Development of manned space flight - 1957 to 1980 - Washington, D.C., USA - Timelines on Waymarking.com

The National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution (visit link) , also called the NASM, is a museum in Washington, D.C.. It holds the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world. It was established in 1946 as the National Air Museum and opened its main building near L'Enfant Plaza in 1976. In 2014, the museum saw approximately 6.7 million visitors, making it the fifth most visited museum in the world.

The physical exploration of space is conducted both by unmanned robotic probes and human spaceflight. Space exploration has often been used as a proxy competition for geopolitical rivalries such as the Cold War. The early era of space exploration was driven by a "Space Race" between the Soviet Union and the United States. The launch of the first human-made object to orbit Earth, the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957, and the first Moon landing by the American Apollo 11 mission on 20 July 1969 are often taken as landmarks for this initial period. 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) on 18 March 1965, the first automatic landing on another celestial body in 1966, and the launch of the first space station (Salyut 1) in 1971.

After the first 20 years of exploration, focus shifted from one-off flights to renewable hardware, such as the Space Shuttle program, and from competition to cooperation as with the International Space Station (ISS).

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The timeline Development of manned space flight describes important milestones in the development of manned space flight.

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