Editing 1960s (section)

====Space exploration====
[[File:As08-16-2593.jpg|right|thumb|250px|On 21 December 1968, the [[Apollo 8]] crew took a picture, for the first time in history, of the entire Earth]]
[[File:Aldrin Apollo 11 original.jpg|thumb|250px|The [[Apollo 11]] mission landed the first humans on the Moon in July 1969.]]
The [[Space Race]] between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the 1960s. The Soviets sent the first man, [[Yuri Gagarin]], into [[outer space]] during the [[Vostok 1]] mission on 12 April 1961, and scored a host of other successes, but by the middle of the decade the U.S. was taking the lead. In May 1961, President Kennedy set the goal for the United States of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

In June 1963, [[Valentina Tereshkova]] became the first woman in space during the [[Vostok 6]] mission. In 1965, Soviets launched the first probe to hit another planet of the [[Solar System]] ([[Venus]]), [[Venera 3]], and the first probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the Moon, [[Luna 9]]. In March 1966, the Soviet Union launched [[Luna 10]], which became the first [[space probe]] to enter orbit around the Moon, and in September 1968, [[Zond 5]] flew the first terrestrial beings, including two tortoises, to circumnavigate the Moon.

The deaths of astronauts [[Gus Grissom]], [[Ed White (astronaut)|Ed White]], and [[Roger B. Chaffee]] in the [[Apollo 1]] fire on 27 January 1967, put a temporary hold on the U.S. space program, but afterward progress was steady, with the [[Apollo 8]] crew ([[Frank Borman]], [[Jim Lovell]], [[William Anders]]) being the first crewed mission to orbit another celestial body (the Moon) during Christmas of 1968.

On 20 July 1969, the [[Moon landing|first humans landed on the Moon]]. The [[Apollo 11]] mission, launched on 16 July 1969, carried mission Commander [[Neil Armstrong]], Command Module Pilot [[Michael Collins (astronaut)|Michael Collins]], and Lunar Module Pilot [[Buzz Aldrin]], and Aldrin and Armstrong flew the Lunar Module ''[[Lunar Module Eagle|Eagle]]'' to the lunar surface. Apollo 11 fulfilled President [[John F. Kennedy]]'s goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

The Soviet program lost its sense of direction with the death of chief designer [[Sergey Korolyov]] in 1966. Political pressure, conflicts between different design bureaus, and engineering problems caused by an inadequate budget would doom the Soviet attempt to land men on the Moon. Shortly after the American Apollo 1 disaster, tragedy struck the Soviet program when cosmonaut [[Vladimir Komarov]] was killed when the parachutes on his [[Soyuz 1]] flight failed.

A succession of uncrewed American and Soviet probes traveled to the Moon, [[Venus]], and [[Mars]] during the 1960s, and commercial satellites also came into use.