On Aug. 10, 1972, an Earth-grazing fireball burst through the sky over North America.



It didn't hit the ground, but instead it passed straight through the sky. The fireball entered the atmosphere somewhere over Utah and passed...

On Aug. 9, 1976, the Soviet space program launched its last moon mission.



Luna 24 was a robotic sample return mission and the third of its kind. It lifted off on a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan...

On Aug. 3, 2004, NASA launched the MESSENGER spacecraft on a historic first mission to orbit the planet Mercury.



The spacecraft's name stands for the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging mission. It...

On Aug. 2, 1971, a lunar liftoff was televised for the first time. Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin spent three days on the moon before departing in the lunar module, named "Falcon."



An RCA TV camera was...

On July 31, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts drove on the moon for the first time.



David Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, and James Irwin, the lunar module pilot explored the moon for three days by driving around in the lunar...

On July 27, 1962, two Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soviet airliner and experienced weightlessness without going to space.



This was the first time cosmonauts completed zero-G training on an airplane. The Tupelov Tu-104 was a...

On July 26, 2005, the space shuttle Discovery launched on the first "Return to Flight" mission following the Columbia disaster that killed seven crewmembers a little over two years earlier.



A few seconds after launching from...

On July 19, 1985, a high school teacher named Christa McAuliffe was selected to become the first American civilian to fly to space.



McAuliffe won NASA's Teacher in Space Project and was selected from more than 11,000...

On July 14, 2015, a spacecraft flew by Pluto for the first time! NASA's New Horizons spacecraft spent 9.5 years making the 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto. When it finally arrived, it took some amazing photos of the dwarf planet's...

On July 11, 1979, the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab made a spectacular return to Earth as it burned up in the atmosphere, showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia. The last crew left the space station in 1974....

On July 9, 1979, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter. It came within 354,000 miles (570,000 kilometers) of the planet's cloud tops. Voyager 2 was one of two space probes launched by NASA in 1977 to study the...

On July 8, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis launched on its final mission. Atlantis was the last of NASA's space shuttles to fly into space. It went on 33 missions since 1985, ferrying astronauts to and from space stations, and even...

On July 7, 1961, the U.S. Air Force launched a satellite called Discoverer 26 into orbit with a classified payload. Discoverer 26 was part of a series of reconnaissance or spy satellites whose missions were kept top-secret by the...

On July 6, 1938, an American astronomer named Seth Barnes Nicholson discovered Jupiter's moon Lysithea. Nicholson spotted Lysithea from Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where he had previously discovered three more Jovian moons....

On July 5, 2015, the Russian Progress 60 cargo ship successfully docked with the International Space Station. The spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 3. It was packed with more than 3 tons of food,...

On July 2, 1985, the European Space Agency launched the Giotto space probe to get a close-up look at Halley's Comet. Nearly nine months later on March 14, 1986, Giotto became the first spacecraft to observe of a comet up close when it...

On June 30, 1908, a giant fireball exploded over the forests of Tunguska in Siberia. The impact leveled hundreds of miles of forest, and the exact cause is a bit of a mystery. At the time of the explosion, it was too difficult to reach...

Happy Birthday, Kennedy Space Center! On July 1, 1962, NASA established the Launch Operations Center — which was later renamed the Kennedy Space Center — on the east coast of Florida. After President John F. Kennedy famously said that...

On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride became America's first woman in space after she and four colleagues blasted off on the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission. The astronauts spent 6 days in space deployed two...

On June 17, 1985, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched on NASA's STS-51-G mission, carrying payload specialist Sultan Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud, a Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who became the first Arab and first Muslim in space. And...

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Nikolayeva Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. Tereshkova, a cosmonaut with then-Soviet Russia, launched into space on the Vostok 6 mission and orbited Earth 48 times in 70.8 hours. That's...

On June 15, 2011, Iran launched satellite Rasad-1 into orbit around Earth. Rasad-1 (the name means Observation 1 in Farsi) is an imaging satellite that was sent into a 162-mile orbit by an Iranian Safir rocket. This was Iran's third...

On June 14, 1914, the first patent for a liquid-fueled rocket design was granted to Dr. Robert Goddard, an American scientist and rocket pioneer. In the patent, Goddard described a rocket fueled with liquid propellants (liquid nitrous...

On June 13, 2013, China's crewed Shenzhou 10 spacecraft made its successful docking with the Tiangong-1 space lab, marking the country's second mission to the mini-space station. This kicked off 12 days of docked operations for Shenzhou...