Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human being to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961. Gagarin became an international celebrity, a...

As spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, the first piloted lunar landing mission, Armstrong gained the distinction of being the first person to step on the surface of the Moon. On July 16, 1969, Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. "Buzz"...

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was a polar explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, and one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Born in Kilkea, Athy, County Kildare, Irel...

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the Antarctic expedition of 1910–1912 which was the first to reach the South Pole. They arrived at the South Pole on 14 December 1911, 35 days before Scott...

Captain Robert Falcon Scott was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition (1901–1904) and the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition (1910–1913). On the first expedition, h...

Adrien de Gerlache, Belgian naval officer and explorer. Sailing with Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen who would later be the first to reach the South Pole, Gerlache led a scientific expedition to Antarctica in 1897–99. During the expeditio...

Matthew Alexander Henson was an American explorer and associate of Robert Peary during various expeditions, the most famous being a 1909 expedition which claimed to be the first to reach the Geographic North Pole. Henson met Commander Ro...

Sven Anders Hedin was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, and travel writer, as well as an illustrator of his own works. During four expeditions to Central Asia he discovered the Transhimalaya (once named the Hedin Ra...

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, KCSI, KCIE, was a British Army officer, explorer, and spiritual writer. He is remembered chiefly for his travels in the Far East and Central Asia; especially the 1904 British expedition to...

Salomon August Andrée, during his lifetime most often known as S. A. Andrée, was a Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and polar explorer who died while leading an attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole by hydrogen balloon. The balloo...

Martha Jane Cannary Burke, better known as Calamity Jane, was a frontiers woman, and professional scout best known for her claim of being an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok, but also for having gained fame fighting Native American Indians....

Sir George Scott Robertson KCSI was a British soldier, author, and administrator who was best known for his arduous journey to the remote and rugged region of Kafiristan in what is now northeastern Afghanistan. He chronicled his Kafiristan...

Sir Henry Alexander Wickham was a British explorer. He later claimed in publicity that he was responsible for stealing about 70,000 seeds from the rubber-bearing tree, Hevea brasiliensis, in the Santarém area of Brazil in 1876. However ther...

Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of Africa and his search for David Livingstone. Stanley travelled to Zanzibar and outfitted an expedition with the best of everything, requiring no fewer than...

Nikolai Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky also transliterated Przewalski, was a Russian geographer of Polish origin and explorer of Central and Eastern Asia. Although he never reached his final goal, Lhasa in Tibet, he travelled through regions unk...