Returning humans to the moon and seeing the first woman take steps on the surface is something we can all get behind, but is there enough time?

A senior NASA official said Tuesday that the Space Launch System, a huge heavy-lift rocket years behind schedule, could launch astronauts on a moon landing mission in 2024 on just its third flight to meet a goal announced last month by Vice President Mike Pence, while commercial companies will be entrusted with more responsibility to develop a lunar lander and a modest mini-space station, or Gateway, in lunar orbit.

Over the past six decades, 12 people have walked on the moon, spacecraft have visited every planet from Mercury to Neptune, and four rovers have racked up more than 60 kilometers traveling on the surface of Mars. And yet, despite the billions of dollars spent on the world’s civilian space programs, never has a probe journeyed very close to the sun. The nearest approach, by the Helios B probe in 1976, came no closer than 43 million km.

When SpaceX launched its first Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station last week, the gleaming white vehicle soared into space on its maiden voyage. Now, Crew Dragon is back, and it doesn't look so new. SpaceX's Crew Dragon returned to Earth today (March 8) with a smooth splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the east coast of Florida, ending a six-day test flight to the International Space Station. When the spacecraft undocked from the space station earlier in the day, it was still a clear white.

NASA is considering launching its Orion crew capsule on a commercial rocket rather than the Space Launch System, the agency's own megarocket that is currently under development. The Space Launch System (SLS) is a super-heavy-lift launch vehicle touted as what will be the most powerful rocket in existence. It will be capable of carrying astronauts beyond low Earth orbit, as NASA aims to do with the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.

We may not have to wait much longer to get our first glimpse of E.T., NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said. NASA has made the search for alien life a high priority, and recent discoveries give ample reason for optimism that the endeavor will be successful soon, Bridenstine said last week at a ceremony announcing the death of the agency's record-setting Opportunity Mars rover.

The failure of the landing highlighted the risks of a fast and cheap approach to space exploration.

Ever since last summer’s Pluto flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, two UVA scientists have been astounded by images streaming in from the edge of the solar system: breathtaking shots of Pluto and its moons, close-up views of icy mountains, glaciers of frozen nitrogen and the dwarf planet’s hazy, tenuous atmosphere. UVA planetary astronomer Anne Verbiscer, and UVA planetary geologist Alan Howard were among the first scientists to witness and begin analyzing photos and data.

American and Russian engineers are getting closer to a new plan for cooperating in space, one that would go beyond low Earth orbit and preserve the multinational alliance forged at the dawn of the International Space Station program in 1993. Organizations on both sides are quietly toying with the idea of going back to the moon together. That is, if politics don't get in the way. With the ISS scheduled to make a controlled plunge into the ocean in 2024, the partners have been preparing to go their own ways. NASA, while funding companies like SpaceX to go to orbit, is developing the Orion spacecraft and the super-heavy rocket called...

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.

“So the ship is really rolling, and the capsule is out there like a wrecking ball.

A darkness has spread over the grim, airless field of ice that threatens to swallow us. Night has come to the nightmare glacier. But then we see the shiny spacecraft, with its four gangly legs extending outward to find purchase on the jagged ice. Within, scientific instruments begin to blink on, one by one. Soon, they will start sniffing for any hint of life on this most alien and mysterious of worlds in the Solar System: the Jovian moon Europa. Through the HoloLens each of us wears, we watch this simulation of what might happen about 15 years from now on the icy, forbidding moon.

David Grinspoon looked as if someone had died. It was January 2017, and the astrobiologist had just received bad news. NASA had recently announced the results of its Discovery Program competition, which would decide where the agency would send its next outer space probe. The options: two asteroid missions or two individual Venus orbiters (another option involved an infrared space telescope). Grinspoon had been investigating Venus for most of his 30-year career. But NASA, to his chagrin, had gone with the asteroids.

Stephen Hawking has been studying, theorizing, pondering, and writing about the universe and everything that makes it tick for decades upon decades, and now he’ll finally get his chance to head into the great unknown for himself. Hawking just revealed that he’s booked a flight on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, thanks to the latter’s offer to help the renowned physicist and cosmologist make his dream of spaceflight a reality.

Next week, scientists will gather at the Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) in Mesa, Arizona. A quick glance at the 63 session topics shows Europa (and other ocean worlds) will be a hot topic of discussion. And it’s easy to see why. Earlier this month, two NASA missions gave us new insight into the icy, wet worlds of Enceladus and Europa. Enceladus stole most of the headlines, but the new data from Europa is promising.

