NASA

Why space is the perfect subject for podcasts

7 December 2024 9:00 am

The podcasts I’m recommending to everyone at the moment are Nasa’s Curious Universe and the Royal Astronomical Society’s The Supermassive…

Acceptable for a hangover day: Fly Me to the Moon reviewed

13 July 2024 9:00 am

Fly Me to the Moon is a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum set during the 1960s space…

The moon matters to China

1 June 2024 9:00 am

China’s Chang’e-6 moon mission was launched on 3 May. It reached lunar orbit a few days later and began waiting…

Fools rush in: Mania, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

18 May 2024 9:00 am

In an alternative universe where the Mental Parity Movement holds sway, the ignorant and unqualified are deemed ‘just as good as anyone else’ – with predictable results

Farewell, Voyager 1

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Some time soon we will have to say farewell to our most distant emissary – the Voyager 1 spacecraft. After…

What would life on Mars actually look like?

2 December 2023 9:00 am

It would need more than 100 million people to make it viable for a start – living in airlocked, subterranean bases, producing food and oxygen in artificially-lit greenhouses

How to talk to astronauts

20 July 2019 9:00 am

Television has the pictures but the most spine-tingling moments in the recordings from the Apollo space missions are the bursts…

How to stop the Grenfell Tower disaster from happening again? Ask the air industry

4 November 2017 9:00 am

It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight…

The green giant

9 September 2017 9:00 am

Environmentalism has gone too far; renewable energy is a disaster; scares about pesticides and chemicals are horribly overdone; no, the…

Yuri Gagarin in the cabin of Vostok, the spacecraft in which he made the first human journey to outer space on 12 April, 1961

When technology was art: Cosmonauts at the Science Museum reviewed

26 September 2015 8:00 am

‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared…

Following Galileo’s discoveries, a rugged, cratered moon is depicted (with papal approval) by Ludovico Cigoli in his ‘Assumption of the Virgin in the Pauline Chapel’

Moving heaven and earth: Galileo’s subversive spyglass

11 April 2015 9:00 am

We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet…

The most expensive typing error ever?

7 February 2015 9:00 am

The world’s most expensive typing errors, and how they were made

Space odyssey: Ed White walking in space over New Mexico, Gemini 4, June 1965 Image: James McDivitt

The images from the Apollo missions will reduce you to tears

4 October 2014 9:00 am

Mark Mason on the images that make grown men cry