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In May 1973, Skylab reached orbit with its heat shield torn away, one solar wing gone and the other jammed, leaving America’s first space station at roughly 54°C — so engineers built a parasol in days and astronauts carried it up to save the laboratory
43+ min ago (467+ words) Skylab reached orbit on 14 May 1973, but the achievement almost ended before anyone could live aboard it. During launch, the shield wrapped around the orbital...
Proxima Centauri is the nearest star beyond the Sun, yet this red dwarf is normally invisible to the naked eye — except during a rare superflare
2+ hour, 43+ min ago (425+ words) Proxima Centauri is the nearest known star beyond the Sun, only about 4.25 light-years from Earth. Yet no matter how dark the night becomes, it is normally...
In 2026, engineers at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands sealed Plato inside the Maxwell chamber and ran every one of its 26 cameras and subsystems at once to find out whether the spacecraft could survive its own electronics screaming at each other
2+ hour, 44+ min ago (190+ words) In 2026, engineers at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands sealed Plato inside the Maxwell chamber and ran every one of its 26 cameras and subsystems at once...
A radio structure thought for 40 years to tower over the Milky Way’s centre is actually a nearby stellar bubble — not the fossil scar of a black hole eruption
4+ hour, 37+ min ago (330+ words) Decades of cosmic detective work unravels when a mysterious radio structure turns out to be much closer—and far less dramatic—than astronomers believed....
In 1977, NASA launched two probes designed to last five years. Voyager 1 and 2 are now the only human-made objects in interstellar space, still operating, still transmitting, funded by a team of engineers some of whom have worked on the mission for nearly 50 years
5+ hour, 43+ min ago (350+ words) NASA launched Voyager 2 on 20 August 1977 and Voyager 1 on 5 September. The spacecraft were built for a five-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn. Almost 49...
A NASA crew study found that tidiness and everyday consideration are strongly linked to cohesion when missions last from 45 to 240 days
6+ hour, 42+ min ago (922+ words) NASA's Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory has spent three decades quietly identifying the competency that best predicts whether long-duration crews hold together. It isn't piloting or engineering — it's the small daily habits of tidiness, attention, and remembering that a crewmate's…...
In early 1962, weeks before John Glenn's orbital flight, a NASA mathematician named Katherine Johnson was asked to recompute by hand what the new IBM 7090 had already calculated, because Glenn had told mission planners he would not fly unless she p
7+ hour, 12+ min ago (286+ words) Before John Glenn flew Friendship 7 into orbit in February 1962, he refused to trust the new IBM 7090's trajectory calculations until Katherine Johnson had verified them by hand. She worked the equations for a day and a half. The numbers matched....
Voyager 1 is still crossing interstellar space with six computers holding about 68 kilobytes of memory between them — less storage than a single compressed photograph on a modern phone
14+ hour, 27+ min ago (945+ words) Yet with less computing power than a 1980s video game, Voyager 1 continues sending back revolutionary discoveries from the edge of the solar system. Published July 19, 2026 The comparison is accurate only after one important qualification. Those 68 kilobytes are not a shared storage…...
During Apollo 11’s final descent, the guidance computer flashed 1201 and 1202 alarms as it ran out of processing capacity — then repeatedly rebooted, discarded low-priority work and kept steering the lunar module towards the surface
14+ hour, 28+ min ago (939+ words) A computer built to handle one task nearly derailed the moon landing when it tried to do too many things at once—and saved itself by knowing what to forget....
A full-time airline crew member flying heavy North Atlantic routes can absorb between 2,000 and 5,000 microsieverts of cosmic radiation a year, picking up four to six microsieverts every single hour aloft
9+ hour, 13+ min ago (421+ words) A Boeing 777 pilot flying North Atlantic routes at 38,000 feet absorbs cosmic radiation at four to six microsieverts per hour — up to 5,000 microsieverts a year, more than the average U.S. nuclear plant worker. In 2025 the National Academies urged the FAA to…...