International Crew Manifest 2020–2027: Reading the Global Timeline of Human Spaceflight

What the Infographic Shows

The infographic below condenses seven years of human spaceflight into a single panoramic timeline. It tracks when crews launch, how long they stay in orbit, which spacecraft they use, and which destinations they serve. Each row represents a program, a vehicle, or a special project. Mission patches, crew nameplates, national flags, and small icons for rockets, capsules, and modules help readers decode who is going where and when.

At the top, a continuous calendar runs from late 2020 through mid-2027. Beneath the months, blocks of color extend across multiple weeks to show long-duration expeditions, while shorter bars indicate brief test flights, visiting crew missions, and suborbital flights. The image combines activity in low Earth orbit with milestones for lunar exploration under the Artemis program. A cluster of rows highlights the International Space Station expedition sequence and the crew-rotation traffic that sustains it. Another cluster follows China’s Tiangong space station and its regular Shenzhouflights. Additional rows track private astronaut missions, suborbital tourism, and development milestones for future commercial stations and science assets, such as the Xuntian Space Telescope.

The graphic also features logos of major agencies and companies. Organizations such as NASA, the European Space Agency, JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency, ISRO, the UAE Space Agency, and the Saudi Space Agency appear alongside the badges of companies including SpaceX, Boeing, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. These symbols are more than decoration; they mark responsibility for launch services, mission operations, or crew participation, and they underscore the shared nature of modern human spaceflight.

How to Read the Timeline

The design follows a simple logic. A mission icon appears where a flight begins, then a colored bar runs to the right, covering the period that crew remains in space. Bars that overlap show handovers between outgoing and incoming teams. Docking or landing icons close out the span. Long bars identify standard six-month expeditions. Shorter spans identify ferry flights, visiting missions, developmental tests, or suborbital hops that last minutes rather than months.

Patches and nameplates offer visual summaries of crew composition. Flags indicate nationality. Capsule silhouettes and rocket icons show which system is in use. For the ISS rows, a red-or-blue theme separates Crew Dragon flights from Soyuz MS flights, indicating how the station’s population is refreshed through alternating vehicles. In the Tiangong rows, repeating Shenzhou badges reveal the steady rhythm of launches supporting the Tianhe core module and its laboratories Wentian and Mengtian.

A narrow band near the middle of the graphic marks suborbital activity. Small spacecraft icons represent New Shepard and VSS Unity flights. These bars are tiny compared with orbital missions, capturing the brevity of their trajectories while signaling their growing role in human spaceflight.

The Post-2020 Context

The period covered by the image begins just as a new era takes hold. After the Space Shuttle’s retirement, crews bound for the ISS relied on Soyuz for nearly a decade. The Commercial Crew Program changed that picture by contracting U.S. companies to deliver routine astronaut transport. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon became operational during 2020, introducing a second independent path to orbit for ISS partners. The timeline shows how that development reshaped the cadence of crewed flights: Crew Dragon and Soyuz alternate across the calendar, often with deliberate overlaps. The redundancy is important for safety and for continuity of research, and it gives the partners more flexibility to balance national seats, science schedules, and training pipelines.

At the same time, China concluded the assembly phase of Tiangong. The timeline captures an orderly rotation of Shenzhou crews living and working in Tianhe and its attached modules. The result is two continuously occupied orbital outposts operating in parallel for much of this period, each with its own rhythm, crew training frameworks, and technological heritage.

International Space Station: A Steady Human Presence

The ISS rows dominate a wide band of the timeline, signaling the station’s role as a permanent outpost. On this graphic, the expedition numbers tick upward as crews overlap to hand off responsibility. The alternating bars show one of the essential mechanics of ISS life: while one quartet lands, another quartet launches, with a short period when both teams are present to exchange knowledge, configure experiments, and manage vehicle berths.

Crew Dragon missions carry the label used by NASA for rotating U.S. crews. Soyuz missions preserve the long-running Russian naming convention that began decades earlier. These two systems mesh like gears. When a Crew Dragon rotates in a NASA-led cohort that includes astronauts from ESA, JAXA, or the Canadian Space Agency, a Soyuz vehicle often provides the parallel path for Russian crewmembers and an exchange seat for a partner. The visual result on the timeline is a ladder of overlapping rectangles, one red rung followed by a blue rung, which together maintain a stable population on the outpost.

