The latest telemetry from the frontiers of science...
Browse our most recent analyses and observations — from orbital mechanics to propulsion systems, we cover the successes, the failures, and all the moments that make you pause and think, “Sure… but why?”
Posted on 27th Jun 2025
It's here. I’ve been harping on about this for a while now. I was so looking forward to it that one of my 2024 things to look forward to was that we'd be one year closer to first light. I'm talking about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory of course, and it has not disappointed. The first images, commis...
Posted on 27th Jun 2025
The International Space Station is really starting to show its age. It's a bit leaky these days, particularly on the Russian side. The Zvezda module had had a worsening air leak since 2019. It's bad enough that the US think it could lead to a catastrophic failure, which, maybe... It is a signifi...
Posted on 27th Jun 2025
I’m fascinated by cosmology. What's not to love? It's the science of the origin and evolution of the universe and its ultimate fate. And the great thing is you can kind of figure a lot of it out by assuming the Big Bang happened and just working forward from there. One of the bits of evidence...
Posted on 13th Jun 2025
There’s been talk over the last few years about a lunar base called the ILRS (or the International Lunar Research Station). It would be built near the south pole of the Moon, with additional outposts near the lunar equator and a space station orbiting overhead. The idea is that the whole thing wou...
Posted on 13th Jun 2025
Titan is an interesting place. It's the largest moon of Saturn, bigger than our Moon and bigger even than the planet Mercury. It's also the only place besides Earth in the solar system with a dense atmosphere and standing bodies of liquid on its surface. Yes, Titan has rivers, lakes, and seas which...
Posted on 30th May 2025
In the outer solar system, beyond all the planets, there’s a lot of stuff. Small rocky and icy objects orbit the sun at enormous distances. But strangely there’s a group of these objects that seem to be clustered together. Now, the use of the word 'clustered' might imply that these objects are close...
Posted on 30th May 2025
This is becoming increasingly regular for Starship. We know SpaceX takes a fail-fast, learn-fast approach, but this is the third launch in a row that's ended in rapid unscheduled disassembly. Elon was meant to talk to the press after the launch, but he disappeared instead. Only hours later did h...
Posted on 7th Mar 2025
Gilmour Space is about to launch its Eris rocket – this time for real! We have a date. The launch window opens March 15. Just to clarify, the delays have generally been out of their control. There have been quite a few regulatory hurdles to overcome, not least being that this is the first time th...
Posted on 7th Feb 2025
Psyche is the mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche – a piece of space rock that is supposedly worth $100k quadrillion. Or, depending which media report you read today, it might be a billion quadrillion dollars, or even a trillion quadrillion dollars. At this point these numbers don’t even mean anyth...
Being almost the holidays, this might be a good time to talk about space tourism. Let’s ignore the advertising of well-known rocket launch companies and...
The hybrid solar eclipse in Exmouth a couple of weeks ago was a pretty rare event, but to the surprise of no-one it was predicted...
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