All articles
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Stargazing
The aurora window isn't closing yet — why 2026 can still light up the sky
The Sun's official peak passed in 2024, but Solar Cycle 25 looks to be double-humped, and the descending phase has a history of throwing some of the biggest geomagnetic storms of all. What that means if you're still chasing the northern lights.
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Science & Discovery
China's probe is closing on a tiny asteroid that may — or may not — be a piece of the Moon
Tianwen-2 reaches the quasi-moon Kamo'oalewa this month to grab a sample. Just as it arrives, a new study undercuts the leading theory of what the object even is — a reminder that we often visit worlds before we understand them.
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Science & Discovery
Curiosity found the richest haul of organic molecules yet on Mars — and a careful reason not to call it life
A rock the rover drilled in 2020 has yielded the most diverse set of carbon-bearing molecules ever detected on Mars, preserved for billions of years in clay that once held water. It's a tantalizing result — and a case study in scientific restraint.
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Missions
Four years after we punched an asteroid, a spacecraft is arriving to read the bruise
In 2022, NASA's DART probe slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos and changed its orbit. We know it worked — but not precisely why. ESA's Hera reaches the scene in November to turn a one-off stunt into a measured, repeatable technique.
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NASA & Agencies
India is one uncrewed test flight away from joining the human-spaceflight club
ISRO is preparing to fly Gaganyaan-1, the uncrewed shakedown of India's first homegrown crew vehicle, with a humanoid robot aboard. Success would put a crewed flight within reach in 2027 — and make India the fourth nation to launch its own astronauts.
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Astronomy
A monster black hole in an almost empty patch of the early universe is rewriting the origin story
JWST has found a black hole some 50 million times the Sun's mass sitting in a region nearly devoid of stars, a billion years after the Big Bang. It is the most lopsided black-hole-to-host ratio ever seen — and evidence that some black holes were born big.
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Astronomy
NASA's next great observatory is ahead of schedule — and built to see wide, not just deep
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is finished, packed, and now aiming for a launch around the end of August — months early. Its trick isn't sharper vision than Hubble's. It's a field of view about a hundred times larger, and what that does to astronomy.
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Commercial
Rocket Lab's bid to challenge the Falcon 9 is down to a few months — and a few tests
Neutron, Rocket Lab's medium-lift, partially reusable rocket, is targeting its first flight in the last quarter of 2026. A tank failure earlier this year forced a redesign — but a fresh multi-launch deal shows customers are already betting on it.
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Commercial
The first privately owned space station is almost ready — and the clock behind it is the ISS
Vast's Haven-1 is on track to become the first commercial space station in orbit, a single module flying on a Falcon 9. It's a modest first step with an outsized purpose: proving private outposts can exist before the International Space Station comes down in 2030.
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Commercial
New Glenn blew up on the pad. Now NASA is decoupling its Moon plans from Blue Origin's rocket.
A static-fire explosion on 28 May wrecked Blue Origin's launch pad and put its New Glenn rocket on the sidelines. With a Blue Moon lunar lander waiting on that rocket, NASA is quietly rearranging the dependencies in its Artemis architecture.
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NASA & Agencies
A familiar crack: why the station's crew spent an afternoon inside a Dragon
On 5 June the International Space Station's crew suited up and retreated into a docked Crew Dragon as an old leak on the Russian segment worsened. The scare passed within hours — but the fault behind it has resisted six years of repairs.
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Stargazing
Your June 2026 sky: a Venus–Jupiter near-miss, a maybe-meteor-outburst, and the Milky Way's core
A practical month guide to what's worth stepping outside for in June 2026 — a tight planetary conjunction at dusk, a meteor shower that occasionally misbehaves, and the galaxy's bright heart rising in the south.
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