Apollo & After
Apollo 13, the last Moon landings, Skylab, the Soyuz-Apollo handshake. The first generation of unmanned planetary probes — Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, Voyager.
Part of Space
13 moments in this segment.
- — Luna 16 (First Robotic Sample Return). September 1970. Soviet probe returned 101g of lunar regolith — the first robotic sample return from another world. Demonstrated that lunar samples didn't require astronauts; the USSR's pivot away from crewed lunar.
- — Lunokhod 1. November 17, 1970. First successful planetary rover — Soviet, on the Moon. Drove 10.5 km over 11 lunar days. Retroreflector still used by laser-ranging stations to measure the Earth-Moon distance to centimetre accuracy.
- — Salyut 1 (First Space Station). April 19, 1971. First crewed space station of any kind. Only one crew (Soyuz 11) ever boarded it — and all three were killed by a depressurization on re-entry. The vehicle was de-orbited five months later.
- — Mariner 9 (First Mars Orbiter). November 13, 1971. First spacecraft to orbit another planet — Mars. Arrived during a planet-wide dust storm; once it cleared, Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the solar system) was visible. Rewrote our understanding of Mars geology.
- — Apollo 17 (Last Moon Walk). Last crewed lunar landing. Cernan and Schmitt spent 22 hours outside the lander. Returned the Blue Marble photograph. No human has been to the Moon since.
- — Pioneer 10 (First to Jupiter). March 1972. First spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt; first to fly past Jupiter (December 1973); first to leave the solar system's planetary region. Carried the famous Pioneer plaque designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake.
- — Skylab. First US space station. Launched May 14, 1973; lost a solar panel and a micrometeoroid shield on the way up — repaired by the first crew. Three crews lived aboard before it was abandoned in 1974; reentered over Australia in 1979.
- — Venera 9 (Venus Surface Photos). October 22, 1975. Soviet probe sent the first photographs from the surface of another planet — Venus. Survived 53 minutes at 485°C in 92 atmospheres before pressure crushed it. The visual coup of the Venera program.
- — Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. First international human spaceflight mission. Apollo (Stafford, Brand, Slayton) docked with Soyuz 19 (Leonov, Kubasov) — the first American-Soviet handshake in space. Détente made real for two days.
- — Voyager 2. Launched two weeks before Voyager 1. Only spacecraft to visit all four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Crossed the heliopause in 2018. Still transmitting after 47 years.
- — Voyager 1. Launched September 5, 1977. Now the most distant human-made object — about 24 billion km away as of 2024. Crossed the heliopause in 2012 — first object to leave the heliosphere. Carries the Golden Record.
- — Viking 1 (Mars Lander). First successful soft landing on Mars. Sent back the first photographs from the Martian surface. The biology experiments were inconclusive — debated to this day.
- — Apollo 13. Oxygen-tank explosion en route to the Moon. "Houston, we've had a problem." Mission Control improvised the safe return — using the lunar module as a lifeboat — over four days. The most-watched space disaster-that-wasn't in NASA history.
