Space & Aerospace

The $17.5B Golden Dome budget bypasses the Senate filibuster entirely. That is not a bigger number — it is a structural change in how the US funds weapons.

Christina Koch is the first woman in cislunar space. Victor Glover is the first Black astronaut there. Most coverage buried that fact. Here is why it belongs in paragraph one.

Undergrads on a spring break observing trip found one of the oldest stars in the universe on their first night at the telescope — spending three hours on it instead of the planned 10 minutes.

OMB wants the same NASA budget Congress rejected nine weeks ago. This time, NASA science gets gutted 47 percent to fund a $20B lunar base plan that needs hardware that hasnt flown yet.

The satellites can broadcast the military-grade GPS signal. The ground system that controls them still does not work after 16 years and $8 billion. The Pentagon just handed Raytheon $45M more to keep trying.

NASA chose a software workaround for a hardware problem that killed three separation bolts on the previous flight. Four astronauts flew anyway.

JWST and ALMA are the two best observatories in existence. They looked at the same star-forming cloud and found almost entirely different stars — only 24 sources in common out of roughly 240 total. The 10 percent overlap is itself a finding.

Scientists spotted this X-ray glow in 1996. It took 30 years and a novel lobster-eye telescope to build the spacecraft that could finally capture it.

Fusion researchers spent decades unable to match tokamak experiments with their simulations. The fix was not exotic physics. It was a number they hadnt been putting in their models — the plasma rotation speed.

Orbital data centers need to reject heat through radiation alone, with no atmosphere to help. The math says a gigawatt of space compute costs 3x more than on Earth. Until someone solves the thermal problem, that gap wont close.

Wildfire prediction depends on knowing how dry a leaf is. UT Austin stuck graphene on one. It runs on the same power budget as some biological neural signaling.