On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Wavering and high-pitched, the beep-beep signal of the 23-inch long satellite was picked up on Earth and signaled the dawn of a new era.
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The first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, went into orbit on January 31, 1958, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Explorer was the U.S. answer to the Soviet’s Sputnik and was the first craft to identify the Van Allen radiation belt.
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On July 29, 1958, NASA is established as part of a government agency after President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act.
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The Russians took the lead yet again in space exploration, sending up the Luna 3 probe on October 4, 1959. The probe brought back 29 photos (17 of which were viable) of the never-before-seen far side of the moon, depicting mountains quite different from the part seen from Earth by the naked eye.
Courtesty of NASA National Space Science Data Center
America’s animal sweetheart, Ham, was the first chimp to be sent into space on January 31, 1961. During his training at Holloman Aerospace Medical Center (H.A.M.—get it?), the little guy beat out 39 other hominids for the coveted role in the spacecraft. Lest you think he was just fooling around up there during his nearly 17-minute flight, the results Ham brought back were directly influential to the later mission made by Alan Shepard.
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Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth on April 12, 1961. He completed a circuit of the Earth while in the satellite Vostok, and his flight lasted 108 minutes. Vostok—Russian for East—reached a height of 202 miles above the Earth.
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On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy set the space race challenge to land a man on the moon. He addressed a joint session of Congress and urged approval for additional funds to back space, foreign aid, and defense programs. He famously said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
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Astronaut Alan Shepard became the second person and the first American to go into space before commanding the Apollo 14 mission years later. The U.S. Naval Academy graduate was chosen for the first manned mission and piloted the Freedom 7 after being launched by a Redstone rocket.
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Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962, while aboard Friendship 7 on the Mercury Atlas 6 mission. The flight lasted nearly five hours. He is seen here during a preflight training exercise at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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It might not look like much, but Telstar 1 was the first private communications satellite to orbit around the Earth. On July 11, 1962, it was launched as an agreement among AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French national PTT. Telstar transmitted the first television pictures, calls, and fax images through space.
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Space geeks received an early Christmas present on December 24, 1968, when Apollo 8 orbited the moon and transmitted back the first photos of an Earthrise. This photo was released five days later and shows the rising Earth after the astronauts came from behind the moon following the lunar orbit insertion burn.
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This year is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first manned mission to touch down on the moon. Astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, seen here on July 20, 1969, was the second person to walk on the moon, after Neil Armstrong. After landing, Aldrin said, “I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.” The mission fulfilled President Kennedy’s goal to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade.
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On November 12, 1980, the Voyager 1 spacecraft encountered the planet Saturn after launching three years before. The photos it sent back displayed Saturn’s complex rings and the thick, hazy atmosphere of the planet’s satellite, Titan.
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The first spaceworthy shuttle in NASA's orbital fleet, Columbia launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 12, 1981, the 20th anniversary of human spaceflight. On its initial two-day mission, during which it orbited the Earth 36 times, it was commanded by space veteran John Young and piloted by Robert Crippen. Tragically, on February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, killing its seven crew members.
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President Ronald Reagan, on March 23, 1983, proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (more popularly known as “Star Wars”), a missile-defense tactic that was later implemented in anti-ballistic missile systems. Reagan’s goal was to protect the U.S. from an attack by nuclear missiles, using ground- and space-based systems. After little progress was made, it was co-opted by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to regionally cover theater missile defense.
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In June 1983, astronaut Sally Kirsten Ride became the first American woman to go into space. She answered a newspaper ad looking for applicants to the space program and joined NASA in 1978. Here, she inspects the array of tools during her orbit in the Challenger shuttle.
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On February 19, 1986, the Soviet space station Mir began its successful orbit, where it would operate for 15 years before purposely breaking apart during re-entry. Don’t envy life inside the station—apparently it was a crowded mess of instruments and possessions, and typically housed three crew members in its shell.
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In 1986, satellites began taking computer-enhanced images, and discoveries included an ozone hole over Antarctica and the location of forest fires. Seen here is a 400-mile high view of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the disaster, with the red area marking the radioactive spots.
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On August 25, 1989, unmanned spacecraft Voyager 2 (just like Voyager 1—only better!) flew within 3,100 miles of the planet Neptune, shown here, and discovered six new moons. The probe discovered the rather awesomely named Great Dark Spot, which, while no longer seen from Earthly telescopes, was probably a huge cloud or a hole in the clouds surrounding the planet.
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was prepped for deployment as early as April 24, 1990, but its repairs and adjustments were not completed for its total mission until 1994. It would later have the capacity to allow astronomers to probe the universe 14 billion light years in the distance, and is the first unmanned telescope designed for astronauts to service it in space.
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The U.S. celebrated Independence Day by staking its claim on the planet Mars using the Pathfinder probe. On July 4, 1997, the surface of the Red Planet was photographed and filmed using NASA television. It was the first time since the 1976 Viking mission that images of Mars’ surface were sent to Earth.
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Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalyov, right, Yuri Gidzenko, and U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd pose before launching at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, on October 31, 2000. The Russian rocket carrying the first residents of the International Space Station went on a mission that NASA hopes will lead to the permanent occupancy of space. Its mission will be completed in 2011, and the ISS is by far the largest satellite ever to hover in Earth’s orbit.
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The first privately funded flight, called SpaceShipOne, climbs after launching from White Knight, and eventually reached a height of 62 miles on June 21, 2004, in Mojave, California. The space effort was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and headed by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan.
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