Gennady Padalka has returned to Earth from the International Space Station. He has broken the record for time in space and will be the first person on Earth to have eaten salad grown in space.
The turbocharged capitalism of private space flight is strangely at odds with the brotherly, generous global consensus that built the legal framework for extra-terrestrial travel.
Some climatologists argue it may be too late to reverse climate change, and it’s just a matter of time before the Earth becomes uninhabitable – if hundreds of years from now. The recent movie Interstellar…
Generations of mariners have spent time anxiously watching the weather, waiting for the right conditions. It seems that despite all the high-tech advances we’ve made, spacecraft are still subject to the…
Last week was a particularly grim one for private space flights. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert, about 150km north of Los Angeles, killing a pilot, Michael Alsbury, and seriously…
This week, I can predict with a high degree of accuracy that more than 50,000 car accidents will occur in the US, over 500 of which will involve fatalities. Last week was no different. Is social media…
Success never comes without sacrifice. And frontiers are never crossed without some type of loss. We are seeing with brutal clarity that the frontier of successful space travel is one which has not yet…
Who will preserve the first lunar landing site at Tranquility Base for future generations? It seems an odd question given the fact that this extraordinary archaeological site was created on July 21, 1969…
It is three years since the final flight of the US space shuttle programme, during which time NASA has had to rely on the Russians, its allies, in space at least, to ferry astronauts and supplies between…
Jill Stuart, London School of Economics and Political Science
The United Arab Emirates has announced plans to launch a mission to Mars by 2021. A first for the Arab world, the mission and accompanying Space Agency are a big deal for the UAE – scientifically and politically…
A famous picture in the English edition of Newton’s “Principia” shows cannon balls being fired from the top of a mountain. If they go fast enough, their trajectory curves downward no more steeply than…