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Galileo built his first telescope in 1608 and subsequently made many improvements to telescope design.
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Around 1670, Sir Isaac Newton built a different kind of telescope. Newton used curved mirrors to focus light and so created the first reflecting telescopes.
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1926-Robert H. Goddard launches first liquid fueled rockets
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1933-Soviet Union launches first rocket of there own
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1946-First research flight launched by the U.S. captured by the V-2 space rocket
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1947-First animals launched into space (fruit flies) by the U.S.
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1957-First artificial satellite put into space that brings back signals to earth launched by the USSR
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1957-First animal launched into orbit, dog named Laika launched by USSR and did not return alive
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1957-First ballistic missle produced by the USSR
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Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was a 58 cm diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses.
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1959-First rocket launched into earths orbit by the USSR
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1959-First detection of solar wind by USSR
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1959-First photograph of the earth from the earth's orbit by U.S. NAS
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First human spaceflight and humanned orbital flight
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1960-First plants and animals to return to earth safely/alive from the Earth's orbit
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1963-First women in space by USSR
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1966-First artificial satellite around another world (moon) purposed by USSR
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1969-First human on moon by the U.S. (Apollo 11) successful! Neil Armstrong led Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on Apollo 11 landed on the moon!
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1971-First soft landing on Mars and first signals from the surface
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April 12 - Columbia became the first Space Shuttle to be launched.
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February 3 - Astronaut Bruce McCandless became the first man to take an untethered space walk.
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was launched April 24, 1990, on the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center in Florida
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December - The Space Shuttle Endeavor made the first servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope.
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February 13 - An investigative panel found that superheated air almost certainly seeped through a breach in space shuttle Columbia’s left wing and possibly its wheel compartment during the craft’s fiery descent, resulting in the deaths of all seven astronauts.
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August 8 - Space Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted off with teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan aboard as a crewmember. Morgan was the first teacher in space since the Challenger disaster in 1986.
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June 18 - NASA launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, also known as LCROSS. The mission is to confirm the presence or absence of ice on the moon. On November 13, 2009, NASA scientists announced the discovery of a "significant amount" of ice in a crater near the moon’s South Pole.
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July 8 - The space shuttle Atlantis became the last American space shuttle to be launched into space. Mission STS-135 and its 4-member crew brought much-needed supplies and equipment to the International Space Station
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September 7 - NASA launched the unmanned LADEE spacecraft from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It was the U.S. space agency's third lunar probe in five years.
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December 24 - NASA astronauts wrapped up successful repairs at the International Space Station after a rare Christmas Eve spacewalk to fix an equipment cooling system.
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1960-First plants and animals to return to earth safely/alive from the Earth's orbit
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1971-First space station in space by USSR called Skylab
