In 1942 the German V2 was the first rocket to reach 100km from the Earth’s surface (the boundary of space).
The rocket was designed by Wernher Von Braun, who later worked with NASA as the creator of the rockets that went to the moon.
In 1947, the first animals were launched into space. Fruit flies were used to study the effects of space travel on animals, and were chosen because they are more similar to humans than you might imagine!
The flies travelled with a supply of corn to eat on the flight.
Albert II, was the first monkey in space. He was a Rhesus monkey, a type of monkey that originally comes from Asia.
Albert went into space on 14th June, 1949 in a specially adapted American V2 rocket, that flew to a height of 83 miles from earth.
On 4th October 1957, Russia launched the first satellite into space; Sputnik 1, and the space age had properly begun!
Sputnik was the first satellite in orbit around the earth. Today there are over 500 working satellites in space. Sputnik means "Satellite" in Russian.
In November 1957, the Russian space dog Laika became the first animal to orbit the earth.
Laika travelled in a spacecraft known as Sputnik 2. Laika means "Barker" in Russian, and her mission helped scientists understand whether people could survive in space.
By 1959 Both American and Russian scientists were in a race to get a spacecraft to the Moon; the Russians made it first.
Space-probe Luna 2 crash-landed into the moon at a speed that would kill an astronaut if one had been travelling in it! It was ten more years until a human visited the moon's surface.