Constellations
Constellations
558 articles in this category.
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
Constellations
Before Apollo 11 lifted off, the seamstresses at the Playtex bra factory in Delaware hand-stitched 21 layers of fabric into each spacesuit using sewing machines and a tolerance of one sixty-fourth of an inch, because no machine could be trusted with the only thing standing between Neil Armstrong and the vacuum of the Moon.
Constellations
On a Saturday afternoon in May 2026, a rock about three feet across hit the atmosphere over New England at 75,000 mph and broke apart with the energy of roughly 300 tons of TNT, and the boom carried from Delaware to Montreal, farther than any fragment ever fell
Constellations
Blue Origin's New Glenn exploded on its Cape Canaveral pad on May 28 — and the costliest casualty may be the lunar timeline NASA had bet on it just two days earlier
Constellations
In early June 2026, the X-59 is expected to cross Mach 1 at 43,000 feet, the first sharp proof point in NASA's fifty-year attempt to turn an overland sonic boom into a certifiable thump
Constellations
The Raptor 3 was supposed to be the engine that finally ended Starship's reliability problem — instead, on its first flight, several of them quit less than 20 seconds into the boostback burn, dropping the booster into the Gulf and grounding the whole program for a federal mishap review
Constellations
Almost everyone assumes Venus is our nearest neighbour, but averaged across its orbit the planet closest to Earth is actually Mercury
Constellations
Much of what we know about the scale of the universe rests on a method worked out by a woman employed as a human computer at Harvard for a few cents an hour
Constellations
Drifting through the Milky Way may be billions — perhaps even trillions — of rogue planets: worlds with no sun of their own, some flung from the systems where they formed, now wandering the galaxy in darkness.
Constellations
When Rosetta sniffed the gas around Comet 67P, it found a cloud that would have smelled of rotten eggs, ammonia and bitter almonds — and hidden in that cosmic stink were some of the chemical ingredients that may have helped life begin on Earth
Constellations
Mars was once a warmer world of rivers, lakes and a thicker atmosphere, but after its internal dynamo died and the planet lost the magnetic shield that helps protect an atmosphere, the solar wind stripped much of its air away over billions of years, leaving the cold desert we see today
Constellations
In 2017, astronomers spotted the first object ever confirmed to have come from another star system passing through our own: a strange, elongated visitor called ‘Oumuamua that seemed to accelerate as it left, in a way scientists are still debating
Constellations
Bolted to Pioneer 10 is a plaque showing two humans and a cosmic map back to Earth, while the spacecraft itself is now a silent ghost ship drifting toward Aldebaran, a star it will not pass for another two million years.
Constellations
After a crippled seven-year journey Japan's Hayabusa probe limped home in 2010 and burned up in the sky over Australia, but not before releasing the first asteroid samples ever returned to Earth.
Constellations