All articles
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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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Science & Discovery
What a fleet of telescopes learned from our third interstellar visitor
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been probed across the spectrum — Webb found methane, ALMA found water unlike any local comet's, and X-ray observatories caught it glowing. A SETI search for technosignatures came up empty.
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Commercial
A robot is about to grab an aging NASA telescope and push it higher
Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL will loft a Katalyst robotic spacecraft to boost the decaying orbit of NASA's Swift Observatory — a real-world test of commercial satellite servicing on a working science mission.
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NASA & Agencies
After 11 years mapping how Mars lost its air, MAVEN goes silent
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.
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Missions
NASA is about to name its next Artemis crew
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.
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Astronomy
NASA's next great observatory, Roman, gets an August launch date
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now set to launch August 30 on a Falcon Heavy — ahead of schedule and under budget. Its wide-field infrared survey could catalogue around 100,000 exoplanets.
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Astronomy
A giant galaxy that doesn't spin is forcing a rethink of how they form
Webb found a massive galaxy from less than two billion years after the Big Bang whose stars move at random, with no rotation at all — a 'slow rotator' that theory says should not exist so early.
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Science & Discovery
A nearby dwarf galaxy is a blueprint for the universe's first dust
Webb found unexpected dust-making in Sextans A, a chemically primitive dwarf galaxy — evidence that the earliest galaxies could forge solid grains by pathways unlike those that dominate today.
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