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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
The Apollo 12 crew brought back Surveyor 3’s camera after 31 months on the Moon, and NASA reported finding live Streptococcus bacteria inside it, but later evidence pointed to contamination in Houston
In November 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved the television camera from Surveyor 3 after 31 months on the lunar surface. When NASA opened it in Houston, technicians reported finding live Streptococcus mitis inside the foam — a claim later challenged, but one that reshaped how spacecraft are built.
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
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
