Aerospace
Aerospace
6,355 articles in this category.
Internet Space
At a 140,000-square-foot plant in Long Beach that the aerospace industry calls Space Beach, a former Raytheon executive is using agentic AI to turn out defense electronics in weeks instead of years — not to replace his engineers, but because the Pentagon wants far more hardware than the shrinking pool of engineers can build
Constellations
In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert
Moon Daily
In 1972, Apollo 17 carried the only scientist to walk on the Moon into Taurus-Littrow, where a broken rover fender, 741 samples, and orange volcanic glass from 3.64 billion years ago turned the final lunar landing into a geology field trip
Constellations
On June 9, 2026, NASA named Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot of Artemis 3, making him the first European ever assigned to an Artemis crew — and within hours ESA's director general framed the seat not as a courtesy but as the opening move in a negotiation to put a European on the surface of the Moon
Constellations
In 1962, a Mariner 1 probe bound for Venus was destroyed 293 seconds after launch because a single missing overbar in a line of guidance code told the rocket it was veering off course when it wasn't, and Arthur C. Clarke later called it the most expensive hyphen in history.
Aerospace
The popular claim that space tastes like raspberries and smells like rum, repeated in science articles for over fifteen years, is based on a single 2009 detection of one organic molecule in one specific dust cloud at the centre of the Milky Way, and the actual story behind the finding is more interesting than the version that has been circulating
Constellations
In August 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts left a small aluminum figurine and a plaque on the Moon called the Fallen Astronaut, listing fourteen Americans and Soviets who had died in the race to get there, and they said nothing about it over the radio, revealing it only after they were safely back on Earth.
Constellations
In June 2026, behind SpaceX’s plan to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the $1.77 trillion question facing investors was not rockets alone, but Starlink, AI data centers, and Mars inside one company
Aerospace
In 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear picked up a 72-second signal so strong and so cleanly from the direction of Sagittarius that the astronomer on duty circled it in red ink and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin, and nearly fifty years later nobody has ever heard it again.
Aerospace
Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado was hollowed out in the 1960s into a 4.5-acre complex of buildings mounted on 1,319 steel springs, each weighing about 1,000 pounds, designed so that the entire underground city could sway during a nuclear blast without snapping the wiring inside.
Aerospace
It is impossible to burp in space, because in microgravity the human stomach cannot separate gas from the liquid and partially digested food it sits inside, and any attempt to burp expels a mixture of all three directly into the astronaut's mouth.
Constellations
In December 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe became the first spacecraft to transmit from another planet, sending 23 minutes of faint temperature data from Venus after a torn parachute tipped it onto its side and buried its signal in what engineers first dismissed as tape noise
Constellations
In 2025, NASA quietly opened the commander's seat on private missions to the International Space Station to astronauts who never wore its patch, and the first man in line is Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman who has commanded the station before and will return in 2027 flying for a California startup
Space Industry
In June 2026, China rolled its brand-new Long March 12B onto a pad in the Gobi Desert, told no one, loaded the maiden flight with paying customers' satellites — and the rocket built to land its booster never even tried.
Aerospace