The race to Mars has quietly become the defining contest of twenty-first century spaceflight, pitting a state-backed Chinese program, a commercially driven SpaceX campaign, and a methodical NASA ...

Where Elon Musk talks openly about building a city on Mars, NASA has been careful to draw a line between exploration and colonization. The agency has long voiced a desire to send astronauts to explore ...

NASA has lost contact with one of its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission ...