For the entirety of the 20th century, from Yuri Gagarin to Alan Shepard to Sally Ride and Mae Jemison, humans that traveled outside of Earth’s atmosphere did so in spacecraft owned and created by a government. Spanning NASA heroes to the pioneers of Roscosmos to the CNSA in China, before 2004, boldly going into space was in many ways an act of statecraft. Although civilians joined the various space agencies over the decades, the earliest astronauts were rooted in a military tradition.
