University students and private companies are racing to build the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. Google and the X Prize Foundation are offering $20 million to the winner.
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Deep water exploration is the hip thing to do these days, whether you’re James Cameron hanging out with “extremophiles” in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, or if you’re […]
In 2018, the space program is scheduled to launch a probe that will get closer to the sun than any craft before it, measuring data in the star’s outer corona where temperatures are hellish.
The space telescope has worsened NASA’s relationships with Congress, who felt duped by the exploding cost of the project. Still, the telescope may prove an amazing technical achievement.
Mistakes made 30 years ago have made much of the early digital age inaccessible to historians. Today, regulators are struggling to find ways to maintain a faithful historical record.
In a post last May, entitled The First Trillionaires Will Make Their Fortunes in Space, we speculated about how the future explorers of space will be chasing unimaginable riches: As Peter Diamandis […]
The Matrix is real… and everyone here at NASA for the GSP has taken the red pill. If you recall in the movie, Neo is startled, puzzled, and quite frankly […]
The search for traces of ancient Martian life has been narrowed to 79 lake beds containing mineral deposits. Clay may have formed on the planet’s surface, preserving evidence of past life.
While talk of mining near-Earth asteroids has concentrated on metals like gold and platinum, the real treasure may be mining water and using its hydrogen to propel ambitious space missions.
You may be familiar with Moore’s Law. The phenomenon was first described in a 1965 paper by Gordon Moore of Intel, and it spelled out the notion that computing capacity […]
As budget cuts hit NASA, the space agency will seek out international partners for a new manned mission that will take humans further into space than ever before.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is turning to individual citizen-scientists to help fine-tune its complex algorithms that search for patterns in noise received from space.
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
With its space shuttle program grounded, NASA has found a great way to stay relevant with its daily release of images and videos, which we are happy to serve up to […]
NASA scientists have discovered a thin strip of oxygen in the atmosphere of Dione, one of Saturn’s 60 moons. It seems to be a rare case of oxygen existing without the support of live organisms.
The space agency’s Biosciences Division has created a medical tool for astronauts that stands to benefit millions of Earth-bound patients by improving a wide range of treatments.
In what should be a boom time for alien-oriented astronomers, given NASA’s recent discovery of an abundance of exoplanets, budget crises are holding back new projects that hold promise.
2012 is shaping up to be the year of the solar storm. In late January, the largest solar storm in years erupted, sending a cloud of particles streaming from the Sun toward […]
The private space company SpaceX has successfully launched a rocket that will soon carry supplies to the International Space Station. Its ultimate goal is a manned mission to Mars.
While private enterprise is not going to take us back to the Moon or to Mars, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says there is still a role for these companies to play.
Although some counterintuitive thinking was necessary to realize that planet GJ 1214b is full of water, scientists now believe there is a greater hope for extraterrestrial life than ever before.
Another technical malfunction from the Russian space program has delayed a manned mission to the International Space Station. NASA desperately wants a private space rocket.
Why would so many people take time off from their smart phones to watch the Transit of Venus through a telescope? According to Bill Nye, it is our human desire to explore. If we ever lose that desire, we’re not going to move forward as a species.
The winds of stellar-mass black hole have been clocked at 20 million miles per hour. Curiously, scientists say the winds carry away as much matter as the black hole draws in.
Breakthrough ideas don’t happen overnight. Origins of Species was published in 1859, 28 years after Darwin first boarded HMS Beagle;James Joyce spent seventeen years writing Finnegans Wake;and when Edison filed […]
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, says that commercial flights could begin flying to Mars in thirty years time. In forty years, many people could afford to buy a ticket, using some savings, of course.
If you saw Martin Scorcese’s film Hugo you will no doubt remember the homage to the iconic 1902 Georges Méliès film A Trip to the Moon. The film depicts a lunar […]
Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have simulated exploding a one-megaton nuclear bomb against an asteroid 500 meters in diameter. The results are encouraging.
Building on work of the Kepler mission, which has discovered Earth-sized exoplanets, NASA is funding three new projects that will carry our search for habitable worlds even further.