The big delay can be traced to a decision Jeff Bezos made years ago. In the fall of 2017, shortly after he became chief executive officer of Blue Origin, Bob Smith received an extensive briefing on the state of the New Glenn rocket program. The projected launch date for the massive, reusable rocket was 2020, he was told.

Information on how to watch the landing of the Perseverance rover.

Last week, I was hard at work on what I thought would be an exclusive: Virgin Galactic had a close call on its most recent suborbital flight in February 2019, which helped to explain why they had gone 22 months before they tried to repeat the flight in December 2020.

A capsule carrying Perseverance will plunge through Mars's atmosphere (left) and a jetpack will fly the rover to a safe landing spot (right).

The next robot on Mars will touch down in a few weeks, and the views will be truly otherworldly.

SpaceX launched 60 more Starlink internet satellites to orbit this morning (Feb. 4) on a mission that notched a booster-reusability milestone for the company. A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped with the 60 broadband spacecraft lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 1:19 a.m. EST (0619 GMT).

On January 31, 1961, an intrepid chimpanzee called Ham was launched on a rocket from Cape Canaveral in the United States, and returned to Earth alive. In this process, he became the first hominin in space.

SpaceX announced plans Monday for the first all-civilian mission to space, a major milestone for private spaceflight and the nascent space tourism industry. The mission aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft will feature a four-person crew led by Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, a Pennsylvania-based payment processing company. The flight is expected to launch sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, according to SpaceX.

A recent NASA mission successfully demonstrated the performance of a non-toxic “green” propellant, creating opportunities for its use in a wide range of future spacecraft. NASA flew the Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) spacecraft as one of the payloads on the Space Test Program 2 mission that launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in June 2019. The spacecraft’s mission ended when it reentered in October 2020 after a series of deorbiting maneuvers.

Elon Musk is planning to soon launch the prototype of a vehicle that could be a game-changer for space travel. Starship, as it's known, will be a fully reusable transport system capable of carrying up to 100 people to the Red Planet. The founding ethos of Elon Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX was to make life multi-planetary. This is partly motivated by existential threats such as an asteroid collision big enough to wipe out humanity.

The US space agency (Nasa) is about to put its latest rover, Perseverance, on Mars. But we shouldn't forget that the existing robot, Curiosity, is still there and working well following its landing in equatorial Gale Crater back in 2012. Curiosity celebrates 3,000 Martian days, or Sols, on the surface of the Red Planet on Tuesday. The Mission Science Team has collected together a series of pictures that record some of the rover's major achievements.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket thundered to life and streaked away from Cape Canaveral on Thursday night, boosting a Turkish communications satellite into orbit to kick off another busy year for the California rocket company. The launching set the stage for the Monday return to Earth of an unpiloted Dragon cargo ship carrying research samples and equipment from the International Space Station and a presumed test flight by a prototype Starship upper stage from SpaceX's Boca Chica, Texas, launch site.

The Big Bang theory is a cosmological model describing how our current, observable universe came to be. But there is still much to learn about the concept, particularly when it comes to what occurred in those early microseconds after the big bang itself. What happened in that split second when our universe appeared? NASA wants to find out. To do so, the space agency has designed a space telescope that will be able to probe the universe for evidence of those earliest moments.

When the 60-year-old Arecibo Observatory collapsed in 2020, the crash didn’t just take down one of the world's preeminent radio telescopes, it also dealt a massive blow to the future of radio astronomy. Arecibo may have been old, but it also had unique capabilities that made it ideal for studying things like gravitational waves, as well as mapping the surfaces of asteroids as they slip by Earth.

Indonesia has put itself forward as a possible rocket launch site for Elon Musk's SpaceX venture. The south-east Asian country is already in talks with Mr Musk's Tesla about a possible electric battery partnership. According to Indonesia's Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investment Affairs, President Joko Widodo has been in discussions with Mr Musk.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says it has successfully grown its very own batch of radishes on the International Space Station (ISS). The successful project took place last month when researchers were able to grow six packs of radishes in space. This is great news for scientists attempting to produce vegetables and fruits in environments with low levels of gravity.

The International Space Station is now sporting a shiny new piece of hardware. On Monday (Dec. 21), the first commercial airlock ever sent to the International Space Station (ISS) was attached to its exterior. The new structure is a bell-shaped airlock that is designed to transfer payloads and other materials from inside the station out into the vacuum of space.

WSU researchers have used the ancient Japanese art of paper folding to possibly solve a key challenge for outer space travel—how to store and move fuel to rocket engines.

There was no clearer set of contrasts between how SpaceX and NASA approach launch vehicle development than the dueling tests the two performed in early December of Starship and Space Launch System, respectively. It was hard to miss the Dec. 9 test flight of SpaceX’s Starship SN8 prototype, the first time the vehicle flew more than a couple hundred meters off the pad. It soared into the Texas sky propelled by its three Raptor engines...

Voyager Space Holdings’ fourth acquisition in a little over a year since it was established is a majority stake in the parent company of Nanoracks, a space services and hardware specialist that has sent more than 1,000 missions to the International Space Station. “Nanoracks is a game changer for us in terms of adding some pretty significant capability in space,” Voyager Space Holdings CEO Dylan Taylor told CNBC.