Aerospace
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Aerospace
In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars spacecraft because of a metric-versus-imperial mix-up — the kind of conversion mistake most of us have made, only this one ended with a probe disappearing into the Martian atmosphere
Constellations
Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.
Psychology
In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a satirical essay about government bureaucracy. Seventy years later, the law that came from it may be more relevant than ever.
Psychology
In the 1980s, an Italian student invented the Pomodoro Technique — the popular timed focus method. He named it after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer sitting on his desk
Science
Quote by Bill Nye: "There's nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind."
Mind & Meaning
Most people are solving the wrong equation — the logic behind why some people compound their effort into results while everyone else stays flat is simple, uncomfortable, and almost never talked about
Constellations
In 1998 ground controllers lost contact with the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft and feared it might be gone for good, until the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico pinged the silent, slowly tumbling craft — beginning a months-long effort to coax it back to life.
Science
In October 1957, Sputnik 1 crossed the sky every 96 minutes while two 1-watt transmitters on 20.005 and 40.002 megahertz sent a beep that radio amateurs around the world could hear on ordinary shortwave receivers
Aerospace
In 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter’s moon Io and revealed active volcanoes erupting beyond Earth for the first time — turning a small Jovian moon into one of the most geologically surprising worlds in the solar system
Science
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in his personal kit, and the ordinary-looking seedlings that came home were planted in courthouses, schools and parks where many grew for decades with their flight history hidden in small plaques
Space Industry
Seven villagers have been trapped inside a flooded cave in central Laos for nearly a week — sealed in by flash floods after going in to search for gold — and an international rescue team, including some of the Thai veterans of the 2018 cave rescue of the boys' soccer team, is now racing through a 340-meter tunnel to reach them
Psychology
I cancelled Netflix for a month and spent the time learning Claude properly — the gap between people who use AI casually and people who actually know what it can do is bigger than I expected
Exo Life
Tardigrades can survive being boiled, frozen to near absolute zero, blasted with radiation, and exposed to the vacuum of space, and they do it by drying themselves into a glass-like state where every cellular process stops and they wait, sometimes for decades, for water to come back.
Science
In April 2016, a mother who had lost two children to the same disease flew to Mexico to try something no one had ever done — and came home with a baby boy carrying DNA from three people, the first child ever born from a science built to spare him his siblings' fate
Constellations