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From Popular Mechanics: The Federal Aviation Administration issued a Commercial Space Transportation License on Friday, February 2. It reads: Space Exploration Technologies is authorized to conduct: (i) A flight of the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) transporting the modified Tesla Roadster (mass...

From the Daily Camera: University of Colorado Professor Jack Burns leads a laboratory on campus that he describes as a mash-up between Silicon Valley and the space program with the help of two undergraduate students he deemed "the next space pioneers." Seniors Benjamin Mellinkoff and Matthew Spydell were hunkered down...

From Scientific American: MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.—Earth’s nearest neighbor, the moon, is far from being a “been there, done that” world in space science and exploration. That’s the message from scientists and engineers at NASA’s Lunar Science for Landed Missions Workshop, recently held here at the space agency’s Ames Research Center...

From CU Boulder Today: Humans have already been to the moon—and will likely return—but engineering undergraduates Benjamin Mellinkoff and Matthew Spydell have their eyes set on an even bigger challenge: helping humans explore the entire solar system with the aid of robotic partners. Mellinkoff and Spydell work in a NASA-funded...

Bang Nhan, a Ph.D. candidate at CU Boulder was one of 6 students to receive the American Astronomical Society’s Honorable Mention Chambliss Prize. He received this acknowledgement based upon the quality of his dissertation research. Bang’s poster presented new results on the detection of the foreground polarization signal using the...

From Nature: Plans to return to the Moon are getting serious. Last month, US President Donald Trump declared that the next time US astronauts blast off, they will be headed to our rocky satellite. In September, the European Space Agency made its strongest call yet for the installation of a...

From The Guardian: This time next year, there may be a new world leader in lunar exploration. If all goes according to plan, China will have done something no other space-faring superpower has been able to do: land on the far side of the moon. China is rocketing ahead with...

From Scientific American: Any way you slice it, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the boldest, highest-stakes gambles in the space agency’s storied history. Just building and testing the observatory has proved to be a dauntingly complex technological enterprise, pushing the observatory’s astronomical price tag to nearly...

From BBC The Inquiry: Governing moon miners, asteroid hunters and space junk sounds pretty tricky, but we better get our act together. This year the majority of space launches included commercial enterprises. Space is no longer just the playground of governments but companies; companies that want to mine the moon...

From American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics: Little consensus exists among scientists and policymakers about the best strategy for getting humans into orbit around Mars and someday to the surface. The Trump administration and a re-established U.S. National Space Council are expected to take yet another look at a possible...