The earliest days of robotic space exploration, to the Moon, Venus, Mars, and even Mercury, likely would never have played out in such dramatic fashion in the late 1950s and early 1960s without the Cold War.  Despite a steep learning curve with lots of rocket misfires and mission malfunctions, it was a hair-trigger era of interplanetary exploration that offered the world its first close up views of our nearest planetary neighbors.  Former NASA Chief Historian Roger Launius and I discuss the details in this revealing episode.