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.
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.
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…
Late on 17 April 1970, Apollo 13 was already close enough to Earth for the planet to fill the lunar module’s alignment sight.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The strangest thing about the smell of space is that no one can smell space directly.
It was about the size of a beach ball, weighed roughly as much as a grown man, and did almost nothing.
The first thing that happens to a body in orbit is that it starts to rearrange itself.
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.
A study published in April 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica identifies a set of Earth-to-Mars trajectories that could, in principle, cut…
During US Spacewalk 95, flight engineers Chris Williams and Jessica Meir will spend about six and a half hours swapping out a joint that drew too much current and stopped moving on May 27.
