Curated playlist
NASA programs
- 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…
- Mariner programThe Mariner program gave humanity its first close look at three worlds beyond Earth. Between 1962 and late 1973, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built ten robotic probes that traveled to Venus, Mars, and Mercury. No…
- Voyager programThe Voyager program launched two spacecraft into the Solar System in 1977, and both are still transmitting from interstellar space today. What began as a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn became something far larger, a decades-long…
- Viking programThe Viking program landed spacecraft on Mars in 1976, and for the next quarter-century it supplied nearly everything humanity knew about the red planet. Two identical probes, Viking 1 and Viking 2, each carried an orbiter and a lander,…
- Mars Exploration RoverMars Exploration Rover was a NASA mission that sent two robots, Spirit and Opportunity, to the surface of Mars in January 2004, with a plan for each to last exactly 90 Martian solar days. Spirit survived more than six years. Opportunity…
- Pioneer programThe Pioneer program gave the world its first probes to escape the gravitational pull of the Solar System entirely. Two separate programs shared that name: the first ran from 1958 to 1960, during the earliest, most uncertain days of the…
- Ranger programThe Ranger program began in 1959 as a series of uncrewed space missions by the United States. Its goal was to obtain the first close-up images of the lunar surface through direct impact. Engineers designed spacecraft that would transmit…
- Space Launch SystemThe Space Launch System is a rocket that took more than a decade to build, cost over $31 billion, and slipped its first launch date more than twenty-six times. When it finally lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in November 2022, it…
- Space Shuttle programThe Space Shuttle program carried 355 astronauts from 16 countries into orbit across 135 missions spanning three decades. It was the fourth human spaceflight program run by NASA, and when it ended in July 2011, it had served twice as long…
- Surveyor programThe Surveyor program launched its first spacecraft toward the Moon on the 30th of May 1966. The most pressing question it carried was one nobody could answer from Earth: how deep was the lunar dust? If the dust was too deep, no astronaut…
- NERVANERVA's most advanced engine was certified for a human mission to Mars at the end of 1968. NERVA, the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, was a joint project of the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA. Barely four years later, the…
- Artemis programThe Artemis program brought the Orion spacecraft home on the 11th of December 2022. That date matched exactly 50 years since Apollo 17 made humanity's last crewed landing on the Moon. The capsule fell through the atmosphere and splashed…
- Commercial Lunar Payload ServicesCommercial Lunar Payload Services made history on the 15th of February 2024, when Intuitive Machines launched Odysseus toward the Moon. A few days later, the spacecraft set down on the lunar surface, the first private lander ever to reach…
- 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…
- Spacecraft propulsionSpacecraft propulsion describes every method ever devised to accelerate a vehicle through the vacuum of space. Right now, hundreds of satellites circle Earth using nothing more than a pressurized tank of hydrazine and a simple nozzle. A…
- Pegasus (satellite)Pegasus, named for the winged horse of Greek mythology, was a NASA project built around a single unsettling question: what happens when a tiny rock traveling at orbital speed punches through the skin of a spacecraft carrying human beings?…
- Lunar Reconnaissance OrbiterThe Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter carries roughly 1.6 million names on a microchip. They belong to ordinary people who answered a NASA invitation before a deadline in July 2008, each asking to be sent, in some small way, to the Moon. The…