BlogFlock

Until the moment Sputnik launched in 1957, the night sky remained a wilderness untouched by the hand of Man. People who looked up, and who did so far enough away from the glare of city…

Hello!

Thanks for reading The Quantum Cat, a newsletter covering space, physics, and the exploration of both. If you have been enjoying the newsletter, I wanted to share what paid subscribers have been reading and what comes next.

Until now, paid content has consisted of additional in-depth articles every month.…

Far out in space, far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, beyond even that of Sedna, lies a vast cloud of ice and dust.

This cloud…

Ours is not an empty world.

Artists sometimes speak of horror vacui, the idea that nature abhors a vacuum. Humans certainly do. Emptiness – the blank…

For a few hours, it seemed close to the nightmare scenario.

On June 5, mission control in Houston directed the astronauts on board the International Space Station to take emergency shelter. In a moment of high drama, five of them entered a docked Dragon capsule and…

“The next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the Moon”, NASA boss Jared Isaacman said on May 19, “they will be taikonauts”.

China has not yet announced any such mission,…

The stars are far, almost unimaginably so.

In 1970, as the crew of Apollo 13 fell back towards Earth, they briefly hit a speed of almost twenty-five thousand miles per hour. This is the fastest…

For most of its known history, nobody has cared much about 2002 XV93. It is a small world lying somewhere just beyond the orbit of Pluto, one presumably covered in a grey and gritty kind of ice, and…