NASA

This astronaut crossed the Kármán Line (100 km), the internationally accepted boundary of space.

Crossed Kármán Line

This astronaut has spent over a month in space.

Space Resident

STS-9 (Columbia)

A dedicated science flight co-sponsored by NASA and ESA, STS-9 marked the first time an ESA/West German astronaut reached space and the first time a non-American launched on a U.S. mission.

The first reusable launch and landing spacecraft, the Space Shuttle began a new chapter of human space exploration. It launched like a rocket but landed on a runway like a plane. Shuttle crews deployed dozens of commercial satellites and two interplanetary probes to Venus and Jupiter. The Shuttle served as a mini space station and hosted hundreds of biomedical, psychological, physiological, materials science, and physics experiments that have directly benefited life on Earth. The five flight-worthy Shuttles -- Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour -- flew 135 missions over 30 years. The Shuttles helped construct the Russian Mir space station and brought nearly 80% of the International Space Station to orbit. Shuttles also deployed and serviced the Hubble Space Telescope.

Space Shuttle

Skylab 3

This 59-day mission saw the three person crew perform over 1,000 hours of science operations on Skylab and gather data on changes to and overall health of the human body on prolonged space missions. A second Apollo spacecraft was rolled out to the launch pad for potential rescue of the Skylab 3 crew when a fuel leak developed on two of the Apollo Service Module's thruster pods. A rescue was ultimately not needed. Observations of the Sun also continued on this Skylab mission. A spacewalk installed a more permanent and efficient debris and heat shield on the outside of the station.

The main Apollo spacecraft was a Command and Service Module designed to take three astronauts to and from the Moon’s orbit and provide access to the lunar lander during missions. After the Moon program ended, Apollo spacecraft flew three crews to the Skylab space station and performed the historic joint U.S.-Soviet mission in 1975.

Apollo

Owen K. Garriott

United States of America

Skylab 3 EVA 1

Skylab 3 EVA 2

Skylab 3 EVA 3

STS-61-B (Atlantis)

Mexico

This mission deployed three satellites for Australia, Mexico, and the U.S., and took the first Mexican citizen to space. Two spacewalks proved assembling large, pre-formed structures in space was possible, though their shape was crucial -- a key to the eventual construction of the International Space Station. At launch, this became the fastest turnaround between flights of any rocket or spacecraft to date; Atlantis launched for a second time just 54 days after her first mission.

STS-28 (Columbia)

European Space Agency (ESA)

Germany

Brewster H. Shaw Jr.

STS-35 (Columbia)

This astronomical mission flew a suite of telescopes as part of the Spacelab observatory mission ASTRO-1.

Robert A. Parker

Soyuz TM-20

Soyuz TM-20 delivered the EO-17 crew to Space Station Mir. A manual docking was performed after the Soyuz unexpectedly lost automatic tracking of the station.

Soyuz is a human-carrying capsule built and operated by Russia, capable of transporting up to three people to the Space Station at a time. It has been upgraded numerous times since its first use in the 1960s for the Soviet lunar program and was the only crewed vehicle for the Station from 2011 to 2020.

Soyuz

STS-42 (Discovery)

This Spacelab mission focused on the effects of weightlessness on numerous organisms and crystals.

Ulf Merbold

STS-45 (Atlantis)

This was the first mission of the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science pallet, a multinational effort from the U.S., France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan.

Byron K. Lichtenberg

Moonwalker

This astronaut is in the top 5% for number of missions.

Frequent Flyer

Moon Flyer

Apollo 10

The flight that did everything except land on the Moon. Apollo 10 was a full-on dress rehearsal of Apollo 11. This mission would do everything except touch down on the lunar surface. The flight marked the first undocking and redocking of a spacecraft in orbit of a space body other than Earth and achieved the fastest speed to date for a human mission of 39,897 km/h. During the non-landing descent toward the Moon, Stafford and Cernan came within 15 km of the lunar surface. Apollo 10 was a total success. The stage was now set. Apollo 11 would attempt to land humans on the Moon.

