Outer Planets
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 557 articles · Back to full archive
Tech Space
Inside Johnson Space Center’s Building 9, Starlab’s multi-floor mockup already occupies the training floor alongside hardware from SpaceX and Blue Origin — an early glimpse of how the historic astronaut-training facility could evolve as NASA transitions from the ISS to commercially operated stations around 2030.
Tech Space
Starship’s first integrated test in April 2023 was so powerful it tore apart the concrete beneath its launch pad and hurled debris hundreds of metres — by Flight 13 in July 2026, its upper stage was travelling more than 16,000 kilometres from Texas before touching down so gently in the Indian Ocean that it remained intact and afloat.
Science
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, yet the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. That isn’t because light broke its own speed limit: while the oldest light travelled toward us, the space separating us from its source continued to expand, leaving that source’s present-day location roughly 46.5 billion light-years away.
Science
In March 2025, DESI used nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars to build the largest 3D map of the universe yet. Combined with several other cosmic measurements, it strengthened a deeply unsettling possibility: dark energy—the force accelerating cosmic expansion—may be weakening, contradicting the standard model’s assumption that it never changes.
Space Scopes
A gas giant 520 light-years away has equatorial atmospheric motion approaching 33,000 kilometres per hour—around 16 times Neptune’s fastest winds. When announced in January 2025, it was the fastest planetary jet stream yet measured, although an even faster one was reported on another exoplanet just a month later.
Science
Engineers sent robotic "sensor fish" through a Columbia River dam, then subjected 5,767 young salmon to the same pressure drop — revealing that turbine blades are rarely what kill them; their swim bladders expand so violently that organs rupture and gas bubbles lodge in their gills
Science
A round-trip Mars mission could last roughly three years, and a model based on bone-density data from 69 astronauts predicted that everyone following the longer mission profile would return with osteopenia, while roughly one-third could be at risk of osteoporosis.
Science
The universe’s first massive fusion stars may have burned out within a few million years. But hypothetical dark stars—made mostly of hydrogen and helium yet powered by annihilating dark matter—would have remained so bloated and cool that radiation could not halt the gas falling onto them, allowing some to grow beyond a million solar masses before collapsing into enormous black-hole seeds.
Launch Pad
Falcon 9 booster B1067 was originally built around a goal of at least ten flights without major refurbishment. It has now launched and landed 36 times in barely five years—only three flights short of the 39 missions Space Shuttle Discovery accumulated across its entire 27-year career.
Earth Observation
Earth’s outer core is an ocean of liquid metal whose volume roughly equals that of Mars. Seismic waves from repeated French nuclear tests at Mururoa have now revealed parts of it changing over only a few years: signals arrived up to 0.2 seconds early or late, suggesting that structures hundreds of kilometres wide are moving through the molten core on human timescales.
Science
On August 16, 1960, as Joe Kittinger's balloon carried him past 100,000 feet toward the edge of space, a seal in his right glove failed and his bare hand began to swell inside the near-vacuum — he told no one on the ground and jumped anyway
Space Medicine
NASA’s astronaut interviews are only part of the test: finalists also face hours of psychological assessment, time pressure and cognitively punishing team simulations while specialists watch how they communicate, adapt and regulate themselves—the qualities that determine whether a crew remains functional after months of isolation in space.
Science
On December 14, 1966, a NASA engineer's spacesuit sprang a leak inside a Houston vacuum chamber and the air pressure around him dropped to the equivalent of 120,000 feet — high enough that the saliva on his tongue began to boil before he blacked out, yet he was conscious again within about ninety seconds and left with nothing worse than a sore ear
Launch Pad
The United States recorded 178 rocket launches in 2025. Trump’s new national space policy directs American ranges to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030—an average of nearly three spaceflight operations every day.
Launch Pad