Space Travel
Space Travel
1,074 articles in this category.
Space Travel
A Soviet probe survived the journey to Venus and began testing the surface of another world — only for its soil instrument to come down on a discarded piece of the spacecraft itself and send the mistaken reading all the way back to Earth
Space Travel
After travelling 122 million miles in orbit, retired space shuttle Endeavour needed 68 hours to cover its final 12 miles through Los Angeles — crawling at no more than 2 mph as crews removed more than 400 trees to clear its 78-foot wingspan
Space Travel
A high-school student's idea sent two spiders to a US space station to see whether they could still spin a web with no gravity to hang it from, and they did, building lopsided, confused webs at first before adjusting, and one of the spiders, named Gladys, turned out on return to be male and was renamed Gladstone.
Space Travel
At the space shuttle’s orbital speed of roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, the journey to Alpha Centauri would take about 165,000 years. Breakthrough Starshot proposes sending a gram-scale chip attached to a metre-wide sail—accelerated by Earth-based lasers—to make the same journey in just over 20 years.
Space Travel
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.
Space Travel
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.
Psychology
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
Space Travel
Physics says a spacecraft with mass can never reach the speed of light: as it accelerates closer to c, the energy required rises without limit, so light speed isn't merely difficult to reach — for massive objects, it's physically unattainable.
Space Travel
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.
Space Travel
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.
Space Travel
Voyager 2 is nearly 50 years old, losing about 4 watts of power every year as its plutonium power source fades — and NASA just bought it at least another year of science with an all-at-once power-system swap engineers called the “Big Bang,” performed on a spacecraft with razor-thin power margins and no possibility of physical repair.
Space Travel
In April 2025, four private astronauts aboard SpaceX's Fram2 became the first humans ever to circle Earth in a true polar orbit — a route that neither NASA, the Soviet Union nor any other government space programme had flown in the entire history of human spaceflight.
Space Travel
Voyager 1 isn't dying because anything failed — nearly 50 years of interstellar travel and every original system still works. The mission is ending because a plutonium battery losing 4 watts a year eventually runs out of watts
Space Travel
Of the 27 songs NASA sent into space aboard the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, one is a Georgian song called Chakrulo, sung by two soloists over a full choir in harmonies tuned to intervals that don't exist on a piano — and this November, the spacecraft carrying it becomes the first human-made object ever to travel a full light-day from Earth
Space Travel