Blue Origin cleared to launch New Glenn rocket again after FAA investigation
Blue Origin can now prepare for New Glenn's fourth flight after the FAA cleared it for launch.
Tag Archives: space
NASA shares Psyche spacecraft’s photos of Mars
NASA has released the photos Psyche took when it did a flyby of Mars.
The SpaceX IPO plans are now public
The paperwork sheds new light on the company that will soon trade as SPCX.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft just got an assist from Mars on the way to its asteroid namesake
Its target asteroid could give us insight on how Earth's core came to be.
Astronomers use the Webb telescope to improve our map of the cosmic web
Adding significantly more detail means better future investigations into the universe's past.
NASA is set to begin training with a prototype of Blue Origin’s crew moon lander
The space agency is planning to put astronauts on the moon in 2028.
LEGO Finally Gives Tintin’s Moon Rocket Its Brick-Built Moment
The moon landing happened in 1969. Tintin got there in 1954. That’s the kind of detail that makes you stop, reconsider, and immediately want to tell someone about it. Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist behind The Adventures of Tintin, published Destination Moon and its sequel Explorers on the Moon in the early 1950s, a good fifteen years before Neil Armstrong ever set foot on the lunar surface. What makes that even more remarkable is how seriously Hergé took the science behind it. He corresponded with space experts, commissioned a physical rocket model to verify its accuracy, and drew every last detail with a level of rigor that would feel at home in an aerospace manual. The rocket he designed, that now-iconic red-and-white checkered tower, wasn’t just a narrative prop. It was a genuine vision of what a moon mission could look like, built from the best technical knowledge available at the time.
And now LEGO has turned it into 1,283 bricks. The LEGO Ideas Tintin Moon Rocket (Set #21367) is available now, priced at $159.99, and it is exactly as satisfying as you’d want it to be. Standing at 49cm tall with the red-and-white checkered pattern faithfully recreated in brick form, it works beautifully as a display piece, which is clearly the whole point. This is part of LEGO’s Ideas line, designed for adults 18 and up, and it carries that same particular energy as the Botanical Collection or the vintage typewriter set: you build it once, and then it earns a permanent spot on your shelf.
Designer: LEGO
The set includes six figures, Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, the twin detectives Thomson and Thompson, all in detailed space suits with helmets and oxygen tanks, plus Snowy. There’s also a removable panel on the nose cone that opens to reveal a miniature control room inside. That’s the kind of considered detail that makes a $159 price tag feel reasonable rather than indulgent.
But the more interesting story is really about the design of the rocket itself. The checkered pattern on Hergé’s original wasn’t just a visual choice. It was a functional one. The two-tone design was rooted in actual aerospace practice, used to track a rocket’s roll and rotation during launch. Hergé based the rocket’s overall silhouette on the German V-2, the most advanced rocket technology the world had seen at that point, developed under Wernher von Braun’s direction during World War II. The full-circle irony is that von Braun, the man whose V-2 work first inspired Hergé’s fictional rocket, later became NASA’s chief rocket architect and was instrumental in developing the Saturn V that carried Apollo 11 to the actual Moon. Fiction and history were chasing each other the whole time, and somehow Tintin was always a step ahead.
This is also the first LEGO Tintin set ever made, which, given how culturally massive the franchise is, feels like it took longer than it should have. Over two dozen albums, translations into dozens of languages, a presence spanning continents and generations. The set started as a fan submission from Portuguese designer Alexis Dos Santos, known online as Tkel86, who put it through the LEGO Ideas community voting process before it reached full production. That origin story is fitting. Tintin has always been driven by devotion rather than obligation.
The LEGO Ideas line has a reliable instinct for picking the right icons, and the Tintin Moon Rocket belongs here. It works on multiple levels at once: a display piece that’s genuinely beautiful, a nostalgic touchstone for anyone who grew up with the comics, and a design artifact with a richer backstory than most people expect. The checkered pattern that looks so striking on a shelf today is the same pattern that was quietly grounded in real rocket science more than seventy years ago. For anyone who appreciates when design, history, and storytelling land in the same object, this one is absolutely worth your attention.
The post LEGO Finally Gives Tintin’s Moon Rocket Its Brick-Built Moment first appeared on Yanko Design.
A Student Built a Pocket Planet Tracker That Works Without Your Phone
Most of us have looked up at the night sky at some point and felt that brief, humbling recognition that there is an enormous universe out there, and we have no idea what is happening in it. Then a notification comes in, and the moment passes. Lumen Orbit, a student concept from CEPT University, is a small handheld accessory designed to keep that awareness alive without requiring a telescope, a star chart, or a dedicated app.
The device is disc-shaped and roughly palm-sized, with a two-part body split along its equator by a copper-toned accent band. The upper half is a polished silver-gray cap; the lower sits wider and shallower in a dark matte gunmetal finish. A woven braided lanyard with a hexagonal metal clasp attaches to the body, making it something you can loop around a wrist, hook to a bag, or hang using a built-in fold-out carabiner.
Designer: Kinshuk Agarwal
The primary face carries a circular display showing real-time planetary positions: which planet is currently visible, where it sits in the sky relative to your location, and when it rises and sets. Flip the device over, and a second, smaller screen on the reverse offers a close-up planetary render. The UI uses pixel-art-style graphics for its planet illustrations, landing somewhere between retro charm and deliberate restraint.
