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The world's first artificial satellite orbitted the Earth for around 98 minutes.
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Sputnik 2 carried a small dog named Laika into orbit, sadly the poor dog died in space from over heating and they were not able to bring it back.
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Explorer 1, the first American satellite to reach orbit, is launched. It carried scientific equipment that lead to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belt.
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Pioneer 1 is launched to a height of 70,700 miles.
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Luna 1 is launched by the USSR. It is the first man made object to orbit the Sun.
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Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth once and becomes the first man in space.
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Gus Grissom is launched on a sub-orbital flight. His Liberty-Bell capsule is lost when it fills with water and sinks after splashdown.
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John Glenn orbits the Earth three times.
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Mariner 2 flies past Venus and enters a solar orbit
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Ranger 7 transmits the first close range images of the Moon.
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Alexei Leonov spends 12 minutes outside of his Voskhod spacecraft performing the first spacewalk.
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Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee are killed when a fire ignites in their Apollo 1 capsule while performing a test on the launch pad
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Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders begin the first manned journey from the Earth to the Moon. On Christmas Eve they take turns reading Genesis in a broadcast heard around the world
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Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon while crewmate Michael Collins orbits around the Moon alone.
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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
