Soyuz
1967
The most-flown crewed spacecraft design in history - flying since 1967, over 140 flights, still flying. Designed by Korolev's bureau as the crew vehicle of the Soviet lunar programme, it outlived that programme and the country that built it: from 2011 to 2020 a Soyuz seat was the only way to and from the ISS, and its design lives on in China's Shenzhou.
Specs
Crew 3; launched from Baikonur, leased from Kazakhstan; standard two-day rendezvous, with some flights using a ~3 hour two-orbit profile. The safety record was paid for in full and learned from: Soyuz 1 lost Komarov to a parachute failure on 24 April 1967; Soyuz 11's in-flight decompression in 1971 made pressure suits mandatory; and on 26 September 1983 the launch-escape rockets fired seconds before the rocket exploded on the pad - the crew walked away. Each fix is written into the same 1960s shape.
Why it matters
Sixty years of continuous service makes Soyuz the collection's longest natural experiment: same basic design, every generation's lessons bolted on, carrying the first cosmonauts' successors, Mir crews, two decades of ISS crews - and every US astronaut who reached the station between 2011 and 2020. Its docking playbook is the clearest orbital-mechanics lesson in the fleet: to catch the station you fire retrograde - dropping into a lower, faster orbit is how you speed up.