Experiments, maintenance, and spacewalks thread through this cadence. While the image doesn’t list specific tasks, the presence of long dwell times implies routine extravehicular activity, robotics operations, and cargo traffic. Uncrewed ships such as Progress and Cygnus are not the focus of this crew manifest, but their periodic arrivals are essential enablers of the human activity depicted.

SpaceX Crew Dragon Becomes a Workhorse

Crew Dragon’s appearance in the 2020 column marks a step change. After its initial demonstration flights, the capsule begins a predictable rhythm of six-month rotations with brief periods of dual-docked vehicles during handovers. The timeline shows a string of Crew Dragon missions supporting the ISS, interleaved with occasional special flights. The vehicle’s reusability model becomes visible as the mission tempo rises; visual clusters of Crew Dragon bars across multiple years suggest that multiple capsules cycle through refurbishment in parallel.

From a reader’s perspective, the takeaway is reliability and cadence. Crew Dragon’s regular presence indicates that the vehicle supports multi-national astronaut cohorts, including European, Japanese, and Canadian members. The structure of these flights keeps the U.S. segment of the ISS fully staffed for operations in microgravity research, station upgrades, and technology demonstrations.

Soyuz MS: Enduring Backbone and Cross-Seat Exchanges

The Soyuz MS series continues across the timeline with the dependable rhythm that has defined ISS logistics for years. Bars associated with Soyuz show half-year intervals that slot into the gaps between Crew Dragon rotations. That pattern reveals a deliberate strategy. Mixed crews appear in the nameplates during several intervals, signaling seat-exchange agreements between partners. When a Soyuz carries a NASA astronaut, it maintains U.S. presence on the station even if another vehicle faces an unexpected delay. When a Crew Dragon carries a cosmonaut, it secures Russian presence against similar schedule shifts. The alternation captured by the image isn’t just scheduling convenience; it’s a resilience feature that keeps an international laboratory continuously staffed.

Boeing Starliner Enters Service

The graphic includes Boeing Starliner test and early operational flights. A short bar for the Crew Flight Test signals the vehicle’s crewed shakeout, followed by longer bands that indicate operational service once certified. The addition of another U.S. crew vehicle matters to the overall picture because it widens the margin of safety and increases the options for rotation planning. Even a handful of Starliner flights across this span is enough to influence crew balance, cargo coordination, and docking port management.

China’s Tiangong: A Parallel Stream of Crewed Spaceflight

On the right half of the graphic, the Tiangong rows present a separate but equally steady cadence of space station life. Mission badges for Shenzhou 12 through the upper teens populate the 2021–2024 segment as station assembly transitions to routine operations. As the timeline progresses toward 2025 and beyond, the bars suggest a mature rhythm of six-month expeditions with occasional shorter visits for specialized objectives.

The modules labeled Tianhe, Wentian, and Mengtian appear as distinctive icons, indicating periods of installation and commissioning, then steady use as laboratories. The diagram’s later columns also depict future infrastructure, including the co-orbital Xuntian Space Telescope and references to additional modules or upgrades. Together these features communicate a clear message: Tiangong supports continuous human presence, a wide science portfolio, and a roadmap that extends beyond the assembly phase.

Launch sites are implicit in the program. Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center supports the Shenzhou crewed flights. Modules for the station were launched from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Long March vehicles. The timeline’s clean alternation of Shenzhou bars suggests strong control over cadence and mission overlap, features that mirror the ISS approach even though the engineering heritage is distinct.

Private Astronaut Missions to the ISS

A set of short, labeled bars identifies missions organized by Axiom Space in coordination with NASA and international partners. These include Axiom Mission 1, Axiom Mission 2, Axiom Mission 3, and Axiom Mission 4. Each flight lasts around two weeks and uses a Crew Dragon capsule to ferry a commander and three private astronauts to the ISS.

The timeline places these flights between long-duration rotations. This arrangement minimizes conflict for docking ports and station resources. It also highlights a new category of human spaceflight: fully commercial, short-stay visits that support national astronaut programs, sponsored research, public-private education initiatives, and training for future commercial stations. The appearance of new national flags during these missions reflects broader access. Examples during this period include participants from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, expanding the map of nations with human spaceflight experience.