While exploring the lunar surface, China’s Chang’e 3 lander discovered a new type of moon rock, and managed to snap THOUSANDS of high-resolution images of the moon. For the first time ever, you can take a peek at the lunar surface like never before thanks to the sophisticated cameras located onboard the Chang’e 3, one of China’s most advanced lunar landers.

The Kepler space telescope's latest and most complete planet catalog adds 219 new candidates, including one that could be a close cousin to Earth.

Just days after celebrating its first anniversary in Jupiter orbit, NASA's Juno spacecraft will fly directly over Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the gas giant's iconic, 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm. This will be humanity's first up-close and personal view of the gigantic feature -- a storm monitored since 1830 and possibly existing for more than 350 years.

Writer/director S G Collins of Postwar Media debunks every theory that the Apollo Moon landings could have been faked in a studio. The filmmaker takes a look at the video technology of the late 1960's, showing alleged fraud was simply not possible.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft could end up bearing a message for intelligent aliens, just as the agency's venerable Voyager probes are doing. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 famously carry copies of the "Golden Record," which are loaded with photos, music, sounds and other data designed to teach any extraterrestrials who might encounter the probes about humanity and its home planet.

Astronaut Peggy Whitson returned to Earth late Saturday, wrapping up a record-breaking flight that catapulted her to first place for U.S. space endurance. Whitson's 665 days off the planet — 288 days on this mission alone — exceeds that of any other American and any other woman worldwide. She checked out of the International Space Station just hours earlier, along with another American and a Russian. Their Soyuz capsule landed in Kazakhstan shortly after sunrise Sunday — Saturday night back in the U.S.

The Voyager 1 space probe was launched 40 years ago and continues to send back data from interstellar space.

Voyager 1, humanity's most distant emissary, has now been streaking through space for 40 years.

A group of scientists from Queen's University Belfast and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany have turned exoplanet-hunting on its head, in a study that instead looks at how an alien observer might be able to detect Earth using our own methods. They find that at least nine exoplanets are ideally placed to observe transits of Earth, in a new work published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Cassini is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration. A joint endeavour of NASA, ESA and the Italian space agency, Cassini is a sophisticated spacecraft exploring the Saturnian system since 2004. The final signal will take 83 minutes to reach Earth.

Yes, Elon Musk still absolutely wants to go to Mars. But in a speech delivered Friday in Adelaide, Australia, the founder of SpaceX opened the door to sending humans to the Moon first. "It’s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now," he said, speaking just a couple of years shy of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landings. "What the hell is going on?"

In an underdog city, at an underdog NASA lab, researchers are thinking hard about an undeservedly neglected planet. Venus is Earth's cousin, closest in composition and size, but for decades it has remained veiled. NASA hasn't sent a mission there since 1989; more recent European and Japanese orbiters have made halting progress that stops largely at the planet's thick sulfur clouds. No craft has touched down since 1985, when the last of a series of advanced Soviet landers clad in armored pressure vessels endured a couple hours before succumbing to the deep-ocean pressure and furnacelike temperature of the planet's surface.

A great way to put an experimental stealthy craft into orbit is to imply that it never even made it there in the first place.

Exploring today's weather on Mars and in your area with the Curiosity Rover.

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 '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.

Launched in 1977, the unmanned space probes Voyager 1 and 2 carried out an extensive survey of the planets and moons of the outer solar system. Visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the Voyager program can only be called an unqualified success on virtually every level. The twin spacecraft returned thousands of photographs and reams of scientific data that fundamentally changed our understanding of our entire solar system. Currently in interstellar space, Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth. Voyager 2 is near the edge of our solar system and will one day also enter interstellar space.

The United Kingdom has entered the race to develop low-cost, high-volume rockets for small satellites. Orbex, a British-based company with subsidiaries and production facilities in Denmark and Germany, announced Monday that it has raised $40 million from public and private sources to develop what it is calling the "Prime" launch vehicle.

This summer, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun, deeper into the solar atmosphere, than any mission before it. If Earth was at one end of a yard-stick and the Sun on the other, Parker Solar Probe will make it to within four inches of the solar surface.

A project called Breakthrough Starshot could reveal the secrets of our nearest star neighbors.