Author: Ian Whittaker, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University

China routinely sends astronauts to and from its space station Tiangong. A crew capsule is about to undock from the station and return to Earth, but there’s nothing routine about its journey home. The Shenzhou-20 capsule will carry no crew, because one of its windows has been struck by space debris. Astronauts noticed an apparent […]

The United States and China are locked in a contest to be the first country to send humans to the lunar surface in half a century. But there’s a developing twist: an emerging competition between American companies to build the landing vehicle that could win this new Moon race for the US. The dust-up over […]

Darryl Fonseka/Shutterstocl What do you think of when it comes to extra terrestrial life? Most popular sci-fi books and TV shows suggest humanoid beings could live on other planets. But when astronomers are searching for extra-terrestrial life, it is usually in the form of emissions from bacteria or other tiny organisms. A new research paper […]

Esteban De Armas/Shutterstock The Artemis program has been Nasa’s best chance to get “boots on the Moon” again. But with the new US administration taking guidance from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is focused on Mars colonisation, will they end up abandoning or pushing back lunar missions? For example, there’s been speculation that returning US […]