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The Space Race

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 21, 2020 | Original: February 22, 2010

After World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers—the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union—against each other. Beginning in the late 1950s, space became another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology, its military firepower and–by extension–its political-economic system.

Causes of the Space Race

By the mid-1950s, the U.S.-Soviet Cold War had worked its way into the fabric of everyday life in both countries, fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media. These tensions would continue throughout the space race, exacerbated by such events as the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the outbreak of war in Southeast Asia.

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveler”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans. In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

Did you know? After Apollo 11 landed on the moon's surface in July 1969, six more Apollo missions followed by the end of 1972. Arguably the most famous was Apollo 13, whose crew managed to survive an explosion of the oxygen tank in their spacecraft's service module on the way to the moon.

NASA Is Created

In 1958, the United States launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun . That same year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration.

Eisenhower also created two national security-oriented space programs that would operate simultaneously with NASA’s program. The first, spearheaded by the U.S. Air Force, dedicated itself to exploiting the military potential of space. The second, led by the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ), the Air Force and a new organization called the National Reconnaissance Office (the existence of which was kept classified until the early 1990s) was code-named Corona; it would use orbiting satellites to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union and its allies.

Space Race Heats Up: Men (And Chimps) Orbit Earth

In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon. In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth , traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1. For the U.S. effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok; they tested the craft with chimpanzees  and held a final test flight in March 1961 before the Soviets were able to pull ahead with Gagarin’s launch. On May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit).

Later that May, President John F. Kennedy made the bold, public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, and by the end of that year, the foundations of NASA’s lunar landing program–dubbed Project Apollo –were in place.

Achievements of Apollo

From 1961 to 1964, NASA’s budget was increased almost 500 percent, and the lunar landing program eventually involved some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 employees of industrial and university contractors. Apollo suffered a setback in January 1967, when three astronauts were killed after their spacecraft caught fire during a launch simulation. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s lunar landing program proceeded tentatively, partly due to internal debate over its necessity and to the untimely death (in January 1966) of Sergey Korolyov, chief engineer of the Soviet space program.

December 1968 saw the launch of Apollo 8, the first manned space mission to orbit the moon, from NASA’s massive launch facility on Merritt Island, near Cape Canaveral, Florida . On July 16, 1969, U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong , Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins set off on the Apollo 11 space mission, the first lunar landing attempt. After landing successfully on July 20, Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon’s surface; he famously called the momen t “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Who Won the Space Race?

By landing on the moon, the United States effectively “won” the space race that had begun with Sputnik’s launch in 1957. For their part, the Soviets made four failed attempts to launch a lunar landing craft between 1969 and 1972, including a spectacular launch-pad explosion in July 1969. From beginning to end, the American public’s attention was captivated by the space race, and the various developments by the Soviet and U.S. space programs were heavily covered in the national media. This frenzy of interest was further encouraged by the new medium of television. Astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes, and earth-bound men and women seemed to enjoy living vicariously through them. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

With the conclusion of the space race, U.S. government interest in lunar missions waned after the early 1970s. In 1975, the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission sent three U.S. astronauts into space aboard an Apollo spacecraft that docked in orbit with a Soviet-made Soyuz vehicle. When the commanders of the two crafts officially greeted each other, their “ handshake in space ” served to symbolize the gradual improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late Cold War era.

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What was the space race?

The space race was a period of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States over who could conquer space exploration first.

• First man in space
• Apollo program
• End of the space race
• Modern space race
• Additional resources

The space race was a series of competitive technology demonstrations between the United States and the Soviet Union, aiming to show superiority in spaceflight. 

It was an outgrowth of the mid-20th-century Cold War, a tense global conflict that pitted the ideologies of capitalism and communism against one another, according to an online exhibit from the National Air and Space Museum . 

From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, the two superpowers were embroiled in a bitter competition over who could 'conquer' outer space first. Beginning with the launch of the first satellite and culminating with a joint mission between the two superpowers, the space race was a unique period in space exploration.

How the space race began

Following the end of the Second World War, a bitter ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War , began. The Cold War had many battlefields, from the United States' intervention in Vietnam to the nuclear arms race. Another area of conflict was the battle to 'conquer' the exploration of space first. The first aim of this "space race" was the launching of an unmanned object, a satellite, which could successfully orbit Earth.

The United States first began planning this venture in 1954, according to a NASA article . However, on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union announced that they had successfully launched a satellite, Sputnik . A month later they followed this with the launch of Sputnik 2, which carried a dog named Laika , making the Soviets the first to send a living creature into outer space, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich .

In the United States, the response to the news that the Soviet Union had sent an object into outer space, caused public panic. "When Sputnik launches, President Eisenhower doesn't see it as an existential threat," according to Brian C Odom, acting Chief Historian for NASA. "He sees it as just what it was, the Soviet Union launching a transceiver transmitter into orbit. But the American public saw it differently, right because they saw it as this larger cold war competition." 

Following the launch of Sputnik, it was deemed appropriate that a private organization should be founded in order to best facilitate the burgeoning American Space Program, according to NASA. In late 1957, America's first attempt at a satellite, the Vanguard TV-3, almost immediately crashed back onto the launchpad, according to The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum . Although the successful launch of Explorer 1 on Jan. 31, 1958, did help soften this blow, it was still decided that a private body should be set up. 

There were other factors involved too. "Eisenhower's chief problem during this period was which branch of the military would be responsible for developing a launch vehicle," according to Odom, "however, this was problematic because it put the various branches in competition with each other. Eisenhower was really trying to disentangle all the military branches from being in competition with each other and move space exploration into a government agency dedicated to peaceful, open communication."

NASA officially opened for business on Oct. 1, 1958. However, the early years of NASA were a far cry from what the organization would become. The fledgling institution was in the process of finding its feet and discovering how it would approach the various problems concerned with launching both humans and objects into space.  "In those early years, particularly 1958-1961, NASA was working to understand what its overall program would be," Odom said. 

"What were its priorities, where would it apply the majority of its funding? There was a huge element of NASA that was thinking, what are the scientific questions that this agency is going to answer? Questions like what can we do with satellites in space? It was kind of a wild west, It was trying to figure out what it wanted to be."

The first man into space

On April 12, 1961, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man into space when he successfully completed a 108-minute flight orbiting Earth a single time, According to New Scientist . Following the flight, Gagarin became a celebrity within the Soviet Union but was kept from returning to space due to the authority's fears that, were there to be an accident, they could lose a useful propaganda tool, according to the BBC . However, on March 27, 1968, Gagarin died in an accident during a routine training flight, according to Phys.Org .

A month after Gagarin's historic flight, on May 5, 1961, the United States was able to catch up with their Soviet Rivals, when Navy Test pilot Alan Shepard became the second man into space, according to The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Because of the placement of the portholes in the capsule, Shepard was, unfortunately, unable to view any stars, according to his flight report . 

"Following Shepard's flight in May 1961, it became very clear that the space race was continuing,"  Odom said. "President Kennedy committed to the lunar program and once that commitment was made, the resources came with it. NASA's attention for the next seven or eight years was focused on putting a man on the moon." 

A major turning point in the space race occurred that same month when U.S. President John F. Kennedy stood before legislators in Congress and announced that he had committed NASA to landing people on the moon before the end of the decade.

Dangers of the space race

Alongside the victories there were also many losses, reaffirming just how dangerous space flight could be. On Jan. 27, 1967, the U.S. program had its first major disaster when a flash fire broke out during a simulated launch for the first lunar module, Apollo 1 . The first death of an astronaut during a mission was that of the Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. On April 24, 1967, Komarov's craft Soyuz 1 crashed when its parachute became tangled, according to the BBC . 

But how does contemporary, or more recent spaceflight, compare to these early pioneering years? "One thing to stress is that space exploration has not gotten easier," Odom said. 

"The challenges that were there in the very beginning are still the challenges that we face today. Yes, they were developing brand new systems and putting human beings at the top of rockets that were built for nuclear delivery systems [the Mercury and Gemini programs ] but what we've learned over the decades of space exploration is that it hasn't gotten easier."

Aim for the moon

On Sept. 12, 1962, President Kennedy delivered a speech at Rice University Stadium, providing a clear goal for Americans in the developing space race: to put a man on the moon with the Apollo Program . "We choose to go to the Moon" Kennedy began" in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills," according to the JFK Library . 

Kennedy's speech followed an earlier one made to Congress on May 25, 1961, following Yuri Gagarin's successful spaceflight, according to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum . Shortly after this speech, NASA's budget would increase by 89% and its research would now have one clear long-term aim in mind - though there would be other victories and developments in the short term. 

"The space race was really a race to the moon," according to Odom."Kennedy wanted to get to the moon first. It would be a great propaganda coup. In the global South, you had a lot of countries becoming independent from former colonial powers. What system would they follow? Would they follow the U.S. liberal democracy or would they follow the Soviet example of communism? Kennedy saw the race to the moon as a way to demonstrate American technological power and the benefit of one system over another." 

Who won the space race?

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 launched from the Kennedy space center . Four days later, at 10.56 PM EDT on July 20, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Although conspiracy theories persist that the moon landing was a hoax , more than half a billion people watched the historic event, which was broadcast on television.

This was a victory for the United States over the Soviet Union, whose own lunar program had made a number of failed attempts. Between 1963 and 1965, 11 rockets had been launched carrying small landing objects with airbags to cushion the impact, all unsuccessful, according to Popular Mechanics . 

Achieving this goal in 1966, they then shifted their research to putting the first man on the moon . However, various issues with rocket launches caused the Soviet scientists to consider a robotic launch instead. Days before the Apollo rocket took off, the Soviet Luna 15 launched. This automated module was intended to achieve a soft landing and bring back samples from the lunar surface, however, communication was lost and it is suspected it crashed into the moon's surface, according to The New York Times . 

Over the next few years, each side in the space race reached several further world-firsts. The Americans achieved the first interplanetary flyby when Mariner 2 sped past Venus in 1962, followed by the first Mars flyby in 1965 with Mariner 4. 

The Soviets sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova , in 1963 — a feat that would take the U.S. 20 more years to achieve). Other nations launched their own rockets and satellites, including Canada in 1962, France in 1965, and Japan and China in 1970. 

Though there were additional American and Soviet missions, after the successes of the Apollo program, the space race was widely believed to have been won by the U.S. Eventually, as the Cold War came to an end, both sides agreed to cooperate in space and construct the International Space Station , beginning in 1998. 

As the 1970s began, relations between the two superpowers improved and discussions on topics such as arms control began according to the Office of the Historian . 

Following the moon landing, the Soviet space program switched its focus to placing the first space station in orbit, according to Astronomy.com . 

However, the astronauts in the Soyuz 11 capsule were all killed when a faulty valve, triggered after the instrument modules were separated from the orbital capsule, caused an oxygen leak. The Soyuz 11 crew are the only humans to have died in space, according to The National Space Center .  

In 1975, as a symbol of cooperation between the two superpowers, a joint mission (called the Apollo-Soyuz mission) between the U.S. and the USSR was launched. On July 17 an Apollo shuttle docked with the Soyuz mission, and the crews greeted each other, according to NASA. symbolic handshake, broadcast globally, between commanders Tom Stafford and Alexi Leonov. In many ways, this can be seen as a symbolic end to the space race. 

