Evolution of Manned and
Unmanned Space Vehicles
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The first space vehicle launched was the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957, which was equipped with very little: only a bulb that emitted one of two radio frequencies at a time: 20.005 or 40.002 MHz, and it weighed 83.6 kg (184 lbs).
Sputnik 1 was followed by Sputnik 2 in the same year, which successfully carried the first animal in space, a dog named Laika.
Those two had collectively cost about 30 million RUB (about ½ million USD) at about 15 million RUB (¼ million USD) each.
The first American satellite that was successfully launched was the Explorer 1 in 1958. It weighed 13.37 kg , with 8.3 kg being instrumentation. Project Mercury then became the first crewed US program, launching a total of 6 crewed missions. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to land on an extra-terrestrial ground on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, the same decade that JFK accepted the challenge of “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Apollo 11 weighed 45,702 kg (100,756 lbs) when it first launched, and cost 25.4 billion USD.
By Gregory H. Revera (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
The most recent spacecraft with a cost of $1.13 billion USD was Juno, which was launched on August 5, 2011 and arrived July 4, 2016. It is equipped with Microwave Radiometer (MWR), a Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), a Magnetometer (MAG), a Gravity Science (GS), a Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE), a Radio and Plasma Wave Sensor, an Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS), and a JunoCam (JCM). This list is notably longer than the list of instruments Sputnik 1 was equipped with. The Juno Mission is planned to take 6 years, with a 20 month science phase, and is supposed to orbit Jupiter to collect information.
NASA plans to launch Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission in 2021, the first robotic mission to visit a large asteroid near Earth, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface, and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon. Astronauts will then explore and take samples from it, with a planned return somewhere in the 2020s. This is a part of NASA’s plans for human space exploration. The spacecraft will use an enhanced gravity tractor to change the asteroid’s orbit after extracting a boulder from its surface. This mission is made possible by technological advancements in low-thrust mission design, solar electric propulsion, proximity operations and robotics.