Wednesday's scheduled launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard would be not only the first crewed launch to orbit by a private corporation but also a major upset in a new kind of space race.

The massive gas giant Jupiter could have potentially become a star in the earliest days of the solar system.

Future astronauts could make lunar buildings out of moon dust and pee. That’s the suggestion of chemist Anna-Lena Kjøniksen and her colleagues, who made a cement from urea — a major component of urine — and faux lunar soil. When humans take up long-term residence on other planets or the moon, they will need to pack light, in part because shipping materials from Earth is expensive. NASA has estimated that every pound of material sent into orbit around the Earth costs around $10,000.

Our sun has had close encounters with other stars in the past, and it’s due for a dangerously close one in the not-so-distant future.

The president and vice president will travel to Florida to witness the first launch of NASA astronauts on a private spacecraft.

Planets form from a disk of gas and dust that encircle a young star — the dusk particles only 1/50th the diameter of a single human hair. Gravitational forces pull the gas and dust together and, sometime between 1 to 10 million years later, all of that collision results in a planetary body.

An update of 50-year-old regulations has kickstarted research into the next generation of rockets. Powered by nuclear fission, these new systems could be the key to faster, safer exploration of space.

Earlier this year, an international team of scientists announced the second detection of a gravitational-wave signal from the collision of two neutron stars. The event, called GW190425, is puzzling: The combined mass of the two neutron stars is greater than any other observed binary neutron star system. The combined mass is 3.4 times the mass of our sun.

Hyperspace, here we come!

An unseen object—probably a black hole—orbits with two normal stars in our cosmic neighborhood.

Let's play a game of bad news, good news, bad news. Bad news first: 2020. Literally all of it. Every second. Every waking moment of 2020. It's grim, I know. Bushfires, pandemic, murder hornets. When will it end? But the good news: Apparently, scientists have discovered a parallel universe, just like our own. It's a little different to ours though. In this mirror world, time runs backward. It's like a Benjamin Button universe. That means they're heading back to 2019, the good ol' days, right?

On Saturday, the US Air Force is expected to launch its secret space plane, X-37B, for a long-duration mission in low Earth orbit. The robotic orbiter looks like a smaller version of the space shuttle and has spent nearly eight of the past 10 years in space conducting classified experiments for the military. Almost nothing is known about what X-37B does up there, but ahead of its sixth launch the Air Force gave some rare details about its cargo.

An amateur astronomer’s discovery kicked off a Space Age detective story.

The 20-ton object, part of a Chinese rocket, is one of the largest ever to fall uncontrolled from space

An amateur astronomer’s discovery kicked off a Space Age detective story.

The crystal clear image of Jupiter exists thanks to NASA's Hubble telescope alongside the Juno space probe orbiting the planet, and it is a vision.

An international team of astrophysicists have discovered the key to unlocking the secret song inside a mysterious group of pulsating stars. Most stars pulsate because waves such as sound waves are trapped within them, unable to escape into the vacuum of space and making the cosmic objects resonate like musical instruments.

The Hawaii-based Gemini telescope produces a super-sharp picture of the gas giant in the infrared.

The sun might be a magnetic slacker. A census of stars similar to the sun shows that our own star is less magnetically active than others of its kind, astrophysicists report in the May 1 Science. The result could support the idea that the sun is in a “midlife crisis,” transitioning into a quieter phase of life. Or, alternatively, it could mean that the sun has capacity for much more magnetic oomph than it’s shown in the past.

3.5 billion light years from Earth — a significant chunk of the way across the visible Universe — lies a monster. It's called OJ287, and it's an active galaxy, one with a tremendous amount of energy blasting out of its nucleus. It's classified as a blazar, one of the most luminous objects in the Universe, with energy pouring out of it across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves all the way up to high-energy gamma rays.