Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will wrap up its landmark test flight to the International Space Station for NASA this week with a touchdown in New Mexico on Wednesday evening (May 25), if all goes according to plan. Starliner arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday (May 20), a day after launching on Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2), an uncrewed shakeout mission designed to show that the capsule is ready to start carrying astronauts to and from the station for NASA.

We have a glimpse now of NASA's latest vision for its first crewed Mars mission. The agency released its top objectives for a 30-day, two-person Mars surface mission on Tuesday (May 17) and asked the public to provide feedback on how the planning is going. Submissions were initially due on May 31, but that deadline was recently extended to June 3.

This evening, Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, successfully docked itself to the International Space Station — demonstrating that the vehicle can potentially bring humans to the ISS in the future. It’s a crucial capability that Starliner has finally validated in space after years of delays and failures.

Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing hundreds of thousands of square miles of the orb's surface in hot lava. Over the eons, that lava created the dark blotches, or maria, that give the face of the moon its familiar appearance today.

The United Kingdom is getting serious about beaming solar power from space and thinks it could have a demonstrator in orbit by 2035. Over 50 British technology organizations, including heavyweights such as aerospace manufacturer Airbus, Cambridge University and satellite maker SSTL, have joined the U.K. Space Energy Initiative, which launched last year in a quest to explore options for developing a space-based solar power plant.

The achievement of powered flight on another world is one of the great spaceflight feats of the last decade. Since its first brief hop on April 19, 2021, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter has subsequently made an additional 27 flights, traveling nearly 7 km across the surface of the red planet and scouting ahead of NASA's Perseverance rover. It has wildly exceeded the expectations and hopes of its scientists and engineers.

Cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, called the "Hero of Russia" won't return to the ISS because he'd have to help Americans with experiments in space.

A crewed Mars mission could happen sooner than you think. Astronauts will likely make it to the Red Planet's surface before the end of the 2020s, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC's Shepard Smith recently.

Four astronauts successfully returned home to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft today, bringing an end to their six-month-long stay on the International Space Station (ISS). After undocking from the ISS early Thursday morning, the crew dove through Earth’s atmosphere before splashing down underneath parachutes off the coast of Florida at 12:43AM ET.

Another cloud of Russian space debris has bloomed in orbit. An Earth-orbiting object cataloged as #32398 broke up on April 15, the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron tweeted on Tuesday (May 3). Sixteen pieces of space debris associated with the event are currently being tracked, the squadron added.

Rocket Lab has taken a huge step towards making its Electron orbital launch vehicle a reusable rocket. The company has successfully captured Electron’s first stage mid-air with a helicopter for the first time upon its return to Earth after deploying 34 satellites to orbit.

The International Space Station (ISS) has helped expand our knowledge of the universe, fostered the birth of the space industry, and led the international community's scientific collaboration.

Two spacewalkers at the International Space Station activated the facility's new robotic arm for the first time on Thursday, April 28.

China plans to crash a spaceship into an asteroid that is potentially hazardous to Earth to alter its trajectory, a maneuver that caps off a multi-step planetary defense strategy that was outlined by a representative of the nation’s space agency on Sunday, reports SpaceNews.

The Webb Space Telescope is in its final (seventh) stage of alignment, bringing the superlative spacecraft tantalizingly close to commencing its scientific operations. This alignment stage involves final tweaks to the telescope’s primary mirrors and is happening right on schedule, four months after the spacecraft’s launch from French Guiana. Unlike the earlier alignment stages, each of which had a specifically outlined goal—stacking images of a specific star, for example—the seventh (and final) stage merely repeats certain checks made previously, to ensure everything is as precise as possible.

Late in 2021, the astronomy community released its decadal survey, a road map of scientific priorities for the next 10 years, which describes the hardware we need to build in order to achieve them. That survey was focused on distant objects and recommended projects like large, broad-spectrum space telescopes.

NASA’s third attempt at a modified rehearsal of the Space Launch System (SLS) came to a halt on Thursday when a leak of liquid hydrogen was detected during tanking operations. The space agency is planning another wet dress rehearsal for the Moon rocket no earlier than April 21. This is the latest in several setbacks to the rocket’s wet dress rehearsal, including delays due to weather, malfunctioning ventilation fans, and valve issues.

If you would go back to 2014 and say NASA would be pro-flying reflown boosters in the future, I think many people would find you crazy. However, after the booster that flew Axiom-1 to space landed for its fifth time, NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted his preference for these reused boosters.

Humanity took a giant leap 61 years ago today (April 12), but marking the milestone is far more complicated than usual this year. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched to Earth orbit aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, becoming the first person ever to reach space. The landmark moment continued a string of space firsts for the Soviet Union, which kicked off the space age with the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1 in October 1957.

U.S. rocket companies are facing the daunting task of ferrying hundreds of satellites to space in the coming years as sanctions sideline the Russian space launch industry.