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Apollo 12
The second crewed Moon landing aimed for a spacecraft already on the surface. Touching down within walking distance of Surveyor 3 showed a crew could aim for a specific spot instead of settling for a broad landing area.
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Apollo 13
An oxygen tank explosion ended the landing attempt. The crew used the lunar module as a lifeboat and made it home. A spacecraft built for a brief stay on the Moon became the means of surviving the trip back.
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Venera 7
Venera 7 reached the surface of Venus and managed to transmit data. It took the next step after Venera 4: surviving long enough on the ground to report from a planet whose atmosphere had already challenged the earlier probes.
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Luna 16
Luna 16 brought lunar soil back without astronauts. The first robotic sample return from another celestial body was proof that laboratories on Earth could study material from the Moon without sending a crew to collect it.
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Luna 17
Luna 17 delivered Lunokhod 1, a wheeled rover controlled from Earth. A lunar lander could study the ground within reach of its instruments. A rover gave controllers a way to explore beyond the landing site.
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Salyut 1
Salyut 1 became the first space station to reach orbit. It gave a crew somewhere to live and work separate from the spacecraft that took them there, a different goal from racing to the Moon.
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Mars 3
The Soviet Mars 3 lander touched down softly on Mars, then went silent before it could send back much. Its brief transmission makes it a useful counterpoint to Mariner 9: getting a machine onto the surface and keeping it working there were separate challenges.
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Mariner 9
The first spacecraft to orbit another planet arrived while a dust storm hid much of Mars. Being in orbit gave the mission something a flyby could not offer: time to wait out the storm and keep imaging the terrain as it came into view.
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Soyuz 11
The crew occupied Salyut 1 and carried out observations and experiments. They died returning to Earth when air escaped from their capsule. Their mission established that people could work for weeks in a space station and exposed a fatal weakness in the vehicle that brought them there.
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Apollo 15
The lunar rover made Apollo 15 a wider-ranging field expedition. A small electric vehicle let the astronauts cover more ground on each outing and visit sites farther from the lander than earlier crews had reached on foot.
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Pioneer 10
Pioneer 10 crossed the main asteroid belt and made the first close flyby of Jupiter. The race to the Moon was winding down, but the probe showed that a spacecraft could still work after crossing into the outer solar system.
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Apollo 17
The last Apollo Moon landing put geologist Harrison Schmitt on the surface. The final crewed expedition of the program used the landing capability Apollo had built to investigate a specific valley and bring back samples for study.
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Skylab 2
The first crew to America's Skylab had to save their damaged station before they could settle in. They installed a sunshade to cool the interior, and repairs turned an emergency in orbit into a place where a crew could stay and work.
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Mariner 10
Mariner 10 let Venus's gravity bend its route toward Mercury. The first mission to use a planetary flyby that way also made the first spacecraft visit to Mercury, taking pictures of two worlds on the same trip.
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Apollo–Soyuz
The crew of a U.S. Apollo and the crew of a Soviet Soyuz met in Earth orbit in July 1975. A docking module made it possible for the different spacecraft to connect and for their crews to visit each other. The space race that began with Sputnik ended this chapter with engineers solving the same problem together.
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