What do you see when you look up at the night sky? The potential for amazing discoveries and scientific advancement? During the 1950s and '60s, some people also saw a place that needed to be claimed.

In The Space Race: How the Cold War Put Humans on the Moon, middle school students will explore the bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that served as fuel for the fire that catapulted rockets into the great unknown of the next frontier--space. While Neil Armstrong will always be remembered as the first person to set foot on the moon, the people and events behind this accomplishment populate a fascinating tale of politics, science, technology, and teamwork that resulted in what might be the greatest accomplishment of the twentieth century. Middle school students will meet some of the tens of thousands of engineers and scientists that worked for years to create the technology needed to send humans to the moon and return them safely to Earth.

The Space Race is one book in a set of four that explore great events of the twentieth century. Other titles in this set include Globalization: Why We Care About Faraway Events; The Vietnam War; and World War II: From the Rise of the Nazi Party to the Dropping of the Atomic Bomb.

Try these hands-on STEAM projects!
- Research the rise of communism in different countries and contrast this type of government to other types