Real Space Vehicles Coloring Pages
Every trip into space needs a ride, and those rides have changed a lot in the last hundred years! This page starts with the very first rockets and works its way up to the rovers exploring Mars today, with a peek at how each one actually works.
Jump to: First Steps | To the Moon | Living in Space | Mars Rovers
First Steps Off the Planet
Vostok 1
In 1961 Vostok 1 carried Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space. Its capsule was a ball, with the heavy equipment packed on one side, so on the way home it rolled itself heavy side down like a wobble toy that won't stay tipped over. Nobody could be sure which side would face forward, so the whole ball was covered in a heat shield.
The ball came down too hard for a soft landing, so it had an ejection seat. About 4 miles above the ground, the cosmonaut shot out and floated the rest of the way under his own parachute.
Mercury
Mercury was America's first spacecraft for people, and it carried one astronaut at a time starting in 1961. It was so small that astronauts joked you didn't climb into it, you put it on! Its sides were covered in thin metal shingles, a bit like a roof, made from a special metal that could handle the heat.
The little pack strapped to the bottom held three small rockets. They fired to slow the capsule down so it would fall out of orbit, then the whole pack was let go so the heat shield underneath could do its job.
The Race to the Moon
Saturn V
In 1969 a Saturn V rocket launched the first astronauts to walk on the Moon. Standing up, it was taller than the Statue of Liberty, and most of it was fuel tanks! Pieces called stages dropped away one by one as their fuel ran out, so only the small capsule at the very top came back to Earth.
Apollo Capsule
Three astronauts rode to the Moon and back squeezed inside the Apollo capsule, which had about as much room as the inside of a minivan. Its computer had less memory than a pocket calculator today, but it was enough to steer all the way to the Moon.
The wide bottom was a heat shield built to burn away on purpose. As it charred and flaked off on the way home, it carried the heat away with it and kept the astronauts safe inside.
Moon Lander (Lunar Module)
The lunar lander was built only for space, so it didn't need to be smooth or pointy and ended up looking like a giant metal bug. In places its walls were about as thin as a few sheets of paper to keep it light. When it was time to leave the Moon, the bottom half stayed behind as a launch pad and the top half blasted off to meet the capsule waiting overhead.
It turned out to be tougher than it looked, too. On Apollo 13, the lander became a lifeboat that kept three astronauts alive on the long trip home.
Lunar Roving Vehicle
On the last three Moon missions, astronauts brought along a car! The Lunar Roving Vehicle ran on batteries and folded up small enough to tuck into the side of the landing craft. It had no steering wheel, just a handle between the seats, and all three rovers are still parked on the Moon today.
Living and Working in Space
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle was the first spaceship built to fly again and again. It was covered in about 24,000 heat tiles, each one shaped to fit its own spot like a giant puzzle. They were so good at shedding heat that you could hold one by its edges just seconds after it came out of a glowing hot oven!
The two white rocket boosters parachuted into the ocean so they could be picked up and used again. Only the big orange fuel tank was thrown away each time.
Soyuz
Soyuz first flew in 1967 and is still flying today, which makes it the longest-working spacecraft ever built. It comes in three parts: a round room in front for living in, a bell-shaped middle where three people squeeze in for launch and landing, and a long back section with the engine and solar panels. Only the middle part comes home.
Soyuz lands on the ground instead of in the ocean. Just before it touches down, little rockets on the bottom fire for a split second to soften the bump. After the shuttle retired in 2011, Soyuz was the only way to get astronauts to the space station for nine years.
SpaceX Dragon
In 2020 Crew Dragon became the first spacecraft built by a company instead of a country to carry astronauts to the space station, and Soyuz finally had some company on the trip up. It was named after the old song "Puff the Magic Dragon." Instead of walls covered in switches like older spacecraft, Dragon has a few big touchscreens, and it can fly itself all the way to the station and dock without anyone steering.
Coming home, it splashes down in the ocean under four big parachutes. A ship lifts it out of the water so it can be cleaned up and flown again.
International Space Station
The International Space Station is a home and science lab about as big as a football field, and its giant solar panels make all the power it needs. Water is so precious up there that the station recycles almost all of it, even the crew's sweat and pee, and turns it back into clean drinking water!
There's no up or down in space, so astronauts sleep in sleeping bags tied to the wall to keep from floating away in the night.
Canadarm2
Canadarm2 is Canada's giant robot arm on the space station. Both of its ends can work as a hand, so it can grab the station and flip end over end to a new spot, a bit like an inchworm. It went up in 2001, twenty years after the first Canadarm started flying on the Space Shuttle, and it still catches cargo ships bringing food and supplies to the crew.
Exploring Mars
Rovers are robot cars that explore places too far away for people to visit yet, like Mars. Radio messages take several minutes to travel between the two planets, so drivers on Earth can't steer with a joystick. They send a plan instead and the rover carefully follows it on its own. One rover called Opportunity was only meant to last 90 days, but it kept exploring for almost 15 years!
Back to the Moon
Artemis (Space Launch System)
NASA's new Moon program is called Artemis, after Apollo's twin sister in the Greek myths, which is a pretty fitting name for the program that comes after Apollo! Its rocket, the Space Launch System, is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever flown, even stronger than the Saturn V.
If it looks a little familiar, that's because it borrows a lot from the Space Shuttle. The big orange tank, the two white boosters on the sides and the four main engines all come from shuttle designs, and some of those engines actually flew on the shuttle years ago. Orion rides on the very top.
Orion
Orion is the newest spacecraft built to carry people to the Moon. It looks a lot like the Apollo capsule, but it's bigger and fits four astronauts instead of three. Its four long solar wings stick out in an X like a giant windmill and turn sunlight into power, and the part they're attached to was built in Europe.
In April 2026, Orion carried four astronauts around the Moon and back, farther from Earth than any people had ever gone. One of them was Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian ever to travel to the Moon. Orion even has a real toilet, something Apollo never had... though it broke on the very first day and the crew had to fix it!
Christina Koch took on the role of space plumber, removing parts from the toilet and following a series of steps radioed up from Houston while controllers on the ground monitored the toilet’s systems.