Space & Missions
In 1980, Voyager 1 flew close enough to Titan to reveal its thick nitrogen…
A celestial detour plotted a decade in advance: one spacecraft chose Titan's secrets over the outer planets it would never reach.
Space & Missions
In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet's tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains…
For seven years, NASA chased a speeding comet through space to snatch its ancient dust—a prize that would reveal secrets about the solar system's earliest moments.
Space & Missions
Astronauts on the ISS watch 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day, and many say the…
The International Space Station circles Earth about once every 90 minutes. That orbital rhythm gives its crew roughly 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in every 24-hour day, each one arriving and disappearing in seconds.
Space & Missions
We tend to think reusable rockets are still experimental, but in 2025 SpaceX’s…
The old image of a reusable rocket is still a test article: stainless steel, scorch marks, crowds watching for the landing, engineers waiting to see whether the thing survives.
Space & Missions
On July 16, 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into orbit for the…
Sixty-three military data-relay satellites now circle the Earth for the Pentagon's newest space network — half of the planned constellation — and the optical…
Space & Missions
The navigation technique that brought Apollo 13 home in April 1970
Late on 17 April 1970, Apollo 13 was already close enough to Earth for the planet to fill the lunar module’s alignment sight.
Space & Missions
In May 1969, Apollo 10 carried a lunar module called Snoopy to within 14.4…
The Apollo 10 lunar module was never meant to land. That was the point. In May 1969, NASA sent a crew almost all the way through a lunar landing profile, held…
Space & Missions
In May 1992, after two failed attempts to capture a 4.5-tonne communications…
The moment people remember from STS-49 looks almost improvised: three astronauts in white suits, fixed to foot restraints and handholds around a huge black communications satellite, reaching for hardware that was not supposed to be grabbed that way.
Space & Missions
In November 1970, a Soviet rover the size of a bathtub rolled off the Luna 17…
In November 1970, the Soviet Union rolled Lunokhod 1 off the Luna 17 lander onto Mare Imbrium, becoming the first vehicle to drive on another world — steered from a control room in Simferopol through a 2.5-second radio delay, at a top speed slower than a walking human.
Space & Missions
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev stayed in orbit so long that the country which launched…
Sergei Krikalev left Earth as a citizen of the Soviet Union on 18 May 1991. When he returned 311 days and 20 hours later, the Soviet Union no longer existed.
Space & Missions
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within a minute of launch and survived…
Thirty-six and a half seconds after Apollo 12 left Kennedy Space Center on 14 November 1969, lightning travelled through the Saturn V and its exhaust trail.
Space & Missions
Space lawyers have a name for satellites claimed on paper years before a single one…
The ITU's geostationary register holds thousands of satellites that never launched — filings made years in advance that quietly lock out every operator who arrives later. Tonga turned six of them into a national income stream.
Space & Missions
Astronauts insist space has a smell — a mix of seared steak, hot metal and welding…
The strangest thing about the smell of space is that no one can smell space directly.
Space & Missions
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched a metal sphere the size of a beach ball into…
It was about the size of a beach ball, weighed roughly as much as a grown man, and did almost nothing.
Space & Missions
Within hours of reaching microgravity, astronauts’ body fluids shift toward the…
The first thing that happens to a body in orbit is that it starts to rearrange itself.
Space Medicine
Astronaut Don Pettit described the light flashes crossing his eyes on the…
Astronaut Don Pettit called them 'luminous dancing fairies' — the streaks of light that cross astronauts' vision on the ISS. They are cosmic rays punching through the hull and through the eye, the same phenomenon every Apollo crew reported from 1969 onward.