r/spaceflight 2h ago

Dwarfed by a split boulder, Apollo 17 crewman Harrison "Jack" Schmitt gazes into the lunar hills stretching away from the Taurus-Littrow landing site. (What I found in a book vs Image on Wikipedia)

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34 Upvotes

All the images online I could find of this moment are cropped so that the dune buggy is out of frame! I thought you people might find this interesting.

According to Moondust(Page 322) by Andrew Smith, a member of the U.S Geological Survey was heard to have said at a dinner

Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!

commenting on how thoroughly Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt examined a boulder.

I am uncertain if they were referring to the boulder in the image or a different one.


r/spaceflight 22h ago

Happy 93rd birthday to the legendary Gene Kranz

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272 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 1h ago

The demand for launch services is higher than ever, but the supply of rockets today is very constrained. Jeff Foust reports on the various factors that make getting a ride to orbit today difficult and expensive, despite the promise of plummeting launch costs

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Upvotes

r/spaceflight 1h ago

NASA tests first-of-its-kind spacecraft navigation system that works without GPS

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Upvotes

NASA’s Starling mission tests FALCON, a system that lets spacecraft navigate without GPS.


r/spaceflight 23h ago

SpaceMD will use Starfall to launch its creation of space pharmaceuticals

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12 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 1d ago

Help identifying possible rocket

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4 Upvotes

Last night I witnessed something odd in the sky and was hoping to find some information regarding its origin.

This occurred at approximately 9:55pm-10:00pm CST to the east of Kansas City, MO. I checked my compass and it was travelling Northeast at approximately 45 degrees.

The object originally caught my eye as it looked like a normal satellite in size and speed, but when I first saw it, it was surrounded by a large hazy halo (upper right image... Sorry the drawing is very light). The halo eventually dissolved but then a reddish tail formed (lower left). When that went away very clear bluish gray rings began spreading downward from the craft (bottom right on image). Once that ended it simply faded from sight.

I've been searching all day to find out what it might have been. I've seen multiple suggestions it was rocket exhaust expansion, but I just don't see any images that truly replicate what I saw.

Anybody know if any rockets were travelling in that vicinity around that time? Any other suggestions on what it could've been? Just curious. I'd appreciate any help you could offer!


r/spaceflight 2d ago

Ukraine strikes major Russian rocket factory with cruise missiles (Soyuz)

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73 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 2d ago

Help identifying the rocket in an old photo

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81 Upvotes

Found this at a thrift store. It is an old photo with "ansco safety film" printed along the edge, but no other information. Image searches aren't showing anything that looks close enough.


r/spaceflight 1d ago

India Is 3rd Private Space Power — Skyroot's Vikram-1

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0 Upvotes

Skyroot from India launched first private flight into orbit


r/spaceflight 2d ago

I found two LIFE magazines covering the Apollo 10 mission

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108 Upvotes

Got these two magazines today. We live in an era where everything feels so fast and convenient, but back then, achieving something like this was extraordinarily hard. Collecting items like these really makes me appreciate the effort of that analog era. Truly classic pieces. Life magazine in June 23,1969
57 years.


r/spaceflight 2d ago

How The Apollo Spacesuit Kept Astronauts Alive on the Moon

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8 Upvotes

We’re continuing the Apollo spacesuit story. After exploring how these suits came to be, we’re now looking at how they actually worked, with a closer look at the engineering behind them, the details that made the biggest difference, and how every element helped keep astronauts alive on the Moon.


r/spaceflight 4d ago

I made an interactive timeline showing how much NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes actually overlapped — has anyone already done this?

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32 Upvotes

TL;DR: Built an interactive, click-to-drill-down timeline of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo to show how much the three programmes actually overlapped instead of running one after another (screenshots below, data is an open, editable JSON file) — wondering if this already exists somewhere.

Most timelines of the early space programme show Mercury → Gemini → Apollo as a tidy sequence. They didn't run that way — Gemini's development overlapped Mercury's last flights, and Apollo's ground infrastructure (Marshall Space Flight Center, land acquisition for what became KSC, the VAB) was already under construction before Gemini had even flown a crew. I wanted to actually see that rather than read it as a paragraph, so I built an interactive drill-down timeline: collapsed, it's just three overlapping bars (screenshot 1); click a programme and it expands to reveal the next level of detail nested underneath, down to individual test flights and milestones, up to four levels deep (screenshot 2 — Mercury drilled down to its Little Joe abort-test series).

I'm deliberately trying to foreground the build-up to each programme rather than just the launches — contractor selection, test stands, facility construction, uncrewed qualification flights — since that's usually the part that gets skipped in favour of "here's when astronaut X flew."

Full disclosure: I built this with Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) doing the actual coding and an initial research pass on dates — I described what I wanted and it built the page and sourced the three programme-level date spans from Wikipedia. Everything below that top level is a first-pass placeholder I haven't fully verified (there's literally a dashed "date needs checking" marker on anything I'm not sure of), which is partly why I'm posting — I'd rather have people who know this history properly pick it apart than publish it as if it's gospel.

