The Grand Tour whet our appetite for learning more about planets and asteroids beyond our closest neighbour Mars. To once more explore Solar System bodies at extreme distances technology needed to be designed with its own intelligence to operate autonomously and reliably over long dur

The Space Race driven by ideology, economics, nationalism, and the military fuelled the technological advancements in rocketry,  robot spacecraft and human presence beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The ground shifted, however, with the end of the Soviet Union as a rival to the United

I couldn’t miss the opportunity to memorialize RMS Titanic in this blog on the 100th-year anniversary of it sinking. Could it happen again? Could a ship hit an ice berg and sink? In light of the Costa Concordia sinking in the Mediterranean, maritime safety is once more a front p

In December 1972 the United States sent Apollo XVII to the Moon – the last time a human stepped on the surface of another world. Since then human activity in space has been limited to missions in near-Earth orbit. The rivalry between the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the United