50 years of Space Exploration

October 7, 1957: Sputnik 1, a basketball-size satellite was launched by USSR, setting off a global space race. In November, Sputnik 2 was launched with a dog Laika aboard. She died of stress and overheating soon after reaching space.

Oct 1, 1958: National Aeronautics and Space Administration set up

September 14, 1959: Luna 2 was first space probe to impact lunar surface

April 12, 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space when he completed a space flight lasting an hour and 48 minutes

May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard became first US astronaut, travelling 115 miles into space in Mercury 3 capsule

May 25, 1961: US president J F Kennedy pledged man on the moon by 1970

Feb 20, 1962: Astronaut John Glenn became first American to orbit the earth

Dec 14, 1962: US' Mariner 2 probe flew by Venus

June 16, 1963: Valentina Tereshkova became world's first woman in space

July 26, 1963: First geosynchronous satellite Syncom 2 was launched. Henceforth people could use satellite-mediated communication transmissions for television broadcasts

Nov 21, 1963: India's first sounding rocket launched from Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station, Kerala

March 18, 1965: Alexei Leonov conducted world's first spacewalk

July 14, 1965: Mariner 4 spacecraft flew past Mars collecting the first close-up photographs of another planet

Jan 31, 1966: Luna 9 landed on Moon, sent first photographs from surface

April 24, 1967: Vladimir Komarov became the first man to die in space when the parachute on his Soyuz 1 developed trouble on landing

Dec 21-27 1968: Astronauts Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell became the first men to leave the vicinity of the Earth when they orbit the Moon

July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong became the first person to ever set foot on the moon. Following him out of the Apollo 11 module was Buzz Aldrin

Aug 15 1969: Indian Space Research Organisation set up

Feb 6, 1971: Alan Shepard became the first man to hit a golf ball on the Moon, using a ball and golf club head he had smuggled on board inside his space suit. The balls were driven “miles and miles and miles"

April 19, 1971: USSR's Salyut-1, the first orbital station launched. Its crew of three died on landing

Dec 2, 1971: USSR's Mars 3 lander became the first human artifact to land on Mars

March 2, 1972: NASA launched Pioneer 10 space probe, the first to capture close-range images of Jupiter and the first human artifact to travel outside the solar system (June 1983)

Dec 14, 1972: Apollo 17, the last moon mission, returned after placing a small commemorative plaque on the Moon, with the words, “Here man completed his first explorations of the Moon, December 1972"

May 14, 1973: First US space station, Skylab sent up. It was four stories high and orbited at an altitude of 270 miles above the earth

April 19, 1975: First Indian satellite Aryabhata launched

July 17, 1975: Soviet Soyuz 19 met and docked in space with US' Apollo, allowing astronauts from the “rival" nations to pass into each other's ships

July 20, 1976. Viking 1 landed on Mars and transmitted pictures from the surface.

July 18, 1980: India' first domestically built satellite Rohini 1 launched on indigenous satellite launch vehicle from Sriharikota

April 12, 1981: Columbia became the first space shuttle to go into orbit. When it relaunched into space seven months later, it became the world's first reusable spacecraft

April 10 1982: India's INSAT-1A satellite launched

April 2,1984: Rakesh Sharma became first Indian in space in an Indo-Soviet mission

Jan. 28, 1986: Only 73 seconds after liftoff, space shuttle Challenger blew apart, killing six astronauts and a teacher. The explosion was attributed to a damaged seal inside the shuttle's rocket booster

Feb 19, 1986. The first long duration space station, Mir, launched. Staying in orbit for over 15 years, occupants set several records in human space endurance.

Feb 14, 1990: Voyager I took the first photograph of the whole solar system

April 24-29, 1990: Shuttle Discovery deployed Hubble Space Telescope.

October 6, 1990: Ulysses spacecraft launched to study the poles of the Sun and interstellar space above and below the poles. The spacecraft passed passed over its north pole in June 1995.

July 4, 1997: Mars Pathfinder deployed the first rover on the red planet

Sept 29, 1997: First operational launch of Indian PSLV with IRS-1D satellite on board

Nov 20, 1998: International Space Station launched. A US-led joint project by 16 countries, ISS is 244 miles above the earth's surface

April 28, 2001: Dennis Tito became the first paying space tourist when he visited the ISS for seven days

Feb 1, 2003: Space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere for landing, killing all seven astronauts, including Kalpana Chawla

Oct. 15, 2003: China launched a “taikonaut" into space, becoming just the third country to send a human into space

Jan 2004: Mars Exploration Rovers Opportunity and Spirit landed on Mars. Spirit took the first high resolution pictures of the planet and found the first hints of water history

June 21, 2004: SpaceShipOne, an experimental suborbital spaceplane, completed the first privately funded human spaceflight

July 16, 2005: After two-and-a-half years, NASA returned to space with launch of Discovery shuttle. A shuttle breach grounded the programme again

Jan 19, 2006: The New Horizons spacecraft blasted off on its 3-billion-mile journey in search of data about Pluto. It is expected to reach the destination in 2015

August 24, 2006: International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a “dwarf planet"

June 22, 2007: Sunita Williams returned after spending 195 days in ISS, the longest spaceflight by a woman

Sept 2007: Thirty years after being launched, Voyager 1 is now the farthest man-made object in space, having left the solar system's frontier in December 2004. Along with Voyager 2, it is still sending back data while on the final leg to interstellar space