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Cape Canaveral Space Force Station
Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, also known as Cape Canaveral AFS, is a U.S. Space Force rocket launch site on Florida's Atlantic coast, hosting its first launch in 1950.
Capella Space
Capella Space is an American commercial synthetic aperture radar satellite operator founded in 2016 and based in San Francisco, acquired by IonQ in July 2025.
Capricorn One
Capricorn One (1977/1978) is Peter Hyams' post-Watergate conspiracy thriller in which NASA fakes a Mars landing on a soundstage; Elliott Gould's reporter exposes it, and the film later fueled moon-hoax theories.
CAPSTONE (spacecraft)
CAPSTONE was a NASA CubeSat launched in 2022, the first spacecraft to fly a near rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon, testing the Gateway orbit.
Captain Midnight broadcast signal intrusion
The Captain Midnight broadcast signal intrusion was a 1986 hijacking of HBO's satellite feed by John R. MacDougall, a Florida uplink operator protesting satellite signal scrambling fees.
Carbon Monitoring System
The Carbon Monitoring System is a NASA research program, begun in 2010, that prototypes satellite-based monitoring of carbon stocks and fluxes on land, in the atmosphere, and in the ocean.
Cardiac rhythm problems during spaceflight
Cardiac rhythm problems during spaceflight are heartbeat disturbances seen in astronauts, ranging from premature beats to ventricular tachycardia; most are benign, but QT prolongation appears on long missions.
Cartosat
Cartosat is a series of Indian Earth observation satellites built and operated by ISRO for cartography and high-resolution imaging, beginning with Cartosat-1 in May 2005.
Cassini–Huygens
Cassini–Huygens was a joint NASA, ESA, and Italian Space Agency robotic mission to Saturn; its Huygens probe landed on Titan in 2005, the first landing in the outer solar system.
CCSDS
The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) is a multi-national forum that develops communications and data systems standards for spaceflight, letting one agency's spacecraft talk to another's ground stations.
Centaur (rocket stage)
Centaur is an American rocket upper stage designed by General Dynamics in 1957 and 1958 for the Atlas missile, and NASA's first operational liquid hydrogen rocket stage.
Center manifold theorem
The center manifold theorem is a result in dynamical systems theory stating that near a non-hyperbolic equilibrium, the local dynamics are governed by dynamics on a lower-dimensional invariant manifold.
Chandra ACIS
ACIS, the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer, is the main X-ray camera on NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Launched in 1999, it images X-ray sources while measuring each photon's energy.
Chandra HRC
The Chandra High Resolution Camera (HRC) is a pair of microchannel plate X-ray detectors on NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, offering Chandra's highest spatial resolution and fastest time resolution, at 16 microseconds.
Chandrayaan programme
The Chandrayaan program, India's lunar exploration series run by ISRO, began with the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter in 2008 and landed Chandrayaan-3 near the Moon's south pole in 2023.
Chandrayaan-1
Chandrayaan-1, also known as Chandrayan I, was India's first mission to the Moon, an orbiter launched by ISRO in October 2008 that mapped the lunar surface and discovered water molecules on it.
Chandrayaan-2 (चन्द्रयान-२)
Chandrayaan-2 (चन्द्रयान-२) is India's second lunar exploration mission, launched by ISRO on July 22, 2019, targeting the Moon's south polar region with an orbiter, the Vikram lander, and the Pragyan rover.
Chandrayaan-3
Chandrayaan-3 was an Indian lunar mission that landed near the Moon's south pole in August 2023, making India the fourth country to achieve a lunar soft landing.
Chandrayaan-3 (चन्द्रयान-३)
Chandrayaan-3 (चन्द्रयान-३) was an Indian Space Research Organisation lunar mission that made India the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon, near the south pole in 2023.
Chandrayaan-4
Chandrayaan-4 is a planned lunar sample-return mission by the Indian Space Research Organisation, approved in 2024, to land at the Moon's south pole and return about 2 to 3 kg of samples.
Chang'e 1
Chang'e 1 (嫦娥一号) was China's first lunar orbiter, launched from Xichang on October 24, 2007, which returned imaging and topographic data before a controlled impact on March 1, 2009.
Chang'e 2
Chang'e 2 (嫦娥二号) was China's second lunar orbiter, launched in 2010 to map the Moon for the Chang'e 3 lander before becoming China's first interplanetary mission.
Chang'e 3
Chang'e 3 (嫦娥三号) was a Chinese lunar mission that landed in Mare Imbrium on December 14, 2013, carrying the Yutu rover, China's first landing on another world.
Chang'e 4 (嫦娥四号)
Chang'e 4 (嫦娥四号) is a Chinese lunar mission that made the first soft landing on the Moon's far side, in Von Kármán crater, in January 2019.
Chang'e 5
Chang'e 5 (嫦娥五号) was a Chinese robotic lunar sample return mission that landed in Oceanus Procellarum in 2020 and returned 1,731 grams of lunar soil, the first since 1976.
Chang'e 6
Chang'e 6 (嫦娥六号), a Chinese lunar sample return mission, landed in the South Pole–Aitken basin in 2024 and brought back the first far-side Moon samples.
Chang'e 7
Chang'e 7 (嫦娥七号) is a Chinese robotic lunar mission planned to send an orbiter, lander, rover, and hopping probe to the Moon's south pole to search for water ice; launch was postponed to 2027.
Characteristic energy
Characteristic energy, written C3, is the square of a spacecraft's hyperbolic excess velocity, measured in km²/s²; it is the standard parameter against which launch vehicle performance is specified.
Charles Bolden
Charles Bolden, born Charles Frank Bolden Jr. in 1946, is a retired Marine major general, former astronaut, and the 12th Administrator of NASA, serving from 2009 to 2017.
Charles Duke
Charles Duke is a retired American astronaut who, as Apollo 16 lunar module pilot in 1972, became the tenth person and youngest to walk on the Moon.