Name↕ | Mission Name↕ | Agency↕ | Year↕ | Type↕ | Key Achievement↕ | Status↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sputnik 1 | Sputnik 1 | Soviet Space Program | 1957 | Satellite | First artificial satellite to orbit Earth | Completed |
Mercury-Atlas 6 (Friendship 7) | Mercury-Atlas 6 (Friendship 7) | NASA | 1962 | Crewed Orbital | First American to orbit Earth (John Glenn) | Completed |
Gemini 4 | Gemini 4 | NASA | 1965 | Crewed Orbital | First American spacewalk (Ed White) | Completed |
Apollo 11 | Apollo 11 | NASA | 1969 | Crewed Lunar | First humans to walk on the Moon | Completed |
Apollo 13 | Apollo 13 | NASA | 1970 | Crewed Lunar | Successful failure — crew returned safely after oxygen tank explosion | Completed (aborted landing) |
Pioneer 10 | Pioneer 10 | NASA | 1972 | Flyby Probe | First spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt and fly by Jupiter | Mission ended 2003 |
Voyager 2 | Voyager 2 | NASA | 1977 | Flyby Probe | Only spacecraft to visit all four outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) | Active (interstellar space) |
Voyager 1 | Voyager 1 | NASA | 1977 | Flyby Probe | Farthest human-made object from Earth; entered interstellar space in 2012 | Active (interstellar space) |
Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1) | Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1) | NASA | 1981 | Crewed Orbital | First orbital flight of the Space Shuttle program | Completed |
Hubble Space Telescope | Hubble Space Telescope | NASA / ESA | 1990 | Space Telescope | Revolutionized astronomy with deep-field images and precise measurements | Active |
Cassini-Huygens | Cassini-Huygens | NASA / ESA / ASI | 1997 | Orbiter / Lander | Orbited Saturn for 13 years; Huygens landed on Titan | Completed (2017 Grand Finale) |
ISS Assembly (Zarya module) | ISS Assembly (Zarya module) | NASA / Roscosmos / ESA / JAXA / CSA | 1998 | Space Station | Largest human-made structure in space; continuous habitation since 2000 | Active |
Rosetta | Rosetta | ESA | 2004 | Orbiter / Lander | First spacecraft to orbit and land on a comet (67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko) | Completed (2016) |
New Horizons | New Horizons | NASA | 2006 | Flyby Probe | First close-up images of Pluto and Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth | Active (extended mission) |
Mars Curiosity Rover | Mars Curiosity Rover | NASA | 2011 | Mars Rover | Found evidence of ancient habitable environment on Mars | Active |
Chang'e 5 | Chang'e 5 | CNSA | 2020 | Lunar Sample Return | First lunar sample return mission since 1976; returned 1.73 kg of Moon rock | Completed |
SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 | SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 | SpaceX / NASA | 2020 | Crewed Orbital | First crewed orbital spaceflight by a commercial spacecraft | Completed |
Perseverance Mars Rover | Perseverance Mars Rover | NASA | 2020 | Mars Rover | Searching for signs of ancient microbial life; carried Ingenuity helicopter | Active |
James Webb Space Telescope | James Webb Space Telescope | NASA / ESA / CSA | 2021 | Space Telescope | Most powerful space telescope; observing the earliest galaxies in infrared | Active |
Chandrayaan-3 | Chandrayaan-3 | ISRO | 2023 | Lunar Lander / Rover | First successful landing near the lunar south pole | Completed |
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How is the Famous Space Missions list ranked?
The Famous Space Missions list is currently sorted by the source data's default ordering. Community voting is not enabled on this dataset.
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This dataset contains 20 entries, each with multiple sortable, filterable columns. The full table is visible on this page and can be downloaded as a CSV, JSON, or Excel file.
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