When the final bill came due, it wasn't Mir's age or achievements that doomed the space station—it was simply too expensive to keep alive.
The onboard software was correct. A ground-file interface undercounted repeated thruster impulses by a factor of 4.45, while warnings and safeguards failed around it.
After 24 days at sea, recovery crews guided the first intact Starship upper stage to calmer water off Christmas Island, preserving an unprecedented post-flight test article.
Blue Origin stopped New Shepard despite a busy 2025, while Virgin Galactic sold a limited new batch of reservations for a Delta spacecraft that still has to complete its test programme.
MMX will use a rover, two sampling systems and a brief Phobos landing to return more than 10 grams of material to Australia in 2031.
A fighter pilot's discipline became essential when Krikalev found himself stranded in orbit as the Soviet Union collapsed around him.
LRO thermal data and UCLA-led modelling show why permanent shade in certain lunar pits can remain near 17°C, while cave habitability still depends on access, structure, air and power.
Venera 13 turned a planned 32-minute Venus surface mission into 127 minutes of confirmed transmission, completing colour panoramas, drilling and X-ray soil analysis.
Alan Shepard's 15-minute Mercury flight in May 1961 was delayed so long on the pad that he had to urinate inside a suit engineers had never designed for it — and the fix set the template for every plumbing system flown since.
NASA's monthly bone-loss range shows the scale of the Mars-transit risk, but individual outcomes depend on duration, exercise, nutrition and whether loss continues linearly beyond six months.
NASA's palm-sized HPSC processor is indicating a 500-fold performance gain in JPL tests, with qualification still ahead.
Gateway-era hardware may help test lunar-surface thermal and electronics risks, but NASA has not finalised HALO's reuse and its early-2028 Artemis IV landing remains a target.
Zond 5 sent two steppe tortoises around the Moon before Apollo 8, but the passenger list and 10 per cent weight-loss figure need context.
Luna 3 revealed the Moon's sunlit far side in October 1959, less than 56 years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight.
On 13 September 1959, a 390-kilogram Soviet probe hit Mare Imbrium at roughly 3.3 kilometres per second, becoming the first human-made object to reach another world — and scattering, in theory, dozens of stainless-steel Soviet pennants across the impact site.
Dragonfly's flight fuselage is in integration at Johns Hopkins APL. Titan's dense air and low gravity explain the ideal 40-to-one hover-power comparison, but not the spacecraft's full energy budget.
