Skip to content
79,433 pages · 13,741 images · since 1994 Browse A–Z Today in space history
Encyclopedia Astronautica The full story of spaceflight

Encyclopedia Astronautica

Exploration Before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, NASA engineers asked her, in all seriousness, whether 100 tampons would be enough for a one-week mission Brendan Brown ·
ExplorationIn 1972 Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke left a photo of his wife and two young sons on the Moon, sealed in plastic, with a note on the back saying it was the family of an astronaut from planet Earth, and it is still lying there in the dustExplorationVoyager 1 left Earth in 1977 carrying computers with less memory than a single photo on your phone, and on November 18 it becomes the first object humans have ever built to travel a full light-day from home, about 16 billion miles awayDeep SpaceA comet’s tail doesn’t stream out behind it like smoke from a moving car, because it always points away from the Sun, which means that as a comet heads back out of the solar system, its tail actually flies out in front of it
November 11

Today in space history

  1. 1964Sodium release Aeronomy mission
  2. 1977The first launch in the Multi-spectral Measurements Program took place at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
  3. 1991FOT GT146GM Follow-on Test launch
Full calendar

Exploration

Rockets, missions and the people who flew them
In 1982 the Soviet Venera 14 probe landed on Venus and pressed an instrument into the ground to test how hard the surface was, but by sheer bad luck it touched down right on the camera lens cap the probe had just popped off, so it measured the cap insteadIn 1970 a Soviet robot probe drilled into the Moon and flew about 100 grams of soil back to Earth, and in 2018 three tiny grains from that sample, barely visible to the naked eye, sold at auction for $855,000When Laika was launched on 3 November 1957 the world was told she had lived for days in orbit, but she died within hours as her cabin overheated, and one of the scientists who trained her later said the mission did not teach them enough to justify her death

Solar System

The Sun, Moon, planets and everything orbiting with them
Mars is called the Red Planet, but if you stood on its surface most of the ground around you would look closer to butterscotch or caramel brown, because the red comes from a fine dust of rusted iron that coats everything and hangs in the airApollo 11 left a silicon disc about the size of a half-dollar coin on the Moon, and etched onto it, shrunk 200 times too small to read without a microscope, are goodwill messages from the leaders of 73 countriesA cliff on Uranus’s moon Miranda is about six miles high, and because gravity there is less than 1% of Earth’s, anyone who stepped off the top would fall for around eight minutes and reach the bottom at roughly highway speed

Sky & Earth

All
The International Space Station has had people living aboard without a break since November 2, 2000, which means anyone younger than 26 has never lived through a single day when every human being was on EarthA Michigan man used a 22-pound rock as a doorstop on his farm for about 30 years before finally taking it to a geologist in 2018, and it turned out to be a meteorite worth around $100,000
The Encyclopedia · Start here

Every rocket, spacecraft and crew, in one archive

79,433 pages and 13,741 images compiled since 1994, the reference NASA's own history office has pointed researchers to.