TOPIC SPACE
Space explainers
THE SHORT ANSWER
What it takes to reach orbit and to operate far from home: cheaper launch, rockets that land themselves, small satellites, and computers that are decades old on purpose. The discoveries are engineering lessons from missions that failed, were rescued, or simply kept going.
Guides
Why Mars Sample Return Stalled and Then Ended
Why NASA's plan to bring Mars rocks to Earth stalled and ended: the 2023 review, the 2040 redesign, the January 2026 budget and what stays on Mars.
SPACE / EXPLAINERHow Rockets Land Themselves
A returning rocket must stop at exactly zero altitude with no second try. How SpaceX's own engineer says it works, and the Mars-landing maths behind it.
SPACE / EXPLAINERWhy CubeSats Changed Access to Space
A standard 10 cm unit made small satellites cheap to build and launch. Where the idea came from, how NASA flies them and what still takes months.
SPACE / EXPLAINERWhy Space Launch Got So Much Cheaper
Reusable boosters cut the cost per kilogram to orbit about twentyfold. What the numbers really show, what stayed expensive and where Starship stands.
Discoveries and curiosities
The Voyager Golden Record
What is on the disc launched into interstellar space in 1977, how an alien is meant to play it, how long it may last and the arguments around it.
SPACE / DISCOVERYMars Climate Orbiter: Pounds and Newtons
One unit mix-up put a Mars orbiter about 170 km too low. What the NASA board found about the people and process failures behind it.
SPACE / DISCOVERYAriane 5 Flight 501: Thirty-Seven Seconds
How reused software and one unprotected number destroyed a new rocket in 1996, and what the official inquiry recommended.
SPACE / DISCOVERYThe Apollo Guidance Computer
36,864 words of memory woven by hand, and a landing that survived five program alarms because the software knew what to drop.
SPACE / DISCOVERYHow Voyager 1 Was Repaired from Space
A memory chip died in a 46-year-old computer, 24 billion kilometres away. How engineers found the fault, cut the code into pieces and fixed it.
SPACE / DISCOVERYWhy Space Computers Are So Old
Radiation flips bits in orbit and wears chips out. Two ways to cope: expensive hardened processors, or fast ones with redundancy and error correction.