Blog

Let's talk about AI.

It could be argued that AI feels like the moment the future arrived. Actually, for me, MP3 players were when the future arrived, the chance to put your entire music collection on one device was a true breakthrough to someone who grew up with cassette Walkmans. But, even if you're not that old, if you can remember a pre-AI world then it's a sure bet that things changed for you when AI arrived.

I grew up where TV shows imagined futures populated by authoritative, if clunky,...

I've previously talked about the difficulty of going 'up'. Of how much energy it takes for a trip that is not confined to the plane in which the planets of the solar system orbit the sun. Well, let's take this a step further. Let's start by assuming we've gone 'up' and that and we're now on course for one of our neighbouring stars, in other words, we're going 'out'.

Immediately, two questions spring to mind:

Firstly, how far do we have to go?

Secondly, how might we go about it?

Let's start with...

Today I'd like to discuss the difficulty of going up. But, not in the sense of getting into orbit, which is already hard enough to cause engineers many a sleepless night. What I actually mean is something harder still, much harder. I mean the difficulty of going up in in the sense of flying missions that don’t simply stay within the neat, flat, well‑behaved orbital plane of the planets in our solar system. Because once you try to break out of that, you discover the universe has absolutely no...

Fifty years ago, in July and September of 1976, two American spacecraft settled onto the surface of Mars and transformed our understanding of the Red Planet. Back then was the aftermath of the Apollo program that took men to the moon. NASA budgets were shrinking, if still large when compared with those of today. There was a drive for missions with ambition that could both capture the public imagination and maintain Cold War prestige. The first robotic probe to land on Mars sought to answer...

At the time of writing, here in the UK, and Europe, it's a month into summer and we're getting through a fierce and unprecedented heatwave. Temperature has been on everyone's mind.

So, let me start by asking, where's the hottest place in our solar system?

No, it's not your bedroom. However, the answer, surprisingly, is near Oxford. Yes, one of the hottest places in the known universe is tucked inside a building that looks, from the outside, like the sort of place that might store filing...

Space is a serious business. Space is difficult, and for those who seek to travel there, death is a very real concern. So you might be surprised to learn that many people who work in the field of space exploration love space movies. In fact, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, mission designers and the like absolutely adore them. But not always for the reasons you might expect.

Yes, scientific accuracy matters. But the films that earn genuine respect from the scientific community aren’t...

In early April 2026, the Artemis II mission that flew around the far side of the moon concluded successfully. Four astronauts on board the Orion capsule reminded us what human beings can bring to deep space exploration through amazing pictures and insights. So, I thought I would round out the experience by taking a look at Artemis III, in terms of how its goals have shifted and the Apollo mission, from over fifty years ago, that it is most similar to.

Artemis III was originally meant to be the...

As of now, the Artemis II mission has just drawn towards a successful conclusion. This was the first mission to travel beyond the moon for over 50 years and has achieved a record for the furthest distance humans have ever travelled beyond the Earth. Without doubt, the most exciting part of this mission was when its four astronauts made observations of the 'dark side' of the moon.

We call it the 'dark side of the Moon' but that’s really just a triumph of drama over accuracy. It’s a phrase that...

Can you digress before you even get started?

Let's find out.

Many words in English have alternative meanings, such as the word that forms the title of today's blog. However, the greatest of them all in this department is a word that runs to just three letters. And there's a major clue to what that word is in my previous sentence.

The word is 'run' and, in the 3rd Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the entry on this particular word extends to 75 columns of text! It starts with "to go...

Artemis II aims to send humans around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. At the time of creating this article, the mission is imminent. It could go as soon as February 2026, it may take until April. With a rocket costing billions of dollars and human lives at stake, NASA will only launch when both conditions and preparations are perfect.

So, with all this uncertainty, I thought I'd take a look back at the last time humanity visited the moon…

In December 1972, the Apollo program was...

Life, the Universe and Everything: a question to which the answer is 42… apparently. Today, I'm only going to tackle two thirds of that question, and all based on what we know so far. I'd advise you to strap in.

