Between launch and safe return lies a catalog of near-fatal malfunctions that officials downplayed or discovered only after the crew touched ground.
The economics of getting to space are following the same brutal math that transformed shipping—mass production drives down price with stunning speed.
The aviation industry has long treated pilot fatigue as an inevitable cost of long flights—but a landmark NASA study suggests the solution might be simpler than better schedules or newer planes.
A torn heat shield left America's first space station baking in the sun—until NASA improvised a fix that would have to work on the first try.
India's space ambitions just shifted from state monopoly to open market, with one company's successful launch signaling a fundamental reshaping of who gets to build rockets.
A spacecraft built to die in 1982 is still calling home from the edge of the universe, defying every prediction about machine mortality and human patience.
Before John Glenn flew Friendship 7 into orbit in February 1962, he refused to trust the new IBM 7090's trajectory calculations until Katherine Johnson had verified them by hand. She worked the equations for a day and a half. The numbers matched. He went.
Yet with less computing power than a 1980s video game, Voyager 1 continues sending back revolutionary discoveries from the edge of the solar system.
A cosmic address written in the language of spinning stars, legible to any civilization that understands the universe itself.
A celestial detour plotted a decade in advance: one spacecraft chose Titan's secrets over the outer planets it would never reach.
For seven years, NASA chased a speeding comet through space to snatch its ancient dust—a prize that would reveal secrets about the solar system's earliest moments.
The International Space Station circles Earth about once every 90 minutes. That orbital rhythm gives its crew roughly 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in every 24-hour day, each one arriving and disappearing in seconds.
The old image of a reusable rocket is still a test article: stainless steel, scorch marks, crowds watching for the landing, engineers waiting to see whether the thing survives.
Sixty-three military data-relay satellites now circle the Earth for the Pentagon's newest space network — half of the planned constellation — and the optical…
Late on 17 April 1970, Apollo 13 was already close enough to Earth for the planet to fill the lunar module’s alignment sight.
The Apollo 10 lunar module was never meant to land. That was the point. In May 1969, NASA sent a crew almost all the way through a lunar landing profile, held…
