Space Mission Picker
About the board
Fourteen firsts and turning points across the Space Age, from Sputnik and Apollo to Webb and Perseverance — spanning NASA, ESA, the USSR and China.
Explore a random landmark of space exploration. Tap Reveal — a scanner sweeps the mission board, slows, and locks on one flight, opening a card with its agency, year, destination and the milestone it reached. From Sputnik and Apollo to Webb, Perseverance and Voyager.
- 14 landmark missions
- For projects & trivia
- A fresh mission each time
The Space Mission Picker turns the story of space exploration into a reveal. A scanner sweeps the mission board, slows, and locks on one flight — which opens into a card with its agency, launch year, destination, and the milestone that made it matter.
From Sputnik to Webb
Space history is too big to take in at once. Landing on a single mission — with a real fact attached — turns a name into a story: the first beep from orbit, the first bootprint on the Moon, the first close-up of Pluto. Use it to hand every student a different mission to research, to warm up a science lesson, or just to rediscover how far we've reached.
What the card tells you
- Agency & year — who launched it and when, from NASA and ESA to Roscosmos and China's CNSA.
- Type — a crewed landing, a deep-space probe, a space telescope, a Mars rover, a comet mission.
- Destination — where it went: the Moon, Mars, Saturn, a comet, or interstellar space.
- Milestone — the first, the farthest or the deepest that the mission achieved.
Every mission on the board
| Mission | Agency | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| Sputnik 1 (1957) | USSR | First artificial satellite |
| Apollo 11 (1969) | NASA | First humans on the Moon |
| Voyager 1 (1977) | NASA | Farthest human-made object |
| Hubble (1990) | NASA / ESA | The deepest views of the universe |
| Cassini–Huygens (1997) | NASA / ESA | Landed a probe on Titan |
| ISS (1998) | International | Permanent human presence in space |
| Rosetta (2004) | ESA | First to orbit & land on a comet |
| New Horizons (2006) | NASA | First close-up of Pluto |
| Curiosity (2011) | NASA | A nuclear-powered lab on Mars |
| Juno (2011) | NASA | Mapped Jupiter's storms & core |
| Chang'e 4 (2018) | CNSA (China) | First landing on the Moon's far side |
| Parker Solar Probe (2018) | NASA | Closest spacecraft to the Sun |
| Perseverance (2020) | NASA | Caching Mars samples for return |
| James Webb (2021) | NASA / ESA / CSA | Sees the first galaxies |
Fair, and free
Every reveal is decided by a cryptographically fair random draw, so each mission has an exactly equal chance. Exploring the rest of the space shelf? Pair it with the Planet Picker for worlds and the Famous Scientist Picker for the people behind the science.