since June 2021 in the German Space Exhibition Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz in Saxony

“Mars 2020” is NASA’s fifth rover and first helicopter mission. An Atlas V launcher was used to send a space probe with the rover and a helicopter on its way to Mars. Your arrival on Mars is scheduled for February 18, 2021. The mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. The Mars rover is called Perseverance.

One of the most fascinating topics in space travel is the ISS (International Space Station). It flies only 400 kilometers above the earth and can be seen with the naked eye. It is currently the only permanently manned space station. Since it was set up in 1998, it has been operated and further developed by 16 countries and 5 space agencies in international cooperation.

No man-made objects advanced further into space like the space probes Pioneer 10 and sister probes Voyager 1 and 2. The probes are now in interstellar space. The Voyager missions were actually only scheduled for 4 years, but they are still sending data. A “Voyager Golden Record” is attached to each probe, a gold record with messages to extraterrestrial life forms. Among others: Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Good.

On July 16, 1969, the Saturn V rocket was launched into the sky from Launch Complex 39A of the Kennedy Space Center. Five days later, on July 21, the lunar module landed with Armstrong’s radio message: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” 500 million people watched the moon landing spellbound on TV.

The mission achieved John F. Kennedy’s 1961 goal of getting a person to the moon and back before the end of the decade.

Yuri Alexejewitsch Gagarin (1934-1968) was the first person in space. He was a “Hero of the Soviet Union” and a colonel in the Soviet Air Force. The 1.57 m small pilot was the first cosmonaut to complete his spectacular space flight in the spaceship Vostok 1 and orbited the earth once in 106 minutes.

In 1968 Gagarin had a fatal accident during a training flight with a MiG-15UTI. Gagarin’s urn is in the Kremlin wall on Red Square in Moscow.

Sigmund Jähn (1937-2019) was a German fighter pilot, cosmonaut and major general of the NVA. In 1978, Jähn was the first German to fly into space in the Soviet Soyuz 31 space capsule. Together with Valery Fyodorowitsch Bykowski he flew to the Soviet space station Salyut 6. The flight lasted almost 8 days with 124 orbits.