Missions Timeline

Carried the dog Laika into orbit a month after Sputnik 1. She did not survive, and the flight remains one of the Space Age's hardest stories.

America's answer to Sputnik. Its onboard detector found the radiation belts that now carry James Van Allen's name.

Deliberately crashed into the surface near Mare Imbrium — the first object made on Earth to touch another world.

Nobody in history had seen the Moon's far side. Luna 3 rounded it, took 29 pictures and radioed them home.

John Glenn circled Earth three times. A faulty sensor suggested his heat shield was loose, and he flew the re-entry not knowing.

Passed Venus and found it far hotter than anyone expected — no oceans, no jungle, a surface above 400°C.

Valentina Tereshkova, a textile worker and amateur parachutist, flew 48 orbits alone. No other woman flew for nineteen years.

Twenty-one grainy pictures ended centuries of speculation about canals and showed a cratered, apparently dead world.

Alexei Leonov floated outside for twelve minutes, then found his suit had stiffened too much to fit back through the airlock.

Proved the surface was solid enough to stand on, settling a genuine fear that a lander would sink into deep dust.

Ten orbits, and the photograph of Earth rising over the lunar horizon that changed how the planet thought about itself.

Survived 23 minutes on the surface of Venus under 90 atmospheres of pressure before the heat finished it.

Drilled the lunar surface, sealed 101 grams of soil into a capsule and flew it back to Earth with nobody aboard.

Drove ten kilometres across the Moon over ten months, steered live from Earth by a five-person crew.

The first place humans lived in orbit. Its only crew died on the way home when a valve opened at the wrong moment.

Arrived at Mars during a global dust storm and had to wait months for it to clear, then mapped the whole planet.

Touched down and transmitted for about twenty seconds before falling silent, most likely blown over by the storm.

Three days on the surface with the only trained geologist ever to go. Nobody has been back since.

Crossed the asteroid belt, which many expected would destroy it, and sent back the first close pictures of Jupiter.

Damaged during launch and saved by the first crew, who deployed a makeshift sunshade to stop it cooking.

An American and a Soviet spacecraft joined in orbit and the crews shook hands, live, in the middle of the Cold War.

One black-and-white panorama of flat broken rock, taken in 53 minutes before Venus destroyed the lander.

Ran the first experiments ever designed to detect life on another planet. The results are still argued about.

Used a planetary alignment that happens twice a century to tour all four giant planets in a single flight.

The only time a new spacecraft has carried a crew on its very first launch. It flew 134 more times.

Flew 600 km from Halley's Comet through a hail of dust, losing its camera but returning the first images of a nucleus.

Occupied almost continuously for a decade, and the place Valeri Polyakov spent a record 437 days in a single stay.

Radar sees through cloud. Magellan used it to map 98% of a surface no camera has ever properly photographed.

Dropped a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, then spent eight years finding evidence of an ocean under Europa's ice.

Orbited Eros for a year, then touched down on it — something the spacecraft was never designed to do.

Assembled in orbit from modules launched by five agencies. Somebody has been living aboard it every day since November 2000.

X-rays never reach the ground. Chandra shows the hot, violent universe of black holes and colliding clusters.

Opportunity kept going for fourteen years. Its last message, during a dust storm, has been paraphrased as "my battery is low and it's getting dark".

Still working after twenty years, and the craft that found strong evidence for water ice at the Martian poles.

Reached space twice in two weeks on a budget a fraction of any government programme, and won the Ansari X Prize.

Took seven years and six planetary flybys just to slow down enough to be captured by the smallest planet.

Fired a copper slug into Comet Tempel 1 at 10 km/s to see what the inside of a comet is made of.

Used ion engines to orbit Vesta, leave, and then orbit Ceres — impossible with chemical rockets.

Stared at one patch of sky for years, watching 150,000 stars for the tiny dips this site's Observatory is built around.

Limped home after fuel leaks, engine failures and a lost lander, carrying 1,500 grains of asteroid Itokawa.

Flies through Jupiter's radiation belts in a long looping orbit to measure what is under the cloud tops.

Measuring the position and motion of nearly two billion stars precisely enough to reconstruct the galaxy's history.

Chased a comet for ten years, then dropped a lander that bounced twice and came to rest in a shadowed crack.

Flies through the Sun's outer atmosphere behind a carbon shield, at speeds over 600,000 km/h.

Listened for marsquakes for four years and used them to work out the size of the planet's core.

The far side never faces Earth, so the mission needed a relay satellite parked beyond the Moon just to talk home.

Fired a copper impactor to expose buried material, collected it, and delivered 5.4 grams to the Australian desert.

The first crew launched to orbit by a private company, and the first from American soil in nine years.

Arrived as an orbiter, lander and rover in one mission — something no country had attempted on a first attempt.

Rammed the moonlet Dimorphos at 22,000 km/h and shortened its orbit by 32 minutes. Planetary defence, tested.

An uncrewed Orion flew around the Moon and back, the first step towards landing people there again.

India succeeded where its previous attempt crashed, and reached a region thought to hold water ice.

Brought back nearly two kilograms of material from terrain no previous sample had ever come from.

Launched towards Europa to find out whether the ocean beneath its ice could support life. Arrives in 2030.

The world's first artificial satellite — its radio beeps from orbit shocked the world and launched the Space Age.

Carried Yuri Gagarin on a single orbit of Earth, making him the first human to travel to space and return safely.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon, fulfilling President Kennedy's challenge to the nation.

Launched to study the outer planets, Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object — beyond our solar system in interstellar space.

Transformed our view of the universe, capturing images from the Pillars of Creation to the Ultra Deep Field — a single photo containing 10,000 galaxies.

Deployed Sojourner, the first Mars rover, proving the concept of robotic surface exploration and paving the way for all future Mars missions.

Spent 13 years orbiting Saturn, discovering active geysers on Enceladus and liquid methane lakes on Titan, before a planned plunge into Saturn's atmosphere.

A car-sized rover still active on Mars today. Curiosity confirmed Mars once had the conditions needed to support microbial life.

Flew past Pluto, capturing the first detailed images of the dwarf planet and its moons, then continued deeper into the Kuiper Belt.

Searching for signs of ancient life on Mars and collecting rocks for future Earth return. Its helicopter Ingenuity achieved the first powered flight on another planet.

The most powerful space telescope ever built, JWST peers into the universe's first light — revealing galaxies that formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang.