US President Donald Trump recently said he wants to push his country's space program to greater heights. Our reporter Frances Read visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California for a reminder on how far things have come in the Space Race -- begun more than 60 years ago by the US and Soviet Union.

ARCHIVE NEWSREADER VOICE: You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the earth's circling satellites, one of the great scientific feats of the age. It was the world's first artificial satellite - 83 kilograms and the size of a beach ball. It took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth, but the Soviet Union's Sputnik One changed history. The race was on with the United States.

ARCHIVE NEWSREADER VOICE: Few events in American history have been so awaited prayed for, worked for, as the successful launching of Explorer One. Fewer than three months after the launch of the Sputnik, the Americans launched their own satellite --- Explorer One. It made one orbit every 114 minutes, outfitted with a cosmic ray detector.

ARCHIVE NEWSREADER VOICE: We are no longer earthbound - soon we will explore boundaries beyond our tiny world.

ERIK CONWAY, HISTORIAN NASA JET PROPULSION LABORATORY "Explorer One was also the first successful space science experiment and discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. It provided the background for the beginning of both space science experiments and earth orbit to study the earth, heliophysics experiments to study the sun and eventually planetary exploration to understand the solar system."

Scientists say what we learned from Explorer One helped to usher in our current understanding of our earth's interconnected systems.

FRANCES READ PASADENA "The original Explorer One satellite was built right here in Pasadena, California - At the time, it was a great feat of science and engineering, but now they're looking to push space exploration even further."

And 60 years later, that means countries working cooperatively in space, to send humans to Mars as well as other planets and moons.

SUE SMREKAR NASA SCIENTIST "NASA has lots of great things happening in the next decade or so. We have a new launch vehicle which is coming online where we'll be able to put huge payloads in space - giving us the ability to send really large vehicles, maybe including humans. One of the things we might do is use those vehicles to explore Europa, with water coming out of the interior, and we have lots of missions exploring planets around other stars as well."

It's the imagination of scientists starting in the 1950's that led to the rocket science we see today. But what may seem like a giant leap for mankind - now - may just be another small step in the space age as we'll eventually know it. Frances Read, CGTN at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.