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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
In May 1992, after two failed attempts to capture a 4.5-tonne communications satellite with a specially built tool, three astronauts left Endeavour together and grabbed the free-flying spacecraft with their gloved hands — the first, and still only, three-person spacewalk in history
In March 2025, four rookie astronauts on SpaceX's Fram2 polar mission carried a portable X-ray machine into orbit, and three of them, after just four hours of preflight training, produced the first diagnostic radiographs ever taken in space, imaging each other and a smartwatch without any support from the ground
Titan is the only place beyond Earth where a spacecraft has landed on a surface with liquid nearby, and the probe sent back the sound of alien wind before falling silent forever
In November 1970, a Soviet rover the size of a bathtub rolled off the Luna 17 lander and crawled across the Sea of Rains at 100 metres per hour, driven by five men in a bunker near Simferopol who had never seen the Moon and faced a 2.5-second delay between command and the wheels responding
In July 2026, Cambridge economist Alessio Terzi and colleagues published the largest launch-cost dataset ever assembled — 4,400 rockets flown since 1960 — and projected that the price of putting a kilogram into orbit will fall from $3,868 last year to $273 by 2040, if the company driving the collapse does not become its own bottleneck
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev stayed in orbit so long that the country which launched him collapsed, and he kept doing his job in space while the world he trusted to bring him home fell apart below
Saturn has a six-sided storm system wider than Earth, and scientists still cannot fully explain why its perfect shape refuses to disappear
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within a minute of launch and survived because one flight controller recognized an obscure electrical pattern almost nobody else in Mission Control understood
Beneath Europa’s fractured ice may be an ocean containing more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, kept warm in complete darkness by the gravitational pull of Jupiter
A single London to New York flight delivers roughly 37 microsieverts of cosmic radiation — about 1% of the natural dose an average person absorbs from rocks, air and ground across an entire year
