The Oscar- and Emmy-nominated documentarist Nanette Burstein working with co-screenwriter and editor Tal Ben-David, brings to life the story of Carl Sagan. The new National Geographic documentary film, Carl Sagan: We Are Made Of Star Stuff, made its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The 53rd Telluride Film Festival was held September 4 through […]

We are a “planet-based” species – all of us on a spin-filled Earth now housing 8.3 billion people. That’s the gravity of the situation. But we’re also a world of floods, typhoons, earthquakes, heat and cold calamities, volcanic eruptions, even encounters with Sun-caused aurora and bruises from incoming space rocks. It’s quite a world worth […]

Could Earth’s Moon be a witness plate, peppered with extraterrestrial material evidence of past extraterrestrial technology? “Whereas electromagnetic SETI is restricted to contemporaneous transmitters, searches for artificially generated particles integrate over gigayear timescales and are therefore sensitive to technomaterial released by civilizations long extinct.” The idea is that technogenic artifacts may survive natural interstellar transport […]

The European Space Agency’s Planetary Defense Office/Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center has published the following Imminent Imactor based on 11 observations: Imminent Impactor: CERNQ52 The Imminent Impactors page contains a list of the confirmed impacting objects detected by ESA’s Meerkat monitoring system in the last 15 days. Meerkat computes impact solutions using the systematic ranging method. […]

Venus appears pale yellow in visible light, but ultraviolet images reveal dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet’s upper sulfuric acid clouds. Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, yet the chemical identity of the material responsible—the “unknown absorber”—remains unresolved. An international research team has now placed new quantitative constraints […]

China’s Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission appears on track for launch next year, dedicated to return to Earth Red Planet collectibles in 2031. A new video posted on Weibo is being shown by CNSPACE.dev, a website on China space development, noting that multi-site sampling by drone is not displayed in the video, only sampling done […]

NASA’s Dragonfly spacecraft is scheduled to launch in summer 2028 and reach Saturn’s moon Titan in late 2034. The rotorcraft’s landing area on Titan has been named – Ahmakiq Undae. The region consists of dunes and interdune areas to the south of Selk Crater, extending to the edge of a range of hills or mountains. […]

Getting a privately-backed robotic mission en route to Venus has become about as foggy as the planet itself. Enter a Rocket Lab-backed kick-starter of a spacecraft hike to that cloud-enveloped world, matched up with the step-by-step agenda of a scientific group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The first step on that program is […]

A National Security Science and Technology Strategy has been issued August 31 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The document is focused on science and technology competition as it relates to military capabilities, homeland defense and resilience, and other direct intersections with national security. Priority areas The strategy identifies three priority […]

Yet another wait-a-minute moment in space exploration? The in boxes at NASA are now pondering a petition regarding the plasma physics of the outer heliosphere. Retired NASA chief scientist, James Green, has kick-started the petition “expressing the critical need for continued heliophysics measurements by the New Horizons mission and respectfully ask NASA to ensure future […]

A new poll has found that about half of Americans, 49 percent, think all Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomena. That poll also found 37 percent believe at least some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies. Another 13 percent […]

The Shenzhou-23 crew aboard China’s orbiting space station completed their mission’s first series of extravehicular activities on Friday, according to the China Manned Space Agency. The Shenzhou-23 crew aboard China’s orbiting space station completed their mission’s first series of extravehicular activities on Friday, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). The astronaut trio — […]

  Starship Recovery: “SpaceX engineers spent several days inspecting Ship 40 in the waters off Christmas Island. They collected heatshield samples and gained vital insight into how the vehicle handled reentry with improvements now planned on future vehicles.”  

That botched re-boost/rescue of NASA’s Swift observatory now means an uncontrolled downing of the multi-wavelength scanning spacecraft that was fine-tuned to digging deep into gamma-ray burst science. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was hurled into orbit back in November of 2004. Over the years, it carried out its duties of studying gamma-ray bursts, the most […]

A bullish look at a future lunar economy predicts that the infrastructure, markets and strategic forces for returning to the Moon could generate up to $566 Billion in economic value through 2050. The report has been assembled by Deloitte – an organization that tracks emerging technologies and markets, “ones that feel speculative today but may […]

China’s Chang’e-7 lunar probe sitting atop its Long March-5 Y14 carrier rocket has been rolled back to the assembly and test building at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan. Chang’e-7 was ready to head for the Moon’s south pole on August 24 (Beijing Time) in a search for evidence of water ice. “China’s Chang’e-7 […]

A Heart for Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Achieving the Impossible by Eiman Jahangir; Forefront Books; August 2026; 224 pages (Hardcover); $26.00. In August of 2024, the author of this insightful and inspiring book flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket. “People often assume that achieving a dream means following a straight line,” explains […]

“China’s Chang’e-7 launch will not proceed in planned window this year” – that’s the word from China Central Television. While not cancelled, the Moon probe atop a Long March 5 booster liftoff has been delayed due to an apparent confluence of issues at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan. But there is no official […]