NASA/JPL/USGS; Lisa O'Connor/Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images; Business Insider

The Starliner spacecraft is finally ready for launch, targeting a liftoff date in May. It’s been a struggle to get to this point for Boeing’s crew vehicle, which suffered from a series of unfortunate delays over the years, the last of which had to do with two major safety hazards discovered on the spacecraft.

In the current era of spaceflight, the Moon is arguably the place to be. International space agencies and private companies alike are racing to the lunar surface, hoping to establish a permanent presence on Earth’s natural satellite that would propel them to farther celestial pitstops. All that increased activity on…

March madness has taken hold of space exploration, with red-hot rockets, gravity-defying hops, and dramatic explosions being just a few of the many captivating highlights from the past few weeks.

It might be the end of the road for two of NASA’s most iconic telescopes as the space agency looks to reduce the funding for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, much to the dismay of scientists who rely heavily on the cosmic observations of the missions.

Stratolaunch flew its Talon-A hypersonic vehicle for the first time after dropping it out of the belly of Roc, an utterly massive aircraft with a 385-foot wingspan. Meanwhile, SpaceX flew its Starship for the third time in a test that pushed the limits of the megarocket. Catch up on these and other top science stories…
dima_zel/Getty Images
Vladimir Vustyansky; Ronald Polidan/Lunar Resources, Inc.; Business Ins