Space
Bruce McCandless floating in space with a manned maneuvering unit, a nitrogen-propelled backpack, on Feb. 12, 1984
Photograph from NASA
space pioneer
december 8, 1952 | Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff
It’s been a long time since most of us felt the need to Draw a smiley face on the moon. Children do that all the time, but children like to see smiley faces everywhere—on dolls and balloons and lollipops and, yes, on pictures of the moon and the sun and the planets. Scary things—or at least strange things—become friendly when they have a happy face, so children’s worlds are filled with them. Our entire species performs the same anthropomorphizing trick, often when we’re not even trying. We see eyes and noses and teeth in the windows and headlights and grilles of our cars.
We look at the random swirls in a piece of marble, and a few errant markings sort themselves into a grin or a glower or a frown. Ages ago, we did the same thing with the lunar surface, with the mottled reflections of mountains and maria becoming what we call the man in the moon.
That humanizing impulse was quickly left behind after the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. lofted their Explorer and Sputnik satellites. Space was not, we quickly learned, a friendly and familiar place. It was a place of lethal energies and killing cold, of gravity fields that are crushingly evident and then suddenly absent, of pitiless physics that makes traveling through the void seem reasonable and achievable when you’re working it all through on paper but is a whole different thing when you try it out for real.
And so the journey to space became not a grand sweep but a cautious creep, an incremental thing that both sides of the Cold War world reported with a mixture of pride and humility. TIME—reluctantly, surely—made Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev its 1959 Man of the Year, featuring him on the cover with a comical Kremlin crown on his head and Sputnik balanced on his fingertips.
“Nikita has made the most of his shiny new rockets,” TIME wrote. “He has exploited the Sputniks at home and abroad.” We could try to make Khrushchev look the fool; we could describe his space machines as if they were toys; we could even infantilize him by referring to him by his first name only. But the man earned the cover, and we grudgingly let him have it.
It didn’t get much better in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin—with his matinee-idol looks and his hammer-and-sickle heritage—became the first man in space, orbiting Earth aboard his Vostok 1 spacecraft. Gagarin, too, made TIME’s cover, but this time the story was far more than merely political; it was epochal, and even the sulking Western press could not deny it.
“Hats were heaved aloft. Russians cheered, hugged each other, telephoned their friends,” TIME wrote. “Vostok was not an unmanned satellite—impersonal, cold, emotionally empty. It had carried an ordinary man soaring across the face of the heavens, and mankind’s imagination had soared with him.”
That, really, was the nut of the matter. Rockets were great, satellites were great. But as soon as the machine carried a person—a diplomatic attaché representing the entire species—the game changed entirely.
It was for those high stakes that the exploration game was played—and mostly won—throughout the first half-century of the space age. TIME paid tribute to the men who flew the ships—Al Shepard and John Glenn, among the first Americans in space; Alexei Leonov, the chubby-faced, everyman cosmonaut who, 20 years before Mikhail Gorbachev, softened the image of the great Red Menace—and to the men who sent the explorers aloft: America’s expat-German rocket designer Wernher von Braun, NASA’s brilliant flight director Chris Kraft.
We paid tribute to the rhapsodic moments too. An ugly, convulsant 1968 ended with the sweet peace of a Christmas Eve broadcast by the Apollo 8 crewmen as they became the first human beings to orbit the moon, and astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders were named TIME’s Men of the Year. Just seven months later, Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, and with only grainy TV footage of the event available and the photographs that had been taken on the surface not yet having been carried to a darkroom, developed and distributed, TIME put an illustration of Armstrong on the cover and quoted Archibald MacLeish inside:
“O silver evasion in our farthest thought—
‘the visiting moon’ ... ‘the glimpses of the moon’
and we have touched you!”
