The opening shot of the space age was not a carefully orchestrated master plan but a scramble born of panic. This episode covers the U.S.-Soviet rivalry from roughly 1955 to 1975, starting with the postwar hunt for German V-2 engineers, Wernher von Braun's team going to the Americans while Sergei Korolev ran a secret Soviet program. The hosts explain why peaceful satellites for the International Geophysical Year were really demonstrations of ICBM capability, how Korolev misread a suborbital Jupiter-C test as an imminent American satellite and swapped his complex Object D for a simple beeping sphere, and how the CIA then overestimated the R-7 rocket at nearly twice its true 267 ton weight.

The conversation moves through the live-TV Vanguard explosion dubbed Flopnik, the animal flights including Albert II and the truth about Laika revealed in ...