The 20th Century had its fair share of ups and significant downs, but an absolute highlight has to be how humanity went from being a largely ground-based species to one that can fly and leave the planet to visit others. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

A huge driver of this progress was not just the pursuit of knowledge, or doing things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard", but to crush the competition in the space race. The US and the Soviet Union raced to send humans into space, around the planet, and to the Moon, slipping ahead of each other at various stages.

In March 1966, the Soviet Union became the first to send a spacecraft around the Moon, with the launch of Luna 10. The satellite, and the Lun

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