Amrad

I really just made this login to have somewhere to put the following. Only after that did I discover that there already is a similar list towards the end of the space race article. Silly me. However, that list stops in 1975. Which makes sense, but makes the list incomplete. It is also interresting to compare the two lists.

Timeline of space exploration

Because the timeline of space exploration article is clogged up by trivia that seem to be intended to hide the fact that the USSR won the space race in the 50s and 60s, I decided to make this into a more balanced list. Of course, I should do this in the article itself, but I foresee lengthy discussions (aka bickering) with little success. So instead I decided to put this list here for reference. Alas, I can't link to it from the article. :)

Ironically, only after the US and the USSR made serious cuts in their space programme bugets, thus effectively ending the space race, did the US start to seriously outperform the USSR, with the exploration of other planets.

The really big ones are in bold type.

For details on what I excluded, see below the tables.

This is a timeline of space exploration including notable achievements and first accomplishments in humanity's physical exploration of space.

Date	Mission Achievements	Country	Mission name
1942	First rocket to reach 100km from the Earth's surface (boundary of space)	Germany	V2 rocket, military program
1946	First pictures of earth from 100 km [1][2]	United States	V2
1947	First animals in space (fruit flies)[3][4]	USA-ABMA	V2
1957	First artificial satellite	USSR	Sputnik 1
1957	First signals from space	USSR	Sputnik 1
1957	First animal in orbit, the dog Laika	USSR	Sputnik 2
1959	First vehicle reaching Earth escape velocity	USSR	Luna 1
1959	First man-made object in heliocentric orbit	USSR	Luna 1
1959	First hard landing on another celestial body (the Moon)	USSR	Luna 2
1959	First photos of far side of the Moon	USSR	Luna 3
1960	First satellite recovered intact from orbit	USA-Air Force	Discoverer 13
1961	First manned spaceflight (Yuri Gagarin)	USSR	Vostok 1
1961	First manned orbital flight	USSR	Vostok 1
1962	First planetary flyby (Venus closest approach 34,773 kilometers)	USA-NASA	Mariner 2
1965	First extra-vehicular activity	USSR	Voskhod 2
1965	First Mars flyby (closest approach 9,846 kilometers)	USA-NASA	Mariner 4
1966	First soft landing on another celestial body (the Moon)	USSR	Luna 9
1966	First photos from another celestial body (the Moon)	USSR	Luna 9
1966	First hard landing on another planet (Venus)	USSR	Venera 3
1966	First orbital rendezvous (docking)	USA-NASA	Gemini 8/Agena target vehicle
1966	First artificial satellite around another celestial body (the Moon)	USSR	Luna 10
1967	First unmanned rendezvous with docking	USSR	Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188
1968	First human orbiting of another celestial body (Moon)	USA-NASA	Apollo 8
1969	First manned docking and exchange of crew	USSR	Soyuz 4/Soyuz 5
1969	First human on another celestial body (the Moon)	USA-NASA	Apollo 11
1969	First space launch from another celestial body (the Moon)	USA-NASA	Apollo 11
1970	First automatic sample return from the Moon	USSR	Luna 16
1970	First lunar rover	USSR	Lunokhod 1
1970	First soft landing on another planet (Venus)	USSR	Venera 7
1970	First signals from another planet (Venus)	USSR	Venera 7
1971	First space station	USSR	Salyut 1
1971	First orbit around another planet (Mars)	USA-NASA	Mariner 9
1971	First hard landing on Mars	USSR	Mars 2
1971	First soft Mars landing	USSR	Mars 3
1972	First human made object sent on escape trajectory away from the Sun	USA-NASA	Pioneer 10
1973	First Jupiter flyby (at 130,000 km)	USA-NASA	Pioneer 10
1974	First Mercury flyby at 703 kilometers	USA-NASA	Mariner 10
1975	First multinational manned mission	USSR USA-NASA	Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
1975	First orbit around Venus	USSR	Venera 9
1975	First photos from the surface of another planet (Venus)	USSR	Venera 9
1976	First photos and soil samples from the surface of Mars	USA-NASA	Viking Lander
1979	First Saturn flyby at 21,000 km	USA-NASA	Pioneer 11
1981	First Reusable manned spacecraft (orbital)	USA-NASA	Columbia
1982	First Venus soil samples	USSR	Venera 13
1982	First sound recording of another celestial body (Venus)	USSR	Venera 13
1983	First spacecraft beyond the orbit of Neptune (first spacecraft to pass beyond all Solar System planets)	USA-NASA	Pioneer 10
1986	First Uranus flyby (closest approach 81,500 kilometers)	USA-NASA	Voyager 2
1986	First consistently inhabited long-term research space station	USSR	Mir
1989	First Neptune flyby	USA-NASA	Voyager 2
1991	First asteroid flyby (951 Gaspra closest approach 1,600 kilometers)	USA-NASA	Galileo
1995	First orbit of Jupiter	USA-NASA	Galileo
1995	First mission into the atmosphere of a gas giant (Jupiter)	USA-NASA	Galileo's atmospheric entry probe
2000	First orbiting of an asteroid (433 Eros)	USA-NASA	NEAR Shoemaker
2001	First landing on an asteroid (433 Eros)	USA-NASA	NEAR Shoemaker
2004	First orbit of Saturn	USA-NASA ESA ASI	Cassini–Huygens
2005	First soft landing on Titan	ESA USA-NASA ASI	Cassini–Huygens

¹Project Vanguard was transferred from the NRL to NASA in late 1958.

