Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS on 23 October 2010. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, with Valeri Polyakov spending 437 days and 18 hours on the station between 1994 and 1995. Mir was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits.
Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) was a German rocket scientist and one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. Von Braun is well known as the leader of what has been called the “rocket team” which developed the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his rocket team were scooped up from defeated Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. For fifteen years after World War II, von Braun worked with the U.S. Army in the development of ballistic missiles. At Fort Bliss, they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile. In 1960, his rocket development center transferred from the Army to the newly established NASA and received a mandate to build the giant Saturn rockets. Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon.
This is a composite of images taken of Pluto and Charon during the fly-by of New Horizons on July 14, 2015. The image has been compiled so their relative positions and sizes are correct. Both images were taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on the Ralph telescope experiment. The image of Pluto was taken from a distance of 150,000 miles (240,000 km).
…that the South Korean launch system Naro-1, which made its first flight on 25 August 2009, is based on the Russian Angara (pictured)?
…that when investigating the Challenger accident, Richard Feynman threatened to remove his name from the report unless it included his personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle?