Curated category
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.
- 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…
- Voyager programThe Voyager program launched two spacecraft into the Solar System in 1977, and both are still transmitting from interstellar space today.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Space Shuttle programThe Space Shuttle program carried 355 astronauts from 16 countries into orbit across 135 missions spanning three decades.
- NERVAIn 1946, Stan Ulam and C. J. Everett wrote a paper considering the use of atomic bombs as rocket propulsion at Los Alamos Laboratory.
- Artemis programOn the 11th of December 2017, President Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive-1. This executive order officially re-established the national space…
- Commercial Lunar Payload ServicesCommercial Lunar Payload Services made history on the 15th of February 2024, when Intuitive Machines launched Odysseus toward the Moon.
- 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.
- Spacecraft propulsionSpacecraft propulsion describes every method ever devised to accelerate a vehicle through the vacuum of space. Right now, hundreds of satellites circle Earth…
- 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…
- 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…