Snug in Earth’s orbit, Hubble is free from the background glare that earthly telescopes must fight to see the stars. This allows its supersensitive camera to take better photos of galaxies farther away—and thus much dimmer—than any optical telescope on the ground can. But despite being closer to the moon than any other telescope, there’s no way the scope could snap a photo of that one small step man took 40 years ago.

Space Adventures, the broker of the first tourist flights to space celebrated its ten-year anniversary today here at the Explorer's Club in New York with the announcement that it had scored a deal with the Russian Federal Space Agency, or RKA, to buy an entire flight to the International Space Station.

Laser radar systems now being developed at Rochester Institute of Technology and MIT's famed Lincoln Lab could eventually generate ultra-detailed, three-dimensional maps of planets, comets, asteroids and moons. The scientists are developing a LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology that operates both in the optical and ultraviolet, and could deliver detailed information about atmospheric composition, plus air temperature and pressure, wind speed, and precise topological features of a planet or planetary body.

Sure, you can sign up for a little piece of property on the Moon, but the little certificate you get in return won't mean anything. Now that the space tourism industry is starting to heat up, though, a few space lovers are calling for a plan to truly open up the lunar real estate business.

The board that has been tasked with reviewing NASA's plans to build a craft that will return astronauts to the Moon apparently has too many insiders.

When the shuttle retires in 2010, as many as 8,000 NASA contractors could lose their jobs. After a request from lawmakers, NASA released these numbers yesterday, but added that this could be a worst case scenario. The Kennedy Space Center would suffer the biggest losses, with 80 percent of its contract workers losing their jobs by 2011.

Using the highest-resolution mapping data of the moon's south pole ever obtained, NASA has created an animation that shows what it would look like to descend to the rim of the Shackleton Crater—which has been proposed as a landing site for a future human mission.

Engineers at Johnson Space Center in Houston this week released a design for a rugged lunar vehicle that astronauts could one day drive around the Moon. The truck has six wheels, no doors or roof, all-wheel drive, and it would be ideal for parallel parking.

We all know that in the distant future powerful robots will cater to our every whim and work as we know it will cease to exist (at least we're keeping our fingers crossed). But in the near future?

NASA hopes to someday use a robot like Bill Stone's DepthX to explore Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter and one of the most probably places in our solar system to support life.

Before NASA sends astronauts to live on the moon in 2020, per presidential mandate, the agency must first figure out what resources the lunar neighborhood has to offer. Are there stores of ice that could be melted and processed to provide oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for rocket fuel? Or is the potential fuel locked up inside rocks?

In July, the space shuttle Discovery is slated to deliver two tons of hardware and supplies to the partially built International Space Station. This mission is paid for. As for the 16 more needed to finish assembly, as mandated by President George W. Bush two years ago in his Vision for Space Exploration policy, NASA is short by as much as $5 billion.

NASA's Ion Engine

1. Charge the Fuel
Xenon is an inert gas, seemingly useless for rocketry. Before it´s used as fuel, the engine must convert it into an electrically charged gas, also called a plasma. An electron emitter fires electrons at the xenon gas. When an electron hits a xenon atom, it strips off an additional electron from the atom´s shell to create a positively charged xenon ion.