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 16th Feb 2024
Osiris-Rex travelled around 6-billion km to get to asteroid Bennu, pick up some samples, and get them back to Earth. Now, you won’t often see people more excited by dirt, but this is dirt from another planet – which as a consequence of being other-worldly is rather rare on Earth. And it might jus...
Posted on 5th May 2023
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 with more-or-less perfect accuracy (cause, science). But it wasn’t always that way – actually, it was only a few hundred years ago that Halley (the comet guy) made the fi...
Posted on 9th Dec 2022
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 hyperventilating of overly enthusiastic journalists for a moment and imagine that we have actually entered “the era of space tourism” (CBS, R...
Posted on 25th Nov 2022
The post office got a bad rap during COVID, but I’m not sure too many people want their mail delivered by rocket. Regardless, it seemed like a good idea to Heinrich von Kleist who was going to use fixed artillery batteries to fire letter-filled shells to speed up delivery of the mail. This was in th...
Posted on 24th Nov 2022
In case you’ve been living under a rock lately and missed the big announcement, Australia recently committed to ‘never conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing’. Why would we do that? Well, for starters New Zealand have already committed and we don’t want to look like we a...
Posted on 20th Oct 2022
DART is the mission based on the Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon. You know, the movie where the oil drillers are trained to go to space because there couldn’t possibly be an astronaut capable of being trained to be an oil driller. Anyway, if you think Michael Bay’s explosions are over the top, well...
Posted on 28th May 2021
Good news. Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be heading to the ISS as a private astronaut in December of this year. Maezawa will be the first private astronaut to set foot on the ISS in 10 years. If you have no idea who Maezawa (or @yousuck2020) is, he is the Japanese fashion billionaire who is fa...
Posted on 5th Mar 2021
We have rovers on Mars. Perseverance (or Percy, if you're on nickname terms) landed there just a few weeks ago to join Curiosity. And don't forget about Spirit and Opportunity (or Oppy, if you like) which also spent years traversing the Martian wastelands. Then just yesterday we saw the...
Posted on 5th Mar 2021
Here's a brief history on our understanding of black holes. In 1783 John Michell had a thought. Now that in itself was not unusual, as Michell was a philosopher, and someone whose thoughts were purportedly generations ahead of his contemporaries. What was unusual was that Michell began to think ab...
In case you’ve been living under a rock lately and missed the big announcement, Australia recently committed to ‘never conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing’....
Nuke Mars. You’ve probably heard about this, or maybe you have the t-shirt. The idea is simple. Mars has a cold, thin atmosphere that doesn’t...
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