AUBURN — We’ve long heard of the “space race” between the United States and the USSR. Long before President Kennedy’s placing man on the moon speech in 1961, the space race had existed between the United States and the USSR for many years.

Senior College instructor Alan Elze will discuss the race, which really started in the 1920s, at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 13, at the Auburn Public Library, 49 Spring St.

In the 1920s, Robert Goddard, an American, was testing liquid fuel rock engines. In the USSR Sergi Korolev and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky were working on a “rocket train” or multistaging. In Germany, Hermann Oberth designed Europe’s first liquid fuel rocket.

When German scientists realized that they had lost WWII, more than one hundred came to the United States to work on rockets and more than three hundred went to the USSR. These scientists were not “captured” but rather hired by the U.S. They did not enter the U.S. through regular channels but rather were brought into the country secretly. These scientists were the ones responsible for just about every aspect of the space program on both sides.

Elze will focus on this evolution of the space program in the U.S. and how it went from being a military program to a civilian one along with the competitiveness with Russia. He will also discuss how different early unmanned space missions were necessary and contributed to the manned program and how the military was able to utilize information that was gleaned from these missions.

Elze recently taught a class, “That’s One Small Step …,” for Senior College, at LAC, which traced the history of the space program mainly in the United States from its beginnings to the last Apollo flight.

Elze has had a life-long interest in the United States space program. Growing up in Southern California in the early 1960s, he was able to attend several NASA seminars designed for school students, encouraging them to enter scientific fields.

Supplemental reading on Russia has been provided by the Camden Conference in the form of book and material money to stock the collection of the Auburn Public Library. The Camden Conference is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to foster informed conversations on world issues.