NASA

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

In the early 1960s, 13 trailblazing American women participated in a secret program to become America’s first female astronaut. Although the skilled pilots passed the same physiological screening tests given to the Mercury Seven astronauts, NASA abruptly shuttered the ...read more

In the early 1960s, 13 trailblazing American women participated in a secret program to become America’s first female astronaut. Although the skilled pilots passed the same physiological screening tests given to the Mercury Seven astronauts, NASA abruptly shuttered the ...read more

For Americans looking to reach the stars, there’s only one possible career that leads there: astronaut. On June 7, 2017, NASA revealed a new class of astronaut candidates, picked from a record-breaking 18,353 applications. In the 56 years of human spaceflight, only 338 other men ...read more

About two years ago, the Chicago-area attorney Nancy Lee Carlson was perusing an online auction site when she saw a listing for a bag containing “lunar dust” as part of an auction on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service. No one had bid on the item in three previous auctions, and ...read more

Though astronomers have long known that other stars in the Milky Way galaxy have planets orbiting them, they weren’t actually able to see such exoplanets until just a couple of decades ago. Now they have confirmed the existence of more than 3,400, according to the latest ...read more

By the winter of 1967, President John F. Kennedy’s goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth” by the end of the decade appeared to be in doubt. A three-month delay in the delivery of a newly designed spacecraft had pushed back the Apollo program’s first ...read more

Barbara “Barby” Canright joined California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1939. As the first female “human computer,” her job was to calculate anything from how many rockets were needed to make a plane airborne to what kind of rocket propellants were needed to propel a ...read more

1. John Glenn was a star before joining the Mercury program. Glenn had fallen in love with flying at an early age, building model airplanes while growing up in Ohio. In 1941, Glenn discovered a U.S. Department of Commerce program looking for students to train as pilots. Just six ...read more

As evidenced by the launchpad fire that killed three members of the Apollo 1 mission and the near disaster of Apollo 13, the elite astronauts selected for NASA’s Apollo program risked their lives in the quest to land the first man on the moon. Now, a new study asserts that even ...read more

1. Apollo employed nearly half a million people. Apollo’s moon mission was one of the most expansive government initiatives in American history. During its peak years, some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 outside contractors took part in the program. Budget estimates vary, but ...read more

1. He saw numerous sunrises and sunsets each day. Cruising along at over 17,000 miles per hour, the International Space Station circumnavigates Earth once every 90 minutes. Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko therefore had the opportunity to witness an astounding ...read more

On December 21, 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, blasted off from present-day Cape Canaveral in Florida. The plan called for the three astronauts onboard to come within about 70 miles of the moon, circle it several times and return safely home, all while ...read more

On July 20, the 46th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic first steps on the moon, the Smithsonian made some history of its own by embarking on its first-ever Kickstarter campaign in a quest to raise $500,000 to preserve the spacesuit Armstrong wore during his ...read more

When the space shuttle Challenger lifted off on its 10th mission on January 28, 1986, its crew of seven included New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, winner of a national competition designed to highlight the importance of teachers and foster students’ interest in space ...read more

As its spacecraft New Horizons prepared to make its history-making flyby with Pluto on the morning of Tuesday, July 14, NASA released a high-resolution image of the dwarf planet, captured by New Horizons before it went out of contact with Earth the previous night. Taken when the ...read more

As soon as NASA began the work of sending humans into space, the question arose: What would they would eat once there? Space food had to fit a number of requirements. It had to be easily portable. It had to be nutrient-dense and filling, as the astronauts would be expending a ...read more

Every epic moment in modern history inevitably spawns a tangled web of conspiracy theories, and the Apollo moon landings are no exception. From the moment astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, some believed it was all an ...read more