It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN for backward compatibility with historic Buran ( spacecraft ) ALGOL software.

First conceived during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a three-man spacecraft to follow the one-man Project Mercury which put the first Americans in space, Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy's national goal of " landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth " by the end of the 1960s, which he proposed in a May 25, 1961 address to Congress.

Kennedy's goal was accomplished on the Apollo 11 mission when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Lunar Module ( LM ) on the Moon on July 20, 1969 and walked on its surface while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command spacecraft, and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24.

It stands alone in sending manned missions beyond low Earth orbit ; Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, while the final Apollo 17 mission marked the sixth Moon landing and the ninth manned mission beyond low Earth orbit.

While the Mercury capsule could only support one astronaut on a limited Earth orbital mission, the Apollo spacecraft was to be able to carry three astronauts on a circumlunar flight and eventually to a lunar landing.

The program was named after the Greek god of light, music, and the sun by NASA manager Abe Silverstein, who later said that " I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby.

At this point during the pre-mission preparations, the Saturn V rocket's three stages were powered up and drinking water was pumped into the spacecraft.

By the time mission control issued the wake-up call to the crew for flight day two, the spacecraft was approximately away from the Earth, traveling at about.

As the Apollo 16 spacecraft was not due to arrive in lunar orbit until flight day four, flight days two and three were largely preparatory days, consisting of spacecraft maintenance and scientific research.

At the beginning of day three, the spacecraft was about away from the Earth.

The early part of day three was largely housekeeping, spacecraft maintenance and exchanging status reports with mission control in Houston, Texas.

The crew performed the Apollo light flash experiment, or ALFMED, to investigate " light flashes " that were seen by the astronauts when the spacecraft was dark, regardless of whether or not their eyes were open, on Apollo lunar flights.

At the end of the Apollo 16 crew's final full day in space, the spacecraft was approximately from Earth and closing at a rate of about.

When the wake-up call was issued to the Apollo 16 crew for their final day in space by capsule communicator Tony England, the spacecraft was about out from Earth, traveling just over.

The main mission objective was to verify performance of Spacelab systems, determine the interface capability of the orbiter, and measure the environment created by the spacecraft.

Two other satellites made observations at the time of the impact: the Ulysses spacecraft, primarily designed for solar observations, was pointed towards Jupiter from its location 2. 6 AU away, and the distant Voyager 2 probe, some 44 AU from Jupiter and on its way out of the Solar System following its encounter with Neptune in 1989, was programmed to look for radio emission in the 1 – 390 kHz range.

The Elektronika MK-52 calculator ( using the extended B3-34 command set, and featuring internal EEPROM memory for storing programs and external interface for EEPROM cards and other periphery ) was used in Soviet spacecraft program ( for Soyuz TM-7 flight ) as a backup of the board computer.

* 1995 – The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.

Deep Space 1 was the first spacecraft to use Ion powered rocketry, in contrast to the traditional chemical powered rockets.

The next spacecraft to use Autonav was Deep Impact.

The next spacecraft to use NSTAR engines was the Dawn spacecraft, with three redundant units.

The Airlock Module's manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, even recycled the hatch design from its Gemini spacecraft and kludged what was originally designed for the conical Gemini Command Module onto the cylindrical Skylab Airlock Module.

They were designed and used to test spacecraft recovery systems, and escape tower and rocket motors.

It was a solid-fuel rocket designed specially for Project Mercury and theoretically able to carry a spacecraft to an altitude of on a ballistic curve.

The Atlas D rocket required extra strengthening in order to handle the increased weight of the Mercury spacecraft beyond that of the nuclear warheads they were designed to carry.

The Mercury spacecraft was designed to be completely controllable from the ground in the event that something impaired the pilot's ability to function.

Several research spacecraft have been designed and partially or completely constructed, including Skylon, the DC-X, the X-33, and the Roton SSTO.

* Ulysses ( spacecraft ), a space probe designed to study the Sun

The Vostok spacecraft were designed to carry a single cosmonaut.

In case of reentry engine malfunction, the spacecraft was designed to descend within 10 days due to orbital decay.

A spacecraft ( or spaceship ) is a vehicle, vessel or machine designed to fly in space.

Each spacecraft was composed of two main parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars from orbit, and a lander designed to study the planet from the surface.

The Mariner 2 spacecraft was designed and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology.

The DCS was a solid-state electronic system designed to gather information from the scientific instruments on board the spacecraft.

Mariner 3 ( together with Mariner 4 known as Mariner-Mars 1964 ) was one of two identical deep-space probes designed and built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) for NASA's Mariner Mars 1964 Project that were intended to conduct close-up ( flyby ) scientific observations of the planet Mars and transmit information on interplanetary space and the space surrounding Mars, televised images of the Martian surface and occultation data of spacecraft radio signals as affected by the Martian atmosphere back to Earth.

Ed Smylie, who designed the scrubber modification in just two days, said later that he knew the problem was solvable when it was confirmed that duct tape was on the spacecraft: " I felt like we were home free ," he said in 2005.

The spacecraft were also designed to act as communications links to the Mars 6 and 7 landers.

A space station ( or orbital station ) is a spacecraft capable of supporting a crew which is designed to remain in space ( most commonly in low Earth orbit ) for an extended period of time, and to which other spacecraft can dock.

The Zond spacecraft was another derivative, designed to take a crew traveling in a figure-eight orbit around the Earth and the moon but never achieving the degree of safety or political need to be used for such.

A starship or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between stars, as opposed to a vehicle designed for orbital spaceflight or interplanetary travel.

Until this hunter-killer operation can be performed by spacecraft, manned aircraft appear to be the only means available to us.

The LOC included Launch Complex 39, a Launch Control Center, and a 130 million cubic foot ( 3. 7 million cubic meter ) Vehicle Assembly Building in which the space vehicle ( launch vehicle and spacecraft ) would be assembled on a Mobile Launcher Platform and then moved by a transporter to one of several launch pads.

The spacecraft and its three-person crew were retrieved by the.

* The fictitious interplanetary spacecraft Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov from the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke is powered by a fictitious Sakharov drive.

Such a spectrometer will also be used by the Philae lander of the Rosetta spacecraft to probe the surface of the 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet.

He conceived the idea of adding an unalterable and universal message on spacecraft destined to leave the solar system that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it.

In the Brain and Brawn series of novels series by Anne McCaffrey and others, beginning with The Ship Who Sang, a " brainship " is a human body, usually one that could not develop normally, encased in the strongest materials available in that universe, and mentally connected to the controls of a spacecraft.

* planoforming spacecraft, which are crewed by humans telepathically linked with cats to defend against the attacks of malevolent entities in space, who are perceived by the humans as dragons, and by the cats as gigantic rats, in " The Game of Rat and Dragon ".

* 1962 – NASA's Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.

Thus a spacecraft can determine its relative position by tracking such asteroids across the star background, which appears fixed over such timescales.

Existing spacecraft are tracked by their interactions with the transmitters of the Deep Space Network ( DSN ), in effect an inverse GPS.

The star tracker determines spacecraft orientation by comparing the star field to its internal charts.

Such images were of higher resolution than the only previous pictures, of Halley's Comet taken by the Giotto spacecraft.

Extra-vehicular activity ( EVA ) is any activity done by an astronaut or cosmonaut outside of a spacecraft beyond the Earth's appreciable atmosphere.

As they had with the first satellite and first man in space, the Soviets again stunned the world on March 18, 1965 with the first EVA ( commonly referred to as a " space walk ") performed by Alexey Leonov from the Voskhod 2 spacecraft, for 12 minutes outside the spacecraft.