All Stories

We’re hard at work on Season 5 (launching this September!) but before then, we’re giving you a second bite at a topic we spent a long time thinking about this year: what’s in a name? Earlier this season we explored how planetary bodies and their geological features get named. We also recorded an explainer on how NASA names their spacecraft, but we just didn’t have time for it in the original episode. So, what do Snoopy, Spider, and Gumdrop have in common? Find out in this bonus episode!

Earl Swift sought out the full story of the LRV’s origins, development, and traverses  in his new book “Across the Airless Wilds.” In this interview, he tells us he believes the LRV changed everything about the Apollo program.

Every rock can tell us a story, once we know how to read it. The sample designated 15016 tells a story of how two visitors from another world happened to collect it.

Wally Funk is finally going to space. After being the youngest of the female pilots tested by Dr. Lovelace, Funk will become the oldest person to fly into space at age 82.

Space history curator Michael Neufeld recounts the harrowing spacewalk of astronaut Gene Cernan on the Gemini IX-A mission.

The upcoming Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery at the National Air and Space Museum will give visitors a new perspective on the many worlds within our solar system.

Did you know the National Air and Space Museum has a huge art collection? Yeah, we keep that secret pretty well. It all STEMs (see what we did there?) from a program organized by NASA beginning in the 1960s where a small number of American artists got tons of access to launch sites, clean rooms, space suits, spacecraft—you name it, they painted it.

On May 5, 1961, a Redstone rocket hurled Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, 116 miles high and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Freedom 7 parachuted into the Atlantic just 15 minutes and 22 seconds later, after attaining a maximum velocity of 5,180 mph. Shepard, a Navy test pilot and NASA astronaut, became the first American to fly in space.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel to space.

We look back at the extraordinary life of pilot, astronaut, and statesman Michael Collins, who has died at the age of 90.