PICTURES: SPUTNIK 50 - Images spanning 50 years of spaceflight: past icons and future concepts

To commemorate Sputnik’s first flight fifty years ago today (4^th October 2007), Flightglobal.com has put together a set of fifty space; 25 highlighting significant breakthroughs and innovations of the last 50 years of space travel, the other 25 offering an insight into what the future of space travel may hold.

Below is a listing of the images, alternatively you can look at a slideshow of the iconic images.

50 Space Images
	Sputnik
	Yuri Gagarin
	NASA astronaut Alan Shephard being launched on his suborbital trip by the Mercury-Redstone rocket
	A replica of the rocket that launched Yuri Gagarin in his Vostock 1 capsule
	NASA’s Gemini-Titan II rocket at Cape Kennedy’s launch complex 19
	A UK Bluestreak F3 rocket launches 22 March 1965 on the third such test
	Apollo 11 crew
	Apollo mission sequence
	Apollo 13 service module explosion damage
	Apollo 13 crew back home
	NASA’s Skylab space station
	Soviet Union’s Mir space station
	Plaque left behind by final Apollo mission, Apollo 17
	Maiden flight of Space Shuttle Columbia 12 April 1981
	The 1979 maiden flight of the European Space Agency’s Ariane rocket
	ESA’s Envisat satellite was launched in 2002
	Chinese Long March launch in January 1986
	Voyager 1 in Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s clean room before its 5 September 1977 launch
	Soviet Union’s Buran shuttle mated to its Energia booster
	ESA concept of Hermes spaceplane from 1990s
	Experimental Israeli satellite called Offeq
	The sixth Japanese N-II rocket lifts off from its Osaki launch site in August 1984
	UK Skynet 4 military telecommunications satellite
	ESA’s Cluster satellite being launched by a Soyuz rocket
	International Space Station
	Japanese lifting body design shuttle
	NASA unmanned spaceplane
	Japanese spaceplane
	Japanese spaceplane approaches a space station
	Early NASA rotating space station with shuttle docking
	Rotating space station form 2001: a Space Odyssey
	A European Space Agency deep space ship in low Earth orbit
	NASA rotating spaceship for artificial gravity
	Japanese lunar cargo transportation
	Japanese manned lunar lander
	NASA lunar crane
	Lunar rover with crane
	NASA lunar telescope array construction
	NASA astronauts and lunar rover
	NASA astronauts and lunar lander
	Japanese lunar outpost
	Japanese concept of early international lunar outpost
	Japanese concept of domed lunar base
	Early NASA Mars base concept
	ESA Mars sample return ascent stage lifts off
	ESA Mars base concept
	Japanese Mars base
	Japanese Mars unmanned flying vehicles
	ESA Mars base with rover
	NASA Mars unmanned flying vehicles

Source: FlightGlobal.com