This result prompted an expansion of the American space program, which tried unsuccessfully two months later to put Vanguard 1 into orbit. On January 31, 1958, the United States orbited Explorer 1 successfully using a Juno rocket. Meanwhile, on November 3, 1957, the Soviet dog Laika became the first animal to circle the Earth. The first people to go into space
SPACE PROJECT
SPACE MANAGEMENT PROGRAM. In the late nineteenth century, authors like as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells created books concentrating on different aspects of space flight. Although imaginary, these tales sparked the imaginations of some early rocket scientists, whose efforts would eventually bring the capability of machines to fly across space to reality.
Unmanned spacecraft photographed and studied the moon in the 1960s, long before men arrived. By the early 1970s, orbiting communications and navigation satellites had become commonplace, and the Mariner spacecraft was circling and surveying the Martian landscape. By the decade's close, Voyager had returned comprehensive photographs of Jupiter and Saturn, their rings, and moons. Skylab, America's first space station, was a landmark of the 1970s human spaceflight era, as did the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, the world's first multinational crewed space mission (American and Russian).
NASA announced in early 1998 that Glenn had been cleared to serve as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery. Glenn, 77, became the oldest person to fly into space on October 29, 1998, over four decades after his memorable orbital mission. He participated in a NASA research on health concerns connected with aging during the nine-day flight. He resigned from the United States Senate in 1999 after serving four consecutive terms, a record for the state of Ohio. He was assassinated on December 8, 2016. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Timeline and Technologies of Space Exploration
