A resumption of crewed flights from US soil has inched closer after NASA named a date for SpaceX's Demo-1. But the latest Delta IV Heavy remains firmly earthbound following the second and latest abort. First SpaceX commercial crew demo now 17 January. Maybe The date of the first commercial crew flight to the International …

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has discovered water on the asteroid Bennu less than a week after its arrival at the hunk of space rock. The journey to Bennu began over two years ago when OSIRIS-Rex left Earth, it has been chugging along since travelling 1.2 billion miles (2 billion kilometers) to get within 12 miles away from …

NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has followed its sibling, Voyager 1, into interstellar space, according to the team managing the veteran spacecraft. Voyager 1 exited the heliosphere – the bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun that surrounds the solar system – back in 2012, although it took the best part of a year …

El Reg has never noticed that rodents were too fussy to turn down food because of mold – but that's what's just put a 24-hour delay to the latest SpaceX mission to the International Space Station. The 16th SpaceX resupply mission is now slated for 1316 EST (1816 UTC) on December 5, because NASA staffers spotted mold on fodder …

Russia returned to crewed spaceflight today, sending a fresh complement of crew to the International Space Station (ISS) following a successful launch of the venerable Soyuz-FG booster. The lift off occurred at 11:31 UTC today from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and was the first with crew since October’s attempt to …

NASA's mission to send a probe to an asteroid, dig up a chunk, and send the material back to Earth is now half-way complete. The agency says its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has reached its hunk-of-rock target after a trip lasting two years and two billion miles. The spacecraft, technically the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, …

NASA adminstrator Jim Bridenstine on Friday announced the companies the US space agency plans to pay to send its next science experiments to the Moon. The selection is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, which aims to set the boffins' gear down on the lunar surface using landers. The good news …

While NASA celebrated another successful landing on Mars, the agency spent the past seven days dealing with some issues considerably closer to home in the latest round-up of all things space. NASA: We won't have what he's smoking The week kicked off with The Washington Post giving Elon Musk that most rarest of gifts: publicity …

VidLanding a spacecraft on Mars is nerve racking and prone to failure, as you can quite well imagine. But fear not, NASA was able to monitor the whole process for the InSight spacecraft thanks to two briefcase-sized CubeSats. Nicknamed WALL-E and EVE after the two main characters in that popular Pixar film, the little satellites …

VidNASA’s InSight lander today successfully fell through the atmosphere of Mars to touchdown in seemingly one piece on the planet's surface. The $810m probe had to execute dozens of steps perfectly in a short period of time as it descended upon the Martian landscape. Tom Hoffman, InSight’s project manager, described the journey …

NASA's Mars InSight lander is due to arrive on the Red Planet on Monday, giving scientists their first in-depth look at the martian interior. The Lander InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is based on 2008's Phoenix Lander, which itself used components left over from the …

The International Space Station turned 20 this week as space agencies and 'nauts alike celebrated the anniversary of the launch of the first module of the ISS. The Functional Cargo Block (FGB) was launched on 20 November, 1998, signifying the start of ISS assembly. Also known as "Zarya" ("Dawn" in Russian) in reference to …

RoundupRussia, China and India all flung rockets into space this week and SpaceX managed to get a secondhand Falcon 9 off the historic pad 39A at Cape Canaveral. Used Falcon 9. One careful owner SpaceX continued demonstrating the reusability of the first stage of its Falcon 9 with the launch of Qatar's Es'hail 2 communications …

Space-fans pricked up their Twitter-ears today, when just for a few minutes it looked like the little lost rover Opportunity had woken up. Opportunity has been silent since June, when a massive dust storm blocked its solar panels from charging its battery. At the time, NASA boffins explained it would have put itself in a …

A third Soyuz was successfully launched yesterday, effectively clearing the way for crewed operations to resume, while the results of the US midterms may have unfortunate consequences for NASA. Three for three for Soyuz A Soyuz rocket launched ESA's MetOp-C meteorology satellite from French Guiana, lifting off at 00:47 GMT. At …

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has kept its cool, successfully surviving sweltering temperatures to reach its first close encounter with the Sun, coming within 15 million miles of the solar surface. Launched in August, the spacecraft is on a mission to study the star at the center of our Solar System. The goal is to help scientists …

It was another busy week in space as Russia notched up a second Soyuz success, China conducted its 32nd launch of the year and NASA awaited the arrival of its first service module for Orion. Russia: Two Soyuz launches down, one to go The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, sent a GLONASS-M navigation satellite into orbit atop the …

NASA’s Dawn space probe, our visitor to the Solar System’s protoplanets Vesta and Ceres, is cold and dead. The spacecraft finally ran out of fuel whilst it was orbiting Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. NASA engineers noticed that it had missed two opportunities to check in with ground control on 31 October and 1 …