The race to space
Sixty five years of leaving the planet — Sputnik, Gagarin, Apollo, the Voyagers, Hubble, the space station, Mars rovers, landing rockets on their legs, and the Webb telescope.
Sputnik beeps overhead
On the fourth of October nineteen fifty seven a polished metal ball the size of a beach ball went into orbit and beeped. Sputnik carried little more than batteries, a radio transmitter and a thermometer. Its real payload was shock, and it worked.
Gagarin orbits the Earth
Four years later Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the planet. One orbit, one hundred and eight minutes, and nobody knew whether a person could even think straight in weightlessness. He ejected and came down by parachute in a field.
The first spacewalk
Alexei Leonov opened a hatch and floated free for twelve minutes. In vacuum his suit ballooned so stiff that he could not bend back through the airlock, and he had to secretly bleed air out of it to get home.
Apollo 11 lands on the Moon
Then, in July nineteen sixty nine, two men landed on the Moon while six hundred million people watched. The guidance computer held less memory than a musical greetings card, and it threw error alarms the whole way down to the surface.
The last footprints
Three years later Apollo seventeen lifted off and nobody has been back since. Its crew included the only professional geologist ever to walk there, and the boot prints they left will stay sharp for millions of years because no wind can touch them.
The Voyagers launch
In nineteen seventy seven two probes launched to catch a planetary alignment that only comes around every hundred and seventy six years. Voyager two is still the only spacecraft ever to visit Uranus and Neptune, and both carry a golden record of Earth.
The Space Shuttle flies
The Space Shuttle promised airline style flights to orbit. It flew one hundred and thirty five missions across thirty years, launched Hubble and built a space station. Two of those flights ended in disaster, killing fourteen astronauts, and after the second one the programme was given a retirement date.
Hubble reaches orbit
Hubble arrived in orbit with a mirror ground wrong by about two thousandths of a millimetre, and everything came back blurred. Astronauts flew up and fitted corrective optics, and it then stared at one empty patch of sky and found three thousand galaxies.
The space station begins
The first module of the International Space Station launched in nineteen ninety eight. Fifteen countries bolted a football field of laboratory together in orbit, and since November two thousand there has always been at least one human living off the planet.
Rovers land on Mars
Two rovers reached Mars in two thousand and four carrying a ninety day warranty. Spirit worked for six years. Opportunity kept driving for fourteen, covered forty five kilometres, and its final message from a dust storm was famously reported as saying its battery was low and it was getting dark.
Voyager 1 reaches interstellar space
Meanwhile Voyager one slipped past the edge of the Sun's bubble and into interstellar space. It is now more than twenty five billion kilometres away, its transmitter is weaker than a fridge light, and its signal takes almost a full day to reach us.
A booster lands upright
Rockets had always been thrown away, which is rather like scrapping an airliner after a single flight. In December two thousand and fifteen a booster came back and landed upright on its legs. Individual boosters have since flown more than twenty times each, and a kilogram to orbit now costs a small fraction of the Space Shuttle price.
A helicopter flies on Mars
A helicopter the size of a tissue box then flew on Mars, where the air is one hundredth as thick as ours. Ingenuity was designed to make five short flights. It made seventy two before a broken rotor blade finally grounded it.
Webb opens its golden eye
And now the James Webb telescope sits one and a half million kilometres from Earth behind a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Its gold mirror catches infrared light from galaxies that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Watch it explain itself
Every step above is narrated aloud. Play it, or open it in the editor and make it yours — no account needed.