Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket successfully lifted off on its inaugural flight July 18, becoming the first commercial Indian rocket to reach orbit.
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An innovative new drone dubbed the “Phantom Twist” can seemingly disappear from view, in a major new robotics advancement offering a close-to-invisible aerial platform.
Its name describes the drone’s rapid spinning motion, which rotates 25 times per second—too fast for the human eye to resolve—thereby acting as a sort of cloak shielding it from visible detection.
The Northwestern University engineering team behind the Phantom Twist revealed their drone during a recent talk at the Sydney, Australia, Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 conference on July 16.
“Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” said Northwestern’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the work. “Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion. This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”
Hiding drones is not a new idea. Other engineers have attempted a variety of techniques, including camouflage, transparent materials, and light-bending to obscure the presence of drones and robots. However, all of those focused on the material the drone’s exterior was constructed from, allowing it to blend into the background. The Northwestern team’s innovation was in how the object moves.
To our eyes, fan blades disappear because they are moving so fast that our eyes cannot track them. The “motion blur” created at these speeds allows the Phantom Twist to almost disappear, leaving only a faint apparition perceptible to the eye.
While several military applications are immediately obvious, the team instead says their work could be useful in developing noninvasive wildlife and environmental monitoring. Loud drones can scare wildlife, disrupting them as they scatter, but by blending in, the Phantom Twist could capture a much more accurate picture of natural behaviors.
Their perception-based design eschews the traditional quadcopter design for a single propeller, with a body that spins in the opposite direction, creating the optical illusion that the drone essentially disappears.
“For a typical quadrotor drone, the propellers are spinning, but the robot is stationary,” Rubenstein said. “So, you still see its body. For our drone, the whole thing is rotating, so there are no stationary parts.”
Using AI and optimization algorithms, the Northwestern team began by generating 20,000 different arrangements of a drone’s propeller, motor, circuit board, and other necessary components. Eventually, the algorithm landed on the most promising configurations, after which the researchers simulated and superimposed them onto real-world backgrounds.
Another computer model mimicked human perception, allowing the engineers to assign a perception score for how visible each design would be to human eyes. An algorithm then optimized those designs by moving components to minimize the visibility score even further.
“The design process was fully automated,” Rubenstein said. “Then, when we were confident that a drone met all our criteria, we built it.”
The key feature of this design is that the individual components are at such varying heights and angles that they do not overlap as it spins, maximizing the motion-blur effect and creating the appearance of a faint cloud rather than a solid object.
“The human eye takes time to accumulate signals, roughly analogous to the exposure time of a camera,” said Alexander, an expert in computer vision. “When an object spins quickly, we perceive it as blurring out and losing distinct features. Because this new drone is almost entirely transparent, its few opaque components are visually averaged with the background for an overall appearance of a slight haze.”
Currently impeding the drone from being even more imperceptible to the eye are the wires and support rods that remain visible, as well as the engine noise it produces, which is readily discernible. Going forward, the team plans to continue improving Phantom Twist in future iterations to incorporate more transparent materials and reduce the noise it produces.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
Barnard’s Star is one of the most famous stars in the night sky for astronomers because it is so close to Earth. Located just under six light-years away, it is the second-closest star system after Alpha Centauri. In 2025, scientists confirmed that four small planets orbit this nearby star. Now, a new study has revealed […]
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The 4½-year award will fund simulated satellite-defense scenarios
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NASA is taking another major step toward a permanent Moon base with four new commercial missions that will test technology, deliver science, and help prepare for humanity’s future beyond Earth. NASA has selected three commercial space companies to carry out four new lunar missions in late 2028 through the agency’s Moon Base Program. Astrobotic, Firefly [...]Investment in satellite companies reached $8.1 billion in the first half of 2026, already surpassing every previous annual total tracked by early-stage investor Space Capital.