There would be horror and sorrow and sadness to come. Seven men and women would die aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986; seven more would die aboard Columbia in 2003. And a spacecraft that probably never should have flown would be mothballed forever. Perhaps for lack of a new human mission, we came to love our robots too. The little Sojourner rover toddled across Mars in 1997, and the giant Curiosity rover followed in 2012, and we celebrated those accomplishments with at least some of the old Apollo joy—having grown up enough in the decades that had passed to realize that a robotic extension of human ingenuity is in some ways no less an emissary of the species than an actual man or woman.
We are, surely, still infants in the space game. Our most distant machines are only now leaving the solar system, and our astronauts have paddled no farther than the nearby moon. But we’re coming of age slowly, slowly, in a universe that has nothing but time. It will be there waiting as we choose to edge farther and farther into its depths.
Wernher von Braun
February 17, 1958
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
The U.S.S.R. stunned the world by launching its satellite Sputnik into space in 1957, but four months later, with the help of a rocket scientist trained in Germany, the U.S. orbited its own, Explorer I.
To some, Von Braun’s transfer of loyalty from Nazi Germany to the U.S. seemed to come too fast, too easy. Von Braun’s critics say he is more salesman than scientist; actually, he learned through the bitterest experience that his space dreams had to be sold (“I have to be a two-headed monster—scientist and public-relations man”). Others claim that the onetime boy wonder of rocketry has become too conservative, e.g., a West Coast rocketeer says that Von Braun is wary of unproved new ideas, no matter how promising, and that he “still takes the conventional view that we should go into space with chemical rockets, with overgrown missiles of conventional design.” To this, Wernher von Braun pleads guilty. “The more you’re in this business,” he says, “the more conservative you get. I’ve been in it long enough to be very conservative, to want to improve what we’ve got rather than begin by building what we haven’t.” So long as the frontiers of space are broken, Wernher von Braun does not care how; he would happily ride a broomstick into the heavens.
U.S. vs. Russia
January 19, 1959
Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff
The Soviets fired another volley when its Lunik spacecraft left Earth’s orbit. It overshot its intended target, the moon, but it threw another scare into the American public.
What is the motive for the push into space? This question gets many sharply conflicting answers. Some military strategists believe that a U.S. rocket base on the moon, which could never be destroyed by surprise attack, would provide the supreme deterrent to any earth aggressor. Most scientists do not agree. Nor do they think much of the idea of armed satellite bases. They see little reason to shoot from a satellite when a rocket shot from solid ground can hit any target on earth. But satellites may prove to have value as “eyes in the sky” over enemy territory. They can also serve as communication relays and act as aids for navigation.
But the rivalry with Russia is not a simple propaganda battle. Says one spaceman: “We could concentrate entirely on our military developments and let the Russians have space to themselves. Would we thus make ourselves impregnable? No, because the rest of the world simply would not believe that we were impregnable. It would look to Russia as the clear leader—and the battle would be lost before it was fought.”
Yuri Gagarin
April 21, 1961
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
For its next trick, Moscow sent a man into space. A Russian farm boy turned pilot orbited Earth for nearly two hours, turning mankind’s fantasies of space travel into reality.
Standing atop the Lenin-Stalin tomb, the most sacred spot in Communist Moscow, Gagarin was greeted by the Presidium, the powerful ruling body of the Soviet Union. [Nikita] Khrushchev made a long speech comparing him to Columbus, naming him a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarding him the brand-new title of First Hero Cosmonaut. The new major, neat in his grey and blue uniform, spoke with admirable poise, the party line rolling easily off his tongue. He thanked the party, the government and Premier Khrushchev for trusting him, a simple Soviet pilot, with the first flight to outer space. “While in outer space,” he said, “I was thinking about our party and about our homeland.” Next day, the stories began to take on an added polish. Russian papers published reports that Gagarin had slept like a baby the night before his flight, that he had climbed into the Vostok as calmly as if he were taking off on a fishing trip.
Alan Shepard
May 12, 1961
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
Upping the ante and seemingly sure of success, the U.S. invited the world to tune in on television to watch the first American astronaut shot into space, for a 15-minute ride around the globe.
