What was once the most important potato field in the world belonged to the Nurskanova family in the town of Engels, in the Saratov region of southwestern Russia. The days moved unremarkably on the farms in Engels, and the morning of April 12, 1961, started out no differently. Not long after breakfast, five-year-old Rita Nurskanova and her grandmother left their farmhouse and went into the field to tend the potatoes. They had barely begun their day’s work when they noticed something strange — an orange-clad man dragging a long parachute on the ground, approaching from a distant part of their property. Rita and her grandmother, alarmed, turned and bolted for the house but the man called them back.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow.”

“Granny, stop!” Rita said. “He’s speaking Russian. He’s probably human.”

And so he was — a particularly noteworthy human. Earlier that morning, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the republic of Kazakhstan, the little five-foot, two-inch man — a one-time steel-worker and fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force known as Yuri Gagarin — had climbed into a spacecraft atop a 20-engine Vostok rocket and hurdled into space, completing a single 88-minute orbit of the Earth, reentering the atmosphere and then parachuting from his spacecraft to land on the Nurskanova farm.

The family did let the returning cosmonaut use their phone, and soon the farm was overrun with space agency personnel, government officials and reporters from the official state news agency Tass. The newsmen excitedly broke the story.

“A great event has taken place,” read the initial Tass dispatch. “For the first time in history, man has accomplished a flight into space. The first man to penetrate space was a Soviet man, a citizen of the USSR. By the will of the working class, by the will of the people, and inspired by the party of Communists, headed by Lenin, our country has turned into a most powerful Socialist state and reached unprecedented heights in the development of science and technology.”

It was 4 a.m. Eastern Time when the history-making news blasted forth from the Soviet Union, and it was thus left to US reporters working the overnight shift to rouse officials out of bed for quotes and reactions. Near Cape Canaveral, the phone rang in the home of John “Shorty” Powers, NASA’s chief public affairs officer, who answered it blearily. Confronted with a near-breathless reporter who told him what had happened and asked for a comment, Powers could only mumble, “We’re all asleep down here.”

A few hours later, the same headline appeared in uncounted newspapers across the country and around the world that carried the wire service report: “SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS US ASLEEP.”

With those ignominious words, the great space race between the US and the Soviet Union — with a manned landing on the moon the ultimate target — truly took flight, and there was no denying the Soviets were in the lead.

Two years before Gagarin’s flight, NASA, America’s newly formed space agency, had announced the names of its seven original astronauts: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton. In those 24 months, the men had trained hard and stumped for NASA hard — marching in Fourth of July parades, touring spacecraft and rocket factories, conducting uncounted press conferences, sitting for interviews with Life Magazine, and posing for photo shoots in their slim, silvery spacesuits.

What they hadn’t done yet was fly.

That changed on May 5, 1961, when NASA — pressed by the Kennedy Administration to answer Gagarin’s flight and do it fast — rolled the little 83-feet Redstone rocket topped by the tiny Mercury capsule out to the pad, loaded Shepard into the cockpit, sealed the hatch, and sent him aloft. The popgun parabolic flight that carried him went 116 miles up without reaching orbit, followed by a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean just 17 minutes after liftoff. It wasn’t much, but that 116-mile altitude it counted as space.

“US Puts Man into Space,” trumpeted the Washington Post.

“American Rides Rocket 116 Miles Up,” announced the Chicago Daily Tribune.

“A Masterful Performance,” applauded The Evening Star, of Washington, D.C.

“A flea hop,” sniffed Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, whose own spaceman had circled the entire Earth, while the best the Americans could answer with was an up-and-down drop into the drink 300 miles off the coast of Florida.

That was how things would stay for the next three years as NASA pressed cautiously forward with the remaining five flights of the Mercury program, as the one-man capsules progressed from sub-orbitals to three orbitals to six orbitals to 22 orbitals. The Soviets, meanwhile, were launching the first woman into space, the first two-person spacecraft and the first dual-spacecraft missions, and conducting the first walk in space — their more powerful rockets and more nimble capsules regularly outperforming Americas’ men and machines. 

But then, the Soviets stalled. Their first eight missions, from 1961 to 1965, had all been in their capable Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft. The next step in their grand cosmic plan was a three-man Vostok spacecraft with which they would practice the skills needed to get to the moon, including long-duration missions, more spacewalks, and rendezvousing and docking with another spacecraft, all in Earth orbit. Those flights would be followed by manned lunar missions in the long-distance Zond spacecraft.

The Soyuz, however, was a complex — and stubborn — ship, one that defied the talented Soviet designers and engineers. For two years the Baikonur launch pads would go cold, and in that time, the Americans would surge into the lead with their two-man Gemini spacecraft. In just 20 months’ time, from March of 1965 to November of 1966, 10 Gemini missions would fly, featuring five men taking spacewalks, four crews docking with unmanned target vehicles, two men staying aloft for a then-unheard-of 14 days, and two manned craft — Geminis 6 and 7 — flying in tandem in orbit, approaching to within a meter of each other.

But the good times could not last. For both nations’ space programs, things would turn suddenly dark. On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed While and Roger Chaffee — the intended first crew of the Apollo program — would die in a spacecraft fire during a dress rehearsal for launch. “We’re burning up!” White could be heard screaming over the radio. Three months later, on April 23, 1967, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov would similarly perish in the first test flight of the Soyuz spacecraft, when the ship would overheat and burn during reentry. “You have failed and killed me!” a doomed Komarov shouted to the ground.

Eventually, both the Soyuz and the Apollo would find their footing, with the Soyuz flying successfully nine more times from 1968 to 1971, and the Apollo flying 15 times from 1968 to 1974. Both countries had the ships for the missions, but only one had the rocket power — at least for trips to the moon.

America’s lunar rocket was the Saturn 5, a sleek, white machine that put out a thunderous 7.5 million pounds of thrust from its five first-stage engines. The Soviets’ answer was the gray-green N1, with a first stage thrust of 10.2 million pounds that easily beat the Saturn. But the Saturn flew straight and flew true.

In December 1968 it carried the crew of Apollo 8 on humanity’s first orbital mission around the moon. In May of 1969, Apollo 10 returned to the moon with the first test of both the Apollo command module and the lunar lander in lunar orbit. Next up was Apollo 11, set to make the first manned lunar landing in July of 1969. 

The N1, like the Soyuz before it, was slow in development and slow in assembly. Racing to keep up, the Soviets scheduled a test flight of the 34-story machine topped by an unmanned Zond spacecraft. On the morning of July 3, 1969, the N1 was positioned on the pad and its engines were lit. The rocket rose barely high enough to clear the launch tower before it tipped over and exploded — its 2,300 tons of fuel producing a giant blast and fireball that shattered windows across the Baikonur complex and sent debris flying for six miles around. The exhausted Soviets surveyed their melted launch pad and their ruined rocket and knew the game was up.

Thirteen days later, Apollo 11 — carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin — lifted off for the moon. Four days after that, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first men on the lunar surface. With that, the cosmic steeplechase ended. The manned space race, joined in a potato field in the spring of 1961, was won in the Sea of Tranquility eight summers later.

Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large at Time, where he has written more than 45 cover stories. Co-author of “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13,” which was the basis for the movie “Apollo 13,” he is also the author of 13 other books including his latest, “Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.“