See almost all NASA spacecraft ever launched

For a species that has been given what might be the best of all possible planets, humans have curiously anxious to leave it. Our desire to venture into space is with us since we realized that the points of light in the sky are really places in the sky. To recognize a place, for us, is to want to visit this place.

For millennia, this wish has remained a wish. Then, in 1957, everything changed when the Soviet Union shook the world with the announcement of the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, around the Earth. The United States rushed to catch up, and the following year they created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with the aim of asserting America's claim on its own. part of the cosmos. That's what NASA did 60 years ago.

Generations of exploration have seen spaceships carrying both the American flag and the NASA logo throughout the solar system. The diagram below, coded by decade, follows most of these trips. This is an illustration of ambition, innovation, or even obsession.

The national passion for the moon of the sixties and the seventies brought not only machines to make the lunar journey, but also people. Our ongoing love story with Mars has produced nothing less than American infrastructure – rovers, landers, orbiters – on and around the red planet.

There have been trips to the inner planets: the Messenger, Magellan and Mariner spaceship to Mercury and Venus. There have also been expeditions to Jupiter and Saturn and their colorful herds of moons. Asteroids and comets and the sun itself have also been studied closely.

Many missions are in progress. In addition to robots that continue to explore Mars, the Juno spacecraft is currently in orbit around Jupiter; the Dawn probe goes around the dwarf planet Ceres; New Horizons, which in 2015 became the first spacecraft to recognize Pluto, is poised to reach a icy, rocky world in the Kuiper Belt on New Year's Eve. And Voyager 2 – after flying by Jupiter, Saturn , Uranus and Neptune decades ago – is coming out of the solar system completely; his sister ship, Voyager 1, has already entered interstellar space.

The spacecraft that NASA flew in 60 years is in some ways more than ships. They are indeed spores – tiny plants on the Earth exposed to the solar wind. Unlike real spores, of course, they can not land and give rise to a new life. But by visiting the moon, we will eventually visit other worlds. It took NASA only 60 years to register its robotic travel lines in the solar system. Humanity, willfully, will follow.