Items57The creator’s order
  1. 1Sputnik 1Sputnik 1On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put the first artificial satellite in Earth orbit. Sputnik's radio signal gave people on the ground a way to hear that the space age had begun.0
  2. 2Sputnik 2Sputnik 2Sputnik 2 carried Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth. Her flight put a living passenger in orbit for the first time, and its one-way design left no way to bring her home.0
  3. 3Explorer 1Explorer 1The first U.S. satellite carried an instrument that revealed the radiation belts around Earth. It made a scientific discovery on the flight that also brought the United States into orbit.0
  4. 4Vanguard 1Vanguard 1Solar cells let this little satellite draw power from sunlight. Vanguard 1 was the first solar-powered satellite, a demonstration of a power source that could outlast a launch-day battery.0
  5. 5Luna 1Luna 1The probe missed the Moon but achieved a different milestone: it became the first spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity. It showed that an artificial object could leave Earth behind and enter an orbit around the Sun.0
  6. 6Luna 2Luna 2A crash was the objective. Luna 2 reached the Moon's surface in September 1959, the first successful impact on another celestial body. The next step was to get equipment down in working condition.0
  7. 7Luna 3Luna 3For the first time, a probe photographed the far side of the Moon. Luna 3 gave scientists a view they could never have obtained with a telescope on Earth.0
  8. 8Korabl-Sputnik 2Korabl-Sputnik 2Belka and Strelka survived an orbital flight and parachute recovery. Bringing the dogs back alive was the advance over Laika's mission, and it tested the kind of descent system the Soviet Union needed for a human passenger.0
  9. 9Vostok 1Vostok 1Yuri Gagarin completed a single orbit of Earth on the first human spaceflight. Soviet engineers had gone from testing whether a living passenger could return to sending a person all the way around the planet.0
  10. 10Mercury-Redstone 3Mercury-Redstone 3Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 went up and came back down without circling Earth. That short flight made him the first American in space and shows how far the U.S. program still had to go to match Vostok 1.0