Basics of Spaceflight

People from all sorts of backgrounds work on projects that explore our solar system and beyond. Find topics here that might be unfamiliar to you, and learn how they fit into the business of interplanetary exploration.

By Dave Doody

Join the mission

This tutorial offers a broad scope, but limited depth, as a framework for further learning. Any one of its topic areas can involve a lifelong career of specialization, but here we see how they all work together. While this is a training guide for mission operations people, anyone interested in interplanetary spaceflight may find it useful.

To navigate through this site, look for “Next Page” with a red-circled white arrow. Clicking on anything below that on a page will lead away from Basics of Space Flight to various other NASA sites — interesting sites, but not part of this tutorial. Likewise for the stripe-menu, the NASA logo, and the search icon that appear up in the page headers.