With a record 11,000 attendees and over 2,000 presentations, there were too many ideas, exhibition stands, papers and talks for anyone to cover comprehensively. The sense of ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out) was inescapable as attendees, lowly humans that we are, lack the...
On 12 September I was asked to do an interview with Al Jazeera English covering the Polaris Dawn spacewalk. What was meant to be a 5-minute overview of what the mission meant to the commercialisation of space ended up being a 45-minute, live play-by-play of the...
My dad was a firefighter, just not the kind that puts out flames in buildings. Instead, he fought fires in forests, from the air. He ‘bombed’ fires with water and retardant, to save communities and wildlife. His crew used radar to track where lightning was striking,...
NASA has cancelled its VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) project 14 months before the golf-cart sized rover, which has already been completed, was set to launch. The news, announced in a teleconference on 17 July, sent shockwaves around the space...
When H G Wells imagined a species of space creatures called Selenites living under the lunar surface in his sci-fi novel The First Men in The Moon, it was still unknown if such spaces even existed. While lunar sink holes and pits have long been accepted as part of the...
The dust had barely settled from the fireworks and celebrations of the new year, before launch vehicles were being launched again. Keep up with the latest launches in January on this page, as we will regularly update our tracker: 1 January 2024...