Curated category
Crewed spacecraft
- Lunar Module EagleThe spacecraft known as LM-5 carried the name Eagle. This choice appeared on the mission insignia for Apollo 11. A bald eagle featured prominently in that…
- 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?
- 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…
- Apollo command and service moduleNorth American Aviation received the initial Apollo contract on the 28th of November 1961. At that time, engineers assumed lunar landings would occur via…
- 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…
- 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.
- Command module ColumbiaJulian Scheer, NASA assistant administrator of public affairs during the Apollo program, suggested a name for the spacecraft.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…