Fruit flies, the first astronauts
The first space travellers were flies on a captured rocket
Long before dogs, monkeys or humans, fruit flies went to space: scientists wanted to know how radiation affects living things. On 20 February 1947 flies rode a captured German V-2 rocket into space and became the first living things to come back alive.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 8 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 2 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — same year
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 1 year later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 2 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 19 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 14 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 11 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 6 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 6 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 11 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 6 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 5 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 2 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 10 years later
Middle East
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 24 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 15 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 1 year later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 1 year later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 6 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 12 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 9 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 11 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 13 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 16 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 2 years earlier
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 2 years earlier
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — same year
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 6 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 19 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 11 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 6 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 5 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 7 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 12 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 78)
- Winston Churchill (aged 73)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 69)
- Albert Einstein (aged 68)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 66)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 58)
- Mao Zedong (aged 54)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 29)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 18)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 17)