The orbiting lab’s first external docking port will be dedicated to future moorings of U.S. commercial crew transport spacecraft.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched a U.S.-built Japanese communications Satellite early Aug. 14, and used three of its nine engines to return its first stage to a picture-perfect tail-down landing on a robotic barge downrange from the Cape Canaveral launch site.

Under a launch-for-data-exchange contract, NASA will launch Lockheed Martin’s SkyFire 6U CubeSat on a lunar science trajectory as part of the agency’s Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).

The survival of human explorers on Mars will depend in part on how well experts size up the Red Planet’s environmental risks and resources, a NASA astronaut says.

An asteroid at least 10 times more massive than originally estimated appears responsible for a prominent impact site on the Moon known as the Imbrium Basin.

Phoenix-based Atlas Space Operations, Inc., plans to inaugurate a commercial deep-space communications service by July 2017.

A Silicon Valley startup plans to send an experiment in fiber-optics manufacturing to the International Space Station next year in a bid to make to the first commercial products that require microgravity for their creation, and sell them at prices higher than the cost of launch.

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover could be ready to resume science operations within a few days, after a near week-long round of troubleshooting to determine why it placed itself in “safe mode” on July 2.