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With the launch of Sputnik 1. A technological feat by the Soviet Union, the beach ball sized satellite weighs 184 pounds and takes 98 minutes to orbit Earth.
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Yuri A. Gagarin was from the Soviet Union and was the first to successfully orbit the globe, circling once at a peak altitude of about 200 miles above Earth.
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Trying to keep up with the Russians, the U.S. sends Alan Shepard on a 15 minute suborbital flight as the first American in space.
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First American, John H. Glenn, orbits the Earth three times in a nearly five-hour flight. Things went amiss though with his Mercury capsule's heat shield, raising the specter that the spacecraft might burn up. But the shield remains in place, and Glenn successfully splashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
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Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exits his Voskhod 2 capsule for a 12-minute spacewalk, knowing that future missions will require astronauts to work outside their spaceships.
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After four test flights in 1981 and 1982, the first space shuttle, Columbia, carries a crew of four and the largest crew ever to be launched into space on a single vehicle.
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Sally K. Ride lifts off on the space shuttle Challenger to become the first American woman in space. However, she wasn't the first women in space.
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The space shuttle Challenger goes into a disaster and disintegrates 73 seconds after liftoff. All seven astronauts were killed.
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More than a single telescope, Hubble is an orbiting collection of instruments designed to view the universe free from interference from the Earth's atmosphere.
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Thirty-six years after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, former astronaut John Glenn boards the space shuttle Discovery for a triumphant return.