Suborbital Human Spaceflight

Below the orbital mission rows, the timeline bundle for suborbital flights shows dozens of New Shepard launches and flights of VSS Unity. Each bar is tiny in comparison to orbital missions, a visual reminder that suborbital trajectories spend only minutes above the Kármán line. Even so, this band reveals growth in commercial human spaceflight during the early to mid-2020s. The pattern shows that launch providers ramped up cadence, carried a changing mix of paying passengers and researchers, and refined operations around reusability. The period also captures pauses in service followed by returns to flight, a common feature for developmental systems managed with an emphasis on safety.

Suborbital flights have outsized value relative to their length. They offer taste-of-space experiences that nurture broader public engagement, they generate datasets on short-duration microgravity, and they help incubate a workforce that may transition into orbital operations. The fact that these flights share space on the timeline with ISS and Tiangong expeditions shows that human spaceflight now covers a spectrum rather than a single product.

Artemis Milestones in Context

Near the right side of the graphic, a row outlines major steps for the Artemis program, which is designed to return crews to the Moon and establish a long-term presence in cislunar space. The image marks past and planned missions with icons for Space Launch System and Orion. It also references the Human Landing System architecture and carries notional windows for Artemis II and Artemis III. These markers are not tracked over weeks like station expeditions because lunar missions are measured in days to weeks and occur at larger intervals. Even so, placing Artemis on the same horizontal axis helps readers see how lunar planning overlaps with the busy traffic of low Earth orbit.

The timeline’s placement of Artemis creates an interesting juxtaposition: human spaceflight is no longer a single thread passing from one program to the next. Instead, the graphic shows parallel lines—ISS and Tiangong in orbit, suborbital services budding, private astronaut flights branching out, and a lunar exploration program building toward crewed operations beyond Earth orbit. Read together, these threads convey a diversified strategy for human activity in space.

Launch Sites and Flight Corridors

The timeline doesn’t annotate launch pads directly, but the programs reveal their geography.

• Crew Dragon missions originate from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Falcon 9 rockets. The spacing of launches and landings reflects access to the ISS’s orbital plane and the operational tempo of the Eastern Range.
• Soyuz flights tie to Baikonur Cosmodrome and, when applicable, to additional Russian launch sites. Their steady cadence mirrors the longstanding crew exchange infrastructure between Moscow mission control and the ISS.
• Shenzhou launches rise from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, with a west-to-east ground track that places the station at a favorable inclination for China’s mission objectives.
• Suborbital flights use private spaceports. Blue Origin operates New Shepard out of West Texas. Virgin Galactic flew VSS Unity from Spaceport America in New Mexico during this period.

These geographic anchors matter because they shape crew training logistics, communications support, splashdown recovery zones, and windows of opportunity. The map behind the timeline is global even when the trajectories are short.

Crew Rotation Logic

The overlapping bars around expedition transitions demonstrate how agencies manage station crew counts. A standard sequence works like this: an incoming vehicle docks with four astronauts on board. For a short period, the station hosts seven to ten people. The behind-the-scenes tasks are intense—safety briefings, handovers on experiments, configuration of life support, and transfer of custom-fitted gear. After a few days, the outgoing vehicle undocks and returns to Earth, bringing the on-board population back to the nominal size. The graphic’s alternating blocks capture that overlap without resorting to prose.

Seat exchange appears throughout the period as a stabilizer. When a NASA astronaut flies on Soyuz or a Russian cosmonaut rides Crew Dragon, the ISS retains cross-segment expertise even if a vehicle family encounters a delay. This strategy is visible on the chart wherever a nameplate or flag appears in a color band associated with the other partner’s vehicle. It’s an operational hedge that protects science time, station maintenance, and emergency response posture.

International Participation and Diversity

Looking across the rows, a reader sees a wider mix of flags than in past decades. The ISS crews include members from the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada, continuing a tradition that began in the early 2000s. Private missions widen that list to include countries without permanent seats in ISS partner agreements. During this window, the United Arab Emirates features prominently, with astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi completing a long-duration mission on a Crew Dragon rotation and Emirati participants on Axiom flights. Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali AlQarni appear in this era as well, reflecting Saudi Arabia’s engagement through a private mission. European astronauts such as Andreas Mogensen contribute leadership roles on the station, pointing to the depth of the ESA corps.

