Distinct years the archive depicts, against Gus Grissom’s lifetime (1926 – 1967) — 24.4% of it. One further depicted year falls outside it and is not counted.
A thread follows one event or historical theme across the archive, wherever and whenever it appears. Pick a tab to read one; they are in the order they are filed on the timeline. Pulling a thread opens up a narrowed timeline view filtered to every year that thread touches.
The first crewed spaceflight program of the United States. With the Soviet Union already ahead in the Space Race with the deployment of Sputnik 1 as the world's first artificial satellite, Project Mercury's goal was to successfully perform a crewed orbit of the Earth before the Soviets. However, this record would also go to the Soviets with the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961.
The successor to Projects Mercury and Gemini that began the United States' development of human spaceflight at the dawn of the Cold War, the Apollo Program represented a high-water mark of the Space Race with the first humans successfully setting foot on the Moon in 1969 as part of Apollo 11.
