Coloring Pages for Kids
History of Space Travel Coloring Pages
The space race started with a beeping metal ball and a brave stray dog, and just twelve years later there were footprints on the Moon... and that was only the first sprint, not the end of the story.
These pages travel through the decades that got us there and beyond, from the earliest satellites and the Moon landing to the shuttles, telescopes, rovers and rockets that are still exploring today.
Jump to: Early Space Race | Moon Landing | Shuttle Era | Space Today | Space Force | Ancients
The Early Space Race
On October 4, 1957, a beeping metal ball called Sputnik became the first object humans ever put into orbit. Within weeks, the race to space had a second contestant, and she had four legs.
Laika
Laika was a stray from the streets of Moscow who became the first animal to orbit the Earth. In 1957 she rode into space aboard the Soviet Union's Sputnik 2. Sadly she did not survive the trip but her journey helped pave the way for human spaceflight. She is remembered as a hero and a pioneer.
Satellites
In 1957 the Soviet Union (a country that included Russia) launched Sputnik, a shiny metal ball about the size of a beach ball. It did nothing but go "beep, beep" as it circled Earth, yet people all over the world tuned their radios to listen! Today thousands of satellites help us forecast the weather and find our way with phone maps.
Ham the Chimpanzee
In January 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham rode an American capsule into space and back. He'd been trained to pull a lever whenever a light flashed, and he kept doing his job the whole way up, which showed a pilot could still think and work in space. He splashed down safely in the Atlantic and spent the rest of his life in zoos.
Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, circling the Earth once in about 108 minutes. On the way down he jumped out of his capsule and floated home under a parachute. He landed in a farm field, where a very surprised woman and her granddaughter were the first people to greet him!
Early Space Capsules
Before anyone walked on the Moon, astronauts and cosmonauts had to prove a person could survive in space at all. Early capsules like this one were cramped and bare bones, built for one short, breath-holding ride at a time.
The First Spacewalk
In 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to float outside a spacecraft. He spent about 12 minutes out there on a tether, but his suit puffed up so much in the vacuum that he couldn't fit back through the hatch. He had to let some air out of his own suit to squeeze back inside.
Apollo and the Moon Landing
By the late 1960s, the target wasn't just orbit anymore, it was the Moon itself. Apollo 11 landed there in 1969, and for the first time in history, human footprints appeared somewhere other than Earth.
Apollo 8 and Earthrise
In December 1968, the three astronauts of Apollo 8 became the first people to fly all the way to the Moon and circle it. They were busy taking pictures of the craters when the Earth suddenly peeked up over the Moon's edge. Bill Anders scrambled for a camera with color film and snapped Earthrise, one of the most famous photos ever taken.
Lunar Lander
The lunar lander had a job nobody had ever done before: set people down gently on a world with no runway.
In 1969, only eight years after the first person flew into space, a lander named Eagle carried two astronauts down to the Moon. Near the end, Neil Armstrong had to steer past a field of boulders by hand with less than a minute of fuel left!
Walking on the Moon
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lander, and Buzz Aldrin followed him a few minutes later. There's no wind or rain on the Moon to wipe things away, so the footprints they left behind are probably still sitting there today, looking almost exactly the way they did that day.
Early Spacesuits
A spacesuit is really a tiny spacecraft of its own, keeping an astronaut breathing, warm and protected from a vacuum that would kill them in seconds. Early suits were stiff and heavy, but they were enough to get the job done.
Fun fact: the Apollo suits were sewn by hand by seamstresses from Playtex, the company that made bras and girdles, and each suit had about 21 layers.
Apollo 13: Houston, We've Had a Problem
In April 1970, Apollo 13 was on its way to become the third crew to land on the Moon. Almost 56 hours into the trip, there was a loud bang and an oxygen tank blew up.
Astronaut Jack Swigert radioed, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here," and commander Jim Lovell said it again a moment later. The Moon landing was off. Now the only job was getting three astronauts home alive.
Houston, We Have a Problem
If that line sounds a little different from the one you know, you're right! In 1995 a movie called Apollo 13 changed it to "Houston, we have a problem," which makes it sound like it's happening right now. The movie version stuck, and today people say it about everything from a flat tire to burnt toast.
The "Failure is not an option" mug on the desk in the first picture comes from the movie too. The line was written for the film, and the real flight director, Gene Kranz, liked it so much he used it as the title of his book.
A Square Filter in a Round Hole
With the main spacecraft badly damaged, the crew moved into the little lunar lander and used it as a lifeboat. But the lander was built for two people for about two days, not three people for four, and the air started filling up with the carbon dioxide they breathed out. There were spare air filters on board, but they were square and the holes they had to fit were round!
Engineers on the ground grabbed only things the astronauts had with them, like plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape, and worked out a fix. Then they read the instructions over the radio, one step at a time, and the astronauts built it.
Teamwork makes the dream work!
