Space Travel
Space Travel
1,057 articles in this category.
Human Behaviour
When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched into orbit on May 18, 1991, he was a citizen of the Soviet Union — and when he returned to Earth 311 days later in March 1992, the country that had sent him no longer existed, his home city of Leningrad had been renamed St. Petersburg, and his spacesuit still bore the letters "USSR" and the red Soviet flag he had worn while the world below him quietly stopped existing
Space Travel
Human beings have now lived continuously aboard the International Space Station since November 2, 2000 — more than 25 consecutive years without a single day when no human was orbiting above the planet — in the longest sustained off-world human presence in the history of the species
Space Travel
In June 2025, a 65-year-old former NASA astronaut named Peggy Whitson became the oldest woman ever to orbit Earth — taking off aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon as commander of the privately funded Axiom Mission 4 — and during her 18-day stay on the International Space Station, she pushed her career total past 695 cumulative days in space, the most of any American astronaut and the most of any woman who has ever lived.
Space Travel
The reason no human being has walked on the Moon in more than half a century is not that humanity lost the capability to get there — it is that humanity lost the reason, in the moment the Cold War goal of beating the Soviet Union to the lunar surface had finally been accomplished and the political momentum behind Apollo evaporated
Space Travel
Approximately 120 private civilians have now flown to space aboard commercial rockets — roughly one-sixth of all the human beings who have ever left Earth — and the rate at which citizens are reaching space is now accelerating faster than the rate at which national space programs are sending professional astronauts
Space Travel
An eight-day mission to the International Space Station ended 286 days later in March 2025, when NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore finally returned aboard a SpaceX capsule — abandoning the Boeing Starliner they had arrived in after it developed thruster problems too serious to fly them home
Space Travel
The longest continuous spaceflight in history — 437 days aboard the Russian Mir space station, completed by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995 — was specifically conducted to prove that a human being could survive a round-trip mission to Mars, in a piece of human endurance that has been waiting unused on a shelf for three decades
Space Travel
NASA is on track to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in roughly 56 years by 2028— followed by the establishment of a sustained human presence near the Moon's south pole in the 2030s — in a civilizational shift that would mark the first time in human history that our species has lived continuously on another world, rather than briefly visiting and returning home
Space Scopes
When the Soviet Venera 13 probe touched down on Venus in March 1982, it survived for 127 minutes in a 465-degree atmosphere that crushed it with the pressure of nearly a kilometre of ocean water, and in that time it scraped a soil sample, analysed it, and transmitted the first colour photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet.
Space Travel
Breathable oxygen has now been produced on the surface of Mars — generated between 2021 and 2023 by a NASA experiment about the size of a toaster, riding inside the Perseverance rover — in the first time humans have ever made air on another planet, opening the door to bringing astronauts safely home one day
Space Travel
It is impossible to burp in space, because in microgravity the human stomach cannot separate gas from the liquid and partially digested food it sits inside, and any attempt to burp expels a mixture of all three directly into the astronaut's mouth.
Space Travel
Fossils found in Scotland just pushed back the origin of land-walking animals by 14 million years and placed them in a stretch of the fossil record where nothing was supposed to exist
Space Travel
In 1965, a 30-year-old cosmonaut named Alexei Leonov became the first human to walk in space — and somewhere in the middle of the live broadcast, while the world was watching the Soviet Union's greatest propaganda triumph, mission control quietly cut the feed, for reasons that wouldn't be publicly known for almost thirty years
Space Travel
When Soviet engineers landed Venera 13 on the surface of Venus in 1982, they expected the probe to survive maybe thirty minutes in the planet's lead-melting heat and crushing pressure — it survived 127 minutes and sent back the first color photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet
Space Travel