Curated playlist
1971 in spaceflight
- Stuart RoosaStuart Allen Roosa orbited the Moon 34 times, alone, while his two crewmates walked on the surface below. No one was watching him through a television camera. No one was broadcasting his name. Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell were getting…
- Apollo 14Apollo 14 launched on the 31st of January 1971, carrying three astronauts on a mission that no one in the program could afford to lose. The previous flight, Apollo 13, had nearly killed its crew and ended human exploration of the Moon…
- Alan ShepardAlan Bartlett Shepard Jr. awoke at 01:10 on the 5th of May 1961, ate a breakfast of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and scrambled eggs, then climbed into a spacecraft perched atop a Redstone rocket. He had been strapped into…
- Apollo Lunar ModuleThe Apollo Lunar Module is the only crewed vehicle in history to land somewhere beyond Earth. That fact alone is worth sitting with. Not a probe, not a robot, not a satellite. A vehicle carrying human beings. And it went somewhere no human…
- David ScottDavid Randolph Scott was born on the 6th of June 1932 at Randolph Field, near San Antonio, Texas. His middle name came directly from that base, a fitting detail for a man whose identity would be shaped at every turn by the places and…
- Alfred WordenAlfred Worden was, for three days in 1971, the most isolated human being who had ever lived. While his crewmates David Scott and James Irwin walked on the Moon, Worden orbited above them alone in the command module Endeavour, at times…
- Edgar MitchellEdgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and on his way home, something happened to him that no training could have prepared him for. Floating back toward Earth after Apollo 14, Mitchell experienced what he would later…
- Saturn VSaturn V stands 363 feet tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty by a wide margin, and when its five F-1 engines fired together during a test at what is now the Stennis Space Center, the roar shattered the plate-glass window of a bank…
- Salyut programmeIn August 1969, engineers at OKB-1 began merging two distinct space station designs into a single project. Vladimir Chelomey's NPO Mashinostroyeniya had created the Almaz-OPS hull as a military reconnaissance platform in October 1964.…
- James IrwinJames Benson Irwin told his mother, when he was about 12 years old, that he wanted to go to the Moon and might be the first person to do so. He was wrong about the first part. On the 30th of July 1971, Irwin became the eighth human being…
- Soyuz (rocket family)Soyuz holds the record for the most launches in the history of spaceflight. That single fact, buried in technical documents and launch logs, is extraordinary when you consider what it means: one rocket family, born in the Soviet Union…