In Europe and the U.S. most space spectators agreed with Leonard J. Carter, secretary of the British Interplanetary Society: “The Americans had the right way of doing it. Unlike the Russians, they allowed us all to take part in the fantastic adventure. I was pretty well right up there in the capsule with him.” Even in the first flush of worldwide praise, U.S. spacemen did not deceive themselves. They still have a universe to conquer. The Russians are far in front of them, and even if Project Mercury puts a manned capsule into true orbit by the end of 1961 (a hopeful schedule that few scientists take seriously), there is always a chance that the Russians will make an even more spectacular shot.
But Shepard’s flight was nevertheless a great U.S. gain, a shot in the arm for U.S. enthusiasts. U.S. spacemen, and the businessmen, engineers, Congressmen and assorted civilians who support them, are once again dreaming brave dreams. Daring and hopeful projects are making the rounds: there is confident talk of nuclear rockets that will penetrate far into space, giant, solid-propellant boosters to lift great weights off the earth and permit manned flights far beyond the known world.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., spectators follow the launch of the Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7, manned by U.S. astronaut John Glenn
Photograph by Paul Slade
John Glenn
March 2, 1962
Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff
The world was transfixed as Glenn commanded the first U.S. manned orbital spaceflight. In four hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds, he completed three rotations around Earth.
This is a new ocean,” said President Kennedy, “and I believe that the U.S. must sail on it.” The President, still tingling from a day of thrill and success, shared by the nation and the world, was paying tribute to Lieut. Colonel John Herschel Glenn, 40, the freshly commissioned admiral of that new ocean ... John Glenn accomplished through his flight in the heavens—which he laconically called a “successful outing” far more than a brief and exciting escape from man’s earthbound environment ... By taking over the controls himself and proving that man can “fly” a capsule through space ... Glenn also struck a blow for man’s genius and versatility, answering the critics who claim that instruments can do anything better in space than man. Said Glenn, “Now we can get rid of some of that automatic equipment and let man take over.”
Aleksei Leonov
March 26, 1965
Leonov was the first astronaut to walk in space. He wore an inflatable airlock suit that became very rigid as he made his way back to the capsule. Thinking on his feet, he bled some air out of the suit.
Tied to a capsule by a 16-ft. tether, the first human satellite whirled through the vacuum of space at 18,000 m.p.h. For ten minutes Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov drifted and spun through dreamlike gyrations while he followed the spaceship Voskhod II in its swift, elliptical path around the distant earth. Then, as easily and efficiently as he had emerged from his ship, Leonov climbed back inside. After 15 more orbits, he and his comrade, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, began the long flight home ...
Dim and probably purposely fuzzy shots showed the round white top of a helmet poking slowly out of a hatch. Then came the visored face of a man, followed by his shoulders and his arms. He seemed to push something away with his left hand before he moved his left arm back and forth as if to test its freedom. He reached for a hand rail, and quickly his entire body came clear of the hatch. Now it could be seen that he was dressed in a bulky pressure suit, with cylinders strapped on his back and a thick cable twisting behind him. The camera followed as Leonov tumbled and turned through casual somersaults while the curving edge of the distant, sunlit earth supplied a moving backdrop ... Light streaming through a porthole showed the spacecraft to be revolving at about one revolution per minute.
Chris Kraft
August 27, 1965
Portrait by Henry Koerner
Thirty-six minutes after Gemini 5 launched, the oxygen-supply tank of the fuel system dropped to dangerously low levels, threatening to scuttle the mission. The flight would last the intended eight days.
An anxious quiet set in ... Kraft faced his responsibility. Go? Or no go? Should he bring his ship down or reach for 18 revolutions? ... The flight director called in his engineers, conferred with top NASA brass. Pride and prestige were involved; no manned U.S. spacecraft had ever failed to complete its planned mission. But Kraft, as ever, was the cool and deliberate flight engineer. He used every available moment to weigh every contingency. He ran a check of the spacecraft. All the key systems ... were normal and running perfectly ... By this time Kraft and his experts were satisfied that the oxygen pressure had stabilized at 71 lbs. ... Said Kraft later: “We decided we were in reasonably good shape—that we had the minimum power we needed, and that there was a chance the problem might straighten itself out ...”
