One was the 1993 in-orbit repair of the Hubble Space Telescope; without astronauts to fit new lenses, the enormously expensive satellite would have been a flop.
The head of the German space program, Walter D nger, told the newspaper it would be ready to send a vehicle without astronauts by 2013.
If SpaceX hits its revised timeline, we should see the demo without astronauts launch in November 2018, with the first crewed launch in May 2018, so still ahead of Boeing's time frames.
Without it astronauts can suffer from disorientation and nausea, or even lose the sense of where their arms and legs are.
(The Soviet copy of the space shuttle, a near-clone called the Buran, actually flew into outer space fully automated, without any astronauts whatsoever).
The suit must provide a pressurized interior, without which an astronaut's blood would boil in the vacuum of space.
While most of the bug larvae shriveled up and died -- just as a human would if he or she hopped out of a spaceship without wearing an astronaut's spacesuit -- the fruit-fly larvae seemed able to survive for 60 minutes in what should have been unbearable conditions.
A few months earlier, about the same time as Tereshkova's divorce, she, too, married a fellow astronaut, Steve Hawley, without any world leaders present.
And there goes the shadow-man shaking hands with astronaut Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon in 1969 -- without a space suit, no less.
Like Astronaut Alan Shepard's pioneering 1961 flight during Project Mercury, the capsule separates from the booster rocket and descends beneath parachutes without going into orbit around the Earth.
He is Crusoe without Man Friday, or indeed Major Tom without Ground Control, and unlike Sandra Bullock's astronaut in Gravity, Redford never hears anything intelligible at all.
