Space Shuttle

​On this day ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Columbus laboratory was launched into orbit, safely nestled in the mammoth cargo bay of the space shuttle Atlantis.

The first astronaut to fly in space untethered died on Thursday at the age of 80. According to NASA, Captain Bruce McCandless II (US Navy, retired) passed away at his home in California from undisclosed causes.

India today entered the ranks of spacefaring nations with reusable spacecraft as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) conducted the first flight of its unmanned, scale hypersonic Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD) spaceplane.

ESA is developing a universal docking mechanism that will allow any spacecraft to lock onto any other.

Attention space rats and astromice, NASA is sending new, posher rodent habitats to the International Space Station (ISS). The high-tech cages will first will fly in August aboard an unmanned SpaceX Dragon cargo ship and are part of an extensive study on the effects of weightlessness.

Chances are one of the materials up for consideration in building the International Space Station was not matchsticks. But for one Iowa artist the idea of using 282,000 matchsticks and gallons of glue to hand-build a scale model of the ISS seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea.

Astronaut Shannon Lucid's spacesuit goes up for auction at Bonhams auction house in New York.

Bonhams next Space Sale will include a Sokol K spacesuit worn by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz docking (the end to the Space Race) and a Sokol KV-2 suit worn by Gennadi Strekalov in a 1990 mission to the Mir space station