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Space exploration has given us some of the most awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, and unforgettable moments in human history. From emotional farewells and heroic recoveries to legendary photos and firsts that changed everything, these are the missions and milestones that hit us right in the feelings. Which one still gets you misty-eyed? Let us know in the comments below!
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00:00Wow, um, not a dry eye in the control room when that happened, and even here, an emotional moment for
00:06the Artemis II crew.
00:07Welcome to Ms. Mojo, and today, we're counting down our picks for the most notable missions, milestones, and farewells in
00:15space exploration that moved the world to tears.
00:17It became one of the most reproduced images ever, in part because no other photographs summed up our place in
00:24the universe.
00:26Number 10. Jim Lovell's posthumous message to the Artemis II crew.
00:31Imagine being hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth and waking up to the voice of a legend.
00:36On April 6, 2026, during Artemis II's sixth day, the astronauts were greeted by a pre-recorded message from Jim
00:44Lovell, recorded shortly before his passing in August 2025.
00:48Hello, Artemis II. This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood.
00:55Lovell warmly welcomed them to his old neighborhood, a nod to his historic journey aboard Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.
01:02It was a deeply nostalgic moment, but it also felt like space history reaching through time.
01:07I'm proud to pass that torch on to you as you swing around the moon and play the groundwork for
01:13missions to Mars, for the benefit of all.
01:17It's a historic day, and I know how busy you'll be, but don't forget to enjoy the view.
01:23Hearing a trailblazer speak directly to a new generation created a haunting, beautiful continuity.
01:29For a moment, past and present astronauts shared the same orbit, and honestly, that's enough to choke anyone up.
01:36It makes me emotional. Lovell recorded that message just before he died at 97 years old last summer.
01:43Number 9. The long-awaited return of Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams.
01:48What was supposed to be a quick eight-day mission turned into a grueling 286-day ordeal for Butch Wilmore
01:54and Sunita Williams.
01:56We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short. That's what we do in human
02:01spaceflight.
02:01Technical issues left them effectively stranded in orbit, forcing months of uncertainty, adaptation, and endurance aboard the International Space Station.
02:10Families waited, the world watched, and every delay raised the stakes.
02:15Their mission had quietly become one of the most talked-about ordeals in recent spaceflight history.
02:20Butch and Suni suddenly became household names, with everybody asking,
02:23What's up? Are they up? Why can't they come back any sooner from being up there?
02:28NASA said the astronauts were safe.
02:29They simply adjusted plans for Butch and Suni to swap places with another crew that would be making their way
02:34to the ISS for a different mission.
02:35When they finally splashed down on March 18, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the relief was palpable.
02:43Watching Wilmore and Williams emerge, smiling, emotional, finally home.
02:49After months of uncertainty was the kind of ending that made you exhale deeply and maybe reach for a tissue.
02:54They appear safe and healthy, but they were carried to a stretcher.
02:58They will undergo a medical evaluation and will be flown from here in Florida to Houston, Texas,
03:03where they will reunite with their families.
03:05David, tonight, that unexpected space odyssey, finally over.
03:10Number 8, Opportunity Rover's final transmission.
03:13Launched in 2004, Opportunity vastly outperformed its initial 90-day mission.
03:19Among its achievements, finding evidence that water once flowed on Mars.
03:23It also examined the first meteorite found on another planet.
03:27After 15 years exploring Mars, way beyond its planned 90-day mission,
03:32the Opportunity Rover faced a massive dust storm that blocked sunlight from its solar panels.
03:37As power drained, engineers received what became its final transmission.
03:41Quote,
03:42My battery is low and it's getting dark.
03:44The messages from mission control went unanswered.
03:48It's an emotional time.
03:50And NASA has finally given up opportunity for dead.
03:54While NASA later clarified this was a poetic interpretation of the data, the sentiment stuck.
03:59This little robot had traveled over 45 kilometers on an alien world,
04:04sending back invaluable scientific data and breathtaking images.
04:08When contact was lost in 2018, it felt like losing a loyal explorer.
04:13Strange how a machine, millions of miles away, could make humanity collectively tear up.
