Space shuttle lessons: Backtracks can create breakthroughs
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 10-Dec-2025 15:11 ET (10-Dec-2025 20:11 GMT/UTC)
In a new study, Francisco Polidoro Jr., professor of management at Texas McCombs, finds present-day insights in an old innovation story: how NASA developed its space shuttles, which flew from 1981 to 2011. The lessons can inform today's rocketeers and anyone looking for breakthroughs cutting-edge fields, from phones to pharmaceuticals.
Rather than a straightforward sequence, NASA used a meandering knowledge-building process, he finds. That process allowed it to systematically explore rocket features, both individually and together.
“With breakthrough inventions, the number of combinations of possible features quickly explodes, and you just can’t test all of them,” Polidoro says. “It has to be a much more selective search process.”
Recently reported methane signatures detected by the James Webb Space Telescope could be a hint to it potentially harboring life, but a University of Arizona researcher urges caution. Sukrit Ranjan argues that it is not clear whether TRAPPIST-1e has an atmosphere at all and whether the methane signature could originate from its host star instead.
High up in the earth’s orbit, millions of human-made objects large and small are flying at speeds of over 15,000 miles per hour. The objects, which range from inactive satellites to fragments of equipment resulting from explosions or collisions of previously launched rockets, are space debris, colloquially referred to as space junk. No matter the size, all of them create danger for operational satellites and spacecraft. Cleaning up space junk is technologically challenging and expensive—and there are currently no incentives for countries or private companies to do so. Without binding international regulations or an enforceable "polluter pays” principle with consequences for non-compliance, the circumstances have led to a "cosmic free-for-all." A new study proposes a way to fix this problem.
Using sound measurements from NASA’s Mars missions to the best extent possible requires an accurate understanding of how sound propagates on the red planet. Focusing on the Jezero crater, the 2021 landing and exploration site of NASA’s Perseverance rover and its attached Ingenuity helicopter, Charlie Zheng and Hayden Baird have simulated how sound moves through and scatters off the region’s complex terrains, whether it comes from a moving or stationary source. They hope their model will help identify signals and patterns that indicate specific Martian atmospheric events.
In the leading model of cosmology, most of the universe is invisible: a combined 95 percent is made of dark matter and dark energy. Exactly what these dark components are remains a mystery, but they have a tremendous impact on our universe, with dark matter exerting a gravitational pull and dark energy driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. What scientists know about dark matter and dark energy comes from observing their effects on the visible universe. Astrophysicists from the University of Chicago measured those effects on a new patch of sky to illuminate the invisible cosmos.
As disruptions to GPS services increase globally, radio signals from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites could become reliable navigation alternatives, a new study suggests.