At first there were the small satellites. The reason was very prosaic: early rockets simply weren't powerful enough to launch more than a few then kilos to Earth orbit. The Sputnik-1 with its 84 kg and 61 cm diameter sphere was a real monster compared to the first American attempts, the 1.5 kg, grapefruit-sized (and mocked) Vanguard-1 or the 14 kg Explorer-1. Capacities expanded rapidly of course and in a short few years launching a human in a spacecraft wasn't a problem any more. Satellites and space probes grew more and more large and complex and entire space stations were orbiting the Earth. But small ones remained throughout to carry out one or two selected experiments or tasks.

But size was the only real difference: be tiny or enormous, they were built slowly and costly, often topped with overcomplicated management. And to assure success and return of investments, specialized and expensive space-rated hardware was used that lagged behind commercial products as much as 10-15 years in capacities. So the question remains: is there another, cheaper and faster way to reach space?

OSCAR-1, the first radio-amateur satellite, was launched in 1961. It achieved other firsts as well: it was built commercially and flew together with the Discoverer 36 reconnaissance satellite as secondary payload.

The Soviet Union and the US raced through the sixties and seventies to conquer the Moon, but the Soviets only managed to deliver some automated sample return spacecrafts instead of cosmonauts strolling on the surface. Then the exploration of the Moon ended, somewhat abruptly, with the Luna-24 mission and priorities were shifted towards Mars and even farther planets in the next decade. After the decade of the Viking, Voyager or Phobos missions, the Moon started to slowly gain interest once again in the nineties in Russia, just as in the rest of the world. After the failed Mars-'96 mission in 1996, the new goal was to search for affordable resources in the Solar System and pave the way towards the industrial exploitation of the Moon and near-Earth asteroids in the middle of the 21^st century. Although money was virtually absent, such planning only required pen and paper. So the Russian planetary exploration plans were set to explore the Moon and Mars' moon Phobos (as a stand-in for an asteroid) once again through the Luna-27 and Phobos-Grunt missions in the early 2000s. The former would have send an orbiter, lander and penetrators (spear-like probes that impact into the surface) to the Moon while the latter should have make up for the two failed Phobos missions by bringing back samples from the tiny body. But the grave financial state of Russia and the international pressure to save the prospective Spektr-RG space telescope meant that one of the missions had to be chosen over the other to have at least some chance to be ready in the decade. Decision was finally made to carry on with the Phobos-Grunt which was considered more ambitious and sophisticated while the Luna program was put on hold, waiting for better economic times.

The Lunokhod-2 examines it's own tracks in this raw, scanned image. Detailed surface imagery hasn't been collected on the Moon since the (quite overlooked) missions of the Soviet rovers in 1970-74. (Courtesy of the Laboratory of Comparative Planetology, Vernadsky Institute, Russia. You can browse the Lunokhod archives here.)

The aim of Team Puli is to send Hungary’s first probe to the Moon. Although the Puli bears the name of a Hungarian herding dog breed, it is itself a machine; but we still consider it important to commemorate all the actual animals that ventured first into space and gave their lives to help the start of human spaceflight.

Space research, now more than 50 years old, owes a lot to the barely recognized but still pioneer spacefarers, without whom it would not have been able to develop in such an unbelievable pace. These first cosmo- and astronauts however were not human, but animals.

Today it might seem trivial but at the dawn of the space age, scientists were not sure if humans could stay alive in space. There were serious debates about how zero gravity or increased radioactivity might affect future astronauts. Herre too, as in many areas of science, the researchers turned to our earthly neighbours and only with their help was space science able to get where it is today.

Most consider the dog Laika the first spacefarer who travelled aboard the Sputnik-2 probe on the 3rd of November, 1957, however, the story starts before his journey.