In 1961, the earliest space program, Project Mercury, put an American named John Glenn into orbit around the Earth. Later, during another program, Project Gemini, an American astronaut was able to get out of his spaceship in outer space, an activity called a spacewalk, then get back in and come home. (The Soviet Union had already done that earlier in the same year.) While doing these things was amazing, since the Soviet Union had done them first, people still felt like the United States was losing the space race. Both the United States and Soviet Union had the same next goal in mind: to go to the Moon.