Tag: space

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.

Meteorite hunters Mike Farmer and Robert Ward travel to Carancas, a tiny village at 12,000 feet in Peru’s remote altiplano, to examine a crater in the hope to claim precious rock from space.

For the men and women who use the Deep Space Network to talk to the heavens, failure is not an option.

A nation skilled in exploiting tax loopholes aims to be the first to make money from asteroid mining.

The nine flight-team engineers of the 1977 mission have been putting off retirement to see through one of NASA’s most successful spacecraft all the way to the end.

In Nautilus, Tim Folger writes about how scientist are still debating whether organic and inorganic materials found on Martian meteorite ALH84001 contain evidence that life existed on Mars before it existed on Earth. If it did, then life could have spread to Earth from meteorites, which could make human beings ─ and other Earthly life ─ […]

Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know […]

“As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes. So as a crew, how do you stay focused, and how do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it? “And the way we do it is to break down what are the risks. […]

“The Long Shot.” — Lee Billings, Seed Magazine

On the lives of Soviet cosmonauts—and circus performers: During the first ninety-six-day Salyut mission in 1978, cosmonaut Yury Romanenko was apparently so mesmerized by the vastness of the cosmos that he stepped out to have a better look and forgot to attach himself with safety tethers to the space station. Fortunately his cohort noticed and […]