Built for People: Crewed Vehicles and Stations

Vostok 1 carried Yuri Gagarin on the first human spaceflight, launched from Baikonur on April 12, 1961. The single-seat capsule was a spherical reentry module with a service module that separated before reentry, and the whole flight lasted 108 minutes.

The Apollo command and service module was the mother ship that carried three astronauts and the Lunar Module to lunar orbit and brought the crew home. Its last flight in 1975 docked with the Soviet Soyuz 19 in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

Salyut 1, launched April 19, 1971, was the first space station launched by any nation. Its only visiting crew, Soyuz 11, spent 23 days aboard but died when their capsule depressurized during reentry, and the station was deorbited that October.

Columbia was the first of five Space Shuttle orbiters to fly, debuting on April 12, 1981 and completing 28 missions. It disintegrated on reentry on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members of STS-107.

Canadarm, the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System built by Spar Aerospace for the Canadian Space Agency, was first tested in orbit in 1981 on Columbia on STS-2. It flew on ninety Shuttle missions and made its final flight on STS-135 in July 2011.

Discovery flew from 1984 to 2011 and launched and landed 39 times, more spaceflights than any other spacecraft. Its missions included International Space Station assembly flights and the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Buran was the Soviet answer to the Space Shuttle, launched atop the expendable Energia rocket. It flew only once, an uncrewed test on November 15, 1988 with two orbits and an autonomous landing, and the orbiter was destroyed in 2002 when its hangar roof collapsed.

Orion is the partially reusable crewed spacecraft NASA uses for the Artemis program, paired with a European Service Module from ESA built by Airbus. It supports four crew beyond low Earth orbit for up to 21 days undocked or six months docked, and first launched on December 5, 2014.

Boeing Starliner was built for NASA Commercial Crew Program flights to the International Space Station. Its first crewed test flight in June 2024 suffered thruster failures, so NASA returned the astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon instead, leaving routine crewed service still in progress.

Tiangong, also called the China Space Station, is China's first permanently crewed space station, in low Earth orbit since 2021 and operated by the China Manned Space Agency. It is one of two operational space stations alongside the International Space Station.