CIA reference photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile in Red Square, Moscow.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union, when American
deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were
matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The crisis lasted from October 16 to October 28, 1962. The
confrontation is widely considered the closest the
the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear
war.

Cuban Missile Crisis, map of immediate-threat areas.

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union inaugurated the "Space Age"
with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite,"
was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch
base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches
and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had
an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee
(nearest point) of 143 miles.

Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be
picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States
with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the
beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day.

 
CAMILLE BOHANNON

Voyager 2 launched by a Titan-Centaur rocket.

CARLATA BRADLEY

On June 29, 1995, the American space shuttle Atlantis docked
with the Russian space station Mir to form the largest man-
made satellite ever to orbit the Earth.

This historic moment of cooperation between former rival
space programs was also the 100th human space mission
in American history.