Yet despite the space race coming to an end, its impact is irrefutable. "We can't forget about the Cold War context for all this activity and the seemingly existential threat of the Soviet Union," according to Odom. 

"As a historian looking at this from a contextual standpoint, I can tell you that I don't think Kennedy would commit to going to the moon without the race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Without the Apollo program, how far and how quickly would our technology have advanced to the point it is at today? The Cold War made the moon landing a priority in Kennedy's mind and his commitment to it really does change America and American technology."

Is there a current space race?

Now, some believe that a new space race has begun with the United States pitted against superpowers such as China and India, as well as old rival Russia. But some criticize this notion.

"The Russians don't have a stated public interest in going to the moon with human spaceflight," Wendy Whitman Cobb, a political scientist at Cameron University in Oklahoma, told Space.com . "[The Chinese] have taken a purposefully slow, methodical approach to spaceflight and for them, I think the motivations are more in the military and national-prestige realms."

The world is much more complex today than it was during the Cold War when two major superpowers vied for dominance. Now, private companies, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, have joined in a new contest to show off their spaceflight capabilities, according to the BBC . While there are some competitive aspects, such as the potential for fights over limited lunar resources , tomorrow's space races will involve a greater number of actors and more muddled win-lose scenarios than before. 

Additional resources:

The NASA History Division contains a wealth of information and documentation for anyone wishing to research the history of the organization. For a comprehensive list of important dates relating to the Space Race, check out Royal Museums Greenwich timeline. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has a number of items related to the space race among it's collections, which can be viewed here . 

Timeline of the space race

Oct 4, 1957: The Soviet Union successfully sends the first man-made object into space. Sputnik is the world's first orbital satellite. 

November 3, 1957 : The second experimental spacecraft successfully launched into earth orbit, Sputnik 2 contained onboard the dog Laika - the first biological organism to enter space.

January 31, 1958: The United States launches its first satellite, Explorer 1, following the launch of Sputnik three months earlier. 

October 1, 1958: On 29th July 1958, President Eisenhower signed the Aeronautics and Space Act which established the organisation of the same name, commonly known as NASA. 

September 12, 1959 : The Soviet Union launches Lunar 2, the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of the moon. 

April 12, 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man into space when he successfully completed a 108 minute flight orbiting the earth a single time. 

August 19, 1960 : The USSR launches Sputnik 5 carrying two dogs, Belka and Strelka, who became the first animals to return to earth following a day in space.

January 31, 1961 : NASA sends Ham, a Chimpanzee into space. Despite the capsule losing pressure, Ham is saved by his spacesuit and returns to earth.

May 5, 1961 : Alan Shepard becomes the first American astronaut in space. Purportedly, due to the placement of the portholes he was unable to see the stars.

May 25 1961 : President Kennedy makes a speech to congress in which he announces that the United States will put a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

June 16, 1963: Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman into space, orbiting the earth 48 times across almost three days. 

July 14-15, 1965: The Mariner 4 becomes the first spacecraft not only to successfully travel to Mars but also the first to take a photograph of another planet from space.

March 18, 1965 : For 12 minutes Soviet Cosmonaut Alexi Leonov floats freely in outer space on the end of nearly 16 foot long tether, becoming the first astronaut to 'space walk'. 

February 21, 1967: Astronauts Virgil I Grissom, Edward Higgins White and Roger Chaffee lose their lives when a fire breaks out on their spacecraft during a launch rehearsal test. 

July 20, 1969 : At 10.56 PM EDT Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

April 11-17, 1970: When an oxygen tank explodes aboard Nasa's third moon landing mission, Apollo 13, astronauts are fortunately able to return home in the lunar module, averting any loss of life. 

April 19, 1971: Salyut 1 is launched by the U.S.S.R. becoming the first space station, orbiting the earth 3,000 times during 157 days in orbit. 

July 15-24, 1975 : As a policy of detente leads to a cooling of tensions between the two superpowers, a joint mission between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. is launched.

Bibliography

• Royal Museums Greenwich
• New Scientist
• The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
• Popular Mechanics
• The New York Times
• JFK Library
• Office of the Historian

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Adam Mann is a journalist specializing in astronomy and physics stories. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Nature, Science, and many other places. He lives in Oakland, California, where he enjoys riding his bike. Follow him on Twitter @adamspacemann or visit his website at https://www.adamspacemann.com/ .

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How the space race launched an era of exploration beyond Earth

Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union fueled a technological sprint to space—which culminated with a historic landing on the moon.

Tensions ran high at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the morning of April 12, 1961, as the Soviet Union prepared to launch the first human into space. Of the 16 previous attempts to propel the U.S.S.R.’s Vostok rocket into orbit, half had failed. Two of the space program’s top engineers reportedly had to take tranquilizers that day as they waited for liftoff at the Kazakh launch site.

But Yuri Gagarin remained calm in the capsule atop the rocket. After months of rigorous physical and technical training, the 27-year-old cosmonaut had been chosen for the historic flight in part for his unflappability. Intelligent, diligent, and well-liked among his comrades, one memo written by Soviet Air Force doctors and obtained by historian Asif Siddiqi noted that Gagarin “understands life better than a lot of his friends.”

At 9:07 a.m., Gagarin called out “ Poyekhali!”— Russian for “Off we go!”—as the rocket lifted off. He narrated his experiences to those on the ground as the rocket’s acceleration to 17,000 miles an hour pushed him back into his seat. “I see the Earth. The g-load is increasing somewhat. I feel excellent, in a good mood. I see the clouds. The landing site ... it's beautiful. What beauty.”

Moments later, the Soviet cosmonaut became the first person in space and, 89 minutes after launch, the first person to orbit the planet. It was a pivotal moment in the space race between the United States and Soviet Union that would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. But it isn’t where the story of human spaceflight truly begins: That trajectory was charted years earlier by another Soviet success.

( Subscriber exclusive: Explore 50 years of lunar visits with our newest moon map .)

The space race begins

Despite being allies during World War II, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. grew increasingly suspicious of one another as the war drew to a close in 1945. The U.S. had just demonstrated its ability to destroy entire cities by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan’s surrender. Thus began the Cold War , in which the U.S. and U.S.S.R. jockeyed for world dominance.

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To prove their superior technological capabilities, both countries began to build massive nuclear arsenals and rockets capable of hitting targets across the world. In the mid-1950s, both countries announced plans to use these rockets to propel artificial satellites into space. While the U.S. scheduled a 1958 launch for its Project Vanguard, the Soviets quietly resolved to beat the Americans to the punch.

On October 4, 1957, the world was taken by surprise when the Soviet Union announced that it had launched a satellite called Sputnik, Russian for “traveling companion ,” into orbit. Although it was no larger than a beach ball and had limited technical capabilities, Americans were frightened as they heard its radio signature “beep, beep, beep” as it passed overhead.

President Dwight Eisenhower had his own concerns. White House officials fretted over whether the world would see the Soviet Union as the more sophisticated superpower, writing in one report that Sputnik’s launch would “generate myth, legend and enduring superstition of a kind peculiarly difficult to eradicate or modify, which the U.S.S.R. can exploit to its advantage.”

Unwilling to concede space to the Soviet Union, the U.S. established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in July 1958 and began its own pursuit of spaceflight in earnest.

Earliest human flights to space

Human space travel was not a novel concept in the 1950s. The U.S. had been launching rockets with animals — including fruit flies and rhesus macaques —into suborbital space since the late 1940s, while the U.S.S.R. began launching dogs in 1951. Just weeks after Sputnik’s 1957 launch, the Soviets famously sent a dog named Laika into orbit. (Laika died within hours of the flight from heat and stress.)

( Subscriber exclusive: See a visual timeline of every animal ever sent to space .)

But the true goal was to send humans to space. In 1958 NASA launched Project Mercury with three specific goals : Launch an American into orbit around Earth, investigate the human body’s ability to tolerate spaceflight, and bring both the spacecraft and astronaut home safety. The unstated goal: Accomplish all of this before the Soviets.

Yet once again the U.S.S.R. proved a step ahead. Gagarin’s historic flight took place a month before astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, 1961. Although Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7 was a key milestone—watched by millions of television viewers—it was overshadowed by Gagarin’s journey all the way around Earth.

Weeks after Shepard’s flight, President John F. Kennedy stood before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Acknowledging that the country hadn’t treated space exploration with enough urgency, he declared his intention to make it a priority and issued a new challenge : Put an American on the moon by the end of the decade.

“No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,” he said. “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation.”

Reaching for the moon

Before NASA could venture to the moon, however, its scientists and engineers had much to learn. The space agency pushed forward with Project Mercury, making astronaut John Glenn the first American to orbit Earth in February 1962 . In May 1963 Gordon Cooper completed a 22-orbit flight, a journey that took about 34 hours and 20 minutes. A month later, though, cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky spent four days and 23 hours in space— still the record for the longest solo spaceflight —and Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly to space.

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After Mercury, NASA advanced its spaceflight capabilities with Project Gemini. Considered a bridge to the moon , Gemini’s goals were to rendezvous and dock in orbit, test atmospheric reentry maneuvers, and determine how longer periods of space travel affected humans.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were still logging milestones. In March 1965 cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to exit an orbiting spacecraft. Lasting 12 minutes, the spacewalk was particularly harrowing : Leonov’s spacesuit was so rigid he had difficulty reentering the spacecraft and ultimately had to release some of his suit’s pressure to close the airlock behind him.

Ten weeks later Ed White became the first American to walk in space , spending 23 minutes floating at the end of a 25-foot umbilical line while he and astronaut James McDivitt in the Gemini 4 capsule circled Earth at 17,000 miles an hour. After that the U.S. began to gain on the Soviets: In December 1965 the astronauts aboard Gemini 7 set the record for the most time in space during a two-week mission. Gemini 8 achieved the first space docking in 1966—though a malfunction sent the spacecraft spinning out of control, to be narrowly recovered by a 35-year-old Neil Armstrong in the commander’s seat .

After 10 crewed flights in five years, the program ended with Gemini 12 on November 15, 1966—a mission during which Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin logged a record-setting five hours and 30 minutes exploring outside a spacecraft. At last it was time to go to the moon.

Footprints on the moon

As it conducted the Gemini missions, NASA had already begun developing the spacecraft for the Apollo program. The vehicle included a command/service module that would fly to the moon and enter orbit, and a lunar module that would undock for landing and then blast off to rejoin the command module for the return trip to Earth.

But the Apollo program got off to a tragic start . On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire on the launchpad during a ground test for their planned February mission. An investigation concluded that the fire was sparked by a short circuit in the wires near Grissom’s seat, and that it spread quickly due to high oxygen levels and flammable materials in the cabin.

Following a lengthy reevaluation of the design and safety of the spacecraft, the first crewed Apollo mission launched on October 11, 1968, when Apollo 7 blasted into Earth orbit. On the first of 11 days in space, the three astronauts aboard came down with cold s—learning the hard way that mucus cannot drain from the head in the weightlessness of space.

The mission was followed by the first flight all the way to the moon, more than 230,000 miles away. Before Apollo 8, the farthest humans had been from Earth was about 850 miles. The crew orbited the moon 10 times between December 24 and December 25, reading the opening lines of Genesis to a captivated audience of roughly a billion people —a quarter of the global population—during a Christmas Eve radio broadcast. The three astronauts were the first to see the far side of the moon with their own eyes and watch as Earth rose over the lunar horizon .

Apollo 9 was the first flight with the lunar module, testing the spacecraft in Earth orbit. Apollo 10 took the lunar module to the moon and descended to within 50,000 feet of the surface.

Finally on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off. On the fifth day in space, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin began preparations to land the lunar module Eagle on the moon’s surface. They touched down at precisely 3:17 p.m. Houston time on July 20—and hours later, at 9:56 p.m., Armstrong became the first person to step on the moon, famously proclaiming: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Over the next two hours , Armstrong and Aldrin collected soil and rock samples and set up experiments. They left an American flag planted on the moon’s surface and a plaque that reads, “We came in peace for all mankind.”

Subsequent lunar exploration

The U.S. would make five more successful crewed trips to the moon’s surface in the years that followed. Astronauts collected samples, ran scientific experiments, and tested a lunar rover. The program ended in December 1972 with Apollo 17, which saw astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spend more than three days on the moon.

( A brief history of moon exploration .)

After the successful missions to the moon, the U.S. and the Soviet Union began to collaborate. In 1975 the countries launched their first joint mission, Apollo-Soyuz , in which American and Soviet spacecraft successfully docked with one another while in orbit—allowing their crews to meet in space. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. and Russia continued their partnership in space, working together to build the International Space Station .

Several countries have since made uncrewed journeys to the moon, but the U.S. remains the sole country whose astronauts have set foot on the lunar surface. NASA intends to return astronauts to the moon by 2025 with its Artemis program , and other countries such as China also plan to send humans to the moon in the coming years or decades.

In the future, humans may venture all the way to Mars. Such a journey would require technologies that do not exist yet —but the same was true when the Apollo program was announced six decades ago.

“We choose to go to the moon,” Kennedy told the nation in a 1962 address . “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

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Space travel comes true – archive, 1957

November 3 1957: On this day the Russians launched a dog into space. This is how the Guardian reported the events

The second Russian satellite has demonstrated not only that space travel is practicable but that it has come true. Tass said early yesterday that the latest satellite contains a dog, later described to be a female of the Russian breed which is smaller than but similar to the husky.

At the same time the weight of the instruments, batteries, food, and dog kennel which the satellite carries was said to be half a ton. The Tass statement makes it clear that this weight is in addition to the weight of the last stage of the carrier rocket, to which, however, the satellite appears still to be attached.

The orbit of the new satellite is a much more ambitious one than that of the first. According to a report form Moscow last night, the greatest height of the satellite so far to be measured is 1,700km. The same report says that the period of the satellite's rotation is 103.7 minutes. This implies that the average height of the satellite round its orbit is nearly 1,100km. This is more than twice the average height of the first satellite, which still circles the earth. It follows that the new Russian venture will stay in the sky for several years unless it is brought down by some mechanism which it may carry.

Last night Moscow radio followed the announcement of the satellite's successful launching with a familiar time-table of its expected progress over the major cities of the world. The information about the inclination of the orbit of the satellite given in the original Tass statement appears to have been confirmed during the day . In this respect the orbit is much like that of the first satellite - inclined at something like 65 degrees to the Equator of the earth.

One notable difference, however, which will prove a mixed blessing for the observers in this country, is that Great Britain will pass under the new orbit during daylight hours. As a result radio reception will be more difficult, but night work will not be necessary.

The dog is reported by Moscow to have been trained for her journey by previous laboratory experiments and by flights in actual rockets. So that she would not eat all her food at once, she has been conditioned in a Pavlovian experiment to eat only at the sound of a bell, which is rung inside her pressurised and air-conditioned compartment at regular intervals.

Records of her respiratory activity and pulse rate are being telemetred back to earth by the radio-transmitters. They will be valuable signs of the way in which the dog is standing up to prolonged exposure to the sensation of weightlessness which future space travellers must expect. It will not be possible to tell how the dog is affected by the cosmic radiation to which she will be exposed unless she is recovered on earth.

This implies that the Russians will attempt to bring her back to earth. That this is so is confirmed by reports from the East German news agency last night, based on an article in the current Soviet "Aviation Review." Technically the problem should not be insuperable.

Means of descent

First it will be necessary for the dog and her pressurised compartment to be thrown out of the orbit in which she is now carried. This could be done by a separate rocket, as yet unburnt, by an explosive charge or even by a simple mechanical spring catapult.

However, the launch back to earth would have to be carried out with some precision: the later stages of the descent would have to be slowed down by some parachute arrangement and some means would have to be provided for protecting the dog's compartment from the heat that would be generated on first entry into the dense atmosphere. This, it will be noticed, is the problem of arranging that ballistic missiles fall safely back to earth.

It may well be that the weight of the arrangements needed to do this accounts for the great mass of the Russian satellite, which yesterday provided scientists with material for speculation.

The instruments needed to measure cosmic rays and the sun's radiation need not weigh more than a hundred weight, even with the power supplies. Radio transmitters and batteries would not take up more than that weight, while the dog and her kennel should not weigh much more. This leave at least half the weight of the instrumentation unaccounted for.

250-ton rocket

Weight is the starting point for another speculation: what kind of rocket was used to launch this satellite? If the rocket fuels available to Western engineers are taken as a starting point, it can be calculated that the initial weight of the rocket would have been between five hundred and a thousand tons for every ton put into orbit.

This implies that the initial rocket structure would have weighed about 250 tons or more. The size of this vehicle is hard to imagine. Its cost would not have been less than several million pounds.

In the circumstances it would appear all too probable that the Russians have developed some kind of rocket fuel which is not available in the West. Otherwise the sheer physical size of their latest project could not have allowed them to carry it off with such speed and success.

It is unlikely that they have developed some means of exploiting atomic energy for rocket propulsion because the inherent problems of this task have only recently been recognised. But it may easily be that they have found some means of burning fuels like metallic boron and compounds of this which exploit the greater inherent energy of these materials.

In the circumstances it would appear that the Russian ballistic missiles could be built on less gigantic lines than those which have until now been thought necessary in the West. This would also mean that Russian rockets could more easily be put into production than the vehicles being developed in the United States.

More bleeps

The arrangements for telemetering information back to the ground from the second satellite appear to be much the same as those from the used previously. Broadcasts are being made on frequencies of 20 and 40 mcs. The first frequency is a continuous transmission. The second is "keyed" into a bleeping form, and is modulated with a coded form of information being sent.

Radio observations of the new satellite were carried out yesterday at several stations in the United Kingdom. At the Mullard Observatory, Cambridge, scientists from the Cavendish Laboratory heard seven transits - including the first in this country at 5.58.

• From the Guardian archive

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The History of Space Exploration

During the time that has passed since the launching of the first artificial satellite in 1957, astronauts have traveled to the moon, probes have explored the solar system, and instruments in space have discovered thousands of planets around other stars.

Earth Science, Astronomy, Social Studies, U.S. History, World History

Apollo 11 Astronauts on Moon

A less belligerent, but no less competitive, part of the Cold War was the space race. The Soviet Union bested its rival at nearly every turn, until the U.S. beat them to the finish line by landing astronauts on the moon.

NASA photograph

We human beings have been venturing into space since October 4, 1957, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. This happened during the period of political hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States known as the Cold War. For several years, the two superpowers had been competing to develop missiles, called intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), to carry nuclear weapons between continents. In the U.S.S.R., the rocket designer Sergei Korolev had developed the first ICBM, a rocket called the R7, which would begin the space race. This competition came to a head with the launch of Sputnik . Carried atop an R7 rocket, the Sputnik satellite was able to send out beeps from a radio transmitter. After reaching space, Sputnik orbited Earth once every 96 minutes. The radio beeps could be detected on the ground as the satellite passed overhead, so people all around the world knew that it was really in orbit. Realizing that the U.S.S.R. had capabilities that exceeded U.S. technologies that could endanger Americans, the United States grew worried. Then, a month later, on November 3, 1957, the Soviets achieved an even more impressive space venture. This was Sputnik II, a satellite that carried a living creature, a dog named Laika. Prior to the launch of Sputnik, the United States had been working on its own capability to launch a satellite. The United States made two failed attempts to launch a satellite into space before succeeding with a rocket that carried a satellite called Explorer on January 31, 1958. The team that achieved this first U.S. satellite launch consisted largely of German rocket engineers who had once developed ballistic missiles for Nazi Germany. Working for the U.S. Army at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the German rocket engineers were led by Wernher von Braun and had developed the German V2 rocket into a more powerful rocket, called the Jupiter C, or Juno. Explorer carried several instruments into space for conducting science experiments. One instrument was a Geiger counter for detecting cosmic rays. This was for an experiment operated by researcher James Van Allen, which, together with measurements from later satellites, proved the existence of what are now called the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth. In 1958, space exploration activities in the United States were consolidated into a new government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). When it began operations in October of 1958, NASA absorbed what had been called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and several other research and military facilities, including the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (the Redstone Arsenal) in Huntsville. The first human in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who made one orbit around Earth on April 12, 1961, on a flight that lasted 108 minutes. A little more than three weeks later, NASA launched astronaut Alan Shepard into space, not on an orbital flight, but on a suborbital trajectory—a flight that goes into space but does not go all the way around Earth. Shepard’s suborbital flight lasted just over 15 minutes. Three weeks later, on May 25, President John F. Kennedy challenged the United States to an ambitious goal, declaring: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." In addition to launching the first artificial satellite, the first dog in space, and the first human in space, the Soviet Union achieved other space milestones ahead of the United States. These milestones included Luna 2, which became the first human-made object to hit the Moon in 1959. Soon after that, the U.S.S.R. launched Luna 3 . Less than four months after Gagarin’s flight in 1961, a second Soviet human mission orbited a cosmonaut around Earth for a full day. The U.S.S.R. also achieved the first spacewalk and launched the Vostok 6 mission, which made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman to travel to space. During the 1960s, NASA made progress toward President Kennedy’s goal of landing a human on the moon with a program called Project Gemini, in which astronauts tested technology needed for future flights to the moon, and tested their own ability to endure many days in spaceflight. Project Gemini was followed by Project Apollo, which took astronauts into orbit around the moon and to the lunar surface between 1968 and 1972. In 1969, on Apollo11, the United States sent the first astronauts to the Moon, and Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on its surface. During the landed missions, astronauts collected samples of rocks and lunar dust that scientists still study to learn about the moon. During the 1960s and 1970s, NASA also launched a series of space probes called Mariner, which studied Venus, Mars, and Mercury. Space stations marked the next phase of space exploration. The first space station in Earth orbit was the Soviet Salyut 1 station, which was launched in 1971. This was followed by NASA’s Skylab space station, the first orbital laboratory in which astronauts and scientists studied Earth and the effects of spaceflight on the human body. During the 1970s, NASA also carried out Project Viking in which two probes landed on Mars, took numerous photographs, examined the chemistry of the Martian surface environment, and tested the Martian dirt (called regolith ) for the presence of microorganisms . Since the Apollo lunar program ended in 1972, human space exploration has been limited to low-Earth orbit, where many countries participate and conduct research on the International Space Station. However, unpiloted probes have traveled throughout our solar system. In recent years, probes have made a range of discoveries, including that a moon of Jupiter, called Europa, and a moon of Saturn, called Enceladus, have oceans under their surface ice that scientists think may harbor life. Meanwhile, instruments in space, such as the Kepler Space Telescope , and instruments on the ground have discovered thousands of exoplanets , planets orbiting other stars. This era of exoplanet discovery began in 1995, and advanced technology now allows instruments in space to characterize the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets.