The interaction model is equally considered. A flip gesture switches between the two display modes, squeezing the body cycles through planets, and haptic vibration signals astronomical events such as meteor showers, eclipses, and alignments. The idea is that information about the cosmos arrives the same way a text message does, as a quiet nudge rather than something you have to actively seek out.
What the concept is really proposing is a dedicated single-purpose ambient device for astronomical awareness. Smartphones can technically do all of this through apps, but a specialized physical object changes the relationship to the information entirely. Carrying something whose only purpose is to connect you to the solar system is a genuinely different proposition than opening an app between emails.
The open questions are substantial. How the real-time tracking handles connectivity, how the device charges, and how positional accuracy works without confirmed GPS integration are things the concept leaves unspecified. The form is confident, and the interaction logic is coherent. The more interesting problem is whether a working version could fit into a jacket pocket for easy access.
The post A Student Built a Pocket Planet Tracker That Works Without Your Phone first appeared on Yanko Design.
SabreSat Air-Breathing Satellite Treats the Upper Atmosphere Like Fuel
Most satellites avoid very low Earth orbit because the atmosphere is still thick enough to drag them down in days or weeks without constant propulsion. That said, Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellites offer sharper imagery with smaller optics and lower latency for communications if you can survive there. Redwire’s SabreSat is a satellite designed to live in that zone on purpose, using the air that normally kills spacecraft as part of its propulsion strategy.
SabreSat is Redwire’s VLEO-optimized satellite bus, chosen by DARPA for its OTTER program to demonstrate sustained operations in very low orbit. The platform is modular and built for Earth observation and atmospheric sensing, but its most interesting option is an air-breathing propulsion system that literally inhales thin air, ionizes it, and throws it out the back as thrust instead of relying on stored propellant alone.
Designer: Redwire
The overall shape from the renders looks more like a glider or flying wing than a cube with panels. A long, rounded fuselage with an oval nose, a huge vertical solar sail rising from the top, and two canted tail fins on each side. It has a clear nose, body, and tail rather than a generic bus, which makes sense for a spacecraft that has to fly through fluid instead of coasting in a vacuum.
The large vertical surface is clearly a solar array, covered in a dense grid of cells and framed in gold. Its size and placement suggest an aerodynamic role as well. In VLEO, that panel can act like a sail or stabilizer, helping align the spacecraft with the flow and giving attitude control systems something to work with. It’s a power source and an aerodynamic surface wrapped into one.
The fuselage and tail support the air-breathing concept. The smooth, rounded nose and long body are consistent with reducing drag and possibly funneling air toward an intake region inside. At the back, renders show twin exhaust plumes emerging from the aft end, hinting at an electric thruster fed by harvested air. The canted tail fin adds stability and helps manage the angle of attack in the thin atmosphere.
The air-breathing system is optional. SabreSat can fly as a more conventional VLEO satellite using stored propellant, or as an air-breathing craft that uses the atmosphere as reaction mass. That flexibility lets operators choose between shorter, simpler missions and long-duration, highly maneuverable flights that treat VLEO more like an operating layer than a decay zone where satellites eventually burn up.
SabreSat is a glimpse of what satellites might look like when we stop pretending space is always empty. Its flying-wing silhouette, solar sail, and air-breathing option suggest a future where spacecraft skim the upper atmosphere, sensing it and using it as fuel at the same time. It’s a reminder that the most interesting design work often happens where two environments overlap.
The post SabreSat Air-Breathing Satellite Treats the Upper Atmosphere Like Fuel first appeared on Yanko Design.
Japanese wooden satellite launched to help curb space trash
The media focus on rocket launches, moon landings, and Internet satellites has inspired many to look to the stars for the future of mankind. There are still plenty of areas on the Earth that can be explored, but our expansion can only expand upward at this point. But even before we get there, we are already filling our outer skies with dozens if not hundreds of small metal objects known as satellites, and their numbers are only expected to grow as we move forward.
Satellites have various applications, from communication to observation, but none of them so far remain in orbit in perpetuity. We are, thus, facing a two-headed problem of a myriad of these objects cluttering the space around our planet as well as plummeting back down, sometimes with disastrous results. To find out if there are more sustainable options, the world’s first wooden satellite just made its extraterrestrial voyage in the hopes of replacing metal with wood in the future.
Designers: Sumitomo Forestry, Kyoto University
Satellites can orbit the Earth for years, but they will eventually be decommissioned and fall back to Earth. Most of their mass will burn up on re-entry, but the burning metal will release dangerous aluminum oxide pollution into the atmosphere. Wood will also burn up, of course, but the effects on the environment will be significantly smaller.
Made from Japanese hinoki or cypress wood, the boxy LingoSat satellite is designed to test the theory of replacing metal satellites with wood-enclosed versions. The sides of the box are held together without screws or glue, using a traditional Japanese craft technique similar to dovetail joints. This method will help minimize the use of metal or potentially toxic materials that would burn in the atmosphere.
The experiment will test how well wood will fare in the harsh environment of space, such as extreme temperature fluctuations, and how well it can shield electronics inside from space radiation. The latter could have useful applications back here on Earth as shielding for semiconductors in data centers. If successful, this design could significantly help solve the problem of space trash and debris falling back down.
The LingoSat wooden satellite launched into space last Tuesday and will be heading to the International Space Station. From there, it will spend six months in orbit at a height of 400km (250 mi) above the Earth. Like any other satellite, it will eventually be decommissioned and fall down but with less fanfare.
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