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Welcome to Edition 9.01 of the Rocket Report! Back in January, I wrote about the 20 launches and landings we were most excited about in 2026. The list included things that were, at the time, officially scheduled to occur this year. I also gave my own view of the probability of each of these events actually happening before December 31. Halfway through the year, we can only count one of the events as completed, and that was NASA's Artemis II mission in April. Many are now scheduled for next year, proving again that delays are a constant in the space industry. A couple of them—such as the launch of NASA's Roman Space Telescope—do appear to be on track to happen soon.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Swift Boost Mission reaches orbit. A pioneering commercial mission to reboost the orbit of NASA's Swift astronomy satellite launched early Friday after attempts earlier in the week were thwarted by bad weather and a technical issue. The Link servicing satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies soared to orbit on the tip of a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket that dropped from the belly of a modified L-1011 jetliner over the remote Pacific Ocean. Mission managers called off two launch attempts Tuesday and Wednesday due to poor weather around the L-1011's staging base on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. On Thursday, "a launch vehicle issue temporarily prevented teams from deploying the rocket" after takeoff of the L-1011.
© SpaceX
An innovative new approach to building safer, more efficient small unmanned aerial vehicles is taking a cue from nature.
Anticipating worsening turbulence due to environmental concerns in the coming years, engineers studying the unmatched hovering ability of kestrels hope to reverse engineer the secrets of their exceptional flight capabilities to help assemble better future drones.
Smaller drones, known as sUAVs, have a range of different applications that include delivery services, photography, and more. However, wind conditions can often cause turbulence that either grounds them temporarily or, when caught off guard, can lead to their destruction.
Now, a team of researchers has published their findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, which details an ongoing collaboration between RMIT University and the University of Bristol that seeks to overcome such issues by building drones that operate more like some of nature’s best flyers.
Specifically, the nankeen kestrel is an avian species whose amazing prowess while flying during adverse conditions still confounds researchers. To unravel the secrets of their flight, the researchers used motion capture technologies made possible in RMIT’s special Industrial Wind Tunnel facility, one of the largest such facilities anywhere on the Australian continent.
“Birds don’t rely on a single response to wind gusts,” according to RMIT researcher Matt Penn. “They constantly adjust their wings and tails to stay balanced, while the natural flexibility of their feathers and joints helps absorb sudden changes in airflow.”
“They can also sense disruptions very quickly, which allows them to respond almost instantly and maintain control,” added Penn, one of the team members who co-led the studies into how birds can cope with turbulence.
According to Penn and his colleagues, these birds possess a range of unique strategies that help them overcome the dangers of turbulence, which help them navigate under conditions that would cause most sUAVs to come tumbling from the sky.
To attempt to understand what makes kestrels such adept fliers, the team created a robotic replica to mimic some of their key flight movements and characteristics, which allowed the team to unravel some of the secrets to how these incredible birds perform.
“By creating a robot replica, we were able to measure how specific movements were contributing to steadiness in flight,” said Dr Mario Martinez Groves-Raines, a researcher now with the Royal Veterinary College in London, adding that precision measurements of kestrel flight that normally could not be achieved in nature were possible using the team’s robotic version.
“We uncovered several unique techniques behind the kestrel’s impressive stability,” Groves-Raines said. “Many of these techniques have the potential to improve [the] manoeuvrability of small aircraft, which encounter similar challenges to kestrels.”
“This research shows what’s possible when engineers look to nature for solutions,” added RMIT senior researcher Associate Professor Abdulghani Mohamed.
“Our findings open new pathways for designing aircraft that can better handle turbulence.”
Going forward, the researchers say they hope to apply their findings toward the construction of novel sUAVs, which can help future drones operate safely and more efficiently, much like their agile avian forebears.
Ultimately, similar engineering in the coming years may have applications that extend well beyond just drone flight, and could also help to ensure safe operations for much larger aircraft.
The team reported their findings in a pair of new studies, ‘Bridging the Gap: A Review of Gust Mitigation in Birds and Small UAVs’, and ‘Stability and control benefits of coupled wing and tail morphing in kestrel wind-hovering flight explored using a robot replica’, both of which were published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Astronomers have discovered a strange and spectacular galaxy that looks like a giant bow and arrow stretching across space. The unusual object, named RAD-BAARG (Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy), has an enormous arc-shaped structure that spans nearly 1.8 million light-years—about 18 times wider than our Milky Way galaxy. What makes this discovery even more special is that […]
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Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) pioneer Archer Aviation has confirmed that it is on track to perform Team USA transport duty during the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California, aboard its Midnight aircraft.
