Please Remain Seated During the Future
From Knight Rider dreams to Tesla’s airborne Roadster: a cheerful defence of engineering excess, childhood wonder, and letting Musk’s critics enjoy the ride.
Excuse Me, Is This Orbit Taken?
Space has a personal-space problem. Unfortunately, nobody agreed on the size of the bubble.
Latest
View all
Before We Answer the Aliens, Check the Receiver
The search for alien signals is a cosmic detective story: separating distant whispers from natural noise, wandering satellites and our own noisy electronics.
A Place to Write
Handwritten notes aboard Apollo 11 reveal the human side of spaceflight: practical reminders, daily routines, and affection for the machines that carried the crew.
Houston, We Have a Login Prompt
Satellites may orbit Earth, but their security problems remain familiar. Starlink shows why even the final frontier needs patches, sceptics, and a good sysadmin.
The Cloud Has a Heat Problem. Even in Space.
Google’s Suncatcher puts AI chips in orbit, where abundant sunshine meets awkward cooling, costly maintenance and lessons from Microsoft’s underwater servers.
Three Rockets. One Thursday.
Three rockets, one Thursday: SpaceX makes the extraordinary routine, while its achievements test the media’s ability to applaud an inconvenient billionaire.