Programs

Roscosmos · 1957–1958

On 4 October 1957 a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball began to beep from orbit — and the space age, and the space race, began in the same instant.

NASA · 1958–1963

Mercury

America's scramble to put a person in space — always a step behind the Soviets, and the foundation for everything that came after.

NASA · 1961–1972

Apollo

The Cold-War sprint that put twelve people on the Moon — and then stopped.

NASA · 1961–1966

Gemini

The bridge program — the unglamorous middle where NASA learned everything Apollo would need except how to fly to the Moon.

Roscosmos · 1961–1963

The program that put the first human in orbit — and kept scoring firsts while America scrambled to catch up.

NASA · 1962–1975

Before any other planet was more than a smudge in a telescope, a run of small American probes went out to see them — and returned the first photographs ever taken of another world.

Roscosmos · 1964–1974

The one race the Soviet Union ran and lost — a secret, starved, divided bid for the Moon whose giant rocket exploded four times and was erased from the record for twenty years.

Roscosmos · 1964–1965

The rushed stopgap that squeezed two more firsts — a crew and a spacewalk — out of maxed-out hardware, and nearly killed people doing it.

Roscosmos · 1967–now

The spacecraft that began in tragedy, paid the highest price in spaceflight — and became the most reliable, longest-serving ride to orbit ever built.

Roscosmos · 1971–1986

The world's first space stations — two secret programmes hidden under one name, a hard and sometimes deadly decade of learning to live in orbit, and the direct ancestor of every station since.

NASA · 1972–2003

Before Voyager could tour the outer planets, someone had to prove the road was survivable. Two small probes went first — through the asteroid belt, past Jupiter, and out.

NASA · 1973–1974

Skylab

America's first space station — improvised from Apollo hardware, nearly lost at launch, saved by the boldest repair job of the era, and then abandoned a little too soon.

NASA · 1975–1982

In 1976 two American landers set down on Mars, sent back the first photographs from its surface — and ran an experiment to answer the oldest question about the planet: is anything alive there?

Roscosmos · 1976–1993

The Soviet space shuttle that looked like America's, flew better in one respect — and flew exactly once, uncrewed and flawless, before the country that built it disappeared out from under it.

NASA · 1977–now

Two probes launched in 1977 to tour the outer planets — and never came back. Half a century on, they are still flying, and still calling home from between the stars.

ESA · 1979–now

Europe's guarantee of its own way to space — born from being told no, grown into the world's dominant commercial launcher, and still flying the continent's independence into orbit.

NASA · 1981–2011

Space Shuttle

The reusable spaceplane that promised routine, airline-like access to orbit — delivered thirty years of extraordinary capability, never delivered cheap or safe, and killed two crews learning the difference.

Roscosmos · 1986–2001

The first modular space station — built piece by piece in orbit, kept alive for fifteen years through the collapse of the country that built it, and the place where Cold-War rivals first learned to fly together.

NASA · 1989–2003

The first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter flew for eight years with a crippled antenna — and still returned the strongest evidence yet that a moon of Jupiter hides an ocean.

NASA · 1997–2017

A bus-sized robot spent thirteen years orbiting Saturn — and found, on a moon nobody was watching, an ocean that could hold life.

ESA · 1983–now

Europe never built a crewed spaceship of its own — and became indispensable to human spaceflight anyway, by choosing partnership over independence and mastering the pieces no one else wanted to build.

NASA · 1990–now

NASA's plan to see the whole universe — four flagship telescopes, one for each kind of light, and the lineage of great space eyes that followed.

NASA · 1996–now

The successor to Hubble — a gold mirror the size of a house, folded into a rocket, unfurled a million miles away to see the first light in the universe.

NASA · 1997–now

A quarter-century of American robots driving across Mars — from a microwave-sized cart that managed a few metres to a nuclear astrobiologist caching rock for the trip home.

Multi · 1998–now

International Space Station

The largest thing humanity has ever built in space, and the place every thread of the space age converges — the former rivals' rivalry turned, after forty years, into the longest act of cooperation in the history of spaceflight.

CMSA · 1999–now

The capsule that made China the third nation to launch its own people — built slowly, tested exhaustively, and never once lost a crew.

JAXA · 2003–now

Japan's asteroid sample-return campaign — a crippled probe that limped home with the first grains ever taken from an asteroid, and a sequel that did it flawlessly.

ESA · 2004–now

Europe's robotic science fleet — the first spacecraft to land on a comet, the most precise map of the galaxy ever made, and a telescope hunting the dark universe.

NASA · 2006–now

It took nine and a half years and the fastest launch in history to reach Pluto — and the dead ball of ice everyone expected turned out to be a young, active world.

JAXA · 2007–now

Japan's ingenious, resource-light exploration of the Moon and planets — famous for missions that fail halfway and get rescued by cleverness.

ISRO · 2008–now

India's Moon program — it found the water that changed how we see the Moon, then became the first nation ever to land near the south pole.

CMSA · 2011–now

Locked out of the world's space station, China built its own — on schedule, and now runs the only other permanently-crewed outpost in orbit.

ISRO · 2013–2022

India reached Mars on its first attempt — something no nation had ever done — for less than the cost of a Hollywood movie about space.

SpaceX · 2002–now

SpaceX — Falcon & Dragon

A startup that nearly went broke made rockets reusable, cut the price of orbit, and gave the United States back its own ride to space.

CNSA · 2007–now

The methodical conquest of the Moon: orbit, land, rove, return — including the first landing ever on the far side, and the first samples from it.

ISRO · 2018–now

India's bid to launch its own people — the crewed program that would make it the fourth nation with independent human spaceflight.

NASA · 2019–now

Artemis

The return to the Moon — this time to stay, and this time with the world, not to beat it.

SpaceX · 2019–now

The first megaconstellation — thousands of satellites that brought the internet to the whole planet, and remade low Earth orbit in the process.

SpaceX · 2019–now

The biggest rocket ever built, designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — the vehicle SpaceX means to carry people to Mars.

Amazon · 2023–now

Amazon's answer to Starlink — the second megaconstellation, backed by the deepest pockets in retail and a deliberate refusal to depend on a rival's rocket.

Commercial · 2025–now

The private outposts meant to replace the ISS — a bet that low Earth orbit can become a business, not just a government program.

Roscosmos · 2027–now

Russia's planned return to a station of its own — leaving the ISS partnership to fly alone again, as it did with Salyut and Mir.