Space News

The European Space Agency has signed a €167 million ($200 million) contract with Thales Alenia Space Italy and Avio to deliver Space Rider -- Europe's first robotic orbital spaceplane -- in time for a mid-to-late 2023 ...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch on its seventh flight Friday (Dec. 11) to deliver the Sirius XM-7 communications satellite into orbit.

A second uncrewed test flight of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner commercial crew spacecraft is now scheduled for no earlier than the end of March, 15 months after its first, flawed mission. SpaceNews

The latest in a series of delays in a test campaign for the core stage of the Space Launch System now leaves "very little margin" in the schedule for its launch next November, NASA managers said Dec. 10. SpaceNews

It would only seem appropriate that the final eclipse in this eccentric year of 2020 will be visible only from Patagonia -- nicknamed "the end of the world."

The Geminid meteor shower, which will likely be the very best meteor display of the year, is just around the corner, predicted to peak late on Sunday night (Dec. 13).

NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP) has awarded multiple Venture Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 (VCLS Demo 2) contracts to launch small satellites (SmallSats) to space, including CubeSats, microsats or nanosatell...

The Senate on Dec. 11 voted 84-13 to pass the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, adopting the compromise defense policy bill by a large enough margin to override a presidential veto. SpaceNews

The House of Mouse just laid out "Star Wars" and "Alien" plans that will utterly dominate sci-fi on streaming video.

A new space game that uses realistic physics launched Tuesday (Nov. 17) on Steam.

This year's only total solar eclipse will cross South America on Monday, and you can watch the spectacle unfold online thanks to a host of webcasts -- no special glasses needed.

National Geographic has announced an ambitious new show that will chronicle NASA's attempt to send the next man and first woman to the moon.

Stargazers across the northern hemisphere could see as many as 70 meteors an hour this coming Sunday, as the Geminids meteor shower reaches its peak. Prospects for what should be this year's best display of meteors are p...

Watery worlds like Ceres -- a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt -- hint that our solar system is wetter than we thought. And where there's water, there might be life.

Solar Orbiter's latest results show that the mission is making the first direct connections between events at the solar surface and what's happening in interplanetary space around the spacecraft. It is also giving us new...

Satellite firm's funding round caps a year of growing Chinese space industry investment alongside cooperation agreements between space companies and local governments. SpaceNews

General relativity is a profoundly complex mathematical theory, but its description of black holes is amazingly simple. A stable black hole can be described by just three properties: its mass, its electric charge and its...

Week in images: 07 - 11 December 2020 Discover our week through the lens

Just two weeks after the sun produced its first medium-size flare of the new solar cycle, scientists offered an update on what the newest sun-studying spacecraft has been up to.

Staff weapons on standby, adjustments made for planetary shift, chevron 7 encoded, open the iris...

Jupiter and Saturn will have their closest encounter in almost 400 years on the solstice (Dec. 21).

The iconic telescope’s tragic end foreshadows future battles over the fate of various legacy facilities --