Film Lesson - "The Right Stuff"

In the film The Right Stuff, the United States and the Soviet Union are competing to see who can send the first man into space. They both had to build rocketships but the U.S. saw problems along the way. The Soviet Union was the first to send a human into space. The U.S. on the other hand wanted to send a monkey into space. Those scenes will help me remember events from the Cold War because it was a race/war between the United States and the Soviet Union. They weren't really fighting though . It was more a race than it was a war.