04:19The objective was to have it be able to move 1,100 yards and survive for 90 days on Mars.
04:2990 souls.
04:31And instead, here we are 14 years later.
04:34Number 7, Hubble's final repair mission.
04:37By 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope had already rewritten our understanding of the universe.
04:43But it was deteriorating.
04:45The Hubble Telescope is slowly dying.
04:47Its batteries and gyroscopes in need of replacement.
04:50NASA's STS-125 mission launched in May 2009,
04:54sending seven astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis on what would become Hubble's fifth and final servicing mission.
05:00The crew performed five back-to-back spacewalks totaling over 36 hours,
05:05replacing gyroscopes, batteries, and installing new cameras under genuinely dangerous conditions.
05:11The astronauts also replaced a small computer on Hubble that had previously malfunctioned,
05:16completing this first spacewalk in seven, sometimes anxious, hours.
05:21Hubble couldn't be reached by the ISS if anything went wrong, and the crew knew this.
05:25Watching them still risk everything to preserve humanity's window into the cosmos
05:30was an extraordinary testament to courage and curiosity.
05:33Even NASA veterans got misty-eyed.
05:36Four very busy spacewalks are going to install one more new instrument,
05:39try to repair two others, install six batteries, six gyroscopes,
05:43very tricky work, and those instrument repairs are much more complicated than what we've seen so far.
05:47Number 6, the first all-female spacewalk.
05:50On October 18, 2019, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir stepped outside the ISS together,
05:57marking the first all-female spacewalk in history.
06:00What we're doing now shows all of the work that went in for the decades prior,
06:04all of the women that worked to get us where we are today.
06:06The moment was long overdue,
06:08especially after a previously planned one had been delayed due to suit availability issues.
06:13This time, everything aligned.
06:15As they worked seamlessly in orbit to replace a failed power control unit,
06:19millions watched, not just for the technical achievement, but for what it represented.
06:24The repair job marked Cook's fourth spacewalk in Meir's first,
06:28but it's the first time two women have ever ventured out of a spacecraft as a team.
06:33For decades, women had fought for equal footing in space exploration.
06:37Seeing Cook and Meir out there, framed by Earth below,
06:41felt like a quiet but powerful correction of history.
06:44It wasn't loud or flashy, but it was deeply, beautifully emotional.
06:48I love how a routine mission is seven hours and 17 minutes.
06:53I don't have the attention span for that, I'm not going to lie.
06:56Congratulations to them, though.
06:58Great step forward.
06:59Number five, a crater named Carol.
07:02Space exploration carries personal weight that rarely makes headlines,
07:06until moments like this one.
07:07Here's a look at those craters.
07:09The proposed name for the second one, Integrity, after the cruise spacecraft.
07:12NASA says after the mission is completed, the crater name proposals will be formally submitted
07:17to the organization that governs the naming of celestial bodies and their surface features.
07:22On April 6, 2026, as the Artemis crew orbited the moon,
07:27Commander Reed Wiseman quietly named a bright, previously unnamed lunar crater, Carol,
07:32after his late wife, Ann Carol Taylor Wiseman, who passed away from cancer in 2020.
07:37It's a bright spot on the moon.
07:41And we would like to call her Carol, and you spell that C-A-R-R-O-L-L.
07:49The gesture wasn't part of any official NASA protocol.
07:53It was a husband honoring the woman he loved from the most extraordinary vantage point imaginable.
07:58The crew noted the crater as they observed the lunar surface together.
08:01For anyone who has ever lost someone they love,
08:04watching that moment unfold was almost too tender to bear.
08:08The fact that we all leave someone down on the ground that we care about,
08:11that's what brought us together.
08:13Because we're all, it's the very humanity of us,
08:15and I'm glad that this crew brings it front and center.
08:18Number 4. The Pale Blue Dot
08:20On February 14th, 1990, Voyager 1, already beyond the outer planets,
08:26turned its camera back toward home at Carl Sagan's request and took a picture.
08:30You can see that it is slightly blue, and this is where we live, on a blue dot.
08:38Earth appeared as a fraction of a single pixel, a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam.
