For the first sixty years of the space age, the math of getting to orbit was simple and brutal: build a rocket, launch a rocket, lose a rocket.
The first thing Harrison Schmitt noticed when he climbed back into the Apollo 17 lunar module in December 1972 was the smell.
You're sitting down to lunch with a friend. Before the food arrives, they take out their phone, flip it face-down on the table, and push it to one side.
Standing at the edge of a kitchen drawer, deciding whether to throw away a key that no longer opens anything, is a small psychological event most people lose to.
For decades, the rule has been simple: massive, quiescent galaxies — the bloated ellipticals whose stars swarm in random directions instead of circling a common axis — are products of deep time.
Somewhere along the way, looking competent became the thing that made people stop checking on you.
Saturn's largest moon is not about to become a funded astronaut destination. But a June summit in Boulder, Colorado is trying to move Titan out of the…
The universe's most massive black holes may not be born directly from dying stars.
The largest impact scar on the Moon was likely gouged out by a massive asteroid that struck at a shallow angle, its iron core shearing off and carving the basin's lopsided shape.
When the next severe solar storm slams into Earth's magnetosphere, satellite operators, grid managers, and military planners will face a question they…
SpaceX has cleared one of the last major technical hurdles before the debut flight of its Version 3 Starship, completing a full-duration, full-thrust static fire of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster at Starbase, Texas.
A commercial spacecraft built to rescue NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has cleared environmental testing and is now heading toward a June launch, in…
The European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency formalized a planetary defense partnership, locking in joint work on the Ramses spacecraft…
Rocket Lab has signed the largest launch contract in its history and is moving to acquire space robotics firm Motiv Space Systems, a pair of announcements that sharpen the company's push to control more of the space hardware stack in-house.
Astronomers have measured the instantaneous power of jets streaming from a black hole for the first time, clocking the outflow from Cygnus X-1 at the energy equivalent of 10,000 suns and a velocity near half the speed of light.
The thing missing from these conversations is the actual feeling. A friend asks how a hard week has been, and the answer comes out as “a lot,” “complicated,” or “fine, just tired.” The person asking is safe.
