John Glenn: First American to Orbit the Earth. On the morning of February 20, 1962, millions of Americans collectively held their breath as the world’s newest pioneer swept across the threshold of one of man’s last frontiers. Roughly a hundred miles above their heads, astronaut John Glenn sat comfortably in the weightless environment of a 9.

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By Tim Fernholz

Patterns scrapped s free printables,digis and clip art. Senior reporter

Astronauts launched to orbit from the United States for the first time since 2011 today, as SpaceX began a crewed test flight of its Dragon spacecraft, which is expected to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday morning.

“Thanks for flying with Falcon 9 today,” SpaceX’s flight chief engineer radioed the two NASA astronauts a dozen minutes into the flight, after the Dragon had separated from the rocket that carried it out of the atmosphere. It marks the first time a private company has flown people into orbit.

With privately-led spaceflight, NASA will once again be able to send astronauts to low-earth orbit, expanding its scientific research and preparations for missions to the Moon or Mars. Today’s launch is also a crucial step toward a new orbital economy, which SpaceX founder Elon Musk believes will have the same impact as the internet.

Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, former military test pilots, will start by demonstrating their ability to manually maneuver the typically autonomous vehicle in orbit. Then they’ll catch up on their sleep during the 19-hour voyage up to the ISS, before carefully docking with the space station. The astronauts will spend at least several days on at the orbiting lab, joining one US colleague and two Russian cosmonauts already onboard.

The launch is the culmination of more than a decade of effort by NASA to replace the retired Space Shuttle with two privately designed and operated space capsules. SpaceX and Boeing were chosen in 2014 to develop these vehicles, and despite delays, are on track to produce the least expensive human-carrying spacecraft ever. Boeing is expected to re-fly a critical test flight of its vehicle, Starliner, later this year.

SpaceX’s test flight won’t be over until the astronauts safely return to earth, and truly proving the Dragon is a safe and reliable transportation system will take multiple flights. But under SpaceX’s agreement with NASA, it can now use its vehicle to fly private missions, at a cost of around $60 million per person. Potential passengers might be astronauts from wealthy countries with new space programs, like the UAE; wealthy individuals, like the trip SpaceX already has under contract with the space tourism firm Axiom; or workers manufacturing unique goods in microgravity.

In the near-term, the most important source of revenue for the new business will still be the US government. But a the private sector’s new experiment in space could yield surprising results.

“It’s a completely new category, an organization now has independent access to send humans into space,” Casey Dreier, a policy analyst at the Space Foundation, told Quartz. “That’s new. It’s really hard to draw historical analogs to that. We’re creating a completely new and unpredictable dynamic by having this capability in the hands of people who are able to play with it, with more freedom and flexibility.”

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 after discovering how expensive it was to transport anything to space, and becoming convinced could deliver a far cheaper solution. He raised venture funding to build a small rocket to launch satellites, and the company ultimately partnered with NASA to develop the Falcon 9 and an earlier version of the Dragon spacecraft that carried cargo to the ISS.

Now, the company dominates the satellite launch business, and is developing its own space internet network and a next-generation space vehicle called Starship.

It was a Space Race victory that would have broken Sarah McLachlan’s heart. On this day, Nov. 3, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first-ever living animal into orbit: a dog named Laika. The flight was meant to test the safety of space travel for humans, but it was a guaranteed suicide mission for the dog, since technology hadn’t advanced as far as the return trip.

Laika was a stray, picked up from the Moscow streets just over a week before the rocket was set to launch. She was promoted to cosmonaut based partly on her size (small) and demeanor (calm), according to the Associated Press. All of the 36 dogs the Soviets sent into space — before Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — were strays, chosen for their scrappiness. (Other dogs had gone into space before Laika, but only for sub-orbital launches.) The mission was another in a series of coups for the Soviet Union, which was then leading the way in space exploration while the United States lagged. Just a month earlier, they had launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. When Laika’s vessel, Sputnik 2, shot into orbit, the U.S. fell even further behind.

News media alternated between mockery and pity for the dog sent into space. According to a 1957 TIME report on how the press was covering the event, “headlines yelped such barbaric new words as pupnik and pooch-nik, sputpup and woofnik,” before ultimately settling on “Muttnik.”

“The Chicago American noted: ‘The Russian sputpup isn’t the first dog in the sky. That honor belongs to the dog star. But we’re getting too Sirius,’” the piece adds.

Other headline-writers treated Laika with more compassion. According to another story in the same issue, the Brits were especially full of feeling for the dog — and outrage toward the Russians. “THE DOG WILL DIE, WE CAN’T SAVE IT, wailed London’s mass-minded Daily Mirror,” the story declares. The Soviet embassy in London was forced to switch from celebration mode to damage control.

“The Russians love dogs,” a Soviet official protested, per TIME. “This has been done not for the sake of cruelty but for the benefit of humanity.”

Nearly a half-century later, Russian officials found themselves handling PR fallout once again after it was revealed that reports of Laika’s humane death were greatly exaggerated.

Although they had long insisted that Laika expired painlessly after about a week in orbit, an official with Moscow’s Institute for Biological Problems leaked the true story in 2002: She died within hours of takeoff from panic and overheating, according to the BBC. Sputnik 2 continued to orbit the Earth for five months, then burned up when it reentered the atmosphere in April 1958.

One of Laika’s human counterparts in the Soviet space program recalled her as a good dog. He even brought her home to play with his children before she began her space odyssey.

“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in a book about Soviet space medicine, as quoted by the AP. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live.”

Read TIME’s 1957 take on Laika’s launch, here in the archives: The She-Hound of Heaven

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