A half-century-old innovation—liquid mercury that let a massive telescope glide frictionlessly—has become an environmental hazard too risky to remediate.
In the vacuum of space, even underwear becomes hazardous waste—burned away in a fiery plunge that nobody talks about.
When NASA spent $150 billion to reach the Moon, its second visitor got back $33.31 in travel reimbursement for driving to the launch site.
Tiangong and the ISS sustain continuous occupation today. Whether that remains a two-station minimum after ISS retirement depends on crew operations, not just commercial launch dates.
Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit from Arctic Norway on its second flight, releasing five CubeSats and giving Western Europe its first successful orbital launch from local soil.
NASA did not conclude that Starliner was certain to fail. It concluded that unresolved thruster behaviour made a crewed return harder to justify than waiting for Crew-9.
A Brazilian girl's methodical scan of deep-space data threatens to upend a record that's stood for a quarter century, raising questions about who gets access to the tools of discovery.
A teenager weaponized a decade of archival telescope data to unearth 1.5 million celestial mysteries that professional astronomers had missed.
A sun-watching satellite designed nearly 30 years ago has become history's greatest comet hunter, with amateur astronomers crowdsourcing its discoveries one frame at a time.
NASA's first chief astronomer created its space-astronomy programme, helped turn Hubble into a real mission and now has a newly launched observatory carrying her name.
Roman separated from Falcon Heavy and began its three-month journey to L2 after a mission history defined by early completion, three cancellation proposals and a fourth funding threat.
Roman reaches launch after a 27-year conceptual lineage, a missed 2020 recommendation, three termination proposals, a new name and a post-pandemic schedule reset.
Three Trump budgets proposed terminating WFIRST/Roman and a fourth proposed a severe late-stage cut. Congress repeatedly funded the observatory through to launch.
Zhuque-3 achieved a controlled orbital-booster touchdown, then toppled during the post-landing phase that separates recovery from true reuse.
SpaceX's 2025 accounts show Starlink-led Connectivity supplied 61% of combined revenue and $4.423 billion of operating income, helping fund Starship's expensive development cycle.
Tianwen-2 has reached a fast-spinning asteroid that Webb estimates at only 18 plus or minus 2 metres wide, just as new spectra and models reopen its proposed lunar origin.
