RACE TO SPACE - Timeline

(October 4, 1957) FIRST SATELLITE TO ORBIT EARTH. The Soviet Union launches the first artificial satellite.

(November 3, 1957) FIRST ANIMAL IN SPACE. The Soviet Union launches a female dog into space. She lives for seven days.

(April 12, 1961) FIRST HUMAN IN SPACE. Riding on the Soviet Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.

(February 20, 1962) FIRST AMERICAN TO ORBIT EARTH. John Glenn circles Earth 3 times in 4 hours and 56 minutes.

(March 18, 1965) FIRST SPACE WALK. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov takes the first space walk. A 10-minute tethered excursion.

(January 27, 1967) FIRST DEATHS IN SPACE. During a test on the launchpad, a fire kills Apollo 1 astronauts.

(July 20, 1969) FIRST MOON LANDING. During the flight of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon. Armstrong says, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

(April 13, 1970) FIRST SPACE RESCUE. An oxygen tank explodes aboard Apollo 13. With help from mission control, the crew return to Earth safely four days later

(April 19, 1971) FIRST SPACE STATION. The Soviets launch Salyut 1, the first orbiting space station

(July 17, 1975) FIRST INTERNATIONAL DOCKING IN SPACE. American and Soviet spacecradt dock together in space in a show of peaceful cooperation during the Apollo- Soyuz mission

(July 20, 1976) FIRST MARS LANDING Viking 1, an unmanned scientific probe controlled by scientists, transmits the first pictures from the surface of Mars.

(April 12, 1981) FIRST REUSABLE SPACE VEHICLE. The space shuttle Columbia launches like a rocket and lands like an airplane.

(July 17, 1984) FIRST WOMAN TO DO A SPACEWALK. Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to do a spacewalk.

(January 28, 1986) FIRST CIVILIAN DEATH. The space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing all seven civilian crew members.

(December 21, 1988) FIRST YEAR IN SPACE. Musa Manarov and Vladimir Titov complete 366 days on the Russian space station.

(April 25, 1990) FIRST SPACE TELESCOPE. The crew of space shuttle mission STS-31 deploy the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope provides the first images of distant galxaxies and planets outside our solar system.

(September 22, 1990) FIRST SPACECRAFT TO LEAVE THE SOLAR SYSTEM. Pioneer 10, reaches a distance 50 times farther from the sun Than Earth, becoming the first spacecraft to leave the solar system

(July 6, 1997) FIRST SURFACE TRAVEL ON ANOTHER PLANET. The robot, Sojourner, explores the surface of Mars.

(October 29, 1998) FIRST SPACE STUDIES ON THE ELDERLY. At age 77, John Glenn flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and became the oldest person to go into space.

(April 28, 2001) FIRST NON-ASTRONAUT TO ENTER SPACE. Dennis Tito, a billionaire became the first paying passenger to enter outer space.

(July 1, 2004) FIRST SPACECRAFT TO ORBIT SATURN. Cassini-Huygens became the first spacecraft to go into orbit around Saturn.

(January 19, 2006). FIRST MISSION TO PLUTO. New Horizons, NASA's first-ever mission to the dwarf planet Pluto

(March 6, 2009). KEPLER MISSION IS LAUNCHED. First space telescope designated to search for Earth-like exoplanets.

(August 25, 2012) MAN-MADE PROBE First man-made probe in interstellar space

(August 10, 2015) FIRST FOOD GROWN AND EATEN Lettuce was the first food that was grown and eaten in space.

(March 1, 2016) LONGEST RECORDED TIME IN SPACE FOR ISS CREW MEMBERS Two crew members return to Earth after their 340-day space mission