Founded in 1937, the Peenemünde Army Research Center was the military proving grounds for Nazi aeronautics. The location is widely considered the birthplace of modern rocketry and spaceflight. It also helped create the V-2 rockets that rained hellfire on London and Antwerp.

Legendary scientist Wernher von Braun was the technical director at the facility, before his team surrendered to the United States and worked for NASA.

Today, the location is home to the
Historisch-Technisches-Museum that traces:

"the path of the dreams of the first rocket pioneers of civilian space travel to the systematic development of the first major military rocket." (from the museum website).

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Nazi rocket scientists had their work brought back to the United States after the fall of the Third Reich. The rockets were reverse engineered at the White Sands Proving Grounds (now called the White Sands Missile Range). Within months, the U.S. were testing rockets that traveled so far that they couldn't be tracked with conventional cameras, so they used anti-aircraft turrets mounted with lenses.

The U.S. troops scorched the Nazi rocket-making facilities so they wouldn't fall into other countries hands, but the Russians managed to get some of their own V-2 rockets. They followed the same process as their U.S. counterparts and the space race began...

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On October 4, 1957, the USSR kicked off the space race with the launch of the first satellite, the adorable Sputnik (aptly, Russian for "satellite").

The People's sphere was 22 inches (56 cm) in diameter, weighed 184 pounds (83 kg), and circled the Earth once every 96 minutes at 18,000 mph (29,000 kph). This little ball of Soviet sunshine transmitted a radio signal as its orbit fluctuated between 143 and 584 miles (230-940 km) above the earth. It continued to do so until its orbit degraded and burnt up in the proletariat flames of the atmosphere in January of 1958.

Located in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan, this facility was known as the Tyuratam launch base in the 50s (named after the nearby rail station). These days, the facility is rented from the Kazakhstan government by the Russians and is known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

All manned Russian spaceflights are currently launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

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The S.P.Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation (or RKK Energiya) is the organization that has been carrying out Russia's space travel development and testing since the end of World War II.

The corporation has a museum called the RKK Energiya Museum on the factory grounds. Exhibits include the recovered capsule from the Vostok 1 mission with which Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and the Vostok 6 capsule in which Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center that specializes in the creation of robotic planetary spacecraft, Earth-orbit and astronomy missions, as well as NASA's Deep Space Network. Located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles, JPL is on the border of the cities of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena. JPL is jointly managed by the California Institute of Techology (CalTech) for NASA.

JPL has been responsible for many of the unmanned spacecraft that have explored the solar system: Ranger and Surveyor programs (Moon-60's), Viking program (Mars- mid 70's), Voyager program (Leaving the solar system, still in progress) and many more.

On August 6, 2012, JPL's most advanced rover to date (named Curiosity) will land on Mars. The lab had to develop a new "skycrane" method of deployment to accommodate the enhanced rover (check out a sweet animation here).

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