Ignition Protocol

1. 4 October 1957Soviet Union

   Sputnik 1 opens the space age

   First artificial satellite of the Earth

   A polished 84 kilogram sphere with four whip aerials, thrown up on a converted R-7 missile, and all it did was beep. That was the point: anything that could put a ball in orbit could put a warhead anywhere, and for four months the United States had nothing to answer with.

2. 3 November 1957Soviet Union

   Laika dies in orbit

   First living creature to orbit the Earth

   Korolev built it in under a month on Khrushchev's order, with no recovery system, which meant the dog was dead the moment she was sealed in. Soviet accounts claimed for decades that she lasted four days; the cabin in fact overheated within hours of reaching orbit.

   Partial success.

3. 6 December 1957United States

   Vanguard falls back on the pad

   The American answer to Sputnik rose about four feet, lost thrust and exploded in front of the assembled press. Newspapers ran it as Flopnik and Kaputnik, and a Soviet delegate at the United Nations offered the United States technical aid for undeveloped countries.

   Failed.

4. 31 January 1958United States

   Explorer 1 finds the radiation belts

   First United States satellite

   Von Braun's team put it up on a Jupiter-C, a Redstone missile with three solid stages stacked on top. Its cosmic ray detector behaved oddly at altitude, and reading that anomaly correctly is how the Van Allen radiation belts were found.

5. 2 January 1959Soviet Union

   Luna 1 misses the Moon

   First spacecraft to escape Earth orbit

   It was built to hit the Moon and passed thousands of kilometres wide because of a guidance error, so Moscow announced it as an artificial planet instead. The claim was fair enough: nothing made by people had ever climbed out of Earth orbit before.

   Partial success.

6. 3 March 1959United States

   Pioneer 4 slips past the Moon

   First American spacecraft to escape Earth gravity

   The first American probe that did not fall back, though it missed the Moon by nearly 59,000 kilometres, far too wide for its photocell to trigger. It tracked out to 658,000 kilometres before the signal faded, which at that point counted as a win.

   Partial success.

7. 12 September 1959Soviet Union

   Luna 2 strikes the Moon

   First human-made object to reach another world

   The transmitter cut out on 13 September, which is how controllers knew it had arrived, at speed and in pieces. Khrushchev landed in Washington the following day carrying a replica of the pennant sphere it had been made to scatter.

8. 4 October 1959Soviet Union

   The far side of the Moon

   First images of the lunar far side

   Launched on the anniversary of Sputnik, carrying a film camera, a developing bath and a fixer, so the negatives were processed in flight and scanned for transmission. Seventeen frames survived the radio link and six were published, showing a hemisphere nobody had ever seen.

9. 19 August 1960Soviet Union

   Belka and Strelka come home

   First animals to orbit the Earth and return alive

   Two dogs went up for a day in orbit and came back alive, which proved the Vostok capsule could return a living passenger rather than merely carry one. Eight months later the passenger was a man.

10. 12 April 1961Soviet Union

    Gagarin orbits the Earth

    First human being in space

    One orbit, 106 minutes, and a reentry in which the service module refused to let go and set the capsule spinning hard until the straps burned through. Gagarin came down under his own parachute near Engels, well short of the aim point, a detail the USSR kept quiet for years to protect the record.

    Crew: Yuri Gagarin

11. 5 May 1961United States

    Shepard flies for fifteen minutes

    First American in space

    Three weeks after Gagarin, the United States threw a man 187 kilometres up and back down again in a quarter of an hour, and did it on live television rather than in secret. Twenty days later Kennedy stood in front of Congress and asked for the Moon.

    Crew: Alan Shepard

12. 21 July 1961United States

    Liberty Bell 7 sinks

    The second suborbital hop went to plan until the explosive hatch fired on the water, the capsule flooded and it sank. Grissom swam clear and said he had been lying there minding his own business when he heard a dull thud; the argument over whether he blew it ran for decades, and the capsule sat on the sea floor until 1999.

    Crew: Gus Grissom

    Partial success.

13. 6 August 1961Soviet Union

    Titov spends a day in orbit

    First full day spent in space

    Eighteen orbits and 25 hours 18 minutes, at a point when the entire American total stood at fifteen minutes. Titov could not keep food down and Soviet officials would admit only to unpleasant feelings in his vestibular system; at twenty-five he remains the youngest person ever launched.

    Crew: Gherman Titov

14. 20 February 1962United States

    Glenn orbits three times

    First American in orbit

    A sensor told Mercury Control that the heat shield had come loose, so Glenn reentered with the spent retropack strapped over it and watched burning debris go past the window. The shield had been secure the whole time and the sensor was wrong.

