Portal:Spaceflight/On This Day/31 January


 * 1961 - Mercury-Redstone 2 is launched, carrying Ham, a chimpanzee, on a suborbital flight with an apogee of 251 kilometres.
 * 1961 - An Atlas-Agena launches a Samos spy satellite.
 * 1966 - Luna 9, the first spacecraft to perform a soft landing on the Moon, is launched atop a Molniya-M rocket.
 * 1967 - A Scout B rocket fails to launch an OV3 scientific satellite.
 * 1971 - A Saturn V launches Apollo 14, with three astronauts, on a mission to land on the Moon.
 * 1973 - A Delta L launches HEOS 2, a scientific spacecraft.
 * 1978 - A Soyuz-U launches a Zenit-4MKM spy satellite
 * 1979 - A Soyuz-U launches Kosmos 1074, an unmanned test of the Soyuz-T spacecraft.
 * 1984 - A Titan 34D launches a Chalet spy satellite.
 * 1998 - lands, completing mission STS-89.
 * 2004 - The Opportunity rover begins its exploration of Mars.
 * 2013 - An Atlas V launches the TDRS-K data relay satellite for NASA.