A NASA safety panel says filling a Starship for the Moon could take around 22 flights. Elon Musk says 6 to 8. That is not a rounding error — it is two different futures for what deep-space flight costs. The most important number in the Mars business this week was not a valuation or a launch date. It was a count of gas-station runs. On Thursday, October 22, NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel held its quarterly public meeting, and panel member Charlie Precourt — a former NA

A new rotor airfoil out of NASA Ames did something counterintuitive — it got thinner and sharper — and in simulation it stretched a single Mars flight from 0.7 kilometers to as much as 18.7. Ingenuity was never supposed to last. NASA's helicopter arrived on Mars in 2021 as a technology demonstration, planned for up to five flights. It flew 72 times before rotor damage ended its mission in January 2024 — and every serious Mars plan since has had to answer the question of what

Four volunteers have spent a full year inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat in Houston, living as if they were on Mars — and on October 31, they finally get to come home from a planet they never left. The most important Mars mission of the past year did not launch. It did not need to. On October 19, 2025, four volunteers walked into Mars Dune Alpha, NASA's 3D-printed simulated Mars habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and closed the door. On October 19, 2026,

Perseverance has now driven farther than any vehicle on another world — and it did it in less than half the time of the rover it passed, by driving itself. The record fell on an ordinary drive. On October 11, on its 2,006th Martian day, NASA's Perseverance rover rolled 299.6 feet across the surface. That short leg pushed its lifetime total to 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometres) — past the 28.06 miles logged by Opportunity between 2004 and 2018, and past every lunar rover as well.

While NASA's own Mars sample plan sits stranded on the surface, a Japanese spacecraft launching Monday will go to Mars' largest moon, scoop up its soil, and fly it home — with American hardware doing the digging. The most important Mars launch of 2026 will not leave from Texas or Florida. It leaves from an island spaceport in southern Japan — and NASA spends this afternoon explaining why American fingerprints are all over it. At 4 p.m. EDT today, October 15, NASA holds a tele

Every founder asks who will buy. Mars founders have to ask it in order — because the first customer of a new world is never the person who eventually lives there. Ask a room of space fans who the customer for Mars is and most will point at the end of the story: settlers, tourists, researchers in habitats, kids born under a pink sky. They are not wrong. They are just last. No new market in history has started with its final customer. Aviation did not start with holiday flights

A student-built gel experiment rode a cargo flight this morning — aimed at one of the hardest gates on the road to Mars. The most important Mars launch of the week was not a Mars launch. At 6:33 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, October 13, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on NASA's CRS-35 mission. The booster, flying for the eighth time, returned about eight minutes later to Landing Zone 40, with sonic booms rolling across th