space travel
Why most scientists don’t want us to believe in life on Mars
All institutional incentives impel towards overcaution, says Steven Benner, so it’s safer to insist that there’s no life than to suggest there is and be proved wrong
To infinity and beyond
How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead
A call to arms
’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
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
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
Television has the pictures but the most spine-tingling moments in the recordings from the Apollo space missions are the bursts…
Remembering the 1968 Apollo mission – when the world was reaching to the future rather than drawing in
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
Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon,…
What was Neil Armstrong like? A complete bore if First Man is anything to go by
Damien Chazelle’s First Man is a biographical drama that follows Neil Armstrong in the decade leading up to the Apollo…
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
The halo slips further
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s…
