Manned Spaceflight

Manned spaceflight is spaceflight with a crew or passengers aboard a spacecraft, the spacecraft being operated directly by the onboard human crew or remotely operated from ground stations on Earth, or autonomously, without any direct human involvement. People trained for spaceflight are called astronauts, cosmonauts, or taikonauts; and non-professionals are referred to as spaceflight participants.

The first human in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who launched on 12 April 1961 as part of the Soviet Union’s Vostok program. Humans traveled to the Moon nine times between 1968 and 1972 as part of the United States’ Apollo program, and have had a continuous presence in space for over 21 years on the International Space Station (ISS). As of 2021, humans have not traveled beyond low Earth Orbit since the Apollo 17 lunar mission in December 1972.

Currently, the United States, Russia, and China are the only countries with public or commercial human spaceflight-capable programs. Non-governmental spaceflight companies have been working to develop human space programs of their own for space tourism or commercial in-space research. The first private human spaceflight launch was a suborbital flight on SpaceShipOne on June 21, 2004. The first commercial orbital crew launch was by SpaceX in May 2020, transporting, under United States government contract, NASA astronauts to the ISS.

For Arguments sake, I’ve included Spaceship Two on this list despite it not reaching The Kármán line, which is the internationally agreed upon boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space (100 kilometres; 54 nautical miles; 62 miles; 330,000 feet).