
Latest issue
Early Galaxies Were Already Grown Up — and That's a Problem for Our Models
7/20/2026
The standard story of cosmic evolution goes something like this: the universe began in chaos, and order emerged slowly. Early galaxies were supposed to be messy, turbulent, still-assembling systems — raw material waiting to be shaped by billions of years of mergers, star formatio…
Recent posts
The headline version of Artemis 3 sounds almost normal now: NASA has a crew, a rocket, and a lander contractor. What the headline skips is that the lander itself exists in at least…
The booster failure on Starship's twelfth flight got most of the headlines. Eight Raptor 3 engines failing during the boostback burn, Booster 19 hitting the Gulf of Mexico at 1,450…
Three months ago, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at a podium and effectively canceled the Lunar Gateway. The "Ignition" event in March reoriented NASA's human spaceflight…
The molecule at the center of the most exciting exoplanet story of the past two years is called dimethyl sulfide. On Earth, it is produced almost exclusively by marine phytoplankto…
Six weeks ago, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during a routine engine test at Cape Canaveral, destroying the vehicle and damaging the company's only launchpad. NASA respon…
SpaceX engineers deliberately broke their own heat shield on Flight 12. They removed a single tile before launch to see what would happen to the tiles around it when superheated pl…
Three years ago, NASA's Human Landing System looked like a model for how to run a commercial space program. Fixed-price contracts, milestone-based payments, two competing providers…
The James Webb Space Telescope has done something genuinely strange this week: it produced a weather forecast for a planet 690 light-years away. Cloudy mornings, clear evenings, wi…
Three months ago, NASA announced it was pulling Artemis 3 back from the Moon. No lunar landing on that mission — instead, a rendezvous test in low Earth orbit, modeled loosely on A…
The ISS has been continuously inhabited for over 25 years. When it comes down — currently planned for 2030 — NASA intends to spend roughly $1.5 billion to deorbit 420 metric tons o…
More than 4,200 spacecraft reached Earth orbit in 2025 alone, launched across 315 missions worldwide. That's not a trend — it's a structural change in how crowded low Earth orbit h…
The Artemis II crew returned from their lunar flyby earlier this month to a hero's welcome. What got less attention: the geopolitical architecture around that mission is more conte…
Every few months, a new JWST result arrives with the same implicit promise: we're getting closer to understanding how planets form and whether any of them might host life. The hone…
The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered some of the most detailed exoplanet atmospheric spectra ever collected. It has also, quietly, revealed a problem that the field is only…
There are roughly 25,000 asteroids near Earth large enough to level a city. Scientists have found fewer than half of them. That gap — between what's out there and what we've catalo…
The standard pitch for reusable rockets goes like this: fly the booster back, refurbish it, fly it again, and the cost per launch collapses. It's a compelling story. It's also only…
There's a useful way to think about what's happening in Earth observation right now: the old model was a telescope pointed at the ground, operated by a government, revisiting any g…
The International Space Station has roughly four years left. That's not a rumor or a pessimistic reading — NASA has committed to deorbiting it by 2030, and the agency is now active…
The International Space Station has been continuously occupied since November 2000. That unbroken human presence in low Earth orbit — now stretching across a quarter century — is e…

















