Man has a long history of trying to figure out what was there above their head. The first human that travel to the outer space was Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961 Gagarin orbited the earth using Vostok spacecraft, it was a giant leap for human.
Since then, many things happened. With the help of Hubble Space Telescope , human can see many planets, galaxies and stars that were not even known before. We managed to land a rover on Mars, put our own satellite on the earth orbit, we understand more as time pass by. Almost every university now have aeronautical courses.
Back then, when we sent the craft to the space, the rocket will fall back to earth. It either burnt out or crashed in the ocean, either way it can no longer be used.
We might solve this problem in the future with SpaceX pioneering a reusable rocket that will improve the economic of the space travel. This new ideas might save billions of dollar and made the space exploration cheaper and maybe, just maybe, available to a wider public.