Constellations
Constellations
569 articles in this category.
Constellations
Starlink crossed 11,000 satellites in orbit on 19 August 2026. At the start of 2019—just months before its first full batch launched—fewer than 2,000 active satellites belonging to every company and nation combined circled Earth.
Constellations
On 19 August 2026, SpaceX pushed its Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites in orbit — meaning a single network now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all active satellites circling Earth.
Constellations
At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.
Constellations
In May 1961, Alan Shepard's Mercury flight was delayed so many hours on the pad that he eventually radioed mission control to say he had to urinate inside his suit, and engineers, having designed no plumbing for a 15-minute flight, told him to go ahead and short out the medical sensors taped to his chest
Constellations
On 2 August 2027, the Moon's shadow will race across Luxor's 3,300-year-old temples and hold the Sun dark for more than six minutes — a duration no total solar eclipse will surpass again until 2114.
Constellations
In the weeks before Apollo 11 launched, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins spent their quarantine signing hundreds of autographs, not for fans, but so their families could sell them if the mission killed them, since no insurer would cover astronauts at all
Constellations
In September 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov sat in a bunker south of Moscow watching his early-warning screens light up with five incoming American missiles, and instead of phoning it up the chain he decided the computer was lying and waited — a judgment call that historians now credit with preventing a retaliatory nuclear launch
Constellations
The tidy diagram of our solar system is misleading: the Sun holds about 99.86 per cent of its mass, Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in 2012 yet the true edge may lie more than a light-year further out, and astronomers still suspect an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune
Constellations
When the FAA proposed letting commercial rocket licenses bypass specified requirements under 13 federal laws, it paired a 1984 waiver power with a Supreme Court ruling about an 88-mile Utah oil railway, carrying a regulatory argument from rail tracks to launchpads
Constellations
How does a spacecraft with less computing power than a modern car key still send back science from beyond the Sun's reach, almost 50 years after launch?
Constellations
The ISS toilet costs $23 million and separates urine into a centrifuge that recycles 98% of it back into drinking water — a closed-loop system that took NASA 40 years to perfect
Constellations
Japan is quietly building a 100-satellite sovereign eye in the sky, and the sensor that makes it actually useful is coming from a Finnish startup nobody in Tokyo had heard of five years ago
Constellations
In 2026, engineers at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands sealed Plato inside the Maxwell chamber and ran every one of its 26 cameras and subsystems at once to find out whether the spacecraft could survive its own electronics screaming at each other
Constellations
Voyager 1 has no engine running. The 38,000-mile-per-hour speed it has held since its Saturn flyby in 1980 is borrowed momentum from planets it grazed more than four decades ago, and that free ride carries it to one light-day from Earth this November
Constellations