
Until the very end of its life, NASA’s space shuttle fleet remained inherently dangerous. But 30yrs ago this month, work began to develop a technology which would make shuttle landings much safer. […]
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![]() Launch of Dragon Endeavour atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 on 30 May 2020. Photo Credit: Mike Killian/AmericaSpace It’s rare that you can time a moment in history to a single split-second. But last Saturday, that split-second fell at 3:22:45 p.m. EDT, when American astronauts rode an American-made spacecraft, atop an American-built rocket, and from […] ![]() NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (right) will pick up where the Hubble (left) will soon leave off, observing the universe in infrared & looking further back in time than Hubble ever could. Photos: NASA April 24 marked the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which has given humanity some of the most […] ![]() One of the final views of Skylab in orbit, as seen directly by human eyes, during the departure of the third crew in February 1974. The station, which began its slow descent back to Earth 40 years ago, this summer, was the largest single object ever launched into space. Photo Credit: NASA Forty years […] ![]() Atlantis roars to orbit on the morning of 2 December 1988, 30 years ago today. Photo Credit: NASA Thirty years ago, at 9:30 a.m. EST on 2 December 1988, Atlantis rocketed into crystal-blue Florida skies to begin the second shuttle mission in the wake of the Challenger tragedy. Two months earlier, her sister […] ![]() The Russian-built Zarya module (lower) and U.S.-built Unity node (upper), pictured during assembly operations on STS-88 in December 1998. Photo Credit: NASA Twenty years ago, on 20 November 1998, Russia’s Zarya (“Dawn”) module—the first component of the International Space Station (ISS)—was launched from Site 81 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, atop a […] ![]() Twenty years ago, this month, the grandest engineering endeavor in human history got underway with the dawn of the International Space Station (ISS). Photo Credit: NASA Twenty years ago, this month, a new era began. On 20 November 1998, a Russian Proton-K rocket—descendent of a family of heavylift boosters which had already launched […] |