The European space agency (ESA) signed a deal worth €129m ($154m) on Tuesday to make a spacecraft for a joint project with NASA looking at how to deflect an asteroid heading for Earth, news wires reported.

The two NASA astronauts who rode to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon are heading home on Sunday, capping a two-month voyage in space that marked NASA’s first crewed mission from home soil in nine years, news wires reported. Crew Dragon “Endeavor” decoupled from the orbital station carrying Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley ahead of a Sunday afternoon splashdown off the coast of Pensacola, Florida.

The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built, a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers, was launched on Thursday as part of a long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life, news wires reported.

The magnificent jazz artist Gregory Porter, whose new single “Concorde” is an ode to space exploration, is set to perform on Thursday as part of a ceremony marking the launch of NASA’s next-generation rover that will search for signs of habitable conditions on Mars.

By this time next year, Mars will be abuzz with robotic activity as three countries - the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates - are to send unmanned spacecraft to the red planet beginning next week. And the three nearly simultaneous launches are no coincidence: The timing is dictated by the opening of a one-month window in which Mars and Earth are in ideal alignment on the same side of the sun, which minimises travel time and fuel use.

Two veteran NASA astronauts were headed for the International Space Station on Saturday after Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first commercial company to launch a rocket carrying humans into orbit, ushering in a new era in commercial space travel and putting the United States back in the business of launching astronauts into orbit from US soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

After a whole day of suspense, SpaceX's landmark launch to the International Space Station - the first crewed mission to blast off from US soil in almost a decade - was scrubbed Wednesday due to fears of a lightning strike. With NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley strapped into the Crew Dragon capsule, the launch pad platform retracted and rocket fueling underway, SpaceX made the call to abort.

In mere hours SpaceX is scheduled to launch two NASA astronauts into orbit  - weather permitting - to kick off a new era of corporate-driven space missions. No company has ever flown commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the International Space Station (ISS). If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country’s space endeavors, being the first human launch from US soil since 2011.

Tom Cruise will film his next Hollywood blockbuster on location - 250 miles up in the air and orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes. Yes, you are reading it right - the "Top Gun" star is flying through the stratosphere to shoot an as-yet-unknown film aboard the International Space Station (ISS), NASA confirmed on Tuesday.

NASA and SpaceX said Friday they were pressing ahead with plans to launch astronauts to space from US soil for the first time in nearly a decade later on this month, despite the coronavirus pandemic. Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, both veterans of the Space Shuttle program that was shuttered in 2011, will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on 27 May. Should the mission succeed, the US will have achieved its goal of no longer having to buy seats on Russian Soyuz rockets to give its astronauts rides to the International Space Station (ISS).