Space Travel
Space Travel
1,056 articles in this category.
Space Travel
Four astronauts just went farther from Earth than any human in history — and on the way home, they asked to name a crater after one of their late wives
Space Travel
In 1980 NASA had to choose between sending Voyager 1 past Titan or keeping it on a course that could reach Pluto, and it picked Titan, ending the mission's planet-hopping for good — the flyby flung the probe out of the plane of the planets, and it never made another planetary encounter
Space Travel
On Mars, a dust storm in 2018 grew large enough to cover the entire planet, blocking sunlight for months and draining the solar panels of the Opportunity rover until it went silent — ending a mission that had lasted 15 years
Space Travel
At about 19 kilometres up the air pressure falls low enough that water boils at human body temperature, so an unprotected person there would feel the saliva on their tongue turn to vapour, which is why aircrew above that altitude wear sealed pressure suits rather than an oxygen mask
Space Travel
On a February day in 1984 an astronaut did what no human had dared, with no safety line to hold him: Bruce McCandless flew free of the shuttle on a jetpack, drifting up to 100 metres out as the first human satellite
Space Travel
The first woman to fly in space was not a test pilot or a scientist but a young textile worker, and in 1963 Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth alone for three days, longer than every American astronaut combined had managed by then
Space Travel
In microgravity, the human spine lengthens by as much as five centimetres, and astronauts come home temporarily taller than when they left, before gravity compresses the column again within days of landing
Space Travel
Skylab cost roughly $2.2 billion, hosted nine astronauts across three missions and remained in orbit for just over six years — before breaking apart over Western Australia, where its remains became museum exhibits, Lucite-encased souvenirs and, according to local accounts, even a cattle trough.
Space Travel
The computers guiding Voyager 1 through interstellar space process roughly 8,000 instructions per second; a modern smartphone processes more than 14 billion — yet that 1970s machine has operated for nearly half a century, farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history.
Space Travel
How did a captured German rocket, launched from a New Mexico desert in 1946, produce the first photograph of Earth from space using a 35mm camera bolted into its nose cone?
Space Travel
7 space missions that came far closer to disaster than anyone was told
Psychology
Buzz Aldrin called the Moon "magnificent desolation." He spent the decades after it showing how much he meant the second word
Space Travel
NASA studied pilots taking 26-minute naps during long flights and found their performance improved by 34 percent and alertness by 54 percent, evidence that in aviation, rest could be a safety tool, not a weakness
Space Travel
In May 1973, Skylab reached orbit with its heat shield torn away, one solar wing gone and the other jammed, leaving America’s first space station at roughly 54°C — so engineers built a parasol in days and astronauts carried it up to save the laboratory
Space Travel