Leonard David

Beastly explorers

On wings of light - Tiny spacecraft are flying through the atmosphere on beams of laser light. Leonard David reports on the start of a new age of cleaner, cheaper space flight

Escape from Mars

Son of Hubble - NASA's replacement for its hugely successful space telescope will have to weigh less, cost less and peer deeper into the Universe than ever before. Leonard David looks at the options

Stardust to catch a comet by the tail

The telescope that flies

Freefall to Jupiter

Technology

Technology: Spacecraft designers reinvent the wheel

The nuts and bolts of flops in space: Recent months have seen a spate of high-profile satellite failures. In a number of these cases, the breakdowns were not in complex electronics or computers but simple mechanics