Ham, a chimpanzee, is fitted into the couch of the Mercury-Redstone 2 capsule No 5 before its test flight on 31 January 1961
The launch of the Mercury-Atlas 8 Sigma 7 mission on 3 October 1962
An unmanned Gemini 2 flight blasts off on 19 January 1965. The second Titan II Gemini launch vehicle carried the unmanned, instrumental Gemini spacecraft for a suborbital shot before the first US two-person Gemini mission
An astronaut’s boot-print photographed with a 70mm lunar surface camera during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity on the moon on 20 July 1969. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended in the Eagle lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, fellow astronaut Michael Collins remained with the Columbia command and service modules in lunar orbit
The Agena target docking vehicle is tethered to the Gemini II spacecraft during its 31st revolution of Earth on 14 September 1966. The area below is the Gulf of California and Baja California at La Paz
The Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean as seen from the Apollo 7 spacecraft at an altitude of 120 nautical miles above Earth. This 1968 photograph was taken during the vessel’s 134th revolution of the planet, 213 hours and 19 minutes after liftoff
On Earth, 240,000 statute miles away, the sunset terminator crosses Africa. The crew took the photo on the morning of 24 December 1968. The south pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds
The Apollo 17 crew member Eugene Cernan drives a roving vehicle around the lunar module on 11 December 1972 at the Taurus Littrow landing site on the moon
The Columbia space shuttle lifts off from the Kennedy space centre, beginning a new era of space travel. The reusable orbiter, with its two fuel tanks and two solid rocket boosters, had cleared the launch tower when this picture was taken. Onboard were John Young and Robert Crippen, the commander and pilot respectively
The astronauts Story Musgrave, left, and Don Peterson float in the cargo bay of the Earth-orbiting space shuttle Challenger 7 in April 1983, during their spacewalk on the STS-6 mission
Moments after ignition, Challenger, mated to its two solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank, soars for a week-long mission in Earth orbit on 29 July 1985.
Installation day on the International Space Station. The Atlantis and Expedition 13 crews worked on attaching the P3/P4 truss during the first of three scheduled spacewalks by STS-115 shuttle members on 12 September 2006
An image taken by the left navigation camera onboard the Mars Curiosity rover in 2011
