When Billions Met a Ballpoint A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic, jointly fetching $857,600 at a recent Sotheby’s auction, offer a blunt lesson in technological hubris. This isn’t Read More
The Price of Persistence in State Space Anil Menon’s eventual ascent to astronaut status, after a grueling nine-year odyssey marked by four rejections, is heralded as a triumph of individual resilience. It is. But Read More
SpaceX’s Intertwined Futures Take Flight Twenty Starlink V3 satellites are packed into the belly of Starship, awaiting deployment on its 13th test flight later this week. For most, the news frames this as yet Read More
Beyond the Catch: Strategic Location and Undisclosed Payloads The specific detail of a rocket booster being recovered in the South China Sea, rather than an inland test range or a less contested international water, casts Read More
The Architecture of Exclusion: Merit Versus Access The death of Wally Funk at 87, the last of the Mercury 13, isn’t just a eulogy for a remarkable woman; it’s a stark reminder that even in Read More
The Billionaire’s Budget Limit A $10 billion capital raise for Blue Origin, valuing Jeff Bezos’s space venture at an eye-watering $130 billion, might sound like another stratospheric win for the new space industry. But look Read More
Beyond the Spectacular Launch: A New Space Paradigm A nearly half-ton satellite, launched on Independence Day weekend, is now racing to meet a two-decade-old NASA observatory, not just to save it, but to redefine how Read More
The Quiet Commercial Exit of a Workhorse Last week’s final United Launch Alliance Atlas V mission for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation marked a definitive end, not just a transition, for a rocket that once Read More
The Persistent Tactic of Symbolically Sanctioning Tech The 1985 space shuttle mission, which carried two 15-inch copper replicas of the Statue of Liberty into orbit, was far more than a quirky historical footnote. This seemingly benign Read More
The Shifting Calculus of Space Operations A routine reboost of NASA’s aging Swift astronomy satellite, performed last week by Katalyst Space Technologies, might seem like a mere footnote in the annals of space activity. Read More