Space

Startup Rocket Lab has suffered a setback during the 20th outing of its Electron booster, with the rocket experiencing an issue in flight and losing its payload along the way. The mission wasn't a complete failure, however.

China has taken another big step forward in its ambitious space program, successfully landing its Tianwen-1 probe on Mars, with a rover to soon be rolled out to study the Martian environment from the planet's surface.

ESA is working on ways to make sharing unwashed underwear used in spacesuits a bit less horrible. The Austrian Space Forum will work with the Vienna Textile Lab to test textiles with improved anti-bacterial properties for suits used on long missions.

Startup Rocket Lab is pressing ahead with its ambitions to turn its Electron booster into a reusable orbital launch vehicle for small satellites, with plans this weekend to recover the rocket's first stage that will have an upgraded heat shield.

NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) robotic deep-space probe is returning from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, beginning its 2.5-year journey to Earth laden with samples.

More than 40 years after launch, Voyager 1 is still making new discoveries. The latest achievement by the craft is the detection of a faint, plasma “hum,” indicating that there may be more activity in interstellar gas than previously thought.

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter has successfully flown for the fifth time. The autonomous rotorcraft lifted off from Wright Brothers Field in Jezero Crater for a 108-second flight that took it on a one-way trip to a new airfield 423 ft to the south.

Mars orbiters have spotted a large volcanic deposit that appears to be relatively fresh, only about 53,000 years old. The find may lend weight to the idea that the Red Planet was recently, or still is, habitable for subsurface microbes.

Following a series of impressive yet explosive attempts to bring down its giant spaceship built for interplanetary travel, SpaceX has today successfully landed its Starship prototype without exploding for the first time.

Blue Origin has opened the first round of bidding for the first passenger seat on its suborbital New Shepard reusable space vehicle, which is scheduled to fly on July 20, 2021.

A wine that spent 14 months on the International Space Station (ISS) is being offered up for sale by auction house Christie's. One of a dozen bottles of vintage Pétrus 2000 sent to the station, it could bring an estimated US$1 million.

On May 5, 1961, about 45 million US television viewers watched as a single-stage Redstone rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Mercury Redstone 3 carried Alan Shepard on a 15-minute flight to become America's first man in space.