The decision was a matter of hardheaded determination. With the guts to gamble after carefully considering the odds, Kraft and his ground controllers kept Gemini 5 up in the air, and they kept its chances of success very much alive. Their measured confidence in themselves, their machines and their spacemen was a testament to the considerable achievements of the space age—it was a reminder of how much man has learned about the arcane art of operating in the cold reaches beyond his own atmosphere.
Race for the Moon
December 6, 1968
Illustration by Robert Grossman
Apollo 8—launched Dec. 21, 1968, on a Saturn V rocket, strong enough to propel a spaceship to the moon—was the first manned mission to a lunar orbit, eclipsing Soviet plans to send a man to the moon first.
The V-2 rocket and its designers eventually helped launch both the U.S. and the Russian missile programs, as well as the moon race that was to follow. Even today’s liquid-fuel rockets are simply highly evolved descendants of that original V2 ... By 1961, when President Kennedy proclaimed a national goal of landing men on the moon before the end of the decade, the Soviets had already used huge rockets to blast far ahead of the U.S. In September 1959, only two years after they successfully orbited Sputnik 1, the Soviets hit the moon with Luna 2. That was 21 years before the U.S. matched the feat with Ranger 4 ... Not until more than six years later did Lunar Orbiter 1 televise similar shots to the U.S. In the middle ’60s, however, a vitalized U.S. space program all but wiped out the Soviet lead in the moon race.
At the end of the turbulent terrestrial year 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, in lunar orbit, sent back the peaceful image known as Earthrise
Photograph from NASA
Man on the Moon
July 25, 1969
Illustration by Louis Glanzman
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong’s iconic words spoken from the moon—a triumph of science and technology.
The tension was obvious in the voices of both the crew and the controller. Just 160 ft. from the surface ... only 114 seconds of fuel remained. [Neil] Armstrong and [Edwin] Aldrin had 40 seconds to decide if they could land within the next 20 seconds. If they could not, they would have to abort ... “Houston,” Armstrong called. “Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed ...” It was a wild, incredible moment. There were cheers, tears and frantic applause at Mission Control in Houston “You got a lot of guys around here about to turn blue,” the NASA communicator radioed to Eagle. “We’re breathing again.” A little later, Houston added: “There’s lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world.” “There are two of them up here,” responded Eagle. “And don’t forget the one up here,” [Michael] Collins piped in from the orbiting Columbia.
James Lovell, Fred Haise and John Swigert
April 27, 1970
“Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” The saga of Apollo 13 began. Two oxygen tanks failed, and for the next 10 days the world held its breath as it witnessed the marvel that was Mission Control.
For four days a fractured world inured to mass suffering and casual death had found common cause in the struggle to save three lives. The magic and mystery of space exploration, the realization that James Lovell, Fred Haise and John Swigert were not simply three Americans on a scientific mission but also humanity’s envoys to the future, had served to bind men and nations in a rare moment of unity. Perhaps the largest audience in history watched the return, participating through TV’s intimacy in every moment of the final, fiery descent. Journey’s end was safe and all according to script, in sharp contrast to the crisis of mid-voyage, which had been full of unprecedented danger and breathtaking improvisation.
Space Spectacular
July 21, 1975
Illustration by Birney Lettick
The Apollo-Soyuz space project was the first joint space mission involving the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It tested docking systems and techniques that might be needed for space rescue.
At 8:02 a.m. E.D.T. on Saturday, after 44 hours of orbital togetherness, the ships will separate. They will link up once again briefly in a test of the Soviet docking mechanism. About three hours later, the spacemen will bid each other a final do svedanya and goodbye.
Traveling in a slightly lower orbit and at a higher speed, Soyuz will gradually pull away from Apollo. Some 38 hours later, it will fire its braking rocket and enter an arcing course back to earth. At 6:51 a.m. E.D.T. next Monday, Soyuz is scheduled to land under its single giant parachute east of the Kazakhstan launch site. The Americans will remain in orbit another three days before their Pacific splashdown on July 24, performing a variety of different chores—some aimed at understanding more about the earth.
