which made it a reliable source because of the reputable historical organization that was backing this title.  The book provided an overview of the history of spaceflight for all countries, not just the United States, so it gave me a chance to look in detail at the other space programs who played a role in the space race.  While the book did not go very in-depth about any particular topic because of its broad scope, it did provide factual information that was very helpful in formulating my analysis.

This documentary provided an overview of the history of NASA, starting with its formation and ending with its recent Columbia disaster.  It showed footage from all of the major missions, including the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, including the footage I included on the Compromise page of the website.  In addition, the documentary talked about NASA’s history with the Soviet Union’s space program, giving me good background information on the topic before I began further research.