Space Exploration
China Makes Historic Landing on 'Dark Side' of the Moon
Just before 10:30 am Beijing local time on January 3, the robotic spacecraft Chang’e 4 made a soft landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin area of the moon, otherwise known as the “far side” or “dark side” of Earth’s only natural satellite. It is the first spacecraft in history ...read more
How Landing the First Man on the Moon Cost Dozens of Lives
A half-century ago, NASA was preparing feverishly for a moon landing in a race against the former Soviet Union. The non-stop campaign of testing and launches was also a race against time—specifically to honor slain president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge for the country to land a ...read more
The Apollo Mission That Nearly Ended With a Mutiny in Space
By 1968, America’s space program was on the brink. A launchpad fire at Cape Canaveral killed three astronauts as they were conducting tests in their space capsule in January 1967. After 20 months of congressional hearings, political fallout and a spacecraft redesign, three new ...read more
Buzz Aldrin Took Holy Communion on the Moon. NASA Kept it Quiet
When Apollo 11‘s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to do something hard: Wait. They were scheduled to open the door of their lunar lander and step onto the unknown surface of a completely different world. But for ...read more
When Sally Ride Took Her First Space Flight, Sexism Was the Norm
When groundbreaking astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, she received plenty of congratulations. But one of the most meaningful nods to her accomplishment was not from a NASA official or a head of state; it was from an attorney named Linda ...read more
How the Search for Little Green Men—or Any Life on Mars—Got Smarter
Humans have been captivated by Mars almost as long as we’ve been watching the night sky. The ancient Greeks and Romans watched nightly as a reddish dot moved among the stars, growing dimmer and brighter in a two-year cycle. Each named it for the god of war; the Roman version, ...read more
Challenger Explosion: How Groupthink and Other Causes Led to the Tragedy
By January of 1986 America was already bored with spaceflight. It was, in part, NASA’s own fault. The government agency had debuted the space shuttle program five years earlier with an aggressive public-relations message that the reusable vehicles would make access to space both ...read more
7 Female Adventurers Who Broke All the Rules
Since the beginning of recorded history, bold women have been casting off the shackles of conventional life and traveling land, sea and sky to explore the world. Read on to discover the stories of seven of these courageous women—who ruled empires, discovered lost cities and ...read more
NASA’s final space shuttle mission comes to an end
On July 21, 2011, NASA’s space shuttle program completes its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour—carried more ...read more
Guion S. Bluford becomes the first African American to travel to space
U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Guion S. Bluford becomes the first African American to travel into space when the space shuttle Challenger lifts off on its third mission. It was the first night launch of a space shuttle, and many people stayed up late to watch the spacecraft ...read more
Lunik 9 soft-lands on lunar surface
On February 3, 1966, the Soviet Union accomplishes the first controlled landing on the moon, when the unmanned spacecraft Lunik 9 touches down on the Ocean of Storms. After its soft landing, the circular capsule opened like a flower, deploying its antennas, and began transmitting ...read more
Superpowers meet in space
As part of a mission aimed at developing space rescue capability, the U.S. spacecraft Apollo 18 and the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 19 rendezvous and dock in space. As the hatch was opened between the two vessels, commanders Thomas P. Stafford and Aleksei Leonov shook hands and ...read more
UFOs and Alien Invasions in Film
On June 24, 1947, the civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects, glowing bright blue-white, flying in a “V” formation over Washington State’s Mount Rainier. He estimated their flight speed at 1,700 mph and compared their motion to “a saucer if you skip it across ...read more
NASA unveils its first space shuttle, the Enterprise
On September 17, 1976, NASA publicly unveils its first space shuttle, the Enterprise, during a ceremony in Palmdale, California. Development of the aircraft-like spacecraft cost almost $10 billion and took nearly a decade. In 1977, the Enterprise became the first space shuttle to ...read more
John Glenn becomes first American to orbit Earth
From Cape Canaveral, Florida, John Herschel Glenn Jr. is successfully launched into space aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first orbital flight by an American astronaut. Glenn, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, was among the seven men chosen by the National ...read more
U.S. space shuttle docks with Russian space station
On June 29, 1995, the American space shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian space station Mir to form the largest man-made satellite ever to orbit the Earth. This historic moment of cooperation between former rival space programs was also the 100th human space mission in ...read more
Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space
On May 5, 1961, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, ...read more
NASA created
The U.S. Congress passes legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space, on July 29, 1958. NASA has since sponsored space expeditions, both human and mechanical, that ...read more