08:43Sagan's reflection on that image remains one of the most humbling passages ever written.
08:49Quote,
08:49On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, lived out their lives.
08:53He called Earth, quote,
08:55A moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
08:58It's a very small stage in a great cosmic arena.
09:04Against the vast, indifferent darkness of space, our planet looked heartbreakingly small and heartbreakingly precious.
09:11Few photographs have ever made humanity feel so simultaneously insignificant and deeply, urgently responsible for each other.
09:19I think this perspective underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish that blue dot, the only home we have.
09:31Number 3. Earthrise and a Christmas Message
09:35The world in 1968 was fractured.
09:38The Vietnam War, political assassinations, and civil unrest left many regions in tatters.
09:43Then, on December 24th, the three astronauts of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, reached lunar orbit
09:52and did something nobody expected.
09:54Problem was, they had precious little film on board.
09:57And what they had was supposed to be used to take pictures of the moon, not the Earth.
10:01Hey, don't take that. That's not scheduled.
10:03But Anders did it anyway.
10:05Anders photographed Earth rising above the moon's gray horizon.
10:08Vivid, colorful, impossibly beautiful against the black void.
10:12That evening, during a live broadcast watched by millions around the world, the crew took turns reading from the book
10:19of Genesis.
10:20In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth.
10:24And the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
10:30It was pitch perfect.
10:32No script could have captured the moment better.
10:34People wept, not from sadness, but from a sudden overwhelming recognition that our small, shared home was worth everything.
10:42They were indeed sailors on a new ocean, returning from a successful voyage at the end of one of our
10:49most turbulent years, during a season all about peace.
10:54Number 2. Apollo 13's fight for survival.
10:58Houston, we've had a problem.
11:00With those words, Commander Jim Lovell signaled a crisis aboard Apollo 13, after an oxygen tank explosion crippled the spacecraft
11:08roughly 200,000 miles away from Earth.
11:11Warning lights indicate something is wrong with the electrical system.
11:16Then, more lights.
11:17Two out of the three fuel cells have just died.
11:20We've had a problem here.
11:23Lovell, alongside Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert and Lunar Module Pilot Fred Hayes, faced an almost certainly unsurvivable situation.
11:32NASA engineers on the ground worked relentlessly, improvising solutions with terrifying ingenuity, including a makeshift CO2 filter built from spare
11:41parts.
11:41So engineering comes up with the idea to fabricate an adapter to fit the square scrubber into the round hole,
11:48test it in the laboratories, and voice the instructions up to the crew.
11:51The crew used the lunar module Aquarius as a lifeboat.
11:55On April 17th, six days after launch, they splashed down safely in the Pacific.
12:01Watching the capsule descend, parachutes open, was one of television's most tear-drenched moments.
12:07There was pure, unfiltered relief pouring through every screen.
12:11For eight years, NASA had been shooting for the moon.
12:16Little did they know their ultimate test would be reaching planet Earth.
12:22Number 1.
12:23The Apollo 11 Moon Landing
12:25July 20th, 1969.
12:28The date humanity rewrote what was possible.
12:31After eight years of relentless effort following President Kennedy's audacious challenge, NASA's Apollo 11 mission delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz
12:39Aldrin to the lunar surface, while Michael Collins orbited above.
12:43That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
12:51As Armstrong descended the eagle's ladder and placed his boot on the moon, an estimated 600 million people, one-fifth
12:58of Earth's population at the time, watched live.
13:02Grown adults sobbed openly.
13:04World leaders fell silent.
13:06Rivals paused their rivalry.
13:08From the White House, the president congratulates the astronauts.
13:11I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have done.
13:16For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.
13:20For one extraordinary moment, humanity wasn't divided by borders or ideology.
13:24It was united, tearfully and triumphantly, by the sheer miracle of what we could achieve together.
13:31Everything before July 20th, 1969, humans only had experience on one planetary body.
13:38From that moment on, we were, at least in some measure, a multi-planetary species.
13:44Got a space moment that still gives you chills?
13:46Let us know in the comments below.
13:50Amplified my son?
13:52Let us know what's going on in the comments below.
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