Splashdown
On April 17, 1970, the capsule hit Earth's air so fast that it glowed with heat, and the radio went quiet, which always happened on the way home. Usually the silence lasted about four minutes. This time it went on longer, and everyone in Mission Control held their breath. Then a voice crackled through, and three big parachutes opened over the Pacific Ocean. A helicopter carried the astronauts to a waiting ship.
The World Cheers
Millions of people around the world had been glued to their TVs for days. When the capsule bobbed safely in the ocean, families cheered and hugged right there in their living rooms. Apollo 13 never made it to the Moon, but people call it "Nasa's most successful failure" because everyone worked together and brought the crew home safe.
The Shuttle Era
Starting in 1981, NASA's space shuttles flew again and again instead of being thrown away after one launch. They carried astronauts, satellites, and eventually pieces of the International Space Station, until the program finally retired in 2011.
Sally Ride
In 1983 Sally Ride rode the space shuttle Challenger into orbit and became the first American woman in space, twenty years after Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union went first. One of her jobs was running the shuttle's big robotic arm, which was built here in Canada. She used it to let go of a satellite and then catch it again, something no one had ever done before.
Space Shuttle
For three decades, the space shuttle was the most familiar spacecraft in the world, launching like a rocket and landing like a glider. It's retired now, which is exactly what makes it history.
Hubble Telescope
Maybe I should have called this page Space Exploration, instead of Space Travel! We don't just want to visit... we want to see what's just out of reach.
When Hubble launched on April 24, 1990, it carried what engineers called the most perfectly polished mirror ever made, and it was ground to the wrong shape by a sliver thinner than a human hair. Every image came back blurry until a shuttle crew flew up in 1993 and fitted the telescope with the equivalent of a pair of glasses, after which it went on to take some of the most famous photos in the history of astronomy.
Space Today
Space travel isn't only history. Right now there are spacecraft from the 1970s still drifting out past the planets, telescopes peering back toward the beginning of the universe, rovers rolling across Mars, people living in orbit and rockets landing themselves so they can fly again.
Voyager
Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977, and both are still out there today, farther from Earth than anything else humans have ever built. Each one carries a golden record with sounds, music, and greetings in 55 languages, meant for any civilization that might someday find it long after the spacecraft themselves have gone silent.
James Webb Space Telescope
Hubble's big sister launched on Christmas Day 2021, folded up like origami so it would fit inside the rocket. Once it was out in space it slowly opened its honeycomb of 18 gold-coated mirrors and a sunshade about the size of a tennis court. Webb sees heat instead of ordinary light, which lets it spot galaxies so far away that their light has been travelling since not long after the universe began.
Mars Rovers
The very first Mars rover landed in 1997. It was about the size of a microwave oven and never wandered more than about 40 feet from its lander. The rovers that came after it kept getting bigger and braver. Today's rovers are as big as a car, and one of them even carried a little helicopter that made the first flight on another planet.
Life on the International Space Station
Since November 2000 there's been someone living on the International Space Station every single day, so anyone younger than that has never known a world without people in space. The station was built piece by piece, and many of those pieces rode up on the shuttle. It circles the Earth about every 90 minutes, which means the crew gets to watch around 16 sunrises a day.
SpaceX and Reusable Rockets
For most of the space age a rocket was used once and then dropped into the ocean, which is a bit like throwing away an airplane after every flight. In December 2015 a SpaceX Falcon 9 did something new. After sending its cargo on its way, the big bottom stage flew back down and landed standing up on its own legs. Now boosters land on ships at sea and fly again and again, some of them more than 20 times.
Space Force
The newest branch of the U.S. military isn't based on land, at sea or in the air, it's based in orbit. Formed in 2019, the Space Force protects the satellites and technology that keep communication and navigation running here on Earth.
Military Branches coloring pages
I decided to put the pre-space flight History of Space Travel at the bottom of this page so as not to confuse young visitors or waste the time of viewers who didn't want to scroll too far to get to the meat of "space travel" but for me the history of space travel started long before a dog or a man first left earth's orbit.
Ancients Looked Up Too
Interest in space didn't start with rockets. Long before anyone could build a satellite, people were already tracing shapes among the stars and telling stories about what they saw...
Jules Verne imagines moon travel
In 1865, more than a hundred years before Apollo 11, Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon, a novel about three men launched toward the Moon from Florida and splashing back down in the Pacific Ocean on their return. Real Apollo missions matched those details so closely that it's hard to believe Verne was only guessing.
I wonder how much Verne's books inspired the people who made it all happen!
Robert Goddard's First Rocket
In 1926 Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket from his aunt's farm in Massachusetts. It flew for about two and a half seconds, climbed 41 feet and landed in a cabbage patch. That doesn't sound like much, but the giant rockets that later carried people to the Moon worked on the very same idea.
A newspaper once laughed at Goddard for saying rockets could work in space, and the day after Apollo 11 launched in 1969 it finally printed an apology!