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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Outer Planets
A real group of scientists and engineers spent two days in Boulder this June asking what it would actually take to send humans to Titan, and their honest answer was that it isn't a question of physics, it's a question of time, technology and commitment
The greatest obstacle to reaching Saturn's moon isn't overcoming the laws of physics—it's summoning the decades of sustained will and innovation that any human mission would demand.
Voyager 2 may have caught Uranus on a freak day — a 2024 reanalysis suggests the 1986 flyby that shaped four decades of understanding arrived during a compressed state estimated to occur only about 4% of the time
After twelve years and more than seven billion kilometres, Voyager 2 arrived at Neptune within 100 kilometres of where it had been aimed — a margin NASA compares to sinking a golf putt 3,630 kilometres long
Saturn now has at least 285 confirmed moons — after astronomers recognised 128 new ones in a single announcement in March 2025 and another 11 in March 2026 — making every textbook printed before 2024 quietly wrong on the subject
The nearest star system sits 4.2 light-years away—a distance today’s spacecraft would need tens of thousands of years to cross, yet a proposed laser-driven sail carrying a gram-scale probe could make the journey in just over 20.
A giant planet was hiding in plain sight in one of astronomy's most-studied star systems
Europa Clipper is already in space, travelling 1.8 billion miles toward Jupiter's moon Europa, where a subsurface ocean holds more water than every ocean on Earth combined — it arrives April 2030 to ask whether anything is alive inside
Four astronauts just went farther from Earth than any human in history — and on the way home, they asked to name a crater after one of their late wives
Titan is moving away from Saturn about 11 centimetres every year — roughly 100 times faster than scientists once believed — suggesting the moon may have begun its life much closer to the planet
A Category 1 hurricane on Earth begins at 119 km/h. Neptune's fastest winds reach about 2,000 km/h — nearly 17 times faster.
Europa may literally glow green, blue or white on its night side because Jupiter’s radiation energises salts frozen into its surface, and the colour of that glow could offer a new clue to what its hidden ocean is made of
