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Floating launch vehicle operations platform
A floating launch vehicle operations platform is a marine vessel for launching or landing orbital rockets, from converted oil rigs to barges; Sea Launch's Odyssey pioneered it in 1999.
Flock (satellite constellation)
A Flock is a group of Dove CubeSat imaging satellites launched together by Planet Labs, adding capacity to its PlanetScope constellation, which images nearly all landmass daily.
Fluid shift and orthostatic intolerance in spaceflight
Fluid shift and orthostatic intolerance in spaceflight is the headward movement of body fluid in weightlessness, which reduces blood volume and causes fainting on return to gravity.
Fobos-Grunt
Fobos-Grunt (Фобос-Грунт, "Phobos Soil"), also spelled Phobos-Grunt, was a Russian sample return mission to Phobos, launched in November 2011 and lost when its main engine never fired; it reentered Earth's atmosphere in January 2012.
Foton (satellite)
Foton (Фотон, "Photon") was a series of Russian unmanned recoverable satellites used for microgravity research in materials science, biology, and exobiology, flown from 1985 to 2014.
Fram (satellite bus)
Fram (Фрам), also designated Zenit-4MKT, was a Soviet recoverable satellite of the Zenit family that took multispectral photographs of Earth for natural-resources research from 1975 to 1985.
Fram2
Fram2 was a privately funded SpaceX mission from March 31 to April 4, 2025, the first crewed spaceflight into a polar orbit over Earth's poles.
Frank Borman
Frank Borman (1928–2023) was an American Air Force officer, NASA astronaut, and airline executive who commanded Gemini 7 and later Apollo 8, the first crewed lunar orbit mission.
Fred Haise
Fred Wallace Haise Jr. (born 1933) is an American astronaut and engineer who was lunar module pilot on Apollo 13, the 1970 mission aborted by an oxygen tank explosion.
Frederic C. E. Oder
Frederic C. E. "Fritz" Oder (1919–2006) was an American aerospace engineer and retired Air Force colonel who directed the Air Force program that created America's first satellite reconnaissance systems.
Frederick W. Sturckow
Frederick Wilford "Rick" Sturckow, born 1961, is an American engineer, retired Marine Corps colonel, and former NASA astronaut who flew four shuttle missions before joining Virgin Galactic as a pilot.
Freesat
Freesat is a subscription-free satellite television service in the United Kingdom, launched in 2008 as a BBC and ITV joint venture, offering over 170 channels to about 1 million homes.
Fregat
Fregat is a Russian autonomous upper stage built by Lavochkin that flies atop Soyuz and Zenit rockets, flight-qualified in 2000, to deliver spacecraft into higher orbits.
Friends of Amateur Rocketry
Friends of Amateur Rocketry (FAR) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit, formed in 2003, operating a launch and static-test site in the Mojave Desert, California, for amateur rockets of all sizes.
Frozen orbit
A frozen orbit is one whose mean eccentricity, inclination, and argument of periapsis stay constant, so the orbit's shape and closest approach do not drift over time.
FSW (satellite bus)
FSW, short for Fanhui Shi Weixing (返回式卫星, recoverable satellite), is a series of Chinese recoverable satellite buses built by CAST since 1974 that returned film and experiment capsules to China.
FTV (satellite series)
FTV, or Flight Test Vehicle, was the numbering scheme the US Air Force used to identify classified SAMOS reconnaissance satellites launched between 1962 and 1963.
Fusion rocket
A fusion rocket is a spacecraft propulsion concept using nuclear fusion reactions to generate thrust, with exhaust velocities far beyond chemical or fission rockets; none has flown.
GAGAN
GAGAN (GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation) is India's Satellite-Based Augmentation System, jointly developed by the Airports Authority of India and ISRO with Raytheon and fully operational since 2015.
Gaganyaan (गगनयान)
Gaganyaan (गगनयान), also called the ISRO Orbital Vehicle, is India's human spaceflight program, announced in 2018, to fly three astronauts on a three-day low Earth orbit mission.
Gaia (spacecraft)
Gaia is a European Space Agency space observatory for astrometry, launched in 2013 to orbit the Sun-Earth L2 point and map nearly two billion stars in the Milky Way.
Galactic cosmic ray shielding problem
The galactic cosmic ray shielding problem is the difficulty of protecting astronauts from galactic cosmic rays in deep space, a principal health constraint on missions to the Moon and Mars.
Galaxy Evolution Explorer
The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) was a NASA space telescope that observed the universe in ultraviolet light from 2003 to 2013 to measure the history of star formation in galaxies.
Galileo (satellite constellation)
Galileo is the European Union's global navigation satellite system, a civil-controlled constellation in medium Earth orbit providing positioning, navigation, and timing signals worldwide, begun in 2016.
Galileo (satellite navigation)
Galileo is the European Union's global navigation satellite system, operational since December 2016, run under civilian control and built so Europe would not depend on GPS or GLONASS.
Galileo (spacecraft)
Galileo was a NASA spacecraft launched in 1989 aboard the shuttle Atlantis that became the first artificial satellite of Jupiter in 1995 and was deliberately flown into the planet in 2003.
Galileo atmospheric probe
The Galileo atmospheric probe was a NASA entry craft dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere on December 7, 1995, making the first direct measurements of any outer planet's atmosphere.
Galileo High Accuracy Service
The Galileo High Accuracy Service (HAS) is a free correction service of the EU's Galileo satellite navigation system, delivering decimetre-level positioning accuracy worldwide since its Initial Service began in 2023.
Galileo project
Galileo, also called the Galileo Mission, was a NASA orbiter and atmospheric probe mission to Jupiter, launched in 1989, that found evidence of an ocean on Europa.
Galileo PRS
Galileo PRS is the robust, encrypted navigation service of the EU's Galileo satellite system, restricted to government-authorized users such as police and emergency services, available since 2016.