Venus, not Mars, has received more landers than any other planet
Venus has a surface hot and crushing enough to wreck machines within hours, yet more landers have been sent there than to any other planet, nearly all of them Soviet. That fits the wider story: many of space exploration's firsts came from Moscow, while the most distant machine humans have built is American and still travelling.
Telescopes opened the sky first. Galileo turned one upward in 1609, and over the following centuries observers found lunar mountains, the phases of Venus, Saturn's rings and two new planets. Going there in person needed big, efficient rockets, which arrived in the mid-twentieth century. A German V-2 test on 20 June 1944 climbed 176 kilometres, making it the first object to reach space, though it fell straight back down.
The Space Race then turned into a string of Soviet firsts. Sputnik 1, an 83-kilogram sphere whose radio beeps could be picked up worldwide, reached orbit on 4 October 1957. Luna 2 struck the Moon in 1959, and on 12 April 1961 the 27-year-old Yuri Gagarin circled Earth once in about 1 hour and 48 minutes. Alexei Leonov floated outside his craft in March 1965, Luna 9 soft-landed on the Moon in February 1966, and Salyut 1 became the first space station in April 1971. The United States claimed the biggest prize when Apollo 11 put people on the Moon on 20 July 1969, the first of six crewed landings ending in 1972.
Robots went farther. Venera 7 sent 23 minutes of data from the Venusian surface in 1970, and five years later Venera 9 returned the first pictures from another planet's surface. On Mars, Viking 1 worked for over six years. Voyager 2 is still the only craft to have flown past Uranus and Neptune, and in 2015 Dawn orbited Ceres while New Horizons swept past Pluto. Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and by early 2025 was 166.4 times farther from us than the Sun.
From the 1970s the emphasis moved to reusable craft and cooperation, most visibly in the International Space Station, lived in continuously since 2000. China, Japan, India and Europe grew their programmes in the 2000s, private rocket firms rose in the 2010s, and rival Chinese and American plans now aim at bases on the Moon.
Source: Space exploration
