Science

SpaceX’s Starship showed stamina on Thursday, flying longer than ever before during its blistering return to Earth and even performed a key flip and landing burn before hitting water.  No injuries or property damages from falling debris were immediately known after the test. Starship, a 400-foot-tall, super-heavy-lift rocket and spaceship, blasted off at 7:50 a.m....

They’re not after you. And they don’t “parachute” from the sky. Periodically, people and headlines on the internet have expressed concern about the spread of the invasive Joro spider, a big, striking arachnid that almost certainly hitched a ride to the U.S. aboard a shipping container, as many invasive species do. Since 2013, the palm-sized...

U.S. astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams left Earth on Wednesday in a new Boeing spaceship, after a string of delays and engineering problems that spanned a decade.  Following two scuttled launch attempts over the past month, the third try appeared to be the charm with a seamless countdown. Starliner‘s first crewed test...

The 21st-century space race is heating up. China announced that, for the second time, it landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon. The nation’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe touched down in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the largest impact basin on the moon, on June 2. The China National Space Administration previously landed...

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has cancelled his planned flight to the moon aboard SpaceX‘s Starship. It’s an understandable decision considering that Starship has yet to have a completely successful test flight. The dearMoon project announced the cancellation of the civilian moon mission on Friday. In a statement on their website, dearMoon cited SpaceX’s failure to...

Boeing’s Starliner spaceship did not launch as planned on Saturday, its second scuttled attempt to blast off with test pilots in the past month. NASA Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams deboarded the craft, following a problem that surfaced with less than four minutes remaining on the countdown clock. Starliner’s first crewed test...

The inventory of meteorites from Mars is astoundingly small: Less than 400 of the known space rocks identified here hail from the Red Planet.  Even smaller is the number of nakhlites and chassignites, two of the three main types of Martian meteorites, of which there are only 35 samples in the world put together, according...

It’s coming back. In mid-May, the brilliant Northern Lights, or aurora, were visible in places that rarely see them, due to powerful ejections from the sun colliding with Earth. These bursts of energy, such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections, are normal, especially as our medium-sized star has entered the peak of its activity...

The most powerful space telescope ever built has peered into the dawn of time. You read that right. The James Webb Space Telescope — with a giant mirror that catches extremely faint light, along with its ability to view a type of light (infrared) that can pass through huge clouds of cosmic gas — has...

Maxime Girardin descends from a long line of winemakers in France’s Burgundy region dating back at least 200 years.  So it caught his family off guard when he decided in 2021, then only 24, to break from tradition and try his hand at spirits instead. Even more unthinkable was what he wanted to do with...