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Encyclopedia Astronautica
Articles
Sky & EarthIn 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
Solar SystemIf 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
Sky & EarthIn 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 sky
ExplorationWhen Laika was launched on 3 November 1957 the world was told she had lived for days in orbit, but she died within hours as her cabin overheated, and one of the scientists who trained her later said the mission did not teach them enough to justify her death
ExplorationIn 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 world
Solar SystemIn 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
ExplorationOn 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
ExplorationOn 28 October 1971 Britain put a satellite into orbit on its own rocket for the first and only time, three months after it had cancelled the rocket
ExplorationIn 1962 an American engineer designed a 150-metre rocket that would be built in a shipyard, towed out to sea and launched straight out of the ocean, able to lift 550 tonnes into orbit, more than the entire International Space Station