1968 · 58 years ago
Apollo 7 flies the redesigned command module
Eleven days in orbit, the whole crew with head colds, and none of them flew again.
11 October 2026
On this day
A hand-written calendar of the things worth remembering — first flights, first landings, the losses, and the photographs that changed what people thought they were looking at. Dates are UTC, which for a couple of these is not the date it was where it happened.
Today
January
02 Jan 1959
Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to leave Earth
It missed the Moon, which was the target, and became the first object to enter orbit around the Sun instead.
04 Jan 2004
Spirit lands in Gusev crater
Designed for ninety days on Mars; it kept working for six years.
07 Jan 1610
Galileo sees three "stars" beside Jupiter
Within a week he understood they were moons, and that not everything went round the Earth.
14 Jan 2005
Huygens lands on Titan
The most distant landing ever made, on a moon with rivers of methane and a sky the colour of butterscotch.
19 Jan 2006
New Horizons leaves for Pluto
It crossed the Moon's orbit in nine hours and still took nine and a half years to arrive.
19 Jan 2024
SLIM lands on the Moon, on its nose
Japan's lander touched down within a hundred metres of its target and then tipped over, which is still the most precise lunar landing anyone has managed.
24 Jan 1986
Voyager 2 passes Uranus
The only spacecraft ever to visit, and the reason almost everything we know about the planet is nearly forty years old.
25 Jan 2004
Opportunity lands in Meridiani Planum
It drove 45 km over fourteen years and signed off in a dust storm.
27 Jan 1967
Apollo 1 fire
Grissom, White and Chaffee died in a pure-oxygen cabin during a ground test, and the spacecraft was redesigned around what the investigation found.
28 Jan 1986
Challenger breaks up after launch
Seven crew, seventy-three seconds, and an O-ring that had been known to be a problem for years.
31 Jan 1958
Explorer 1 reaches orbit
America's first satellite, and it found the Van Allen radiation belts on the way up.
February
01 Feb 2003
Columbia is lost on re-entry
Foam shed at launch had punched a hole in the wing sixteen days earlier.
03 Feb 1966
Luna 9 makes the first soft landing on the Moon
It sent back panoramas proving the surface would hold a spacecraft's weight, which nobody had been certain of.
06 Feb 2018
Falcon Heavy flies for the first time
Two boosters landed side by side on the coast, and a car went into solar orbit.
14 Feb 1990
Voyager 1 turns round and takes the Pale Blue Dot
Earth is a point less than a pixel across, six billion kilometres away, caught in a scattered sunbeam.
15 Feb 2013
A 20-metre rock explodes over Chelyabinsk
Nobody saw it coming; the airburst broke windows across six cities and injured about 1,500 people.
18 Feb 1930
Clyde Tombaugh finds Pluto
Two photographic plates taken a week apart, compared by eye, with one dot in a slightly different place.
18 Feb 2021
Perseverance lands in Jezero crater
The first landing filmed from the spacecraft itself, and it carried a helicopter strapped to its belly.
20 Feb 1962
John Glenn orbits the Earth three times
Mission control spent much of the flight worried the heat shield was loose. It was not.
20 Feb 1986
The core module of Mir reaches orbit
It was occupied almost continuously for a decade and stayed up for fifteen years.
22 Feb 2024
Odysseus becomes the first commercial lander on the Moon
It came down faster than planned, caught a foot and tipped, and kept transmitting anyway.
24 Feb 1968
The first pulsar is announced
Jocelyn Bell Burnell found a signal pulsing every 1.34 seconds and it was labelled LGM-1 before anyone worked out it was a neutron star.
March
01 Mar 1966
Venera 3 reaches Venus
The first spacecraft to touch another planet, though its instruments had already failed on the way.
02 Mar 1972
Pioneer 10 sets out for Jupiter
The first spacecraft through the asteroid belt, carrying a plaque in case anyone ever finds it.
06 Mar 2009
Kepler launches to count planets
It stared at one patch of sky for four years and turned exoplanets from a handful of curiosities into a population.
13 Mar 1781
William Herschel finds Uranus
The first planet discovered with a telescope, and he thought it was a comet for two years.
16 Mar 1926
Robert Goddard flies the first liquid-fuelled rocket
It reached 12 metres and flew for two and a half seconds, from a field in Massachusetts.
