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Spaceflight became part of human achievement in the 20th century following theoretical and practical breakthroughs by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert H. Goddard. The Soviet Union took the lead in the post-war Space Race, launching the first satellite, the first man and the first woman into orbit. The United States caught up with their Soviet rivals, landing the first man on the Moon in 1969. Following the end of the Space Race, spaceflight has been characterised by greater international co-operation, cheaper access to low Earth orbit and an expansion of commercial ventures. Interplanetary probes have visited all of the planets in the Solar System, and humans have remained in orbit for long periods aboard space stations such as Mir and the ISS. Most recently, China has emerged as the third nation with a significant spaceflight capability, including manned missions. ==Background== At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, inspired by fiction by writers such as Jules Verne (''From the Earth to the Moon'') and H.G. Wells (''War of the worlds''). The first realistic proposal of spaceflight goes back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His most famous work, "" (''Issledovanie mirovikh prostranstv reaktivnimi priborami'', or ''The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices''), was published in 1903, but this theoretical work was not widely influential outside Russia.〔(''Walking in Space'' By David Shayler, p.4 )〕 Spaceflight became an engineering possibility with the work of Robert H. Goddard's publication in 1919 of his paper "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes", where his application of the de Laval nozzle to liquid fuel rockets gave sufficient power for interplanetary travel to become possible. This paper was highly influential on Hermann Oberth and Wernher Von Braun, later key players in spaceflight. In 1929, the Slovene officer Hermann Noordung was the first to imagine a complete space station in his book ''The Problem of Space Travel''.〔''The Story of Manned Space Stations'', 2007, by Philip Baker, SpringerLink p.2 ()〕〔(''Walking in Space'' By David Shayler, p.6 )〕 The first rocket to reach space was a German V-2 rocket, on a test flight in June 1944. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of spaceflight」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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