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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Aerospace
The UAE didn't have a space agency twelve years ago. It now has a probe at Mars, a seat at the UN's new space-safety body, and a plan to be in the global top 10 by 2031.
On 9 February 2021, an Emirati spacecraft called Hope entered orbit around Mars.
China installed more solar capacity in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history, and the panels were largely manufactured using coal-fired electricity
The Soviet naval officer who refused to fire his nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis is the reason most people alive today exist — and almost no one in the West knew his name until 2002
A quantum flicker measured in centimeters and nanoseconds may be the hidden switch deciding whether a dying star explodes into a supernova or simply collapses in silence
The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because its fuel was running low and engineers refused to risk it drifting into Enceladus, a moon with a subsurface ocean, and the final 22 orbits were designed to thread a 1,500-mile gap between Saturn and its innermost ring that no spacecraft had ever attempted.
The Apollo Guidance Computer that landed humans on the Moon had less processing power than a modern microwave, and the engineers programmed it with rope memory that was hand-woven by women who were called "Little Old Ladies" in the official documentation — and the entire system worked because they were never wrong
SpaceX has launched more rockets in the past four years than the Soviet Union launched during the entire Space Race, and the cost per kilogram to low Earth orbit has dropped about 95% since 2010 — which has quietly rewritten the economics of every space program on the planet without most of the public quite registering it.
The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth at a gravitational sweet spot called L2, and the only way to refuel or service it is to send another spacecraft on a one-way mission that hasn't been designed yet, which means every photograph it takes for the rest of its life is being captured by an instrument we've already accepted we can't save
The Voyager Golden Record was pressed in 1977 with greetings in 55 languages and a sample of human music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry — and the engineers who chose what to include had six weeks to decide what humanity wanted to say to whoever might eventually find it
The four astronauts who flew farther from Earth than any humans in history have just come back. The advice they're giving the rest of us has almost nothing to do with space.
Voyager 1's signal now takes more than 23 hours to reach Earth, and by the time NASA receives the next status check the spacecraft will already be 1.5 million kilometres further into interstellar space
