On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put a 184-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik into orbit. Americans could tune in its beeps on shortwave radio as it passed overhead. Two months later the first U.S. attempt to answer rose four feet off its pad and exploded on live television. The United States got Explorer 1 into orbit on January 31, 1958, and Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which opened on October 1 of that year.

The Soviets were first again with a person: Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth on April 12, 1961. Alan Shepard followed on a 15-minute up-and-down flight on May 5. Twenty days later, with a total of 15 minutes of American spaceflight experience on the books, President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to commit to landing a man on the Moon before the decade ended.

Project Mercury’s six flights showed a person could function in orbit; John Glenn became the first American to do so on February 20, 1962. The ten crewed flights of Project Gemini in 1965 and 1966 rehearsed what a Moon trip would demand: two-week missions, spacewalks, and bringing two craft together in orbit.

Apollo began with a disaster. On January 27, 1967, a fire during a ground test killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. After a redesign, Apollo 8 carried the first people around the Moon at Christmas 1968. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11’s lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins orbited overhead. An estimated 600 million people watched.

Six landings between 1969 and 1972 put twelve men on the surface. They brought back 382 kilograms of rock and left instruments, including reflectors still used to measure the Moon’s distance. At its peak the program employed about 400,000 people and took more than 4 percent of the federal budget.

The Space Shuttle, first flown April 12, 1981, was a reusable orbiter the size of a small airliner. In 135 missions over thirty years it launched and repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, carried the first American woman and first Black American to space, and built the Space Station. It also cost fourteen lives: seven aboard Challenger on January 28, 1986, and seven aboard Columbia on February 1, 2003.

The International Space Station, a partnership of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, has had people aboard without a break since November 2, 2000. It is about the size of a football field and circles the Earth every 90 minutes. NASA plans to retire it around 2030 and steer it into the Pacific.

NASA’s current Moon program is named for Apollo’s twin sister. Artemis I sent an uncrewed Orion capsule around the Moon in late 2022 atop the new Space Launch System rocket. Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on April 1, 2026, with Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They looped around the far side of the Moon and splashed down off San Diego on April 10 after a flight NASA measured at 694,481 miles. They were the first people to leave low Earth orbit since 1972. Glover became the first Black astronaut, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American to travel to the Moon.

Koch grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and holds three degrees from N.C. State.

In February 2026 NASA reorganized the next steps. Artemis III, planned for 2027, is now a test in Earth orbit in which Orion will practice meeting the commercial landers. The first landing near the lunar south pole is assigned to Artemis IV, targeted for 2028.

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