Latest issue
Dragonfly's First Flight Happened on a Testbed — Its Rotor Blades Still Have to Prove Themselves on Titan
10/28/2026
The headline event isn't a liftoff. It's a simulation that ran on a rack of flight-like avionics in Laurel, Maryland, where engineers watched a virtual Dragonfly separate from its backshell, scan Titan's dunes for a safe spot, circle back, and touch down — all without a human in…
Recent posts
Here's a number that should bother anyone who thinks about sunk costs: NASA put $3.1 billion into developing and certifying Crew Dragon. SpaceX was contractually obligated to fly s…
A spacecraft the size of a small van, built to reach an asteroid 173 miles wide, and NASA didn't put a single conventional rocket engine at its core. Psyche runs on solar electric…
Watch the replay from Flight 14 and the moment that sticks isn't the ascent. It's the ending: Starship splashes down north of Hawaii, tips over, and erupts in flames — a dramatic c…
Nine millimeters of aluminum-zinc alloy doesn't sound like much. But that's the thickness of the walls protecting Europa Clipper's most critical electronics from one of the most ra…
The descent engine throttling challenge for NASA's Artemis lunar lander is genuinely fascinating engineering — a tight negotiation between fuel efficiency and landing precision tha…
The number that matters most from Artemis II's return isn't the splashdown time or the crew's heart rates. It's the difference between 100 and 9. After Artemis I's December 2022 re…
On July 23, 2026, Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager captured something engineers had been watching for years: fresh cracks in the outer material of one of the rover's wheels, worn…
The engineers who designed Webb's primary mirror set their performance targets conservatively. They had to. You don't get a second chance to adjust a mirror sitting at the L2 Lagra…
The assigned topic asks about Orion's heat shield ablation material selection — the trade-off between reentry temperatures and mission cost. That's a real engineering story. But th…
The original twelve holes in each of Curiosity's wheels were deliberate. Drilled at the factory, spaced precisely, they were odometry markers — a way to count rotations and track d…
The number that keeps engineers up at night isn't the 344 single-point failures Webb carried into space — though that's alarming enough. It's the temperature differential the sunsh…
The hardest moment in a lunar landing has nothing to do with the final touchdown. It happens roughly 10 kilometers up, when the lander transitions from a high-energy descent burn t…
The capsule hit the atmosphere at 24,581 miles per hour — roughly 24 times the speed of a bullet. The heat shield surface climbed to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly half t…
Sixteen miles in 37 hours. That's what ERNEST, NASA's new rover prototype, just completed in the California desert — more than ten times the speed at which Perseverance can navigat…
The rocket made the decision before any engineer did. Webb's primary mirror spans 6.5 metres across — a gold-coated beryllium structure that needed to be the largest mirror ever de…
There's a specific kind of engineering courage required to put one engine between your crew and a fatal outcome. No backup. No second chance. One combustion chamber, one turbopump,…
The hardest part of returning from the Moon isn't the heat. It's that the thing protecting you from the heat also has to hold the spacecraft together while it's being heated. That…
The intuitive answer is wrong. When people ask why Mars rovers use wheels instead of legs, the usual response is something like "wheels are simpler" or "legs break more easily." Bo…
There's a number that stops engineers cold when they first encounter it: one kilowatt. That's roughly what the James Webb Space Telescope uses to run everything — four science inst…