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History of Space Travel

Learn about the history of humans traveling into space.

The first earthling to orbit our planet was just two years old, plucked from the streets of Moscow barely more than a week before her historic launch. Her name was Laika. She was a terrier mutt and by all accounts a good dog. Her 1957 flight paved the way for space exploration back when scientists didn’t know if spaceflight was lethal for living things.

Humans are explorers. Since before the dawn of civilization, we’ve been lured over the horizon to find food or more space, to make a profit, or just to see what’s beyond those trees or mountains or oceans. Our ability to explore reached new heights—literally—in the last hundred years. Airplanes shortened distances, simplified travel, and showed us Earth from a new perspective. By the middle of the last century, we aimed even higher.

Our first steps into space began as a race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, rivals in a global struggle for power. Laika was followed into orbit four years later by the first human, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin. With Earth orbit achieved, we turned our sights on the moon. The United States landed two astronauts on its stark surface in 1969, and five more manned missions followed. The U.S.’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched probes to study the solar system. Manned space stations began glittering in the sky. NASA developed reusable spacecraft—space shuttle orbiters—to ferry astronauts and satellites to orbit. Space-travel technology had advanced light-years in just three decades. Gagarin had to parachute from his spaceship after reentry from orbit. The space shuttle leaves orbit at 16,465 miles an hour (26,498 kilometers an hour) and glides to a stop on a runway without using an engine.

Space travel is nothing like in the movies. Getting from A to B requires complex calculations involving inertia and gravity—literally, rocket science—to "slingshot" from planet to planet (or moon) across the solar system. The Voyager mission of the 1970s took advantage of a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to shave off nearly 20 years of travel time. Space is also dangerous. More than 20 astronauts have died doing their job.

That hasn’t stopped people from signing up and blasting off. NASA’s shuttle program has ended, but private companies are readying their own space programs. A company called Planetary Resources plans to send robot astronauts to the Asteroid Belt to mine for precious metals. Another company named SpaceX is hoping to land civilian astronauts on Mars—the next human step into the solar system—in 20 years. NASA and other civilian companies are planning their own Mars missions. Maybe you’ll be a member of one? Don’t forget to bring your dog.

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Outer this world, planet earth, calling all earthlings, the milky way, shoot for the stars, what is hubble, how hubble works, read this next, total solar eclipse.

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• October 4 - The Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.
• November 3 - The Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 was launched with a dog named Laika on board. Laika did not survive the voyage.
• January 31 - Explorer 1 was the first satellite launched by the United States when it was sent into orbit on January 31, 1958. It was designed and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. The satellite was sent aloft from Cape Canaveral in Florida by the Jupiter C rocket that was designed, built, and launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) under the direction of Dr. Wernher Von Braun.
• August 19 - The Soviet craft Sputnik 5 was launched, carrying the dogs Strelka and Belka. They became the first living beings to survive a trip into space.
• April 12 - Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
• May 5 - Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space.
• May 25 - President Kennedy challenged the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
• February 20 - Astronaut John Glenn became the first American in orbit.
• June 16 - Valentina Nikolayeva Tereshkova became the first woman in space.
• March 18 - While tethered to his spacecraft, cosmonaut Alexi Leonov became the first man to walk in space.
• June 3 - Astronaut Ed White became the first American to walk in space.
• July 14 - The spacecraft Mariner 4 transmitted the first pictures of Mars.
• February 3 - The Russian spacecraft Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to land on the moon.
• June 2 - Surveyor 1 became the first American spacecraft to land on the moon.
• January 27 - Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in an accidental fire in a command module on the launch pad.
• April 24 - Cosmonaut Vladimir M. Komarov was killed in a crash when the parachute on his Soyuz 1 spacecraft failed to deploy.
• October 18 - A descent capsule from the Soviet probe Venera 4 collected data about the atmosphere of Venus.
• September 15 - The Soviet spacecraft Zond 5 was launched and later became the first spacecraft to orbit the moon and return to Earth.
• December 21 - Apollo 8 was launched, and later her crewmembers became the first men to orbit the moon.
• July 20 - Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men on the moon.
• April 11 - Apollo 13 was launched.
• September 12 - The Soviet craft Luna 16 was launched and became the first automatic spacecraft to return soil samples of the moon.
• November 17 - The Soviet automatic robot Lunokhod 1 landed on the moon with Luna 17.
• December 15 - The Soviet Venera 7 became the first probe to land on Venus.
• April 19 - The Soviet space station Salyut 1 was launched.
• July 30 - The moon rover was driven on the moon for the first time.
• November 13 - The Mariner 9 probe became the first craft to orbit another world - Mars.
• December 11 - Eugene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt became the last men to walk on the moon.
• May 14 - The U.S. launched its first space station, Skylab.
• July 17 - The American Apollo 18 and Soviet Soyuz 19 dock in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
• September - The American probe Viking 2 discovered water frost on the Martian surface.
• August and September - Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched. (Voyager 2 was launched before Voyager 1, but Voyager 1 was on a faster trajectory.)
• March and August - Voyagers 1 and 2 began transmitting images of Jupiter and her moons.
• September - The U.S. probe Pioneer 11 reached Saturn and began transmitting images.
• November 13 - Voyager 1 reached Saturn and began transmitting images.
• April 12 - Columbia became the first Space Shuttle to be launched.
• August 26 - Voyager 2 reached Saturn and began transmitting images.
• April 4 - The second Space Shuttle, Challenger, was launched.
• June 19 - Sally Ride became the first American woman in space on Challenger’s second mission.
• August 30 - Guion Bluford became the first African-American in space.
• February 3 - Astronaut Bruce McCandless became the first man to take an untethered space walk.
• August 30 - The third Space Shuttle, Discovery, was launched.
• October - Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space.
• October 3 - Atlantis, the fourth Space Shuttle, was launched.
• January 24 - Voyager 2 began transmitting images from Uranus.
• January 28 - The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded seconds after liftoff.
• February 20 - The core section of the Space Station Mir was launched.
• August - Voyager 2 began transmitting images from Neptune.
• August 10 - The Magellan spacecraft began mapping the surface of Venus using radar equipment.
• August 24 - The Space Shuttle Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.
• May 7 - The Space Shuttle Endeavor was launched on her maiden voyage.
• September 12 - Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space.
• December - The Space Shuttle Endeavor made the first servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope.
• February 3 - Sergei Krikalev became the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a Space Shuttle.
• February 2 - Eileen Collins became the first female Shuttle pilot.
• December - The Galileo probe began transmitting data on Jupiter.
• July 4 - The Mars Pathfinder arrived on Mars and later began transmitting images.
• October 29 - John Glenn became the oldest man in space.
• July 23 - Eileen Collins became the first female Shuttle Commander.
• February 14 - The U.S. Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft began transmitting images of the asteroid Eros.
• February 12 - NEAR landed on the surface of Eros.
• April 28 - American Dennis Tito became the first tourist in space after paying the Russian space program $20,000,000.
• February 1 - The Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
• February 13 - An investigative panel found that superheated air almost certainly seeped through a breach in space shuttle Columbia’s left wing and possibly its wheel compartment during the craft’s fiery descent, resulting in the deaths of all seven astronauts.
• August 25 - NASA launched the largest-diameter infrared telescope ever in space, the Spitzer Space Telescope.
• September 21 - NASA’s Galileo mission ended a 14-year exploration of the solar system’s largest planet and its moons with the spacecraft crashing by design into Jupiter at 108,000 mph.
• January 14 - President Bush proposed a new space program that would send humans back to the moon by 2015 and establish a base to Mars and beyond.
• July 1 - The Cassini spacecraft sent back photographs of Saturn’s shimmering rings.
• July 3 - A NASA spacecraft collided with a comet half the size of Manhattan, creating a brilliant cosmic smashup designed to help scientists study the building blocks of life on earth.
• July 26 - Space Shuttle Discovery was launched with seven astronauts aboard; this was America’s first manned space shot since the 2003 Columbia disaster.
• January 15 - NASA spacecraft Stardust returned safely to Earth in a desert near Salt Lake City with the first dust ever collected from a comet.
• August 4 - NASA launched its Phoenix Mars Lander.
• August 8 - Space Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted off with teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan aboard as a crewmember. Morgan was the first teacher in space since the Challenger disaster in 1986.
• January 14 - The NASA space probe Messenger skimmed 124 miles above Mercury.
• May 25 - NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander landed safely and began sending images home after a 10-month, 422 million-mile journey. Scientists later reported that Phoenix discovered chunks of ice.
• March 6 - The NASA spacecraft Kepler was launched. Its mission is to search for planets outside our solar system, in a distant area of the Milky Way.
• June 18 - NASA launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, also known as LCROSS. The mission is to confirm the presence or absence of ice on the moon. On November 13, 2009, NASA scientists announced the discovery of a "significant amount" of ice in a crater near the moon’s South Pole.
• October 10 - Virgin Galactic, a private company, announced the successful first manned glide flight of the VSS Enterprise. This vehicle is a suborbital plane designed to take private citizens on suborbital space flights.
• October 11 - President Barack Obama signed legislation focusing NASA’s efforts on exploring Mars and the asteroids.
• December 8 - A private company named SpaceX launched a spacecraft into orbit and returned it to earth safely. It was the first non-government organization to accomplish this.
• July 8 - The space shuttle Atlantis became the last American space shuttle to be launched into space. Mission STS-135 and its 4-member crew brought much-needed supplies and equipment to the International Space Station (ISS).
• July 16 - NASA's Dawn spacecraft became the first man made craft to orbit an asteroid.
• November 26 - NASA launched Curiosity, the biggest, best equipped robot ever sent to explore another planet. It will reach Mars in 2012.
• May 22 - SpaceX, a commercial space company, launched its Dragon C2+ mission to resupply the International Space Station (ISS).
• August - NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, entered interstellar space.
• August 6 - NASA's Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars. As large as a car, it carried an array of advanced new instruments and experiments.
• September 7 - NASA launched the unmanned LADEE spacecraft from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It was the U.S. space agency's third lunar probe in five years.
• December 24 - NASA astronauts wrapped up successful repairs at the International Space Station after a rare Christmas Eve spacewalk to fix an equipment cooling system.

This timeline is mainly compiled from the NASA Space Exploration Timeline: 1957 A.D.-Present , Sea and Sky’s Space Exploration Timeline and Timeline of NASA, the Space Shuttle and Near Earth Space Flights .

The History of Space Travel Timeline

Albert II became the first monkey in space on June 14, 1949, in a specially adapted US V2 rocket.

