A top official with the European Space Agency said it had no plans to send European astronauts to the newly completed Chinese space station, making it clear for the first time that the agency is no longer committed to working with China in human space flight in the near future.

With the successful launch of Artemis I behind it, NASA has been doubling down on efforts to make deep space travel – and it’s reported future trips to the Moon and Mars – easier to achieve. We’ve already reported on why the Space Launch System used for the Artemis mission isn’t sustainable, but now NASA has tested a new propulsion tech that could cut down on the fuel needed for those missions.

Nearly three years ago, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced its intent to develop a flyable nuclear thermal propulsion system. The goal was to develop more responsive control of spacecraft in Earth orbit, lunar orbit, and everywhere in between, giving the military greater operational freedom in these domains.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has been on Mars for almost two years and the high-tech contraption is still in good enough shape to get airborne.

A defunct NASA satellite is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere on Sunday evening (Jan. 8). The U.S. military predicts that the 5,400-pound (2,450 kilograms) Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) will crash back to its home planet Sunday around 6:40 p.m. EST (2340 GMT), plus or minus 17 hours, NASA officials said.

MIT scientists built a microwave-sized box that could let astronauts build parts in space that can’t be made on Earth.

At its "Destination: Space 2050" event in October Lockheed Martin (one of the largest American aerospace, advanced technologies and defense companies) shared its vision of a vibrant space economy in the year 2050. Here Lockheed Martin envisions a future on Mars with "power beaming, laser communications and robotic in-situ construction for a sustainable living and economic environment". Note company's conceptual Mars lander on the landing pad.

The Webb Space Telescope’s instruments have been in safe mode intermittently since December 7, but scientific operations resumed earlier this week, NASA said in a press release on Wednesday.

In its quest for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, the NASA's Perseverance Rover has unearthed several fascinating pieces of information about the Red Planet. It landed on the Jezero crater in 2020 and has been since exploring the region. In its latest discovery, the rover has found that the floor of the crater, which once hosted a lake billion years ago, is made up of volcanic rocks rather than sedimentary rocks, as believed earlier.

Nasa’s InSight lander has delivered what could be its final message from Mars, where it has been on a history-making mission to reveal the secrets of the Red Planet’s interior. In November the space agency warned the lander’s time may becoming to an end as dust continued to thicken and choke out the InSight’s power.

Massive asteroids could one day be home to future space colonizers. That's because a team of scientists from the University of Rochester published, what they call, a "wildly theoretical paper" outlining how we could one day use asteroids as massive city-sized space habitats.

NASA can now say what a dust devil sounds like on Mars. A NASA rover had its microphone on by chance when a whirling tower of red dust passed directly overhead, recording the racket. It is about 10 seconds of not only rumbling gusts of up to 40kph (25mph), but the pinging of hundreds of dust particles against the rover Perseverance. Scientists released the first-of-its-kind audio Tuesday.

What's a dust devil sound like on Mars? A NASA rover by chance had its microphone on when a whirling tower of red dust passed directly overhead, recording the racket. It's about 10 seconds of not only rumbling gusts of up to 25 mph, but the pinging of hundreds of dust particles against the rover Perseverance. Scientists released the first-of-its-kind audio Tuesday.

Human-built spacecraft have been exploring other planets for a full 60 years. On Dec. 14, 1962, a NASA spacecraft called Mariner 2 flew past Venus in the first-ever planetary flyby. The maneuver gave the spacecraft 42 minutes to observe what scientists now consider Earth's hellish twin — whose hidden surface at the time was thought to be lush, tropical jungle or swamp.

It's not off to the scrapyard quite yet for the historic aircraft that carried NASA's flying telescope. On Sept. 29, NASA and the German Space Agency (DLR) retired their joint Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft, a modified Boeing 747SP that lofted a 106-inch (2.7-meter) reflective telescope on overnight flights.

On a clear dark Queensland night in 1997, Brendan Downs was staring up into the cosmos alongside a band of other amateur astronomers. He trained his telescope on a galaxy called NGC 6769, floating more than 169m light years away, and took a picture. “I had a reference image that I had in a book at the time, and I visually compared the object on the screen to the object in the book,” he says. “I counted the number of stars I was looking at.”

Part of a Chinese rocket that launched the Yunhai 3 satellite last month is now a debris cloud of around 350 pieces. The Long March 6A rocket launched from Taiyuan, north China, on Nov. 11, successfully inserting the Yunhai 3 environmental monitoring satellite into its intended orbit.

NASA's Orion spacecraft zoomed behind the moon once more, providing stunning views again of Earth and our planetary neighbor, before firing up its engines Monday to set it on course for Earth in the final stages of the Artemis 1 mission.

The uncrewed Orion capsule of NASA's Artemis I mission sailed within 80 miles (130 km) of the lunar surface on Monday, achieving the closest approach to the moon for a spacecraft built to carry humans since Apollo 17 flew half a century ago.

The space elevator — a structure that reaches into the sky — might feel like a distant, farfetched concept, but it could be closer than we think. In an op-ed for Scientific American, Physics professor Stephen Cohen at Vanier College in Montreal, Quebec, said he believes the sci-fi-like technology could be a reality within "the next two or three decades."