What's up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Space Travel
In early 1962, weeks before John Glenn's orbital flight, a NASA mathematician named Katherine Johnson was asked to recompute by hand what the new IBM 7090 had already calculated, because Glenn had told mission planners he would not fly unless she personally verified the machine's numbers on paper
Before John Glenn flew Friendship 7 into orbit in February 1962, he refused to trust the new IBM 7090's trajectory calculations until Katherine Johnson had verified them by hand. She worked the equations for a day and a half. The numbers matched. He went.
In July 1969, Michael Collins orbited alone on the far side of the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked below, and for 48 minutes of every 2-hour loop he was cut off from radio contact — the most physically isolated human in history, and by his own account not lonely but quietly content in the dark.
Voyager 1 is still crossing interstellar space with six computers holding about 68 kilobytes of memory between them — less storage than a single compressed photograph on a modern phone
The lines etched into Voyager’s Golden Record cover point towards 14 pulsars whose spinning clocks reveal both where the Sun is and roughly when the spacecraft left — directions designed to work without relying on a single human language
In 1980, Voyager 1 flew close enough to Titan to reveal its thick nitrogen atmosphere — but the gravity-assist geometry bent the spacecraft permanently out of the planetary plane, trading Uranus and Neptune for one close look at Saturn’s largest moon
In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet's tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains 4.6 billion kilometres home, and dropped them into the Utah desert — the first solid pieces of a comet ever returned to Earth
A primitive dwarf galaxy with almost none of the heavy elements found in the Milky Way is somehow producing iron and silicon-carbide dust — materials astronomers thought early galaxies would struggle to make
Astronauts on the ISS watch 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day, and many say the hardest thing to describe back home is how thin the atmosphere looks from above — a bright blue line you could almost rub out with a thumb
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
A planet orbiting twin suns was directly photographed in 2025, hugging its two stars six times closer than any other world ever found in a binary system — a real version of Tatooine that should not, according to current theory, be able to exist there
In 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Oleg Atkov flew a portable ultrasound to Salyut 7 and became the first doctor to image a human heart shrinking in real time in orbit
