Crewed Space Missions

Crewed space missions, or human spaceflights, have been happening since 1961 when Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, first orbited the Earth. Since then, various countries around the world have ventured into space. The majority of these missions were low‐Earth orbit missions, such as Project Mercury, which performed a series of sub-orbital flights and orbits around the Earth. Alan Shepard was the first American in space, and John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth. Project Mercury ended, to be followed by the Gemini program. Starting in 1969, the Apollo program, run by NASA, landed humans on the Moon. The Soviet Union, and later Russia, ran the Soyuz program. In the 1980s, NASA ran the space shuttle program, which had many separate missions with multiple crew members. Explore the diversity of crewed space missions using Wolfram|Alpha.