Later this year, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) is scheduled to launch on an exploratory and scientific mission for NASA, with support by the University of Colorado Boulder. As part of the spacecraft’s mission, it will act as the first spacecraft to focus primarily on the state of the upper atmosphere, the […]
The idea of harvesting resources from asteroids long predates space travel, and NASA is now taking the first steps toward bringing those celestial bodies down to Earth. Plans are being made for an entirely robotic spaceship able to haul a typical nearby asteroid, about 25 feet long and 500 tons, to a position near the […]
Richard Garriott’s Father, Owen, was an astronaut. The neighbors on either side of his childhood home, Joe Engle and Hoot Gibson, were astronauts. “Going to space,” Garriott said at SXSW on Monday, “seemed like something everybody just did.” Garriott has since made millions developing video games (famously inserting himself into the Ultima series of role-playing […]
What do director James Cameron, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page (executive chairmen of Google, respectively), and Ross Perot Jr. have in common? They’re all going into the space mining business, backing the startup company Planetary Resources. Planetary Resources hopes to have a private spacecraft operational in less than two years, using it to mine for […]
