Here's an infographic that shows the space race in it's historical context.

[Gus]

It's a little on the ugly side and might hurt your neck to read. Apart from that, I like it.

Edited August 1, 2013 by Gus

[Scorpi15]

It still boggles my mind that atari's Lunar Lander game came out after apollo 11. And that the US military budget in 2005 was more than the cost to put a man on the moon...

[0x7be]

Hmm, what units of measure exactly are counted on vertical axis?

[0x7be]

It still boggles my mind that atari's Lunar Lander game came out after apollo 11. And that the US military budget in 2005 was more than the cost to put a man on the moon...

Well, it appears that there is no much reason to send man to the Moon. America needed this desperately to restore it's national pride after early failuers and humiliations in space, but after that there was not so much motivation to do that. And, by the way, nation was not willing to spend few dozen of billions on a space program anymore.

This actually led to a crisis in post-Apollo US space program which suffered severe budget cuts and resulted in quite meaningless Space Shuttle.

[Gus]

Hmm, what units of measure exactly are counted on vertical axis?

It's not to any scale, but simply shows a progression of heights. If there was a scale, it would probably be logarithmic.

[0x7be]

It's not to any scale, but simply shows a progression of heights. If there was a scale, it would probably be logarithmic.

It doesn't look like height i.e. altitude.

It looks like subjective meause of coolness

[Crown]

From a scientific view, if the Y-axis has no unit the whole chart is useless. It could just be a flat line or a list of milestones.