It's a Space Station! Blog

On May 5, 1961, Mercury-Redstone 3 became the first United States human spaceflight. It was the first crewed flight of the Mercury program, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard.

Ulysses was the robotic space probe sent to orbit and study the Sun at all latitudes that launched on October 6, 1990, and made three "fast latitude scans" of the Sun.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains operational 30 years later. The Hubble Space Telescope has contributed to record-setting amounts of scientific...

Apollo 16 was the fifth crewed and penultimate mission to land on the Moon and the first mission to land in the lunar highlands. The second of Apollo's "J missions" was crewed by Commander John...

Apollo 13 was the nearly disastrous seventh crewed Apollo space program mission launched on April 11, 1970. It was meant to be the third Moon landing, but an abort occurred after an oxygen tank...

Apollo 6 was the second A-type mission of the United States Apollo program, which launched on April 4, 1968. Apollo 6 was an uncrewed test of the Saturn V launch vehicle and the final uncrewed Apollo...

Gemini 3 was the first crewed mission as part of NASA's Gemini program. Astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom flew three low-Earth orbits on March 23, 1965, in their spacecraft, nicknamed Molly...

Gemini 8 was the sixth crewed spaceflight as part of NASA's Gemini program and saw the first docking of two spacecrafts in orbit. However, the mission suffered the first critical system failure of a...

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a NASA spacecraft designed by Lockheed Martin to study the climate and geology of Mars, provide data on future prospective landing sites, and relay information...

Apollo 9 was the third spaceflight in NASA's Apollo program, the second crewed Apollo mission, and the first flight of the full Apollo spacecraft, which included the Lunar Module (LM) with the...

New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched in 2006 as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. The primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015,...

Mercury-Atlas 6 was the very first American orbital spaceflight, which took place on February 20, 1962. Astronaut John Glenn piloted Friendship 7 spacecraft, and NASA operated the mission as part of...

The Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous satellite, later re-named NEAR Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe made to study Eros, the near-Earth asteroid, from close orbit over the course of a year.

Skylab was the first space station for the United States, launched by NASA in 1973 and was occupied for nearly 24 weeks until the mission was ended in 1974.

Apollo 14 was the eighth crewed mission of the Apollo program, the third mission to land on the Moon, and the first mission to land in the Moon's highlands.

More than 30 years after launch, NASA received the magnificent Pioneer 10 spacecraft's last, very weak signal on January 23, 2003.

The first time a docking between two crewed spacecrafts occurred on January 16, 1969, when the Soyuz 4 and 5 spacecrafts docked.

2020 has been an unprecedented year, but who knew we would get some of the most exciting space news in such a tumultuous year?