Space

Stories filed under Space in the Weird Science History archive — 32 stories from the strange edge of science.

• The Two Tortoises That Flew Around the Moon Before Any Human Did
• The Venus Lander That Tested the Hardness of Its Own Lens Cap
• The Year in Space That Turned Twin Astronauts Into a Living Experiment
• The Teenager Who Sent Two Spiders to Spin Webs in Space
• The Time a Falling Space Station Got a $400 Littering Ticket
• The Senator Who Went to Space and Came Back as a Unit of Nausea
• The September That Jumped From the 2nd to the 14th
• The Spaceship That Was Supposed to Ride Atomic Bombs to Saturn
• The Newspaper Hoax That Put Bat-People on the Moon
• The Pigeon Mess That Turned Out to Be the Echo of the Big Bang
• The Plan to Set Off a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon So Everyone Could Watch
• The Planet That Was Officially Named 'George' for 67 Years
• The Rocket That Exploded on Live TV and Got Called 'Kaputnik'
• The Mars Lander That Carried a Blur Ringtone and a Damien Hirst Painting — and Then Went Quiet for 11 Years
• The Million-Dollar Space Pen Myth — and the
  28.89 Pencils NASA Actually Bought
• The Moon Golf Shot That Went 'Miles and Miles and Miles' — and Actually Went 40 Yards
• The Moon Rocket Struck by Lightning Twice — and the Switch Nobody in Mission Control Had Heard Of
• The Most Expensive Hyphen in History Was Not a Hyphen
• The Farm Boy Who Discovered Pluto — and Now Sails Past It Forever
• The Flake of Chipped Paint That Made a
  .5 Billion Telescope Nearsighted
• The Genesis Capsule That Crashed Because a Switch Was Installed Backward
• The Graduate Student, the 'Little Green Men,' and the Nobel That Got Away
• The Kitchen Microwave That Impersonated a Signal From Deep Space
• The Element Discovered on the Sun 27 Years Before Anyone Found It on Earth
• The Corned Beef Sandwich That Got NASA Hauled Before Congress
• The Crash-Test Foam That Invented Your Mattress
• The Airstream Trailer That Was Supposed to Save Earth From Moon Germs
• The Astronomer Who Spent Eleven Years at Sea to Watch Venus Cross the Sun — and Missed It Anyway
• The Astronomer Who Saw Canals on Mars That Weren't Real
• The Astronomer With a Metal Nose and a Beer-Drinking Elk
• Laika: The Moscow Stray Who Orbited Earth, and the Truth Hidden for 45 Years
• The Unit Mix-Up That Doomed a Mars Probe

Other categories: Archaeology · Biology · Chemistry · Engineering · Medicine · Physics