All articles
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Commercial
Why most satellites now fly on a faint blue glow
Electric propulsion trades thrust for efficiency, delivering specific impulses an order of magnitude beyond chemical rockets. It is why modern constellations and deep-space probes do more with far less propellant — and why patience is the price.
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Missions
Why Mars landings are an unforgiving engineering problem
Mars has just enough atmosphere to destroy a spacecraft and not enough to land one. Entry, descent, and landing compresses every hard problem in spaceflight into about seven autonomous minutes — and it sets a hard ceiling on how much mass we can put on the surface.
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NASA & Agencies
Mars Sample Return: the architecture, and the reckoning
Bringing Perseverance's cached samples to Earth would be the most complex robotic campaign ever flown. Its cost and schedule have forced NASA into a hard rethink — and, as of 2026, the agency is weighing competing architectures rather than committing to one.
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Science & Discovery
The Hubble tension: a 5-sigma crack in the standard model
Two rigorous ways of measuring how fast the universe expands disagree by about 9%, at better than five sigma. A decade of scrutiny — most recently with JWST — has failed to dissolve it, and the discrepancy may be pointing at physics beyond the standard cosmological model.
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Astronomy
Measuring a strain of 10⁻²¹: how gravitational-wave detectors work
LIGO detects spacetime distortions a thousandth the width of a proton across a four-kilometre arm. The instrument is an exercise in suppressing every other effect on Earth — and it has opened a genuinely new way of observing the universe.
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Missions
The long road back to the Moon
With Artemis II flown and a crewed landing now planned for Artemis IV in 2028, NASA's return to the Moon has shifted from promise to schedule. Here is where the program actually stands, and the dependency that still governs its timeline.
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Science & Discovery
From one solar system to six thousand worlds
Thirty years after the first planet was found around a Sun-like star, NASA's confirmed exoplanet count has passed 6,000 — almost none of them ever directly imaged. The methods that found them now drive a far harder pursuit: reading their atmospheres for signs of life.
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Astronomy
Why the most powerful telescope ever built has to freeze itself
Webb's gold mirror, tennis-court sunshield, and orbit a million and a half kilometres from Earth all follow from one requirement: to see the first galaxies, it must observe in the infrared — and an infrared telescope that is even slightly warm is blind.
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Commercial
How landing boosters rewrote the economics of spaceflight
Recovering an orbital booster was long assumed to be uneconomic. Falcon 9 disproved that operationally, and the industry has spent the years since reorganising around reuse — with one harder problem still unsolved.
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Stargazing
A beginner's guide to the naked-eye sky
Naked-eye observing rewards technique far more than equipment. A practical guide to what's worth finding — including June 2026's Venus–Jupiter meeting — and the habits that separate a frustrating session from a memorable one.
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NASA & Agencies
Who actually runs space? A field guide to the agencies
Spaceflight is now a multipolar, increasingly commercial enterprise, structured as much by alliances as by rockets. A guide to the major agencies — their specialities, their constraints, and the strategic fault lines forming between them.
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Commercial
By June, 2026 was already one of the busiest years in launch history
Barely half over, 2026 had logged 131 orbital launch attempts — driven by a Falcon 9 fleet flying every few days, a surging Chinese sector, and the maiden flight of Europe's heaviest Ariane 6.
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