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The term spaceship is generally applied only to spacecraft capable of transporting people.

A spacesuit has at times been called a miniature spacecraft or spaceship, emphasizing its purpose of keeping its wearer alive while traveling in the vacuum of outer space.

The spacecraft is one of the primal elements in science fiction. Numerous short stories and novels are built up around various ideas for spacecraft. Some hard science fiction books focus on the technical details of the craft, while others treat the spacecraft as a given and delve little into its actual implementation.

1 A few examples of existing spacecraft

• Cassini
• Cluster
• GenesisCourtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech) The Genesis spacecraft was the first ever attempt to collect a sample of solar wind, and the first sample return mission to return from beyond the orbit of the Moon. It was launched on August 8, 2001, and crash-landed on Septemb
• International Space StationOverview Continuing on from the United States' Skylab and Russia's Mir, the International Space Station ISS represents a permanent human presence in space: it has been manned with a crew of at least two since November 2, 2000. Each time that the crew is r
• MirThis article is about Mir the Soviet space station. See Mir (disambiguation) for other meanings. Mir (, which can mean both world and peace in Russian) was a Soviet (and later Russian) space station. It was humanity's first permanently inhabited space sta
• Pioneer 10Launched on March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10 (also called Pioneer F) was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, the first spacecraft to make direct observations of Jupiter, and on June 13th 1983 it became the first man-made object to leave the
• ProgressThe Progress is an expendable unmanned freighter spacecraft; it is Soyuz derived and is launched also by the Soyuz launch vehicle. It is currently used for supplies to the International Space Station, in addition to what the two manned Soyuz flights per y
• Shuttle BuranThe Soviet reusable spacecraft program Buran ("" meaning " snowstorm" or " blizzard" in Russian) began in 1976 at TsAGI as a response to the United States Space Shuttle program. Soviet politicians were convinced that the Space Shuttle could be used for mi
• ShenzhouShenzhou ( variously translated as "Vessel of the Gods," "Divine Craft," "Divine Mechanism" but also a pun on a literary name for China, ) is the name of a spacecraft from the People's Republic of China which first carried a Chinese astronaut into orbit i
• Space Shuttle
• SOHO
• Soyuz spacecraft
• SpaceShipOne
• Stardust
• Vostok spacecraft
• Voyager I and II
• WMAP