Tiangong’s crews are drawn from China’s training pipeline, representing a separate national track of human spaceflight. The Shenzhou missions often include multiple spacewalks, experiments across life sciences and materials, and technology demonstrations for future exploration infrastructure. The presence of two parallel stations in orbit produces a simple but meaningful consequence: more people live and work in space at any given time during 2020–2027 than at any earlier period.

Science, Spacewalks, and On-Orbit Maintenance

Although the image focuses on who flies and when, the length of the bars tells a story about what happens on board. Six-month spans create room for research campaigns that require sustained attention: long-term plant growth studies, human physiology protocols, fluid physics experiments, and Earth observation time series. Shorter private missions pack their schedules with education outreach, national demonstration payloads, and technology trials that benefit from the ISS lab’s microgravity environment.

Spacewalks, formally known as extravehicular activity, are woven into many of these intervals. The ISS crews maintain and upgrade solar arrays, swap out external hardware, and prepare for visiting vehicles. Tiangong crews conduct their own set of EVAs to install experiments, test next-generation suits, and refine procedures. The existence of overlapping crew bars highlights how teams distribute EVA responsibilities. Outgoing crews often finish a maintenance cycle; incoming crews continue with upgrades or science installs.

Commercial Destinations on the Horizon

The rightmost columns of the timeline include early markers for private space stations. References to projects such as Haven-1, Starlab, and Orbital Reef appear alongside company logos like Vast. These items occupy relatively small portions of the image because they are future milestones and short missions rather than continuous occupations. Even so, their presence on the same canvas as ISS and Tiangong implies a path where private habitats host researchers, national astronauts, and technology demonstrations. The Axiom missions on the left act as precursors by proving procedures for short-stay visits, training, docking operations, and return to Earth aboard commercial vehicles.

Key Vehicles and Their Roles

Each vehicle on the timeline fulfills a distinct role in the ecosystem.

• Crew Dragon is the primary U.S. orbital crew transport in this period, launching on Falcon 9 and returning to ocean splashdowns near Florida. Its reusability appears indirectly through the mission cadence.
• Soyuz MS is the steady ferry with deep heritage, launching on Soyuz-2.1a rockets and landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Its reliability is visible in the uniform spacing of flights.
• Boeing Starliner transitions from test to service, adding capacity and redundancy for ISS rotations once on contract.
• Shenzhou supports Tiangong expeditions, pairing with the Long March family for launch and returning to land touchdowns in Inner Mongolia.
• New Shepard and VSS Unity conduct suborbital flights that build human spaceflight experience outside government programs.
• Orion sits in its own category, designed for deep space, with Space Launch System as the heavy-lift rocket for crewed lunar sorties.

The combination of these vehicles shows how human spaceflight has diversified. There are multiple independent ways to reach low Earth orbit, a separate line to fly suborbital research and tourism, and a heavy-lift system for deep-space missions. The image captures these pathways converging on a single calendar.

Training, Crew Health, and Return Operations

Although training and medical timelines aren’t depicted directly, they are embedded in the schedule. Six-month missions require years of preparation, including language training for international crews, spacecraft systems work, robotics proficiency, and emergency protocols. Suborbital astronauts complete condensed versions focused on high-G profiles and safety procedures. The appearance of new national flags during private missions suggests growing international training partnerships and the spread of standardized crew certification paths.

Return operations also shape the rhythm. Crew Dragon splashdowns depend on weather windows in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Soyuz landings target specific recovery zones with helicopters and ground support standing by. Shenzhou landings follow a choreography carried out by search and rescue teams in designated areas. These behind-the-scenes details aren’t shown, yet the spacing between bars gives them away; designers place missions to accommodate not just launch but also safe return.

Risks, Resilience, and Contingencies

The diagram’s redundancy—multiple vehicles, overlapping handovers, diverse launch sites—reduces the chance that an unforeseen issue would interrupt permanent human presence in orbit. Alternate seats on partner vehicles help protect against temporary suspensions. The cadence of suborbital flights shows a learning cycle in which providers pause to incorporate findings, then return with updated hardware or procedures. Artemis milestones appear at lower frequency by design, acknowledging the complexity of deep-space missions.

