In Pictures: NASA’s cool, radical and visionary concepts
From satellite swarms to interstellar subs NASA is advancing transformative aerospace projects.
Elon Musk showed a crowd of space enthusiasts and reporters at SpaceX’s rocket development site late on Saturday in the remote village of Boca Chica, Texas, animations of Starship landing on the moon and Mars and predicted that the rocket's first orbital flight could come in the next six months, followed by missions to space with humans aboard the next year.
The mission will ferry technology and experiments to the moon under a NASA program that will lay the groundwork for astronaut trips by 2024 under the optimistic schedule laid out by the Trump administration.
A NASA-funded lab in Colorado aims to send robots there to deploy telescopes that will look far into our galaxy, remotely operated by orbiting astronauts.
The vehicle was built to drive six-tenths of a mile (1 km), but ended up covering 28 miles (45 km) and lasting longer on Mars than any other robot sent to the surface of the Red Planet.
If this mission is a success then Rocket Lab expects to increase its activity 2019, with a goal of 16 missions.
The Planck space mission has given scientists new information about the age, content and origin of the universe.
The first half of 2012 was pretty bad - from the embarrassing hack of a conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard to a plethora of data breaches - and the second half wasn't much better, with events including Symantec's antivirus update mess and periodic attacks from hactivists at Anonymous.