In 1959, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) began working on projects where people could fly into space on specially-designed rockets and come back to the Earth. They were doing this because another country, the Soviet Union, was working on doing the same thing, and at the time, the United States and Soviet Union were competitors – they did not get along. When the Soviet Union put a satellite into orbit around the Earth, and later a person named Yuri Gagarin, the United States felt that the Soviet Union was getting too far ahead of them when it came to space. This is usually called the space race.