To travel into the unknown of space is a dream for so many children and adults alike, although one that very few will ever reach.

Throughout time so many countries, and now private companies, across the world have tried to create a method of getting in amongst the stars.

It’s even united countries that previously had such strong conflict.

Here we’re going to go through a timeline of the significant moments in the history of space travel, starting way back in the 1940s.

In 1942 the German V2 rocket, designed by Wernher Von Braun, was the first to reach 100km (62 miles) from the Earth’s surface.

Also known as the boundary of space.

Braun later worked with NASA on the rockets that went to the moon.

In 1947, the first animals went into space.

Fruit flies were used to study the effects of space travel on animals as they’re very similar to humans.

The flies traveled with a supply of corn to eat on the flight.

Albert II was the first monkey in space.

Albert II was a Rhesus monkey and boldly went where no primate had been before on June 14 , 1949, in a specially adapted US V2 rocket, that flew 83 miles from Earth.

On October 4 , 1957, Russia launched the first space satellite (or sputnik in Russian) named Sputnik 1.

Sputnik 1 was the first satellite in orbit around the earth.

In November the same year, Laika the Russian dog became the first animal to orbit the earth. Laika is Russian for “Barker”.

She traveled in Sputnik 2 and helped understand whether people could survive in space.

By 1959 Both US and Russian scientists were in a race to get a craft to the Moon; the Russians won.

Space-probe Luna 2 crash-landed into the moon at fatal speeds.

Ten years later, the first human visited the surface.

On April 12, 1961 , Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.

Traveling in Vostok 1 he completed one orbit of the earth, landing about two hours after launch.

Gagarin had to eject and use a parachute to land as the craft was designed to crash land.

John Glenn became the first US man to orbit the Earth aboard the Friendship 7.

John actually chose this name; officially the craft is called the Mercury-Atlas 6, for the mission Mercury and it being the 6 th flight to use the faster Atlas rocket.

Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian cosmonaut, became the first woman in space.

After her mission, she had a crater on the far side of the Moon is named after her.

Who could believe, after just sending men to the moon, NASA managed to successfully conduct the first Mars flyby with their Mariner 4 craft.

In 1963 John F. Kennedy promised that by 1970 the US would have put men on the moon.

NASA firstly sent a robot spaceship called Surveyor 1, to make sure they could safely land.

It reached the moon on May 30 , 1966, just after the Russian probe Luna 9.

Once Surveyor 1 landed it took photographs and sent them back to eagerly awaiting scientists who used them to visualize the terrain and work out a plan to land people on the moon safely.

On July 20 , 1969, the famous “one small step” was taken by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and the first words were spoken, “the Eagle has landed”.

This iconic phrase confirmed them as the first men on the moon.

The Apollo 11 craft flew them 250,000 miles to the moon and back.

Apollo 13 on April 13, 1970 , the second day of its trip to the moon, suffered a wiring fault causing an explosion.

Using what was on board, NASA and the astronauts on board made repairs to bring the damaged craft back to Earth.

This saw the first use of the Lunar Rover, an electric vehicle with a top speed of 8 mph (13 kph), to explore the moon on the fourth, fifth and sixth Apollo missions.

The rover took Boeing 17 months to design and develop.

The first-ever space station was launched in 1971, the Russian Salyut 1, and was launched from an unmanned rocket.

In 1973 Mars 2, a 2-part Russian probe explored Mars .

One part was to stay in orbit for the whole year sending pictures back to earth and the other was to land and explore Mars’ surface.

It was destroyed when a parachute failed.

The US launched their Voyager 1 deep space probe.

Voyager 1, on February 17, 1998 , became the most distant human-made object in space after it passed the previous title holder; Pioneer 10.

From April 12, 1981, saw the idea of reusable space crafts, prior to this they were a one-hit-wonder.

The Space Shuttle was designed to lower costs and could be used up to 100 times.

With five rocket motors, it reached 17,000+ mph (27,350+ Kph). Six were built and 2011 saw their last use.

The first craft to start the Space Shuttle era was called Columbia.

On January 28, 1986 , Space Shuttle Challenger exploded due to a fuel system failure just after launch.

All seven astronauts were killed.

After this tragedy, all shuttles were grounded for almost three years.

In the same year, Construction started on the MIR space station, the first consistently inhabited long-term space station.

It was built in sections, taking 10 years, with each bit rocket-launched and combined in orbit.

In 2001 it was destroyed on its descent to earth. The ISS or International Space station also started construction in this year designed for research and space exploration.

The final major module of the ISS didn’t arrive until 2010.

The shuttle Discovery was launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into Earth’s Orbit.

The telescope is able to lock onto a target without moving to about the width of a human hair seen a mile away, or more scientifically, more than 7/1000 th of an arcsecond.

Just like there are 60 minutes in an hour, there are 60 arcminutes in 1 degree, and 60 arcseconds in an arcminute.

In 1989, Helen Sharman won a competition to become the first British astronaut in space, she previously worked for Mars Bar.

After 18 months of harsh training, she joined a Russian mission to the MIR space station.

After all their problems, the US and Russia finally start working together, or at least in space terms they were.

This year saw the US shuttle Atlantis dock at the Russian MIR space station.

The first look at mars occurred when Sojourner, A U.S rover, travels onto Mars to explore the planet’s geology.

In 2000 the first permanent crew inhabited the International Space Station (ISS), and have been there ever since.

On April 28, 2001 , US millionaire Dennis Tito spent around $20,000,000 and had 900 hours of training to be the first space tourist for a ride in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

He spent one week in orbit and of this time he spent most visiting the ISS.

This symbolized the hopes for space travel, for it to become a normal venture one day for everyone.

On June 21 , 2004, the first privately funded manned space flight happened with the craft SpaceShipOne.

An adaptation of this technology is being used by Virgin Galactic, a company offering private tourist flights into space.

Even though in 2014 it crashed during testing, flights are still happening.

In this year, the European Space Agency launched their Rosetta probe hoping to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

SpaceX, a private company that built a craft to replace the newly retired Space Shuttle, became the first to launch a privately funded liquid-fueled rocket into Orbit, the Falcon 1.

These rockets are used to launch their Dragon capsule, a remote-controlled capsule that takes supplies to the ISS.

The U.S Messenger mission to Mercury , launched in 2004, made its journey successfully traveling 48 million miles (77 million km), to begin its yearlong orbit of the mysterious planet.

Russia launched the largest space telescope to date named Spekt-R beating the Hubble.

The device is built to study astronomical objects with an angular resolution of a few millionths of an arcsecond.

The colossal telescope weighed 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilograms).

A major moment for commercial space travel started on May 22 nd , SpaceX launched another Dragon C2+ powered by their Falcon 9 rocket to deliver a resupplying capsule to the ISS.

The capsule was caught by the ISS’s robotic arm and docked for nearly six days while astronauts removed cargo and loaded that destined for Earth, a trip it made with no real complications.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, a piece of equipment the size of a car, landed on Mars on August 6 th .

It’s the largest and most advanced rover ever to land on the red planet.

On August 25 th , Voyager 1, launched in the late ‘70s, became the first man-made spacecraft to cross into interstellar space.

The Rosetta probe, launched in 2004, finally reached Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko after a 4 billion-mile journey.

Whilst on the comet, the lander sent data and high-resolution images from the Comet’s surface back to earth including 490-foot cliffs and house-sized boulders.

The Philae lander made a soft landing on November 12 th after a perilous 7-hour descent.

Harpoons designed to attach to the comet failed, and the lander bounced twice before landing successfully.

On March 6 th , NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered an orbit around a dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter .

With a 590 mile (950 km) diameter, it makes up a quarter of the mass of the belt.

July 14 th saw NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrive at Pluto after traveling 9 years and 4.6 billion miles.

It passes, during its closest approach, only 7,750 miles from the surface and took high-resolution photos of Pluto and Charon, the largest moon.

Pluto is said to be about 50 miles larger than thought.

On July 30 , 2020, at 11:50 UTC, NASA launched their Mars Rover, which was the largest of four missions to Mars in 2020 . 

Without a doubt, this mission plans to be the most fruitful with the craft equipped with state-of-the-art modern technology and engineering capable of truly exploring the martian land like never before!

The Mars Rover’s mission among other things is to see if the red planet has ever accommodated extra-terrestrial life by exploring any signs of habitable conditions both in the past and present.

Space travel has for so many people mesmerized them from a very young age, myself included, and as this list has shown, there is always something new to discover!

We have barely scratched the surface, and yet every year we learn or launch something new with the dream of reaching some unknown bit of the universe.

To travel to the furthest edge man can reach will always be the aim.

To unearth the secrets hidden, to find life or anything that’s interesting and bewildering drives some of the best minds in the world every day.

• Space Kids - Space History
• Hubblesite.org
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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

The sad, sad story of laika, the space dog, and her one-way trip into orbit.

A stray Moscow pup traveled into orbit in 1957 with one meal and only a seven-day oxygen supply

Alice George

Museums Correspondent

With a pounding heart and rapid breath, Laika rode a rocket into Earth orbit, 2,000 miles above Moscow streets she knew. Overheated, cramped, frightened, and probably hungry, the space dog gave her life for her country, involuntarily fulfilling a canine suicide mission.

Sad as this tale is, the stray husky-spitz mix became a part of history as the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Over the decades, the petite pioneer has repeatedly found new life in popular culture long after her death and the fiery demise of her Soviet ship, Sputnik 2 , which smashed into the Earth’s atmosphere 60 years ago this month.

Soviet engineers planned Sputnik 2 hastily after Premier Nikita Khrushchev requested a flight to coincide with November 7, 1957, the 40th anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. Using what they had learned from the unmanned and undogged Sputnik 1 and often working without blueprints, teams labored quickly to build a ship that included a pressurized compartment for a flying dog. Sputnik 1 had made history, becoming the first man-made object in Earth orbit October 4, 1957. Sputnik 2 would go into orbit with the final stage of the rocket attached, and engineers believed the ship’s 1,120-pound payload, six times as heavy as Sputnik 1 , could be kept within limits by feeding its passenger only once.

They expected Laika to die from oxygen deprivation—a painless death within 15 seconds—after seven days in space. Cathleen Lewis , the curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum doubts that a few ounces of food would have made a difference, and she recalls reports that a female physician broke protocol by feeding Laika before liftoff.

The Soviet canine recruiters began their quest with a herd of female stray dogs because females were smaller and apparently more docile. Initial tests determined obedience and passivity. Eventually, canine finalists lived in tiny pressurized capsules for days and then weeks at a time. The doctors also checked their reactions to changes in air pressure and to loud noises that would accompany liftoff. Testers fitted candidates with a sanitation device connected to the pelvic area. The dogs did not like the devices, and to avoid using them, some retained bodily waste, even after consuming laxatives. However, some adapted.

Eventually, the team chose the placid Kudryavka (Little Curly) as Sputnik 2’s dog cosmonaut and Albina (White) as backup. Introduced to the public via radio, Kudryavka barked and later became known as Laika, “barker” in Russian. Rumors emerged that Albina had out-performed Laika, but because she had recently given birth to puppies and because she had apparently won the affections of her keepers, Albina did not face a fatal flight. Doctors performed surgery on both dogs, embedding medical devices in their bodies to monitor heart impulses, breathing rates, blood pressure and physical movement.

