Space Race
Sputnik 1 through Apollo 11. Twelve years from the first satellite to humans on the Moon — the most concentrated decade of technological progress in history.
Part of Space
24 moments in this segment.
- — Sputnik 1. First artificial satellite. Beach-ball-sized; broadcast a beeping signal for 22 days. Launched October 4, 1957 by the USSR. Triggered the Sputnik crisis in the US — NASA was created within a year.
- — Sputnik 2 (Laika). First living creature in orbit — a Moscow street dog named Laika. The capsule was not designed to return. The USSR admitted in 2002 that she died within hours of launch from overheating.
- — Vanguard TV-3 (Flopnik). December 6, 1957. The US response to Sputnik exploded on the pad two seconds after ignition, on live television. The press christened it "Flopnik." Eisenhower fast-tracked the Explorer 1 backup; the humiliation drove the creation of NASA.
- — Explorer 1. First US satellite. Discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. Designed and built by JPL in 84 days after the Vanguard rocket exploded on the pad on national television.
- — Pioneer 1. October 11, 1958 — NASA's first launch (six days after the agency began operations). Failed to reach the Moon but reached 113,800 km — the highest any spacecraft had gone. Confirmed the outer Van Allen belt.
- — Luna 2. First spacecraft to reach the Moon — by crashing into it. Carried Soviet pennants. Khrushchev gave Eisenhower a replica during a visit two days later.
- — Luna 3. First photographs of the far side of the Moon — which no human had ever seen. The images were transmitted via radio after the film was developed onboard automatically.
- — TIROS-1 (Weather). April 1, 1960. The first successful weather satellite. Returned the first television images of Earth's cloud cover. Made operational meteorology a satellite-driven science within a decade.
- — Freedom 7 (Shepard). First American in space. Alan Shepard, 15-minute suborbital flight, May 5, 1961. Three weeks later JFK announced the Moon program. Shepard would walk on the Moon 10 years later.
- — Friendship 7 (Glenn). First American in orbit. John Glenn made three orbits aboard the Mercury capsule. Returned a national hero; later US Senator; flew again on the Space Shuttle aged 77.
- — Mariner 2 (Venus). August 27, 1962. First successful planetary flyby — Venus. Confirmed Venus has no magnetic field and a surface temperature of ~470°C. Killed any remaining "Venus is Earth's twin" hopes.
- — Vostok 6 (Tereshkova). First woman in space. Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times. No other woman flew to space for 19 years (until Svetlana Savitskaya, 1982).
- — Mariner 4 (Mars Flyby). First successful Mars mission. 22 grainy photographs of a cratered, Moon-like surface. Killed Lowellian fantasies of Martian canals and seas overnight; recast Mars as a dead world for the next 30 years.
- — Voskhod 2 (Leonov EVA). First spacewalk. Alexei Leonov, 12 minutes outside the capsule. His suit ballooned and he barely fit back through the airlock. Landed in the Siberian taiga; spent the night surrounded by wolves.
- — Gemini 3 (First Crewed Maneuver). March 23, 1965. Grissom and Young's Gemini 3 was the first spacecraft to change its own orbit while crewed. Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard; the resulting Congressional scolding is NASA folklore.
- — Gemini 7 / Gemini 6A. First crewed rendezvous in space. Schirra and Stafford in Gemini 6A flew within 30cm of Borman and Lovell's Gemini 7. Proved astronauts could find each other in orbit — the prerequisite for Apollo.
- — Surveyor 1. June 2, 1966. First American soft landing on the Moon (USSR's Luna 9 beat it by four months). Demonstrated the lunar surface could support a crewed lander — settled a 1960s debate about whether astronauts would sink into dust.
- — Soyuz 1 (Komarov). April 24, 1967. First in-flight fatality of any spaceflight. Vladimir Komarov's Soyuz parachute failed on re-entry; he was killed. Soviet officials had been warned the vehicle was unsafe; Komarov flew rather than let Yuri Gagarin (his backup) take the risk.
- — Apollo 8 (First Lunar Orbit). First crewed flight to leave Earth orbit and orbit the Moon. Borman, Lovell, Anders. The Christmas Eve Genesis reading was broadcast to ~1 billion people. Anders took the Earthrise photograph.
- — Apollo 10 (Dress Rehearsal). May 1969. Full Apollo dry-run — Stafford, Young, Cernan flew the LM to within 15.6 km of the lunar surface but did not land. The most successful "dress rehearsal" in spaceflight history; cleared Apollo 11 for the landing two months later.
- — Apollo 11 (First Moon Landing). July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface; Michael Collins in lunar orbit. ~650 million people watched on TV. The Cold War rationale of the Moon program ended within the next few flights.
- — Apollo 12 (Precision Landing). November 1969. Conrad and Bean landed within 200m of the Surveyor 3 probe (1967) and returned pieces of it to Earth. Hit by lightning 36 seconds after launch; the famous "SCE to AUX" fix from controller John Aaron saved the mission.
- — Apollo 1 Fire. January 27, 1967. Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee killed in a launchpad fire during a test of the Apollo command module. Delayed Apollo by 20 months; the redesigned spacecraft was much safer.
- — Vostok 1 (Gagarin). First human in space. Yuri Gagarin, 27, in orbit for 108 minutes. Ejected from the capsule and parachuted down separately. Returned a worldwide hero; died in a 1968 jet crash.
