NASA’s new initiative to go back to the moon at the behest of President Donald Trump is an intriguing notion, but for now, we’re still relegated to studying and exploring the lunar surface with the help of robots. But it’s not NASA’s robots we ought to be paying attention to—there aren’t any. Instead, China currently has the leg-up in lunar exploration, and it’s poised to make a splash with its Chang’e 4 spacecraft, launched last Saturday.

The two pilots on board Virgin Galactic's spacecraft Unity became the company's first astronauts. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was on hand to watch the historic moment. Virgin Galactic said the test flight reached an altitude of 51.4 miles, or nearly 83 kilometers. The U.S. military and NASA consider pilots who have flown above 80 kilometers to be astronauts. Test pilots in 2004 were awarded a commercial astronaut badge by the Federal Aviation Administration for flying a previous, experimental iteration of Virgin Galactic's spacecraft design.

Weeks after Parker Solar Probe made the closest-ever approach to a star, the science data from the first solar encounter is just making its way into the hands of the mission's scientists. It's a moment many in the field have been anticipating for years, thinking about what they'll do with such never-before-seen data, which has the potential to shed new light on the physics of our star, the Sun.

For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.

Traveling the vast distances of space isn’t cheap. It costs spacecraft time, fuel and money. Fortunately, nature offers free help along the way and mission designers always take it. They’re called gravity assists. In these manoeuvres, a spacecraft exchanges its momentum in a close encounter with a planet to gain velocity. Gravity assists have been used in numerous interplanetary missions to propel spacecraft towards their destinations.

Before the United States can return astronauts to the moon, it needs to send robots there first. As part of that ultimate mission, several lunar lander companies — including Cape Canaveral-based Moon Express — were selected to compete for up to $2.6 billion worth of NASA contracts that will fast-track the nation’s return to the moon.

When it comes to events in space, 2019 is going to be an extraordinary year. That’s not to say 2018 will be an easy act to follow. After all, SpaceX debuted the world’s most powerful operational launch system (called Falcon Heavy), sent a car beyond Mars, and helped lift off more orbital rockets than in any year since 1990.

Russian entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner wants to send a probe back to Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus, to search for evidence of life there. NASA wants to help him.

On 1st October, sixty years ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—better known as NASA—began operations, ushering in a new era of space exploration for the United States. The space agency emerged from its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, which was created in 1915, in part, because America was lagging behind Europe in the field of airplane technology.

A mysterious cigar-shaped object spotted tumbling through our solar system last year may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate Earth, astronomers from Harvard University have suggested. The object, nicknamed 'Oumuamua, meaning "a messenger that reaches out from the distant past" in Hawaiian, was first discovered in October 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii.

Using an AI design process, engineers at software company Autodesk and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came up with a new interplanetary lander concept that could explore distant moons like Europa and Enceladus. Its slim design weighs less than most of the landers that NASA has already sent to other planets and moons.

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.