I. “Mars One has been my full-time job for almost four and a half years now,” says Bas Lansdorp, the company’s cofounder and CEO. His thick Dutch accent weighs on his learned English, traveling across the Internet via Google Voice from a hotel room in Rome. His accent yields succinct, tame sentences that sound like the rehearsed ultimatums of a villain’s monologue.

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft will reach a major milestone June 23, when it completes its 60,000th orbit since arriving at the Red Planet in 2001.

The sheer beauty of the planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacreous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal.

The greatest obstacle has most certainly been politics.

The Pentagon is working on technology that will allow it to engineer a new organism within a day of it being found in the wild. It’s no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. If you’re in the excitement camp, however, here’s a nugget for you: DARPA believes that it's on the way to...

What will NASA be up to by 2030? The space agency (and even President Barack Obama) hopes it will be close to launching a manned mission to the surface of Mars. But, before that's possible, there's a whole lot of puzzle pieces to fit together. In fact, some of those pieces haven't even been invented yet. But NASA is already laying the groundwork. Dig through the agency's roadmap (a dense collection of science-heavy documents) and you can put together...

Innovation could lead to a flier in 2022-24.

If we're planning to transform Mars’ atmosphere, then why don’t we do the same to combat climate change? NASA scientist and researcher Chris McKay tells us we're actually closer than we'd thought.

NASA's Opportunity rover has 'run' a science marathon (and then some!) on the Red Planet, traveling over 26.2 miles. The Mars Exploration Rover team compiled ‘Hazcam’ imagery (2004 - 2015), combined with terrain vibration data, odometer readings and made a map to track the journey. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars Trek is a NASA web-based portal for exploration of Mars. This portal showcases data collected by NASA at various landing sites and features an easy-to-use browsing tool that provides layering and viewing of high resolution data.

Doesn't look much different than a desert on Earth.

As Curiosity works its way up Mount Sharp on Mars, studying rock and soil samples, it’s also helping scientists observe sunspots on the far side of the Sun.

Visiting Mars might sound like science fiction, but plenty of dreamers think it might soon be possible.

Traveling to the Moon just got a whole lot cheaper. A NASA-funded study (PDF) has found that the cost of lunar missions could be reduced by a factor of 10 using a number of techniques – and it could also have implications for getting humans to Mars. The extensive NexGen Space study by the National Space Society (NSS) and the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF) said that partnerships with private companies could return humans to the Moon for $10 billion...

Welcome to the future of space exploration. 

Since the Curiosity Rover - NASA's robot explorer on the surface of Mars - has come back online, images have begun to be transmitted back to Earth. The grainy, black-and-white images are being made freely available online for all to see. It really does show you how far technology has come that we're able to get clear images from Mars and analyse them for ourselves.

After watching a two hour debate on the feasibility of the Mars One mission last night, I think I finally understand its problem. It’s not that the company is broke. It’s that we don’t yet have the technology to sustain human life on Mars, and Mars One still won’t admit it.

Andy Weir’s “The Martian” has become a wildly popular science fiction book. It tells the story of Mark Watney: a brilliant and sarcastic NASA astronaut who gets stranded on the surface of Mars and must improvise and innovate to survive.

Mars enthusiasts around the world can participate in NASA’s journey to Mars by adding their names to a silicon microchip headed to the Red Planet aboard NASA's InSight Mars lander, scheduled to launch next year.

A potential advancement in the United States’ electric propulsion capability for the future of spaceflight is being underscored by a new NASA contract to support work on the VASIMR project - short for the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket.