Experts say the one-time space leader is swiftly becoming a liability for the countries it works with, particularly on the International Space Station.

The Perseverance rover's first sample-snagging attempt didn't go according to plan. The car-sized Perseverance landed inside the Red Planet's Jezero Crater this past February with two main tasks: to hunt for signs of past Mars life and to collect and cache samples for future return to Earth.

Publicly traded rocket builder Astra will go for its first launch of the year later this month, aiming to carry a Pentagon payload to orbit. "The Space Force is right now lined up to do a demonstration launch with a window that's going to begin August 27," Astra CEO Chris Kemp told CNBC.

Boeing's Starliner won't launch Wednesday as had been planned following problems with its propulsion system that prevented a key uncrewed test flight to the international space station a day earlier—and it's not clear when the troubled spaceship will fly next.

Billionaires, not governments, are the contestants in the new space race. Their competition is drawing criticism and eye rolling — and sparking debate about whether it actually benefits the rest of us. The big picture: International and corporate competition have been a part of the space industry since the launch of Sputnik nearly 65 years ago.

Last Thursday the large new Russian space station module, Nauka, finally docked with the International Space Station after several technical issues en route to the orbiting laboratory. However, the problems did not end there. About three hours after linking to the station, Nauka began firing its propulsion thrusters, throwing the space station off kilter.

Following the conclusion of World War II in the 1940s, worldwide superpowers started developing rocket propulsion technologies in aircraft, ultimately leading to supersonic planes like the North American X-15 and the first Race for Space. Currently, a new rivalry is brewing among private businesses seeking to expand outside our borders.

Jeff Bezos' space company is offering to cover billions of dollars in costs for a contract with NASA to take astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin said it would cover up to $2 billion in operating costs for the first two years of production of a moon lander, waiving payments for the first two years if NASA awards the company the project. The company is also offering to develop and launch a pathfinder mission at its own costs, as well as work with NASA on a fixed-price contract, which would free NASA from any cost overages.

Jeff Bezos went to space, and gave the industry the worst day of publicity it’s had in recent memory. The animus had little to do with his space company, Blue Origin. Much of it was driven by Bezos’ wealth and how he got it, amplified by recent reporting into the poor treatment of Amazon’s logistics workers and how the company’s founder used (legal) strategies to avoid paying income tax.

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.