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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Space Travel
A newly formed nonprofit plans to launch the first spacecraft deliberately targeted at another star system by 2029 for under $15 million—knowing its 80,000-year journey will end in the distant outskirts of Alpha Centauri long after everyone involved is dead.
Fermi Explorer trades speed for feasibility: existing ion propulsion, a tiny payload and a coast lasting almost 80,000 years toward the outer reaches of Alpha Centauri.
Saturn's rings look ancient, but data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests they are surprisingly young, likely no more than a few hundred million years old, meaning dinosaurs walked the Earth in a solar system where Saturn had no rings at all
Pluto’s atmosphere has probably persisted in some form for millions of years, but observations suggest its pressure fell 16% between mid-2021 and July 2023. With Pluto continuing away from the Sun until 2114, astronomers may be witnessing the beginning of its nitrogen sky slowly freezing onto the surface.
A Soviet probe survived the journey to Venus and began testing the surface of another world — only for its soil instrument to come down on a discarded piece of the spacecraft itself and send the mistaken reading all the way back to Earth
After travelling 122 million miles in orbit, retired space shuttle Endeavour needed 68 hours to cover its final 12 miles through Los Angeles — crawling at no more than 2 mph as crews removed more than 400 trees to clear its 78-foot wingspan
A high-school student's idea sent two spiders to a US space station to see whether they could still spin a web with no gravity to hang it from, and they did, building lopsided, confused webs at first before adjusting, and one of the spiders, named Gladys, turned out on return to be male and was renamed Gladstone.
At the space shuttle’s orbital speed of roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, the journey to Alpha Centauri would take about 165,000 years. Breakthrough Starshot proposes sending a gram-scale chip attached to a metre-wide sail—accelerated by Earth-based lasers—to make the same journey in just over 20 years.
Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018) was NASA’s first chief astronomer, its first female executive, the “Mother of Hubble,” and the woman who built its space-astronomy programme from scratch — yet she remained far less famous than the telescope she made possible.
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope launched today, nine months ahead of its official deadline after surviving three cancellation proposals and a fourth major funding threat — the observatory that nearly didn’t exist is now bound for an orbit 1 million miles from Earth.
People who have followed NASA’s Roman Space Telescope from its late-1990s conceptual roots aren’t being dramatic when they call it overdue — it was once expected to launch in 2020, survived repeated White House attempts to cancel it, was renamed, and is finally scheduled to lift off tomorrow.
Trump targeted the Roman Space Telescope for cancellation or crippling cuts four separate times — Congress protected it each time, and the observatory that repeatedly faced extinction is now scheduled to launch nine months early aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
