Space travel is humanity's greatest adventure - the chance to explore the moon, the planets, and the stars. The space age began on October 4, 1957. On that day, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched Sputnik l, the first artificial satellite to circle the earth. The first manned space flight was made on April 12, 1961, when a Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, orbited the earth in a spaceship. During the years that followed this first space expedition, many flights carried people into space.

Human beings first set foot on the moon on July 20,1969 . U.S. astronaut Neil A. Armstrong stepped out of the Apollo 11 lunar module, «Eagle». For about two hours he and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., explored near the module and set up experiments.

During the years since the space age began, many uses for space travel have been discovered. The space age developed a huge industry called the aerospace industry to design and build space equipment. A new field of medicine called space medicine came into being to study the problems of living and working in space. Weather forecasters receive warning of storms with pictures taken by weather satellites. Telephone calls and television pictures are sent around the world by communications satellites. Signals from navigation satellites enable ship navigators and search and rescue forces to determine their positions with great accuracy. Scientific satellites and space probes discovered the Van Allen radiation belt around the earth and made many other discoveries.

During the early years of the space age, success in space became a measure of a country's leadership in science, engineering, and national defense. As a result, the Soviet Union and the United States competed with one another in developing their space programs. But both nations began to realize that they could benefit from working together. In 1975, the Soviet Union and the U.S. cooperated in their first joint space mission «Soyuz-Apollo». The principal area of cooperation between U.S. and Soviet space programs has been in space medicine.

People have always wanted to explore the unknown. Scientists hope that exploration of space will answer many questions about the universe - how the sun, the planets, and the stars were formed, and whether life exists elsewhere.

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