Saturn
November 24, 1980
Image by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Voyager 1 took stunning images of the planet called the gem of the solar system, revealing that Saturn’s rings are much more intricate than ever imagined.
As more pictures came in, Saturn’s many-splendored rings began looking more and more like grooves in a celestial gold record. Even the Cassini division, a dark area first noticed three centuries ago and once thought to be the only gap in an otherwise solid surface, suddenly showed rings within it. At least two other rings were spotted slightly off center, like wobbly wheels on an old car, a curious and as yet inexplicable quirk. To complicate matters, near the outer edge of Saturn’s phonograph disc, the ring shows sinewy strands of material that look as if they had been twisted into braiding. Equally perplexing, spokes seem to form in some regions of the rings as the material whirls out from the planet’s shadow. Such aggregations of particles—apparently very tiny ones, judging from the way they reflect sunlight—should be quickly ripped apart, like a spoonful of sugar being stirred in a cup of coffee. Yet somehow the spokes survive for hours at a time, almost as if they were intentionally setting out to destroy scientific theories about the rings. Says University of Arizona Astronomer Bradford Smith, chief of Voyager’s photo-interpretation team: “Those spokes are giving us nightmares!”
The Space Shuttle
April 27, 1981
Photograph by Neil Leifer
The space shuttle was the most sophisticated craft ever built. It ushered in a new era of space travel, building enthusiasm in a nation that had grown weary of space travel and cost.
The real “show stopper,” of course, might have been the landing. But it was breathtakingly “nominal,” NASA lingo for “perfect.” Crossing the coast below Big Sur at Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, or about 5,100 m.p.h., [pilot Bob] Crippen crowed: “What a way to come to California!” [Commander John] Young lost his cool only after he had artfully landed Columbia right on the runway’s center line. Eager to make an exit, he urged Houston to get the reception crews to speed up their “sniffing” chores—ridding the ship of noxious gases with exhausts and fans. When he was finally allowed to emerge, 63 min. after touchdown, he bounded down the stairs, checked out the tiles and landing gear, then jubilantly jabbed the air with his fists. It was probably Young’s most uncontrolled move of the entire flight.
Curiously, Young’s and Crippen’s heartbeat patterns reversed on takeoff and landing. Both are normally in the 60s. At launch Young’s rose only to 85 beats a minute, while Crippen’s soared to 135. Returning, Young’s pulse rate zipped up to 130 as he flew the craft in. Crippen’s stayed around 85. To be sure, Young’s racing pulse slowed down soon after landing—and the nation’s is likely to do the same.
Space Shuttle Challenger
February 10, 1986
Photograph by Bruce Weaver
It was one of NASA’s darkest days. A faulty O ring in one of two solid rocket boosters burned a hole in the external fuel tank. Christa McAuliffe, America’s first civilian in space, and six other astronauts perished.
Roger, go with throttle up,” [commander Dick] Scobee confirmed. The message came at 70 seconds into Challenger’s flight. NASA’s long-range television cameras had been following Challenger’s shiny white rocket plume, recording the graceful roll that had awed the spectators. But then the cameras caught an ominously unfamiliar sight, imperceptible to those below ... NASA analysts [later] said that an orange glow had first flickered just past the center of the orbiter ... Milliseconds later, the fire had flared out and danced upward. Suddenly, there was only a fireball. Piercing shades of orange and yellow and red burst out of a billowing white cloud, engulfing the disintegrating spacecraft ... The configuration resembled a giant monster in the sky, its two claws reaching frantically forward.
Life Beyond Planet Earth
February 5, 1996
Digital montage by Seth Shostack
New planets have been discovered. And some may contain water in liquid form, presenting the possibility of life as we know it. How many worlds are similar to ours?