18 Mar 1965
Alexei Leonov makes the first spacewalk
His suit ballooned so badly he had to bleed pressure out of it to get back through the airlock.
23 Mar 2001
Mir is brought down over the Pacific
Fifteen years in orbit, deliberately ended in a controlled re-entry east of New Zealand.
April
11 Apr 1970
Apollo 13 lifts off
An oxygen tank ruptured 56 hours later, and the mission became the most famous rescue in the history of flight.
12 Apr 1961
Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space
One orbit, 108 minutes, and he ejected and landed by parachute because the capsule did not slow down enough on its own.
12 Apr 1981
Columbia flies the first Space Shuttle mission
The first crewed spacecraft to fly people on its maiden flight, which nobody would sign off on today.
19 Apr 1971
Salyut 1, the first space station, reaches orbit
Its only crew died on the way home when a valve opened during re-entry.
19 Apr 2021
Ingenuity hovers for 39 seconds
The first powered flight on another world, in an atmosphere one percent as thick as ours. It managed 72 flights before a rotor clipped the ground.
20 Apr 2023
Starship flies for the first time
It cleared the pad, tumbled, and was destroyed four minutes in — and took a large piece of the launch mount with it.
24 Apr 1990
Hubble goes up
Its mirror was ground to the wrong shape, and it took three and a half years and a servicing mission to fix.
May
05 May 1961
Alan Shepard flies a suborbital hop
Fifteen minutes, and America's first person in space three weeks after Gagarin.
14 May 1973
Skylab reaches orbit, damaged
It lost a micrometeoroid shield and a solar array on the way up; the first crew fixed it with a parasol.
20 May 1978
Pioneer Venus leaves for Venus
It mapped the surface by radar through cloud that no camera can see through.
25 May 1961
Kennedy commits to the Moon before the decade is out
At that point the United States had accumulated fifteen minutes of human spaceflight.
30 May 2020
Crew Dragon carries people for the first time
The first crewed launch from American soil in nine years, and the first ever by a private company.
June
03 Jun 1965
Ed White walks in space for 23 minutes
He did not want to come back in; the transcript has him saying so.
16 Jun 1963
Valentina Tereshkova flies alone for three days
The first woman in space, and more time in orbit than every American who had flown to that point, combined.
18 Jun 1983
Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space
The press asked her whether she wept when things went wrong.
19 Jun 1976
Viking 1 enters Mars orbit
It spent a month photographing the planned landing site before anyone dared commit to it.
30 Jun 1908
Something explodes over Tunguska
Two thousand square kilometres of forest flattened, no crater, and no expedition reached the site for nineteen years.
July
04 Jul 1997
Mars Pathfinder bounces to a stop
It landed on airbags and carried Sojourner, a rover the size of a microwave and the first wheels on Mars.
11 Jul 1979
Skylab comes down over Western Australia
The town of Esperance fined NASA $400 for littering. The fine went unpaid for thirty years.
12 Jul 2022
The first Webb images are released
A twelve-and-a-half-hour exposure of a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, full of galaxies.
14 Jul 2015
New Horizons passes Pluto
Nine years of travel for a few hours of data, sent home over sixteen months at dial-up speed.
16 Jul 1969
Apollo 11 lifts off
A Saturn V burning twenty tonnes of propellant a second for the first two and a half minutes.
17 Jul 1975
Apollo and Soyuz dock
A handshake in orbit between two countries that had spent fifteen years racing each other.
20 Jul 1969
Apollo 11 lands
Armstrong flew it manually past a boulder field with about twenty-five seconds of fuel left.
20 Jul 1976
Viking 1 lands on Mars
The first spacecraft to operate on the surface, and it sent a picture of its own footpad.
23 Jul 1999
Chandra launches to see in X-rays
Its mirrors are nested cylinders, because an X-ray will not reflect off anything it hits straight on.
30 Jul 2020
Perseverance leaves for Mars
It carried the first sample tubes intended to be picked up by a later mission that has not yet been funded.
August
05 Aug 2011
Juno leaves for Jupiter
It flies a long ellipse that dives between the planet and its radiation belts, which is the only way to survive there.
06 Aug 2012
Curiosity is lowered onto Mars by a rocket-powered crane
Seven minutes of a sequence nobody had ever flown, executed entirely by the spacecraft with Earth eleven minutes away.
12 Aug 2018
Parker Solar Probe launches to touch the Sun
It has since flown through the corona at 690,000 km/h, the fastest anything built by people has ever moved.
