Challenger Thrusting, STS-41B, 3-11 February 1984.

Orbiter Columbia OV-102 had a unique external feature the “SILTS” pod (Shuttle Infrared Leeside Temperature Sensing), it was located on the top of her vertical stabilizer. It was installed after STS-9 (1984) to acquire infrared and other thermal data on the vehicle’s environment. The instruments were removed after several missions but the pod remained.

Crescent Earth seen from the Moon

Space is one of the most hazardous environments for a human being to exist in. That's what makes it so damned enticing.

Space is so essentially deadly. It differs from any location on Earth in that way. You can't 'tame' space. You can't make a vacuum hospitable. Space is a desolate, dry, sterile, irradiated expanse, which is home to extreme temperatures and occasional overspeeding projectiles, and to which full-body exposure is almost instantly lethal. Space must command your respect.

I wish some people would realise that the obstacle to colonising Mars isn't just a lack of funding. It's crazy that there's people in the world who think that billionaires are just going to build extraterrestrial cities like it's so easy. ‘Oh, we'll just build thousands of giant rockets, and oh we'll just stuff 100 people inside each, and oh we'll just travel in an armada through deep-space, and oh we'll just land thousands of giant rockets on Mars, and oh we'll just build a city with millions of inhabitants on a freezing rocky desert with no breathable atmosphere, almost no running water, toxic soil, literally nothing to eat, and no economic incentive. Why hasn't anyone done this already? Total no-brainer!’

I say this because I used to be the kind of person who had actually thought that Mars colonisation were possible and could happen in my lifetime.

Gemini and Agena.

There are only 2 genders

Please people thee are only two genders…. I can’t believe that Tumblr is allowed to exist and make up all these ridiculous identities and not have all its users in mental health facilities. 

Apollo 17 ascent stage returning to moon orbit.

The surface of Pluto, painted by James Hervat for Astronomy magazine in the 1970s

true space facts

if u look up there it is