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"Houston, we have a problem," a line NASA never quite said, sold Ron Howard's retelling of the 1970 flight that failed to reach the Moon and got everyone home. Tom Hanks in a real zero-g airplane, Ed Harris in a white vest, and the biggest opening a Hanks film had yet had.
Before serialized television was the norm, J. Michael Straczynski pitched a "novel for television" — one five-year story with a planned beginning, middle, and end, most of it written by him alone. Babylon 5 was the scrappy syndicated space station that proved appointment sci-fi didn't need a Trek badge.
Ronald D. Moore took a cheesy 1978 space opera and rebuilt it as the darkest drama on television: fifty thousand survivors, Cylons who look human, no aliens, no lasers, and a war on terror allegory the United Nations eventually hosted a panel about. So say we all.
A green rabbit captain, a four-armed duck gunner, and a boy from San Francisco fighting a Toad Empire run by a computer. The cartoon lasted 13 episodes in the fall of 1991, the Hasbro toys lasted one wave, and the Konami NES game outlived them both.
Joss Whedon's space western lasted eleven episodes on Fox, aired out of order on Friday nights, and became one of the most beloved cancelled shows of its generation. The Browncoats bought the DVDs, raised the money, mailed the postcards and got a movie, Serenity, out of a network that never wanted the pilot.
The Great Comet of 1997 — the bright, hanging smudge of light that had entire families standing in the driveway looking up. Visible to the naked eye for a record stretch, Hale-Bopp was the comet everyone actually saw, a shared sky-watching moment that also collided with one of the decade's strangest tragedies.
A 33,000-square-foot spaceship restaurant in Times Square where you literally flew to Mars on a motion-simulator shuttle before tumbling into a three-story underground Martian cavern. It was the largest space-themed restaurant on Earth when it opened, and it felt like it — a pure sci-fi fever dream.
Commander Shepard, the dialogue wheel, Paragon or Renegade, and a galaxy map you could actually fly around: BioWare's November 2007 Xbox 360 space opera was planned from day one as the first act of a trilogy. It sold a million copies in under three weeks, and a Fox News segment went after its love scene with a critic who admitted she hadn't played it.
The space shooter your parents wanted you to play: math problems zip across the screen, you fire the cannon at the correct answer, and somehow you're drilling fractions without noticing. Every 90s school computer lab had it, and every kid who touched it felt like an arcade ace instead of a student.
On August 24, 2006, astronomers voted and every solar-system poster in every classroom on Earth became wrong. Pluto was out, 'dwarf planet' was in, and a generation raised on nine planets took it personally.
A fireworks-factory accident blasts the little purple car to the Moon, where he's stranded, scared — and then befriended by Rover, a lonely lunar rover left behind by astronauts. Kids remember the arc viscerally: lost far from home, then puttering back with a new best friend.
The franchise that started in 1966 hit its cultural zenith in the 1990s, when two series aired simultaneously, a film franchise thrived alongside them, and Trek's technobabble and ethics debates penetrated the mainstream. From TNG's syndication dominance to Voyager's network-launching premiere, Star Trek was inescapable.
Two brothers find a mysterious board game in the basement, and it launches their whole house into outer space. From the same picture-book universe as Jumanji, Zathura came out in 2005 with real robots and real miniatures — and a generation of rental-shelf loyalists still swears it's underrated.
Kirsten Storms as Zenon Kar, a 13-year-old exiled from her orbiting space station to boring old Earth in the year 2049, where nobody gets her slang and she has to stop a plot to crash the station for the insurance money. Disney Channel premiered it on January 23, 1999, and "zetus lapetus" entered the vocabulary of every kid watching. It was the first Disney Channel Original Movie to get a sequel.