space travel

How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead

16 July 2022 9:00 am

How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead

Like Alan Bennett but less funny: 'night, Mother at Hampstead Theatre reviewed

6 November 2021 9:00 am

’night, Mother is a two-hander that opens like a comedy sketch. ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ says Jessie. She’s…

What Prince William gets wrong about space travel

19 October 2021 10:15 pm

Time was when ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ was not just a line from Star Trek.…

Branson vs Bezos: In praise of the billionaire space race

12 July 2021 8:52 pm

They are rich boys with some very expensive toys. As Richard Branson completes his first space flight, it would be…

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…

Apollo 8 on its launch pad in December 1968. Photo: AP / REX / Shutterstock

Remembering the 1968 Apollo mission – when the world was reaching to the future rather than drawing in

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Take yourself back to (or try to imagine) Christmas 1968; a year full of disturbances, dashed hopes and extreme violence…

It’s Christmas. You don’t want Götterdämmerung. You want a waltz-operetta

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon,…

Running on empty: Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in First Man

What was Neil Armstrong like? A complete bore if First Man is anything to go by

13 October 2018 9:00 am

Damien Chazelle’s First Man is a biographical drama that follows Neil Armstrong in the decade leading up to the Apollo…

The earliest aerial drawing, made from a balloon basket, by Thomas Baldwin, 1785, left, and Apollo 8’s ‘Earthrise’, right, 50 years old

How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives

16 June 2018 9:00 am

‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…

Richard Branson deserves (some) respect

8 February 2014 9:00 am

Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s…