The experiment was failing. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian was in a cave in Spain, one outfitted to resemble the surface of a foreign planet, and she knew it was time to pull out. The goal had been to ...

Models help scientists understand everything from the particles that make up the universe to massive superstructures of galaxies at the beginning of time. But sometimes they model more mundane, though ...

If we want to someday live on Mars, spaceships won’t be enough. We would need a Martian city—and this is how we might build one. In many ways, the problem of moving to Mars is simply a packing problem ...

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." --Robert A. Heinlein Stephen Hawking just gave a lecture in Hong Kong. Part of his message was that ...

Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and steadily began to spread its reach from the tidal pools to the oceans to the shorelines to the ...

Space exploration will always be limited by three major factors: access to power, computing capacity, and cost. In one fell swoop, Elon Musk and his trio of companies seem to have solved all these ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...

All 3. We need the high-orbit colonies because constructing spacecraft on the ground just doesn't make a lot of sense. We need the lunar base as a means to shorten the distance to Mars and to allow ...

Is human migration into space inevitable? Is it based on facts, or is it based upon a belief in human exceptionalism? These are some of the questions explored by Lee and Morgan Irons in a recent ...

Many are passionate about colonizing outer space. They argue that it can be "Plan B" to rescue earth, or a solution to depleting resources and human overpopulation, or a way to move polluting ...