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Space Travel
Human spaceflight, commercial missions, astronaut life, station operations, space medicine, and the technologies making travel beyond Earth more accessible.
Space Travel
Michael Collins spent roughly 21 hours alone in the Apollo 11 command module while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface, and for 48 minutes of each orbit he was on the far side of the Moon with no radio contact to Earth, further from another human than anyone before him
During the Apollo 11 mission, Michael Collins spent about 21 hours alone in lunar orbit aboard Columbia, losing radio contact with Earth for roughly 48 minutes of every orbit as he passed behind the far side of the Moon — a physical isolation no human has matched since.
How does a city-state of just over six million people meet up to 40 percent of its water needs by recycling what residents flush and drain away?
How did one half of a war-stripped Asian peninsula grow from 35 percent forest coile the other lost forests after the early 1990s?
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
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?
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
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?
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
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?
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?
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
