Spacecraft

A brain drain from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could pose problems for the space agency’s ambitious science plans

The Xuntian Space Telescope is China’s entry in a global race to unlock the secrets of dark energy, and it will now lift off no earlier than mid-2025

The International Space Station—larger than a football field and weighing almost 450 tons—must eventually fall to Earth. It’s a delicate, dangerous process

SpaceX’s Starship—the most powerful rocket ever built—experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in its otherwise successful second full-scale launch, triggering a federal investigation into what went wrong

The best-yet map of active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io hints at a hidden magma ocean—and more

Amid uncertainty over space agencies’ plans for future Venus exploration, enthusiasm for a private-sector mission grows

The James Webb Space Telescope’s studies of the Crab nebula may shed new light on the supernova remnant’s origins

Reproducing in space is just one of many reasons we should delay settlements beyond Earth

The earliest active supermassive black hole ever seen offers clues on how these enigmatic objects first formed

The Lucy spacecraft’s encounter with asteroid Dinkinesh has revealed a bizarre “contact binary” double-moon companion

The James Webb Space Telescope is gazing across the universe to find galaxies close to the “cosmic dawn”—and you can explore them from the palm of your hand

Fresh investigations find that the Red Planet’s liquid-metal core is smaller than scientists thought