Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover aerospace, astronomy & hosted The Cosmic Controversy Podcast. Sixty years hence, it’s hard to appreciate just how much of ...

WASHINGTON -- President John F. Kennedy's challenge for America to be first on the moon is the stuff of American and NASA legend, but a new release of secret recordings Kennedy made in the Oval Office ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. On Feb. 20, 1962, NASA astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. became the first American to orbit the Earth.

In June 1962, a little more than a year after President John F. Kennedy put the U.S. on course for the moon, NASA's piloted spaceflight organizations agreed that Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) should be ...

John Glenn’s Friendship 7 flight took less than five hours. But the lessons NASA learned that day continue to propel the agency forward today. The United States was falling behind in the space race in ...

On May 24, 1962, NASA astronaut Scott Carpenter became the fourth American to go to space and the second American to orbit the Earth. Carpenter was one of NASA’s first group of astronauts known as the ...

Fifty years ago, on Dec. 14, 1962, reporters gathered for a press briefing at NASA headquarters and heard an unearthly sound: radio signals being beamed back by a spacecraft flying within 22,000 miles ...

This historic photograph was captured in full color by John Glenn, the first human being to take photographs from space, showing the Planet Earth’s brilliant blue and white horizon at the lower half ...

John F. Kennedy had not even taken the oath of office when the battle began. In December 1960, with the inauguration a month away, the U.S. Air Force launched a first strike—not against a foreign ...

On July 9, 1962, the United States Air Force launched a 2,200-pound W-49 nuclear warhead into space. It exploded with a yield of 1.44 megatons 248 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Starfish Prime, the ...

Editor's note: It's been 60 years since John Glenn's mission aboard the Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962. We're republishing this story on its impact, originally published in 2012, in honor of the ...