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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Two of Neptune's tiny inner moons contain clay minerals that could not have formed on worlds so small and cold — suggesting they're built from the exposed interiors of much larger moons shattered when the captured Kuiper Belt world Triton tore through Neptune's original satellite system billions of years ago.
On 19 August 2026, SpaceX pushed its Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites in orbit — meaning a single network now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all active satellites circling Earth.
Sophie Adenot became the first French woman to spacewalk on 18 August 2026, but the job she went outside to finish remains unfinished — stubborn electrical cables ate the time she needed to install a new antenna
A camera the size of a small car, sitting on a mountain in Chile, began taking a new image of the southern sky every 40 seconds on 30 June 2026 — building a ten-year time-lapse of the universe that will scan the entire southern sky every few nights and issue up to seven million alerts a night whenever something moves or flickers.
NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in July 2028 and spend six and a half years crossing the solar system to land on a moon that has weather, seasons, rivers and seas — with methane and ethane flowing across its surface instead of water.
Apollo 14 carried roughly 500 tree seeds around the Moon in 1971, they were germinated and planted in schoolyards and state capitols across America, and then nobody kept a proper list — until a NASA scientist started hunting the survivors and has now tracked down dozens still growing.
JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune's tiny inner moons and its rings that probably formed deep inside much larger icy worlds — compelling evidence that today's moons may be rubble from Neptune's original satellite system, destroyed when the captured moon Triton tore through it billions of years ago.
A 58-kilometre-long spacecraft called Chrysalis won an international design competition in 2025 by laying out in extraordinary detail how 2,400 people could live, reproduce and govern themselves on a 400-year voyage — long enough for generations to be born, grow old and die without ever seeing Earth or the world their descendants were travelling toward.
At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.
Mimas looks like one of Saturn's deadest moons: a frozen, heavily cratered ball with no obvious activity. Then scientists discovered a global ocean beneath it in 2024 — an ocean less than 25 million years old, younger than the Himalayas, hiding beneath a surface that gives almost nothing away.