All articles
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Military Space
One Outage Stopped Navy Drone Tests. The Pentagon's SpaceX Problem Is Bigger Than That.
When a Starlink outage last August left Navy unmanned surface vessels bobbing uselessly off the California coast, it crystallized a strategic anxiety the Pentagon had been managing quietly: the U.S. military is profoundly dependent on a commercial satellite network it does not own or control.
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Science & Discovery
The CNO Cycle: How Massive Stars Burn Hydrogen Differently Than the Sun
The Sun fuses hydrogen through the proton-proton chain. Stars more than twice as massive use a completely different nuclear pathway — one that uses carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts and burns hotter, faster, and far more violently.
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Astronomy
The Coma Cluster: Where Dark Matter Was First Weighed and Found Wanting
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky calculated the mass of the Coma Cluster from its galaxies' motions and found a discrepancy of a factor of 400. He called the missing mass 'dunkle Materie.' The mystery hasn't been solved in the ninety years since.
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NASA & Agencies
ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover: Still Alive, Still Going to Mars
ESA's ExoMars rover survived the loss of its Russian Roscosmos partnership and is being rebuilt for a European launch. If it gets to Mars, it will carry a drill no other mission has ever attempted.
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Stargazing
Galaxy Season: A Guide to Observing the Local Group This Autumn
Every autumn the great galaxies of the Local Group rise into prime viewing position. Here's how to find M31, M33, and their satellites — and what you're actually looking at when you do.
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Missions
ESA's Hera Mission Is About to Rewrite What We Know About Asteroid Deflection
NASA's DART proved we can move an asteroid. Now ESA's Hera spacecraft is arriving at Didymos to find out exactly what happened — and whether planetary defense is ready for a real threat.
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Science & Discovery
When Neutron Stars Collide: How Kilonovae Forge the Universe's Heavy Elements
Gold, platinum, uranium — the heaviest elements in the periodic table weren't forged in ordinary stars. They were made in the violent milliseconds of neutron star mergers, and in 2017, we watched it happen for the first time.
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Astronomy
Inside a Stellar Nursery: How the Orion Molecular Cloud Builds Stars
The Orion Molecular Cloud is the nearest massive star-forming region to Earth — a turbulent, ultraviolet-blasted environment where new solar systems are assembling right now, and JWST has given us our sharpest look yet.
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Commercial
The Upper Stage Problem: Why Reusable Second Stages Are Harder Than They Look
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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Military Space
The SDA's Transport Layer: America's Proliferated Military Satellite Constellation
The Space Development Agency is building a mesh network of hundreds of small military satellites in low Earth orbit — a fundamentally different approach to space-based command and control than anything the US has operated before.
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Missions
VIPER Is Cancelled. Here's Why NASA's Ice-Hunting Rover Mattered.
NASA cancelled the VIPER rover in 2024 after costs ballooned and schedules slipped. The science it was supposed to do — characterizing water ice at the lunar south pole — still needs to be done before Artemis astronauts go there.
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Military Space
Anti-satellite weapons are real, tested, and leaving debris clouds that threaten everyone
China, Russia, the US, and India have all tested direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. The debris those tests create persists for decades. The tension between military necessity and orbital sustainability is becoming one of the defining strategic problems of the 2020s.
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