The human kind always dreams to colonize new worlds. We always want to have a larger knowledge of our Universe and our planet. We also want to build new civilization and discover unknown lands to study them and to colonize them.
The first man who discovers a new world was Christopher Columbus. The second was Neil Armstrong. Who will be the next?
The first “real” rockets were built by a German, Werner Von Braun, for the German army at the end of World War II.
After World War II there was a race between Russians and Americans. Russians were the first to launch a satellite in the space, called Sputnik. It was on 4th October 1957. Two years later they were the first to send up an animal in the space, Laïka the dog. Unfortunately it died after the launching.
America responded in 1959 by launching Ham the monkey in the space. It landed safely in the ocean after its trip. After that, they announced they were ready to launch a man in space.
But Russians were again faster and they launched the first man sooner than the Americans. They even launched the first woman, Valentina Terechkova in 1963.
In 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent a challenge to the Russians. The first nation which would launch a man on the moon would win. In June 1969, Americans won their challenge and on 20 June 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first step on the moon.
In 1971, Russians launched the first space station: Salyout 1. But on 29 June 1973, during the descent a window broke up and the 3 passengers of the ship died in the space; they were the first men to perish in space.
The first American who died in the space were the 7 passengers of the shuttle Challenger on 28 January 1986. Later, they lost an other shuttle: Columbia.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the space conquest slowed down. Because there was no more competition between the two nations.
But now there is a union between all the nations to go on Mars: the next challenge of the century. The first human creation that took photos of Mars was the probe Mariner 4 in 1965. The probe, a small machine who explores, discovered a death planet without life. But other probes were launched to find a past life or a microbial life.