Constellations
Constellations
562 articles in this category.
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
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
Apollo astronauts trying to sleep on the way to the Moon kept seeing flashes and streaks in the dark, and the cause turned out to be cosmic rays from deep space passing straight through their eyes.
Constellations
The Apollo astronauts who carried lunar dust back into the cabin kept making the same strange report — fresh Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder — yet the smell never survived the trip home, and more than fifty years later no one has fully explained what they were breathing in up there.
Constellations
In 2017, the first confirmed visitor from another star system tumbled through the solar system on a path that should have been simple to read, then accelerated slightly as it left without showing the coma or tail of an active comet — a gap that let Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argue it might be alien technology, a claim most astronomers reject but one that has never quite gone away.
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