Tag: NASA History

On March 3, 1959, the United States launched Pioneer 4 with the goal of photographing the Moon during a close flyby. As part of the International Geophysical Year that ran from July 1, 1957, to Dec. 31, 1958, the United States planned to send five probes to study the Moon. The first three planned to orbit the Moon, while the last two simpler probes planned to photograph it during flybys. After NASA opened for business in October 1958, the new space agency inherited the Pioneer program from the Advanced Research…

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“A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women.” – Valentina Tereshkova “If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.” – Sally Ride “International cooperation is very necessary. Chinese have a saying, ‘When all the people collect the wood, you will make a great fire.’” – Liu Yang As of Feb. 29, 2024, 75 women have flown in space. Of these, 47 have worked on the…

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In 1994, a joint NASA and Department of Defense (DOD) mission called Clementine dramatically changed our view of the Moon. As the first U.S. mission to the Moon in more than two decades, Clementine’s primary objectives involved technology demonstrations to test lightweight component and sensor performance. The lightweight sensors aboard the spacecraft returned 1.6 million digital images, providing the first global multispectral and topographic maps of the Moon. Data from a radar instrument indicated that large quantities of water ice may lie in permanently shadowed craters at lunar south pole,…

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On Feb. 3, 1994, space shuttle Discovery took off on its 18th flight, STS-60. Its six-person crew of Commander Charles F. Bolden, Pilot Kenneth S. Reightler, and Mission Specialists N. Jan Davis, Ronald M. Sega, Franklin R. Chang-Díaz, who served as payload commander, and Sergei K. Krikalev of the Russian Space Agency, now Roscosmos, flew the first mission of the Shuttle-Mir Program. Other objectives of the mission included the first flight of the Wake Shield Facility, a free-flying satellite using the ultra-vacuum of space to generate semi-conductor films for advanced…

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The new year of 1969 dawned with optimism that NASA would meet President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. The previous year saw four Apollo missions, two uncrewed and two carrying three astronauts each, test different components of the lunar landing architecture, culminating with Apollo 8’s December flight around the Moon. Challenges remaining for the new year included testing the Lunar Module (LM) with a crew, first in Earth orbit, and then in lunar orbit, a flight that…

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In space since their launch on Nov. 16, 1973, Skylab 4 astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue began the new year of 1974 roughly halfway through their planned 84-day mission. By the end of January, the three rookies held the records for the longest single space flight and the most cumulative time spent in space. Mission managers monitored the station’s and the astronauts’ health and weekly concurred with extending the mission to its full duration as the astronauts accomplished a record number of science observations…

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To replace the cargo and crew transportation services to and from the International Space Station following the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, the United States developed a novel approach to procure those services from American commercial entities. On Jan. 9, 2014, Orbital Sciences Corporation, one of two companies selected initially to provide cargo transportation services, launched the first operational mission of its Cygnus spacecraft. During its one-month stay at the space station, the onboard Expedition 38 crew unloaded its cargo and then filled it with trash and unneeded…

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