The new space race is in full swing. While the world's eyes are turned towards NASA and private ventures such as SpaceX, space fans would be wise to keep their eyes on China. On October 23 of last year, China launched the Shijian-21 satellite, which was designed...
We have previously reported on how two feature film projects are competing to become the first to be recorded in space. In the end, it wasn't Tom Cruise and the American film team who won the competition of becoming the first movie produced in space. Russian...
Whether in real life or Kerbal Space Program, the holy grail of spacecraft is the single stage to orbit vehicle, or SSTO for short. Such a vehicle would, for obvious reasons, be the pinnacle of reusability.SSTOs were widely pursued in the 1990s, for example, by NASA...
It's an exciting time to be a space fan. Space tourism is emerging; we're going back to the moon and visiting Mars not much later. Yet scientists are already considering issues associated with even longer voyages.As long, arduous, and dangerous voyages to...
A small step towards making space more accessible is the emergence of smaller satellites, called CubeSats. These can weigh in the span of 0.2kg to 40kg and be launched in bulk. For example, SpaceX recently launched more than 100 CubeSats with a single launch...
Those who object against ventures into space often argue that those investments do not benefit ordinary people. After all, results tend to be abstract, seemingly far away from our everyday lives. Yet, there are projects where the practical advantages are in focus.With...