    Crew: John Glenn

15. 11 August 1962Soviet Union

    Two Vostoks fly together

    Nikolayev went up on the 11th and Popovich followed on the 12th, closing to a few kilometres. Neither ship could steer, so the formation was really a compliment to the accuracy of the R-7, and the two drifted steadily apart over the following days.

    Crew: Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich

16. 27 August 1962United States

    Mariner 2 reaches Venus

    First successful mission to another planet

    It flew past on 14 December 1962 and reported no magnetic field, no break in the cloud deck, and a surface hot enough to end a century of speculation about a swampy twin Earth. This was the first American win in the race that was not a catch-up.

17. 16 June 1963Soviet Union

    Tereshkova is first woman in space

    First woman in space

    Vostok 5 went up on 14 June with Bykovsky aboard and Vostok 6 followed two days later, so for a stretch the Soviet Union had a man and a woman in orbit at the same time. Tereshkova was twenty-six, and the first woman ever launched.

    Crew: Valentina Tereshkova

18. 12 October 1964Soviet Union

    Three men in a one-man capsule

    First spaceflight carrying more than one crew member

    To take the multi-crew record before Gemini flew, engineers pulled the ejection seats and pressure suits out of a Vostok and packed three men into the space. They landed to find Khrushchev gone, removed in a Kremlin coup while they were in orbit.

    Crew: Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, Boris Yegorov

19. 28 November 1964United States

    Mariner 4 photographs Mars

    First flyby images of Mars

    Twenty-one frames taken on 14 July 1965 showed craters, no canals and nothing growing, and finished off a hundred years of speculation in a single pass. It was the first close look at any planet beyond the Earth.

20. 18 March 1965Soviet Union

    Leonov walks in space

    First spacewalk

    Several minutes outside, then a suit that ballooned so stiff he had to bleed off his own air to fold himself back into the airlock. The automatic reentry failed the next day, the crew flew it down by hand and overshot by more than 800 kilometres, and landed in forest north of Perm to wait for someone to come and find them.

    Crew: Alexei Leonov, Pavel Belyayev

21. 23 March 1965United States

    Gemini learns to steer

    First crewed spacecraft to change its own orbit

    Grissom and Young fired thrusters and changed their own orbit, the first crew ever to do it. Rendezvous, docking and everything about a Moon landing rests on that one trick, and this is the flight where the Americans acquired it.

    Crew: Gus Grissom, John Young

22. 3 June 1965United States

    White walks outside

    First American spacewalk

    Twenty-three minutes on an eight metre tether with a hand-held gas gun, eleven weeks after Leonov, and White had to be ordered back inside. The same flight tried to fly formation with its spent booster and could not, which is how NASA learned that orbital rendezvous is not flying.

    Crew: James McDivitt, Edward White

23. 4 December 1965United States

    Fourteen days in a small cabin

    Borman and Lovell stayed up for 330 hours and 35 minutes, a fortnight, to establish that a crew could sit through a lunar round trip without coming apart. They then held still and served as the target for Gemini VI-A.

    Crew: Frank Borman, James Lovell

24. 15 December 1965United States

    Two crews meet in orbit

    First rendezvous of two crewed spacecraft

    Three days after the engines lit on the pad and shut down without lifting, Schirra and Stafford flew up and closed to within a foot of Gemini VII, holding station for over five hours. Without this manoeuvre there is no lunar mission, only a very expensive flyby.

    Crew: Walter Schirra, Thomas Stafford

25. 31 January 1966Soviet Union

    Luna 9 lands softly on the Moon

    First soft landing on another world

    On the twelfth Soviet attempt an airbag-cushioned ball rolled to a stop in the Ocean of Storms on 3 February and sent back a panorama of the ground it was sitting on. It settled the open question of whether a lander would sink into the dust, which it did not.

26. 16 March 1966United States

    Gemini VIII docks and tumbles

    First docking of two spacecraft in orbit

    Armstrong and Scott joined their ship to an Agena target, then began tumbling violently because a roll thruster had stuck open and nobody could see which one. Armstrong stopped it with the reentry control system, which burned three quarters of that fuel and by the rules meant coming down at once.

    Crew: Neil Armstrong, David Scott

    Partial success.

27. 31 March 1966Soviet Union

    First satellite of the Moon

    First artificial satellite of another world

    It entered lunar orbit on 3 April and played a revolutionary anthem down to the 23rd Party Congress, which tells you plainly what the programme was for. It came two months after Luna 9 landed: two Soviet lunar firsts inside a single spring.

28. 11 November 1966United States

    Aldrin solves the spacewalk

    Every EVA since White's had left its astronaut exhausted and behind schedule. Aldrin trained underwater, fitted foot restraints and tethers, took a dozen scheduled rest periods, and worked outside for over two hours without trouble, which is why anyone could later do a job on the Moon.