In an email to The Debrief, a company spokesperson said Archer was selected as the Official Air Taxi Provider of the LA28 Olympic Games and Team USA, marking a historic first in the quest for commercial eVTOL operations before the end of the decade.
“Through this exclusive partnership, the two will look to integrate Archer’s Midnight eVTOL aircraft across theLA28 Games in a variety of ways, such as transporting VIPs, fans, and stakeholders, while electrifying vertiport take-off-and-landing hubs for key venues and providing support for emergency services and security,” a company spokesperson explained.
Archer Aviation founder and CEO Adam Goldstein recently shared more specific updates about the company’s road to the Olympics and eventually government approval, noting that “we made tremendous progress towards beginning operations in the US later this year, with record FAA certification progress and our most expansive flight testing to date.”
Goldstein also highlighted the company’s recent winning applications to begin pre-certification test flights of Midnight in 8 US states later this year, including New York, Florida, and Texas. According to the CEO, those test flights are part of the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), “which was unlocked through the White House’s Executive Order in June last year.”
“Archer expects Midnight operations in American cities to begin this year as part of the White House’s eIPP and in preparation to serve as the Official Air Taxi Provider of the LA28 Olympic Games, in coordination with the DOT and FAA,” the CEO explained, adding that the two benchmarks “pave the way for Archer to showcase its air taxi technology in parallel with its continued work toward FAA Type Certification for Midnight.”
When asked about the technical aspects that have put Midnight on course to become the first commercial eVTOL air taxi provider in the U.S., the company spokesperson first noted that their aircraft are “designed and manufactured” domestically, which can shorten development timelines and improve quality control. This includes focusing the team’s research and development on what the company termed “differentiating technologies,” including the pioneering aircraft’s unique powertrain.
“Our world-class in-house team, coming with experience from Apple, Tesla, SpaceX and beyond, contribute to our efficient and certifiable electric propulsion design,” the company told The Debrief.
Some of the differentiating technologies the team said set it apart from the competition include rapid charging, long-lasting battery packs “and the capability of >1500 horsepower.” They also note that Midnight’s high-performance battery cells, patented high-voltage architecture, and gearbox are designed to operate reliably for roughly 10,000 “flight cycles” before the vehicle’s battery pack needs replacement.
“We are optimized for electric flight,” the company told The Debrief.
Due to the potential risks in premiering a new vehicle platform, with Archer Aviation telling The Debrief that “eVTOL aircraft are the first new category of aviation in more than 60 years,” the company said Midnight is built as a ‘fly-by-wire’ system, reducing the number of mechanical components that can fail. The company also said that each of Midnight’s engines operates independently “allowing for high levels of redundancy and safety.”
Although the current version of the Midnight eVTOL aircraft is flown by a human pilot, the company told The Debrief that it is “continuing to build the technology stack” required for its longer-term goal of a fully autonomous eVTOL aircraft.
With the 2028 Summer Olympics just two years away, the company said it has transitioned out of a successful Phase 3 of the FAA’s 4-phase Type Certification process, an industry first, and has “already been advancing its work in Phase 4 for some time now.”
“This is where Midnight’s compliance with FAA airworthiness requirements will be demonstrated through formal testing and analysis,” the company told The Debrief.
In his address to shareholders, Goldstein said the company’s flight test program “continued to expand this quarter.” The CEO said this expansion includes piloted VTOL and CTOL flights across its expanded fleet of test aircraft “occurring nearly every day, often multiple times a day.”
To expedite the testing phases leading up to the 2028 Olympics, the company recently took over operations of Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles County. Goldstein said the move will help Archer develop the local airstrip “into the airport of the future.”
“Located near LAX and several major LA sports and entertainment venues, Hawthorne Airport is expected to anchor Archer’s planned LA air taxi operations while also serving as an innovation hub for next-generation aviation technologies,” the CEO explained.
When asked how soon the company expects to fulfill the FAA’s Phase 4 requirements and gain full certification, the spokesperson told The Debrief that Archer is in the final stages of the process, “and is anticipating approval in the near future.” However, the company also added that their focus is on building a safe, high-performance aircraft, and that once they can demonstrate the safety and versatility of Midnight, “it is the FAA’s job to certify it.”
