Curated playlist
Crewed spacecraft
- Project MercuryProject Mercury began on the 7th of October 1958, with a single, blunt question: could the United States put a human being into space before the Soviet Union? The answer would take five years, twenty uncrewed test flights, and six missions…
- Project GeminiProject Gemini launched its first crewed mission on the 23rd of March 1965, but the real story begins four years earlier, in a problem no one had solved: how do you teach people to work in space before you send them to the Moon? Between…
- 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…
- Space ShuttleThe Space Shuttle first left the ground on the 12th of April 1981, carried aloft by the combined fury of three main engines and two giant solid rocket boosters, piloted by John Young and Robert Crippen. It was a machine unlike anything…
- 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…
- Salyut 5Salyut 5 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the 22nd of June 1976, riding a three-stage Proton-K rocket into orbit above the Kazakh steppe. It was the last of the Soviet military's secret Almaz space stations, and it carried a…
- 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 GatewayThe Lunar Gateway was never going to orbit Earth. It was designed to circle the Moon instead, and Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin wanted no part of it. Aldrin said he was "quite opposed to the Gateway" and called the idea of using it as a…
- Orion (spacecraft)Orion is NASA's spacecraft for returning humans to the Moon, and on the 1st of March 2026, it carried a crew of four into deep space for the first time. That mission, Artemis II, was a flyby of the Moon to test Orion's systems. The crew…
- International Space StationThe International Space Station travels at 7.67 kilometres every second, circling the Earth roughly every 93 minutes at about 400 kilometres up. It hangs below the Van Allen radiation belts and most space debris, tracing a path between…
- SkylabSkylab, America's first space station, was not built from scratch. It was built from a leftover rocket stage, a repurposed piece of a Saturn V that once existed to hurl men toward the Moon. When that enormous machine was no longer needed…
- Salyut 3Salyut 3 carried a secret into orbit. Launched on the 25th of June 1974, it was presented to the world as a civilian Soviet space station, part of the Salyut programme that had already sent crews into orbit. But Western observers were…
- MirMir, the Russian word for both "world" and "peace," circled the Earth for fifteen years at a height where gravity still pulled at 88% of its sea-level strength. On the 19th of February 1986, a rocket lifted off from Baikonur just in time…