The story of skylab

This October marks 50 years since a heavily shielded spacecraft, the Soviet Union’s Venera 9, parachuted into the atmosphere of Venus. Then, having landed, it did something extraordinary: it beamed ba

In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britai

On 2 November 2000, a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts became the first full-time crew of the International Space Station (ISS). Expedition 1’s Bill Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko

On the morning of Sunday, 3 September 1916, farm bailiff Charles Lewis set out across the fields at Abbott’s Hall near the village of Horsley Cross, in rural Essex, to check on the wheat crop. He took

On 21 August, in the dead of night, a mysterious spacecraft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The craft in question was the eerily named X-37B – an experimental and highly secretiv

Astronomers love a challenge. They place their observatories on the highest mountains, in the driest deserts, on the coldest ice shelves, beneath the deepest oceans, in orbit around Earth and the Sun,