Human Behaviour
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 599 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
ESA and China’s Smile mission is set to launch on May 19, and it exposes the space-policy split Washington’s Wolf Amendment built into the Western alliance
Human Behaviour
Adults who keep apologizing for things that weren't their fault, who thank cashiers three times, and who say sorry when someone steps on their foot aren't unusually polite, they may have grown up in homes where being agreeable was the price of being safe
Human Behaviour
Russia's Sarmat ICBM was declared on combat duty before its flight-test record could support it; its Soviet predecessor went through years of sustained testing first, and the gap is less about engineering than about what 'operational' has come to mean inside a strategic-weapons bureaucracy
Human Behaviour
People who keep their childhood bedroom exactly as it was, who can't throw out their parents' handwriting, and who hold onto kitchen tools nobody uses aren't always cluttered, they may be keeping access to people they can no longer call
Constellations
A trajectory study suggests spacecraft may not need to meet Earth-moon L1 exactly — and that small mathematical shortcut could matter for the next decade of lunar logistics
Human Behaviour
SpaceX is reflying its sixth cargo Dragon while Boeing's crewed Starliner reverts to uncrewed resupply — and the $4.2B-versus-$2.6B contracts that produced both were signed the same day in 2014
Psychology
Quote by Carl Sagan: “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let them live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another”
Constellations
NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s
Constellations
India's Mars orbiter cost less than the movie Gravity and reached its destination on the first attempt, and what that says about who actually owns the future of space exploration.
Psychology
Why do we explore, anyway
Human Behaviour
The Katy Perry flight wasn't a vanity project. It was the moment the space industry finally admitted who its real customer is — and the backlash, however satisfying it felt, missed the point entirely.
Psychology
Why Chris Hadfield argues that fear is a knowledge problem, and how we might apply it to our own lives
Psychology
The quiet freedom of routine
Constellations
Voyager 1 is still transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your hallway — and the engineers who built it in the 1970s never expected we'd still be listening half a century later.
Psychology