Space Exploration Articles, Photos, And Videos

Giant Leaps Poster Series featuring the historic missions of human spaceflight. The Apollo program continued until 1972, with 12 astronauts walking on the lunar surface over 6 landing missions. China has launched men into orbit, thereby demonstrating the quality of its technology, especially to the propaganda disadvantage of Japan , which has pursued a half-hearted and largely unsuccessful space program.

Bridenstine wants to terminate NASA's use of Russian rockets to carry personnel to the International Space Station. Our space program has produced breakthrough advances in everything from cybersecurity to energy technology to communications capability and medical research.

The International Space Station is a research laboratory in low Earth orbit. Some may be content to conclude that there is nothing new to be learned from human space exploration. July 14 - The spacecraft Mariner 4 transmitted the first pictures of Mars. A mission to our nearest planetary neighbor provides the best opportunity to demonstrate that humans can live for extended, even permanent, stays beyond low Earth orbit.

Unlike the shuttle, SpaceShipOne was carried aloft by a reusable jet mothership (White Knight) to 46,000 ft (13.8 km), where it was released and fires its rocket engine. By the end of the decade, the Voyager spacecraft had sent back detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn, their rings, and their moons.

Probe the solar system from Mercury to Pluto with this stellar schematic of space exploration! This course bridges the divide between systems engineering and space and planetary science. China launched its first satellite in 1970 and then began the Shuguang program to put an astronaut into space, but the program was twice halted, ending in 1980.

On the International Space Station we will improve and learn new ways to ensure astronauts are safe, healthy and productive while exploring, and we will continue expand our knowledge about how materials and biological systems behave outside of the influence of gravity.

Robotic missions will provide reconnaissance information about asteroid orbits, surface composition, and even return samples to Earth for further evaluation. 49 He argued that humanity's choice is essentially between expansion off Earth into space, versus cultural (and eventually biological) stagnation and death.

The model of private funding for ground-based telescopes—like the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar or the twin ten-meter Keck Telescopes in Hawaii—has been around Space Exploration for 200 years, and it's time to adapt it to space science and exploration. NASA's plan to get to Mars entails a three-year journey in a tube that will end in an orbit of the planet — but no landing there.

Curiosity and exploration are vital to the human spirit and accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will invite the citizens of the world today and the generations of tomorrow to join NASA on this exciting journey. August - NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, entered interstellar space.

The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006, is the latest NASA unmanned mission. In a decade or so, the International Space Station will be done with. From the 1990s onwards, private interests began promoting space tourism and then public space exploration of the Moon (see Google Lunar X Prize ).

Particular attention was given to the study of solar flares (see sun ). The earth applications, which involved remote sensing of natural resources, relied on visible and infrared light in a technique called multispectral scanning (see space science ). The data collected helped scientists to forecast crop and timber yields, locate potentially productive land, detect insect infestation, map deserts, measure snow and ice cover, locate mineral deposits, trace marine and wildlife migrations, and detect the dispersal patterns of air and water pollution.


After failing twice to develop a successor to the space shuttle in the National Aerospace Plane and the X-33, and running more than fifteen years overdue in completing the space station, the U.S. space program clearly required fundamental redirection.