While the Sputnik 1 launch can clearly be called the start of the Space Race, its end is more debatable. Most hotly contested during the 1960s, the Space Race continued apace through the Apollo moon landing of 1969. Although they followed Apollo 11 with five more manned lunar landings, American space scientists turned to new arenas. Skylab would gather data, and the Space Shuttle would work on returning spaceships intact from space journeys. Americans would claim that by first landing a man on the moon they had won this unofficial "race". Soviet scientists meanwhile pushed ahead with their own projects, and would likely not have conceded anything like defeat. In any event, as the Cold War cooled, and as other nations began to develop their own space programs, the notion of a continuing "race" between the two superpowers became less real.

Both nations had developed manned military space programs. The USAF had proposed using its Titan missile to launch the Dyna-Soar hypersonic glider that would be used to intercept enemy satellites. This was replaced by the Manned Orbiting Laboratory that used hardware based on the Gemini program to carry out surveillance missions, but this was also cancelled. The USSR commissioned the Almaz program, for a similar manned military space station, which merged with the Salyut program.

The Space Race slowed after the Apollo landing, which many observers describe as its apex or even its end. Others, including space historian Carole Scott and Romanian Dr. Florin Pop's Cold War Project, feel its end was most clearly punctuated by the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975. The Soviet craft Soyuz-19 met and docked in space with America's Apollo 18, allowing astronauts from the "rival" nations to pass into each other's ship and participate in combined experimentation. Although each country's endeavors in space persisted, they went largely in different "directions", and the notion of a continuing two-nation "race" was outdated after Apollo-Soyuz.