Space Race

By 98avega

  • USSR launches Sputnik 1

  • USSR launches Sputnik 2 which carried a small dog named Laika into orbit.

  • First Communications Satellite

  • The US launches Discoverer XIV, its first camera equipped spy satellite.

  • Alan B. Shepard becomes the first Astronaut

    The U.S. sent Alan Shepard into space. He made a 15 minnute flight.

  • NASA announces the Gemini Program.

  • Mariner 2 flies past Venus and enters a solar orbit.

  • Cosmonaut Valentia Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.

  • Luna 9 becomes the first spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon.

  • Surveyor 1 soft-lands on the Moon.

  • Zond 5 is launched. It carried a biological payload around the Moon and returned to Earth six days later.

  • Soyuz 4 & 5 perform the first Soviet spacecraft docking.

  • Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon.

  • Pete Conrad and Alan Bean perform the first precision lunar landing, touching down just 600 feet from the Surveyor 3 probe that arrived two years earlier.