Today in 1963, a black and white cat from the streets of France became the first cat to go into space. She didn't choose to go, of course, but she's a pioneer just the same - and until a few years ago, a greatly underappreciated one.
For National Hispanic Heritage Month, here's the story of the first Hispanic woman in space, Ellen Ochoa, talented and versatile even by astronaut standards.
Apollo 8 brought the first human astronauts to lunar orbit in late 1968, but a few months beforehand, the Soviet Zond 5 mission sent two tortoises (and a few other living things) for a trip around the moon.
Sputnik IV, to be specific, had some trouble getting back to Earth as planned. Today in 1962, pieces of the Soviet spacecraft ended up crashing into a street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin - so the town started holding a SputnikFest to celebrate their place in space history.
There was a story recently about how NASA was partnering with Tide laundry detergent to work on a way to do laundry in space. Which means we don’t already do laundry in space, and there are some pretty big reasons why.
Next week many of us will be watching for the Super Blood Moon, which is actually three moon phenomena all happening at the same time, thus earning its memorable and maybe kind of terrifying nickname.
Way out there beyond the edge of the solar system, Voyager 1 is measuring the density of the stuff out there. And because that stuff is vibrating, it comes out as sound. In other words, there are sounds in interstellar space and we have now recorded them.
A new website called the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is taking us back through the words that have made sci-fi what it is and showing how much this genre has shaped popular culture.
The next Mars rover is set to land next month, and it's equipped with microphones to make the first audio recordings on another planet. So how does sound work on Mars, which has about 1 percent of the atmosphere Earth does?
On this day in 1973, something happened aboard the Skylab space station. Depending on who you talk to, it was somewhere between a "sensitivity session" between astronauts and ground crew, and a full-on space mutiny.
Today in 1969 Apollo 12 returned to earth after visiting the moon, and if the stories are true, it brought with it a tiny tile containing line drawings by six Earth artists.
