By Ta’shun Richardson

SpaceEploration Timeline

1900Although Tsiolkovsky was born more than one hundred years before Sputnik became the first object launched into space, he prepared the way for it and all future space exploration. Tsiolkovsky was a true visionary who theorized many aspects of space travel and rocket propulsion decades ahead of others. Tsiolkovsky also imagined satellites and space stations long before such ideas could actually be implemented

1914Goddard's Rocket Patents U.S. rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard receives two landmark patents for rockets. The first described a multi-stage rocket and the second described a rocket fueled with gasoline and liquid nitrous oxide. These two patents would become major milestones in the history of rocketry.

1926By 1926, Goddard had constructed and successfully tested the first rocket using liquid fuel. Indeed, the flight of Goddard’s rocket on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, Massachusetts, was as significant to history as that of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.

1930The  US Navy’s only attempt to launch a liquid fueled rocket from an aircraft carrier. Operation Sandy involved the September 6, 1947 launch of a V-2 rocket from the deck of the USS Midway. A newsreel account of the launch can be viewed online.

1944After two previous failures, Germany successfully launches their V-2 rocket. It is the first man-made object to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight, reaching an altitude of 100 km (62 miles). The V-2 is the progenitor of all modern rockets including the U.S. Apollo program's Saturn V moon rocket.

1961The Redstone rocket launched the first American satellite into orbit. The rocket was developed by a team headed by Dr. Werhner von Braun, who had been working for the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. In 1950, the team was transferred to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where the army centered its rocket development activities. The arsenal had been used during World War II to produce various chemical compounds and pyrotechnical devices. Its name referred to the color of the rock and soil in Huntsville

1967

Five Lunar Orbiter missions were launched in 1966 through 1967 with the purpose of mapping the lunar surface before the Apollo landings. All five missions were successful, and 99% of the Moon was photographed with a resolution of 60 m or better. The first three missions were dedicated to imaging 20 potential lunar landing sites, selected based on Earth-based observations. These were flown at low inclination orbits. The fourth and fifth missions were devoted to broader scientific objectives and were flown in high altitude polar orbits. Lunar Orbiter 4 photographed the entire nearside and 95% of the farside, and Lunar Orbiter 5 completed the farside coverage and acquired medium (20 m) and high (2 m) resolution images of 36 pre-selected areas. The images at the top of the page show the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft with the high and medium resolution cameras at the center, and an image of the crater Tycho taken with the Lunar Orbiter 5 medium resolution camera.

1969On July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon. He said the historic words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

1971The April launch went smoothly and Salyut 1 entered orbit, but it was all downhill after that. The crew of Soyuz 10, intended to be the first cosmonauts to take occupancy of Salyut 1, couldn’t enter the space station because of a docking mechanism problem.

1972Here’s a picture of the launch of the Apollo 16 mission at the Kennedy Space Center on April 16, 1972. The Apollo 16 mission crew is composed of John W. Young, Thomas K. Mattingly II, and Charles M. Duke, Jr.

1973Skylab was the first US space station and the world's first big space station. It was launched on May 14th, 1973 by a Saturn V Rocket. Skylab Space Station was assembled from Saturn V and Apollo components. Skylab's purpose was to serve as a laborarory for scientific experiments in space until February 1974

197609.09.10 -- Data from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest liquid water has interacted with the Martian surface throughout the planet's history and into modern times.

1979The limb event of 13 August 1973, observed by Skylab in soft X-rays, exhibited typical characteristics of the giant post-flare arches observed by HXIS and FCS on board SMM in the 1980s. We present here examples of the processed Skylab images which yield 4 times better angular resolution than the SMM experiments and thus, for the first time, make it possible to distinguish the real fine structure of a giant post-flare arch

1981The US space shuttle, first launched in 1981, was the world's first reusable space craft. Of its three components - the orbiter space plane, rocket boosters, and external fuel tank - only the fuel tank is not recovered after a mission

1983On Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. The crew module remained together until it struck the Atlantic Ocean almost three minutes later at a speed of 207 mph, the commission that investigated that tragedy said in its report. NASA and the accident board never commented

1986The culmination of the Russian space program's efforts to establish a long-term manned space presence, Mir (which in Russian means both "peace" and "world") spent 15 years in orbit.

1990The Hubble Space Telescope's launch in 1990 sped humanity to one of its greatest advances in that journey. Hubble is a telescope that orbits Earth. Its position above the atmosphere, which distorts and blocks the light that reaches our planet, gives it a view of the universe that typically far surpasses that of ground-based telescopes.

1995

1998