Russian officials considered delaying the return of Soyuz TMA-10M from the International Space Station March 11 because of blowing snow and 0F cold at the landing site 230 mi. southwest of the Karaganda staging area, but decided to proceed with a reduced helicopter-recovery force instead. ISS Expedition 38 Commander Oleg Kotov, cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy and NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins later parted ways after 166 days in space, with Hopkins headed straight back to Houston and the cosmonauts returning to their Star City base near Moscow.

Commercial launchers retool and revise business strategies

Communication satellite operators shore up cyber defenses

Innovation and competitiveness in the space sector

Spectacular new results from NASA's Kepler planet-finding space telescope have raised scientists' hopes that Earth-like planets in the “Goldilocks zone” where conditions are “just right” for life are fairly common in the Universe.

NASA still wants to build the heavy-lift Space Launch System, and as long as Sen. Richard Shelby is alive, it will. The U.S. space agency needs the Alabama Republican, who is the ranking member of his party on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he needs the SLS to keep his constituents at the Marshall Space Flight Center happy. So the fairly level funding of $1.3 billion for the big rocket, plus some extra advanced-technology money, in the agency's fiscal 2015 budget request is no surprise.

Crowded manifest tests SpaceX's mettle in satellite launch sector

Two retired NASA astronauts died recently—Dale A. Gardner, who helped capture two satellites in orbit and return them to Earth in 1984, and William R. Pogue, who logged 84 days on the first U.S. space station, Skylab, in 1973-74. Gardner, who died Feb. 19 in Colorado Springs, was 65. Pogue, who was 84 and died March 4, had been living in Cocoa Beach, Fla. The causes of the deaths were not disclosed.