Space Age

우주 시대

The Space Age is the historical period inaugurated by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, encompassing the US–Soviet space race, space exploration, and the technological and cultural transformations that followed. That a country which had been agrarian a generation earlier could seize every first milestone (first satellite, first human in space, first woman in space, first spacewalk) was a product of the free technical education and concentrated resources of a planned economy, and Sputnik's signal was its declaration. A self-representation of the Cold War Soviet Union and a narrative of systemic competition, the Space Age persisted as a universal periodization of humanity's venture into space even after spaceflight shifted to multinational and commercial phases.