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

Encyclopedia Astronautica

Sky & Earth In 1962 an engineer named Robert Truax designed a rocket taller than a 40-story building that would be welded in a shipyard from cheap steel plate, towed out to sea, flooded until it bobbed upright and launched straight out of the ocean, and a shipyard study concluded it could actually be built Brendan Brown ·
Solar SystemA 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 speedExplorationThe first photos of the far side of the Moon, taken by a Soviet probe in 1959, were shot on American film salvaged from downed US spy balloons, then developed, dried and scanned inside the spacecraft before being radioed back to EarthSolar SystemIn 1982 a Soviet probe survived at least 57 minutes on the surface of Venus, but the instrument built to test the planet's soil landed on the probe's own lens cap and measured that instead
October 31

Today in space history

  1. 1958Aeronomy mission
  2. 1970Soyuz 7K-L1 s/n 10L and 15L
  3. 1994Elektro 1
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Exploration

Rockets, missions and the people who flew them
On 29 October 1998 John Glenn went back into orbit at 77, 36 years after he became the first American to circle Earth, and he is still the oldest person ever to reach orbitOn 28 October 1971 Britain put a satellite into orbit on its own rocket for the first and only time, three months after it had cancelled the rocketIn August 1961 a 25-year-old Soviet cosmonaut named Gherman Titov spent a full day in orbit and became the first person to sleep in space, and he overslept by about half an hour, waking up to find his arms floating in the air in front of him

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In 1960 two stray Moscow dogs named Belka and Strelka became the first dogs to orbit Earth and come home alive, and a year later Nikita Khrushchev sent one of Strelka’s puppies, a fluffy female called Pushinka, to the White House as a gift for Caroline KennedyIn 1954 a grapefruit-sized meteorite smashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama, bounced off a radio and hit Ann Hodges on the hip as she napped on her couch, making her the first person known for certain to have been struck by a space rock
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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.