Human spaceflight

Human spaceflight (also referred to as crewed spaceflight, and historically as manned spaceflight) is spaceflight with a crew or passengers aboard a spacecraft, often with the spacecraft being operated directly by the onboard crew. Spacecraft can also be remotely operated from ground stations on Earth, or autonomously, without any direct human involvement. People trained for spaceflight are called astronauts (American or other), cosmonauts (Russian), or taikonauts (Chinese); and non-professionals are referred to as spaceflight participants or spacefarers.

The first human in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who launched as part of the Soviet Union's Vostok program on 12 April 1961 at the beginning of the Space Race. On 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, as part of Project Mercury. Between 1968 and 1972, humans reached the Moon's vicinity nine times and landed on the Moon six times as part of the United States' Apollo program. Humans have had a continuous presence in space for 25 years and 137 days on the International Space Station (ISS). On 15 October 2003 Yang Liwei went to space as part of Shenzhou 5, the first human spaceflight of the Chinese space program. As of March 2026, humans have not traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 lunar mission in December 1972.

Currently, the United States, Russia, and China are the only countries with public or commercial human spaceflight-capable programs. Non-governmental spaceflight companies have developed human space programs of their own, e.g. for space tourism and commercial in-space research. The first private human spaceflight launch was the suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne on June 21, 2004. The first commercial orbital crew launch was by SpaceX in May 2020, transporting NASA astronauts to the ISS under United States government contract.