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SpaceShipOne
SpaceShipOne was a privately funded, rocket-powered suborbital aircraft built by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites with Paul Allen's financing, becoming the first private crewed vehicle to reach space in 2004.
SpaceShipTwo
SpaceShipTwo is a reusable, air-launched, eight-seat suborbital rocket plane built for Virgin Galactic's space tourism program, carried aloft by White Knight Two and using a folding feather wing for reentry.
SpaceWire
SpaceWire is a European spacecraft data-handling network standard developed under ESA auspices and standardized in 2003, used by NASA, JAXA, and Roscosmos missions including JWST and BepiColombo.
SpaceX
SpaceX, formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is an American spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk in 2002, now the dominant orbital launch provider and Starlink operator.
SpaceX Crew-1
SpaceX Crew-1, also known as USCV-1, was the first operational Commercial Crew mission, flying NASA and JAXA astronauts to the International Space Station from November 2020 to May 2021.
SpaceX Crew-11
SpaceX Crew-11 was the 11th SpaceX crew rotation mission to the International Space Station, flying four astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavour from August 2025 to January 2026.
SpaceX Crew-12
SpaceX Crew-12 was a 2026 NASA Commercial Crew mission to the International Space Station, carrying Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot, and Andrey Fedyaev for 237 days in orbit.
SpaceX Crew-13
SpaceX Crew-13 is the thirteenth SpaceX crew rotation mission to the International Space Station, launched for NASA on October 1, 2026 with four astronauts from three space agencies.
SpaceX Crew-9
SpaceX Crew-9 was a 2024 NASA Commercial Crew mission to the International Space Station that returned Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth in 2025.
SpaceX Dragon
SpaceX Dragon, also known as the Dragon spacecraft, is a reusable SpaceX capsule that carries cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station atop Falcon 9 rockets.
SpaceX Dragon 2
SpaceX Dragon 2, also called Crew Dragon, is a reusable SpaceX spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, certified by NASA in 2020.
SpaceX Merlin
The SpaceX Merlin, also known as the Merlin 1, is a family of kerosene and liquid oxygen rocket engines powering the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy.
SpaceX Raptor
The SpaceX Raptor, or Raptor engine, is a liquid oxygen and liquid methane rocket engine developed by SpaceX, powering the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage.
SpaceX reusable launch system development program
The SpaceX reusable launch system development program is SpaceX's effort begun in the early 2010s to recover and re-fly rockets, achieving the first orbital booster landing in December 2015.
SpaceX rocket engines
SpaceX rocket engines are the liquid-propellant engines developed in-house by SpaceX to power the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship rockets and the Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX Starbase
SpaceX Starbase, also known as Boca Chica spaceport, is SpaceX's Starship launch, test, and manufacturing complex at Boca Chica, Texas, incorporated as a city in May 2025.
SpaceX Starbase, Louisiana
SpaceX Starbase, Louisiana, is a planned commercial spaceport announced in 2026 on 125,000 acres of Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, backed by a $100 billion investment.
SpaceX Starfall
SpaceX Starfall, also called Project Starfall, is SpaceX's uncrewed, mass-producible reentry capsule for carrying payloads to orbit and returning them to Earth, first flown in 2026.
SpaceX Starshield
SpaceX Starshield is SpaceX's government-oriented satellite business built on Starlink technology, offering Earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads, including a classified reconnaissance constellation for the National Reconnaissance Office.
SpaceX Starship
SpaceX Starship, also called the Starship and Super Heavy, is a fully reusable two-stage super-heavy-lift rocket developed by SpaceX at Starbase, Texas, and selected by NASA for the Artemis lunar landings.
SpaceX Starship design history
The SpaceX Starship design history traces the fully reusable Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft from 2012 Mars studies through the ITS, BFR, and V3 vehicles.
Spektr-RG
Spektr-RG (Спектр-РГ), also written Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma or SRG, is a Russian-German X-ray observatory launched in 2019 that carries the eROSITA and ART-XC telescopes and surveys the sky from the Sun-Earth L2 point.
SPHEREx
SPHEREx is a NASA astrophysics space telescope launched in March 2025 that is conducting the first all-sky near-infrared spectral survey, imaging the entire sky in 102 infrared colors.
Spin stabilization
Spin stabilization is a passive spacecraft attitude-control technique in which the whole vehicle spins, so its angular momentum stays fixed and gyroscopic stiffness resists disturbance torques.
SpinLaunch
SpinLaunch is a California-based space company founded in 2014 that uses a large electric centrifuge in a vacuum chamber to launch projectiles, with suborbital test flights from Spaceport America in New Mexico since 2021.
Spire Global
Spire Global is an American space data company founded in 2012 and headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, operating a nanosatellite constellation for weather, aviation, and geolocation data.
Spirit (rover)
Spirit, also known as MER-A, was a NASA Mars rover that landed in Gusev Crater in 2004, planned for 90 days but operating for over six years.
Spirit of Mojave
Spirit of Mojave, formerly Virgin Orbit's Cosmic Girl, is a modified Boeing 747-400 that Stratolaunch bought in 2023 and uses to air-launch the reusable Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle over the Pacific.
Splashdown
Splashdown is the landing of a spacecraft on water at the end of a spaceflight, the standard recovery method for American crewed capsules since Mercury.
SPOT (satellites)
SPOT (Satellites Pour l'Observation de la Terre) is a family of French civil Earth-observation satellites developed by CNES and operated from 1986 for mapping and environmental monitoring.