Astronomers like to joke that their job is simply to "look up". But if you’ve ever stood outside on a clear night, with little or no light pollution and "looked up" you've likely been staggered by all you can see. You might be able to spot a planet, the pole star, name some...

Voyager 1 will soon achieve a cosmic milestone. Allow me to explain…

When you turn on the light in a room it looks like it becomes instantly bright. But that's not quite the case. In reality, light races from the bulb at nigh on 186,000 miles per second, so it doesn't fill the room instantaneously - but it does get mighty close

186,000 miles per second is mind bogglingly fast. At that speed you could circle the Earth seven times in the blink of an eye, or reach the moon in just over a second.

...

You spend years pouring you heart and soul into creating your masterpiece. It becomes everything you'd ever want in a story. It has to be shared with the world. How could anyone not want to read your work?

OK, maybe not everyone has that level of self-belief. Perhaps your work has not been years in the making and, most likely, you're writing in a niche rather than attempting to move the soul of the entire world. But the fact remains that you think that there are people out there who will...

(Image by Steve Gribben/NASA/Johns Hopkins APL)

If you’ve ever dreamed of exploring alien worlds, Titan might just become your next obsession. Saturn’s largest moon is a place of paradoxes: it’s freezing cold, yet brimming with organic chemistry; it’s drenched in methane rain, yet eerily Earth-like in its landscapes. And in 2028, NASA plans to send a flying robot there - not a rover, not a lander, but a drone. A nuclear-powered, eight-rotor, science-packed flying machine called Dragonfly.

Titan...

If you could take a trip into space, where would you go?

Perhaps you wouldn't go at all. Perhaps you might consider the risks too great, be it taking off or the prospect of being surrounded by an environment that could kill you in seconds. That's entirely understandable, but you'd be missing out on a lot.

Maybe you'd be content with just a sub-orbital flight? These are available now (to anyone with several million dollars to spare). Blue Origin's New Shepherd flies passengers to the edge of...

The newly built Vera C. Rubin Observatory is our cosmic sentinel. Based in northern Chile, it is one of the most ambitious astronomical projects of the 21st century. Formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a bit of a mouthful, the observatory was renamed in honour of Vera Rubin whose work provided compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter.

Dark matter is a material whose existence we have inferred, because it cannot be seen directly. Astronomers have done a...

I'm writing this in the summer during a spell of hot weather (yes, even in the UK). So I think it's fitting to write about a spacecraft that's been feeling the heat for quite some time - and it's just achieved a significant milestone.

The Parker Solar Probe is a ground-breaking spacecraft launched on the 12th August 2018, by NASA. Its objective was to fly closer to the sun than ever before and gather data on the solar corona, the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere.

The corona is a halo of...

You will not be surprised to learn that Star Trek ranks amongst my favourite TV shows. I should say that we're not in an exclusive relationship. I'm a fan of Star Wars, Stargate, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, The Expanse… the list goes on and on. I can even be persuaded to watch things without any kind of science fiction element - occasionally.

I hate to break it to people, but I'm far from convinced that Star Trek will ever become a reality. But it has some core themes running through it that I...

The Hubble Space Telescope is 35 years old!

For those who need a reminder, Hubble is a large space-based observatory, and it was launched by NASA in 1990. It orbits the Earth and captures high-resolution images and data in ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light. Red and violet bookend the visible light spectrum i.e. the colours we can see. Ultraviolet is simply shades of violet beyond what we can see and the same applies to Infrared light. Hubble uses this range of light to bring out extra...

Can you steal a spacecraft? Sure you can, in Science Fiction. But, way back in 1959, this actually happened.

The Cold War was raging and the Americans were a long way behind in the space race. Their rivals, the Soviet Union, had put a satellite in orbit and even sent a dog up in a vehicle weighing over a tonne. Even more impressively, they'd also sent spacecraft to the moon.

In contrast, the Americans had only managed to send very small probes into space. The first of these was called...