In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.June 5, 2026
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.June 4, 2026
The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow Saving Tips May 31, 2026 Voyager 1 is currently drifting through interstellar space at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, more than 15 billion miles from…
NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s. Saving Tips May 30, 2026 The popular version of the story sounds almost too perfect: NASA is still flying the Voyager spacecraft with code written…
On 15 September 2017, NASA engineers deliberately steered the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn’s atmosphere at 70,000 miles per hour, not because the mission had failed but because they were terrified of where it might fall if they left it in orbit. Saving Tips May 27, 2026 On 15 September 2017, Cassini stopped talking. The spacecraft had spent its final minutes plunging into Saturn’s upper atmosphere at…
