TITUSVILLE, Fla. — NASA has added milestones and funding to agreements with two companies working on commercial space station concepts using money from a third agreement that ended last year.

TITUSVILLE, Fla. — The United Arab Emirates has agreed to develop an airlock module for the lunar Gateway, helping complete the design of the lunar space station while enhancing the UAE’s role in the Artemis lunar exploration effort.

WASHINGTON — As NASA prepares for the first launch of a commercial lunar lander carrying agency-sponsored payloads, it is trying to balance the science it can achieve with the challenges of landing on the moon and other emerging concerns.

HELSINKI — A newly-completed launch pad on China’s Hainan island could increase China’s access to space, boosting national constellation projects and commercial launch plans.

WASHINGTON — The Government Accountability Office is recommending that the Federal Aviation Administration improve its process for investigating launch mishaps, one that currently relies heavily on launch providers.

HELSINKI — A Shanghai government initiative aims to foster a robust commercial space ecosystem including a range of satellites, launch vehicles and related applications and infrastructure.

NASA’s robotic Mars exploration program is in crisis. A recent review of the plan of its flagship Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission pegged its cost at $10 billion, a price tag that threatens to preclude funding any other exploration missions to the Red Planet for the next decade and a half.

WASHINGTON — DARPA has selected 14 companies, ranging from small startups to established aerospace corporations, to participate in a study on developing commercial lunar infrastructure.

WASHINGTON — The drogue parachute on the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule failed to deploy properly because of a design error, a flaw that did not prevent a safe landing of the capsule.

HELSINKI — China launched a new internet technology experiment satellite from a sea platform Tuesday, apparently continuing tests for a low Earth orbit megaconstellation.

HELSINKI — Egypt and China signed a series of space agreements Wednesday including cooperation on the China-led International Lunar Research Station.

WASHINGTON — The success of a NASA project last year to demonstrate an inflatable heat shield has attracted interest from several companies who are working with the agency to advance the technology.

WASHINGTON — NASA will give companies greater choice in the type of contract to use for producing a deorbit vehicle for the International Space Station.

There are several plausible chemical pathways a hypothetical methane-based life-form could use to generate energy.

Life has found a home on Earth for around 4 billion years. That’s a significant fraction of the universe’s 13.77 billion-year history. Presumably, if life arose here, it could have appeared anywhere. And for sufficiently broad definitions of life, it might even be possible for life to have appeared mere seconds after the Big Bang.

“Researchers can extract more knowledge from the same data, contributing to a deeper understanding of the cosmos”