[A History of Human Space Exploration 02] • Foothold in the Heavens · the Seventies

Foothold in the Heavens focuses on the early 1970s, when we completed our first exploration of the Moon and established a real, long-term presence in orbit with the first space stations. It marked a transitional phrase between the heady days of the 1960s and efforts to make space travel more economical, more frequent and more routine in the later 1970s and 1980s. This book explores the intense competition and bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union - with one side devoting its energies to lunar exploration, the other diverting its attention to near-Earth studies - which eventually brought a pair of Cold War foes away from the nuclear trigger to the negotiating table and opened a new era of cooperation in space.