With scarce nutrients and weak gravity, growing potatoes on the Moon or on other planets seems unimaginable. But the plant hormone strigolactone could make it possible, plant biologists from... Read more
A University of Manchester PhD student has developed a prototype flexible heat shield for spacecraft that could reduce the cost of space travel and even aid future space missions to Mars. He... Read more
Lava tubes, underground caves created by volcanic activity, could provide protected habitats large enough to house streets on Mars or even towns on the Moon, according to research presented... Read more
As NASA pursues innovative, cost-effective alternatives to conventional propulsion technologies to forge new paths into the solar system, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Ce... Read more
AlbertaSat will bring home world-class data using smaller-than-ever instruments with the fluxgate magnetometer on the Ex-Alta 1 CubeSat. Smaller, faster, cheaper—miniaturised space technolog... Read more
For a piloted mission to Mars, fueling up on the moon could streamline cargo by 68 percent Launching humans to Mars may not require a full tank of gas: A new MIT study suggests that a Martia... Read more
Berkeley Lab Scientists Believe Biomanufacturing a Key to Long-term Manned Space Missions Does synthetic biology hold the key to manned space exploration of the Moon and Mars? Berkeley Lab r... Read more
EU-funded researchers are demonstrating revolutionary robotic techniques inspired by plants, featuring a 3D-printed ‘trunk’, ‘leaves’ that sense the environment and ‘roots’ that grow and cha... Read more
On the less glamorous side of space exploration, there’s the more practical problem of waste — in particular, what to do with astronaut pee. But rather than ejecting it into space, scientist... Read more
Paves the Way for Future Deep Space Missions Including Asteroid Exploration In a breakthrough that will help make it possible for astronauts and robots to work together in deep space, resear... Read more
Currently, a significant fraction of the engineering cost and launch mass of space systems is required exclusively to enable the system to survive launch. This is particularly true for syste... Read more
ARKYD is an orbiting space telescope that can be controlled by the public – its primary aim is to make space exploration accessible to anyone who is interested. Technology that would normall... Read more
An autonomous system for exploring the solar system’s smaller members, such as moons and asteroids, could bring us closer to a human mission to Mars. Stanford researchers, in collabora... Read more
Strange expects that solar panels of sufficient power for the first cislunar missions will be available by 2020. A marriage of the tortoise and the hare may be the key to exploring the Solar... Read more