A European-Japanese spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole as part of only the second human survey of our solar system's innermost planet.

As soon as the U.S. decided to go ahead with Project Mercury, the first missile-borne man-in-space capsule (TIME, Jan. 26), the Pentagon’s IBM machines began sorting through Air Force and Navy ...

Largely because McDonnell farsightedly started designing space capsules long before Washington asked for them, his company won the coveted Mercury contract, a $130 million program. It has turned ...

The work of building the Mercury spacecraft, like all military aircraft, was contracted out to corporations to carry out engineers’ designs. But NASA controlled the launches and crews.

Orion—like Crew Dragon and Starliner—is a space capsule similar to the spacecraft of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, as well as Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. But the Orion capsule is ...