Curated playlist
Apollo program
- Earth orbit rendezvousEarth orbit rendezvous is a concept that shaped the entire architecture of human spaceflight before anyone had set foot on the Moon. Before NASA chose how to get astronauts to the lunar surface, engineers debated three fundamentally…
- AS-105Engineers constructed the BP-9A boilerplate spacecraft to mimic the weight and shape of a real Apollo command module. This dummy vessel lacked life support systems or crew quarters. It served as a structural test bed for the Saturn I…
- Apollo programThe Apollo program landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969, and roughly 650 million people worldwide watched it happen on television. That number alone tells you something about the moment. A species that had never left its own…
- Lost MoonLost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 opens with a premise that sounds like failure. In April 1970, three astronauts set out for the Moon on what was supposed to be the third lunar landing in history. They never got there. An oxygen…
- Lunar Receiving LaboratoryThe Lunar Receiving Laboratory stands at the center of one of the most cautious scientific undertakings in history. When NASA's Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down in 1969, they were not allowed to simply walk free. They were whisked into a…
- Apollo Applications ProgramThe Apollo Applications Program was born in 1966, just three years before any American set foot on the Moon, out of a worry that may surprise you: NASA was terrified of success. The agency had assembled roughly 400,000 workers to get…
- S-IVOn the 27th of October 1961, at 15:06 UTC, the S-IV fired for the first time as the second stage of NASA's Saturn I rocket. Douglas Aircraft Company had built it for the early flights of the Apollo program. Over the next four years, NASA…
- Vehicle Assembly BuildingThe Vehicle Assembly Building sits on Merritt Island on Florida's Atlantic coast, 50 miles due east of Orlando, and it is so large that clouds can form inside it. That is not a rumor. When the massive doors swing open, fog rolls in and…
- Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 sits on Merritt Island in Florida, and it has witnessed more of humanity's most ambitious departures from Earth than almost any other place on the planet. Before the rockets came, the land was quiet…
- Lunar orbit rendezvousLunar orbit rendezvous is the technical name for the process that put human beings on the Moon and brought them home alive. The idea is elegant and counterintuitive: instead of flying a single large spacecraft all the way down to the lunar…
- EarthriseEarthrise is a photograph of Earth taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on the 24th of December, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. At the moment of its capture, at 16:39:39.3 UTC, no human had ever seen the Earth from this…
- Thomas J. Kelly (aerospace engineer)Thomas Joseph Kelly was born on the 14th of June 1929 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Merrick, a middle-class neighborhood where parents compared their children's grades to his own. Teachers at Wellington C. Mepham High School…
- Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control CenterThe Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, is the room where human spaceflight history was made. Its radio callsign is simply "Houston" - the single word that connects Earth to astronauts orbiting two hundred…
- Michoud Assembly FacilityThe Michoud Assembly Facility sits on 832 acres in New Orleans East, and it has spent most of its existence building the largest machines human beings have ever launched into space. At any given moment, more than 4,200 people work inside a…
- S-IIThe S-II generated one million pounds of thrust as the second stage of the Saturn V rocket. Five J-2 engines in a quincunx formation burned liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to produce that force. Its job was to take over from the first…
- Saturn IBThe Saturn IB carried an odd nickname: engineers called its first stage Cluster's Last Stand. NASA built this launch vehicle for the Apollo program as an uprated version of the earlier Saturn I. It filled a gap between that smaller rocket…
- Taurus–LittrowTaurus-Littrow is a lunar valley on the near side of the Moon, and in December 1972 it became the last place human beings have ever stood on another world. The Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt touched down there amid…
- The Blue MarbleThe Blue Marble is a photograph of Earth taken on the 7th of December 1972, by Harrison Schmitt aboard Apollo 17. Shot from roughly 29,400 kilometers above the surface, it captured nearly the entire face of an illuminated planet in a…
- S-ICFive F-1 engines at the base of the S-IC generated 7,750,000 pounds of thrust at sea level. The S-IC was the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. More than 90 percent of its launch mass was propellant: RP-1 rocket fuel and liquid oxygen.…
- S-IVBThe S-IVB, pronounced "S-four-B," is the rocket stage that sent human beings to the Moon. Built by the Douglas Aircraft Company and powered by a single J-2 engine, it was the third stage of the Saturn V and the second stage of the Saturn…
- Saturn ISaturn I lifted off for the first time on the 27th of October 1961. The men watching from the blockhouse were braced for the worst: no American launch vehicle had ever succeeded on its first attempt. Saturn I was the largest booster yet…
- We choose to go to the MoonOn the 12th of September 1962, John F. Kennedy stood before roughly 40,000 people at Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas, on a warm and sunny afternoon, and made one of the most audacious public commitments any American president had…
- Stolen and missing Moon rocksStolen and missing Moon rocks are a surprisingly widespread problem, one that has unfolded quietly across decades and dozens of countries. Of the 270 rocks given to the nations of the world by the Nixon Administration following the Apollo…
- Direct ascentDirect ascent was the first method NASA seriously considered for landing astronauts on the Moon. The idea sounds almost brutally simple: build one enormous rocket, point it at the Moon, and fly there in a single bound. No pit stops in…
- Harrison StormsHarrison Allen Storms, Jr. was born on the 15th of July 1915, and by the time he died on the 11th of July 1992, just four days before his birthday, he had helped put human beings on the Moon. He was known inside North American Aviation…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- A-001A-001 was the second abort test of the Apollo spacecraft. This mission aimed to prove that the launch escape system could safely remove the command module under critical conditions. Unlike Pad Abort Test 1, which ignited at ground level,…
- Abe SilversteinAbe Silverstein named the Apollo program after the Greek and Roman god of light and the sun, a choice that would define one of humanity's greatest undertakings. He made that decision as part of his work at NASA headquarters in the late…
- Trans-lunar injectionA spacecraft performs a trans-lunar injection burn to leave its circular parking orbit around Earth. This large propulsive maneuver uses a chemical rocket engine to increase velocity significantly. The burn changes the path from a circle…
- Boilerplate (spaceflight)On the 9th of September 1959, a boilerplate spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket. It carried no crew, had no working systems, and could not sustain a mission. What it had was the correct shape, the correct mass, and…