Soviet physicians chose Laika to die, but they were not entirely heartless. One of her keepers, Vladimir Yazdovsky, took 3-year-old Laika to his home shortly before the flight because “I wanted to do something nice for the dog,” he later recalled.

Three days before the scheduled liftoff, Laika entered her constricted travel space that allowed for only a few inches of movement. Newly cleaned, armed with sensors, and fitted with a sanitation device, she wore a spacesuit with metal restraints built-in. On November 3 at 5:30 a.m., the ship lifted off with G-forces reaching five times normal gravity levels.

The noises and pressures of flight terrified Laika: Her heartbeat rocketed to triple the normal rate, and her breath rate quadrupled. The National Air and Space Museum holds declassified printouts showing Laika’s respiration during the flight. She reached orbit alive, circling the Earth in about 103 minutes. Unfortunately, loss of the heat shield made the temperature in the capsule rise unexpectedly, taking its toll on Laika. She died “soon after launch,” Russian medical doctor and space dog trainer Oleg Gazenko revealed in 1993. “The temperature inside the spacecraft after the fourth orbit registered over 90 degrees,” Lewis says. “There’s really no expectation that she made it beyond an orbit or two after that.” Without its passenger, Sputnik 2 continued to orbit for five months.

During and after the flight, the Soviet Union kept up the fiction that Laika survived for several days. “The official documents were falsified,” Lewis says. Soviet broadcasts claimed that Laika was alive until November 12. The New York Times even reported that she might be saved; however, Soviet communiqués made it clear after nine days that Laika had died.

While concerns about animal rights had not reached early 21 st century levels, some protested the deliberate decision to let Laika die because the Soviet Union lacked the technology to return her safely to Earth. In Great Britain, where opposition to hunting was growing, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the British Society for Happy Dogs opposed the launch. A pack of dog lovers attached protest signs to their pets and marched outside the United Nations in New York. “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it,” said Gazenko more than 30 years later.

The humane use of animal testing spaceflight was essential to preparation for manned spaceflight, Lewis believes. “There were things that we could not determine by the limits of human experience in high altitude flight,” Lewis says. Scientists “really didn’t know how disorienting spaceflight would be on the humans or whether an astronaut or cosmonaut could continue to function rationally.”

Alas, for Laika, even if everything had worked perfectly, and if she had been lucky enough to have plenty of food, water and oxygen, she would have died when the spaceship re-entered the atmosphere after 2,570 orbits. Ironically, a flight that promised Laika's certain death also offered proof that space was livable.

The story of Laika lives on today in websites, YouTube videos, poems and children’s books, at least one of which provides a happy ending for the doomed dog. Laika’s cultural impact has been spread across the years since her death. The Portland, Oregon, Art Museum is currently featuring an exhibition on the stop-motion animation studio LAIKA , which was named after the dog. The show "Animating Life" is on view through May 20, 2018. There is also a “vegan lifestyle and animal rights” periodical called LAIKA Magazine , published in the United States.

The 1985 Swedish film, My Life as a Dog , portrayed a young man’s fears that Laika had starved. Several folk and rock singers around the globe have dedicated songs to her. An English indie-pop group took her name, and a Finnish band called itself Laika and the Cosmonauts. Novelists Victor Pelevin of Russia, Haruki Murakami of Japan, and Jeannette Winterson of Great Britain have featured Laika in books, as has British graphic novelist Nick Abadzis.

In 2015, Russia unveiled a new memorial statue of Laika atop a rocket at a Moscow military research facility, and when the nation honored fallen cosmonauts in 1997 with a statue at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Star City, Moscow, Laika’s image could be seen in one corner. During the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity mission in March 2005, NASA unofficially named a spot within a Martian crater “Laika.”

Space dog biographer Amy Nelson compares Laika to other animal celebrities like the Barnum and Bailey Circus’s late 19th-century elephant Jumbo and champion thoroughbred racehorse Seabiscuit, who lifted American spirits during the Great Depression. She argues in Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans and the Study of History that the Soviet Union transformed Laika into “an enduring symbol of sacrifice and human achievement.”

Soon after the flight, the Soviet mint created an enamel pin to celebrate “The First Passenger in Space.” Soviet allies, such as Romania, Albania, Poland and North Korea, issued Laika stamps over the years between 1957 and 1987.

Laika was not the first space dog: Some had soared in the Soviet military’s sub-orbital rocket tests of updated German V-2 rockets after World War II, and they had returned to Earth via parachuted craft—alive or dead. She also would not be the last dog to take flight. Others returned from orbit alive. After the successful 1960 joint flight of Strelka and Belka, Strelka later produced puppies, and Khrushchev gave one to President John F. Kennedy.

During the days before manned flight, the United States primarily looked to members of the ape family as test subjects. The reason for the Soviet choice of dogs over apes is unclear except perhaps that Ivan Pavlov’s pioneering work on dog physiology in the late 19th and early 20th century may have provided a strong background for the use of canines, Lewis says. Also, stray dogs were plentiful in the streets of the Soviet Union—easy to find and unlikely to be missed.

According to Animals In Space by Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs, the Soviet Union launched dogs into flight 71 times between 1951 and 1966, with 17 deaths. The Russian space program continues to use animals in space tests, but in every case except Laika’s, there has been some hope that the animal would survive.

Ed Note 4/15/2018: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the postage stamp at the top of this article, stating it was from a Soviet bloc country. It is from the Emirate of Ajman, now part of the UAE. This story also now includes updated information about the Portland Oregon Museum's exhibition "Animating Life."

Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox.

Alice George | | READ MORE

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.

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• Published: 23 September 2015

Space travel: When Soviets ruled the great beyond

• Tim Radford 1  

Nature volume  525 ,  pages 452–453 ( 2015 ) Cite this article

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Tim Radford is thrilled by an unprecedented exhibition marking the USSR's cold war feats in space.

Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age

Science Museum, London . Until 16 March 2016 ..

Between the cold war years of 1957 and 1966, the Soviet Union established primacy in space. Its heady list of triumphs embraces, in the 1950s alone, the first artificial object and first animal in orbit, and the first image of the far side of the Moon. In the next decade, it grew to include the first attempt on Venus, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first three-man mission in space, and the first spacewalk, automaton touchdown on the Moon, lunar rover (1970), and scoop of Moon rock brought back to Earth by an automaton. Reflecting the significance and extent of those triumphs, the long-awaited Cosmonauts at the Science Museum in London assembles memorabilia and engineering marvels borrowed from around a score of Russian institutes.

It opens with dreams: of high orbit, free fall and exit through an airlock, sketched on paper in 1933 by schoolmaster and rocket visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It concludes with a recumbent mannequin in a cradle (a “tissue equivalent phantom” flown in 1969 to absorb and measure space radiation), representing the Soviet dream of a crewed mission to Mars, and a quotation attributed to Tsiolkovsky: “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” In between is a parade of hardware that none of us who followed the news greedily in those years had ever dreamed we might see assembled in one place, let alone in South Kensington.

The models are marvels. Here is a highly polished display model of Sputnik 1, launched in October 1957 (its chief designer, Sergei Korolev, reportedly said, “This ball will be exhibited in museums”). There are two engineering models: one of the two Lunokhod lunar rovers, the other of the once-secret lander Lunniy Korabi , designed to deliver one cosmonaut to the lunar surface in 1969. It flew, but not to the Moon, and the rest of us knew of its existence only two decades later.

And then there are the real things. Along with the charred, three-person Voskhod 1 descent module used in 1964 is the descent module of Vostok 6 . In it, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth for three days in 1963 before a return during which the heat shield was scorched by impact with Earth's atmosphere at 27,000 kilometres an hour. This is iconic stuff: the RD-108 engine that powered the space race; the complex space toilet designed to drain human waste aboard the space station Mir; the powered backpack with port and starboard lights for free flight beyond the spacecraft.

But what sets the scalp prickling are the little things that tell those other stories implicit in this dizzying show. There is Georgy Krutikov's 1928 drawing Labour Commune , a stratospheric dream prefiguring the great adventure. And there is a little metal mug once owned by Korolev, the man most people now recognize as the driver of the space race, and thus the hero of this story.

Korolev, a Ukrainian, had been incarcerated in a prison camp in the Kolyma region of Siberia during Joseph Stalin's notorious 1930s purges. No Westerner — and few Russians — knew his name during the cold war, so closed was the Soviet world. Fresh from wartime labour detention, he arrived at the German Peenemünde base of the Nazi V-2 rocket programme to realize the dream of planetary exploration.

Sputnik 1 jolted Western complacency and helped to reignite the US space programme originally launched by the aerospace engineer and Nazi-turned-émigré Wernher von Braun. When Korolev died in 1966 during what should have been a routine operation, the new Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was a pallbearer. Even then, no one in the West knew of Korolev's existence.

Inevitably, the rocket engineer's genius surfaces again and again through the exhibition. There is a letter signed by Stalin authorizing the intercontinental ballistic-missile programme that made Sputnik 1 possible, and the personalized number plate YG1, used by Yuri Gagarin, the foundry worker who became a fighter pilot and, in 1961, the first man in space. There is Korolev's freehand drawing of the launch of canine cosmonauts Strelka and Belka. Alongside triumphant official Socialist realist posters there is a white lab coat daubed in red with the Russian for “Space is ours”, a memento of a spontaneous 1961 celebration in Red Square. The pencils and sketch pad that Alexei Leonov took on his pioneering 1965 spacewalk — a near-catastrophe — are here, along with a later self-portrait of him floating at the end of a tether over the Black Sea.

The United States' role in the space race is hardly acknowledged, beyond a Time magazine cover declaring Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev its 1957 man of the year. But the Soviet space effort seemed to lose momentum as the US Apollo programme — a story told in the Science Museum's main galleries — began in every sense to take off. Korolev's death must also have been a factor. The wonders went on, but the never-admitted race for the Moon was all but over.

This cosmic cornucopia reflects the intoxication of those first years and looks forward to the age of the space station. There is a spoon used aboard Mir by Sergei Krikalev, the man who went up as a Soviet cosmonaut and came down in 1992 as a citizen of the Russian Federation (and yes, there is a Soyuz descent module that carried a Mir crew back to Earth that year). But this unprecedented collection delivers more than a glimpse of distant exploratory technologies. It is a snapshot of Soviet history and, because the cold war warped the twentieth century, of global history, too. And where else could you see an ejector seat for a dog? The exhibits impose their own metaphors: see this show and be uplifted, transported, taken out of this world. It is the curatorial equivalent of a legal high.

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April 22, 2024

Low-Earth Orbit Faces a Spiraling Debris Threat

Millions of human-made objects travel at high speeds in low-Earth orbit, polluting space and increasing the chance of collision with satellites and other spacecraft

By Aneli Bongers & José L. Torres

Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/GETTY Images

Space is getting crowded, with junk. Essential satellites delivering navigation, weather forecasts, the Internet and other services face this threat daily. Old rockets, decaying spacecraft and human operations in space leave behind orbital debris that increasingly threatens collisions, menacing a growing space economy. A decade ago the film Gravity dramatized the consequences of space pollution, with an avalanche of space junk sweeping across the sky to batter everything in orbit, including its astronaut hero. We haven’t done anything serious about it since then.