From an editorial perspective, the timeline communicates resilience without commentary. Regular patterns suggest working systems; irregular clusters hint at adaptation. A reader can infer that spaceflight remains challenging and that program managers adjust on the fly to keep crews safe and science running.

Why Two Space Stations Matter

The ISS and Tiangong rows occupy the most space on the graphic because they host people for months at a time. Two stations in orbit change the scale of human presence. More experiments happen in parallel. More spacewalks occur in a given month. More national space agencies build astronaut corps and life-science programs. This period also demonstrates that separate stations can drive innovation along different vectors: the ISS focuses on multinational collaboration with a wide partner base, while Tiangong refines systems that reflect China’s domestic roadmap. The coexistence of both expands the total throughput of research and engineering learning related to human spaceflight.

How Suborbital Activity Connects to Orbit and the Moon

Suborbital flights show up as small ticks, but their influence spreads across the larger canvas. They create training opportunities for researchers, engineers, and potential future astronauts. They supply data on brief exposures to microgravity and on human performance in high-acceleration environments. They also nourish interest among sponsors and national programs that may later support orbital research or send representatives on private missions. In that sense, the suborbital band is a feeder system for the rows above it.

The Role of Private Companies

The presence of company logos alongside national agency symbols captures a structural shift. SpaceX provides transport services to a national laboratory under contract, and its capsule also flies private missions organized by Axiom Space. Boeing is both a prime contractor on government programs and a provider of crew transport. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic operate their own vehicles for paying customers and researchers. Vast and station partnerships such as Starlaband Orbital Reef point to future markets.

The graphic doesn’t make policy arguments, yet it signals how procurement, certification, and operations now blend government oversight with commercial execution. Crews still train to a common standard, safety remains the anchor, and mission control centers keep procedures disciplined. The difference is that the path to orbit often flows through private factories and launch pads.

Representative Missions and Destinations (Quick Reference)

The following table summarizes what the image presents across its main categories. It is not a complete manifest; it’s a compact guide for readers mapping the icons to programs, vehicles, and destinations.

Agencies and Companies at a Glance

The image’s legend collects the organizations behind the missions. The table below summarizes who they are and the role they play during 2020–2027.

What the Cadence Says About Technology and Operations

Several themes emerge when viewing the graphic as a whole.

Operational maturity. Regular alternation of Crew Dragon and Soyuz signals routine operations built on checklists, certified hardware, and disciplined training. The measured tempo of Artemis milestones, by contrast, reflects the complexity of deep-space systems and the need for longer development cycles.

Reusability. Crew Dragon’s frequent returns and relaunches illustrate a shift toward reuse at the capsule level. Suborbital vehicles emphasize reuse even more strongly, with rapid refurbishment driving turnaround time. The timeline captures this through density rather than labels; more bars in a row often imply more reuse behind the scenes.

International breadth. Wide participation by ESA, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency on Crew Dragon flights shows how the commercial transport model fits inside an international laboratory. Private astronaut flights add nations that are not formal ISS partners, broadening access to microgravity.

Parallel architectures. Two orbital stations, plus suborbital services and a lunar program in development, create parallel tracks that serve different objectives. The result is a layered approach to human spaceflight: research and technology development in low Earth orbit, public outreach and short-duration science on suborbital flights, and exploration beyond Earth orbit under Artemis.

Education and Workforce Signals

The image is useful for educators and workforce planners because it visualizes demand for specific skill sets. Peaks in crew traffic correspond to periods when mission control centers, training facilities, and industrial partners operate at higher tempo. The presence of Axiom missions suggests demand for payload integration specialists who can tailor short campaigns. Suborbital rows hint at training needs for researchers who want to fly experiments requiring rapid setup and teardown. Artemis markers point to a sustained need for systems engineers versed in deep-space navigation, life support, and mission assurance.

For students, the mixed set of operators offers multiple entry points. Agency astronaut corps remain selective, but private missions and science payloads create opportunities for national programs and universities in countries without legacy space industries. The image demonstrates that human spaceflight careers are no longer limited to a single agency pipeline.