20 Aug 1977
Voyager 2 launches — ahead of Voyager 1
It took the slower route, and it remains the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune.
23 Aug 2023
Chandrayaan-3 lands near the lunar south pole
India became the fourth country to land on the Moon, days after a Russian attempt at the same region crashed.
25 Aug 1989
Voyager 2 passes Neptune
The last planet of the tour, and the end of the Grand Tour that a 1960s orbital alignment made possible.
25 Aug 2012
Voyager 1 crosses into interstellar space
Confirmed only a year later, from the pitch of plasma waves around the spacecraft.
September
05 Sep 1977
Voyager 1 launches with a gold record
Greetings in 55 languages, whale song, and Chuck Berry, aimed at nobody in particular.
12 Sep 1962
"We choose to go to the Moon"
Kennedy at Rice, explaining a decision that was already made and not yet paid for.
14 Sep 2015
LIGO records the first gravitational wave
Two black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago, stretching a four-kilometre arm by a thousandth of a proton's width.
15 Sep 2017
Cassini is flown into Saturn
Deliberately destroyed after twenty years, to make certain it could never contaminate Enceladus.
24 Sep 2023
OSIRIS-REx drops an asteroid sample over Utah
Sixty grams of Bennu, collected by a spacecraft that touched the surface for six seconds.
26 Sep 2022
DART hits Dimorphos on purpose
The first demonstration that a spacecraft can move an asteroid — it shortened the orbit by 32 minutes, far more than expected.
October
01 Oct 1958
NASA opens for business
Assembled out of the older NACA in under a year, because of a beeping sphere.
04 Oct 1957
Sputnik
Eighty-three kilograms, a radio beep anyone with a shortwave could hear, and the start of everything on this site.
07 Oct 1959
Luna 3 photographs the far side of the Moon
It developed the film on board, scanned it, and radioed the result back — twenty-nine grainy frames of a hemisphere nobody had seen.
11 Oct 1968
Apollo 7 flies the redesigned command module
Eleven days in orbit, the whole crew with head colds, and none of them flew again.
15 Oct 1997
Cassini–Huygens leaves for Saturn
Seven years and two Venus flybys to get there, carrying a European lander for Titan.
19 Oct 2017
‘Oumuamua is spotted from Haleakalā
The first object confirmed to have come from outside the solar system, already on its way out when found.
November
01 Nov 2000
The first crew moves into the space station
It has not been empty since, which makes it the longest continuous human presence off Earth.
03 Nov 1957
Laika reaches orbit and does not come back
There was never a plan to return her, a fact the Soviet Union did not admit for decades.
12 Nov 2014
Philae lands on a comet, twice
Its harpoons failed, it bounced for two hours, and settled in shadow with too little sunlight to survive long.
13 Nov 1971
Mariner 9 enters orbit around Mars
The first spacecraft to orbit another planet, arriving to find the whole surface hidden by a global dust storm.
16 Nov 2022
Artemis I finally launches
Years late and billions over, and the Orion capsule went round the Moon and came home at 40,000 km/h.
20 Nov 1998
Zarya, the first piece of the space station, reaches orbit
Everything else was built around it over the next twelve years.
26 Nov 2011
Curiosity leaves for Mars
A car-sized nuclear-powered laboratory, launched on the assumption that the sky crane would work.
December
07 Dec 1972
The Blue Marble is taken
Five hours into Apollo 17, with the Sun behind the spacecraft — the whole Earth, lit edge to edge, in one frame.
11 Dec 1972
Apollo 17 lands in Taurus–Littrow
The only mission to carry a geologist, and the last to carry anyone.
14 Dec 1972
The last people leave the Moon
Cernan climbed the ladder after Schmitt, and nobody has been back since.
21 Dec 1968
Apollo 8 leaves for the Moon
Decided on at four months' notice, on a rocket that had flown twice, neither time perfectly.
24 Dec 1968
Earthrise
Anders took it out of a side window, out of sequence and off the flight plan, and it is the reason the environmental movement has a photograph.
25 Dec 2021
Webb launches
Three hundred and forty-four single-point failures on the way to unfolding, and every one of them worked.
27 Dec 1571
Johannes Kepler is born
He spent years fitting Mars's orbit to circles before admitting it was an ellipse, which is how the modern description of the solar system starts.