Human spaceflight programs

[2][3] Early planning and research was carried out by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and the program was officially conducted by the newly created NASA.

The X-15 set speed and altitude records in the early 1960s, reaching the edge of outer space and returning with valuable data used in aircraft and spacecraft design.

While the Vostok program was dedicated towards understanding the effects of space travel and microgravity on the human body, Voskhod's two flights were aimed towards spectacular "firsts".

All experimental or unsuccessful starts received the status of satellites of a series Kosmos, and flights of the Lunar orbital ships around the Moon – the name Zond.

Its earliest form was intended to travel to the Moon without employing a huge booster like the Saturn V or the Soviet N-1 by repeatedly docking with upper stages that had been put in orbit using the same rocket as the Soyuz.

The first failure resulted in the deaths of three astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire.

When its mission was complete, the shuttle could independently move itself out of orbit (by means of making a 180-degree turn and firing its main engines, thus slowing it down) and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.

[9] In 1992, under China Manned Space Program (CMS), also known as "Project 921", authorization and funding was given for the first phase of a third, successful attempt at crewed spaceflight.

[11] On October 31, 2014, SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise suffered an in-flight breakup during a powered flight test,[12][13] resulting in a crash killing one pilot and injuring the other.

A one-week uncrewed orbital flight to the ISS occurred in March 2019,[16] an in-flight abort test was successfully conducted on 19 January 2020.

The New Shepard is a reusable launch system capable of vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL), suborbital crewed spacecraft by Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon.com founder and businessman Jeff Bezos, flying humans to space since 2021.

[24][25] Twelve subsequent flights (through January 2019), including two in-flight abort tests, took place with safe landings of both capsule and booster with two additional vehicles.

[39] In April 2017, China's first cargo spacecraft, Tianzhou 1 docked with Tiangong 2 and completed multiple in-orbit propellant refueling tests.

[41] It was later visited by multiple cargo and crewed spacecraft and demonstrated China's capability of sustaining Chinese astronauts' long-term stay in space.

The Dream Chaser was originally intended to serve as an American reusable crewed suborbital and orbital lifting-body spaceplane being developed and privately funded by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems.

The spacecraft, when revealed in 2015, resembled NASA's Orion capsule and had a set of soft-landing type legs similar to the plans for Dragon 2 at that time.

In 2020 and 2021 it was tested without a booster stage as part of the development program to get launch and landing working and iterate on a variety of design details, particularly with respect to the vehicle's atmospheric reentry.

Artemis would be the first step towards the long-term goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon, laying the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy, and eventually sending humans to Mars.

During the mission, an uncrewed Orion capsule spent 10 days in a 40,000 mi (64,000 km) distant retrograde orbit around the Moon before returning to Earth.

[62] Artemis II, the first crewed mission of the program, is planned to launch four astronauts in May 2024[63] on a free-return flyby of the Moon at a distance of 4,000 miles (6,400 km).

[66] Artemis III is planned to be the maiden flight of the SLS Block 1B and will use the minimalist Gateway and expendable lander to achieve the first crewed lunar landing of the program.

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) was part of the United States Air Force's crewed spaceflight program, a successor to the canceled X-20 Dyna-Soar project.

In accordance with the quinquennial plan of the Soviet air forces, the Spiral program to develop a 2-stage launcher plane began in 1965 and was entrusted to OKB-155 A.I.Mikojan whose chief of the engineering and design department was Lozino Lozinsky (55 years).

The spacecraft was designed for both crewed and autonomous uncrewed cargo resupply flights, but was never used operationally in its intended role – only four test missions were flown (including three that docked to Salyut space stations) during the program.

The German Hypersonics Program and its Saenger II reference vehicle received most of the domestic funding for spaceplane development in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[75] In 1995, the project was discontinued primarily due to concerns of development costs and limited gains in price and performance compared to the existing space launch systems such as the Ariane 5 rocket.

Hermes was a proposed spaceplane designed by the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) in 1975, and later by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Kankōmaru) is the name of a proposed vertical takeoff and landing (VTVL), single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO), reusable launch system (rocket-powered spacecraft).

The shuttle prototype spaceplane was one of several proposals for a European reusable launch vehicle (RLV) planned to cheaply ferry satellites into orbit by 2015.

Kliper (Russian: Клипер, Clipper) was a partly reusable crewed spacecraft concept, proposed in the early 2000s by RSC Energia.