Space Travel
Space Travel
1,057 articles in this category.
Space Travel
In 1977, NASA launched two probes designed to last five years. Voyager 1 and 2 are now the only human-made objects in interstellar space, still operating, still transmitting, funded by a team of engineers some of whom have worked on the mission for nearly 50 years
Space Travel
In early 1962, weeks before John Glenn's orbital flight, a NASA mathematician named Katherine Johnson was asked to recompute by hand what the new IBM 7090 had already calculated, because Glenn had told mission planners he would not fly unless she personally verified the machine's numbers on paper
Space Travel
Voyager 1 is still crossing interstellar space with six computers holding about 68 kilobytes of memory between them — less storage than a single compressed photograph on a modern phone
Space Travel
The lines etched into Voyager’s Golden Record cover point towards 14 pulsars whose spinning clocks reveal both where the Sun is and roughly when the spacecraft left — directions designed to work without relying on a single human language
Space Travel
In 1980, Voyager 1 flew close enough to Titan to reveal its thick nitrogen atmosphere — but the gravity-assist geometry bent the spacecraft permanently out of the planetary plane, trading Uranus and Neptune for one close look at Saturn’s largest moon
Space Travel
In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet's tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains 4.6 billion kilometres home, and dropped them into the Utah desert — the first solid pieces of a comet ever returned to Earth
Space Travel
Astronauts on the ISS watch 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day, and many say the hardest thing to describe back home is how thin the atmosphere looks from above — a bright blue line you could almost rub out with a thumb
Space Travel
On July 16, 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into orbit for the Pentagon's first operational low Earth orbit data network, pushing the constellation to half its planned size, even as the optical laser mesh that is supposed to let those satellites talk to one another remains dark and unproven
Space Travel
The navigation technique that brought Apollo 13 home in April 1970 — holding the spacecraft steady against the line where day meets night on Earth and timing a fourteen-second engine burn with a wristwatch — was later made mandatory training for every subsequent Apollo crew
Space Travel
In May 1969, Apollo 10 carried a lunar module called Snoopy to within 14.4 kilometres of the Moon, then fired its ascent engine until the fuel ran out and sent it into orbit around the Sun, leaving a spacecraft that had carried two human beings somewhere in interplanetary space while its crew returned safely to Earth
Space Travel
In May 1992, after two failed attempts to capture a 4.5-tonne communications satellite with a specially built tool, three astronauts left Endeavour together and grabbed the free-flying spacecraft with their gloved hands — the first, and still only, three-person spacewalk in history
Space Travel
In November 1970, a Soviet rover the size of a bathtub rolled off the Luna 17 lander and crawled across the Sea of Rains at 100 metres per hour, driven by five men in a bunker near Simferopol who had never seen the Moon and faced a 2.5-second delay between command and the wheels responding
Space Travel
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev stayed in orbit so long that the country which launched him collapsed, and he kept doing his job in space while the world he trusted to bring him home fell apart below
Space Travel
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within a minute of launch and survived because one flight controller recognized an obscure electrical pattern almost nobody else in Mission Control understood
Space Travel