Humanity's brutal and bellicose past provides ample justification for pursuing settlements on the moon and Mars, Elon Musk says. The billionaire entrepreneur has long stressed that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help make humanity a multiplanet species — a giant leap that would render us much less vulnerable to extinction.

The thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft just did what we thought was impossible. After 37 years of inactivity, NASA just received response from spacecraft 13 billion miles away, NASA said in a statement on its website. Voyager 1 is NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft. It was launched on September 5, 1977. Having operated for 40 years, 6 months and 14 days as of March 19, 2018, the spacecraft relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth.

Unlike the hit song played nonstop on the radio or your mother questioning you about when you’re going to give her grandchildren, rocket launches are one thing that never gets old. That’s lucky, because SpaceX has done two in the span of just four days. Today, the company again launched its Falcon 9 rocket, this time with 2,630 kilograms (5800 pounds) of deliveries to the International Space Station, from the base in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX has a green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won't have too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed 4,425 satellites within six years.

Sperm is objectively pretty strange here on Earth, so imagine how it looks and acts in microgravity. A NASA scientist tells Inverse that’s exactly what astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) will be doing over the next few months.

A startup claims it will be able to place a single-module commercial space station into orbit by 2022, although the company faces multiple and significant technical and financial hurdles. Orion Span announced April 5 plans to develop what it calls the Aurora Station, a space station it says will be the “first luxury space hotel” in orbit. The company unveiled its plans at the Space 2.0 conference in San Jose, California.

A team of mechanical engineers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute is working on a new electrical cooling system that has no moving parts. Already being tested aboard the International Space Station, the electrohydrodynamic cooler uses electrically charged fluids to carry away heat.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship is returning to Earth today (May 5) with more than 2 tons of NASA gear from the International Space Station. The capsule's splashdown will cap a busy day for NASA, which began its weekend with a launch to Mars. The Dragon capsule left the space station this morning at 9:23 a.m. EDT (1323 GMT) when it was released by the orbiting laboratory's robotic arm. The spacecraft is packed with over 4,000 lbs. (1,800 kilograms) of experiment samples and other gear to Earth for NASA, and is returning to Earth two days late.

The French space agency CNES is creating an investment fund of 80 to 100 million euros ($95 to $119 million) to spur innovation in the space sector. Jean-Yves Le Gall announced the fund during an interview with French publication Les Echos posted May 7. Few details have been released about the fund.

SpaceX might have paved the way, but a new group of space startups want to take the space industry to new heights. Elon Musk wants people to get to Mars for $200,000 a ticket. A new crop of space entrepreneurs want to make it much, much cheaper. Tim Ellis, co-founder of Inc. 30 Under 30 winner Relativity Space, spoke Wednesday at the Wall Street Journal Future of Everything Festival in New York. He was joined by TransAstra founder Joel C. Sercel.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk says rocket technology will "enable anyone" to move to Mars and beyond. And gas-powered cars will be relics, "like steam engines," he says. This according to a recent series of tweets from the Tesla and SpaceX boss. On Friday, SpaceX launched and landed the Falcon 9 Block 5, the newest version of the company's reusable rocket.

SpaceX’s first launched and landed Falcon 9 Block 5 booster has returned to port after a handful of days at sea, hopefully marking the beginning of a long and storied future of commercial missions. The booster – numbered B1046 – appears to be in extraordinarily good shape, more or less unscathed after a relatively high-energy reentry. Photographer Tom Cross documented the historic return in person at Port Canaveral.

A 'self-eating' rocket engine which could place small satellites in orbit more easily and more affordably is under development at universities in Scotland and Ukraine.

You can now sign up for a 10-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — if you've got $55 million to spare. That's the price just announced by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that's organizing expeditions to the ISS and working to build the first commercial space station. The $55 million covers the orbital stay, transportation to and from the ISS, and a 15-week astronaut-training program.

The most powerful rocket in operation just landed another launch contract. The US Air Force said Thursday that it has picked SpaceX to fly a secretive military satellite atop its Falcon Heavy, the towering machine that took flight for the first time in February. The satellite, called AFSPC-52, is slated to launch in the summer or fall of 2020, according to an Air Force statement.

It's all part of a wider plan. Humanity needs to become a multiplanetary species to “preserve the light of consciousness,” Elon Musk told his Twitter followers on Monday. The SpaceX CEO’s company is developing a rocket that can travel to Mars and refuel at specially-built stations to continue its journey, but while the “BFR” project sounds like a cool science-advancing feat, Musk’s comments suggest he sees a deeper meaning in interplanetary expansion.

With its stubby nose and matte-black fins, SpaceX's first Crew Dragon spaceship for astronauts looks like something out of science fiction. But this privately built space capsule is no figment. It's going through some final testing for a scheduled uncrewed launch debut this summer. A new SpaceX photo shows just what kind of tests SpaceX's Crew Dragon is undergoing. The space capsule appears here at NASA's Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, where the agency's In-Space Propulsion Facility is testing the craft.

On Feb. 6, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its largest rocket into the blue Florida sky. Onboard was “Starman,” a dummy strapped into the billionaire’s cherry red Tesla roadster. Minutes later, fans cheered as Musk topped himself by nailing a simultaneous landing of the Falcon Heavy’s boosters. It was arguably a turning point for the commercial space age. Airlines were somewhat less thrilled. On that day, 563 flights were delayed and 62 extra miles added to flights in the southeast region of the U.S., according to Federal Aviation Administration data released Tuesday by the Air Line Pilots Association, or ALPA.

India’s space program wants to go where no nation has gone before -– to the south side of the moon. And once it gets there, it will study the potential for mining a source of waste-free nuclear energy that could be worth trillions of dollars. The nation’s equivalent of NASA will launch a rover in October to explore virgin territory on the lunar surface and analyze crust samples for signs of water and helium-3. That isotope is limited on Earth yet so abundant on the moon that it theoretically could meet global energy demands for 250 years if harnessed.

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.