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 crew carried out various housekeeping and maintenance tasks aboard the spacecraft and ate a meal before concluding the day.

RTGs had been used for years in planetary exploration without mishap: the Lincoln Experimental Satellites 8 / 9, launched by the U. S. Department of Defense, had 7 % more plutonium on board than Galileo, and the two Voyager spacecraft each carried 80 % as much plutonium as Galileo did.

It also carried the Heavy Ion Counter, an engineering experiment added to assess the potentially hazardous charged particle environments the spacecraft flew through, and an added Extreme Ultraviolet detector associated with the UV spectrometer on the scan platform.

The rotation of the spacecraft carried each field of view through a full circle.

The engine was technically a liquid hydrogen / liquid oxygen design, but dramatically reduces the amount of oxidizer needed to be carried on board by utilising atmospheric oxygen as the spacecraft climbed through the lower atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the spacecraft suffered technical difficulties soon after launch and fell back to Earth so the experiment was never carried out.

The spacecraft carried 10 days of provisions to allow for survival and natural decay of the orbit in the event the retrorockets failed.

It carried an instrument payload similar to Mariner 6 and 7, but, because of the need for a larger propulsion system to control the spacecraft in Mars orbit, it weighed more than Mariners 6 and 7 combined.

The first manned spacecraft was Vostok 1, which carried Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, and completed a full Earth orbit.

Mariner 5 ( Mariner Venus 1967 ) was a spacecraft of the Mariner program that carried a complement of experiments to probe Venus ' atmosphere by radio occultation, measure the hydrogen Lyman-alpha ( hard ultraviolet ) spectrum, and sample the solar particles and magnetic field fluctuations above the planet.

During the experiment, both spacecraft were going to be on the same idealized magnetic field spiral carried out from the sun by the solar wind.

The spacecraft which carried Lunokhod 1 was named Luna 17.

The spacecraft which carried Lunokhod 1 was named Luna 17.

Among its diverse and expansive exhibits, the Museum features a full-size replica coal mine, a German submarine ( U-505 ) captured during World War II, a model railroad, the first diesel-powered streamlined stainless-steel passenger train ( Pioneer Zephyr ), and the Apollo 8 spacecraft that carried the first humans to the Moon.

* 1963-US X-15 rocket-plane, the first reusable manned spacecraft ( suborbital ) reaches space, pioneering reusability, carried launch and glide landings.

The ability of spacecraft to make midcourse corrections was demonstrated, and the landers carried instruments to help evaluate the suitability of their landing sites for manned Apollo landings.

This spacecraft was similar in design to the previous Surveyors, but it carried more scientific equipment including a television camera with polarizing filters, a surface sampler, bar magnets on two footpads, two horseshoe magnets on the surface scoop, and auxiliary mirrors.

These spacecraft carried two TV cameras-one for its approach — which was not used in this case — and one for taking still pictures of the lunar surface.

The spacecraft carried a set of

The spacecraft is believed to have been similar to Luna 12 and the instrumentation was similar to that carried by Luna 10.

Virtually identical to Surveyor 5, this spacecraft carried a television camera, a small bar magnet attached to one footpad, and an alpha-scattering instrument as well as the necessary engineering equipment.

The High Energy Astronomy Observatory ( HEAO ) Program involved three missions of large spacecraft in low-Earth orbit Each spacecraft was about 18 feet ( 5. 5 m ) in length, weighed between 6000 and 7000 lb ( 2700 and 3200 kg ), and carried some 3000 lb ( 1400 kg ) of experiments for X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy and cosmic-ray investigations. The project provided revolutionary insights into celestial objects by studying their high-energy radiation from space.

There have been too many spacecraft since then to list them all here and they have carried a wide variety of instruments.

The mission of most spacecraft is unrelated to gathering information about the space environment for research or applications, but some of these other spacecraft have carried auxiliary instrument or had some part of their primary payload used for space weather.