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
The Bullet Cluster is one of the most famous objects in astronomy. For years, many scientists have considered it one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to make up most of the matter in the universe. However, a new study suggests there may be another […]
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Millions of years ago, a massive star exploded somewhere far away in our galaxy. During this violent event, called a supernova, the dying star blasted huge amounts of matter into space. These materials included carbon, nitrogen and oxygen—the essential ingredients for life—as well as many other elements, some as heavy as iron. The explosion itself […]
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Astronomers have discovered an unexpected surprise on the famous “Pink Planet,” a strange world known as GJ504b. Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists found that the object is surrounded by salty clouds and has an atmosphere filled with unusual chemicals. GJ504b was first discovered in 2013. It orbits a sun-like star about […]
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Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to go before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a like like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currently of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
A robotic spacecraft built by a Flagstaff, Arizona, startup is preparing to chase down one of NASA’s space telescopes and boost it into a higher orbit. Katalyst Space Technologies’ craft, called LINK, is set to launch later this month aboard an air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, then rendezvous with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and raise its altitude.
The target is a telescope that cannot save itself. After 21 years in orbit, Swift is sinking. The spacecraft carries no thrusters of its own, and its low Earth orbit has been decaying for years as it brushes against the top of the atmosphere. A recent stretch of heightened solar activity made the problem worse, puffing the atmosphere outward, thickening the drag, and pulling Swift down faster than NASA had planned for.
Swift launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. NASA describes it as a kind of cosmic dispatcher: when a sudden, violent event flares somewhere in the sky, Swift pins down where it happened and alerts other observatories to swing around and look. Over two decades it has fed discoveries about exploding stars, flares from distant galaxies, comets, asteroids, and even high-energy lightning on Earth.
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the mission, with partners that include Penn State, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the UK Space Agency, the University of Leicester, and the Italian Space Agency. Losing the telescope to an uncontrolled reentry would end all of that.
Rather than let Swift fall, NASA decided to try something it had never done with a science satellite. In September 2025 the agency awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract, routed through its Small Business Innovation Research program, to mount a robotic boost on a compressed schedule. NASA framed the speed itself as the point, calling the effort a way to prove it can go from concept to implementation in under a year.
“This is a forward-leaning, risk-tolerant approach for NASA,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the acting director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division at the time of the award, who noted that boosting Swift is both cheaper than building a replacement and a way to extend satellite servicing to “a new and broader class of spacecraft.” The clock is real: without a boost, NASA expects Swift to reenter the atmosphere in the fall of 2026, and for the rescue to have its best chance the telescope needs to stay above roughly 185 miles, about 300 kilometers. To buy time, controllers suspended Swift’s science observations and reoriented the spacecraft to cut its drag, a change the mission had never made before.
The choice of a Pegasus XL is itself a consequence of the rush. Swift sits in an unusually low-inclination orbit of 20.6 degrees, which is hard to reach from U.S. launch pads, where most small rockets are confined to steeper angles. Pegasus solves that by skipping the pad entirely: Northrop Grumman’s modified L-1011 aircraft, named Stargazer, carries the rocket aloft and releases it in midair, letting it start its climb from tens of thousands of feet and from a location chosen to match Swift’s path.
NASA has been careful about what it is claiming. By the agency’s own description, a successful boost would be the first time a commercial robotic spacecraft captures a government satellite that is uncrewed, or not originally designed to be serviced in space. That qualifier matters. Robotic servicing has been demonstrated before on craft fitted with docking targets or otherwise built to be approached; Swift was not. LINK, an 880-pound spacecraft that grips its target with three robotic arms, will have to dock with an observatory that was never built to cooperate with a visiting robot, over a maneuver NASA expects to unfold across several months.
It is also, for now, an attempt rather than a sure thing, and the schedule remains soft. NASA has described the launch as targeted for later in June while cautioning that shifting solar activity could still move the timing. Whether the boost works or not, it is a test of a capability NASA says it will need as satellites pile up in orbit and more of them, someday, may be worth saving rather than discarding.
The post A commercial robot will try to catch NASA’s sinking Swift telescope this month — a first for a satellite never built to be serviced appeared first on Space Daily.
The quote has a clean, precise quality that most observations about fear do not. Reid Wiseman posted it to Twitter in October 2014, a few days after completing the first spacewalk of Expedition 41 aboard the International Space Station: “While #spacewalking I realized something: I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.”
He was floating outside the station at roughly 400 kilometres above Earth, working with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst for six hours and thirteen minutes on cooling pump relocation and external robotics work. The spacewalk was conducted on 7 October 2014. At that altitude, with nothing below and the planet curving away at the edge of peripheral vision, Wiseman noticed the absence of something he had expected to find: the fear he thought he had.
The quote has resurfaced in the months around the Artemis II mission, for which Wiseman serves as commander. On 1 April 2026, he launched as part of the first crewed mission to the Moon since Gene Cernan commanded Apollo 17 in December 1972. The insight is more than a decade old. It reads differently now, from a trajectory that takes Wiseman and his crew past the Moon and back.
The difference between fearing heights and fearing gravity sounds like wordplay until you hold it carefully. Both terms are commonly used to describe the same cluster of behaviour: the discomfort on balconies, the reluctance to stand near the edge of a cliff, the particular unease of a glass floor above a long drop. The behaviours are consistent. What Wiseman is questioning is the diagnosis.
A fear of heights, understood as a response to elevation and exposure, locates the problem in the altitude. But what most people are responding to in those situations is not the height in any abstract sense. It is the fall. It is gravity’s action on the body in the event of a slip. It is the trajectory the body would follow if the ledge gave way, and the irreversibility of what that trajectory leads to. The height is the setup. Gravity is the mechanism.
In microgravity, the mechanism has been removed. There is no directional pull toward a surface that recedes infinitely. There is no trajectory the body would follow if it lost contact with the station. An astronaut outside the ISS is not high in the sense that a person on a balcony is high, because the relationship between position and consequence that produces the fear of heights has been cancelled. Wiseman was in the most extreme version of elevation a human can occupy, and the thing he expected to feel was not there.
He worked backward from that absence to what it meant. The fear he had carried was not of heights. It was of gravity.
This kind of revision is harder than it sounds. Most people who believe they fear heights have arranged something around that belief: the avoidance patterns, the decisions about which windows to stand near, the self-description offered when explaining a refusal. The label has become load-bearing. It organises behaviour.
What Wiseman found was that the label was describing a proxy rather than the cause. The altitude was consistently present when the fear appeared, so the altitude got named. But the consistent presence of altitude was itself a consistent presence of gravity’s consequences. The two variables had never been separated. Spacewalking separated them.
The implication is not that people who fear heights are wrong about their fear. The fear is real and the behaviour it produces is real. What shifts is the precision of the account. Someone who understands their discomfort as being about gravity’s consequences, rather than about altitude per se, has a different description of where the sensitivity lives. That description may or may not change anything practical about what they avoid. But it is more accurate, and accuracy in these matters has a certain value even when it is not immediately actionable.
Wiseman did not overcome a fear. He reclassified one. The distinction matters because overcoming implies confronting the same situation repeatedly until the response diminishes. Reclassification involves recognising that the situation you have been avoiding is not quite the thing you thought it was.
Wiseman is 50 years old, a retired United States Navy captain and test pilot. As of April 2026, he is the commander of a mission carrying him further from Earth than any human since the Apollo programme. His crew includes NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Artemis II is a circumlunar flyby, not a landing. The crew will loop around the Moon and return. The distances involved, the communication delays, the duration, make any analogy between this and an ISS spacewalk look quite small. The environment Wiseman occupied in 2014 was far more controlled than the one he entered in April 2026.
The 2014 insight does not become more or less true in this context. It is not predictive of how Wiseman or anyone else experiences the Artemis II mission specifically. But the Artemis II frame does something to the quote: it makes the scale of what he has learned to not be afraid of more visible. The man who discovered in 2014 that his fear was of gravity, not altitude, is now travelling to a distance at which Earth’s gravity is a much smaller presence.
