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Soviet Union launches Sputnik. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball.
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U.S. launches an artificial satellite
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Lunik 2 was the second of the Soviet Union's Luna programmed spacecraft launched to the Moon.
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Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to enter space and the first to orbit the Earth, helping boost the Soviet space program and intensify the space race with the United States.
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NASA astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off in a Freedom 7 capsule atop a Mercury-Redstone rocket to become the first American in space.
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Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission and became the first American to orbit the Earth and the fifth person in space.
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She is the first woman to have flown in space, having been selected from more than four hundred applicants.
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Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to fly by Mars, and the first to return close-up images of the Red Planet.
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first manned moon landing
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins -
Soviet spacecraft, part of the Venera series of probes to Venus. When it landed on the Venusian surface, it became the first spacecraft to land on another planet and first to transmit data from there back to Earth.
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Drops capsule
First manned space station
It consisted of a spherical 1.2 m diameter landing capsule -
sent toward Jupiter
the second in a series of solar-orbiting, spin-stabilized, solar-cell and battery-powered satellites designed to obtain measurements of interplanetary phenomena from widely separated points in space on a continuing basis. -
the Soviet Union neared collapse, with its ideological underpinnings evaporating, the impetus for the arms race and competition in space declined, allowing both countries to seriously pursue strategic partnerships in space
