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Spaceflight Technology
Human beings have now traveled farther from Earth than ever before with Artemis II's flyby of the lunar far side. Here's how it happened.
No human has ever left the Solar System, and only six already-launched spacecraft will ever exit it. Will Voyager 1 remain the most distant?
There are plenty of engineering obstacles, and those can be overcome. But you cannot change the laws of physics, and those matter too.
The Parker Solar Probe is about to undergo its seventh encounter with Venus on its journey toward the Sun. Here's how fast it'll go.
Comparing Elon Musk's Mars rocket to NASA's new ride.
For thousands of years, we puzzled at how far away the Moon was. Today we know its distance, at any time, to within millimeters.
You can't throw a DART at everything in space.
Experts believe they could cut the time it takes a rocket to reach Mars by up to 25%, shaving about two months off the trip.
Nearly 200 orbital launches are scheduled for 2022.
Space planes could radically lower the cost of spaceflight.
Besides offering an incredibly cool way to get stuff into space, SpinLaunch promises to reduce the cost of a launch by 20-fold.
The massive craft could carry 100 humans to Mars and revolutionize space exploration.
On December 19 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the Apollo 17 lunar mission. They were the last people to travel […]
One day, we could fly across the U.S. in half an hour. A state-of-the-art hypersonic flight testing facility at UTSA could help make that dream a reality.
SpinLaunch's launcher, which is larger than the Statue of Liberty and works like the Olympic hammer-throw event, just came online in the New Mexico desert.
There are a few possible solutions to the problem of interstellar travel, but they largely remain within the realm of science fiction.
Theoretically, we know what happened on the red planet. Here’s how we’ll find out whether we’re right. When it comes to the worlds beyond Earth in our Solar System, it’s only […]
We give it the flight plan, and it takes care of the rest. It has to. Here’s why. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, there are certain limits that can […]
Our views from the red planet’s surface are more spectacular than ever. Ever since the earliest spaceflight, humanity has reached for Mars. This photo composite shows Meande Ring, a river on […]
A single lifetime is more than enough to take you to the limits of the Universe. Right now, there are only three things limiting how far our spacecrafts can take […]
As long as it remains operational, we’ll have a chance to conduct groundbreaking science with it. In the history of spaceflight, only five spacecraft ever launched by humanity possess enough energy […]
It doesn’t have to be a science-fiction dream. For as long as human beings have been watching the night sky, we’ve dreamed of visiting other worlds and truly seeing what’s […]
Two of our biggest science-fiction dreams might not remain fiction for much longer. Here’s how 21st-century science could make it real. For as long as human beings have looked up at […]
It would be the ultimate method for solving our pollution or hazardous/radioactive waste problems, but we’ll never do it. Here’s why. Imagine our planet as it was for the first 4.55 […]
Even with the best preparation imaginable, sometimes you have to get lucky, too. Even from our perspective in 2019, 50 years later, humanity’s achievements from July, 1969, still mark the pinnacle […]
Here are four separate ways you can prove it, even 50 years after-the-fact. 50 years ago, on July 20, 1969, humanity took our first footsteps on the surface of another […]
Our planet is rare, precious, and fragile. It’s up to all of us to be its steward. With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever. The very […]
If you want to go where no one has gone before, you have to make the investment. Here’s what last week’s launch means. If you want to send humans to Mars, […]
Aiming for the nearest star would necessitate a whole slew of advances. Even if the mission fails, humanity wins by investing in itself. There have been some magnificent moments in NASA […]
From the most beautiful to the most impactful, some of these are so powerful it’s breathtaking. “Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact […]