A brief history of manned spaceflight



FIFTY years have elapsed since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lit the blue touchpaper on the era of manned spaceflight. Progress was rapid—only eight years separated Gagarin's flight from the infinitely more complicated mission that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon in 1969. Although the moon landings handed victory in the space race to America, the Soviet Union dominated manned spaceflight for the next decade, including some pioneering missions to the Salyut space stations to test the effects of long periods spent aloft. Only with the rise of the Space Shuttle programme in the early 1980s, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years later, did America retake the crown. Manned spaceflight is now no longer a two-horse race. China first sent men up in 2003, and a year later three privately funded sub-orbital missions were made in SpaceShipOne. Rocketeering remains a dangerous profession. Four missions have killed 18 astronauts between them, two each from the Soviet and American programmes, and more have died in accidents on the ground. After the Challenger and Columbia disasters, America's shuttle fleet was grounded, which explains the big drop in missions immediately after both accidents.

For a slideshow of the space-age future that never happened, see our Babbage Blog