Reason

WE WERE SUPPOSED to go back to the moon last week. We were also supposed to go back five weeks before that in mid-September, and six months before that. We were maybe supposed to go back to the moon during the George W. Bush administration. And we we

FOLLOWING 11 YEARS in which the space agency has had no launch capability of its own, NASA will soon attempt to fly its huge Space Launch System (SLS) booster for the first time. A few minutes after liftoff, the Orion spacecraft will separate from th

THE ROSENBERG SPACE Habitat, or Rosie, is a 3D-printed, two-person pressurized living space designed to fit inside a SpaceX Starship for quick construction on the moon’s surface. Designed by space architecture firm SAGA, the 23-foot-tall polymer stru

AFTER THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions that followed, Dmitry Rogozin, former head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, signaled a looming end to the U.S.-Russia space partnership. “If you block cooperation with us,” he twee

ON FEBRUARY 6, 2018, I was sitting in the American Airlines Admirals Club at the Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, getting a snack prior to boarding a flight. CNN was playing on the club’s large TV screens. When I looked up, I happened to see b

IS SPACE MORE awesome than ever, now that we’ve walked on the moon and beheld the stunning photos transmitted by the James Webb telescope? Or is the night sky, thanks to modernity, more meh? In particular, do kids find the universe more meh than the

Getting off-planet is finally getting cheap. For decades, the only way to reach low Earth orbit (LEO) was on a wildly expensive, overbooked, and unreliable government rocket. But since independent companies have moved into the sector, improvements in

STATISTICALLY, AMERICANS LOVE space. Anecdotally, they hate it when billionaires go there. Majorities of all parties, genders, and geographies tell pollsters they support U.S. missions to the moon and Mars, and three-quarters say that the effort to l

SEVERAL INFLUENTIAL PHILOSOPHERS and environmentalist thinkers argue that terraforming Mars and other planets, making them suitable for humans and other Earth life, would be immoral. As we near a day when terraforming is actually possible, the argume

LET’S SAY YOU’RE interested in UFOs. It’s a fun hobby, but you’d like to monetize your efforts. What do you do? Historically, your avenues were limited. There was entertainment—science fiction movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or

IN 2010, PORTLAND State University anthropologist Cameron Smith taught himself how to sew. He was not developing his own line of socks or winter hats. He was making a spacesuit. Smith’s creation, made from a few thousands dollars’ worth of common ite

DISPLAYED NEAR A triceratops skull in a small gallery in Cambridge, England, you can find a bit of moon rock on sale for just under $40,000—or you could have found it for sale, if only you’d arrived sooner. A red “sold” sticker is attached to the lab

IN TRUTH, DIPPIN’ Dots are neither space-age (they were invented in 1988) nor space-safe (see page 76 for the skinny on what kind of ice cream astronauts actually eat). But many Americans nonetheless associate the “ice cream of the future” with Apoll

AFTER SPACEX FOUNDER Elon Musk smoked a blunt on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was happy to cut him some slack. “Let the man get high if he wants to get high,” Tyson told TMZ. “He’s the best thing we’ve had since Tho

ASTRONAUT ALAN SHEPARD was the first space athlete. On the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, at the end of a 4.5-hour moonwalk, Shepard took a lunar sampling device modified with a six-iron club head and hit two golf balls. According to a 2021 photo analysi

IN JULY, NASA released the first trove of deep space images from the James Webb Space Telescope, including this infrared photo from the Southern Ring planetary nebula featuring a dying star and a young star orbiting each other within a plume of burni

THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS Commission (FCC) has transformed significantly since its birth, taking on new powers and responsibilities as technology evolves. But one thing long remained the same: the agency’s New Deal–era official seal, virtually uncha

State operators are government entities that operate satellite networks for everything from weather to navigation to military uses. The federal Landsat program is a series of observational satellites. The program produces a massive amount of mappable

IF YOU HAVE spent any time reading or watching science fiction, you have almost certainly encountered stories in which humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and is capable of traveling relatively easily between star systems. These stories tend to

FOR THE FIRST time ever, more people will go to space as commercial astronauts than as government astronauts in 2022. Admittedly, the government astronauts spent more total time off-world this year than their private counterparts—stints on the Intern

THE LAST SUCCESSFUL cavalry charge in military history took place in Poland on March 1, 1945—more than a decade before the first man-made object would exit Earth’s atmosphere. So it might come as a surprise to learn that the U.S. Space Force—the sixt

IF THE VAST potential of outer space excites you but the cost of exploring it does not, The End of Astronauts is for you. The book imagines a future where frugal humans can have their cosmic cake and eat it too—as long as they don’t mind robot bakers

“WHEN WE LOOK to the future, there is a vast territory that civilization might expand into: space,” the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill observes in What We Owe The Future. “There are tens of billions of other stars across our galaxy, and billion

During the climax of Revenge of the Sith, the third Star Wars prequel film, an angst-ridden Anakin Skywalker snarls at his former master, Obi-Wan Kenobi: “You underestimate my power!” (Obi-Wan proceeds to sever three of Anakin’s limbs, burn off all h

As the last solar robot on Earth, WALL-E spends his days compacting skyscrapers of trash in an abandoned city with no sign of life, until one day when he finds a small plant. Centuries before WALL-E’s discovery, the Buy n Large corporation packed up

In episode 15 of The Simpsons’ fifth season, “Deep Space Homer,” NASA decides to send an average Joe to space in order to boost its rocket launch ratings. The agency picks goofy family patriarch Homer Simpson. Predictably, Homer’s indomitable appetit

IN BESTSELLING NOVELIST Andy Weir’s vision, space is always trying to kill you and has probably already killed some of your friends. But the heroes of The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary somehow manage to use their astonishingly but not quite

In 1998, NASA spent $125 million on the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was supposed to report back weather and temperature conditions on Mars and search for possible water. The team that calculated the probe’s navigation used metric measurements, while