The history of human spaceflight

Human spaceflight grew out of the Cold War space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, and in 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space and the first to orbit Earth; Alan Shepard became the first American in space weeks later, and John Glenn the first American to orbit Earth in 1962. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, and Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in 1965. NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs led to Apollo 11 in July 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon; twelve astronauts walked on the Moon on six missions through 1972. Later, astronauts lived for months at a time on space stations such as the U.S. Skylab, the Soviet Mir, and the International Space Station, built by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada and continuously occupied since 2000. NASA's reusable Space Shuttle flew from 1981 to 2011; the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) disasters each killed seven astronauts and led to major safety changes. China has launched its own astronauts since 2003, private companies have flown crews to the space station under NASA contracts since 2020, and NASA's Artemis program aims to land astronauts on the Moon again.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report