What's up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Space Industry
Forecasters say a strong El Niño is building again in the Pacific, and the rest of the world tends to feel it months later as heatwaves, failed harvests and rainfall landing in all the wrong places
The United States Climate Prediction Center has an El Niño Watch in place, and in its mid-May 2026 discussion it put the odds of El Niño emerging in the tropical Pacific by mid-year at about 82 per cent, rising to 96 per cent for the…
An AI trawled through 35 years of Hubble images and found more than 800 strange objects that had never been documented before, showing that one of astronomy’s most famous archives is still hiding discoveries in plain sight
Voyager 1, the first human-made craft to enter interstellar space, carries a golden record of Earth’s music and greetings — a message launched into the dark, even though it will not pass near another star for about 40,000 years.
We picture the asteroid belt as a dense field of tumbling rock, but the spaces between its objects are so vast that spacecraft can fly straight through it, with the chance of hitting anything almost nil.
Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado was hollowed out in the 1960s into a 4.5-acre complex of buildings mounted on 1,319 steel springs, each weighing about 1,000 pounds, designed so that the entire underground city could sway during a nuclear blast without snapping the wiring inside.
Mercury is not the hottest planet in the solar system despite sitting closest to the Sun, because Venus traps so much heat under its thick atmosphere that it stays hotter day and night.
Carl Sagan and four colleagues published the 1983 'TTAPS' paper that introduced the phrase 'nuclear winter', and the calculations that frightened Reagan and Gorbachev into arms talks were first run not on a supercomputer but on a model originally built to study dust storms on Mars.
When Soviet engineers launched the N1 moon rocket from Baikonur in July 1969, it climbed about 200 metres before falling back onto Site 110 and exploding with an estimated seven kilotons of energy, destroying a launch pad in a disaster the USSR kept hidden for two decades
It is impossible to burp in space, because in microgravity the human stomach cannot separate gas from the liquid and partially digested food it sits inside, and any attempt to burp expels a mixture of all three directly into the astronaut's mouth.
In December 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe became the first spacecraft to transmit from another planet, sending 23 minutes of faint temperature data from Venus after a torn parachute tipped it onto its side and buried its signal in what engineers first dismissed as tape noise
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
