Launches, discoveries, missions, and the people pushing humanity into space. Accurate, interesting, no jargon without explanation.
A 50-million-solar-mass black hole in a galaxy 700 million years after the Big Bang weighs more than the galaxy that surrounds it, supporting the idea that the universe started making giant black holes earlier than the standard story allows.
A static fire test on Thursday night ended in a fireball at Launch Complex 36, destroying the NG-4 vehicle, damaging ground infrastructure, and pulling the second-largest US rocket out of service for an unknown stretch.
Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang touched down in Inner Mongolia Friday after the longest Chinese crewed mission yet, ending a stay that was extended when a debris-cracked window forced an unprecedented spacecraft swap last fall.
Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev installed a solar radiation sensor on Zvezda and retrieved two long-running Russian experiments during the 279th station-supporting EVA.
At a press conference in Washington, NASA named the contractors, rovers, and hopping drones that will go to the lunar south pole between now and 2029. It is the first hard schedule of dollars and hardware behind Administrator Jared Isaacman's March pledge to build a permanent base.
TESS caught a rare triple star system in which a swollen red giant and a pair of sun-like stars orbit on almost exactly the same plane, blocking each other in turn from our viewpoint. The geometry is so well aligned that the masses, sizes, and temperatures of all three stars can be read straight off the light curve.
Administrator Jared Isaacman has merged the agency's exploration and operations arms into a single Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, set up a dedicated Moon Base program, and renamed Moon to Mars as plain Artemis. The structure sets the table for a strategy update on Tuesday.
NASA's Psyche spacecraft used a close pass of Mars on May 15 to bend its trajectory toward the asteroid belt, gaining velocity without burning a drop of propellant. The images it captured on the way through are the first dividend of a four-year journey to a place no spacecraft has ever visited.
JWST detected methane in the atmosphere of TOI-199b, a Saturn-sized world with Earth-like equilibrium temperatures and the first temperate giant ever spectrally characterized.
A Long March 2F lifted off Sunday for the Tiangong space station, carrying the first astronaut from Hong Kong and setting up China's longest crewed flight yet.
An Electron rocket put Japan's ninth StriX satellite into low Earth orbit on May 22, adding to a growing fleet that images the planet through clouds and darkness.
A new JWST survey traces the cosmic web of dark matter and gas across 164,000 galaxies, reaching back to when the universe was about a billion years old.
A joint ESA and Chinese Academy of Sciences spacecraft lifted off May 18 on a Vega-C rocket. Over the next three years it will image the invisible bubble that keeps the solar wind from sterilizing Earth.
Flight 12 is the debut of the V3 vehicle, the largest Starship yet, after a seven-month pause. It will deliberately stress the parts most likely to fail.
The White House's FY2026 budget request for NASA proposes the deepest cuts to the agency in a generation, restructures Artemis around a faster lunar return, and effectively ends several long-running science missions. Here is what the numbers actually say.
Congressional hearings on UAP have become increasingly prominent since 2023. Some testimony has been credible and specific. Some has not. Separating the two requires knowing what to look for.
The Artemis Accords have grown from eight founding signatories in 2020 to more than 55 nations in 2026. The agreement is doing something more interesting than its press releases suggest: quietly establishing the legal norms for the next century of activity on the Moon.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has released two annual reports to Congress. They are worth reading carefully. They are not what either believers or skeptics want them to be.
Beneath the cracked ice of Jupiter's moon Europa sits an ocean with more liquid water than every ocean on Earth combined. In 2030, a NASA spacecraft will get close enough to ask whether anything lives in it.
On flight four, both stages of the largest rocket ever built survived to controlled splashdowns. Neither caught the tower. Neither was supposed to. What matters is the part that worked.
The James Webb Space Telescope completed its first full year of science operations with results that genuinely surprised the astronomers who built it. Some findings revised existing models. Others created new puzzles.
Starlink passed 4 million subscribers in 2024 and is generating over $6 billion in annualized revenue. After years of being described as a moon shot, it is beginning to look like a business.
In May 2024, astronomers confirmed the most distant galaxy ever observed, dating to just 290 million years after the Big Bang. It is unexpectedly large and bright, adding to a growing puzzle about early galaxy formation.
NASA's Perseverance rover has spent four years in what was once a lake. The sedimentary rocks it has found tell a story about Mars that is increasingly specific, and increasingly hopeful.
Rocket Lab is building a reusable medium-lift rocket called Neutron, targeting the gap between small satellites and Falcon 9's heavy-haul capability. The market it is aiming at is larger than it looks.
Planet Labs and a wave of new entrants have democratized access to Earth observation data. What used to be a government monopoly is now a competitive market. The implications are bigger than they first appear.
In September 2024, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis became the first civilians to conduct a spacewalk. The mission also reached the highest Earth orbit since the Apollo era. Here is what the mission actually demonstrated.
SpaceX has announced contracts and letters of intent for Starship from NASA, commercial satellite operators, and others. The list reveals what serious customers think Starship will deliver and when.
The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope released its first major data set in 2024, including the most detailed map of dark matter distribution ever produced. The map raises as many questions as it answers.
Fast radio bursts are millisecond flashes of radio energy that release as much power in a blink as the Sun does in three days. Scientists have been detecting them for almost two decades and still do not fully understand what produces them.
Chandrayaan-3 set Vikram down in the high southern latitudes of the Moon and walked a rover across regolith no one had ever sampled. It cost $75 million. The implications are larger than the price tag.
In late 2019 and early 2020, Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, faded dramatically. Speculation about an imminent supernova ran wild. The actual explanation was more mundane, and more interesting.
NASA's Dragonfly mission will fly a rotorcraft through the thick atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, sampling the organic chemistry of a world that may resemble early Earth. It is one of the most ambitious planetary missions ever designed.
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