Curated playlist
Apollo program hardware
- Apollo command and service moduleThe Apollo command and service module flew nineteen times, nine of those voyages taking astronauts to the Moon and home again. North American Aviation began building it in November 1961, a decade before the last one left the launchpad. The…
- 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…
- Command module ColumbiaColumbia, designated CM-107, is the only piece of Apollo 11 hardware that returned to Earth in 1969. Three people rode it to lunar orbit and home, and when the mission was over, the capsule's story was far from over. How it came by its…
- Rocketdyne J-2Twice on every flight to the Moon, the Rocketdyne J-2 had to ignite. The first ignition was a matter of reaching orbit. The second was a matter of reaching the Moon. Between them, the engine sat in the void: cold, inert, waiting. No other…
- Apollo Telescope MountOn the day Skylab launched, the solar arrays of the Apollo Telescope Mount were the only ones to survive the journey intact. A problem during liftoff destroyed one of the station's main workshop panels. The second failed to deploy…
- 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…
- Apollo (spacecraft)Apollo had one job, stated as a deadline: land American astronauts on the Moon before the end of the 1960s, and bring them home alive. It was not one ship but a stack of separate machines, built once, used once, then left behind piece by…
- Lunar Roving VehicleThe Lunar Roving Vehicle made its first drive on the Moon on the 31st of July 1971, and in doing so, it changed what Apollo astronauts could actually accomplish on the lunar surface. Before it arrived, crews were limited to short walks…
- Little Joe IIThe Apollo program needed a way to test its launch escape system without spending millions on full-scale rockets. Engineers at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, faced a tight budget and a heavy schedule of high-priority…
- Apollo Guidance ComputerThe Apollo Guidance Computer sits at the center of one of the most audacious engineering feats in human history. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins flew to the Moon relying on a machine roughly the size of two cubic feet,…
- Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments PackageThe Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, known as ALSEP, was a constellation of scientific instruments left behind on the Moon by five Apollo crews. While the astronauts themselves returned to Earth, the machines they planted kept…