1961: Aboard the Freedom 7 capsule, Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into space. During this Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) mission, he performed a 15-minute suborbital flight, reaching an altitude of 187 km. Unlike Gagarin, Shepard was able to manually pilot his spacecraft, testing the attitude control systems that would become essential for future lunar missions.

2018: Launch of NASA's InSight mission by an Atlas V rocket from California. The first interplanetary mission launched from the West Coast of the United States, it carried the SEIS seismometer, a high-precision instrument developed through significant European collaboration (including Belgium). Its mission: to study the internal structure of Mars to understand the formation of the solar system's rocky planets.

Image credits : nasa.gov