    Crew: James Lovell, Buzz Aldrin

29. 27 January 1967United States

    Fire in the command module

    This was a ground test, not a launch. Pure oxygen above atmospheric pressure, exposed wiring and a hatch that opened inward killed three men in about half a minute, and the review board that followed rebuilt the spacecraft that eventually reached the Moon.

    LostVirgil Grissom, Edward White, Roger Chaffee

30. 23 April 1967Soviet Union

    Komarov does not come back

    A solar panel failed to unfold, power ran short, and by the thirteenth orbit the automatic stabilisation was dead, so the flight was cut to a day. The main parachute never left its container, the reserve tangled with the drogue, and the descent module hit the ground at about forty metres a second.

    LostVladimir Komarov

31. 12 June 1967Soviet Union

    Venera 4 enters the Venusian air

    First in-place analysis of another planet's atmosphere

    On 18 October a capsule descended under parachute and radioed temperature, pressure and composition until the atmosphere crushed it. It established that the air is over ninety per cent carbon dioxide, the first chemistry ever done in place on another planet.

32. 27 October 1967Soviet Union

    Two Soyuz dock unattended

    First fully automatic docking in orbit

    Six months after Komarov died in one, the Soviets flew two uncrewed Soyuz under cover names and let the onboard systems find each other and lock together on 30 October. Nobody was aboard either ship, which is the point: the hardware that had killed a man could now be trusted to fly itself.

33. 15 September 1968Soviet Union

    Tortoises round the Moon

    First living creatures to circle the Moon and return

    A stripped Soyuz swung behind the Moon with two tortoises and a load of biological samples aboard and was lifted out of the Indian Ocean on 22 September. It was a prototype of the Soviet crew ship, which meant the next one round could have a person in it.

34. 11 October 1968United States

    Apollo flies again with a crew

    Eleven days in Earth orbit in a rebuilt command module, twenty months after the fire, and the reporting at the time called it 101 per cent successful. Every change the review board forced was proved in low orbit before anyone risked taking it further out.

    Crew: Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, Walter Cunningham

35. 21 December 1968United States

    Apollo 8 goes to the Moon

    First humans to leave Earth orbit and orbit the Moon

    NASA gambled the programme: put three men on the first crewed launch of the Saturn V and send them to the Moon rather than around the block. They were home on 27 December, and from that week the race was decided in all but fact.

    Crew: Frank Borman, James Lovell, William Anders

36. 14 January 1969Soviet Union

    Crew transfer by spacewalk

    First docking of two crewed spacecraft

    Shatalov went up alone on the 14th, three more followed on the 15th, and the two ships docked on 16 January. Yeliseev and Khrunov then climbed hand over hand along the outside from one ship to the other, because Soyuz had no internal tunnel yet.

    Crew: Vladimir Shatalov, Boris Volynov, Alexei Yeliseev, Yevgeny Khrunov

37. 21 February 1969Soviet Union

    N1 fails on its first flight

    Thirty engines clustered in the first stage, and the vehicle broke up 68.7 seconds after leaving Site 110 at Tyuratam. Three more N1s would fly over the next three years and not one of them finished a first stage burn.

    Failed.

38. 3 March 1969United States

    Flying the lunar module

    The first flight of the full Apollo stack, kept in Earth orbit, where the lunar module undocked, flew away and came back to the command module. A Moon landing is that rendezvous with a bigger delay, and here it worked.

    Crew: James McDivitt, David Scott, Russell Schweickart

39. 3 July 1969Soviet Union

    N1 destroys its launch pad

    Vehicle 5L failed at liftoff and came down on Site 110, taking the pad with it. It happened thirteen days before Apollo 11 left the ground, and it is the closest the Soviet Moon programme ever came to a schedule.

    Failed.

40. 13 July 1969Soviet Union

    Luna 15 races Apollo 11

    Sent up three days ahead of Apollo 11 to bring back soil first and take some of the shine off the landing. It circled the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface and crashed into Mare Crisium on 21 July, roughly two hours before they lifted off.

    Failed.

41. 16 July 1969United States

    Armstrong and Aldrin land

    First crewed landing on another world

    Launched on 16 July, landed at Tranquility Base on 20 July, splashed down on 24 July. Twelve years of rivalry, and it ended in about the time it takes to say one sentence out loud.

    Crew: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins

42. 11 April 1970United States

    Apollo 13 gets home

    An oxygen tank ruptured two days out, so the crew moved into the lunar module and used it as a lifeboat around the Moon and back, splashing down on 17 April. NASA has called it a successful failure ever since, which is true and also means nobody landed.

    Crew: James Lovell, Jack Swigert, Fred Haise

    Partial success.

43. 17 August 1970Soviet Union

    Venera 7 signals from the ground

    First transmission from the surface of another planet

    The capsule reached the surface on 15 December and transmitted, which fixed the pressure at around 93 atmospheres and the temperature between 237 and 246 degrees Celsius. Nothing built on Earth had ever sent data back from the surface of another planet.

