Brandon Moran

Professor Raymond
UWRT 1103-E02
15 November, 2015
Remembering Our Past
For my conversation I chose to talk to my younger brother Ryan, a current senior at
Cuthbertson High School in Charlotte. It was held at my home and we conversed for well over
an hour as we talked about the numerous different impacts that the space race has had on our
nation as a whole. While he is not an extremely technology oriented person we did quickly
discuss some of the types of technology that were created as well as the developments in
computing and other electronics that would not have been had it not been for the funding of the
Space Race in the quest to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon landings.
Some of my first questions were of a very broad range. I asked him how much he had
heard about the Space Race and if he was aware of why it had commenced in the first place. He
stated that he did in fact have a small understanding of this but was not knowledgeable on the
more specific details of the time period. For roughly ten minutes I divulged some of the finer
details of the era and how World War II and the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe had
caused the Western world to push back in an ideological manner. This progressed into the finer
aspects of the discussion such as the proposition by President Kennedy to the body of Congress
that the United States should commit itself to the task of sending a man to the Moon. My brother,
being fairly well-versed in American history recalled this particular speech from a history class
of his that he currently was taking. He made several comments to the effect of declaring that he

thinks that the United States could possibly have never even made it into Earth orbit if the Soviet
Union had not begun its aggressive expansion. This launched us into a side part of the
conversation on politics that lasted several more minutes. Once I began talking to him about the
more specific technology oriented sides of the Space Race he was initially hesitant to answer but
once I pointed out that the Space Race impacted audio systems he opened up tremendously.
One part of this conversation that surprised me was that he had never been aware of some
of the first space programs conducted by NASA in the early days such as Gemini and Mercury.
While everyone had heard of the Apollo program and the time mankind first set foot on the
Moon I would have expected him to be more familiar with the times directly preceding this
event.