Humans have dreamed about visiting the stars for millennia, with mythological flying vehicles, or vimanas, described in ancient Sanskrit writings dating back to 300 C.E. that might be used by the gods to visit the skies above. Lucian: A True Story, a story about a mortal man who becomes embroiled in an intergalactic conflict between godlike space entities, was written in Ancient Greek approximately 170 C.E. by Lucian of Samosata (who, despite the title, admitted that the story was, in fact, not true).
Many scholars consider this novella to be the first written work of science fiction, though the genre didn't fully take off until Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. From H.G. Wells' novel War Of The Worlds in 1898 through Isaac Asimov's galactic empire series Foundation in 1942, a plethora of stories about space travel and invasions arose. However, until the real-life success of Germany's V2 rocket, the first man-made object to make it into space, in 1944, traveling to the stars remained a fiction.
Following World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union began a "space race," believing that technological superiority in nuclear weapons and spaceflight would ensure their countries' future survival. The military-industrial complex and its scientists grew preoccupied with finding a path into the great unknown, but the Soviet Union beat them to it, launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into space on October 4, 1957, much to America's dismay. On April 12, 1961, they achieved yet another milestone when they sent the first human into space, 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.
President John F. Kennedy responded by telling the American people that the country "should commit itself to attaining the goal, before the end of this decade, of landing a man on the Moon and safely returning him to Earth." He was alive to see America officially "win" the space race after landing Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on the Moon's surface in July 1969, but sadly died before witnessing the first American travel to space—Alan B. Shepard on May 5, 1961.
While NASA continued to send Apollo missions to the Moon for several years, political backing and public interest dwindled, and Apollo 17 mission commander Eugene Cernan became the last human to walk on the Moon in 1972. Instead, NASA focused on unmanned Voyager flights to the outer solar system, Mars rovers, and experiments on the International Space Station for the following few decades.
As the government's desire to fund space exploration dwindled, many in the private sector stepped forward to fund and construct the next generation of spacecraft. The year 2015 was a watershed moment for the privatized space games, as both Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's Space X successfully launched and recovered reusable rockets, a breakthrough that is projected to drastically lower the cost of future spaceflight. NASA announced in April 2021 that as part of their new Artemis program, they will return to the Moon in collaboration with Space X, which they describe as a "critical step [that] puts humanity on a path to sustainable lunar exploration while keeping our eyes on missions farther into the solar system." including Mars.
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