•The first spacecraft was the German V-2 rocket, launched from Peenemünde, East Prussia (now Poland) in June 1944. Although other flights reached altitudes above 100 km, the International Aviation Federation considers 100 km to be the beginning of spaceflight, and calls this the Karman line. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite. It was launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 into an elliptical Low Earth orbit. The launch marked the beginning of a new political, military, technological and scientific era that would soon be reached. By measuring changes in the satellite’s orbit, the density of the upper atmosphere was determined. Data were also obtained on the radio-signal distribution in the ionosphere. Thanks to the pressurized nitrogen in the satellite’s false body, for the first time, meteoroid detection was possible. Sputnik 1 was launched from the Tyuratam launch site, site number 5, at the Gagarin Start launch complex, as part of the International Geophysical Year. The satellite traveled at a speed of 29,000 km per hour, completing a full orbit in 96.2 minutes, and transmitting radio signals at frequencies between 20.005 and 40.002 MHz.
The second human space vehicle to be named Freedom 7 was launched on 1961, during a suborbital spaceflight, and carried American astronaut Alan Shepard to an altitude of about 187 km. Five more manned space missions were carried out using the Mercury spacecraft. The first partially reusable space vehicle, the X-15, was launched on 19 July 1963 in a suborbital trajectory. The X-15 made two manned flights to an altitude of 100 km in the 1960s.
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