Constellations
Constellations
557 articles in this category.
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.
Constellations
Sea Launch died in 2014 because the economics didn't work — but a Florida startup founded by two former Crowley Maritime executives just convinced Lockheed Martin and Firefly that the rise of low Earth orbit constellations and a Pentagon afraid of fixed targets have quietly inverted that math
Constellations
In September 2022 a NASA spacecraft deliberately crashed into a harmless asteroid 11 million kilometres away and shifted its orbit by about 32 minutes — the first time humans had ever moved another world, the moment planetary defence stopped being theory and became something we have actually done.
Constellations
Just 12.5 light years away, around a star so faint it was only discovered in 2003, sits one of the most Earth-like rocky worlds ever found in a habitable zone — and yet we still cannot answer the single question that decides everything: whether it has any atmosphere at all
Constellations
In June 2026, the Finnish radar-satellite company Iceye raised more than a billion euros at a valuation above ten billion, a number that tracks a quieter shift — European governments increasingly buying and operating their own reconnaissance constellations rather than renting the imagery from anyone else
Constellations
In 1977, NASA mounted a gold-plated record on each Voyager probe carrying greetings in 55 languages, the sound of a kiss, and Ann Druyan’s brainwaves — a message built to survive long after the spacecraft fell silent, and possibly long after the civilization that made it.
Constellations
Iceye, a Finnish company that builds radar satellites that see through clouds and darkness, just hit a 10-billion-euro valuation — and the buyers weren't venture funds chasing the next SpaceX, but European governments preparing for a world without American satellite intelligence
Constellations
The Big Bang did not explode into empty space from a central point. It was space itself expanding everywhere at once. That is why the universe has no centre in the ordinary sense, why every galaxy sees distant galaxies moving away from its own vantage point, and why the question “where did the Big Bang happen?” has the strange but genuine answer: everywhere — including the place where you are sitting now.
Constellations
In 2026, Airi Toida and Yuichiro Ezoe modeled a sub-10-kilogram X-ray telescope that could spend two years tracing oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, and silicon across the Moon, toward the complete elemental map Apollo never delivered
Constellations
At the University of Twente, Davoud Jafari's team flew 3D-printed nickel-titanium micropillars on a parabolic flight where gravity vanished for seconds at a time, testing whether an electric field alone could do the job everyone assumed only gravity could — lift boiling bubbles off a scorching surface before they smother it
Constellations
The next great space race may not be to plant flags, but to bring home the first untouched samples from Mars, Phobos, and ancient asteroids.
Constellations
W2246f sits 1.2 billion light years away with an old, quiet central kiloparsec and a still-star-forming disk, but MUSE found no recent collision or active nucleus to explain the galaxy’s split personality
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
Constellations