What's up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Solar storms don't harm people directly — they induce electric currents in long metal, meaning the power lines, pipelines and undersea internet cables we've strung across the planet are exactly what they attack
New Nature research suggests interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be a 12-billion-year-old relic from another planetary system, with carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen isotope ratios unlike those seen in Solar System comets — a chemical fingerprint from a world-forming environment that existed billions of years before the Sun.
The Cosmic Microwave Background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang detectable across the sky, contains a strange Cold Spot — a region measurably cooler than its surroundings — and while some physicists have wondered whether it could be the scar of a collision with another universe, others argue it may be a rare statistical fluctuation or the imprint of enormous cosmic structure.
For decades, we did not know whether Earth-like worlds were cosmic accidents. But Kepler and TESS have shifted the mystery: small planets are common, and Kepler’s census suggests rocky worlds in the habitable zones of ordinary stars may be common too. If so, the deeper question is not where the planets are — but why, so far, the universe remains quiet.
Voyager 1 has been travelling non-stop since 1977, faster than a speeding bullet every second of every day, and it has not yet reached the distance of a single light-year from Earth
Musk's original 2001 Mars plan was almost childishly simple: land a small greenhouse on the red planet to reignite public excitement for space, the seed idea that grew into SpaceX
On March 13, 1989, a geomagnetic storm collapsed Quebec's entire power grid in just 90 seconds — leaving 6 million people in the cold and dark before most of them had even woken up
When JWST looked at XLSSC 122, a galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light-years away, it caught gravity bending light from galaxies about 12 billion years in the past, and a dark matter core packed too tightly for cosmic noon
SpaceX's full legal name is Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, and the company still frames itself less as a rocket business than a mission to push humanity beyond Earth
Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk describes how one private decision kept Starlink dark near Crimea in 2022, leaving Ukrainian sea drones suddenly offline before they reached Russia's Black Sea Fleet