44. 12 September 1970Soviet Union

    A robot brings back rock

    First robotic sample return from another world

    It landed in Mare Fecunditatis on 20 September, drilled, and put 101 grams of soil into a capsule that was back on the ground in Kazakhstan on 24 September. The USSR never landed a person on the Moon, and this was the argument that it never had to.

45. 10 November 1970Soviet Union

    Lunokhod 1 drives on the Moon

    First rover to operate on another world

    The lander touched down on 17 November and rolled off an eight-wheeled rover driven from Earth by radio. It was built for three lunar days, lasted eleven, and covered 10,540 metres before it stopped answering in September 1971.

46. 19 April 1971Soviet Union

    The first space station

    First space station

    A Proton put the first crewed orbital laboratory into space, and with it the Soviet programme quietly changed its objective from reaching the Moon to living in orbit. That is the direction it has held ever since.

47. 23 April 1971Soviet Union

    Soyuz 10 cannot get in

    The first crew sent to Salyut 1 made contact with the docking port, but a clutch in the probe mechanism broke under the force of the approach and the two could not be drawn together. No pressurised tunnel formed, and they came home without ever entering the station.

    Crew: Vladimir Shatalov, Alexei Yeliseev, Nikolai Rukavishnikov

    Partial success.

48. 28 May 1971Soviet Union

    Mars 3 lands and goes quiet

    First soft landing on Mars

    The lander reached the surface intact on 2 December, started transmitting ninety seconds later and stopped twenty seconds after that, for reasons nobody has ever established. What it returned was one grey frame with nothing in it, and it is still the first soft landing on Mars.

    Partial success.

49. 6 June 1971Soviet Union

    Soyuz 11 comes down with no air

    Twenty-three days aboard Salyut 1, and then a pressure equalisation valve was jolted open as the modules separated and the cabin emptied in under a minute. The recovery team opened the hatch on a spacecraft that had landed perfectly, with three dead men strapped inside.

    LostGeorgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsayev

50. 27 June 1971Soviet Union

    N1 rolls and breaks apart

    Vehicle 6L went out of control in roll almost at once and was torn apart 50.1 seconds after leaving the pad. Apollo had landed two years earlier, and the rocket built to get there first had still not survived a first stage burn.

    Failed.

51. 23 November 1972Soviet Union

    The last N1 flight

    Vehicle 7L flew for about 107 seconds, further than any of the others, before the first stage failed just short of separation. It was the last N1 to leave the ground, and the Soviet Union never did build a Moon rocket that worked.

    Failed.

52. 7 December 1972United States

    The last men on the Moon

    The only Apollo to carry a professional geologist, and the last one of any kind. Three days working the Taurus-Littrow valley and highlands, and then Cernan climbed the ladder and nobody has been back since.

    Crew: Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, Harrison Schmitt

53. 14 May 1973United States

    Skylab reaches orbit damaged

    First United States space station

    It reached orbit damaged and too hot to live in, so the first crew went up on 25 May with a repair job rather than a science programme. They pushed a parasol sunshade out through a scientific airlock to bring the temperature down, then cut a jammed solar array loose on a spacewalk, and three crews worked aboard after that.

    Partial success.

54. 8 June 1975Soviet Union

    A photograph from Venus

    First image from the surface of another planet

    The lander reached the surface on 22 October and returned a black and white panorama of angular rock before the heat finished it. It is the first picture taken standing on another planet, and it was taken by the side that had lost the Moon.

55. 15 July 1975Soviet Union

    Leonov flies up to meet Apollo

    The man who made the first spacewalk in 1965 lifted off with Kubasov about seven and a half hours ahead of the American crew. The two ships joined at 16:09 GMT on 17 July, ten years after the two programmes had been racing to be first at everything.

    Crew: Alexei Leonov, Valery Kubasov

56. 15 July 1975United States

    The last Apollo docks with a Soyuz

    Stafford, Brand and Slayton took the last Apollo command module up to meet Soyuz 19, and Stafford and Leonov shook hands through the hatch on 17 July. Slayton had been grounded as a Mercury astronaut in 1962 and was fifty-one; it was the final flight of Apollo, and the formal end of the race.

    Crew: Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, Donald Slayton

57. 23 July 1999United States

    Collins commands a shuttle

    First woman to command a spaceflight

    Thirty-six years after Tereshkova, and twenty-four years after the race ended, a woman was finally given a spacecraft to run. Collins took Columbia up to deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory, at 22,780 kilograms the heaviest payload the shuttle system ever carried.

    Crew: Eileen Collins

Before the race · 1926 to 1956

The race · 1957 to 1975

The shuttle era · 1976 to 2010

The commercial era · 2011 to today