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...

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.”

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.

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 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.

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 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.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will conduct a spacewalk next month to learn more about a pressure leak discovered in August that has resulted in a mild international incident between the United States and Russia. On Wednesday, NASA released a carefully worded statement sharing news of the November spacewalk — no date has been announced — that adds color to previous statements made by Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Russian space agency ROSCOSMOS. Rogozin has indicated that a small hole in the space station was not a manufacturing defect.

NASA has announced the first crewed flight by a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to take place in June 2019. It will be the first manned US launch to the orbiting research laboratory since the space shuttle program was retired in 2011, forcing US astronauts to hitch costly rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The NASA Office of the Inspector General released a scathing audit of Boeing and the space agency Wednesday morning, detailing Boeing’s delays and billions of dollars of cost overruns in building key components of a next-generation rocket destined for missions to the moon and Mars. The report also accused NASA of being overly generous with its evaluations of Boeing, leading to questionable payments.

NASA is considering a spectacular airship concept for Venus exploration. The space agency’s Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate (SACD) has posted potential designs of the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) on its website. The airships have even been compared to a “cloud city” by Space.com.

NASA’s next Mars rover — the first to gather rock samples meant to come back to Earth — should dream big and visit as many places on the red planet as possible, scientists concluded on 18 October. Its stops would probably include some combination of Jezero crater, once home to river deltas and a lake; Northeast Syrtis, which contains some of the most ancient rocks on Mars; and Midway, a compromise option located between those two. Project scientists have proposed visiting both Jezero...

When the Falcon Heavy rocket launched for the first time in February, some critics of the company wondered what exactly the rocket's purpose was. After all, the company's Falcon 9 rocket had become powerful enough that it could satisfy the needs of most commercial customers. One such critic even told me, "The Falcon Heavy is just a vanity project for Elon Musk."

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has once again entered a safe mode as the aging spacecraft appears to be running out of fuel. In a brief statement Oct. 23, NASA said that, during a routine communications session on Oct. 19, controllers found that the spacecraft had entered a “no-fuel-use sleep mode” that disrupted operations. “The Kepler team is currently assessing the cause and evaluating possible next steps,” the agency stated.

China unveiled on Tuesday a replica of its first permanently crewed space station, which would replace the international community's orbiting laboratory and symbolises the country's major ambitions beyond Earth. The 17-metre (55-foot) core module was a star attraction at the biennial Airshow China in the southern coastal city of Zhuhai, the country's main aerospace industry exhibition.

The Altai mountain region of Central Asia is a rugged and remote place. Right in the center of the continental landmass, it forms a crossroads between the Kazakh steppes, the snow forests of Siberia and the arid plains of Mongolia. It’s a landscape of granite, forced up by the inch-a-year collision of the Indian tectonic plate with Asia, then carved out over millions of years by streams of snowmelt. Siberian Ibex wander here, along with musk deer feeding on the lichenous rocks and brown bears that follow the retreating snow fields in spring.

NASA has certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (likely F9 v1.2) to launch the space agency’s most valuable and critical scientific spacecraft, opening up the floor for SpaceX to routinely compete for missions comparable to Hubble Space Telescope, the Curiosity Mars rover (Mars Science Laboratory), Cassini (a Saturn orbiter), and James Webb Space Telescope, among many others.

When the first humans go to Mars, they may want to bring lichens with them. Because lichens are mini-ecosystems made of both fungi and algae or bacteria, they are particularly good at surviving the extreme conditions on Mars, and could even be used to produce rocket fuel in space.

Europe and Russia's ExoMars rover has been assigned its destination on the Red Planet. The robot explorer will almost certainly land on Oxia Planum -- a site rich in iron-magnesium clays near the equator -- say scientists from the Landing Site Selection Working Group (LSSWG) in Leicester, UK. They've been discussing touchdown options for around four years and -- with the blessings of the European and Russian space agencies...