The first journeys: Sputnik, Gagarin and the Moon

The space age began with a beep. On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched a polished metal ball called Sputnik. It was 58 cm across, about the size of a beach ball, and weighed 83.6 kg, about as much as a grown man. It circled the Earth every 96 minutes, and for 22 days its radio sent out a steady beep that anyone with a receiver could hear. This photograph shows a replica of it. A month later a second Sputnik carried a dog called Laika.

On 12 April 1961 a Soviet air force pilot called Yuri Gagarin sat on top of a rocket and said “Let’s go!” He flew once round the Earth, and 108 minutes after leaving the ground he was back on it. He was the first person to see the Earth from outside. This drawing of his flight is to scale. At its highest his path was 327 km up, a thin skin over a planet 12,742 km wide. Space is close. It is the speed that is hard.

Six weeks later the American president, John Kennedy, asked his country to land a man on the Moon before the 1960s were over. In December 1968 three men, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, became the first people to leave the Earth behind. Their spacecraft, Apollo 8, circled the Moon ten times. On the way round they saw this: the Earth coming up over the Moon’s edge. Anders took the photograph.

On 20 July 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon while Michael Collins circled overhead. About six hours later Armstrong climbed down onto the surface. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” About 600 million people watched on television, a fifth of everyone alive. The two men spent two and a half hours outside. This is Aldrin, photographed by Armstrong. Look in the visor and you can see Armstrong taking the picture.

Five more landings followed. Between July 1969 and December 1972, twelve people walked on the Moon, at the six places marked on this photograph. They brought back 382 kg of rock and soil, which is still being studied. One flight, Apollo 13, never landed. An oxygen tank burst on the way out, and the crew only just got home.

Then it stopped. After December 1972, nobody went further than a few hundred kilometres from the ground for more than fifty years. On 1 April 2026 four people set off round the Moon in a flight called Artemis II: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. They went 406,771 km from home, further than anyone before them. On the way round they took this photograph of the Earth setting behind the Moon.