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Apollo 17 astronaut Ron Evans hauls the cylindrical film canister from the SIMbay mapping camera back to the safety of the command module, during humanity’s most recent deep-space EVA, 45 years ago, today. Photo Credit: NASA Forty-five years ago, today, a fully-suited astronaut poked his helmeted head out of the side hatch of the […] 
Apollo 17 launches into the night at 12:33 a.m. EST on 7 December 1972. Photo Credit: NASA, via Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de Forty-five years ago, the combined spacecraft of Apollo 17—the Command and Service Module (CSM), named “America”, and the spider-like Lunar Module (LM), dubbed “Challenger”—slipped smoothly into lunar orbit. In doing so, it represented the […] 
Gene Cernan salutes the U.S. flag at Taurus-Littrow in December 1972. Photo Credit: NASA A little more than a week since his passing, aged 82, veteran astronaut and Navy Capt. Eugene Cernan—the last man to have left his footprints on the surface of the Moon—was honored today in a touching funeral service at St. […]
Gene Cernan salutes the U.S. flag at Taurus-Littrow in December 1972. Photo Credit: NASA On 16 January, a day of reflection—the 14th anniversary of the launch of Space Shuttle Columbia on her final mission—the world lost a shining light in the early annals of human space exploration. Retired Navy Capt. Gene Cernan, veteran of […] 
Forty-five years ago, this month, the names of the final crew of lunar explorers of the 20th century were announced. Photo Credit: NASA Forty-five years ago, this month, NASA made the decision which would close out human exploration of the lunar surface for more than two generations: the selection of the final crew to […] 
As Project Apollo wore on, the intensity of lobbying by the scientific community to get geologist-astronaut Jack Schmitt to the Moon increased. Originally assigned to the Apollo 15 backup crew, Schmitt might have flown Apollo 18, prior to a sweeping cancelation of the final missions in the program. Photo Credit: NASA For almost five […] 
Al Shepard, pictured at Fra Mauro during Apollo 14 in early 1971. This was the planned landing site for Apollo 13. Photo Credit: NASA Forty-five years ago, this week, the sixth team of Apollo lunar explorers—and only the third to accomplish a landing on the Moon’s dusty surface—headed back to Earth after a mission […] A mere four years after humanity’s first spacewalk, EVA and space suit technology advanced sufficiently to permit Neil Armstrong’s historic first steps on the Moon. Photo Credit: NASA Fifty years ago, yesterday, on 18 March 1965, humanity became an “extravehicular” spacefaring civilization for the first time, when 30-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov ventured outside […] The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is halfway to its next destination, Solander Point. Photo Credit: NASA / JPL Since August 2011, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been exploring the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater called Endeavour that is geologically very distinct from anything the robot craft had previously encountered. Ancient rocks and clay […] The fragility of Earth hangs like a Christmas bauble in the black sky above Taurus-Littrow. Together with Old Glory—earlier planted by Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt—it offered one of the few aspects of colour in this uniformly grey landscape. Photo Credit: NASA Forty years ago, this month, the ethereal stillness and silence of ages […] |
 Next Launch NROL-71 on a Delta IV Heavy rocket from Vandenberg AFB, CA scheduled for: 9 Dec 18 at 4:15 GMT 8 Dec 18 at 8:15pm Pacific 8 Dec 18 at 11:15pm Eastern 
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