All articles
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Commercial
Planet Labs photographs every point on Earth every day. What that means for science and surveillance.
Planet Labs operates the largest commercial Earth observation constellation in history — over 200 Dove cubesats producing daily global coverage. The dense time series enables monitoring of agriculture, deforestation, urban growth, and disaster response at scales and cadences previously impossible.
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Science & Discovery
The Sun occasionally fires plasma clouds at Earth that can knock out power grids. We're not prepared.
Coronal mass ejections — billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma from the Sun — can trigger geomagnetic storms that damage transformers, disable satellites, and disrupt GPS. The 1859 Carrington Event caused telegraph fires; a comparable storm today would have catastrophic infrastructure consequences.
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NASA & Agencies
China's Tiangong station is complete and permanently crewed. Here's what it's doing.
Tiangong, China's modular space station in low Earth orbit, reached its full three-module configuration in 2022 and has maintained a continuous crew since. It conducts experiments in biology, materials science, space medicine, and Earth observation, while serving as the operational backbone of China's long-term human spaceflight program.
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Stargazing
You don't need a telescope to see deep-sky wonders. A pair of binoculars opens the Messier catalog.
A standard pair of 7x50 or 10x50 binoculars under reasonably dark skies can reveal dozens of Messier objects: open clusters, globular clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. This guide explains which ones to start with, how to find them, and what you'll actually see.
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Commercial
Satellites are replaced when they run out of fuel. A nascent industry wants to refuel and repair them instead.
In-space servicing — refueling, repairing, and repositioning satellites — could extend the operational life of billion-dollar space assets by decades. Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicles have already done it commercially. The next generation aims to do it at scale.
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NASA & Agencies
ESA's next decade in space: gravitational wave detectors, exoplanet atmospheres, and Venus.
The European Space Agency's science program for the 2030s includes LISA (a space-based gravitational wave observatory), Ariel (systematic exoplanet atmosphere survey), and EnVision (a Venus orbiter). Together they address three of the biggest open questions in astrophysics.
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Missions
After seven years of flying past planets, BepiColombo has finally reached Mercury
ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo mission spent seven years threading gravity assists around Earth, Venus, and Mercury before finally entering Mercury orbit in late 2025. Now its two orbiters are mapping the innermost planet's magnetic field, geology, and interior with unprecedented precision.
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Missions
NASA's Lucy mission has already upended what we thought about small bodies — and the Trojans haven't started yet
Lucy launched in 2021 to study the Trojan asteroids — ancient leftovers from the solar system's formation that share Jupiter's orbit. Two surprise flyby targets along the way turned out to be binaries, previewing what the Trojans may hold.
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Science & Discovery
Something massive might be hiding at the edge of the solar system. Here's the evidence for and against.
A cluster of distant Kuiper Belt objects have orbits that seem to point toward an unseen planet — perhaps 5 to 10 times Earth's mass, orbiting 400 to 800 AU from the Sun. The hypothesis is compelling, the search is active, and the skeptical case is real.
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Commercial
The company quietly building the ISS's replacement, one pressurized module at a time
Axiom Space has flown four private astronaut missions to the ISS, is designing the spacesuits for Artemis moon walks, and is under contract to attach its own commercial module to the station before 2030. When the ISS is decommissioned, Axiom's section will detach and operate independently.
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Science & Discovery
Where did the Moon come from? Apollo's rocks are still answering that question.
The giant impact hypothesis — a Mars-sized body struck the early Earth and the debris coalesced into the Moon — has dominated lunar science for 40 years. New analyses of Apollo samples and Chinese lunar returns are both confirming and complicating it.
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NASA & Agencies
Boeing's crew capsule is still on the ground. What Starliner's failure means for human spaceflight.
Boeing's Starliner flew its first crewed mission in June 2024 — and left two astronauts stranded on the ISS for nine months after thruster failures and helium leaks forced NASA to return the capsule uncrewed. As of mid-2026, Starliner's future remains unresolved.
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