Lawmakers came up with a budget penalty bad enough to prompt themselves to deal with taxes and entitlements. Until now, the consequences of the $85 billion budget penalty known as sequestration were largely an academic exercise, but the looming closure of FAA contract towers is already making that tangible (see p. 18).

Satellite startup brings high-speed Internet to emerging markets

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.