Six hours behind schedule, with a backup engine system shuddering in lunar orbit and mission controllers in Houston running out of options, Apollo 16 came within one meeting of being sent home without landing. The problem was a wobble in a gimbal. The solution was math done under pressure.
SpaceX fired all 33 Raptor 3 engines on Starship V3, while a 1,000th Starlink launch of 2026 and Apple's $11.6B Amazon satellite deal reshape the industry.
White House directs NASA and Pentagon to field space nuclear power systems by 2028, with DoD demonstration required by 2031. Game-changer for military satellite power budgets.
Landsat 7 launched on April 15, 1999, designed to last five years. It operated for twenty-five, survived a failure that destroyed a fifth of every image it took, and became part of the longest continuous record of Earth's surface ever assembled. Then they made the data free.
SpaceX launches its 1,000th Starlink satellite of 2026 on Falcon 9, adding 29 more craft to a 10,191-working-satellite constellation.
Planet Labs institutes 14-day delay on imagery covering Iran and Gulf States. Commercial remote sensing faces new operational security pressures as conflict escalates.
