Russian engineers are betting that a radically different rocket engine can compress the long slog to Mars into something closer to an interplanetary commute. Their new plasma propulsion prototype, ...

We’ve been talking about going to Mars for decades, but we haven’t yet cracked how to get people there and back safely and in a reasonable amount of time. The problem is one of distance and the ...

NASA’s push for a new nuclear rocket engine is not just another upgrade to the hardware we strap to the bottom of spacecraft. It is an attempt to rewrite the basic rules of how far, how fast, and how ...