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Category: space travel

SpaceX is skipping the booster catch on Starship V3’s debut flight — and the reason quietly reveals which milestone Musk actually cares about hitting before Artemis

SpaceX will not attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster on Starship V3’s debut flight. The booster will steer itself to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the launch tower’s mechanical arms — the maneuver that became the defining image of the program on multiple V2 flights. For a company that has made spectacle a core part of its engineering culture, skipping the catch is a tell. It signals what Elon Musk and his engineers actually care about getting right on this flight, and it isn’t the part that makes for a good replay.

Finding Stardust in the Ice

For the past tens of thousands of years, our Solar System has been traversing the local interstellar cloud (LIC), one of the 15 clouds of gas and dust that occupy the Sun’s neighborhood. Dust that might have come from the LIC has been found on Earth’s surface, its interstellar origins earmarked by an iron isotope produced in supernovae (see Synopsis: Seeking Stardust in the Snow). Now more traces of iron-60 (60 Fe) have turned up, this time buried in ancient Antarctic ice [1]. Dominik Koll of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany led the team that purified and analyzed the ice. He and his colleagues inferred that the LIC is the likeliest source of the 60 Fe and that the LIC is the result of past supernova activity.

Gas and dust trapped in the layers of Earth’s ice sheets provide a record of past environments. Koll and colleagues took 300 kg of an Antarctic ice core, representing the period 40–80 thousand years ago. They melted the ice, extracted the radionuclides, and used mass spectrometers to identify 60 Fe along with manganese-53. The latter is produced with 60 Fe when cosmic rays strike interplanetary dust. Because the researchers found more 60 Fe than expected from this “local” source, they concluded that the surplus came from beyond the Solar System.

Combining measurements from contemporary Antarctic snow and recent deep-sea sediments, Koll’s team reconstructed the influx of 60 Fe to Earth over the past 80 thousand years. The measured profile showed a very low 60 Fe influx around the time the Solar System entered the LIC, a peak while traversing the cloud, and a gradual decline as it nears the exit. The most direct explanation for the pattern is that the LIC is part of a single supernova remnant, but other explanations are in play.

A twinkling pulsar reveals invisible structures in space

The twinkling stars in the night sky are not just beautiful to look at. Their flickering reveals something about the varying temperatures and densities in the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, which refract the light as it travels toward us. Certain stellar remnants that emit radio waves can exhibit a very similar effect.

Although their radio waves—which have longer wavelengths than visible light—can penetrate Earth’s atmosphere almost undisturbed, they are scattered by the thin gas between the stars. Their twinkling—known as scintillation—thus provides unique insights into interstellar space.

An international team led by Tim Sprenger from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) has measured the flickering radio radiation from an object using an innovative observation technique. The results are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Russia is building engines for interstellar travel while nearly two-thirds of rural households still have no indoor plumbing — and that gap says something important about how space programs actually get funded

In February 2026, Rosatom announced a prototype plasma rocket engine that its scientists claim could reduce the travel time to Mars from eight months to thirty days. The engine, built at a dedicated facility in Troitsk and tested inside a fourteen-metre vacuum chamber designed to simulate deep space, uses electromagnetic fields to ionise hydrogen into […].

Every Theory About Why We Haven’t Found Aliens Yet Explained

Why haven’t we found aliens yet? From the Fermi Paradox to the Great Filter, the Dark Forest theory, rare Earth, simulation theory, and more — here’s every major explanation for why the universe seems so silent.

00:00 The Fermi Paradox.
00:54 The Great Filter.
01:45 The Rare Earth Hypothesis.
02:40 The Dark Forest Theory.
03:36 The Zoo Hypothesis.
04:34 The Self-Destruction Filter.
05:35 The Simulation Hypothesis.
06:33 The Communication Gap.
07:35 The Interstellar Distance Problem.
08:35 The Short Window Problem.
09:32 The Planetarium Hypothesis.
10:30 The Transcension Hypothesis

NASA Welcomes Paraguay as 67th Artemis Accords Signatory

The Republic of Paraguay signed the Artemis Accords on Thursday during a ceremony in Asunción, becoming the latest nation to commit to the shared principles guiding civil space exploration.

“Today, I am proud to welcome Paraguay as the 67th signatory to the Artemis Accords,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “They join an ever-growing coalition of like-minded nations committed to the peaceful, transparent, and responsible exploration of space. Established by President Trump in his first term, the Artemis Accords provided the principles for how we explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Now, with his national space policy, we are putting the Artemis Accords into practice with our Moon Base. We are creating opportunities for all Artemis Accords signatories, including Paraguay, to join us on the lunar surface and advance our shared objectives in this next era of exploration.”

U.S. Embassy Asunción Chargé d’Affaires ad interim Aaron Pratt shared Isaacman’s remarks during the ceremony. Minister President of the Paraguayan Space Agency Osvaldo Almirón Riveros signed on behalf of Paraguay.

The 20 Different Types of Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Travel In Fiction

What if humanity could travel faster than light?

In this cinematic deep dive, we explore the different types of FTL (Faster-Than-Light) travel, including warp drives, wormholes, the Alcubierre drive, hyperdrive concepts, and other theoretical methods that could one day change space exploration forever.

From bending spacetime to creating warp bubbles and bridging distant galaxies, this video breaks down the science, theory, and science-fiction inspirations behind each method — in a realistic and visually immersive way.

Whether you’re a fan of space science, futuristic technology, or sci-fi universes, this is your ultimate guide to FTL travel.

🚀 Which method do you think is the most realistic?
Comment below!

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