Space Exploration

Imagine leaving Earth forever and boarding a spaceship designed to carry you and thousands of others on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri — a journey that could take 400 years.This is the bold vision behind Chrysalis, a hypothetical spacecraft that could transport 2,400 people over 25 trillion miles (40 trillion…

NASA astronaut Jim Lovell, who helped turn the near-disastrous Apollo 13 moon mission into an inspiring tale of ingenuity and survival, has died at the age of 97.Jim Lovell passed away on Thursday (Aug. 7) in Lake Forest, Illinois, according to NASA officials. But the astronaut, a veteran of four pioneering spaceflights, left a mark…

Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to our own. The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its…

There's a secret, extra member of Crew-11 aboard the International Space Station right now: disease-causing bacteria.Or, at least, such bacteria will be growing aboard the orbiting laboratory very soon. Scientists at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel, in partnership with U.S.-based space tech company SpaceTango, have developed a study that will examine how microgravity affects…

There's no doubt that SpaceX's Starlink internet service has connected the world like never before — but at what cost? Astronomers have long voiced concerns about Starlink's satellite constellation interfering with observations of the universe, and a new survey by Curtin University confirms those fears.An analysis of 76 million images from a prototype station for…

U.S. President Trump's "One, Big Beautiful Bill Act," H.R. 1 includes $1 billion for the U.S. Space Force (USSF) X-37B military spacecraft program.The largely classified X-37B – also called the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) program – carried out its seventh mission, landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on March 7, touching down after…

We've sent some pretty interesting payloads to space since the first satellite (Sputnik 1) launched on October 4th, 1957. As access to space has increased, thanks largely to the commercial space industry, so too have the types of payloads we are sending.Consider the Nyx capsule created by German aerospace startup The Exploration Company, which launched…

"You operate as an autonomous agent controlling a pursuit spacecraft."This is the first prompt researchers used to see how well ChatGPT could pilot a spacecraft. To their amazement, the large language model (LLM) performed admirably, coming in second place in an autonomous spacecraft simulation competition.Researchers have long been interested in developing autonomous systems for satellite…

Last year, scientists detected a mysterious, powerful burst of radio waves originating from within our galaxy. Now, astronomers think it was caused by a long-dead NASA satellite — but they're not sure how it happened.Relay 2 blasted off in 1964, but the communication satellite went offline in 1967 after its two onboard transponders failed. Almost…

Moon-orbiting spacecraft belonging to NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have both snapped photos of Japan's ruined lunar lander Resilience, following its catastrophic "hard landing" earlier this month. Some of the images — the first to visually confirm the spacecraft's fate — show pieces of debris scattered across the surrounding area.The Resilience lunar…