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The International Space Station (ISS) is one of the most complex space projects ever undertaken. It is an enormous artificial, habitable satellite. A coalition of nations that includes the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada designed, developed, built, operated, and maintained the station. ISS was established for the purpose of learning more about space in order to know more about Earth. The coalition's vision refers to the station as "a human outpost in space, bringing nations together for the benefit of life on Earth and beyond."

A space launch vehicle is a rocket that is used to carry a payload into outer space. Many different launch vehicles have been used in space exploration. The United States and Russia are two of the leading nations in the manufacture of launch vehicles. The United States began using the Delta family of launch vehicles for space missions in the 1960s. This family includes several different types of expendable, or single-use, launch vehicles, some of which were still in use into the 2020s. The US National Security Space Launch program also used launch vehicles provided by SpaceX, a private spaceflight company.

Spaceships, Spaceships also called “spacecraft,” are manned or automatic vehicles for flying beyond planet atmospheres. Different types of spaceships serve different purposes, including scientific or applied observations and data collection, exploration of celestial bodies, communication, and recreation.

The Orion spacecraft is a NASA space vehicle designed to carry human crews on proposed missions to the moon and, possibly, to Mars as well. Technically called the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the spacecraft was named after the constellation Orion, a well-known star pattern said to be a legendary hunter from Greek mythology. The ship consists of a crew module that can hold up to four astronauts. The crew module was built by the American aerospace company Lockheed Martin while the service module, which powers the craft, was constructed by the European Space Agency.

Significance: Rutan revolutionized aircraft design with his tail-first, canard airplanes and all-composite homebuilt and commercial aircraft. His best-known design, the Voyager, was the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling in December 1986. Mostly through his Scaled Composites firm, he has designed forty new types of aircraft, including a catamaran, a space-load launcher, a gondola, and a car body. His futuristic-looking prototypes have been used in several Hollywood motion pictures.

Spacecraft engineering is an interdisciplinary engineering field concerned with the design, development, and operation of unmanned satellites, interplanetary probes, and manned spacecraft. Unmanned satellite missions include commercial communications and remote sensing (including meteorological satellites), scientific research, military communications, navigation, and reconnaissance. Interplanetary probes are exclusively confined to scientific and exploratory missions. Manned spacecraft missions are currently confined to long-duration assignments at the International Space Station (ISS) and to short-duration flights supporting the ISS on either the United States Space Transportation System (STS) or the Russian Federation Soyuz spacecraft. However, manned missions returning to the moon or manned flights to Mars are in the planning stages and scheduled to begin in the 2020s and 2030s.

Reusable spacecraft are spacecraft with one or more sections that can be recovered, refurbished, and reused in future spaceflights. They have been used in spaceflight since the Space Shuttle era, with the first successful deployment of the reusable Space Shuttle taking place in 1981. However, reusable spacecraft comprise only a small percentage of the rocket systems used in modern space exploration, mainly because engineering a spacecraft to be reusable adds inert mass that compromises the optimization of its performance characteristics.