Missions, discoveries, commercial spaceflight, and what's overhead tonight — written for everyone, not just rocket scientists.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket detonated during a test on May 28, gutting its launch pad. The company vows to fly again this year; NASA warns the pad itself may not recover until 2028 — with consequences for Artemis.
Read the story →Europa Clipper, launched in 2024, is cruising toward a 2030 arrival at Jupiter, where it will make nearly 50 flybys of the icy moon Europa to judge whether its hidden ocean could support life.
NASA's Juno spacecraft, now in extended operations, made a close pass of the small moon Thebe in May — the latest in a mission that has overturned much of what we thought we knew about the giant planet.
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.
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.
On June 9, NASA names the astronauts for Artemis III. Under the agency's current plan it is a demonstration mission, not the landing itself — the first crewed surface landing is now Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028.
Sagittarius A* is a famously quiet black hole, but new ALMA observations have finally revealed powerful winds streaming from it — the outflow astronomers spent half a century hunting for.
Two ultramassive black holes totalling roughly 60 billion solar masses sit at the heart of a distant galaxy, spiralling toward a merger that would create one of the largest black holes known.
Using a clever masking technique, Webb resolved the dusty core of the Circinus Galaxy and found that almost all its hot-dust glow comes from right beside the black hole — overturning a long-standing assumption.
Inside a 'little red dot' just 570 million years after the Big Bang, Webb has caught a supermassive black hole feeding voraciously — and far too large for its host galaxy, deepening a puzzle about early cosmic growth.
The maiden flight of the Long March 12B on June 1 marks another step in China's drive toward reusable launchers — and another entrant in an increasingly crowded global market for cheap access to orbit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NASA has declared its MAVEN orbiter unrecoverable after a December anomaly. The mission rewrote our understanding of how Mars lost its atmosphere — and leaves a record of more than 800 papers behind it.
A 2026 batch of discoveries pushed Saturn's moon tally to 285 and Jupiter's to 101. The new satellites are tiny, faint, and a sign that a new generation of survey telescopes is just getting started.
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.
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.
June brings the two brightest planets together at dusk, a Moon that briefly hides Venus, the summer solstice, and the long, deep-sky nights that follow. Here's what to look for and when.
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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