SpaceX chief Elon Musk has tweeted two photos that give us a peek into the company's Martian dreams. One of the images shows the BFR, the massive rocket SpaceX is developing for deep space missions, while the other shows the BFR and what he called "Mars Base Alpha." It's no secret that the private space corporation wants to build a human settlement on the red planet. Back in 2017, it announced its plans to launch two BFR cargo missions to Mars by 2022 to prepare for the arrival of the first Martian settlers by 2024. Before any of that can happen, though, SpaceX has to be able to start testing its BFR system in the first half of 2019.

On a Monday night filled with emotion as much as engineering, one of the most poignant moments came toward the end of the program at SpaceX's rocket factory in California. The company's founder, Elon Musk, choked up as he described the financial contribution from a Japanese businessman, Yusaku Maezawa, to his Big Falcon Rocket project. "I’ll tell you, it’s done a lot to restore my faith in humanity," Musk said, seated in front of the end of a Falcon 9 rocket and its nine engines.

SpaceX revealed Monday that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be its first space tourist. Maezawa has chartered a flight aboard the company's Big Falcon Rocket, which is still being developed, for a slingshot trip around the Moon as soon as 2023. He's planning to take six to eight artists with him on the mission free of charge.

Everyone's talking about the Moon. It'll be 50 years this Christmas since Apollo 8 first flew to the Moon – with the crew taking the famous Earthrise photos – and we're close to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's first moon landing and moonwalk for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Can we go back? Should we go back? NASA knows we probably have to go back, if only to use the Moon as an off-Earth stepping stone to enable deeper solar system exploration missions, so it's spent years trying to create a nuclear reactor that can be operated there.

SpaceX has signed its first customer to fly on the company’s huge new rocket, the BFR, the company says. The passenger will fly on the monster ship around the Moon, though there are no details yet regarding when the trip will happen. SpaceX says it will announce who is flying — and why — on Monday, September 17th. The BFR, or the Big Falcon Rocket, is the giant rocket that SpaceX is currently developing to send humans to the Moon and Mars. The BFR design, presentated by CEO Elon Musk last year, consists of a combined rocket and spaceship, called the BFS for Big Falcon Spaceship.

Speaking on a panel titled “Future of Space” at a 2018 conference for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) 60th anniversary, SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell reportedly confirmed that SpaceX is still targeting integrated BFR tests in 2019, in the form of hops with the next-gen rocket’s upper stage (known as BFS).

According to two recently deleted job postings on the internet, where nothing can ever really be deleted, Amazon Web Services is hiring technical engineers to develop cloud services for satellites and “space-based systems.” TJI Research spotted the listings, which called for a software engineer and product manager to “to help innovate and disrupt the launch, satellite and space world with new AWS products, services and features,” according to one of the job ads, for “a new AWS service that will have a historic impact.”

Unwilling to go quietly into that good night, the Kepler Space Telescope is once again gathering scientific data—despite a malfunctioning thruster and painfully low levels of fuel. With the $600 million Kepler Space Telescope high atop our dead pool lists, this brief report published yesterday by NASA comes as a rather pleasant and unexpected surprise...

Mystery continues to swirl around a hole found in the outside of the International Space Station. Last week, Nasa and the Russian space agency scrambled to fix a leak in the floating laboratory that was causing air to slowly rush out of the space station. The crew on board eventually plugged up the gap with epoxy, fixing the problem at least temporarily.

ThumbSat aims to make access to space for the scientific community a much more affordable endeavor.

Spacewalks have become a regular feature of life in the International Space Station, but they are still a risky adventure. By Jason Caffrey.

For the second time in less than three years, a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station has been cut short because of a water leak in an astronaut's helmet. A spacewalk involving NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and British colleague Tim Peake was called off about 2 hours early today (Jan. 15) when Kopra noticed some water inside his helmet.

Astronaut ice cream — did it really fly? Vox's Phil Edwards investigates, with the help of the Smithsonian and an astronaut.

There are only few places in the world where rockets lift off. That short list will get a little longer on Tuesday, when Russia plans to open a new gleaming gateway to orbit. The Vostochny (Eastern) Cosmodrome should officially enter service with the launch of a Soyuz rocket scheduled for 10:01 p.m. EDT on April 26. The first mission from a brand new launch pad will deliver three satellites into the Earth's orbit—and it could deliver much more than that.

SpaceX has successfully landed another Falcon 9 rocket after launching the vehicle into space this evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Shortly after takeoff, the vehicle touched down at SpaceX’s Landing Complex 1 — a ground-based landing site that the company leases at the Cape. It marks the second time SpaceX has pulled off this type of ground landing, and the fifth time SpaceX has recovered one of its rockets post-launch. The feat was accomplished a few minutes before the rocket's second stage successfully put the company's Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will rendezvous with the International Space Station later this week.

NASA is working on sending a submarine into the depths of the Kraken Mare — the largest ocean on Saturn’s moon Titan. There are really two big reasons why we want to go to Titan. Number one: “to determine if hydrocarbon based life is possible on Titan,” said Jason Hartwig, a NASA cryogenics engineer, in a presentation at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium in Raleigh on Wednesday.

