linguistic:paraphrasing
First advances and precursors

The first human flew to space and concluded the first orbit on April 12, 1961, with Vostok 1.

The Apollo program had in its early planning instead of a lunar landing a crewed lunar orbital flight and an orbital laboratory station in orbit of Earth, at times called Project Olympus, as two different possible program goals, until the Kennedy administration sped ahead and made the Apollo program focus on what was originally planned to come after it, the lunar landing. The Project Olympus space station, or orbiting laboratory of the Apollo program, was proposed as an in-space unfolded structure with the Apollo command and service module docking. While never realized, the Apollo command and service module would perform docking maneuvers and eventually become a lunar orbiting module which was used for station-like purposes.

But before that the Gemini program paved the way and achieved the first space rendezvous (undocked) with Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 in 1965. Subsequently in 1966 Neil Armstrong performed on Gemini 8 the first ever space docking, while in 1967 Kosmos 186 and Kosmos 188 were the first spacecrafts that docked automatically.

In January 1969 Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 performed the first docked, but not internal, crew transfer, and finally in March Apollo 9 performed the first ever internal transfer of astronauts between two docked spaceships.