Space Travel

Space startup Vast has announced that it intends to launch what it calls the world's first commercial space station, Haven-1, sometime after August 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the first element of a 100-m (330 ft) rotating station.

Having previously announced that it had signed a launch contract in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, Moon Express has now received official verification of the contract from XPRIZE. It is the second team receive verification, after SpaceIL. The news kicks off a new space race.

NASA has announced the winners of its 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition. The contest sought architectural concepts for how 3D printing might be used to create shelters on the Red Planet. The overall winner, Ice House, would be built using the planet's predicted abundant water supply.​

Plans are afoot to establish a spaceport in Australia. The town of Rockhampton in Queensland is one of three locations currently being considered as a potential site for the base which would focus primarily on space tourism.

It may not get the same attention as the Kennedy Space Center or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, is responsible for developing much of the complex inner-workings of rockets, satellites, and future technologies.

With a judging panel made up of former NASA astronauts, industry experts, space enthusiasts, and others, a competition being run by Spaceship Earth Grants (SEG) aims to give away one space flight for every 50,000 applications it receives.

A NASA study has recently concluded that the "Cannae Drive," a disruptive new method of space propulsion, can produce small amounts of thrust without the use of propellant, in apparent discordance with Newton's third law.

Arizona-based World View Enterprises has successfully completed its first test flight of a space tourism balloon that, for the price of US$75,000 per person, will lift six passengers into the stratosphere to an altitude of 20 miles (32 km).

With a projected settlement date of 2025, the Mars One project has received over 200,000 applications for the one way trip to the Red Planet. Bryan Versteeg is a conceptual designer who’s been working with the Mars One team in anticipation of the planet’s eventual colonization.

ESA’s Clean Space initiative is looking at developing a satellite that can rendezvous with space debris and render it harmless by netting it like fish. The proposal is just one of the ideas to be discussed as part of a symposium this May focusing on the e.DeOrbit mission.

Snacking on a freshly-made pizza in outer space just got a whole lot closer thanks to Anjan Contractor's 3D pizza printer. Contractor, who won NASA's US$125,000 grant last year to create a 3D printer that could print food for astronauts on missions, has come out with a functional prototype.

As a Chinese rover explores the lunar surface and astronauts work to repair the International Space Station, Gizmag looks back on the space highlights of 2013.