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The cool dude is Walter Schirra, one of the original seven astronauts for Mercury Project selected by NASA in 1959.

This is an arstist's impression of Mariner 2, the world's first successful interplanetary spacecraft.

Launched August 27, 1962, on an Atlas-Agena rocket, Mariner 2 passed within about 34,000 kilometers of Venus, sending back valuable new information about interplanetary space and the Venusian atmosphere.

Mariner 2 recorded the planet's temperature for the first time, revealing the its very hot atmosphere of about 500 degrees Celsius.

The spacecraft was also the first to measure the density, velocity, composition and variation over time of the solar wind.

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51 years ago last week, NASA launched the Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket carrying Alan Shepard aboard the Freedom 7 capsule.

Shepard successfully became America's first man in space, making a brief but historic suborbital test flight that propelled American astronauts into the space race of the 1960s.

This is what he saw.

A close up view of astronaut Jack Lousmataking a hot bath in the crew quarters of the Orbital Workshop of the Skylab space station cluster in Earth orbit.

In this 1960 photo, NASA test pilot Neil Armstrong is seen here next to the X-15 ship #1 after a research flight.

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This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon.

It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in 2004 one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission.

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The original seven project Mercury NASA astronauts from the 1950s take a close look at a model of the rocket which would chuck them into space.

Pictured are (from left, front row) Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Donald "Deke" Slayton, Gordon Cooper, (back row) Alan Shepard, Walter Schirra and John Glenn.

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Astronaut James Irwin works at the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the first Apollo 15 lunar surface extravehicular activity at the Hadley-Apennine landing site.

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All six Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne space shuttle main engines from Endeavour's STS-134 and Atlantis' STS-135 missions sit in test cells inside the Engine Shop at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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The Space Shuttle prototype Enterprise flies free in 1977 after being released from NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft over Rogers Dry Lakebed during the second of five free flight tests carried out at the Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, California.

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