NASA defines space junk, or orbital debris , as “any human-made object in orbit that no longer serves a useful purpose, including spacecraft fragments and retired satellites.” A 2009 incident, when the U.S. communications satellite Iridium 33 collided with the defunct Russian military satellite Kosmos 2251, serves as a good reminder of its growing threat. That single collision created more than 2,200 pieces of new debris measuring over five centimeters in diameters, according to NASA .

More of these collisions are coming. In February an abandoned Russian satellite passed within about 20 meters of a NASA satellite. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation alone carried out more than 25,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers from December 2022 to May 2023. And even on Earth, space junk is a problem, with a Florida home struck in March by a battery that fell from an International Space Station cargo mission.

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In space, debris comes from the frequent breakup of expended rocket bodies , explosion of satellites, dead satellites , collisions , paint flakes and even tools lost by astronauts. Around 85 percent of this debris resides within low-Earth orbit, which is below 2,000 kilometers in altitude. NASA estimates this orbit contains around 34,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 cm in diameter, 900,000 objects between 1 cm and 10 cm, and more than 128 million fragments between 1 mm and 1 cm. But let’s not be fooled by the size. Even small debris traveling at high velocities can trigger catastrophic collisions, with the added problem that fragments smaller than 10 cm are impossible to track with existing surveillance technology . An even more dangerous threat is self-propagation. Called the “ Kessler syndrome ,” this phenomenon occurs when collisions produce so much debris that Earth’s orbit becomes unusable for any human activity.

We must stop the growth of space debris, while realizing it is a demanding task. Neither national governments nor international organizations control property rights on orbit, apart from spacecraft ownership. Therefore, space activities are not subject to any centralized regulation or property rights scheme. In outer space “first come, first serve” instead applies. Like other global economic failures on Earth (such as fisheries in international waters, high seas sailing and climate change ) that international cooperation has failed to solve or left only partly solved, overuse and depletion are direct consequences of such a “ tragedy of the commons .”

In all these cases, including orbital debris, pollution exerts a cost on society where market prices do not capture the impact. Such “ externalities ” are market failures that, in most cases, require intervention from a government or other central authority. Simply put, rocket launch prices don’t reflect their real costs, which include clean-up expenses. We must reverse this situation before the cost becomes too high. Although human exploration and economic exploitation of outer space are relatively recent (the first human-made spacecraft, Sputnik, successfully launched in 1957 ), evident market failures and other economic, legal and political issues are arising at rocket speed as commercial, military and scientific activities in outer space expand. SpaceX is now developing a massive rocket that will launch 1.25-ton satellites like a Pez dispenser , adding to a fleet of 5,500 Starlink satellites already in space, part of a planned constellation of 42,000. That’s particularly alarming, because, according to a study of ours published last year in Ecological Economics , low-Earth orbit can only hold about 72,000 satellites without a real risk of a Kessler syndrome event, under current debris conditions.

LEO stands for low Earth orbit and is the region of space within 2,000 km of the Earth's surface. It is the most concentrated area for orbital debris, represented with white dots and scaled to optimize visibility.

No surprise, spacefaring nations that are most dependent on satellites face the biggest risks of space debris. Instead of cooperating to mitigate space debris, however, they have failed to take decisive action. That’s despite the increasing probability of losing satellites, resulting in more resources that must be dedicated to debris surveillance tracking and collision-avoidance maneuvers that interrupt services and burn fuel. That, in turn, reduces the operational life of satellites, adding to their costs as the threat burgeons. Nonetheless, spacefaring companies have no incentive to minimize debris generation except for protecting their own spacecraft, which they do with shields .

We need to take both passive and active measures before space junk gets out of control. Space agencies and the United Nations have elaborated guidelines for debris mitigation. Some include changing the design of satellites with shields and reinforcing fuel systems to avoid breakups. Another recommends that all spacefarers provide spacecraft with maneuverability and add reserve fuel to de-orbit derelict spacecraft.

On the active measures side , developing debris-free recovery launch vehicles will greatly help to eliminate the primary source of debris. But there are still other sources, and given current orbiting derelict stock, active depolluting actions are also necessary. That’s because the life spans of orbital debris vary depending on altitude. Below 200 kilometers, it may only last a few days, whereas those at 1,000 km can last up to a thousand years. At 2,000 km, the debris can remain in orbit for up to 50,000 years without human intervention.

Cleaning space requires designing and implementing active debris removal (ADR) projects . ADR vehicles can be equipped with robotic arms, nets, collecting balloons and other tools. Earth-based lasers might also increase the atmospheric drag of debris, as another option. Policy makers must explore financing the cost of removal policies with instruments already in place for mitigating pollution on Earth. They should also develop guidelines and regulations to share the space junk removal cost among all spacefaring agents.

Finally, there is also a more alarming problem to pay attention to: the military’s use of space. Space pollution results not only from commercial and scientific activities, but also because of outer space’s growing strategic value for defense, security and warfare. Hard as it is to understand, Earth's orbit has been polluted not only accidentally but also intentionally, as some countries have conducted antisatellite tests using missiles that destroyed their own satellites. The last one, performed by Russia in 2021, created a vast cloud of hundreds of thousands of fragments , dramatically increasing orbital debris at the most congested and polluted altitudes.

The militarization and weaponization of outer space contribute to orbital debris while acting as a roadblock to the de-pollution of space. Development of debris removal vehicles and devices is hindered by their dual-use status as antisatellite weapons, a significant obstacle to implementing international policies for eliminating orbital pollution. Any ADR technology could also be viewed as an offensive weapon, as it could remove enemy satellites from orbit. For the same reason, the militarization of outer space could threaten the development of new in-space industries for the servicing, refueling, upgrading, maintenance and repair of satellites. Humanity instead needs a clean, safe and regulated space environment to build a better world on Earth.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Scientists Are Getting Closer to a Real, Working Warp Drive

A crucial development is propelling engineers toward faster-than-light travel.

• If humanity wants to be a spacefaring species, it needs to figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light.
• Now, a new online toolkit — backed up by a $500,000 grant — will help engineers kickstart how humanity can achieve its faster-than-light dreams in reality.
• This toolkit was created by Applied Physics, an international group of scientists, which hopes to also provide a "reality check" on warp drive concepts that rely on exotic physics.

The galaxy—let alone the universe—is a stunningly huge place. Containing anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars (and by extension trillions of planets), the Milky Way is a stunning 100,000 light years across. That means a trans-galactic photon that just exited the Milky Way today likely began its journey when Homo sapiens had yet to migrate out of Africa, and that’s traveling at roughly 670 million miles per hour. Considering the velocity limitations of our rockets, it takes roughly half a human lifetime just to exit our solar system.

Simply put, if humans want to be a spacefaring species, we’re going to need something better than chemical — or even nuclear — rockets, and for decades, it’s science fiction that has held the answer. The most famous example is Star Trek , which relies on the power of its warp drive to traverse the galaxy in a fraction of the time. Galactic journeys that once took centuries could now be wrapped up in a couple of hours.

Scientists have longed for some sort of technology that can propel humans faster than what physics says is possible, and now a new online tool is helping engineers make a warp drive the sole property of Starfleet. Last week, Applied Physics, which is an international group of scientists and engineers, announced that they’d created an online toolkit for “analyzing warp drive spacetimes” called the “Warp Factory.”

“Physicists can now generate and refine an array of warp drive designs with just a few clicks, allowing us to advance science at warp speed," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in a press statement . “Warp Factory serves as a virtual wind tunnel, enabling us to test and evaluate different warp designs. Science fiction is now inching closer to science fact.”

As Public Benefit Company, Applied Physics is ponying up $500,000 in potential grants for aspiring warp drive theorists. However, those grants come with a few caveats, mainly that the idea is to produce a physical warp drive based in classical relativity, which means not relying on “negative energy or superluminal matter” to make your time-bending engine work.

AP’s Christopher Helmerich, in an interview with The Debrief , also compared the Warp Factory as a “reality check” for warp drives as concepts can be analyzed in a comprehensive way and hopefully weed out ideas that have no chance of operating in the real world.

While a fully working warp drives has many hurdles to overcome, it’s a technology worth taking seriously. Because if humans have any hope of one day exploring distant stars, it’ll need the help of space-bending tech that the newly-minted Warp Factory hopes to nurture.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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• Pacific NW Magazine

At Seattle’s Smith Tower, 110-year-old elevators travel through time and space

THE SMITH TOWER opened on July 4, 1914, during the wild summer that kicked off the first World War, between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in June and the declaration of hostilities in August. At 38 stories and 462 feet tall, it was, at the time, the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

The skyscraper was built adjacent to Pioneer Square, a major fixture in a growing city rebuilding its downtown from the ashes of the 1889 Great Seattle Fire.

Smith Tower sits on the corner of Second Avenue and Yesler Way, a corner variously known as Wirth Corner or Bailey Corner before the tower’s construction. Today, tourists and downtown workers mill about the area, which contains many of Seattle’s most notable buildings and, it must be noted, also is sometimes quite unsafe.

The building itself consists of two parts: a low-rise portion that goes up to floor 21, and the high-rise extension (the “tower” part of the construction) topped with a distinctive, arrow-shaped triangular roof. While the building’s plaque lists Smith Tower at 42 stories, that is a bit of an overstatement — the builders claimed it was  technically  42 of what, by measure, could be considered a story, but the building has always had a maximum of 38 actual  floors — even fewer at the time of its construction. 

Today,   the very top of the tower holds a private penthouse, and the 35th floor of the high rise — reached by one of seven still-working, 110-year-old elevators — houses a beautifully vintage 1920s chinoiserie-style bar and observation deck, a space that still commands striking views of downtown Seattle, shipping cranes and Elliott Bay.

Smith Tower by the numbers

7: Number of elevators

Smith Tower is a work of art, its ornate construction and interior fixtures a combination of neoclassical and Art Nouveau sensibilities, and its elevators are similarly gorgeous: century-old bronze-toned wrought-iron birdcages lining the hallway enrobed in pearly, fondantlike Mexican onyx, topped by a row of carved Native American chieftain heads watching over the proceedings like sentinels.

The enigmatic initials LCS grace every set of ornate elevator doors, a nod to the original builder, the eponymous Lyman Cornelius Smith (of Smith-Corona typewriter fame), whose fortune was built on firearms and typewriters, the modern version of the pen vs. the sword. But the ostentatious initials are far from a statement of vanity; they’re actually a statement of love: Smith died in 1910, and his son Burns Lyman Smith had more than 50,000 instances of his father’s initials placed throughout the building in tribute.

Up until 2016-17, all the elevators were manually operated. Each working car had an attendant inside who would raise and lower the apparatus using a hefty lever. Originally, seven of the elevators serviced the first 21 floors only (today, it is six, as one is out of commission), and for those on the bottom floor, it was a matter of choosing an elevator and telling the operator your desired floor. For those in the high-rise, a call to the concierge desk would result in the sole elevator that serviced those lofty heights being sent up to fetch you. But for those on an intermediate floor, the low-rise, calling a car would mean standing in the elevator hallway and shouting through the cage at the operators as they passed up and down through the shaft, until someone obligingly pulled the carriage to a halt and admitted the passengers inside, like hailing a taxi on a busy street.

