…as long as you’re part of an older, married couple with amazing mechanical skills, great long term resilience, and relaxed attitude towards being exposed to high levels of radiation. Storify of today’s Inspiration Mars press conference: [View the story "Want to go to Mars? Dennis Tito will take you there" on Storify] Want to go [...]

On 4 November 2011, six men emerged from a windowless capsule based on the site of the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia. They had been inside their spaceship for 520 days, enough time to (optimistically) go to Mars and back. They carried out the same kinds of activities and experiments that any astronauts [...]

As the docking attempt between the Dragon cargo vehicle and the International Space Station gets underway, here are some of the latest images, plus the LIVE stream to the Dragon/ISS docking at the bottom! [Note: recorded video of final moments of capture by ISS arm now added below] …and shortly before this fly-under took place [...]

Dissatisfied with the current state of the solar system, NASA is looking to do a little remodeling. The space agency is angling to capture a small asteroid and drag it closer to Earth for human exploration, the Associated Press reported April 6. The Obama administration’s proposed budget for 2014 will include $100 million to kick [...]

SpaceX has been the darling in the past few years of the so-called NewSpace movement—private companies aspiring to do the spacefaring work that was once limited to the space programs of the world’s superpowers. The California-based company, headed by Paypal co-founder Elon Musk, has already completed successful demonstrations of its Falcon 9 rocket and its [...]

After nearly eight months’ journey in a small, enclosed craft, the crew of the Mars500 mission is nearing the turning point of its voyage—arrival and disembarking at the Red Planet. They will spend 10 days there, exploring the surface in a series of excursions, before returning to their craft and beginning the lengthy trip home. [...]

On November 10 the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a body created by President Obama to find solutions to the nation’s budgetary woes, released a draft list of "illustrative" cuts that could save taxpayers $200 billion a year by 2015. Among the 58-point list (pdf) produced by Alan Simpson, a [...]

1. As of November 2, 2010, the International Space Station (ISS) had been occupied for 10 years straight, the longest-duration continuously manned outpost in spaceflight history. The first crew of the ISS is pictured at left. The Russian Mir space station, which was staffed from 1989 to 1999, held the record before the ISS surpassed [...]