One of the few humans to ever walk on the surface of the Moon has just issued a new, international call to ramp up the development of a human settlement on Mars.
Recent statements from one of NASA's lead officials indicate that the U.S. isn't likely to return to the Moon anytime soon, at least not under its own power.
Russia has been sending Soyuz capsules into space since the late 1960s. As spaceships go, they're simple, cheap, and dead nuts reliable, but the design is old enough that taking a Soyuz capsule much beyond Earth orbit isn't really an option. We've just heard that Russia has finalized the design for a new spacecraft that will be able to take humans all the way to the Moon.
For the past year, two spacecraft the size of washing machines have been orbiting the Moon in formation, mapping out gravitational anomalies by precisely measuring the distance between them. Now they're all done, and to celebrate, NASA is about to slam 'em both into a lunar mountain at a couple thousand miles an hour.
Mars has been the hot hypothetical destination for space tourists in recent months, but a new commercial space travel company called Golden Spike wants to open up the Moon to science and tourism instead, by offering round trip tickets to the lunar surface for governments, businesses, and people with an obscene amount of money.
We've known since February that the leading candidate for NASA's next major manned mission is a station located at the L2 Earth-Moon Lagrange Point out beyond the far side of the moon. The latest rumors suggest that this mission was probably approved by the Obama administration, and now that he's been reelected, it has a good chance of actually happening.