After 53 years working with type, Pat Lightizer got the ultimate retirement gift: her own font.

The commander and pilot of NASA's Artemis II mission have gained a new distinction five months after splashing down from the Moon: They're not fully retiring from the space agency.

Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover are the first astronauts to join NASA's emeritus program, enabling them to continue to support the work being done at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They will remain available to train and mentor the current workforce while still being able to pursue employment and opportunities outside of NASA.

"I have asked NASA ... to not use the term 'retire' as much, but technically emeritus is a retirement program," Glover told collectSPACE.com on Wednesday. "It's something we have typically done for scientists when they have groundbreaking research, and they want to go back to academia to teach or to research and publish."

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© NASA/Kim Shiflett

Sixty years after television audiences first tuned in to see the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, an astronaut on board the International Space Station has paid tribute to Star Trek by flying the badge of the franchise's latest fictional captain.

Expedition 75 flight engineer Sophie Adenot with European Space Agency (ESA) donned the Delta badge originally worn by actor Anson Mount for a video recorded from aboard the space station. Mount portrays Christoper Pike in the Paramount+ streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Paramount and ESA both released the clip on their Instagram feeds.

"For 60 years, Star Trek has brought us stories of friendship and exploration. I'm wearing Captain Pike's badge aboard the ISS in celebration of continuing the real world work of science and exploration," said Adenot. "For me, exploration and science are about curiosity and cooperation daring to go a little farther together, learning from what we discover and build, and turning that knowledge into a better future for everyone."

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The ampersand is nearly 2,000 years old. yet designers still can’t agree on what it should look like. From ancient Roman *et* to hundreds of wildly different & designs, the story behind typography’s favorite squiggle is stranger than you might expect.

The first Japanese citizen to launch into space, Toyohiro Akiyama was also the first commercially sponsored cosmonaut and the world's first journalist to file reports while on a spaceflight.

Akiyama, 84, died last Wednesday, August 26, of lower gastrointestinal bleeding, news agencies in Japan reported. A funeral was held with his close relatives in attendance.

As a correspondent for the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Akiyama was chosen out of his 162 fellow employees who applied to fly to space in celebration of the network's 40th anniversary. He trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, located outside of Moscow, and was assigned to the Soyuz TM-11 crew.

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© Roscosmos

For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look.

The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon. The Artemis design retains nods to what made the "white rocket" immediately recognizable, but adds a new colorway and painted graphics to make clear where NASA is headed.

"This new 'Artemis' livery has a black and white paint scheme with blue and red stripes that separate those two paint schemes," said Sean Brady, who proposed and designed the new livery while serving as the T-38 project pilot in NASA's Aircraft Operations Division (AOD), part of the Flight Operations Directorate at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The Artemis program logo in the back and a picture of the Moon is on the left and right side of the rear fuselage."

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© NASA/James Blair

September 11, 2001, will be remembered as one of the darkest days in American history. As the 25th anniversary approaches, National Geographic, in collaboration with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, is marking the occasion with a new documentary miniseries: 9/11: Reunited. The three-episode series revisits the personal stories of several survivors of the terrorist attacks, with a twist: It reunites people whose paths crossed at that time to celebrate the bonds they formed 25 years ago.

Director Julian Jones was a producer on NatGeo's Emmy-winning 2021 documentary miniseries 9/11: One Day in America. The experience inspired him to return to direct 9/11: Reunited. "What emerged for me [while making the 2021 documentary] was a sense of people showing up for each other, a selflessness and everyday heroism," Jones told Ars. As the 25th anniversary of the attacks approached, he and National Geographic decided to commemorate the milestone with a documentary series focused on that aspect.

"We wanted to bring people together to offer gratitude to each other, to answer unanswered questions, to talk about things that maybe they weren't ready to talk about until now, and also to remember their fallen comrades or friends," said Jones. "After 25 years, who do they want to meet? What questions have they got? I think we also wanted to tell the story of what many in the 9/11 community call 9/12, that's the rest of your lives—the journey, and in many cases, the psychological and physical struggles."

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© AP Photo/Mark Lennihan/FILE

As Virgin Galactic nears christening the first of its next-generation spaceship designed to launch customers on suborbital flights, it still is missing a key component—a name.

The self-described "commercial spaceline," which was founded by British tycoon Richard Branson, has turned to the public to vote on what to call the new vehicle. The spaceplane will be a member of Virgin Galactic's Delta-class fleet, succeeding SpaceShipTwo, which carried Branson and 31 others on 12 short hops above the US-defined boundary between Earth and space.

"You can vote for one of four finalist names for a spaceship that will join Virgin Galactic's growing fleet and the next chapter in our journey to expand access to space," the company announced on its website on August 11. "Name a Virgin Galactic spaceship, shape a piece of spaceflight history."

