Editorial Team

Space War Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space War Editorial Team produces Space War's coverage of military space and defense technology. We report on missile defense and space-based systems, nuclear weapons and arms control, drones and directed-energy weapons, and the great-power competition shaping security beyond Earth. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space War takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Nukewars

In 1961, a Soviet test over Novaya Zemlya detonated a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb called Tsar Bomba whose mushroom cloud reached 64 kilometres into the sky and whose flash was visible from roughly 1,000 kilometres away, still the largest explosion humans have ever produced

On 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb over Novaya Zemlya — a mushroom cloud that climbed 64 kilometres and a flash visible 1,000 kilometres away. More than six decades later, Tsar Bomba is still the largest explosion humans have ever produced.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

A tiny jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp when injured or starving, effectively restarting its life cycle and making it one of the only known animals with no fixed lifespan

The tiny Mediterranean jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can reverse its own life cycle — dissolving its adult body and reassembling as a juvenile polyp when injured or starving. A look at the biology of the only known animal that can, in principle, live forever.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

Why did a wealthy delta nation deliberately breach its own dykes and pay farmers to let the rivers flood their fields, after four centuries of building the walls ever higher?

After the near-miss floods of 1993 and 1995, the Netherlands spent €2.3 billion on Room for the River — deliberately widening channels, relocating dykes, and paying farmers to accept seasonal flooding on 30 sites, reversing four centuries of hydraulic doctrine.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

The USS Nautilus became the first submarine to cross beneath the North Pole in August 1958, travelling 2,945 kilometres under the Arctic ice cap on a single reactor core without surfacing

On August 3, 1958, the USS Nautilus became the first vessel to reach the North Pole by water, sliding beneath the polar ice cap on nuclear power and proving that submarines no longer needed the surface at all.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

How did a temple complex in southern Anatolia get built roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge by people who had neither metal tools nor the wheel?

The riddle of Göbekli Tepe: how did hunter-gatherers move and erect massive stone pillars with nothing but flint and determination, millennia before civilization itself took root.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

How did a single quaking aspen colony in the mountain west spread across roughly 106 acres, weigh about 6,000 tonnes and share one root system, making it possibly the heaviest living organism on Earth?

Pando, a single male quaking aspen in Utah's Fishlake National Forest, covers 106 acres, weighs about 6,000 tonnes, and consists of roughly 47,000 genetically identical trunks sharing one root system — likely the heaviest living organism on Earth.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

What happened when a physician in 1854 mapped 578 cholera deaths onto a London street grid and traced the entire outbreak to a single wooden pump handle?

In September 1854, physician John Snow mapped 578 cholera deaths onto the streets of Soho and traced them to a single contaminated water pump — an act that founded modern epidemiology and still shapes how outbreaks are tracked today.

Jul 28, 2026

Nukewars

In 1859, a solar storm now called the Carrington Event induced currents so strong in telegraph lines that operators disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages powered by the aurora alone, with sparks jumping from the keys to their fingers

On September 2, 1859, the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded induced currents so powerful in telegraph lines that operators across North America disconnected their batteries and kept working — powered entirely by the aurora — while sparks leapt from keys to their fingers.

Jul 27, 2026

Nukewars

How did a desert nation with almost no freshwater rivers grow its agricultural output more than tenfold while cutting the water used to produce each crop, mostly by rethinking a black plastic tube?

A black plastic tube with tiny holes became the difference between agricultural abundance and scarcity in one of the world's driest regions.

Jul 27, 2026

Nukewars

The Soviet Venera 13 probe survived 127 minutes on the surface of Venus in 1982, transmitting colour photographs of orange rock through an atmosphere hot enough to melt lead before the pressure crushed its electronics into silence

In March 1982, the Soviet Venera 13 lander survived 127 minutes on Venus — nearly four times its design life — long enough to return colour panoramas of orange-lit basalt and drill a sample of alkaline rock before the pressure and 855-degree heat killed it.

Jul 27, 2026

Nasa

The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth and runs on less power than a household kettle — and its deployment sequence had 344 single points of failure, any one of which could have ended the mission

A machine that had to execute hundreds of flawless maneuvers in the vacuum of space—with no possibility of repair—is now our window into the cosmos's deepest past.

Jul 26, 2026

Nasa

Voyager 1 is now so far from Earth that a signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it — so when engineers send a command, they can wait nearly two days to know whether the spacecraft responded

The vast distances that once defined deep space exploration have become a practical engineering problem: even at light speed, a simple yes-or-no answer from Voyager 1 now takes nearly two days.

Jul 25, 2026

Nasa

In 1990, after years of lobbying by Carl Sagan, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 6 billion kilometres away and photographed Earth as a pale blue speck smaller than a single pixel — an image NASA had repeatedly resisted because it offered little scientific value, but that became one of the most famous photographs ever taken.

A scientist's plea transformed NASA's resistance into humanity's most humbling self-portrait—proof that the greatest discoveries sometimes require looking backward.

Jul 24, 2026

Nukewars

What happened when engineers terraced a 640,000 square kilometre plateau whose yellow silt had been choking the world’s muddiest river for millennia, and the sediment load fell by nearly 90 percent within two decades?

On China's Loess Plateau, two decades of terracing, tree planting, and check dams cut the Yellow River's sediment load by close to 85 percent — reshaping the world's muddiest river, its delta, and the water balance of a region the size of France.

Jul 22, 2026

Nukewars

At around 30 years old, the human spinal discs begin losing water and compressing under gravity, shortening most people by about 1 centimetre per decade. On the International Space Station, astronauts float free of that load and grow up to 5 centimetres taller within weeks

From about age 30, the water-rich discs between human vertebrae start to dry out, shortening most people by roughly a centimetre per decade. In orbit, freed from gravity, astronauts grow up to 5 centimetres taller — and Russian engineers have to remould their Soyuz landing seats to fit.

Jul 22, 2026

Uncategorized

When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated

For forty-five years, the world was told the wrong story about the death of a small dog in space.

Jul 14, 2026