Launch Windows, Inclinations, and Logistics

Although the graphic is not a trajectory diagram, schedule patterns whisper about orbital mechanics. Crew Dragon and Soyuz launches cluster around specific weeks because they must hit rendezvous windows with stations at fixed inclinations. Recovery windows affect return timing, especially for ocean splashdowns that require favorable weather. Shenzhou’s cadence syncs with Tiangong’s orbit and with campaign planning at Jiuquan. Suborbital flights respond to weather, airspace coordination, and vehicle readiness, which explains gaps followed by bursts of activity.

These constraints reinforce why redundancy is important. When a weather front blocks splashdown, another vehicle’s schedule may provide breathing room. When an inspection stretches a capsule’s prelaunch flow, a partner’s seat exchange protects crew presence. The timeline shows the result without calling attention to the mechanics.

Public Outreach and National Presence

Nameplates and flags on the timeline carry a public narrative. When a nation’s flag appears on a new row—through a long-duration mission, a private astronaut visit, or a suborbital research flight—it signals a milestone in that country’s space story. For ISS partners, long-duration missions sustain public interest in science campaigns and technology demonstrations. For countries leveraging private missions, brief flights can ignite national programs, academic partnerships, and industry involvement. In both cases, the timeline is a roll call of presence, showing that human spaceflight is no longer limited to a small club.

What to Watch as the Timeline Approaches 2027

The right edge of the image invites readers to think about what comes next. Artemis crewed missions increase the range of destinations beyond low Earth orbit. Private stations appear as mission markers and development milestones, suggesting test flights, uncrewed shakeouts, and eventually crewed visits. The ISS continues its rotation pattern through this period, supporting research and acting as a bridge toward commercial destinations. Tiangong maintains its own cadence, including potential upgrades and the deployment of the Xuntian Space Telescope, which will operate in tandem with the station.

Several decision points lie just beyond the edge. ISS lifetime planning intersects with the readiness of commercial stations. Crew vehicle fleets continue to evolve through refurbishment cycles, new capsule builds, and certification updates. Suborbital providers iterate on systems and operations to reach steady flight rates while balancing safety margins. These threads will shape the look of the next edition of this manifest.

How the Image Can Be Used

For journalists, the timeline is a fact-checking companion. It helps verify whether two missions overlapped, whether a particular capsule was docked during an event, or how many people were on a station during a given month. For educators, it is a teaching aid that turns abstract ideas—expedition numbers, rotation logic, cross-agency cooperation—into visuals that students can follow. For policy analysts, it captures the balance between government programs and commercial services, showing where public funds, private investment, and international partnerships intersect.

The image is also a reference for fans of space exploration who want to track who’s in space today, which spacecraft are active, and what’s next on the lunar horizon. Because it spans several years, it reveals patterns that are not obvious when viewing missions one at a time.

Key Takeaways, Distilled

• Human spaceflight between 2020 and 2027 features two continuously occupied orbital stations—ISS and Tiangong—with regular crew rotations.
• Crew Dragon and Soyuz provide complementary transport for ISS crews, with seat exchanges reinforcing resilience.
• Boeing’s Starliner adds another U.S. crew vehicle as it moves from testing into service.
• Shenzhou flights maintain a steady rhythm at Tiangong, indicating a mature station program with long-duration expeditions.
• Axiom missions introduce fully commercial, short-stay astronaut visits to the ISS, opening pathways for new national participants.
• Suborbital flights by New Shepard and VSS Unity expand access to human spaceflight experiences and short-duration research.
• Artemis milestones place deep-space exploration on the same calendar as orbital activity, signaling a multi-track era.

Summary

The attached infographic presents human spaceflight as a living schedule rather than a set of isolated achievements. Across seven years, the bars and patches show people moving through a connected system: crew capsules and launch sites, research laboratories in low Earth orbit, suborbital vehicles, and a lunar program building toward regular operations. The International Space Station remains a constant presence supported by Crew Dragon, Soyuz MS, and Boeing Starliner. China’s Tiangong runs in parallel with regular Shenzhou expeditions. Private astronaut missions demonstrate a new way to access the ISS, and suborbital services widen participation even more. Artemis milestones connect lunar exploration to the same timeframe, reminding readers that human spaceflight now extends from a classroom experiment flying above the Kármán line to planned crewed operations around the Moon. The timeline is both record and roadmap, capturing how multiple programs, agencies, and companies share a single calendar to keep people in space.