Yesterday, Jeff Bezos — the founder and CEO of Amazon, and, not incidentally, Blue Origin — took a ride into space along with three other people inside the capsule of a New Shepard rocket.

Last weekend, Richard Branson described his bounce up to low-earth orbit as making space “more accessible to all.” It’s laughably ironic for a billionaire to co-opt the language of inclusivity to describe the privatization of space flight. However, mainstream media shared the speech far and wide, largely uncritically, with few journalists pointing out that this carnival ride for the uber-rich was funded with over $200 million dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

The iconic but elderly Hubble Space Telescope appears to have been resurrected again after a shutdown of more than a month following a computer glitch. Science has learned that following a switch from the operating payload control computer to a backup device over the past 24 hours, Hubble’s operators have re-established communications with all the telescope’s instruments and plan to return them to normal operations today.

Jeff Bezos' space venture Blue Origin on Thursday revealed that 18-year-old Oliver Daemen will fly in place of the still anonymous auction winner.

Last week, CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that the company plans to build an engine known as “Raptor 2.” This would be a more powerful version of the Raptor engine, currently being used for the under-development Starship vehicle.

Rockets may help humanity explore the solar system in more ways than one. Three companies — Masten Space Systems, Lunar Outpost and Honeybee Robotics — are developing a new system that would use rockets to mine water ice on the moon.

As a tourist destination, the Moon doesn’t have a lot to offer: no beaches, no museums, no oxygen. On the other hand, it does have the virtue of being the Moon. The fucking Moon! That’s reason enough, really, to justify a trip, but try booking a flight and you’ll quickly run into obstacles. You’ll be told that NASA more or less dismantled its sending-people-to-the-Moon capacities decades ago and is only now building them back up. You’ll be told that even if, somehow, Moon tourism were made possible, it would be affordable only to the super-rich.

The European Space Agency hopes to hire and launch the world's first physically disabled astronaut and several hundred would-be para-astronauts have already applied for the role, ESA head Josef Aschbacher told Reuters on Friday.

Where are you now, Mars Ingenuity helicopter? While it seems like the little chopper has been quiet, it turns out that Ingenuity has aced more of its flights -- and even got a software update to fix an annoying issue that impacted some of its previous outings.

Virgin Galactic has received the go ahead from aviation regulators to fly passengers to space. The company announced today that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has updated its existing commercial space transportation operator license, which it has held since 2016. Virgin Galactic said the decision makes it the first spaceline to secure permission to fly customers.

SpaceX is unlikely to meet its July deadline for performing the first ever orbital flight of its Mars-bound Starship rocket, according to reports. Elon Musk’s space firm said earlier this year that the milestone launch would take place “by July”, in order to keep up with a rigorous testing schedule aimed at achieving the technology billionaire’s ambition of reaching Mars this decade.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been hit with computer trouble, with all astronomical viewing halted, NASA said Wednesday. The orbiting observatory has been idle since Sunday when a 1980s-era computer that controls the science instruments shut down, possibly because of a bad memory board.

NASA is troubleshooting a memory problem that put the telescope's instruments into safe mode and slowed its science roll. The Hubble Space Telescope has spent over three decades scanning the cosmos, bringing us glorious images and data from our universe. The spacecraft is showing its age. The Hubble team is now troubleshooting a problem with the telescope's payload computer -- a piece of hardware built in the 1980s -- that controls its science instruments.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, originally proposed in the 1990s, is finally slated to launch later this year: at the end of October, 2021. In many ways, it’s the successor telescope to Hubble, capable of showing us the Universe beyond our current limits. Not only will James Webb be the largest telescope ever sent to space, capable of gathering more light and achieving superior resolution compared with any prior space-based observatory, but it will be specialized for near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths, allowing it to peer through the gas and dust that obscures the views of our other cutting-edge telescopes.

Every billionaire needs something to spend their fortunes on. For Howard Hughes, it was the Spruce Goose; for Roman Abramovich, it’s Chelsea FC. And for the current crop of tech moguls, it’s space. Jeff Bezos has led the charge. He founded his company, Blue Origin, in 2000, after a conversation with his friend, the science fiction author Neal Stephenson. And in July, 21 years later, the investment will pay off...

If you want to explore the outer solar system, you need plutonium. Deep inside some of NASA's most venerable space probes lie plutonium-filled hearts beating to warm and power the robots, which include the twin Voyager spacecraft, Cassini before its daring plunge through Saturn's rings and New Horizons trekking through the rubble of the Kuiper Belt.

SpaceX launched thousands of tiny sea creatures to the International Space Station on Thursday, along with a plaque-fighting toothpaste experiment and powerful solar panels. The 7,300-pound (3,300-kilogram) shipment — which also includes fresh lemons, onions, avocados and cherry tomatoes for the station’s seven astronauts — should arrive Saturday.

As part of last week's federal budget rollout, a process during which the White House proposes funding levels for fiscal year 2022, the US Air Force released its "justification book" to compare its current request to past budget data. The 462-page book contains a lot of information about how the Air Force spends its approximately $200 billion budget.

For months, NASA had strongly suggested that it would select two companies for the next phase of its Human Landing System (HLS) program. Just as with the commercial cargo and crew programs, agency officials said, having two companies develop and demonstrate lunar landers would provide redundancy and ensure NASA was getting the best deal.

The platform is intended to be used as a launch and landing platform for the SpaceX Starship, a spacecraft that Musk intends to send to Mars.