Everyone wants to be the next to find a distant world. The scientists are eagerly awaiting the results from the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), a newly orbiting European satellite that can detect the faint heat from distant planets. They’re looking forward to the 1997 installation of a new infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which could take a picture of at least one of the newly discovered worlds.
Most promising of all, they’re buoyed by a newly unveiled NASA initiative, known as the Origins project, that will build a generation of space telescopes to search for new worlds. Says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: “We are restructuring the agency to focus on our customer, the American people.” And the public excitement about this field, he says, “is beyond belief.”
Pathfinder on Mars
July 14, 1997
Photograph by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The Mars Pathfinder mission delivered a lander and a robotic rover to the planet to conduct experiments and analyses, transmitting almost 17,000 images to Earth.
When Pathfinder was closer than seven miles above the Martian hardscrabble and two minutes from landing, a 40-ft. parachute opened. Less than 1,000 ft. up, a swaddling of shock-absorbing airbags inflated. Immediately after that, a cluster of retrorockets fired for a quick 2-sec. burst, applying a final brake. The almost comically balloonlike ship then struck the surface at about 22 m.p.h., bounced as high as 50 ft. and finally came to rest somewhere in the 4.6 billion-year-old dust ...
It was just after 4 p.m. when the images began to appear on mission control monitors. They were, by any measure, astounding: scrub plains without the scrub, prairie land without the prairie grass. The eye, schooled to scout such familiar terrain for equally familiar landmarks, scanned briefly for cactus until common sense reminded the viewer that there would be none. “The little engine that could,” said [chief engineer Rob] Manning after the first clutch of pictures appeared, “did.” Added [flight systems manager Brian] Muirhead: “We’ve scored a major home run here.”
Space Shuttle Columbia
February 10, 2003
Photograph by Dr. Scott Lieberman
The tragedy of Columbia began on its launch, when a piece of foam broke off the external fuel tank and struck insulating tiles on the left wing’s front edge. That doomed the crew upon re-entry.
So the reunions were ready, the celebrations waiting at the Kennedy Space Center, where Columbia was due to land. In Spokane, Wash., neighbors of [commander Michael] Anderson’s parents thought maybe they were having a party Saturday morning, a day to celebrate their son’s second space adventure, but then it was the pastor coming and a neighbor with groceries because the truth was on TV.
The countdown clock in Florida had started counting back up, when the landing time had passed and the shuttle had not arrived. People watching in eastern Texas heard a crushing rumble outside, the dogs whined, and horses started, and a poisonous rain of broken shuttle pieces fell onto backyards and roadsides and parking lots, through the roof of a dentist’s office, bits of machinery in Nacogdoches ... “There are no survivors,” the President said, but by then we had been watching the endless video of what looked like the shooting stars of August, knowing that those bright white puffs of star were made of metal and rubber and men and women.
Curiosity Rover
August 20, 2012
Photo-illustration by Joe Zeff
NASA’s Curiosity pushed space exploration into the 21st century. The massive, sophisticated rover’s mission: to find out whether the Red Planet has the ingredients to harbor life.
Curiosity’s landing site is a formation known as Gale Crater, 96 miles (155 km) wide. Located in the southern Martian hemisphere, it is thought to be up to 3.8 billion years old—well within Mars’ likely wet period and thus once a large lake ... Channels that appear to have been carved by water run down both the crater walls and the mountain base, and an alluvial fan—the radiating channels that define earthly deltas—is stamped into the soil near the prime landing site. All this is irresistible to geologists searching for the basic conditions for life ...
The impulse to sentimentalize Curiosity—to treat it almost like a human astronaut—is hard to resist. “The rover is getting ready to wake up for its first day in a new place,” said mission manager Jennifer Trosper at an early postlanding news conference. Describing what the science team’s work schedule will be like, [mission systems manager Mike] Watkins says, “The rover’s day ends on Mars around 3 or 4 p.m. The rover tells us what she did today, and that ... lets us plan her day tomorrow.”
NGC 6302 spreads insect-like 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpio, as seen in 2009 by the Hubble Space Telescope
Photograph from NASA