Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission in April, led humanity’s first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years — a nearly 10-day journey that looped around the moon and back. He told a standing room only audience at the National Book Festival on August 22 about what it looked and like […]

China’s Tiangong space station has upgraded its in-orbit kitchen. During a space lecture to science class students, the Shenzhou-23 crew —Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying — covered the crew’s daily orbital meals and upgraded food-heating tools aboard the space station. Lai, Hong Kong’s first payload specialist, explained the heating facilities, which enable astronauts […]

On August 20, 2026, U.S. President Trump signed The National Space Transportation Policy presidential memorandum, which sets a target of enabling over 1,000 space launches and reentries annually by 2030 through expanded launch infrastructure and industrial base capacity. What’s up with China’s plans for launch, and more recently, recoverable rocketry? What are the challenges and […]

NASA is pressing forward on the plan to establish a Moon Base in the lunar South Pole region. Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, NASA posted a NextSTEP-3 Broad Agency Announcement Appendix A. The Lunar Enabling Infrastructure Accelerator solicitation aims to mature and demonstrate capabilities in five areas: Vertical solar array technology that can provide consistent […]

China is making progress on its Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission. It appears on track getting the trek underway next year, dedicated to bring back to Earth roughly 500 grams of Red Planet collectibles in 2031. According to the China National Space Administration, the Tianwen-3 probe will have a lander, an ascender, a service capsule, […]

Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek by Glen E. Swanson and Foreword by Margaret A. Weitekamp of the Air and Space Museum; 2025; 288  pages (Hardcover); $35.00 Put aside the issue of cranky sliding doors on the USS Enterprise. Level out those pointy Spock ears and discount […]

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 […]