On June 30, 1908, a giant fireball exploded over the forests of Tunguska in Siberia. The impact leveled hundreds of miles of forest, and the exact cause is a bit of a mystery. At the time of the explosion, it was too difficult to reach...

ESA's Biomass spacecraft recently unfurled its antenna reflector. Watch footage from space and animation of the deployment. Credit: Space.com | footage & animation: ESA/ATG medialab | edited by Steve Spaleta

Happy Birthday, Kennedy Space Center! On July 1, 1962, NASA established the Launch Operations Center — which was later renamed the Kennedy Space Center — on the east coast of Florida. After President John F. Kennedy famously said that...

On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride became America's first woman in space after she and four colleagues blasted off on the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission. The astronauts spent 6 days in space deployed two...

Why is Spain's economy booming? Thanks to migration.

Isar Aerospace's first Spectrum rocket suffered an anomaly about 18 seconds into its first-ever launch and crashed. The rocket launched from Europe's Andøya Spaceport in Norway. Credit: Space.com | footage courtesy: Isar Aerospace |...

On June 17, 1985, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched on NASA's STS-51-G mission, carrying payload specialist Sultan Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud, a Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who became the first Arab and first Muslim in space. And...

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Nikolayeva Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. Tereshkova, a cosmonaut with then-Soviet Russia, launched into space on the Vostok 6 mission and orbited Earth 48 times in 70.8 hours. That's...

Did you know the Rodrigues fruit bat (a.k.a. "flying fox") has a wingspan of three feet?

On June 15, 2011, Iran launched satellite Rasad-1 into orbit around Earth. Rasad-1 (the name means Observation 1 in Farsi) is an imaging satellite that was sent into a 162-mile orbit by an Iranian Safir rocket. This was Iran's third...

On June 14, 1914, the first patent for a liquid-fueled rocket design was granted to Dr. Robert Goddard, an American scientist and rocket pioneer. In the patent, Goddard described a rocket fueled with liquid propellants (liquid nitrous...

On June 13, 2013, China's crewed Shenzhou 10 spacecraft made its successful docking with the Tiangong-1 space lab, marking the country's second mission to the mini-space station. This kicked off 12 days of docked operations for Shenzhou...

On June 12, 1967, Venera 4 was launched into space on a mission to Venus, thus becoming the first spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's atmosphere. This was a Russian probe designed to study the atmosphere of Venus down to...

Learn all about these tiny tortoises from Madagascar.

Contrary to popular belief, penguins don't only live in cold, icy locations... some are beach bums! These penguins have made a home on the shores of the southwest coast of Africa.

On June 11, 2015, NASA astronaut Terry Virts, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency and Russian Anton Shkaplerov returned to Earth after 199 days on the International Space Station. The trio made up the...

Can AI tools be used to Hollywood's advantage?

On June 10, 1854, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann gave his classic lecture on curved space. Riemann was a 19th century mathematician from Germany. His landmark lecture included a workable definition of how someone might measure the...

On June 9, 1952, the Abee meteorite fell in Alberta, Canada, at 11:05 at night. The space stone weighed nearly 326 pounds and was recovered from a 6 foot- deep crater in a wheat field when it was found five days later. A piece of it is...

Chinese astronaut conduct a spherical flame experiment during an orbit to ground space lecture using a match and a candle. Note: Video is in Mandarin - No translation available. Credit: China Central Television

On June 8, 1959, NASA's rocket-powered X-15 experimental plane made its first glide flight. The X-15 rocket plane was part of a series of experimental hypersonic aircraft. This flight marked the beginning of almost a decade of research...

On June 7, 1965, after a four-day mission and 62 orbits, NASA's Gemini 4 mission returned to Earth with an Atlantic Ocean splashdown. Gemini 4 was NASA's 10th manned spaceflight. It included the first spacewalk by an American astronaut....

On June 6, 1995, American astronaut Norman Thagard broke NASA's space endurance record at the time of 84 days, 1 hour and 16 minutes while aboard the Russian space station Mir.



Thagard, a veteran of four shuttle flights, was...

China used the moon's gravity as a slingshot to help get a pair of damaged satellites into the correct orbit after the launch failed to do so. Credit: China Central Television (CCTV) | CGTN