Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight masked a cascade of hidden failures—spinning modules, failed separations, and a landing no one expected him to survive. Only years later did the truth emerge about the ...

At the height of the Space Race, the United States and the Soviet Union bitterly tried to outdo one another, each attempting to be the first to succeed in a number of scientific and exploratory ...

On the C-SPAN Networks: Cathleen Lewis is a Curator for the Space History Department in the National Air and Space Museum with two videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 2019 ...

On 20 February 1962, NASA astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. The mission was part of NASA’s Mercury human spaceflight programme and came just nine months after Soviet ...

Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn “Gagarin’s Start” into a museum. The pad is known as Gagarin’s Start because it hosted the ...