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79,433 pages · 13,741 images · since 1994 Browse A–Z Today in space history
Encyclopedia Astronautica The full story of spaceflight

Encyclopedia Astronautica

Sky & Earth In 1900 a monk in western China opened a hidden cave stuffed with tens of thousands of ancient scrolls, and among them was a paper chart showing more than 1,300 stars, the oldest complete star atlas known from any civilization, drawn around 1,300 years ago Brendan Brown ·
ExplorationVoyager 2, launched in 1977, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, and because it left the planets heading south, only one antenna in the world can still send it commands, a 70-meter dish outside Canberra, AustraliaSky & EarthThe Moon looks enormous when it rises over the horizon, but it isn’t any bigger or any closer, and it is actually slightly farther away than when it sits high overhead, which means the giant moon you see is an illusion created by your own brainSolar SystemApollo 11 left a silicon disc about the size of a half-dollar coin on the Moon, and etched onto it, shrunk 200 times too small to read without a microscope, are goodwill messages from the leaders of 73 countries
November 3

Today in space history

  1. 1961Operational test
  2. 1969Polar Ionosphere Ionosphere mission
  3. 1993Operational test
Full calendar

Exploration

Rockets, missions and the people who flew them
In 1993 a video game designer paid $68,500 at Sotheby's for a Soviet rover that was still sitting on the Moon, and he later said that made him the only private person who owns something on another worldThe first photos of the far side of the Moon, taken by a Soviet probe in 1959, were shot on American film salvaged from downed US spy balloons, then developed, dried and scanned inside the spacecraft before being radioed back to EarthOn 29 October 1998 John Glenn went back into orbit at 77, 36 years after he became the first American to circle Earth, and he is still the oldest person ever to reach orbit

Solar System

The Sun, Moon, planets and everything orbiting with them
A cliff on Uranus’s moon Miranda is about six miles high, and because gravity there is less than 1% of Earth’s, anyone who stepped off the top would fall for around eight minutes and reach the bottom at roughly highway speedIn 1982 a Soviet probe survived at least 57 minutes on the surface of Venus, but the instrument built to test the planet's soil landed on the probe's own lens cap and measured that instead

Sky & Earth

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In 1962 an engineer named Robert Truax designed a rocket taller than a 40-story building that would be welded in a shipyard from cheap steel plate, towed out to sea, flooded until it bobbed upright and launched straight out of the ocean, and a shipyard study concluded it could actually be builtIn 1960 two stray Moscow dogs named Belka and Strelka became the first dogs to orbit Earth and come home alive, and a year later Nikita Khrushchev sent one of Strelka’s puppies, a fluffy female called Pushinka, to the White House as a gift for Caroline Kennedy
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Every rocket, spacecraft and crew, in one archive

79,433 pages and 13,741 images compiled since 1994, the reference NASA's own history office has pointed researchers to.