The 50th Paris air show will offer French space agency CNES an opportunity to detail engineering tradeoffs being weighed as it designs a leaner, more cost-effective successor to Europe's Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket. The new launcher is expected to fly in 2020, assuming European Space Agency (ESA) governments approve the estimated €4 billion ($5.2 billion) project at a meeting of ESA ministers slated for 2014.

Space solar power plan lauded for vision, but not for business case

A micrometeoroid might be the culprit for an abrupt attitude problem that halted the flow of critical weather-prediction data for the U.S. East Coast from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite.

Globally, aerospace and defense merger and acquisition activity has been slow for quite awhile, but Curtis Reusser and Mike Dumais have had plenty to do. They have been heading integration teams for the exception to that rule—the new business unit created by United Technologies' $18.4 billion purchase of Goodrich Aerospace last September.

The military called it Operation Bumblebee: a secret program to develop a weapon that -- like the insect -- could take off vertically, change directions instantly and deliver a painful sting

These satellite images, taken less than a month apart by France's new Pleiades optical-imaging spacecraft, show the mile-wide trail of devastation left by the EF5 tornado that tore through Moore, Okla., on May 20. The image on the left was collected on April 29, and the one on the right on May 23.

Concepts for meeting Mars science priority evolving

Uncertainty hits defense contractors, but civil airframers take up the slack