ProductionNinja.com

Space.com has a top ten list of NASA’s most memorable missions

There aren’t a whole lot of surprises there, with things like Explorer I, the Mars rovers, and Apollo 11.

They also mention Apollo 8 and 13 together, since both missions involved Jim Lovell and both were pretty triumphant in their own way.

One peculiarity is the fact that they list the Challenger explosion, but not the first shuttle flight. NASA made things look so easy for so long (usually to their own detriment) that it’s very easy to overlook the fact that Columbia’s maiden voyage was the first flight where we put astronauts on a completely untested spacecraft. None of the shuttle components had ever been used in flight conditions… it took a lot of guts to strap yourself in when the pocket-protector clad rocket scientists hadn’t tested the spacecraft.

In the same vein, the most interesting thing to me is the fact that they list the Hubble Space Telescope as one of NASA’s greatest missions… while it certainly deserves a place on the list, I think that it is more interesting to look at Hubble through the lens of the upcoming service mission. This is a flight that is in fact so dangerous that NASA won’t even let it fly unless there is a rescue shuttle sitting on the launch pad ready to fly. That too takes a lot of guts, especially since all of the crew members of STS 125 have basically said “Meh, it’s part of the job.”