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Space Travel Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Space Travel Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space Travel Editorial Team produces Space Travel's coverage of human spaceflight and access to space. We report on launch, crewed missions and space tourism, and the propulsion, vehicles and human factors of getting people to space. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space Travel takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Physics News

The two neutron stars whose collision was detected on 17 August 2017 had been spiralling toward each other in a galaxy 130 million light-years away, and the aftermath of their smashup was observed by about 70 observatories on Earth and in orbit

On 17 August 2017, gravitational waves from two colliding neutron stars 130 million light-years away reached Earth — and roughly 70 observatories swung to watch. The event forged strontium, gold and platinum in real time, and rewrote how astronomy is done.

Sep 22, 2026
Space Travel

While hunting for the disputed planet Fomalhaut b, astronomers on Hubble noticed a second point of light appear out of nowhere near the same star, and Berkeley’s Paul Kalas says it looks like the debris of a violent collision unlike anything in our solar system today

While hunting for the disputed planet Fomalhaut b, Berkeley astronomer Paul Kalas and colleagues caught a second point of light appearing in Hubble images of the same star — the debris of a collision between two 60-kilometre bodies, and a live view of the violence that built the rocky planets.

Sep 21, 2026
Earth Observation

Why does a Central African rainforest nation get paid tens of millions of dollars to keep its trees standing while its own timber industry argues those same trees are worth more felled?

Gabon became the first African country paid to protect its rainforest — $17 million from Norway in 2021, against a $150 million commitment. The country's timber industry argues the same trees are worth more felled. Both claims survive because of a gap in how the world prices standing forest.

Sep 21, 2026
Flora And Fauna

The immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can respond to injury or starvation by reabsorbing its tentacles, sinking to the seafloor, and reverting its adult cells back into a juvenile polyp, essentially rewinding its own development instead of dying

Turritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish the size of a fingernail, escapes death by reabsorbing its tentacles, collapsing into a cyst on the seafloor, and reprogramming its adult cells back into a juvenile polyp — a process biologists call transdifferentiation.

Sep 21, 2026
Flora And Fauna

How does an East African pastoralist community keep grazing its cattle across the same rangelands where lion, elephant and giraffe populations have recovered over roughly two decades, even as fences and farms fragment the corridors around them?

In Kenya's Amboseli ecosystem, lion, elephant and giraffe numbers have climbed for two decades on land grazed by Maasai pastoralists — while Tanzania's elephant herd has fallen from 134,000 to 66,714 over the same period. The difference is land tenure, corridor connectivity, and where the tourism money lands.

Sep 15, 2026
Earth Observation

Between 2020 and 2024, a Chinese-led team used the submersible Fendouzhe to survey seven hadal regions in the Indo-Pacific and found rich protist-dominated communities living on rocks more than nine kilometres down, where hard-substrate life had been largely unknown

A Chinese-led team using the crewed submersible Fendouzhe has photographed tubeworm fields, giant clam beds and snowy microbial mats more than nine kilometres beneath the Pacific — chemosynthetic ecosystems on a scale nobody expected at hadal depths.

Sep 14, 2026
Space Travel

Saturn’s famous northern hexagon has stood in place for more than 40 years of observations, and now Hubble has caught a matching 10-sided wave beginning to form around the planet’s south pole as its seasons swing that hemisphere back into view

A team led by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega has confirmed a 10-sided atmospheric wave circling Saturn's south pole in Hubble images from 2023 to 2025, a possible counterpart to the northern hexagon that Voyager first glimpsed in 1980.

Sep 14, 2026
Deep Impact

A 710-metre asteroid in the main belt was found completing one rotation every 1.88 minutes—about 70 times faster than the limit beyond which a loosely bound rubble pile should begin breaking apart. Modelling suggests 2025 MN45 requires cohesion comparable to solid rock, perhaps because it is a compact fragment left by the destruction of a larger parent body.

Rubin Observatory measured a 710-metre main-belt asteroid turning once every 1.88 minutes, requiring rock-like cohesion under the study's model.

Sep 14, 2026
Space Travel

Venus’s 467°C surface can melt lead and has destroyed landers within minutes or hours, yet at roughly 50 kilometres altitude its thick atmosphere provides radiation shielding comparable to Earth’s. Curiosity measured about 0.67 millisieverts per day on the Martian surface, making a floating Venus habitat substantially safer from radiation—though certainly not from sulphuric acid, carbon dioxide or the challenges of remaining airborne.

At 50 kilometres above Venus, a thick atmospheric column may provide Earth-like cosmic-ray shielding, but that advantage is modelled and applies to radiation rather than overall safety.

Sep 14, 2026
Moon Daily

The flag Apollo 11 planted on the Moon cost just $5.50, and when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter examined the six landing sites in 2012, shadows indicated that five flag assemblies were still standing. Apollo 11’s had apparently been flattened by the lunar module’s ascent exhaust, while decades of unfiltered ultraviolet radiation may have bleached the surviving nylon flags white.

The inexpensive nylon flag needed a purpose-built lunar assembly, and orbital shadows reveal more about the surviving poles than they do about the condition or colour of the cloth.

Sep 13, 2026
Space Travel

The Voyager probes were built to last five years. Forty-nine years later, NASA engineers performed an all-at-once power-saving swap on Voyager 2—despite commands taking about 20 hours to reach it—to keep its final three science instruments operating for at least another year, a challenge far beyond anything envisioned in its original design.

A coordinated power and thermal reconfiguration has kept Voyager 2’s last three science instruments operating for at least another year.

Sep 13, 2026
Moon Daily

When Luna 9 made the first successful soft landing on the Moon on 3 February 1966, astronomers at Jodrell Bank recognised that its unencrypted picture signal resembled the Radiofax format used by newspapers. The Daily Express supplied a facsimile receiver, allowing the first photographs from the lunar surface to appear in Britain before Moscow officially released them.

Jodrell Bank turned Luna 9’s open picture signal into a printable image with a newspaper facsimile receiver before the Soviet official release.

Sep 13, 2026