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© Virgin Galactic

For 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has looked out into the Universe. Now, Lego is inviting builders to look inward with its latest model of the orbiting observatory.

The new Lego Icons Hubble Space Telescope (set no. 11382) was released on August 1 for $140 at the toy company's stores and its online shop. The 1,252-piece kit builds a 15-inch-long (38-cm) desktop model that is about twice as large as the previously released Lego Hubble models.

The Icons Hubble is the first to be sized in comparison to a Lego minifigure, such that the included astronaut provides a sense of scale for the telescope.

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© LEGO

A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday.

What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to where the two items were 57 years ago—lifting off aboard NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft on humanity's first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. More than flown odds and ends, one was the problem that almost stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, and the other was the simple solution to saving the mission.

"Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?" radioed Aldrin to Mission Control after realizing he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, beginning their trip back to Earth. "The reason I'm asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off. I think we can push it back in again. I'm not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though."

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© Sotheby's

Back in 2024, we reported on the discovery of the Quest shipwreck, the polar exploration vessel that served Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his last voyage. Shackleton died before reaching their destination, and the ship sank in 1962. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) has now released the first images of the wreck more than 60 years after it sank, published in Canadian Geographic magazine.

Shackleton, of course, is most famous for his ill-fated voyage on the Endurance, which became trapped in sea ice in 1914 and sank. Shackleton and his crew defied the odds and survived. (The Endurance shipwreck was finally found in 2022.) By the time Shackleton returned to England, the country was embroiled in World War I, and many of his men enlisted. Shackleton was considered too old for active service. He was also deeply in debt from the Endurance expedition, earning a living on the lecture circuit. But he still dreamed of making another expedition to the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to explore the Beaufort Sea. He got funding from an old school chum, John Quillier Rowett.

Shackleton purchased a wooden Norwegian whaler, Foca I, which his wife Emily renamed Quest. When the Canadian government withdrew its support, the mission shifted back to the Antarctic, and the Quest received an extensive retrofit. The improvements included a new deckhouse, a heated crow’s nest, a wireless set, and an odograph for tracing and charting the route automatically, as well as a Lucas deep-sea sounding machine, a large and pricey collection of cameras and photographic equipment, and even a small airplane.

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© YouTube/Canadian Geographic

Wally Funk, who in 2021 became the oldest woman to fly into space—60 years after she and 12 other women sought the same opportunity as NASA's original astronauts—died on Wednesday at 87 years old.

Funk was the last living member of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs, or as they were later dubbed by the media, the Mercury 13), a group of women pilots who volunteered to go through the same physical and psychological tests as the United States' first spacemen.

Despite performing as well or better than their male counterparts, though, the Lovelace Woman in Space Program was conducted separately from NASA, and the space agency required that its astronauts be test pilots with jet time. The US military, however, did not accept women into its flight programs.

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© Blue Origin

Did you know that the space shuttle once launched the Statue of Liberty into space?

In fact, there were two "Lady Liberties" on board Discovery when it lifted off on its fourth flight in April 1985. To be fair, each statue was only 15 inches tall (38.1 centimeters), but they were also each made of copper that was removed from the full-size statue during its then-still-ongoing restoration.

After the weeklong STS-51D mission was over, one of the space-flown statues was placed on display, and the other was melted down to create copper seals, which were then sold to the public by the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Centennial Commission.

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Michael Collins looked down at his watch.

The Apollo 11 astronaut had already beaten the original schedule for the opening of the National Air and Space Museum by three days, but no one would remember that if these final 36 minutes didn't go perfectly.

President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller took 35 seconds to find their seats on the red, white, and blue bunting-lined outdoor stage. The flyover by the Thunderbirds was quick enough. At any other event, it would have been the only time-dependent concern of the day.

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© Smithsonian/collectSPACE.com

The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone's location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.

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From a clunky grey box on a 1995 dial-up screen to the invisible, AI-driven "zero-click" purchases of 2026, the "Buy" button has evolved into a seamless biometric handshake. We’ve spent three decades systematically deleting the "friction of thought," turning the entire physical world into a clickable, autonomous storefront.

The 90s web was loud, ugly, and alive — and that’s exactly why we miss it. Before design systems and AI templates, every page had a pulse and a personality. Today’s web might be faster, but it lost its soul — and maybe it’s time we brought back a little chaos.

Read the book, Typographic Firsts

Slip cover, dust cover, or dust jacket — whatever you call it, and whether you’re the type to trash or treasure them — have you ever wondered what purpose they serve and when they were invented? In Europe, the first printed books were typically sold without covers! Printers were not also […]

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Read the book, Typographic Firsts

When ancient Egyptians embalmed their dead, organs were removed from the body. The brain, considered useless, was disposed of, while the stomach, liver, intestines, and lungs were preserved separately in boxes or canopic jars. However, the heart, considered the seat of intelligence, was thought to be essential in the afterlife […]

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