Apollo 16

Apollo 16 was the second of three science-focused human lunar landings. Young and Duke spent just shy of 3 days on the Moon's surface and drove a second Moon car 26.7 km. While walking on the Moon's surface, Mission Control told Young Congress had approved funding for the Space Shuttle program; Young responded, "America sure needs that Shuttle."  He would go on to Command the first Shuttle mission almost exactly 9 years later. After leaving lunar orbit, Mattingly performed a spacewalk to retrieve film cassettes. At a distance of 320,000 km, it stands to this day as the farthest spacewalk ever performed from Earth.

STS-1 (Columbia)

The first flight of the Space Shuttle Program, and the first flight of Shuttle Columbia. The mission marked the first time in history a rocket was launched on its very first test flight with people onboard. At liftoff, an overpressure wave from Solid Rocket Booster ignition damaged and bent a critical flight control surface on Columbia, nearly preventing a safe return at the end of the mission. NASA enhanced the sound suppression system at the pad and the issue never recurred.

Gemini 3

The first human flight of NASA's Gemini Program saw two astronauts perform a three-orbit test flight of the new capsule. This mission marked the first time a human spacecraft changed its orbit using its onboard thrusters.

Gemini was a two-person spacecraft designed to prove technologies and procedures for the Apollo lunar landings. Crews proved rendezvous and docking as well as transfer from one ship to another via spacewalk were possible. Gemini demonstrated that humans could live and work in space for the length of time needed for a lunar flight.

Gemini

Gemini 10

This flight marked the first double-rendezvous in human spaceflight history, the first time a person met another spacecraft in space, the first U.S. mission to significantly raise its orbit higher than any human had ever been, and the first time a human spacecraft used a target vehicle's engine to change its orbit and control its orientation. The flight launched 100 minutes after its Agena target vehicle and docked to it 6 hours later. The crew then used the Agena's engine to raise their orbit from 272 km to 763 km -- the highest a human flight had gone to that point. The next day, they made two burns with the Agena to get into the correct orbit to rendezvous with another Agena that had been part of Gemini 8. Collins performed a spacewalk to photograph stars, sunrise, and the Gemini capsule. The crew rendezvoused with the second Agena and Collins performed a second spacewalk to retrieve a micrometeorite collector from the Agena.

John W. Young

Apollo 12

The second human lunar landing. The Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning twice during launch, the first time 36 seconds after liftoff. The first lightning strike caused a loss of almost all instrumentation in the Command Module and knocked all three fuel cells (critical to the mission) offline. Communication with Mission Control became garbled. A second lightning strike struck the rocket 52 seconds after liftoff. Thankfully, the Saturn V flight computer was isolated from the Apollo crew vehicle and kept flying perfectly. A single flight controller in Mission Control remembered a one-off test malfunction of the Command/Service Module signal conditioning electronics (SCE) assembly and made an on-the-fly, educated call to switch the SCE to its backup power source. The physical switch was unknown to the Flight Director and the mission's Commander. It was Lunar Module pilot Alan Bean who remembered the SCE to AUX button from a training incident a year prior when the same simulated failure occurred. After making it safely to Low Earth Orbit, the crew checked over the spacecraft, got the fuel cells back online, and confirmed there was not serious damage to systems. On the ground, flight controllers were worried the pyrotechnics on the parachutes may have fired when the lightning strikes occurred and would therefore not deploy on landing. Since nothing could be done about this, they sent Apollo 12 to the Moon without telling the crew. The mission safely landed very close to NASA's Survey 3 lunar lander; pieces of the probe were removed for return to Earth. After a successful mission, the crew returned to Earth; the parachutes worked perfectly.

Alan L. Bean

STS-3 (Columbia)

The third flight of the Space Shuttle was an eight day mission and an overwhelming success. The two-person crew tested the Shuttle's endurance on orbit and performed several science experiments. The mission is the only Shuttle flight to land in New Mexico instead of Florida or California and marked the first time a human spaceflight ended with a landing in New Mexico.

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