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“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…

In 1839, Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon.

The details of this image have been lost to the mists of time. A fire destroyed the laboratory and much of the work of Daguerre just weeks after it was made. The photograph of the Moon was one of…

Where did the comet 3I/Atlas come from?

It was not born in our solar system. Instead, the comet came from the stars: it is passing through our system of planets at high speed, moving so fast that although the Sun…

The way NASA tells it, Space Reactor Freedom sounds simple.

This reactor, of course, is a nuclear one. NASA has apparently obtained one,…

After travelling further into space than any human before them, the crew of Artemis II returned safely to Earth on April 10th.

Their voyage lasted ten days, and covered a distance of almost seven hundred thousand miles.…

In March, a chunk of rock and metal appeared over Lake Erie, flew at supersonic speed over northern Ohio, and then blew up in a deafening explosion. Over the next week, at least four other fireballs appeared over North America:…

For the first time in half a century, humans have flown over the surface of the Moon.

The moment of closest approach came on Monday evening. After flying for six days, the Orion…

In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut off the supply of cotton to the textile mills of New England. The solution, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot thought, might be found in moths. With the right kind he could produce silk, and with this he could alleviate the shortage.

Unfortunately, the American…