Encyclopedia Astronautica
Exploration In 1998 the SOHO observatory spun out of control and went silent 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, and engineers found it with a giant radio dish in Puerto Rico, then slowly thawed its frozen fuel, and the spacecraft is still watching the Sun more than 25 years later
ExplorationHow does a spacecraft launched in 1977, with less memory than a single photo on your phone, still find its way home with data from 15 billion miles away?Deep SpaceThought of the day from Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”Sky & EarthWhen Japan picked its new astronauts in 2008, the finalists spent a week sealed in an isolation chamber folding 1,000 paper cranes, while psychologists watched to see whether their work got sloppier as the stress built
November 15
Today in space history
- 1960X-15A XLR-99 Checkout test
- 1971Long range test
- 1990STS-38
Before 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 mission
In 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
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 
If you stood on the shore of a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan, the waves lapping at your boots would be liquid methane, the pebbles under your feet would be ice as hard as rock, and the air would be so thick and the gravity so weak that you could strap on wings and fly
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 
In 1969 a fireball broke apart over the small town of Murchison in Victoria, and locals picked warm black stones out of their paddocks and garden beds, never imagining that some of the dust inside them was 7 billion years old, older than the Sun itself
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 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