Spacecraft

The rockets, capsules, landers, probes and stations of Log On Globe, each modelled at real size: who built it, when it first flew, what it can carry, and its 3D model to turn around.

Launchers

Saturn V (Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft · 1967): The three-stage rocket NASA built to send astronauts to the Moon, still the tallest and heaviest rocket ever to fly successfully. Its first stage burned kerosene in five F-1 engines, the two upper stages liquid hydrogen in J-2 engines. Between 1967 and 1973 it flew 13 times without losing a payload, including every crewed Apollo lunar mission and the launch of Skylab.
SLS (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, United Launch Alliance · 2022): NASA's heavy launcher for the Artemis programme, built on Space Shuttle hardware: four RS-25 engines under an orange core stage and two five-segment solid boosters. In its Block 1 form it sends an Orion capsule and its crew toward the Moon. It first flew Artemis I in November 2022, then carried the four astronauts of Artemis II around the Moon in April 2026.
Falcon 9 (SpaceX · 2010): SpaceX's two-stage launcher, nine Merlin engines on the first stage and one on the second, both burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. Its first stage flies back to land on a pad or a drone ship and is reused, which has made it the most frequently launched rocket in the world. It carries Crew Dragon and its astronauts to the International Space Station, as well as satellites and probes such as DART.
Falcon Heavy (SpaceX · 2018): Three Falcon 9 first stages strapped side by side, 27 Merlin engines lit together at liftoff, under a single second stage. The two side boosters usually fly back to land in Florida while the centre core is often expended on the heaviest missions. It launched NASA's Europa Clipper toward Jupiter in 2024 and the Roman Space Telescope in 2026.
Starship (SpaceX · 2023): SpaceX's fully reusable launch system: the Super Heavy booster with 33 Raptor engines burning methane and liquid oxygen, topped by the Starship upper stage. It is the most powerful rocket ever flown, and the booster returns to be caught by the arms of its launch tower. Still in development since its first flight in 2023, it is meant to refuel in orbit and land astronauts on the Moon as Starship HLS.
Ariane 5 (ArianeGroup · 1996): Europe's heavy launcher, flown from Kourou in French Guiana: a cryogenic main stage with a single Vulcain engine between two large solid boosters that gave most of the liftoff thrust. Its first flight in 1996 failed, then it became one of the most reliable rockets of its time, with 82 consecutive successes. Over 117 flights until 2023 it launched Rosetta toward its comet in 2004 and the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021.
Atlas V (United Launch Alliance · 2002): United Launch Alliance's workhorse, a first stage powered by a Russian RD-180 engine and a Centaur upper stage burning liquid hydrogen. Its three-digit name gives the fairing width, the number of solid boosters and the number of Centaur engines: a 541 has a 5-metre fairing, four boosters and one engine. In that configuration it sent Curiosity to Mars in 2011 and Perseverance in 2020.
Delta IV Heavy (United Launch Alliance · 2004): Three identical common booster cores, each with an RS-68A burning liquid hydrogen, side by side under a cryogenic upper stage. At ignition the hydrogen collecting around the engines caught fire and wrapped the base of the orange rocket in flames, its signature sight. Over 16 flights from 2004 to 2024 it launched heavy US government satellites and, in 2018, Parker Solar Probe toward the Sun.

Crewed spacecraft

Apollo CSM (North American Aviation · 1966): The Apollo spacecraft proper: a conical command module where three astronauts lived and which alone returned to Earth, joined to a cylindrical service module carrying the main engine, the oxygen and the fuel cells. The service module's engine braked the stack into lunar orbit and fired it home again. It flew from 1966 to 1975, through every Apollo Moon mission, the Skylab crews and the Apollo-Soyuz docking.
Apollo LM (Grumman · 1968): The two-stage lander Grumman built to put two astronauts on the Moon, the first crewed vehicle designed to fly only in space. The descent stage, with its throttleable engine and four legs, served as the launch pad for the ascent stage, which carried the crew back up to the command module in lunar orbit. Six landed between 1969 and 1972, and on Apollo 13 Aquarius served as the crew's lifeboat.
Crew Dragon (SpaceX · 2019): SpaceX's capsule for four astronauts, launched on a Falcon 9 and docking to the International Space Station on its own. Eight SuperDraco engines built into its sides can pull the crew clear of a failing rocket, and it returns under four parachutes to a splashdown at sea. Since its first crewed flight in 2020 it has carried NASA's rotation crews, including Crew-9 aboard Freedom, and private missions.
Orion (Lockheed Martin, Airbus · 2014): NASA's deep-space capsule for four astronauts, built by Lockheed Martin, flying on a European Service Module from Airbus that supplies propulsion, power and water. Its heat shield, five metres across, is designed for reentry at lunar return speed, about 11 km/s. After two uncrewed flights, Integrity carried the Artemis II crew around the Moon in April 2026, the first humans to go there since 1972.
Space Shuttle (Rockwell International, Martin Marietta, Thiokol · 1981): The first reusable crewed spacecraft: a winged orbiter strapped to an external tank feeding its three main engines and to two recoverable solid rocket boosters. The orbiter landed on a runway like a glider and carried crews and large payloads in its 18-metre bay. Five orbiters flew 135 missions from 1981 to 2011, deploying and servicing Hubble and building most of the International Space Station.
Starship HLS (SpaceX): The lunar lander version of SpaceX's Starship, chosen by NASA to take Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface and back. It has no heat shield or flaps, since it never returns to Earth, and is refuelled in Earth orbit by a series of tanker Starships before heading to the Moon. Its crew cabin sits near the nose, reached from the surface by an elevator; the crewed landing is planned for Artemis IV.

