President Trump and Vice President Pence are expected to formally reestablish the U.S. Space Command on Thursday. It's not the Space Force they want, but they intend it as a step in that direction.
NPR's Audie Cornish talks with Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center about what satellite imagery can tell us about the cause and extent of the fires in Brazil.
President Trump has made creating a Space Force a key line in his campaign rallies. Congress is now on board due to concerns about security threats to satellites and the chance to land more jobs.
It started as a joke, as President Trump riffed on the idea last year. Now, Congress could create the first, new military service in more than 70 years.
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Wired writer Daniel Oberhaus about a failed lunar mission that left a few thousand tardigrades a microscopic animal, on the moon.
An international consortium planning the Thirty Meter Telescope still prefers to site it atop the Big Island's Mauna Kea. But local protests may drive the project to the Canary Islands.
The South American country is home to the Andes Mountains and the Atacama Desert, places that have some of the stillest and driest air in the world. That makes them ideal for astronomy.
With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, what has the space program meant for America? NPR's Steve Inskeep and commentator Cokie Roberts take listener questions.