There is a version of this story that treats it as an arc of overcoming, each mission more extreme than the last, the fear perpetually shrinking. That is not what Wiseman is describing. He is describing a single clarification, arrived at empirically, during six hours of work outside a space station. The rest followed from that, or did not.
Wiseman’s observation raises a question that has no clean answer: when we say we fear something, how often are we naming the right thing?
The fear of heights is a durable shorthand, but it collapses a set of variables that could in principle be separated. The height. The exposure. The lack of handholds. The awareness of what would happen if the body fell. The mental simulation of the fall itself. These are not identical. They would, if separated, suggest different things about where the sensitivity lives. Most people never encounter the conditions that would separate them. Wiseman did.
There is no general lesson here that applies predictably from person to person. What seems clear is that the precision of Wiseman’s account is a function of the specificity of the test. An environment that removed gravity as a variable allowed him to see that gravity was the variable that mattered. Ordinary environments, which almost always include gravity as a background constant, do not offer the same diagnostic clarity.
He has not said whether the reclassification changed anything else. He has said that he now knows which word to use.
The post Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman on spacewalking: “I used to think I was scared of heights — now I know I was just scared of gravity” appeared first on Space Daily.
A few months ago, I found myself deep in a conversation about Mars colonization timelines. The other person — a software engineer, genuinely enthusiastic, not naive about the engineering — was walking me through radiation shielding approaches, the habitability of lava tubes, the logistical case for SpaceX’s Starship architecture. It was fascinating. He clearly knew far more than I did about the technical specifics. But somewhere in the middle of it, a question started forming that I couldn’t quite place, until eventually I did: we hadn’t once asked whether any of this was a good idea.
We had been talking about how for an hour, and neither of us had said the word why.
That conversation has been sitting with me since. Not because the technical questions aren’t important — they’re genuinely hard, and the people working on them are doing serious work. But there is a gap between “this is technically possible” and “this is what we should do,” and that gap tends to close faster in the Mars discourse than it does almost anywhere else. The survival problem gets all the oxygen. The ethical one gets treated as settled — as if the answer to “should we go?” is obviously yes, and the only thing left to figure out is the radiation shielding.
I’m not a space scientist and I don’t have a strong stake in any particular answer here. What I do have is a persistent discomfort with how questions get framed — with the way the tractable problem has a tendency to absorb all the attention that the harder one deserves.
The survival discourse is, in its way, extraordinary. Cosmic radiation at the Martian surface running at roughly six to seven chest X-rays per day under normal conditions — and significantly higher during transit and solar storm events. An atmosphere that amounts to about one percent of Earth’s. Temperatures swinging 70 degrees Celsius or more between day and night. The progressive bone density loss from low gravity that compounds across months into something that isn’t easily reversed. These are real problems, and the engineers working on them deserve the coverage they get. None of that is what I’m questioning.
What I’m questioning is the habit of treating “can we survive there?” as a proxy for “should we go?” — as though answering the first settles the second. It doesn’t. They are different questions that require different kinds of thinking, and we have, for the better part of a decade, let the excitement and tractability of the first crowd out serious engagement with the second.
One of the more uncomfortable things I’ve come across in reading about this is the planetary protection question — specifically, the possibility that Mars might not be as empty as the colonization narrative tends to assume. The debate about whether Mars currently harbors microbial life, perhaps in briny subsurface water or in the recurring slope lineae that have been periodically interpreted as evidence of seasonal liquid water, remains genuinely open. No confirmed biology has been found. But “not yet confirmed” is not “not there,” and the question of what we would do if we found it — before or after we arrived — seems to get less serious treatment than it warrants.
NASA’s planetary protection guidelines exist precisely because this uncertainty is real. They were built around the concern that Earth microbes carried on spacecraft could contaminate Mars and compromise any future ability to find or study native life there — or vice versa. The protocols apply most strictly to robotic missions, which can be sterilized. They apply far less cleanly to humans, who exhale, shed skin cells, and carry an internal ecosystem of trillions of organisms that are not optional passengers. A crewed mission, by design, cannot be managed the same way a probe can.
