The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes at 7.66 kilometres per second, giving its crew 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single day — and forcing them to live by UTC, tunable LED lighting, and shaded sleep stations to keep their biology from unravelling.
Since September 2019, the Russian-built Zvezda service module has been leaking air through hairline cracks in a narrow tunnel called the PrK — at one point losing 1.7 kilograms of atmosphere a day. NASA auditors now rate it the highest open safety risk on the entire International Space Station.
The ISS weighs 420 tons, stretches the length of a football field, orbits at 17,500 mph, and cost roughly $150 billion across 13 nations and 42 launches — making it the most expensive single object ever built.
The Curiosity rover was given its name by a 12-year-old girl from Kansas named Clara Ma, who in 2009 won a NASA-sponsored essay contest with a submission that included the line: "Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives.
Apollo 13 had been launched four and a half days into a planned ten-day mission that would, if everything had proceeded as designed, have landed Lovell and…
For roughly the last three billion years, half of the Moon has been hiding. Earth's gravity caught the Moon early in its existence and slowed its spin until…
Canadarm2 has been bolted to the outside of the International Space Station since April 2001, working in shifts measured in years rather than hours.
Imagine throwing a refrigerator at a mountain travelling 135,000 kilometres per hour through deep space, after a ten-year flight, and asking the refrigerator to land softly enough to keep ten scientific instruments intact.
In approximately five years, if everything goes to plan, a small sealed canister containing roughly two pounds of Martian dirt and rock will arrive on Earth —…
Astronauts returning from long ISS rotations consistently describe a half-step-outside-themselves sensation that flight surgeons recognize as part of the post-mission readjustment curve — a perceptual cost of spending six months in a body that had to learn a different world.
Get in a car. Point it at the sky. Drive at the speed limit. You would reach the official boundary of outer space — the line at which Earth's atmosphere thins…
The next-generation observatory arrived in Florida on June 21 to begin a roughly 70-day march to the pad. NASA is targeting liftoff no earlier than Aug. 30 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, made a number of strange predictions about how time and motion interact, several of which sounded…
The demo flight from Cape Canaveral is the first test of a wide, flat capsule SpaceX has barely described in public. Almost everything known about it comes from federal filings, not the company.
The threshold quietly crossed on 2 November 2000 was, in retrospect, one of the more consequential moments in the history of human spaceflight.
The numbers behind Peggy Whitson's career do not, by themselves, capture the unusual shape of it.
