The Russians are planning a Mars mission according to all the activity centered around the experiment that confined budding astronauts inside a capsule for 520 days to test their endurance and how well they can get along with each other. If they go to Mars and bring back some pictures, they will be more successful than those American probes that keep failing and failing. The first manned spaceflight was Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin who went into orbit in the Vostok 1 space capsule on April 12, 1961 becoming the first man to orbit the Earth. The Americans followed with Alan Shepard, who made the first American sub-orbital flight in the Freedom 7 space capsule on the 5th of May 1961. Quickly afterwards, this flight was followed by another, this time the Liberty Bell 7 made a sub-orbital flight carrying Virgil Grissom into orbit. The first American into orbit to rival Yuri Gargarin was astronaut John Glenn, who went into orbit around the Earth in the space capsule Friendship 7. He only orbited the Earth three times, the Russian cosmonaut Andrian Nikoyalev orbited Earth 64 times in the Vostok 3 space ship.
On the 25 of May 1961, President Reagan announced that America would commit itself to achieving the dream of landing a man on the moon and bringing him back safely to American soil. This was a success in July 16, 1969 when the giant Saturn IV rocket blasted off into space carrying three astronauts that would be destined to be the first men to reach the Moon: Neil Armstrong, Micheal Collins and Edwin Aldrin. Once they reached the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin crawled from the service module into the lunar module and separated from the service module for the descent to the Moon. After a tense descent to the surface of the Moon, they touched down on the evening of July 20, 1969, Greenwich mean time. It was one of Americas most famous moments, watched all around the world. America was only one year after Russia in achieving manned flight into space, but now they are heading towards a recession and the glory days are over. Nowadays Russia are the ones sending rockets into space and even India & China will be dominating spaceflight in the future. China have performed their first spacewalk and are planning a space station to do experiments and see the Earth from their own piece of space. The American dream of maintaining a foothold in space looks to be lost.