During one of the most challenging periods of the Cold War, President John F. Kennedy made it his personal mission to promote America’s space program and encourage it to tackle new challenges and showcase the nation’s technological capabilities, and by extension the superiority of democracy to Communism. The United States seemed behind the Soviet Union, their primary rival in the competition for global influence, in the space race as Kennedy’s presidency began. In 1957 a Soviet satellite reached orbit around the earth ahead of the one launched soon after by the Americans, and a Soviet cosmonaut went into space and returned safely soon after Kennedy took office in early 1961.