Apollo 11's mission was to land two men on the moon. They also had to come back to Earth safely. Apollo 11 blasted off on July 16, 1969. Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins were the astronauts on Apollo
It was the Cold War. NASA wouldn't accept women applicants to the astronaut corps until 1978. The first American woman to fly into space aboard the space shuttle was Sally Ride in 1983, and the glass stratosphere was finally shattered
The Mercury Project suffered some early setbacks, however, and on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in the world's first manned space flight. Less than one month later, on May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard was successfully launched into space on a suborbital fligh
A rhesus monkey called Albert 1 became the first monkey launched into space on June 11, 1948; also on board a US-launched V2 rocket. These were just suborbital flights, though. The first animal to actually go into orbit was the dog Laika, launched on board the Soviet Sputnik 2 spacecraft on November 3, 1957