Late tomorrow evening (AEST), all going well, a Falcon 9 rocket will lift-off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A few days after launch the craft will rendezvous in low-Earth orbit with the International Space…
Where there's mineral wealth, people always follow.
MGM
As history has repeatedly shown, where there are valuable minerals to be unearthed, adventurous humans will arrive in droves – even if it means battling extreme conditions and risking life and limb.
So…
When we start building structures outside Earth, the raw materials will likely come from asteroids.
Planetary Resources
There will be a future mining boom, as heralded in recent media stories. But this mining will take place in a location even more hostile than the Australian Outback – space.
More specifically, the ore…
Russia is no stranger to ambitious space exploration – and has produced several notable firsts.
Maxim Shipenkov/ EPA
For decades, the Soviet Union was a major player in the exploration of space, famously locking horns with the US in the “Space Race” – a competition for orbital supremacy and solar system exploration throughout…
Does the US suffer from its desire to go it alone in space?
NASA
In its newly released budget request to Congress, the Obama Administration is seeking to reduce NASA’s funding by US$59m to US$17.7 billion – a reduction of just 0.03%, not that you would know that from…
Another election campaign, another out-of-this-world promise.
Erik S. Lesser/EPA
In Florida last week, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich asserted that, under his leadership, the US would establish a “permanent moon base” by 2020. What’s more, he claimed, “it will be American…
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
It seems we’re about to come one step closer to putting man (and woman) on Mars. Is this exciting? Of course it is. Nothing fires the imagination quite like the prospect of walking around on a planet other…
China is becoming a superpower in space as well as on earth.
AAP
In the early hours of this morning, the tranquility of the remote Gobi desert was shattered by the sound of a brand new spacecraft hurtling towards the sky.
The rocket, Shenzhou-8 or “Divine Vessel…
The brand new launch system announced by NASA last week has received wide mainstream media coverage – and why wouldn’t it? It is a plan for a giant rocket, after all.
The proposed Space Launch System…
Malcolm Walter talks space, science and NASA's future with Dr Greg Chamitoff.
Download the full interview with Dr Chamitoff as a podcast by clicking here.
For the latest in our In Conversation series, Malcolm Walter, Professor of Astrobiology at the University of New South…
Could Stanley Kubrick's classic offer direction for the future of space travel?
slagheap
Tomorrow morning (AEST), weather depending, the Space Shuttle Atlantis will blast off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, marking the end of NASA’s 30-year-old Space Transportation System.
But as the…
Has NASA's 30-year space experiment been worth it?
EPA/NASA TV
All going well, the final Space Shuttle mission will be launched from the Kennedy Space Centre early on Saturday morning (AEST). This flight, being made by the Space Shuttle Atlantis, will be the 135th…
A computer-generated artists impression of the thousands of objects in orbit around Earth.
AFP
By Fred Watson, Australian Astronomical Observatory
Since the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 – the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 – countries around the world have been putting satellites and spacecraft into Earth orbit.
While the majority…
Keeping the space shuttle together is a tremendous feat of engineering.
Stan Honda/AFP
The Space Shuttle Endeavour, one of the most complex machines ever created, is about to take its last trip into space.
But not just yet.
The countdown to Endeavour’s final flight began a few days ago…
How hard can it be getting an object from A to B at great speed?
KARI/HANDOUT
You know, it’s odd being a rocket scientist. The people you meet assume you’re not just smart, but some super-colossal paragon of intelligence with the wits of an atomic lovechild of Albert Einstein and…
It is inevitable that we will one day venture into space beyond the moon not just with robots but in person.
Exploration is part of the human psyche: we are risk-takers with an insatiable curiosity. No…