In addition, virtually all manned duration records have been set by the USSR, due largely to their Salyut and Mir series of space stations.

Scientific and Technological

I deleted the following, because they don't really fit in this list, but deserve some mention anyway, so I made a separate list. For the scientific discoveries, some were side-effects, not intended purposes. And many technological achievements were not goals in themselves, but rather means to achieve those goals. Of course, some of this is somewhat arbitrary.

1926	Robert H. Goddard launches the first liquid fueled rocket	United States
1946	First space research flight (cosmic radiation experiments)	United States	captured and improved V2 rocket
1958	Confirmed the existence of the Van Allen belts	USA-ABMA	Explorer 1
1958	First solar powered satellite	NRL	Vanguard 1
1959	First firing of a rocket in Earth orbit	USSR	Luna 1
1959	First detection of solar wind	USSR	Luna 1
1961	First launch from orbit	USSR	Venera 1
1961	First mid-course corrections	USSR	Venera 1
1961	First spin-stabilisation	USSR	Venera 1
1963	First reusable manned spacecraft (suborbital)	USA-NASA	X-15 Flight 90
1970	First X-ray orbital observatory	USA-NASA	Uhuru (satellite)
1974	First gravitational assist manoeuvre	USA-NASA	Mariner 10
1978	First real time remotely operated ultraviolet orbital observatory	USA-NASA ESA UK-SERC	International Ultraviolet Explorer
1983	Infrared orbital observatory	USA-NASA UK-SERC Netherlands-NIVR	IRAS
1983	Ultraviolet orbital observatory	USSR France	Astron
1989	Ultraviolet to gamma ray spectrum orbital observatory	USSR France Denmark Bulgaria	Granat
1990	Optical orbital observatory	USA-NASA ESA	Hubble Space Telescope
1998	First submarine-launched spacecraft	Russia	K-407

My edits

First of all, I don't see the reason for splitting the list in different periods, so I put it into one single table.

I excluded stuff like (incomplete list):

• Publication of books on how it could be done. What counts is what was done. This excludes most of the earliest entries.
• 1935: a student starts work on a rocket. What counts is the successful launch of a rocket. Anyway, the great rocket scientists of the beginning of space exploration, Sergey Korolyov and Wernher von Braun, started building their rockets before that.
• Formation of space agencies. Again, what counts is what they do, not when they were founded.
• The first satellite for some specific purpose (weather, communication, spying). What counts is the first satellite. This excludes several US entries.
• The second time something is done. It's the first time that counts. This excludes the second and third nation in space. Does it matter, really, which nation it was? That's about the space race, not space exploration.
  • Example: "1946: First U.S.-designed rocket to reach edge of space (80 km (49 mi))". It's not the first one to do that and it's not even a record (and it's not even the edge of space, which is, rather arbitrarily, set at 100 km up).
• 1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile. This is about space exploration, not just any rockets.
• 1959: First photograph of Earth from orbit. The first photo of Earth from space already preceded that, so it's basically more of the same.
• 1962: First orbital solar observatory. Not sure if this should be included.
• 1963: First woman in space. Why not also include the first black man in space?
• 1964: First multi-man crew (three members)
• 1965: First orbital rendezvous (parallel flight, no docking). It's the docking that counts.
• 2 June 1966: soft landing on the Moon and photos from the Moon. Neither of these was done for the first time (which was earlier that year), so why was that in the list? Because it was done by the US?
• 23 April 1967: First spaceflight casualty. No it wasn't. That was on Apollo 1, earlier that year. But we don't want the US to have set this record, now do we? :) Anyway, not really relevant for this list.
• 1971: First signals from Mars. That was already covered by 'First signals from another planet (Venus)'.
• 1971: First Manned orbital observatory.First space station already covers that.
• 1972: First mission to enter the asteroid belt and leave inner solar system. The entry before that says 'First human made object sent on escape trajectory away from the Sun. Which comes down to the same thing. The first entry says it started doing something, so adding that it actually did that dies not add much.
• 1972: First signals from Mars surface. hat is already covered by the first signals from another planet (Venus)
• 1980: Saturn flyby. Not the first one. I even wonder if flyby's should be in the list. But the photographs taken by these missions are among the best things that came out of space exploration. In that sense, the USA is underrepresented in the latter part of the list.
• 1992: First polar orbit around the Sun. Just a variation on the first man-made object in heliocentric orbit (1959).
• 2001: First space tourist.

A note on one that I kept in the table:

• 1947: First animals in space (fruit flies). I bet the first rocket in space had loads of microbes in it, so where does one draw the line? And probably even on it, so were those the first EVAs? :)

Noteworthy is that in the original list, when one vehicle did several firsts, this was split for US vehicles, but not for USSR vehicles. The big difference is of course that splitting results in more flags for that country.

I changed 'impact' to 'hard landing' because that is the more common terminology (at least in Dutch). Given all the other bias, I wonder if the terminology was chosen because all three were done by the USSR.

So I started from the existing list, excluding mostly (but by no means exclusively) pro-US stuff. Which makes sense, considering that most editors here will be from the US. What I don't know is if any Soviet achievements have been kept from this list. Alas, I can't read Russian, so that Wikipedia can't help me very much. If you see anything missing here, tell me. And maybe try to include it in the article itself.