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[13] [14] [15] On June 14, 1949, the US launched the first mammal into space, a rhesus macaque monkey named Albert II, on a sub-orbital flight, though Albert II died when the parachute failed. [16] On July 22, 1951, the Soviets launched the Soviet space dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, who were the first dogs in space and the first to safely return. [17]
First human-piloted space flight (Alan Shepard). First human-crewed suborbital flight. USA Freedom 7: 19 May 1961: First planetary flyby (within 100,000 km of Venus – no data returned). USSR Venera 1: 6 August 1961: First crewed space flight lasting over twenty four hours by Gherman Titov, who is also the first to suffer from space sickness ...
Alan Shepard became the first American in space on a suborbital flight three weeks later, on May 5, 1961. [138] John Glenn, the third Mercury astronaut to fly, became the first American to reach orbit on February 20, 1962, but only after the Soviets had launched a second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov , into a day-long flight in August 1961. [ 220 ]
Chimpanzee Ham, who flew America's first suborbital space flight on Jan. 31, 1961, toasts NASA's anniversary by sampling a Skylab space drink on Oct. 01, 1973 at the National Zoo in Washington D.C.
Notable test flights of spaceflight systems may be listed even if they were not planned to reach space. Some lists are further divided into orbital launches (sending a payload into orbit, whether successful or not) and suborbital flights (e.g. ballistic missiles, sounding rockets, experimental spacecraft).
They piloted the six spaceflights of the Mercury program that had an astronaut on board from May 1961 to May 1963, and members of the group flew on all of the NASA human spaceflight programs of the 20th century – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle. Shepard became the first American to enter space in 1961, and walked on the Moon on ...
The mission was a technical success, though American pride in the accomplishment was dampened by the fact that just three weeks before, the Soviet Union had launched the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, who completed one orbit on Vostok 1. In 2017 the first National Astronaut Day was held on May 5 to pay tribute to this first U.S. flight.
But on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, and the first to orbit the Earth. [22] Nearly a month later, on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, completing a 15-minute suborbital journey.