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First satellite launched
Sputnik 1 -
First human in space
Yuri Gagarin -
First American in space
Alan Shepard -
First man to circle the Earth
John Glenn -
First space walk
A cosmonaut remembers the exhilaration-and terror-of his first space mission. In March 1965, at the age of 30, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in history, beating out American rival Ed White on Gemini 4 by almost three months. -
Apollo 1
tragedy struck the Apollo 1 mission when a fire inside the space capsule caused the death of the three astronauts slated to travel to the moon. The event changed spacecraft design forever. -
Apollo 8
Apollo 8, the second manned mission of the Apollo program, took astronauts farther than anyone had gone before and showed humanity just how small and special our planet is. During their seven-day flight in December 1968, the crew became the first people to orbit another world. Awed by the sight of Earth rising over the moon's horizon, they took one of the most iconic photographs in history. -
Apollo 11
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said that the U.S. should work quickly and meet a goal. The goal was to send people to the Moon and back. The U.S. did meet the goal. And it only took eight years. One day in July, Apollo 11 launched towards the Moon. A few days later, Apollo 11 began to orbit around the Moon. Then Armstrong and Aldrin took the Lunar Module to the Moon. On july 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong put his left foot on the rocky Moon. It was the first human footprint on the Moon. -
Apollo 13
Apollo 13 was to be the third mission to land on the Moon. An explosion in one of the oxygen tanks crippled the spacecraft during flight and the crew were forced to orbit the Moon and return to the Earth without landing. -
Apollo 17
Apollo 17 was the final mission of NASA's Apollo program, the enterprise that landed the first humans on the Moon. Launched at 12:33 am Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 1972, with a crew made up of Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, it was the last use of Apollo hardware for its original purpose. -
Mariner 10 Launched
On Nov. 3, 1973, the Mariner Venus/Mercury 1973 spacecraft, also known as Mariner 10, was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, becoming the first spacecraft designed to use gravity assist. Three months after launch it flew by Venus, changed speed and trajectory, then crossed Mercury's orbit in March 1974. -
Voyager 2 launched
As originally designed, the Voyagers were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of the two planets. -
First space shuttle launch
The first launch of the Space Shuttle occurred on 12 April 1981, exactly 20 years after the first manned space flight, when the orbiter Columbia, with two crew members, astronauts John W. Young, commander, and Robert L. Crippen, pilot, lifted off from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, at the Kennedy Space Center. -
First American woman in space
Sally Ride -
challenger disaster
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when the NASA Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members, which included five NASA astronauts and two Payload Specialists. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11:39 EST -
Galileo launched
The Galileo mission consists of two spacecraft: an orbiter and an atmospheric probe. Launched during the STS 34 flight of the Atlantis orbiter, the two spacecraft were kicked out of Earth orbit by an inertial upper stage (IUS) rocket, sending them careening through the inner solar system. The trajectory which the spacecraft followed was called a VEEGA (Venus-Earth-Earth Gravity Assist), traveling first in toward the Sun for a gravity assist from Venus before encountering the Earth two times (spa -
International space station constructed finished
The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Its first component launched into orbit in 1998, and the ISS is now the largest artificial body in orbit and can often be seen with the naked eye from Earth. The ISS consists of pressurized modules, external trusses, solar arrays and other components. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets as well as American Space Shuttles. -
Hubble launched
The Hubble Space Telescope's launch in 1990 sped humanity to one of its greatest advances in that journey. Hubble is a telescope that orbits Earth. Its position above the atmosphere, which distorts and blocks the light that reaches our planet, gives it a view of the universe that typically far surpasses that of ground-based telescopes. -
First tourist in space
American businessman Dennis Tito, the world's first orbital space tourist, is seen training for his historic 2001 flight to the International Space Station. Tito launched in April 2001 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft thanks to a $20 million deal brokered by the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures -
columbia disaster
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster occurred on February 1, 2003, when Columbia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana as it reentered Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
During the launch of STS-107, Columbia's 28th mission, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the left wing. A few previous shuttle launches had seen minor damage from foam shedding,[1] but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. -
First launch of space ship one
A major turning point for private spaceflight occurred on June 21, 2004, when SpaceShipOne, the first non-governmental manned spacecraft, flew 62.5 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth's surface to reach the boundary of space. -
New horizons launched
On January 19, 2006, New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral directly into an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory with a speed of about 16.26 kilometers per second (58,536 km/h; 36,373 mph). After a brief encounter with asteroid 132524 APL, New Horizons proceeded to Jupiter, making its closest approach on February 28, 2007, at a distance of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). -
First Chinese space walk
China's first spacewalk. On 27 September, Zhai Zhigang, wearing a Chinese-developed Feitian space suit, conducted a 22-minute space walk, the first ever for a Chinese astronaut. -
Last space shuttle launch
STS-135 (ISS assembly flight ULF7)was the 135th and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program. It used the orbiter Atlantis and hardware originally processed for the STS-335 contingency mission, which was not flown. STS-135 launched on 8 July 2011, and landed on 21 July 2011, following a one-day mission extension. The four-person crew was the smallest of any shuttle mission since STS-6 in April 1983. -
Curiosity Mars landing
Curiosity is a car-sized robotic rover exploring Gale Crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL).
Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 15:02 UTC aboard the MSL spacecraft and landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17 UTC. The Bradbury Landing site was less than 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from the center of the rover's touchdown target after a 563,000,000 km (350,000,000 mi) journey. -
New horizons reaches Pluto
During the cruise, New Horizons also crossed the orbits of Saturn (June 8, 2008), Uranus (March 18, 2011) and Neptune (August 25, 2014). Pluto System Encounter. In January 2015, New Horizons entered the first of several approach phases that will culminate with the first close-up flyby of the Pluto on July 14, 2015.
