Humans in Space

These pages list the major organisations putting humans in space.

Take me back to the Microcosm 'landing' page

Space Agencies and Companies

The world has entered a new 'space race'. There used to be only a handful of space agencies operated by the governments of the space-going nations. The most famous one in the world is NASA, arguably one of the most important organisations on the planet and vital for the future survival of the human race because of the work it does in understanding earth science.

With the commercialisation of space there are now many privately run space organisations all vying to reach different parts of space.

Some want to go to Mars, some want to re-supply the International Space Station, some want to mine asteroids for resources, some want to take tourists to low earth orbit. All of them are taking part in a new age of space exploration!

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

European Space Agency, ESA

JAXA - The Japanese Space Agency

UK Space Agency

Orion Span

Consensys Space

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

NASA is the most famous space agency in the world. Formed from an organisation called NACA (responsible for experimental aircraft development), NASA has been responsible to some of the most famous acts of human exploration of the cosmos, such as landing on the moon between July 1969 and December 1972 and the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft (which were launched in 1977 and have now left the solar system, still functioning!).

Publicly funded by American taxes, NASA has had to change the way it works in recent years. For this reason some of the activities NASA used to take part in are now 'contracted out' to final companies.

Main NASA Site

Aeronautics Research

Human Spaceflight

Science

Space Technologies

Robotics and Jet Propulsion

European Space Agency, ESA

ESA was founded with the ESA Convention in 1975. It had ten founding member states: Belgium, Denmark, France, (West) Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. ESA works both independently and in cooperation with other agencies such as NASA.

ROSCOSMOS

"The Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities, commonly known as Roscosmos, is a state corporation responsible for the wide range and types of space flights and cosmonautics programs for the Russian Federation.".

quoted from wikipedia

The Russian space agency were responsible for many of the early technological developments which made space exploration possible and are still only second to NASA in terms of capabilities. Indeed since the retirement of the NASA space shuttle, only Russia have had the capability to send and return astronauts to the international space station via the 'Soyuz' sapcecraft and Soyuz-FG, and Soyuz U rockets launched from Kazakhstan.

Roscosmos operate a mixture of open and secretive, state run missions important to the Russian Federation as well as commercial launches such as communications satellites.

Space X

Space X is a company majority owned and run by the technology entrepreneur and visionary Elon Musk. In 2006, Space X won the contract to build and operate the the resupply missions to and from the International Space Station (ISS). This freed NASA engineers up (and the budget) to concentrate their resources on the missions that were most important to them.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin is a company owned by the world's richest man and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin has plans to take humans on a commercial mission to the moon by 2024 with the aim of setting up a permanent colony there. It also has interests in sending commercial satellites to space, space tourism and mining asteroids and planetary bodies such as comets for resources so that those on the earth do not run out.

Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic was formed in 2004 with the intention of developing the technology to take commercial tourists to the edge of space on sub-orbital flights. The original intention was to commence the maiden (first) flight using the Burt Rutan designed 'SpaceShipOne', however there were a significant number of hurdles to overcome with the revolutionary technology (the craft glides back to earth like a shuttlecock). Unfortunately due to pilot error in 2014 SpaceShipOne was lost in an accident. The company has continued to develop the craft involved and hope to launch commercial services in 2020.

JAXA - The Japanese Space Agency

JAXA was formed in 2003 as a result of the merger of three separate Japanese space companies. It is the main company responsible for the development of space technologies in Japan and operates its own missions. One of its most famous missions was the Hayabusa mission where in 2010 it successfully landed on an asteroid, took rock samples and returned them to earth. Hayabusa 2 is the current successor to that mission.

UK Space Agency

The UK has been involved in space activities since its years as one of the world's pioneering aircraft developing nations. In the 1950's after the second world war, the UK opted not to finance and develop its own technologies for exploration of space. As a result, it missed out on over half a century's worth of development. The UK government opted to start to reverse this in 1st April 2010 when they formed the UK Space Agency.

Orion Span

Orion Span is a space tourism company with plans to create a hotel in space!

Consensys Space

Consensys Space plan to mine asteroids and other space bodies for natural resources. They have developed multiple technologies and patented them to protect them from being developed by rival companies.