What this means, if taken seriously, is that any crewed mission to Mars before we have higher confidence about the biological status of the planet carries a non-trivial risk of introducing an extinction event for whatever might be living there. Carl Sagan, who spent his career both advocating for space exploration and urging caution about it, made this point repeatedly — that introducing Earth organisms into a low-diversity Martian ecosystem, if one exists, could eliminate it entirely before we ever knew it was there. The argument has not aged out. If anything, growing scientific interest in Martian subsurface habitability has made it more pressing, not less.
We have spent years asking whether humans can survive on Mars. We have spent much less time asking what Mars might be surviving from, if we arrived.
The most common justification offered for Mars colonization at the level of civilizational stakes is the backup argument: a multi-planetary species is an insurance policy, and the cost of not going is existential risk to the entire human project. Stephen Hawking made this argument in his final years. Elon Musk has built it into the explicit ideological foundation of SpaceX’s long-term mission — a self-sustaining city on Mars as a hedge against collapse on Earth.
I find this argument more worth taking seriously than most critics give it credit for. The underlying concern about existential risk is real. The logic that a species concentrated on one planet is more vulnerable than one distributed across two is coherent. But the argument is doing more work than it usually admits, and some of its hidden premises deserve more scrutiny.
The most obvious one is timing. The existential threats most likely to end civilization on Earth in the foreseeable future — climate change, engineered pandemics, nuclear conflict, biodiversity collapse — are immediate relative to any realistic projection of a self-sustaining Martian colony. A genuinely self-sustaining Mars city, by most serious estimates, is generations away. The threats we are failing to address are not. If the backup civilization argument is meant to be taken literally as a response to existential risk, it would seem to require securing the primary civilization first — not as an alternative to Mars ambitions, but the sequencing matters considerably more than the discourse tends to acknowledge.
The governance question matters here too. The Mars colonization effort as it currently stands is being driven largely by the decisions of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals and their companies, operating mostly outside democratic institutions, international treaty frameworks, or any serious mechanism of public deliberation. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits national sovereignty claims over celestial bodies, but it was not designed to address private colonization by corporations operating under whatever regulatory minimums they can find. The choices being made now — when to go, at what pace, under what protocols — will shape the terms of Mars activity for a very long time. The fact that those choices are being made by a small group of people with specific and concentrated interests seems like something a more serious public conversation would address.
I want to resist the easy conclusion here — the “we should never go” position that treats any Mars ambition as inherently reckless or hubristic. There are real arguments for human Mars exploration. The science alone — the geology of ancient riverbeds, the evidence of a once-warmer world, the complex chemistry of the regolith — has produced discoveries with no parallel in the history of planetary science, and there are legitimate cases that humans on the surface could accelerate that science in ways robots fundamentally cannot. I find the impulse to go, the sheer ambition of it, genuinely compelling on some level I can’t entirely defend rationally.
But I think we owe it to the question — and possibly to whatever might be living on that planet — to stop treating the survival problem as a substitute for the ethical one. An honest accounting would start with the life question: invest seriously in determining whether Mars is biologically empty before a crewed mission departs, and treat a positive finding as a real constraint on what comes next rather than a footnote to manage. It would include meaningful international deliberation about who gets to make these decisions, and why the current answer to that question is “the people with the most rockets.” It would take the backup civilization argument seriously enough to notice what it actually implies about sequencing and urgency on Earth.
The conversation I had a few months ago was a good one. The engineer was genuinely thoughtful, and I learned things I didn’t know. But I’ve been bothered, in the time since, by how naturally we both moved through the technical questions and how completely we both skipped the other kind. The “can we?” problem is captivating in a way the “should we?” problem never quite is. It has cleaner edges. It has milestones. It announces itself as progress.
The harder question doesn’t do any of that. It just sits there, waiting for the conversation to slow down enough to make room for it.
The post We keep asking whether humans can survive on Mars and skipping the more important question of whether we should go at all appeared first on Space Daily.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has captured remarkable new images of dozens of giant dust devils swirling across an ancient canyon system on Mars. The images show more than 30 active whirlwinds moving through Mamers Valles, a vast network of valleys and canyons that formed billions of years ago. Dust devils on Mars are similar […]
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