A new NASA mission to bring an asteroid closer to Earth in time to meet President Obama's goal of landing humans on one by 2025 would do more than bring the mountain to Mohammed. It also would add relevance to some of lawmakers' favorite NASA programs—the Orion crew vehicle, heavy-lift Space Launch System and commercial human spacecraft. NASA's fiscal 2014 budget request will include $100 million for the mission to find a small asteroid, capture it with a robotic spacecraft and bring it into range of human explorers somewhere in the vicinity of the Moon.

New peek at the dawn of time sets up need for a new physics

An international groundswell of less visible but no less ambitious commercial-space concepts is materializing quietly—one idea at a time.

The U.S. Air Force could clear the Delta IV rocket for flight as soon as May as an investigation into a mishap with the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne RL10B-2 upper stage winds down.

Wilson is a senior adjunct international security analyst at the Rand Corp.

To counter the mounting number of cyberattacks, a group of senators led by Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) are working on legislation urging the Pentagon to train members of the National Guard to respond to cyberthreats. The bill would establish Cyber Guard units in every state that could be activated by governors or the Defense Secretary and would draw on the private-sector information technology expertise of members of the National Guard. The bill is aimed at offsetting a shortage of cyberexperts across the government.

No evidence Chinese debris took out Russsian satellite

NASA has taken down a popular technical reports server after the chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the space agency complained the website was particularly popular in China. Shutdown of the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) follows the March 16 arrest of a NASA contractor employee as he awaited takeoff at Dulles International Airport on a flight to his native China.