Seventeen years ago today, an operational American communications satellite and a dead Russian military relay crossed paths over Siberia. What happened next created more than 2,000 pieces of trackable debris - and fundamentally changed how the world thinks about space traffic.
Forty-two years ago, an Atlas H rocket climbed into the California sky carrying four objects that would help the U.S. Navy track every Soviet warship on the planet - a mission so secret that even the satellites' true name wasn't declassified until 2023
Sixty-five years ago, America launched two very different space missions within hours of each other - one broadcast live to a fascinated nation, the other quietly reaching orbit from a fog-shrouded California launchpad while no one was watching
When a 135-foot inflatable mirror bounced a radio signal from England to Russia, it became the first joint US-Soviet space venture - and changed how we think about satellite communication.
On January 20, 1972, the second KH-9 HEXAGON lifted off from Vandenberg - carrying the most sophisticated reconnaissance system ever built by engineers who weren't allowed to say 'film,' 'camera,' or even talk to each other about what they were doing.
Cassini's Titan T-115 encounter marked the moment the spacecraft stopped looking down and started looking sideways, trading one type of science for another as it entered the final chapter of an iconic mission.
