Gazing into space has always preoccupied man, but venturing out there to take a closer look took a while.
The first man-made object that scraped into space and plummeted down again was Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket in 1942.
The Soviets' Sputnik satellite was the first object in orbit, in 1957, conducting tests, making beeping noises on the radio and getting everyone gazing upward to see its shining light spinning through the night sky. That woke up the Americans and the infamous Space Race was on - a proxy for the Cold War.
After Yuri Gagarin became the first human out there, The Right Stuff team was hot on his rocket streams. In no time there were spacewalks, moon walks, David Bowie, Stanley Kubrick, shuttles, space stations, probes of Mars, private flips into orbit - and now a 50000km/h landing on a comet a billion kilometres away. The space cadets have come a long way rather quickly.
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