Unlike with modern elevators, whose heavy doors are so often unceremoniously halted by an arm thrust between them, sticking one’s arm through the gap of the Smith Tower elevators was unwise: just as likely to damage the door mechanism as the arm in question. To request someone hold the elevator, guests would call out, “One more!” regardless of how many people actually needed to climb in.

One forgets, in a predigital world, how much of one’s life in a city involved yelling.

These days, the elevators look as they did back in 1914, with a few modifications, such as modern earthquake sensors and safety glass, copper-sheeted back walls and cleverly hidden escape hatches added in the 1940s to conform to fire code. One of the original motors is on display, a green sleeping giant that looks like an oversized sewing machine, and the levers and wheels used by the manual operators are extant as well, though they are now entirely for show.

Each elevator is like a wee Jules Verne time machine taking paying guests from the unrelenting modernity at ground level to the glamorous days of yore preserved in the upstairs bar, an experience complete with vintage cocktails. And while the cars are now operated by modern motors, safety key cards and buttons, at least one still features an attendant — now most often an extremely knowledgeable “guest experience guide” named Richard Phillips, who spends his days riding up and down from the heart of Seattle to its lofty heights, giving short elevator tours or roaming about the building on longer historical tours for guests who come to sip a vintage cocktail and enjoy some historical context about a building that was central to Seattle’s Prohibition era.

While the view from the observation deck morphs day by day as the city grows around it, the view from the inside of a century-old elevator never changes.

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The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

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I'm a Notorious Overpacker, but These 12 Space-saving Hacks Help Me Fit Everything in a Carry-on

These travel organizers changed the way I pack — and they start at $9.

We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation. Learn more .

Travel + Leisure / Tyler Roeland

Life is full of challenges that call for us to rise to the occasion, but for me there’s nothing quite like that “ Can I fit all of this in a carry-on bag ? ” conundrum to really get my problem solving skills going. Over the years, I’ve managed to pack a large amount of items into a carry-on bag, and it’s a badge of honor I wear proudly. 

To be fair, achieving this is much easier when packing for warmer climates that call for less bulky clothing, but there are still ways to bring along your favorite cardigan and snow boots. On a recent ski trip to Vail, Colorado, for example, I wore my trusty snow boots and ski jacket on the plane instead of packing them to free up space in my luggage. Next up, I’m currently packing for a two-week trip through Italy, finally fulfilling my bucket list dream to visit  T+L reader favorite The St. Regis Venice , have a whirlwind culinary adventure through  Emilia Romagna in  Modena   and Bologna’s  Leading Hotels of the World Grand Hotel Majestic già Baglioni , and end it all with a grand finale at  IHG’s Grand Hotel Des Arts in Verona  and  R Collection’s Grand Hotel Victoria  on Lake Como. And yes, I’ll have a carry on through it all. Naturally, hotels with the word grand in them, require fab outfits to match the mood. This is where good packing cubes can make magic happen, and I’m proud to share that I’ve already fit at least eight of my favorite dresses into one cube for my Italian jaunt. 

Are you team fold or roll? Do you tuck your socks into shoes and sit on your suitcase, praying that the zipper will be merciful? If so, it may be time to consider a different approach. With effective products (and a strong will), you too can forget the stress of checking a bag and wondering if it will arrive in time. From space-saving packing cubes to a compression garment bag , these are some of the products I rely on to remain #TeamCarryOn.

Packing Cubes

One of my biggest travel regrets is that I didn’t give into packing cubes sooner. The hours spent debating whether to fold or roll, leave a favorite item behind, or simply be able to close my luggage due to space has cost me hours of time. For me, these Calpak 5-piece Packing Cube Set packing cubes have truly delivered the solution with a set of four packing cubes and a water-resistant pouch for storage. The top portion is a breathable mesh that makes it easy to identify what you’ve packed without having to open anything to sort through it, and you can even label each cube based on attire. Alternatively, this Bagail 8-piece Packing Cube Set over at Amazon has even more cubes at just a fraction of the cost. It has more than 22,000 five-star ratings and includes a laundry pouch and shoe bag. If you’re traveling with little ones, State Bags makes kid-friendly packing cubes with handles .

Hanging Toiletry Bag

This squishable, waterproof Calpak Toiletry Bag has a durable, lightweight polyester material that makes it easy to lay items on top of while packing. At the same time, it’s still large enough to store makeup products, with a few pockets to stash those random beauty and toiletry items that you may be scrambling to find a spot for in the final hour of packing. As a bonus, it comes in a range of bright colors like bubblegum that are just plain fun and an instant mood booster. Amazon offers a durable alternative with this Nishel Toiletry Bag for $19. Transparent pockets and a soft exterior that allows it to lie flat are just a few of its perks.

Roll Packing Organizer

The Osprey Ultralight Roll Packing Organizer , another hanging kit, is a helpful accessory if you’re looking to keep anything from your toiletries to a first-aid kit in one location. It’s rollable too, allowing for more space in your carry-on bag. The organizational pockets are large enough to store random knick knacks during last-minute packing, and a hanging clip loop makes it easy to find a home for it wherever you’re checking in during travel. 

Foldable Tote Bag

What’s the perfect complement to carry-on luggage? A spacious purse for all of the items that didn’t fit in your larger bag — but one that you can easily pack away in your luggage when not in use. My State Graham Shopper accomplishes all of this and more, with a lightweight, smooth recycled fabric that helps me breeze through airports without being weighed down. Best of all, it’s so large that I’m able to fit my laptop, makeup bag, and even a packing cube with clothing. The State bag is currently on sale, but if you’re looking for an even more affordable option, Amazon has got you covered with this ETidy Foldable Tote Bag , currently on sale for $18. The 2-in-1 design allows the larger tote to be folded into a smaller bag, making it convenient to carry and save space.  

Tech Organizer Case

Tangled cords and bulky chargers, be gone. My go-to, the sleek The Tech Case by Away , offers compartments to efficiently store your chargers in two different sizes. I can easily store travel adapters, earbuds, and random chargers in its sectioned compartments. On Amazon, FYY makes a handy, water-resistant tech organizer case that comes in a number of colors for $10.

Travel Shoe Bag

Say goodbye to trying to contort your shoes between clothes with this waterproof shoe organizer from Hezelf. The bag can carry up to three pairs of shoes and includes a handle to carry it. I also opt to pack foldable shoes whenever I can, with my favorite slides and foldable flats from Vivaia , or, check out these similar foldable shoes from Amazon for $22. 

Pill Organizer

I used to make the mistake of choosing which vitamins to pack based on the size of the bottle. It was a simple fix problem, and this 3-pack pill organizer from Meacolia was the answer. A double lock ensures that pills don’t fall out in your bag, and two of its eight compartments can house larger pills. It’s currently on sale on Amazon for $9, so grab it while you can. 

Lightweight Travel Neck Pillow

A travel pillow can make long flights much more comfortable, but the right one can also save real estate in a bag. To maximize carry-on space, take a look at this genius, stuffable travel pillow that can hold up to an extra 3 days’ worth of clothes (without checking a bag). Or, this versatile, lightweight neck pillow from Trtl is much less bulky than your average option but still provides support by keeping your neck upright while padding it. The super soft fleece material and cushioning provide ultimate comfort, and it can be attached to your luggage. Plus, it’s machine washable, making it easy to clean between trips, too.

Wrinkle-free Compression Travel Garment Bag

I avoid having to make the call to reception for an iron with this wrinkle-free compression garment bag from Eagle Creek. Currently on sale on Amazon for $30, this clothes organizer can hold up to 12 items with compression wings to keep everything tightly secured. Packing folders allow you to lay ironed clothing in stacks, preventing wrinkles during transit. 

Leakproof Toiletry Bottles

Though travel-size toiletry holders are not exactly new, this set from Dot&Dot is a favorite because of its leakproof build. The squeezable silicone also makes my favorite conditioners and lotions easy to get out. The 3-ounce silicon bottles are BPA-free and easy to clean with a wide mouth opening. A range of colors help differentiate between liquids. 

Collapsible Travel To-go Cup

If you never leave home without your refillable cup, consider this collapsible option from Stojo that even comes with a straw. For travelers on the go, shrinking the cup to just two inches can save space in your bag for other items. Separable parts include a heat sleeve, lid, collar, tab, straw, and cup. Best of all, it's made from platinum food-grade silicone, meaning no BPAs or lead. 

Laundry Detergent Sheets

Part of what makes believing in the power of carry-on packing only for longer trips difficult is the challenge of having clean clothes. Fortunately, these detergent sheets from Kind Laundry will allow you to revisit outfits instead of packing more, as well as avoid steep hotel dry cleaning fees. Free of parabens and harsh chemicals, the plant-powered sheets are easy to tuck into carry-ons and stay fresh while traveling. 

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A knotty problem: Boffins working on fuel-efficient trajectories for space travel

Not yet the london underground style efficient schematic we want, but it's a start.

Boffins at the UK's Surrey Space Centre have devised a way of determining the optimal route for spacecraft that doesn't require the engines to burn precious fuel.

The concept of shifting from one orbit to another without using fuel is not a new one. Engineers have turned to heteroclinic connections as a way of transferring a spacecraft between orbits without expending propellant. However, calculating these points presents a challenge, requiring either immense amounts of computing power or a human-in-the-loop to make an intelligent estimate that can be worked from.

In 2019, a paper was published, extolling the virtues of using artificial neural networks to identify heteroclinic connections.

The Voyager probes undertook the Grand Tour [PDF] based on a certain alignment of the planets that occurs once every 175 years. They used orbital mechanics and gravity assists to take in Jupiter, Saturn, and, in the case of Voyager 2, Uranus, and Neptune. However, the need to save fuel on missions closer to home has become a priority, thanks in part to NASA's Artemis program.

While a direct moonshot is all well and good, planners want to cut down on the fuel needed for expeditions around the vicinity of the Moon, particularly considering that a substantial chunk of the Artemis program involves the construction of the Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon. Hence the need for fuel-minimal trajectories in the vicinity of the Moon.

It's a variation of the classic three-body problem. One body is the spacecraft itself, while the other two are the Earth and the Moon. Yet calculating a trajectory to travel from point A to point B while using minimal fuel, thanks to heteroclinic connections, is no easy task.

The approach published by Postgraduate Research Student Danny Owen and Lecturer in Orbital Mechanics Dr Nicola Baresi this week uses knot theory , an area of mathematics. This is used to generate rough trajectories that can then be refined, effectively giving space agencies a variety of possible routes from a specific orbit.

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Owen said: "Previously, when the likes of NASA wanted to plot a route, their calculations relied on either brute force or guesswork.

"Our new technique neatly reveals all possible routes a spacecraft could take from A to B, as long as both orbits share a common energy level.

"This makes the task of planning missions much simpler. We think of it as a tube map for space."

The researchers have applied the technique to other planetary systems, including the Galilean moons of Jupiter, in addition to the Earth-Moon system. ®

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