The Space Age was inaugurated with the launching of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957. Yet astronautics originated in the early nineteenth century. As early as 1819 Konstantine E. Ziolkovsky, the "founding father' of Russian space science, predicted the of a space rocket employing liquid fuel and liquid oxygen capable of thrusting man into space. From 1957 to 1961, Russian spaceships were the first top carry live animals, to reach the vicinity of the moon and orbit the sun, and to photograph the far side of the moon. While America was reaching significant scientific progress, Russia clearly dominated the excitement of space exploration.

In the Roman Catholic Church, certain reformist movements began to surface visibly after World War II. The movements varied, but they included such aims as harmonizing theology with science and modern philosophy, greater social action on the part of Catholics, and reforms in the official worship of the church. In 1958, Pope John XXIII was elected to his seat as leader of eth Catholic Church. His time as Pope proved to be perhaps the most eventful for eth Church in nearly four hundred years. From the first day of his reign, he was not aloof like many of the Popes before him. He was jovial, informal, and apparently open-minded. He visited the slums and prisons of Rome, raised wages for workers at the Vatican, and told jokes about himself. According to the Pope's later account, the idea of summoning a general council of the Church occurred to him in late 1958. Pondering a way of showing an example of peace and hope to the world. He proposed his idea of a council to a group of eighteen cardinals in Rome. Their response was stunned silence. They began making objections to the idea and insisted that it would take at least ten years to organize such a thing.

hrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would soon place a man in space. Within a few weeks, on April 12, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The spaceship Vostok I weighed 10,395 pounds, orbited the globe in eighty-nine minutes at a top speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Gagarin's journey was incredibly smooth. He reported writing a note, drinking, and eating. Reentry into Earth's atmosphere, more rapid than anticipated marred his capsule, but Gagarin landed safely four hundred miles southeast of Moscow.

In 1968, on August 20th to the 21st, Russia invades Czechoslovakia in attempts to squash encouragement of other groups to revolt. Alexander Dubeek had reformed the Czech government to an open-minded society.

Although West Germans were denied the right to cross into East Berlin, the crisis soon eased. The flow of refugees was stopped and East Germany began a period of extraordinary economic growth. The West accepted the Berlin Wall as eth best solution to a bad situation, with the realization that both Khrushchev and Ulbricht had been forced into this action by circumstances that might have led to war.

John F. Kennedy became president in January of 1962. East Germany was losing thousands of people a day. On August 13, the East Germans began closing the checkpoints between eth two sectors of the city and started construction of a barbed wire barrier along the entire border between east and West Berlin. This barrier was soon replaced with a concrete wall. Khrushchev then announced that he was giving over control of eth city to the East Germans.

In 1962, the United Nations sends troops to control civil war in the Congo, after Katanga governor Tshombe rejects a peace plan and attempts to secede.

In 1963, scandal breaks out when Britain's war minister, Lord John Dennis Profumo, is discovered to be sleeping with a call girl, Christine Keeler, who happens to also be intimate with a known Soviet spy.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2312
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)