The US company SpaceX on Wednesday said it was unlikely to meet a planned May 7 launch to send its Dragon space capsule to the International Space Station, but did not set a new date for the attempt. "At this time, a May 7th launch appears unlikely," spokeswoman Kirstin Grantham said in a statement. "SpaceX is continuing to work through the software assurance process with NASA. We will issue a statement as soon as a new launch target is set." …

WASHINGTON: SpaceX said Monday it is pushing back by a week a bid to become the first private company to attempt to launch a spacecraft to the International Space Station on an unmanned cargo mission. "After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data," said SpaceX spokewoman Kirstin Brost Grantham. "While it is still possible that …

The first privately owned passenger spaceship is on track for a test flight beyond the atmosphere this year, and nearly 500 people have signed up for rides. Another company just closed on $5 million equity financing, enough to finish building a two-seater rocketplane called Lynx. Both firms -- and a half-dozen more -- are looking at flying not just people, but experiments and payloads owned by research laboratories, businesses and educational institutes. …

A stolen US space agency laptop containing codes that control the International Space Station did not put the orbiting lab in peril, a NASA spokesman said on Friday. The unencrypted notebook computer went missing in March 2011 and "resulted in the loss of the algorithms used to command and control the International Space Station," NASA Inspector General Paul Martin told lawmakers this week. But the US space agency insisted that international astronauts …

Solar radiation from a massive sun storm - the largest in nearly a decade - collided with the Earth's atmosphere on Tuesday, prompting an airline to reroute flights and skywatchers to seek out spectacular light displays. US carrier Delta Air Lines said it had adjusted flight routes for transpolar journeys between Asia and the United States to avoid problems caused by the radiation storm, a spokesman said. NASA confirmed the coronal mass ejection …

The global average temperature last year was the ninth-warmest in the modern meteorological record, continuing a trend linked to greenhouse gases that saw nine of the 10 hottest years occurring since the year 2000, NASA scientists said on Thursday. A separate report from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the average temperature for the United States in 2011 as the 23rd warmest year on record. The global average …

The second of two NASA lunar probes on a mission to study the Moon's inner core so scientists can better understand the origins of planets went into orbit Sunday as planned, the US space agency said. The second Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL-B) began orbiting the Moon at about 2243 GMT, according to officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. GRAIL-A reached its lunar orbit on Saturday. "NASA greets …

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system, a milestone in the search for planets like the earth, the space agency said on Tuesday. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are the smallest planets outside the solar system confirmed around a star like the Sun, NASA said in a statement. The planets are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where …

About 1,000 asteroids big enough to cause catastrophic damage if they hit Earth are orbiting relatively nearby, a NASA survey shows. In a project known as Spaceguard, the U.S. space agency was ordered by Congress in 1998 to find 90 percent of objects near Earth that are 1 km (0.62 of a mile) in diameter or larger.

The sun's abundant energy, if harvested in space, could provide a cost-effective way to meet global power needs in as little as 30 years with seed money from governments, according to a study by an international scientific group. Orbiting power plants capable of collecting solar energy and beaming it to Earth appear "technically feasible" within a decade or two based on technologies now in the laboratory, a study group of the Paris-headquartered …