If you heard champagne corks popping on Aug. 6, it was for a good reason. That was the staff at NASA celebrating the first birthday of the Curiosity mission. The rover landed on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, and has been sending data back to Earth ever since. The mission is an enormous (and ongoing) success, but it wasn't always like this. After a good start, launching monkeys into space in 1948 and 1949, the U.S. lost the lead in exploring outer space. The Soviet Union launched the first communications satellite, Sputnik I, in 1957 and put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. What followed was the headlong rush to the big goal.
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