Encyclopedia Astronautica
Sky & Earth In 1920 a Namibian farmer’s plough jolted to a stop against something buried just under his field, and when he dug it out he found a 60-ton slab of iron that had fallen from space, so heavy that more than a century later it still hasn’t been moved an inch from where it landed
Sky & EarthTwo and a half kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a cubic kilometre of frozen water has been wired with 5,800 light sensors, turning the South Pole itself into a telescope that looks down through the entire planet to catch particles arriving from the other side of the skyExplorationBefore Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, NASA engineers asked her, in all seriousness, whether 100 tampons would be enough for a one-week missionExplorationIn 1972 Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke left a photo of his wife and two young sons on the Moon, sealed in plastic, with a note on the back saying it was the family of an astronaut from planet Earth, and it is still lying there in the dust
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Today in space history
Voyager 1 left Earth in 1977 carrying computers with less memory than a single photo on your phone, and on November 18 it becomes the first object humans have ever built to travel a full light-day from home, about 16 billion miles away
In 1982 the Soviet Venera 14 probe landed on Venus and pressed an instrument into the ground to test how hard the surface was, but by sheer bad luck it touched down right on the camera lens cap the probe had just popped off, so it measured the cap instead
In 1970 a Soviet robot probe drilled into the Moon and flew about 100 grams of soil back to Earth, and in 2018 three tiny grains from that sample, barely visible to the naked eye, sold at auction for $855,000 
Mars is called the Red Planet, but if you stood on its surface most of the ground around you would look closer to butterscotch or caramel brown, because the red comes from a fine dust of rusted iron that coats everything and hangs in the air
Apollo 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
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 speed 
The International Space Station has had people living aboard without a break since November 2, 2000, which means anyone younger than 26 has never lived through a single day when every human being was on Earth
A Michigan man used a 22-pound rock as a doorstop on his farm for about 30 years before finally taking it to a geologist in 2018, and it turned out to be a meteorite worth around $100,000 The Encyclopedia · Start here
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.
- Space history chronologyDay by day, through 2018
- Launch vehiclesRockets and their families
- Crewed spacecraftFlown, planned and unflown
- Engines and propellantsWhat made them fly
- Families and collectionsSpacecraft, rockets and missiles by type
- Launch sitesPads, ranges and cosmodromes
- Space activity by countryNational programs
- Russian and Soviet historyIncluding the Mishin Diaries