Landers and rovers

Sky crane (JPL · 2011): The rocket-powered descent stage that lowered Curiosity and then Perseverance onto Mars. Hovering about 20 metres above the ground on eight throttleable engines, it let the rover down on nylon cables, cut them at touchdown and flew off to crash at a safe distance. The manoeuvre made it possible to land rovers of about a tonne, too heavy for the airbags of earlier missions.
Curiosity (JPL · 2011): NASA's car-sized rover in Gale crater, powered by a radioisotope generator rather than solar panels. Its laboratory drills rock and analyses the powder inside the rover, and its laser can vaporise a target several metres away to read its composition. Since landing in August 2012 it has climbed the slopes of Mount Sharp and shown that the crater once held a lake that could have supported microbial life.
Perseverance (JPL · 2020): NASA's rover in Jezero crater, an ancient river delta, built on Curiosity's design with new instruments and a stronger set of wheels. It drills rock cores and seals them in tubes, some left on the ground, for a future return to Earth. It landed in February 2021 carrying the Ingenuity helicopter, the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

Probes and observatories

Hubble (Lockheed, Perkin-Elmer · 1990): A space telescope with a 2.4-metre mirror, in low Earth orbit since 1990, observing in visible, ultraviolet and near-infrared light above the blurring of the atmosphere. A flaw in its mirror was corrected by astronauts in 1993, and five Shuttle servicing missions replaced its instruments, gyroscopes and arrays in orbit. Its images helped pin down the expansion rate of the Universe and the age of the cosmos.
JWST (Northrop Grumman · 2021): The largest space telescope ever launched, a 6.5-metre mirror of 18 gold-coated beryllium segments that unfolded in space after launch. A five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court keeps its optics below minus 230 °C, cold enough to observe in the infrared from its orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, 1.5 million km from Earth. Launched on an Ariane 5 in December 2021, it studies the first galaxies and the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Roman (NASA Goddard, L3Harris · 2026): NASA's wide-field infrared survey telescope, with a 2.4-metre mirror the size of Hubble's but a field of view about a hundred times larger. Its Wide Field Instrument maps vast areas of sky to measure dark energy and to find thousands of exoplanets by microlensing, while a coronagraph tests the direct imaging of planets around nearby stars. It launched on a Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026 toward the Sun-Earth L2 point.
Parker Solar Probe (Johns Hopkins APL · 2018): The probe that flies through the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, to study how it is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated. A carbon-composite heat shield 11.4 cm thick faces temperatures near 1,400 °C while the instruments behind it stay close to room temperature. Using seven flybys of Venus to shrink its orbit, it passes 6.1 million km from the Sun's surface at about 690,000 km/h, the fastest object ever built.
Rosetta (Astrium · 2004): ESA's comet chaser, the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and to deliver a lander to its surface. After a ten-year journey with three Earth flybys and one of Mars, it reached comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 and released Philae, which bounced twice before coming to rest. Rosetta followed the comet through its closest approach to the Sun, then ended its mission with a controlled descent onto it in September 2016.
DART (Johns Hopkins APL · 2021): NASA's first planetary defence test: a 610 kg spacecraft that deliberately rammed Dimorphos, the small moon of asteroid Didymos, at about 6.1 km/s. It steered itself onto the target in its last hours using only its own camera, while the Italian cubesat LICIACube, released two weeks earlier, photographed the impact. The collision on 26 September 2022 shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 33 minutes, showing that an asteroid can be nudged off course.
Europa Clipper (NASA JPL, Johns Hopkins APL · 2024): The largest planetary spacecraft NASA has built, its solar arrays spanning 30.5 metres to collect enough sunlight at Jupiter's distance. It will make about 50 close flybys of Europa to find out whether the ocean under its ice could support life, with nine instruments including an ice-penetrating radar. Launched on a Falcon Heavy in October 2024, it uses flybys of Mars and Earth to reach Jupiter in 2030.

Stations

ISS (Boeing, Energia, Khrunichev, Thales Alenia Space, EADS Astrium, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries · 1998): The largest structure humans have assembled in space, built from 1998 by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, and continuously crewed since November 2000. Its pressurised modules hang from a 94-metre truss carrying the solar arrays and radiators, and it circles the Earth about every 90 minutes at around 400 km. Crews arrive and leave on Soyuz and Crew Dragon, and cargo ships keep it supplied.