New research on changes in the Earth's upper atmosphere suggests space debris could remain in orbit for longer than expected.

There's gridlock in orbit. More than 400 telecommunications satellites, plus an indeterminate number of retired, failed, and secret spacecraft, occupy a narrow band of space some 35,000 kilometers above Earth's equator. Now, researchers have found a way to alleviate the congestion: attaching solar sails to satellites that would propel them 10 to 30 kilometers north or south of the standard orbit.

NASA is nervous about sending astronauts to Mars because exposure to the wind of high-energy particles streaming from the sun could indeed prove deadly. But a team of researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, UK, have shown that a magnet no wider than your thumb can deflect a stream of charged particles like those in the solar wind. It gives new life to an old idea about shielding spacecraft, and might just usher in a new era of space travel.

Future manned missions to the moon or Mars could use plants as bio-harvesters to extract valuable elements from the alien soils, researchers say.

Dealing with space debris presents a thorny political issue that must be addressed, according to an international foundation's brief to the United Nations. Yet tensions between countries about the best way to deal with space junk could make a solution difficult, experts say.

Solar storms unleashed by the sun's activity may threaten future Mars colonies in addition to Earth. Now NASA is investing in a forecasting system that may someday give up to three days advance warning of space weather events.

A preliminary version of an upcoming report on the link between national security and U.S. commercial launch capabilities warns that U.S. leadership in space is threatened by poor coordination in setting space policy.

NASA scientists are crowdsourcing lunar exploration by appealing to space fans to help identify features on the Moon - and even to discover the wreckage of long-lost spacecraft.

President Barack Obama set a lofty next goal this week for Americans in space: Visiting an asteroid by 2025. But reaching a space rock in a mere 15 years is a daunting mission, and one that might also carry the ultimate safety of the planet on its shoulders.

Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.