Curated category
Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
- AS-105Engineers constructed the BP-9A boilerplate spacecraft to mimic the weight and shape of a real Apollo command module. This dummy vessel lacked life support…
- Lunar Module EagleLunar Module Eagle, designated LM-5, arrived at the surface of the Moon with only 216 pounds of usable fuel left in its tanks.
- AS-201AS-201 lifted off from Pad 34 on the 26th of February 1966, and it was over in 37 minutes. The spacecraft splashed down in the south Atlantic Ocean, and…
- AS-203AS-203 launched from Pad 37B at Cape Kennedy on the 5th of July 1966, carrying no astronauts and no spacecraft. In its place sat an aerodynamic nose cone…
- Apollo 11Apollo 11, launched on the 16th of July 1969, carried three astronauts toward a destination no human being had ever reached.
- Apollo 12Apollo 12 launched into a sky that had no business sending anyone to the Moon. On the 14th of November 1969, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, rain fell…
- Apollo 7Apollo 7 launched on the 11th of October, 1968, the first American spacecraft to carry a crew in nearly two years. The men inside were not breaking new…
- Apollo 17Apollo 17 launched at 12:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on the 7th of December 1972, blazing into the night sky above Florida.
- Apollo 15Apollo 15 launched on the 26th of July 1971, and from the moment it left the ground, it was a different kind of Moon mission.
- Apollo 14Apollo 14 launched on the 31st of January 1971, carrying three astronauts on a mission that no one in the program could afford to lose.
- 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…
- Apollo 8On the 4th of October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. This small metal sphere changed everything for the United States.
- AS-202AS-202 launched from Pad 34 on the 25th of August 1966, carrying no crew and making no claim to glory on its own terms. What it carried instead was a…
- Apollo 10Apollo 10 came within 7.8 nautical miles of the Moon's surface in May 1969 and then turned back. The crew had a working spacecraft, they had the training…
- Apollo 1Apollo 1 never left the ground. On the 27th of January, 1967, three astronauts -- Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B.
- Apollo 16Apollo 16 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the 16th of April, 1972, carrying three men toward a highland plain that scientists were certain…
- 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 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…
- Apollo 4Apollo 4 announced itself with a sound that one Columbia University scientist described as one of the loudest noises, natural or artificial, in all of human…
- Apollo 9Apollo 9 launched on the 3rd of March 1969, carrying three men into low Earth orbit aboard the first complete Apollo spacecraft ever flown.
- Apollo 5Apollo 5, launched on the 22nd of January 1968, sent a spacecraft to orbit with no crew aboard and no windows visible through its hull.
- Apollo 6Apollo 6 launched from Kennedy Space Center on the 4th of April 1968, at precisely 7:00:01 in the morning Eastern time. That same day, Martin Luther King Jr.
- 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.
- Apollo 13Apollo 13 launched from Kennedy Space Center on the 11th of April, 1970, carrying three astronauts toward what should have been humanity's third walk on the…
- 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…
- AS-101AS-101 launched from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station on the 28th of May 1964, carrying not an astronaut, not even a real spacecraft, but a hollow metal…
- 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…
- Apollo–SoyuzApollo-Soyuz brought together the two most powerful space programs on Earth for the first time in July 1975. On the 17th of July, an American spacecraft and…
- Saturn I SA-1Saturn-Apollo 1, known as SA-1, lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on the 27th of October 1961, and with it began both the Saturn rocket family and the…