The early beginnings of the space age were marked by experiments with solid fuel rockets in 1918, but the main leaps forward were to take place during the second world war when developing weapons. The successful launch of the first earth-orbit satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 heralded the beginning of the so-called 'space race'.

During the cold war, the race between the Soviet Union and the USA to put a man on the Moon culminated in Neil Armstrong's historic achievements in 1969 in Apollo 11.

Since then, although others have walked on the Moon the concentration has been on unmanned exploration of the solar system although technologies such as the space shuttle have made manned transport into earth-orbit a regular occurrence.