On Valentine’s Day, 1990, 3.7 billion miles away from the sun,
the Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photograph of Earth.

The picture, known as Pale Blue Dot, depicts our planet as a
nearly indiscernible speck roughly the size of a pixel.

Launched on September 5, 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 were
charged with exploring the outer reaches of our solar
system.

Félicette, a Parisian stray, became the first—and only—cat
in space. The black-and-white feline traveled 98 miles into
space for 13 minutes before her capsule safely parachuted
to Earth.

 
CAMILLE BOHANNON

Technical rendition of Atlantis docked to the Kristall module
of the Russian Mir Space Station. 

On June 29, 1995 the shuttle Atlantis docked with the Mir station
for the first time. This also marked the first in orbit docking of a
NASA spacecraft since the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission of July,
1975.

NASA’s Shuttle-Mir program continued for 11 missions and was
a crucial step towards the construction of the International Space
Station now in orbit.

On June 16, 1963, aboard Vostok 6, Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. After
48 orbits and 71 hours, she returned to earth, having spent more
time in space than all U.S. astronauts combined to that date.

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was born to a peasant family
in Maslennikovo, Russia, in 1937. She began work at a textile
factory when she was 18, and at age 22 she made her first
parachute jump under the auspices of a local aviation club.

Her enthusiasm for skydiving brought her to the attention of the
Soviet space program, which sought to put a woman in space in
the early 1960s as a means of achieving another “space first”
before the United States.

    
Tereshkova, and Nikita Khrushchev at Lenin’s Mausoleum
on 22 June 1963.

Tereshkova (87) in 2024.

The original series ran from September 8, 1966 to June 3,
1969 on NBC.