User:Amrad

I really just made this login to have somewhere to put the following. Only after that did I discover that there already is a similar list towards the end of the space race article. Silly me. However, that list stops in 1975. Which makes sense, but makes the list incomplete. It is also interresting to compare the two lists.

Timeline of space exploration
Because the timeline of space exploration article is clogged up by trivia that seem to be intended to hide the fact that the USSR won the space race in the 50s and 60s, I decided to make this into a more balanced list. Of course, I should do this in the article itself, but I foresee lengthy discussions (aka bickering) with little success. So instead I decided to put this list here for reference. Alas, I can't link to it from the article. :)

Ironically, only after the US and the USSR made serious cuts in their space programme bugets, thus effectively ending the space race, did the US start to seriously outperform the USSR, with the exploration of other planets.

The really big ones are in bold type.

For details on what I excluded, see below the tables.

This is a timeline of space exploration including notable achievements and first accomplishments in humanity's physical exploration of space.

1Project Vanguard was transferred from the NRL to NASA in late 1958.

In addition, virtually all manned duration records have been set by the USSR, due largely to their Salyut and Mir series of space stations.

Scientific and Technological
I deleted the following, because they don't really fit in this list, but deserve some mention anyway, so I made a separate list. For the scientific discoveries, some were side-effects, not intended purposes. And many technological achievements were not goals in themselves, but rather means to achieve those goals. Of course, some of this is somewhat arbitrary.

My edits
First of all, I don't see the reason for splitting the list in different periods, so I put it into one single table.

I excluded stuff like (incomplete list):
 * Publication of books on how it could be done. What counts is what was done. This excludes most of the earliest entries.
 * 1935: a student starts work on a rocket. What counts is the successful launch of a rocket. Anyway, the great rocket scientists of the beginning of space exploration, Sergey Korolyov and Wernher von Braun, started building their rockets before that.
 * Formation of space agencies. Again, what counts is what they do, not when they were founded.
 * The first satellite for some specific purpose (weather, communication, spying). What counts is the first satellite. This excludes several US entries.
 * The second time something is done. It's the first time that counts. This excludes the second and third nation in space. Does it matter, really, which nation it was? That's about the space race, not space exploration.
 * Example: "1946: First U.S.-designed rocket to reach edge of space (80 km (49 mi))". It's not the first one to do that and it's not even a record (and it's not even the edge of space, which is, rather arbitrarily, set at 100 km up).
 * 1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile. This is about space exploration, not just any rockets.
 * 1959: First photograph of Earth from orbit. The first photo of Earth from space already preceded that, so it's basically more of the same.
 * 1962: First orbital solar observatory. Not sure if this should be included.
 * 1963: First woman in space. Why not also include the first black man in space?
 * 1964: First multi-man crew (three members)
 * 1965: First orbital rendezvous (parallel flight, no docking). It's the docking that counts.
 * 2 June 1966: soft landing on the Moon and photos from the Moon. Neither of these was done for the first time (which was earlier that year), so why was that in the list? Because it was done by the US?
 * 23 April 1967: First spaceflight casualty. No it wasn't. That was on Apollo 1, earlier that year. But we don't want the US to have set this record, now do we? :) Anyway, not really relevant for this list.
 * 1971: First signals from Mars. That was already covered by 'First signals from another planet (Venus)'.
 * 1971: First Manned orbital observatory.First space station already covers that.
 * 1972: First mission to enter the asteroid belt and leave inner solar system. The entry before that says 'First human made object sent on escape trajectory away from the Sun. Which comes down to the same thing. The first entry says it started doing something, so adding that it actually did that dies not add much.
 * 1972: First signals from Mars surface. hat is already covered by the first signals from another planet (Venus)
 * 1980: Saturn flyby. Not the first one. I even wonder if flyby's should be in the list. But the photographs taken by these missions are among the best things that came out of space exploration. In that sense, the USA is underrepresented in the latter part of the list.
 * 1992: First polar orbit around the Sun. Just a variation on the first man-made object in heliocentric orbit (1959).
 * 2001: First space tourist.

A note on one that I kept in the table:
 * 1947: First animals in space (fruit flies). I bet the first rocket in space had loads of microbes in it, so where does one draw the line? And probably even on it, so were those the first EVAs? :)

Noteworthy is that in the original list, when one vehicle did several firsts, this was split for US vehicles, but not for USSR vehicles. The big difference is of course that splitting results in more flags for that country.

I changed 'impact' to 'hard landing' because that is the more common terminology (at least in Dutch). Given all the other bias, I wonder if the terminology was chosen because all three were done by the USSR.

So I started from the existing list, excluding mostly (but by no means exclusively) pro-US stuff. Which makes sense, considering that most editors here will be from the US. What I don't know is if any Soviet achievements have been kept from this list. Alas, I can't read Russian, so that Wikipedia can't help me very much. If you see anything missing here, tell me. And maybe try to include it in the article itself.