Launches
ON RECORD33MISSIONS
32 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1959, the most recent 2025.
ARCHIVE // DAY OF YEAR
November 20 in spaceflight
33 orbital launches flew on November 20, the earliest of them in 1959, and 32 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 1 spaceflight and astronomy event on November 20. Below are the pictures NASA published on November 20 in 5 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD1ENTRY
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1998 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED5IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for November 20, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on November 20
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2025
Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka
Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka are the bright bluish stars from east to west (upper right to lower left) along the diagonal in this cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie from 700 to 2,000 light-years away, born of Orion's well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the upper right. The famous Orion Nebula itself is off the right edge of this colorful starfield. The telescopic frame spans almost 4 degrees on the sky.
© Aygen Erkaslan — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
Earthset from Orion
ght billion people are about to disappear in this snapshot from space taken on 2022 November 21. On the sixth day of the Artemis I mission, their home world is setting behind the Moon's bright edge as viewed by an external camera on the outbound Orion spacecraft. Orion was headed for a powered flyby that took it to within 130 kilometers of the lunar surface. Velocity gained in the flyby maneuver was used to reach a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. That orbit is considered distant because it's another 92,000 kilometers beyond the Moon, and retrograde because the spacecraft orbited in the opposite direction of the Moon's orbit around planet Earth. Orion entered its distant retrograde orbit on November 25. Swinging around the Moon, Orion reached a maximum distance (just over 400,000 kilometers) from Earth on November 28, exceeding a record set by Apollo 13 for most distant spacecraft designed for human space exploration. The Artemis II mission, carrying 4 astronauts around the moon and back again, is scheduled to launch no earlier than September 2025.
NASA · public domain
2023
The Horsehead Nebula
Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex. About five light-years "tall," the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left of the full image. The featured gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using several different telescopes. New: Follow APOD on Telegram
© Mark Hanson & Martin Pugh, SSRO, PROMPT, CTIO, NSF — used with the credit NASA publishes
2022
Airglow Ripples over Tibet
Why would the sky look like a giant target? Airglow. Following a giant thunderstorm over Bangladesh in late April, giant circular ripples of glowing air appeared over Tibet, China, as pictured here. The unusual pattern is created by atmospheric gravity waves, waves of alternating air pressure that can grow with height as the air thins, in this case about 90-kilometers up. Unlike auroras powered by collisions with energetic charged particles and seen at high latitudes, airglow is due to chemiluminescence, the production of light in a chemical reaction. More typically seen near the horizon, airglow keeps the night sky from ever being completely dark.
© Jeff Dai — used with the credit NASA publishes
2021
An Almost Total Lunar Eclipse
Predawn hours of November 19 found the Moon in partly cloudy skies over Cancun, Mexico. Captured in this telephoto snapshot, the lunar disk is not quite entirely immersed in Earth's dark umbral shadow during a long partial lunar eclipse. The partial eclipse was deep though, deep enough to show the dimmed but reddened light in Earth's shadow. That's a sight often anticipated by fans of total lunar eclipses. Wandering through the constellation Taurus, the eclipsed Moon's dimmer light also made it easier to spot the Pleiades star cluster. The stars of the Seven Sisters share this frame at the upper right, with the almost totally eclipsed Moon. Notable APOD Submissions (so far): Lunar Eclipse of 2021 November 19
© Robert Fedez — used with the credit NASA publishes
What happened on November 20
1998
The first space station module component, Zarya, for the International Space Station is launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Zarya (ISS module) ↗
Every launch on November 20
33 launches
ONLINE
- 2025Electron | Follow My Speed (BlackSky Gen-3 3)RLSUCCESS
- 2023Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 7-7SpXSUCCESS
- 2021Astra Rocket 3 | STP-27AD2ASSUCCESS
- 2021Long March 4B | Gaofen-11-03CASCSUCCESS
- 2020Electron | Return to Sender (Rideshare)RLSUCCESS
- 2015Long March 3B/E | LaoSat-1CASCSUCCESS
- 2014Long March 2D | Yaogan-24CASCSUCCESS
- 2013Long March 4C | Yaogan 19CASCSUCCESS
- 2013Minotaur I | ORS-3OSCSUCCESS
- 2012Proton-M / Briz-M Enhanced | EchoStar XVIILSSUCCESS
- 2011Long March 2D | Shiyan Weixing 4 & Chuang Xin 1CCASCSUCCESS
- 2010Minotaur IV HAPS | STP S-26OSCSUCCESS
- 2009Soyuz-U-PVB | Lotos-S 1VKSSUCCESS
- 2004Delta II | SwiftUSAFSUCCESS
- 2002Delta IV M+(4,2) | Eutelsat W5BASUCCESS
- 2000Kosmos-3M | QuickBird 1NPFAILURE
- 1998Proton | ZaryaKhSCSUCCESS
- 1994Proton | Uragan 60 to 62KhSCSUCCESS
- 1993Ariane 44LP | Solidaridad 1 & Meteosat 6ASASUCCESS
- 1992Soyuz U | Yantar-4K2 67VKSSUCCESS
- 1991Soyuz U | Yantar-4K2 61CCCPSUCCESS
- 1990Ariane 42P | Satcom C1 & GStar 4ASASUCCESS
- 1990Molniya 8K78M-PVB | US-K 67CCCPSUCCESS
- 1987Soyuz-U2 | Progress 33CCCPSUCCESS
- 1986Molniya-M | US-K 51CCCPSUCCESS
- 1981Kosmos-3M | Bhaskara 2CCCPSUCCESS
- 1981Delta 3910/PAM | Satcom 3RUSAFSUCCESS
- 1975Delta 2910 | AE-EUSAFSUCCESS
- 1974Kosmos 11K63 | DS-P1-Yu 73CCCPSUCCESS
- 1973Kosmos 11K63 | DS-P1-Yu 66CCCPSUCCESS
- 1971Kosmos-3M | Sfera 7CCCPSUCCESS
- 1969Apollo LM | Apollo 12NASASUCCESS
- 1959Thor Agena A | Discoverer 8USAFSUCCESS
Sources and licences
Event text and thumbnails come from Wikipedia and are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Images are drawn only from Wikimedia Commons, which does not accept non-free content — each thumbnail links to its file page, where its licence and author are recorded.
Launch records are from The Space Devs’ Launch Library 2. Pictures are NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day; NASA imagery is generally not subject to copyright, but individual APOD entries are frequently the property of the photographer, and each caption says which applies.
FIELD KIT / LIBRARY
SPONSORED
General-audience astronomy and spaceflight — none of it a textbook.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Links here cost you nothing extra.
- VIEW
LISTING
Cosmos — Carl Sagan
Still the best single argument for why any of this matters, and it leaves the arithmetic in. For a reader who wants the science, not just the awe.
- VIEW
LISTING
Pale Blue Dot — Carl Sagan
The case for leaving Earth, written by someone unsentimental about how hard that is. Suits readers who want the argument rather than the poster.
- VIEW
LISTING
Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
Hard-SF problem solving in The Martian's key — for anyone who liked the engineering more than the peril. The only novel on this list.
BROWSE opens an Amazon search, not a specific recommendation.
LINKS AMAZON.COM