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...the item is now believed to be a rocket booster from NASA’s Surveyor 2 mission which crash landed on the Moon in 1966... Of course, there’s still a chance that 2020 SO is actually an asteroid, in which case it would be considered a minimoon while in direct orbit around the Earth. However, an old rocket booster finding would merely be considered ‘space junk’ and join the 57,000-plus pieces of human debris currently being tracked by various entities. One astronomer’s space ‘trash’ is a vintage space collector’s treasure? You decide. You can watch more on NASA’s Surveyor missions below:...

Making Skylab Human-Friendly Best known for his iconic designs, from the Lucky Strike logo to Air Force One, Raymond Loewy also consulted on NASA’s first space station. They dined on Lobster Newberg, fresh bread, and butter cookies, and slumbered in their own individual berths, which had the luxury of privacy curtains. But in the blackness of space, there was one thing the Skylab astronauts still craved: Color. As Skylab commander Gerald Carr told the New York Times in September 1994, the astronauts were so starved for color they would stare at the test color bars used to calibrate their cameras....

The Tiangong-1 space station, which is hurtling towards Earth carrying a 'highly toxic chemical', will likely hit sometime between March 24 and April 19... Exactly where it will hit is slightly harder to predict, although experts agree it will be somewhere between latitudes of 43° north and 43° south. On September 14, 2016, China made an official statement predicting Tiangong-1 would reenter the atmosphere in the latter half of 2017. (???)

NASA has apparently been stripping and reusing parts from old spacecraft, because when you have lofty goals and a limited budget, you gotta do what you gotta do. For instance, it's salvaging the four water tanks installed on the space shuttle Endeavour this week, so the agency can use them to build a new storage system for the International Space Station. Those tanks can store 300 liters in all that can last for 25 to 27 days: they're expected to help free more time for the crew to spend on their experiments. Also, according to NASA spokesperson Daniel Huot, they...

Explanation: Skylab was an orbiting laboratory launched by a Saturn V rocket in May 1973. Skylab, pictured above, was visited three times by NASA astronauts who sometimes stayed as long as two and a half months. Many scientific tests were performed on Skylab, including astronomical observations in ultraviolet and X-ray light. Some of these observations yielded valuable information about Comet Kohoutek, our Sun and about the mysterious X-ray background -- radiation that comes from all over the sky. Skylab fell back to earth on 1979 July 11.

Far out in the Nevada desert, miles from prying eyes, is a secret Air Force facility that has been known by numerous names over the years. It has been called Paradise Ranch, Watertown Strip, Area 51, Dreamland, and Groom Lake. Groom is probably the most mythologized real location that few people have ever seen. According to people with overactive imaginations, it is where the United States government keeps dead aliens, clones them, and reverse-engineers their spacecraft. It is also where NASA filmed the faked Moon landings. However, for humans whose feet rest on solid ground, Groom is the site of...

In... 1970, a Washington gossip columnist found herself seated at a dinner party next to rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. "One of the most fascinating men in the world has just moved to town," she gushed to her readers afterward. "The rocket genius is a brilliant conversationalist, extremely handsome and socially charming." It might seem odd to judge the mastermind of the Apollo program's Saturn V launch vehicle -- and, earlier, the German V-2 -- by his savoir faire. Yet Dr. von Braun's gift for talk and salesmanship, together with his technical skill and managerial prowess, were indispensable to his...