Out past the gates at the Kennedy Space Center along Florida's Atlantic Coast, Al Worden was on his way to the launch pad where he and his Apollo 15 crewmates blasted off for the moon almost a half-century ago.
“We used to have a lot of fun here and we did a lot of our training here,” the retired NASA astronaut said Friday, as he led a tour group along roads that offered views not only of alligators and eagles’ nests but also of the past, present and future of America’s space program.
Chris Kraft, first flight director for NASA, dies at 95
He was the man who was the "control" in Mission Control as the space race between the U.S. and Soviets heated up.
Read More.
Fifty years ago next week, 600 million people around the world watched on live television as Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took those historic first footsteps on the moon. Since then, that achievement has been spotlighted in countless books, TV shows, documentaries and feature films.
Yet, some of the most intriguing details from the Apollo 11 saga remain largely unknown or poorly understood.
All that glitters ... may be gold. At least that’s what scientists think about a shiny, Massachusetts-size asteroid that may be chock-full of precious metals.
NASA recently approved a mission to visit the metallic space rock, which orbits the sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The mission — the first to a metal asteroid — could reveal secrets about our solar system’s earliest days while setting the stage for a future space mining industry.
With help from a pair of NASA satellites, scientists have identified what’s being called the biggest patch of seaweed ever seen. The vast mat of brown Sargassum algae extends all the way across the Atlantic Ocean — a distance of about 5,500 miles — and the researchers say the so-called bloom may represent the “new normal” for parts of the Atlantic.
Think of it as a crash course in averting asteroid crashes.
As part of the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference, NASA, FEMA and their international partners will conduct a so-called tabletop exercise designed to show how they would react to the discovery of a fictional asteroid heading our way.
“We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star,” Carl Sagan declared in 1996, in one of the astronomer's last interviews.
It’s a simplistic description of Earth, but that picture is changing.
An astronomer at Columbia University has a new guess about how hypothetical alien civilizations might be invisibly navigating our galaxy: Firing lasers at binary black holes (twin black holes that orbit each other).
The idea is a futuristic upgrade of a technique NASA has used for decades.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule returned safely to Earth early Friday, wrapping up its inaugural mission to the International Space Station and signaling that the U.S. may soon be able to ferry astronauts to and from space without relying on Russian spacecraft.
Dragons may be make-believe, but a dragon-shaped aurora borealis that flickered in the sky over Iceland this month was breathtakingly real — just have a look at this dramatic photograph.
The photo, taken by Jingyi Zhang on Feb. 6, became NASA's astronomy photo of the day on Feb. 18 and has been widely viewed online since. It shows a swirling green aurora over a dark, snowy landscape where a solitary figure — the photographer's mother — stares up at the sky as if awestruck.
It’s a hit! A harpoon designed to help clean up the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space junk now orbiting Earth passed a key test earlier this month when it successfully speared a piece of simulated debris.
After falling silent eight months ago during a severe dust storm that swept across the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Opportunity rover has been officially declared dead.
Ready to feel small? A striking new photograph taken by China’s Longjiang-2 satellite affords a rare view of the lunar far side — the side that’s impossible to see from the surface of our planet — with Earth visible in the background as a tiny blue marble.
"Few pictures have been taken that show the entire far side of the moon, so we're pretty proud to have helped take this picture," Cees Bassa, an astronomer at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, told NBC News MACH in an email. Bassa is a volunteer astronomer at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands, where the photo was processed.
Scientists have discovered an enormous void under an Antarctic glacier, sparking concern that the ice sheet is melting faster than anyone had realized — and spotlighting the dire threat posed by rising seas to coastal cities around the world, including New York City and Miami.
The cavity under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is about six miles long and 1,000 feet deep — representing the loss of 14 billion tons of ice.
Seems we weren't quite right about the Milky Way.
Last year we learned that our home galaxy is bigger than we imagined, and now comes word that its shape isn't quite what many have believed it to be. Instead of being a mostly flat spiral disk of stars and gas, new research by astronomers in China and Australia shows that the Milky Way is significantly warped at its edges.
A dying star, a gleaming starship, a distant snowman, and more far-out space photos.
For those trying to understand the link between the polar vortex and the freakishly cold weather that gripped the Midwest in recent days, a new NASA video should help.
The brief animation, created from data collected from Jan. 20 to Jan. 29 by the space agency’s Aqua satellite, shows a shape-shifting mass of frigid Arctic air dipping down to the lower latitudes to bring record-breaking low temperatures. In addition to forcing schools to shut down and disrupting air travel, the chilly weather has been blamed for several deaths.
