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| Buzz Aldrin on the Moon NASA Images at the Internet Archive |
In the early 1960s, the Soviet
Union took the lead in the space race. At the end of that decade, the United
States took over with the Apollo Project, which in 1968 began to launch manned
flights (Apollo 7), in
1969 put for the first time two men on the Moon (Apollo 11), and until December 1972 made five more
lunar landings, the last of which was Apollo 17. Since then, mankind
has not returned to the Moon, although there have been several unmanned
automatic lunar landings.
From the 1980s, NASA changed
tactics and began using space shuttles for its manned flights. These
ships differed from the previous ones because the shuttle was reusable: when
returning to Earth, it could land in a similar way to an airplane, rather than descending
on the sea, like the capsules of the Apollo project. In all, five shuttles were
built, named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor.
