Space Coloring Pages

Space is where children put their biggest daydreams, and these space coloring pages have room for all of them: real rockets and real missions, a home on the moon, and a few aliens who are much friendlier than the ones in films.

The missions come first. A rocket lifts off beside its launch tower in towering clouds of smoke, a rocket drawn open shows its crew cabin and fuel tanks, a shuttle arrives at a space station, a station spreads its solar panels over a cloudy planet, and a satellite passes over a coastline. Mission control fills a page with consoles, screens and headsets, and a space suit hangs ready in the airlock with its helmet, gloves and boots. On the ground there is a field of old rockets standing in rows, like the rocket gardens outside real space centers.

Then life beyond Earth. A moon base of domes and tunnels has a rover parked outside, a moon buggy leaves tracks with Earth low in the sky, a robot probe scoops soil into a sample tray, an astronaut floats upside down among drifting food packets, another plays a guitar in a domed window, one skates across an icy moon, and one sits on a smiling crescent moon. A chibi astronaut hugs a little planet.

The aliens are all friendly: one waves from a flying saucer, a family has a picnic in a crater, a six-legged alien pet sniffs a rover wheel, and a little alien rides a shooting star like a sled. The sky itself fills the rest: a comet between two asteroids, an asteroid belt, a striped ringed planet, a patterned galaxy, a nebula of swirling clouds, the sun with ribbon flares, the planets on their orbits, a star chart of constellations, a cat keeping watch beside a telescope, two children watching a meteor shower from a rooftop, a hot air balloon shaped like a planet, and a mandala of planets and comets.

What a nebula is

A nebula is a huge cloud of gas and dust in space, far bigger than our whole solar system. Some are the leftovers of old stars that exploded; others are nurseries where new stars are forming, as gravity slowly pulls the gas together until it is hot enough to shine. Space telescopes photograph them in glowing reds, blues and golds, and those colors are partly real and partly chosen by scientists to show different gases. That means there is no wrong way to color the nebula page.

Why astronauts float

Astronauts on a space station are not beyond gravity: it is almost as strong there as on the ground. They float because the station and everything in it are falling around the Earth together, moving sideways so fast that they keep missing it. Everything falls at the same speed, so nothing presses on anything else. That is why the astronaut and the food packets on one page drift together, and why drinks are sipped from pouches with straws rather than poured into cups.

How we know what is out there

Almost everything on these pages has been seen by a real machine. The first satellite, Sputnik, went up in 1957; the first person, Yuri Gagarin, orbited the Earth in 1961; and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in July 1969, driving no buggy on that first trip but leaving boot prints that are still there, since there is no wind on the moon to blow them away. Rovers have been driving on Mars since 1997, scooping soil into their instruments much like the probe on these pages, and space telescopes photograph nebulas and galaxies that no eye could ever see.

Colors for space

• The sky: deep navy, purple or black. Colored hard with a dark blue pencil, it looks deeper than black.
• Stars: leave them as white paper, or add a touch of pale yellow.
• Spacesuits: white with gray shadows in the folds, and small patches of red, blue and orange on the controls.
• Rockets: white or silver with an orange fuel tank or red stripes; flames in yellow at the center, orange around it, and red at the edges.
• The moon: gray, darker inside each crater.
• Aliens: any color at all, the brighter the better.

Easy rockets and busy stations

The simplest pages have one clear object and plenty of dark sky, like the comet between the asteroids, the galaxy and the rocket launch. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Comet and asteroids
• Patterned galaxy
• Star chart

The detailed pages are packed with panels, patterns and swirls, like the sun, the planet mandala and the station. Lots of detail begins with:

• Sun with flares
• Planets and comets mandala
• Station over a cloudy planet

A mission patch of your own

Every real space mission has a mission patch, a round or shield-shaped badge designed by the crew with the name of the mission, the spacecraft and the names of the astronauts. Children can design one for an imaginary mission: color one of the round pages, the mandala or the orbits, cut out the circle, and add a mission name and the crew's names around the edge. Glue it onto a paper cap or a cardboard helmet, like the ones on the rooftop page, and the crew is ready for launch.

Printing for a space mission

Each page is a free PDF drawn on A4 at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" reduces it by about six percent so no rocket tip is cut off. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers a whole mission into one file. The planets have their own collection in the solar system coloring pages, and the night sky continues in the star coloring pages and the Earth coloring pages, with flight closer to home in the airplane coloring pages.