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January 23, 1998 — STS-89 Endeavour launches

STS-89 was the eighth Space Shuttle mission to the Russian space station Mir. Astronaut Andrew Thomas replaced astronaut David Wolf as the station's resident American crew member and experiments and supplies were transferred between the station and Shuttle.

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January 22, 1992 — STS-42 Discovery launches

Discovery carried International Microgravity Laboratory-1 into space for biology experiments and materials processing, including studying the effects of microgravity on different organisms. Mission Specialist 3 was originally Sonny Carter, who was tragically killed in the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 in Brunswick, Georgia. Payload Specialist 1 Roberta Bondar was the first female Canadian astronaut.

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January 21, 1960 — Miss Sam the space monkey rides Little Joe 1B

Little Joe 1B was a test of the Mercury spacecraft's launch escape system that launched from Wallops Island, Virginia. Though Miss Sam, a rhesus monkey, did not reach space, she did survive the test flight and was recovered in good condition.

Read more about the American space monkey flights here!

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Lego Space and Futuron (1978/1987)

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January 19, 1965 — Gemini 2 launches from Cape Canaveral

Gemini 2 was a suborbital test flight of the Gemini spacecraft's heat shield prior to the Gemini program's first manned mission scheduled for March. When the capsule was refurbished and launched with a boilerplate spacecraft in November 1966, it became the first capsule to fly in space more than once. For this flight, it was refurbished as the Gemini B, an Advanced Gemini concept planned to be used by the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program.

Read more about Advanced Gemini concepts here!

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have u ever seen a tandem so beautiful u cried

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January 18, 2024 — Axiom Mission 3 launches to the International Space Station

Launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, Crew Dragon Freedom visited the ISS on a private spaceflight for three weeks before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean near Daytona Beach, Florida.

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January 17, 1990 — Astronaut Group 13 is selected

NASA Astronaut Group 13, known as the Hairballs, was a group of 23 Space Shuttle astronauts. Beginning with Group 10, every astronaut group has had an animal mascot and for Group 13, noting the unlucky connotations of the number 13, their mascot was a black cat (hence the nickname "Hairballs").

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January 16, 2003 — STS-107 Columbia launches

STS-107 was the 113th flight of the Space Shuttle program and the final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. During its nearly 16-day mission, it carried the SPACEHAB Research Double Module, the Freestar experiment, and the Extended Duration Orbiter pallet. Mission Specialist 2 Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian descent to fly in space while Payload Specialist 1 Ilan Ramon was the first Israeli astronaut. All seven crew members were lost when Columbia broke apart during reentry on February 1.

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January 15, 1973: Soviet remote-controlled lunar rover Lunokhod 2 lands on the moon.

Lunokhod 2 was carried to the moon on the Luna 21 lander and was part of the Lunokhod program. Some of its objectives included surface photography and the analysis of lunar regolith. It also took more than 80,000 photographs during its four month expedition, in which it traveled 26 miles.

Read more about the Lunokhod rovers here!

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January 14, 1973 — Elvis Presley's Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite is the first live satellite broadcast of a single performer

Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was broadcast live from the Honolulu International Center to audiences in Asia and Oceania by the Intelsat IV F-4 communications satellite. The show opened with Richard Strauss's "Also sprach Zarathustra", which had become popular due to the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Six years earlier in 1967, the European TV special Our World became the first live multinational and multi-satellite broadcast.

Read more about early American communications satellites here!

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January 13, 1921 — Space engineer Philip Bono is born in Brooklyn, New York

While employed by Douglas Huntington Beach in the 1960s, Bono designed advanced heavy-lift, reusable, and single-stage-to-orbit space launch vehicles. For example, the Reusable Orbital Module-Booster & Utility Shuttle (ROMBUS) wan SSTO vertical takeoff and landing heavy-lift recoverable launch vehicle pitched as a low-cost follow-on to the Apollo program. Ithacus, an adaptation of ROMBUS, would've been used as an intercontinental military troop transport.

Read more about some of Bono's vehicle concepts here!

image credit: painted by Don Charles via Flickr

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January 12, 1986 — STS-61C Columbia launches after four unsuccessful launch attempts

STS-61C deployed the Satcom-K1 geosynchronous communications satellite and carried numerous smaller scientific experiments. Columbia also carried two future NASA Administrators, Charlie Bolden (served 2009 - 2017) and Bill Nelson (served 2021 - 2025), into space.

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January 11, 1996 — STS-72 Endeavour launches

STS-72 captured and returned to Earth the Japanese Space Flyer Unit, a microgravity research spacecraft, and flew the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology Flyer spacecraft. The mission, its crew, and their families were the subject of the PBS documentary Astronauts narrated by Bill Nye.

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January 10, 1946: The US Army Signal Corps successfully bounces radar signals off the moon for the first time during Project Diana.

Project Diana was the first experiment in radar astronomy and the start of American space exploration. As the unofficial birth of the Space Age, the post-WWII project sought to find out whether a weapon launched at the United States could be tracked using radar. It resulted in the development of a technique called “Moonbounce”, now known as Earth-Moon-Earth communication, and paved the way for satellites of future decades.

Read more about Project Diana here!

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January 9, 1990 — STS-32 Columbia launches

STS-32 deployed the Syncom IV-F5 military communications satellites (also called Leasat 5) and retrieved the Long Duration Exposure Facility, which had been orbiting Earth for 4.5 years. With a duration of nearly 11 days, it was also the longest Shuttle mission to that date and the first crewed space mission of the 1990s.

image source: NASA