The Titan II was the two-stage intercontinental ballistic missile that the Glenn L. Martin Company derived from the Titan I, and it carried the largest single warhead in the American arsenal. Later adapted as a space launch vehicle, it…
Proton, conceived as an oversized intercontinental missile that was never deployed as one, became the heavy workhorse of the Soviet and later Russian space programme. It flew the Venus and Mars probes, every Salyut station, almost all of…
The Saturn IB was the "uprated Saturn I" that NASA commissioned to test the Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit before the Saturn V was ready. A two-stage vehicle with a spotless record, it carried the first Apollo crew, the three Skylab…
Soyuz is the expendable launcher with which the Soviet Union, from 1966 onward, brought order to the sprawling family of rockets derived from the R-7. The original 11A511 model founded a lineage that still sends Progress freighters to the…
The Saturn V was the three-stage super heavy-lift launch vehicle NASA developed for the Apollo programme and the first to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit. Thirteen vehicles flew between 1967 and 1973; nine sent twenty-four astronauts…
The N1 was the super-heavy rocket with which the Soviet Union intended to land cosmonauts on the Moon, its counterpart to the American Saturn V. All four launch attempts, between 1969 and 1972, failed, and the programme stayed secret until…
