NASA Human Spaceflight
About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- 3–12
- Subjects
- guidance (careers), science (astronomy, space exploration, technology & innovation), social studies (United States history)
- Provider
- NASA
- Special requirements
- Quicktime is needed to view the videos.
Legal
This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.
This site has current news about the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, space news, and information behind the scenes of human flight.
The Space Shuttle section tells about past shuttle missions and future missions as well as the current status of the shuttle. It also answers question about what it is like living in space, from what astronauts eat to what they wear and what jobs they do.
The Space Station section explains the assembly of the station and Space Station science. You can find out who the current Space Station crew is as well as past crew members. Viewers can also learn about what it is like to take a spacewalk.
Check out the Gallery for Space Station images, mission video, and mission audio. The gallery also has images of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, and Space Shuttle missions.
Educator's guide
The Space History area of NASA's Human Spaceflight site provides detailed information on every manned space mission ever undertaken by the U.S., from Alan Shepard's first Mercury flight in 1961 to the Space Shuttle missions and space station efforts. Much of the data provided for more recent missions is heavily scientific, but the sections on the older Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs have material for which there could be any number of classroom applications. In the Apollo archive, for example, you will find a mission log, historical summary, photographs, and a video gallery for each mission. Video clips include some television broadcasts in which the astronauts demonstrated how they survived in the tiny spacecraft. You can also watch John Kennedy state his challenge that the United States land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
The video clips are fun to watch, of course, but you can use the resources on the early space programs to launch a serious discussion of why the U.S. undertook such a risky endeavor. Spaceflight seems almost trivial now, but have your students try to imagine the perspectives of Americans in the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War, watching these events on television. This sort of discussion might be especially productive in a high school U.S. history course, perhaps by comparing the nation's fascination with the moon landing with more divisive events occurring at the same time, such as the anti-Vietnam War protests. Did the lunar missions have lasting value, or were they mainly an expression of national pride?
