Encyclopedia Astronautica
Exploration In 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 dust
ExplorationVoyager 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 itExplorationIn 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 instead
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In 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 $855,000
When 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
Voyager 2, launched in 1977, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, and because it left the planets heading south, only one antenna in the world can still send it commands, a 70-meter dish outside Canberra, Australia 
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 air
Apollo 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 countries
A 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 
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 Earth
A 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.
- Space history chronologyDay by day, through 2018
- Launch vehiclesRockets and their families
- Crewed spacecraftFlown, planned and unflown
- Engines and propellantsWhat made them fly
- Families and collectionsSpacecraft, rockets and missiles by type
- Launch sitesPads, ranges and cosmodromes
- Space activity by countryNational programs
- Russian and Soviet historyIncluding the Mishin Diaries