On May 25, 1961, twenty days after the first US manned spaceflight Freedom 7, Kennedy proposed the Apollo program to Congress in a special address to a joint session:

On June 21, 2004, Space Ship One became the first privately funded aircraft to make a spaceflight, opening the possibility of an aviation market capable of leaving the Earth's atmosphere.

The first human spaceflight in history was accomplished on a derivative of R-7, Vostok, on 12 April 1961, by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

* 2004 – SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.

He is considered the father of spaceflight and the first person to conceive the space elevator, becoming inspired in 1895 by the newly-constructed Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The experiment aimed to prove that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness, paving the way for human spaceflight and providing scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.

* Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program of the United States

Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States.

The USA had lost the first round of the space race to the Soviets ; however, the FAI rules in 1961 required that a pilot must land safely with the spacecraft for the flight to be considered an official spaceflight.

* 2004 – SpaceShipOne wins Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, by being the first private craft to fly into space.

The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world's first human spaceflight.

* 2004 – The Burt Rutan Ansari X Prize entry SpaceShipOne performs a successful spaceflight, the first of two required to win the prize.

Challengers many spaceflight accomplishments included the first American woman, African-American, and Canadian in space ; three Spacelab missions ; and the first night launch and night landing of a Space Shuttle.

Columbia was successfully launched on April 12, 1981, the 20th anniversary of the first human spaceflight ( Vostok 1 ), and returned on April 14, 1981, after orbiting the Earth 36 times, landing on the dry lakebed runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

In 1983, Columbia, under the command of John Young for his sixth spaceflight, undertook its second operational mission ( STS-9 ), in which the Spacelab science laboratory and a six-person crew was carried, including the first non-American astronaut on a space shuttle, Ulf Merbold.

The Soviet space program achieved many of the first milestones, including the first living being in orbit in 1957, the first human spaceflight ( Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 ) in 1961, the first spacewalk ( by Aleksei Leonov ) in 1965, the first automatic landing on another celestial body in 1966, and the launch of the first space station ( Salyut 1 ) in 1971.

Vostok 1 (, East 1 or Orient 1 ) was the first spaceflight in the Vostok program and the first human spaceflight in history.

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

There was an artificial lake just out of sight in the first stand of trees, fed by a half dozen springs that popped out of the ground above the hillside orchard.

The first part of the road was steep, but it leveled off after the second bend and curled gradually into the valley.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

Once again, Tom Horn was the first and most likely suspect, and he was brought in for questioning immediately.

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

The Indian's arm whipped sidewise -- there was a flash of amber and froth, the crash of the bottle shattering against the side of the first car.

It was her first smile.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

Miss Langford ( her first name was Evelyn ) was an attractive girl.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

It was just as well that the ignorant Dandy enjoyed himself to the hilt that first evening, for the room was to become his prison cell.

`` Bastards '', he would say, `` all I did was put a beat to that Vivaldi stuff, and the first chair clobbered me ''!!

In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a `` state's-responsibility '' proposal -- provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus.

The first systematic thinking about this Pandora's box within Pandora's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle, a frail, meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist.

The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.

His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.

Four orbits later, it achieves the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7.

The Soviets were able to launch two Voskhod capsules before the first manned Gemini was launched.

The first American spacewalk was performed on June 3, 1965 by Edward H. White, II from the second manned Gemini flight, Gemini 4, for 21 minutes, on a tether.

Finally, on November 13, 1966, Edwin " Buzz " Aldrin became the first to successfully work in space without tiring, on the Gemini 12 last flight.

Such a self-contained spacewalk was first attempted by Eugene Cernan in 1966 on Gemini 9A, but Cernan could not reach the maneuvering unit without tiring.

After docking with their Agena booster in low orbit, Young and Collins used it to climb another 763. 8 kilometers to meet with the dead, drifting Agena left over from the aborted Gemini 8 flight — thus executing the program's first double rendezvous.

* 1965 – Launch of Gemini 4, the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew.

* 1966 – Launch of Gemini 8, the 12th manned American space flight and first space docking with the Agena Target Vehicle.

* 1965 – NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States ' first two-man space flight ( crew: Gus Grissom and John Young ).

He made his first space flight, as command pilot of Gemini 8, in 1966, becoming NASA's first civilian astronaut to fly in space.

The first flight of Columbia ( STS-1 ) was commanded by John Young, a Gemini and Apollo veteran who was the ninth person to walk on the Moon in 1972, and piloted by Robert Crippen, a rookie astronaut originally selected to fly on the military's Manned Orbital Laboratory ( MOL ) spacecraft, but transferred to NASA after its cancellation, and served as a support crew member for the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions.

** Gemini 1 is launched, the first unmanned test of the 2-man spacecraft.

* March 23 – Gemini 3: NASA launches the United States ' first 2-person crew ( Gus Grissom, John Young ) into Earth orbit.

* June 3 – Gemini 4: Astronaut Edward Higgins White makes the first U. S. space walk.

* August 21 – Gemini 5 ( Gordon Cooper, Pete Conrad ) is launched on the first 1-week flight, as well as the first test of fuel cells for electrical power.

** Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 perform the first controlled rendezvous in Earth orbit.

In early 1964 Alan Shepard was grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière's disease and Grissom was designated command pilot for Gemini 3, the first manned Project Gemini flight, which flew on March 23, 1965.

In a joking nod to the sinking of his Mercury craft Grissom named the first Gemini spacecraft Molly Brown after the popular Broadway show The Unsinkable Molly Brown ; NASA publicity officials were unhappy with this name.

Grissom was backup command pilot for Gemini 6A when he shifted to the Apollo program and was assigned as Command Pilot of the first manned mission AS-204, with Senior Pilot Ed White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee.

During the Gemini 4 mission, White became the first American astronaut to perform a spacewalk.