Modernising Australian space laws

Australia cannot build a resilient space sector while its legal framework remains incomplete and fails to keep pace with commercial change.

Peering into the unknown

Nasa is about to launch a space observatory that could help settle some of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy regarding how the universe began, what it is made of and how it has evolved over time.

Tales from the dark side

The recovery of ancient rock samples from the Moon’s far side are helping scientists uncover how asteroid impacts shaped the early Solar System.

Lumpy space process

Cosmology has long assumed that matter should be evenly distributed throughout the universe, but the latest data suggests this isn’t true and may force a fundamental rethink of this ‘cosmological principle’.

How Moon bases could help the Earth

Building bases on the Moon will push our engineering to its limits but lunar habitation is more than just an engineering challenge. Understanding human experience at the extreme limits of life can help improve conditions for those living at the edge on Earth.

The day of the comet

At around 12 billion years old, the interstellar comet that sped between Mars and Earth last year was far older than the Solar System it passed through.

The balloon files

The US Government has released a new trove of documents on various cases of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” and while they’re mostly camera anomalies, other drones and slow, far away balloons picked up by Reaper thermal sensors, some people will always assume they’re proof of alien craft.

After Artemis

The US has maintained its superiority in space because it has a clear vision of where it wants to be and is willing to invest to achieve it. Artemis II has come home from its epic trip around the Moon, but Australia is still on the launch pad. It is time we took off.

The sky’s not the limit

Artemis II has returned humans to deep space for the first time in fifty years but the forces that brought us back are the same ones that kept us away and until scientific discovery displaces geopolitics and profit, the next fifty years will look just like the last.

4 visions of our future in space

NASA’s flight around the moon is a welcome reminder of its technical achievement and human ambition and in the background, decisions about what happens next and who benefits are already taking shape.

Some of our black holes are missing

When an international team of scientists, led by Monash University, working with the global network of gravitational-wave detectors measuring tiny ripples in spacetime, recently examined the masses of merging black holes, they noticed something strange – a gap where black holes should exist, but don’t.

What took so long?

The successful launch of the Artemis II mission to circumnavigate the Moon is a welcome boost for NASA and manned space flight, but why has it taken half a century to return there after Apollo?