Top 10 Greatest Space Missions of All Time

Launched on 5 September 1977, Voyager 1 conducted flybys of Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980 before continuing on a trajectory out of the solar system, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in August 2012. As of 2026 it is over 24 billion kilometres from Earth and still transmitting data, making it the most distant spacecraft and the longest-operating scientific mission in history.

Deployed from Space Shuttle Discovery on 25 April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1.5 million observations and contributed to more than 20,000 scientific papers in its first three decades. Its deep-field images revealed that the universe contains over two trillion galaxies, its measurement of Cepheid variable stars helped pin down the Hubble constant, and its observations provided the first strong evidence for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, carrying the Curiosity rover, landed in Gale Crater on 6 August 2012 using a never-before-attempted sky crane system. Within the first year, Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument confirmed that the crater once hosted a freshwater lake with the chemistry necessary to support microbial life — the most significant discovery in the search for extraterrestrial life and the clearest evidence yet that Mars was once habitable.

A joint project of NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA, the ISS has hosted continuous human habitation since 2 November 2000 and is the largest structure ever assembled in orbit at over 400,000 kilograms and the size of an American football field. It has served as a microgravity laboratory for more than 3,000 scientific experiments, advancing research in medicine, materials science, fundamental physics, and Earth observation across 25 years of uninterrupted operation.

Launched on 11 April 1970, Apollo 13 suffered an oxygen tank explosion on 13 April that crippled the Command Service Module 330,000 kilometres from Earth, transforming a routine Moon mission into history's most dramatic space rescue. Flight director Gene Kranz's team improvised a CO2 scrubber fix using plastic bags and duct tape, re-routed the trajectory using the lunar module Aquarius as a lifeboat, and returned all three crew members safely on 17 April, demonstrating that engineering ingenuity under pressure is its own form of heroism.

Launched in October 1997 by NASA and ESA, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft arrived at Saturn in July 2004 and spent 13 years orbiting the ringed giant. The mission discovered active geysers of water ice on Enceladus suggesting a subsurface ocean that could harbour life, landed the Huygens probe on Titan in 2005 to reveal rivers of liquid methane, and ended with a deliberate death dive into Saturn's atmosphere on 15 September 2017 to protect those ocean worlds from contamination.

Launched on 19 January 2006, New Horizons completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto on 14 July 2015, travelling 4.67 billion miles in nine and a half years. The images it returned demolished assumptions about the dwarf planet: Pluto had towering water-ice mountains, nitrogen glaciers flowing into smooth plains, and a vast heart-shaped basin named Tombaugh Regio — a geologically active world far stranger and more dynamic than anyone had predicted.

The maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy on 6 February 2018 was the most powerful operational rocket since the Saturn V, and SpaceX made it historic by launching Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster with a spacesuit-clad "Starman" mannequin as its payload. The synchronized landing of the two side boosters at Cape Canaveral — a perfect mirror-image touchdown never seen before — demonstrated reusable heavy-lift capability that has since reshuffled the global launch market and enabled the Artemis era of lunar return.

Launched on 25 December 2021 after three decades of development and $10 billion in cost, JWST reached its observing position at Lagrange Point 2 in January 2022 and released its first science images in July 2022. Its infrared eye has captured the earliest galaxies formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, revealed atmospheric compositions of exoplanets including water vapour on K2-18b, and imaged protoplanetary disks in unprecedented detail — opening a new chapter in our understanding of cosmic origins.

Launched on 5 September 1977, Voyager 1 conducted flybys of Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980 before continuing on a trajectory out of the solar system, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in August 2012. As of 2026 it is over 24 billion kilometres from Earth and still transmitting data, making it the most distant spacecraft and the longest-operating scientific mission in history.

Deployed from Space Shuttle Discovery on 25 April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1.5 million observations and contributed to more than 20,000 scientific papers in its first three decades. Its deep-field images revealed that the universe contains over two trillion galaxies, its measurement of Cepheid variable stars helped pin down the Hubble constant, and its observations provided the first strong evidence for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, carrying the Curiosity rover, landed in Gale Crater on 6 August 2012 using a never-before-attempted sky crane system. Within the first year, Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument confirmed that the crater once hosted a freshwater lake with the chemistry necessary to support microbial life — the most significant discovery in the search for extraterrestrial life and the clearest evidence yet that Mars was once habitable.

A joint project of NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA, the ISS has hosted continuous human habitation since 2 November 2000 and is the largest structure ever assembled in orbit at over 400,000 kilograms and the size of an American football field. It has served as a microgravity laboratory for more than 3,000 scientific experiments, advancing research in medicine, materials science, fundamental physics, and Earth observation across 25 years of uninterrupted operation.

Launched on 11 April 1970, Apollo 13 suffered an oxygen tank explosion on 13 April that crippled the Command Service Module 330,000 kilometres from Earth, transforming a routine Moon mission into history's most dramatic space rescue. Flight director Gene Kranz's team improvised a CO2 scrubber fix using plastic bags and duct tape, re-routed the trajectory using the lunar module Aquarius as a lifeboat, and returned all three crew members safely on 17 April, demonstrating that engineering ingenuity under pressure is its own form of heroism.

Launched in October 1997 by NASA and ESA, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft arrived at Saturn in July 2004 and spent 13 years orbiting the ringed giant. The mission discovered active geysers of water ice on Enceladus suggesting a subsurface ocean that could harbour life, landed the Huygens probe on Titan in 2005 to reveal rivers of liquid methane, and ended with a deliberate death dive into Saturn's atmosphere on 15 September 2017 to protect those ocean worlds from contamination.

Launched on 19 January 2006, New Horizons completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto on 14 July 2015, travelling 4.67 billion miles in nine and a half years. The images it returned demolished assumptions about the dwarf planet: Pluto had towering water-ice mountains, nitrogen glaciers flowing into smooth plains, and a vast heart-shaped basin named Tombaugh Regio — a geologically active world far stranger and more dynamic than anyone had predicted.

The maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy on 6 February 2018 was the most powerful operational rocket since the Saturn V, and SpaceX made it historic by launching Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster with a spacesuit-clad "Starman" mannequin as its payload. The synchronized landing of the two side boosters at Cape Canaveral — a perfect mirror-image touchdown never seen before — demonstrated reusable heavy-lift capability that has since reshuffled the global launch market and enabled the Artemis era of lunar return.

Launched on 25 December 2021 after three decades of development and $10 billion in cost, JWST reached its observing position at Lagrange Point 2 in January 2022 and released its first science images in July 2022. Its infrared eye has captured the earliest galaxies formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, revealed atmospheric compositions of exoplanets including water vapour on K2-18b, and imaged protoplanetary disks in unprecedented detail — opening a new chapter in our understanding of cosmic origins.