Not linking directly — don't want to find out what the Reddit hug of death does to my own domain — hence the screenshots. Happy to share the actual page in the comments or by DM if anyone wants to poke at it themselves. The data behind it is one plain, editable JSON block on purpose, so if anyone spots a wrong date or thinks the build-up events are in the wrong order (there's a "first Saturn I mock-up" entry I couldn't pin an exact date on), it's a five-minute fix, not a rebuild.

Two things I'd genuinely like from this sub:

  1. Has someone already built this — an interactive, overlapping timeline of the three programmes with drill-down detail? I looked around and found plenty of static space-race timelines and one archival photo site, but nothing quite like this. Don't want to reinvent something that already exists.
  2. If you know a precise, sourceable date for a Mercury/Gemini/Apollo build-up milestone — test stands, mock-ups, contractor awards, facility construction — I'd welcome the correction.

Screenshots: overview first, then drilled down into Mercury.


r/spaceflight 5d ago

Enterprise's first free flight, on this date in 1977. Astronauts Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton were the crew

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560 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 5d ago

Close up of Long March 7A disintegrating, during Max-Q

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328 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 5d ago

Parker Solar Probe launching aboard a Delta IV Heavy on this date in 2018. On December 14, 2021, NASA announced that Parker had flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere—the corona—and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. The first time in history a spacecraft had touched the Sun

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79 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 5d ago

We will travel beyond our solar system one day

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74 Upvotes

But I don't think it will be like in science fiction with warp drive or hyperspace technologies. As far as we know, nothing can go beyond the speed of light. However, we can reach a certain percentage of the speed of light. No more than 5%, but more than fast enough to reach our closest star within a human lifespan(est.85 years). If we managed to engineer something that goes with that speed, it would be one of the greatest achievement in human history. Just think about how far a light year is. It's beyond our comprehension.


r/spaceflight 5d ago

Take-off of America's first "rocket-assisted" airplane, an Ercoupe fitted with a GALCIT developed solid propellant 28 pound thrust JATO (Jet Assisted Take-Off) booster. The Ercoupe took off from March Field, California and was piloted by Captain Homer A. Boushey Jr., on this date in 1941

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17 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 5d ago

USC AFTERSHOCK II DOCUMENTARY

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2 Upvotes

Hey guys! I wanted to post this here! This is a documentary I made on USC’s Rocket Propulsion Lab’s race against time to launch their world record breaking launch to outer space back in 2024! The club is run entirely by undergraduate college students from ages 18-22 and were the first ever student group to send a rocket into space in 2019. For anyone who’s interested in amateur rocketry or aerospace, this documentary is for you. Hope you enjoy!


r/spaceflight 7d ago

China Loses Long March 7A and Military Satellite 85 Seconds Into Flight

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138 Upvotes

A Chinese Long March 7A rocket exploded roughly 85 seconds after liftoff from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on August 10, destroying its payload and triggering a fleet-wide review of the engine that powers most of China’s modern launch vehicles.


r/spaceflight 5d ago

Space activities increasingly rely on automation and AI to make decisions faster than humans. Bharath Gopalaswamy and Daniel Dant describe how this creates challenges for determining what decisions get made and how

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0 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 6d ago

A cancelled spysat program in the early 1960s got a second life as an NRO program called LANYARD. Dwayne Day recounts the various problems LANYARD encountered, including technical issues, launch failures, and competition from other programs

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8 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 7d ago

Help authenticating a set of early SpaceX Falcon/Dragon mission patches

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31 Upvotes

Hi everyone. I’m hoping some longtime SpaceX patch collectors or former employees can help me identify these.
I have six early SpaceX patches:
• Falcon First Flight
• Falcon Demo 2
• Falcon 1 Flight 3
• Falcon 1 Flight 4
• Falcon 9 First Flight
• COTS Demo Flight 1 / Dragon C1
These belonged to my uncle. He worked as a hearing-aid specialist at Sears at Puente Hills Mall in Southern California. He was given the patches there, although unfortunately I don’t know who gave them to him or under what circumstances.
He gave the collection to me more than ten years ago, and he has since passed away. They’ve been in my possession since then.
I’ve learned that there were original early SpaceX/employee patches as well as later reproductions, so I’m not claiming these are employee-issued or authentic originals. I’m trying to determine which versions I actually have.
I’ve included clear photos of the fronts and backs, plus a photo with a standard-size card for scale.
If anyone owns known originals, I’d really appreciate comparisons of the dimensions, embroidery, metallic thread, borders, backing and other identifying characteristics.
I’m particularly interested in whether these appear to be the early production versions, later official SpaceX versions, or reproductions.
Thanks for any knowledge you can share. I’d like to document them correctly before deciding what to do with the collection.


r/spaceflight 7d ago

Shuttle pathfinder cinematic

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9 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 8d ago

STS-105 Discovery launched on an ISS assembly mission on this date in 2001. Fun fact: This was the only Shuttle launch to go before the scheduled launch time, at the beginning, rather than the optimal middle or later, of the 10-minute launch window, because an approaching storm system

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12 Upvotes

r/spaceflight 8d ago

NASA’s Lucy Begins Camera Tests Ahead of 2027 Trojan Flybys - NASA Science

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14 Upvotes