Space Travel
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 14 articles · Back to full archive
Space Travel
In May 1952, Rosalind Franklin's graduate student Raymond Gosling exposed a single photographic plate to DNA fibres for 62 hours in a King's College basement, and the sharp black cross on Photo 51 showed the double helix before Watson and Crick had finished their cardboard model
Space Travel
Why did a crater lake smaller than one square mile suddenly release a suffocating cloud one night in 1986 that killed 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock within hours?
Space Travel
Astronauts returning from long stays on the International Space Station can come home up to 3 percent taller as their spines lengthen in microgravity, and the extra height disappears within a few months back on Earth
Space Travel
How does a moon in the outer solar system run an Earth-like weather cycle with rain, rivers, and seasonal lakes, using liquid methane instead of water at temperatures near minus 180 degrees Celsius?
Space Travel
In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from a summer holiday to find a stray mould had drifted onto a Staphylococcus plate in his cluttered London lab, and the clear ring of dead bacteria around it became the accidental beginning of the antibiotic era
Space Travel
What happened when a London doctor had the handle removed from one street pump in 1854, and how did the investigation reshape how cities track disease?
Space Travel
How did a captured wartime rocket, launched from a New Mexico desert in 1946, take the first photograph of Earth from space more than a decade before any satellite reached orbit?
Space Travel
In 1970, Soviet engineers landed a small eight-wheeled rover called Lunokhod 1 on the Moon and drove it by joystick from a bunker in Crimea, and its laser reflector sat lost on the lunar surface for nearly 40 years before a team at UC San Diego bounced a beam off it again in 2010
Space Travel
In 1957, Soviet engineers strapped a stray Moscow dog named Laika into Sputnik 2 knowing they had no way to bring her home, and telemetry later showed she died within hours of overheating, not the peaceful week the state broadcast claimed
Space Travel
Margaret Hamilton wrote the Apollo 11 guidance software by hand on paper and stacked the printout taller than she was, and when the 1202 alarms started firing 40,000 feet above the Moon, her priority-scheduling code decided which tasks to drop so Eagle could keep landing
Space Travel
What happened when engineers finally closed a small dam across a shrinking inland sea, and how did one half of it come back while the other half kept dying?
Space Travel
How does a coastal forest that grows in saltwater store three to five times more carbon per hectare than a tropical rainforest on solid ground?
Space Scopes