The so-called EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around in an enclosed chamber, and uses only solar power - and now a Nasa lab is set to reveal its findings on the technology.

New results on the controversial, “impossible” EmDrive propulsion system could be soon published in a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, according to credible rumors. “It is my understanding that Eaglework’s new paper has been today accepted for publication in a peer-review journal, where it will be published,” said high-reputation poster José Rodal, Ph.D, on the NasaSpaceFlight forum, which is often the primary source of updates for all things EmDrive. “Congratulations to the Eagleworks team!” The poster added that the sources of the leak are not employed by NASA.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos says the big, re-usable rocket he has been developing inside his Blue Origin space company will be called New Glenn, after John Glenn.

SpaceX’s recent Falcon 9 explosion seems to have been caused by a breach in the "cryogenic helium system" of the vehicle's upper oxygen tank, according to an update from the company. However, SpaceX says the accident is not connected to last year's Falcon 9 explosion, when a rocket disintegrated en route to the International Space Station. On September 1st, one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida as the vehicle was being fueled in preparation for a static fire test.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has outlined his highly ambitious vision for manned missions to Mars, which he said could begin as soon as 2022 – three years sooner than his previous estimates. However, the question of how such extravagantly expensive missions would be funded remains largely in the dark.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather's shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. This was years before we'd set foot on the moon. Decades before we'd land a rover on Mars. A generation before photos from the International Space Station would show up in our social media feeds.

The European Space Agency has teamed up with Russia's Roscosmos program to land a spacecraft on Mars on Wednesday, October 19. If they stick the landing, they’ll join NASA as the only space agencies in history to successfully land a spacecraft on Mars (minus the failed Mars 3 probe). And that will only be the beginning - the lander will then start a whole new quest to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

Why blow billions of dollars on space exploration when billions of people are living in poverty here on Earth? You’ve likely heard the justifications. The space program brings us useful innovations and inventions. Space exploration delivers perspective, inspiration, and understanding. Because it's the final frontier. Because it's there. What you haven’t heard is anything to inspire a sense of urgency. Indeed, NASA’s struggle to defend its existence and funding shows how weak these justifications sound to a public that cares less about space than seemingly more pressing needs.

In space, metals can weld together without heat or melting.

If Elon Musk's SpaceX can get to Mars and bring samples back to Earth before the United States can get there, it would be cause for celebration not lament, said NASA's new science chief. "If Elon Musk brought the samples in the door right now I'd throw him a party out of my own money," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's newly named associate administrator for science, told reporters Monday.

The results of NASA's tests on the 'impossible' EM Drive have been leaked , and they reveal that the controversial propulsion system really does work, and is capable of generating impressive thrust in a vacuum, even after error measurements have...

When a scientist announced last decade that he’d built a new form of spacecraft propulsion called the EmDrive that didn’t require conventional fuel, it sounded too good to be true. But the great thing about science is that you don’t have to take someone’s findings at their word; you can test it for yourself. NASA did just that—and while the space agency hasn’t officially released its findings yet, a leaked copy of NASA’s report reveals the EmDrive seems to work as advertised.

The most advanced weather satellite ever built rocketed into space Saturday night, part of an $11 billion effort to revolutionize forecasting and save lives. This new GOES-R spacecraft will track U.S. weather as never before: hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, volcanic ash clouds, wildfires, lightning storms, even solar flares. Indeed, about 50 TV meteorologists from around the country converged on the launch site—including NBC's Al Roker—along with 8,000 space program workers and guests.

The so-called 'impossible' hypothetical EmDrive thruster, that was designed to propel craft through space using electromagnetic waves, is scientifically possible, physicists have said. Since the theory behind the EmDrive was released in 2006, the potential thruster has proved controversial. Until now, a lack of independent verification left the device open to criticism, but a new peer-reviewed paper, looking at the 'impossible' drive, is set to change this by giving the propulsion method more credibility than it has had before.

After years of speculation, a maverick research team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has reached a milestone that many experts thought was impossible. This week, the team formally published their experimental evidence for an electromagnetic propulsion system that could power a spacecraft through the void—without using any kind of propellant.

NASA needs help solving one of its most basic — and critical — problems, and the winning idea could land you $30,000. The problem is this: During launch and entry, astronauts are locked into their suits, unable to access any part of their body for hours. As a result, if they need to urination, defecate or are menstruating, they must do so in special adult diapers.

With some help from NASA satellites, the Global Positioning System could be key to getting a better understanding of hurricanes, and help improve forecasts for their strength when they make landfalls. The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission will use radio signals from the GPS satellites to measure the wind speed near the ground in the tropics, between 35 degrees north and 35 degrees south where most hurricanes are born.

Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. Descending through the clouds of boiling sulphuric rain is actually the easy bit—the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470°C (878°F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water.

Working with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), NASA is pioneering the development of tiny spacecraft, each made from a single silicon chip, that could slash interstellar exploration times. Speaking at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco last December, NASA’s Dong-Il Moon detailed this new technology, which is aimed at ensuring such spacecraft survive the potentially powerful radiation they’ll encounter on their journey.