Atlas Trail
Space Beyond NASA's Own Name
A path through the agencies, aerospace companies and programs whose contributions often ride along under someone else's mission name, and the NASA leaders and engineers, beyond the astronauts, whose decisions and designs made those missions possible: from the joint international partnerships behind Cassini-Huygens to the wartime-footing testing strategy that saved the Apollo schedule.
Stop 1 of 7.
Space Agencies and Companies
Founded in 1988, Italy's space agency joined NASA and ESA on Cassini-Huygens, contributing the high-gain antenna and radar instruments that made the mission's Saturn science possible.
Stop 2 of 7.
Missions and Programs
A three-agency mission whose Huygens probe made the first landing in the outer Solar System, on Saturn's moon Titan, before Cassini's own deliberate, planet-protecting plunge into Saturn in 2017.
Stop 3 of 7.
Space Agencies and Companies
Formed in 1994, and heir since 2002 to TRW, the company that quietly built Pioneer 10 and 11, the first spacecraft to leave the inner Solar System.
Stop 4 of 7.
Missions and Programs
The first joint US-Soviet crewed spaceflight, docking an Apollo craft with cosmonaut Alexei Leonov's Soyuz in July 1975, a mission built on diplomacy as much as engineering.
Stop 5 of 7.
Pioneers
The NASA administrator who pushed all-up testing through over his own engineers' objections, betting the whole Saturn V stack on one test flight at a time when nobody else thought that was sane.
Stop 6 of 7.
Pioneers
The administrator who built NASA's budget and institutions through the Apollo buildup, and whose own record before NASA is still argued over, an open question this atlas records rather than settles.
Stop 7 of 7.
Pioneers
The lone woman among Lockheed Skunk Works' forty founding engineers in 1952, sketching preliminary concepts for interplanetary travel before most of this trail's missions had a name.
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