First artificial satellite, launched 1957: Sputnik 1 (Soviet Union) First animal in orbit, 1957: Laika the dog, on Sputnik 2 First human in space, 1961: Yuri Gagarin First American in space, 1961: Alan Shepard First American to orbit Earth, 1962: John Glenn First woman in space, 1963: Valentina Tereshkova First spacewalk, 1965: Alexei Leonov Project Mercury: NASA's first program to put Americans in space Project Gemini: NASA program of two-person flights that practiced docking and spacewalks Project Apollo: NASA program that landed people on the Moon Apollo 8: First crewed mission to orbit the Moon, 1968 Apollo 11: First crewed Moon landing, July 1969 First person on the Moon: Neil Armstrong Second person on the Moon: Buzz Aldrin Apollo 11 command module pilot: Michael Collins Armstrong's famous words: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind Apollo 13: 1970 mission that returned safely after an oxygen tank failure Apollo 17: The last crewed Moon landing, December 1972 Lunar rover: A vehicle astronauts drove on the Moon in later Apollo missions Skylab: The first US space station, launched 1973 Salyut: The first space station, launched by the Soviet Union in 1971 Mir: A Soviet and Russian space station that orbited from 1986 to 2001 International Space Station: A research station orbiting Earth, with crews living aboard since 2000 ISS orbit height, about: 400 kilometers above Earth Space Shuttle: NASA's reusable spacecraft that flew from 1981 to 2011 First Space Shuttle to orbit: Columbia, 1981 Space Shuttle orbiters: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour First American woman in space: Sally Ride, 1983 First African American in space from the US: Guion Bluford, 1983 Mae Jemison: The first African American woman in space, 1992 Hubble Space Telescope: Orbiting telescope launched in 1990 Who is the Hubble named for?: Astronomer Edwin Hubble Voyager 1: Probe launched in 1977; entered interstellar space in 2012 Voyager 2: Probe launched in 1977 that visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune Pioneer 10: The first spacecraft to fly past Jupiter, in 1973 Mariner 4: First spacecraft to photograph Mars up close, 1965 Viking 1 and 2: US probes that landed on Mars in 1976 Mars Pathfinder: 1997 mission that carried the small rover Sojourner Spirit and Opportunity: Twin Mars rovers that landed in 2004 Curiosity: A Mars rover that landed in 2012 Cassini: A probe that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 Huygens: A probe that landed on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005 Galileo: A spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 Juno: A spacecraft that began orbiting Jupiter in 2016 New Horizons: Probe that flew past Pluto in 2015 Magellan: A probe that mapped Venus with radar in the early 1990s MESSENGER: The first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, 2011 Dawn: A spacecraft that orbited the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres Rosetta: European mission that orbited a comet and sent a lander in 2014 Kepler: A space telescope that found thousands of planets around other stars Spitzer: An infrared space telescope launched in 2003 Chandra: A NASA X-ray space telescope launched in 1999 Parker Solar Probe: Spacecraft launched in 2018 to fly close to the Sun OSIRIS-REx: A probe that collected samples from asteroid Bennu in 2020 Hayabusa: Japanese probes that returned samples from asteroids Chang'e 4: Chinese lander that touched down on the Moon's far side in 2019 Challenger disaster: 1986 Space Shuttle accident in which seven crew members died Columbia disaster: 2003 Space Shuttle accident that lost its seven crew Crew Dragon: SpaceX capsule that carried NASA astronauts in 2020 Sputnik: Russian for fellow traveler or satellite Longest single spaceflight by a woman, 2019-20: Christina Koch, 328 days Cosmonaut: A Russian space traveler Taikonaut: A Chinese space traveler Astronaut: A space traveler from the United States and many other countries Launch pad: The platform a rocket lifts off from Kennedy Space Center: NASA's launch site in Florida Baikonur: The launch site in Kazakhstan used by Russian rockets Free flashcards from Peabody at peabody.kids/flashcards/space-missions