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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
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
For years astronomers kept finding rocky planets in habitable zones and then discovering they were bare, airless cinders. LHS 1140b, announced Thursday in the journal Science, is the first one that isn't: it has an atmosphere, a surface temperature that allows liquid water, and a quiet enough star to keep both
On July 16, 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into orbit for the Pentagon's first operational low Earth orbit data network, pushing the constellation to half its planned size, even as the optical laser mesh that is supposed to let those satellites talk to one another remains dark and unproven
In Renens, Switzerland, a company called SWISSto12 is building geostationary satellites the size of an industrial washing machine and a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft they replace, and this week it raised $70 million on a bet that governments would rather own one outright than lease capacity on someone else's constellation
In July 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into polar orbit for the Pentagon's Golden Dome mesh network, a constellation designed to be too numerous to destroy, yet the laser links meant to weave those satellites into a single battle network are still switched off in orbit, months behind schedule
The North Star is not the brightest star in the sky — not even close: Polaris ranks around 48th, far outshone by Sirius and dozens of others; what makes it special is only that it sits almost over the North Pole
Even at noon Titan sits in permanent dusk: distance and thick haze together leave barely a thousandth of Earth's sunlight at the surface — about as dim as Earth ten minutes after sunset, a golden gloom that never lifts
The navigation technique that brought Apollo 13 home in April 1970 — holding the spacecraft steady against the line where day meets night on Earth and timing a fourteen-second engine burn with a wristwatch — was later made mandatory training for every subsequent Apollo crew
In May 1969, Apollo 10 carried a lunar module called Snoopy to within 14.4 kilometres of the Moon, then fired its ascent engine until the fuel ran out and sent it into orbit around the Sun, leaving a spacecraft that had carried two human beings somewhere in interplanetary space while its crew returned safely to Earth
