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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Konstantin Batygin said in June 2026 that discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory beginning that summer would directly test every line of evidence for Planet Nine — potentially revealing the hidden planet itself or showing that the strange orbital patterns behind the hypothesis were never real.
In 2026, astronomer Samantha Lawler and two colleagues modelled SpaceX’s proposal for one million orbital AI data-centre satellites and found that, if they are launched with the assumed sizes and reflectivity, naked-eye satellites could outnumber visible stars for large portions of the night and year almost everywhere on Earth.
In 2025, NASA funded LEAP, a jumping robot concept designed to bound directly through the geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, collecting water and ice expelled from its buried ocean. The appeal is beautifully simple: instead of drilling through kilometres of ice to reach the ocean, let the ocean erupt directly into the robot’s sampler.
NASA has awarded Helicity Space an early-stage grant to test the feasibility of the Helicity Drive, a proposed fusion-propulsion system whose developers say could carry a crew to Mars and back in under four months. That entire theoretical round trip would be shorter than the roughly nine months a conventional chemical-powered mission may spend travelling in one direction—but the engine remains an unproven concept, not a flight-ready NASA system.
Titan is wider than Mercury, operates a complete methane weather cycle, and contains hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all Earth’s known oil and gas reserves. It is the only known world beyond Earth where you could stand beneath clouds beside a calm lake—provided you remained sealed inside a heated, oxygenated suit.
Before every spacewalk, astronauts spend hours breathing pure oxygen inside their own bodies for one specific reason — to stop their blood from doing to them exactly what nearly happened to test subjects inside vacuum chambers on Earth
Starlink crossed 11,000 satellites in orbit on 19 August 2026. At the start of 2019—just months before its first full batch launched—fewer than 2,000 active satellites belonging to every company and nation combined circled Earth.
Rainstorms on Titan may be assembling one of life’s earliest structures without liquid water: a 2025 NASA-backed study proposes that splashes from its methane-and-ethane lakes create coated droplets which acquire a second molecular layer as they fall back, forming the same kind of bilayer compartments that preceded Earth’s first cells.
China's water-hunting Moon mission was hours from launch on Sunday when the countdown stopped — the next window may not come until 2027
At Enceladus’s south pole, the ice above its hidden ocean may be only one to five kilometres thick, compared with Europa’s newly estimated 29 kilometres. But a spacecraft might not need to drill through it at all: Enceladus already blasts material from its ocean into space, making the lesser-known moon our most accessible alien sea.
