DALLAS (Reuters) – A solar airplane that developers hope to eventually pilot around the globe landed safely on Thursday in Texas, completing the second and longest leg of an attempt to fly across the United States powered only by the sun. The spindly experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse, touched down at Dallas/Forth Worth International Airport [...]

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – In a scene right out of Star Trek, a Texas company is developing a 3-D food printer for astronauts to create custom meals on the fly. With support from NASA, the firm, Systems and Materials Research Corp of Austin, intends to design, build and test a food [...]

By Andrea Shalal-Esa WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Public backlash against deadly overseas drone strikes may undermine promising uses of such technology for anything from disaster response to mail delivery, a top U.S. industry group said as it launched a lobbying effort to "demystify" unmanned planes. The Aerospace Industries Association wants to prevent misperceptions and regulatory roadblocks [...]

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – An automated telescope monitoring the moon has captured images of an 88-pound (40 kg) rock slamming into the lunar surface, creating a bright flash of light, NASA scientists said on Friday. The explosion on March 17 was the biggest seen since NASA began watching the moon for [...]

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA's first telescope dispatched to hunt for Earth-like planets that may support life elsewhere in the universe has lost use of its positioning system, threatening its mission, officials said on Wednesday. Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope revolutionized the study of so-called exoplanets, with discovery of [...]

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – An unmanned Atlas rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Wednesday to deliver an upgraded global positioning system satellite into orbit. The 189-foot (58-meter) tall rocket, built and launched by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, soared into blue skies [...]

By Tom Brown MIAMI (Reuters) – The U.S. National Weather Service is getting a quantum jump in computing power that will significantly improve its forecasting and storm tracking abilities to better protect the country from severe weather. "This is a game changer," Louis Uccellini, who took over as director of the National Weather Service in [...]

By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) – After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own [...]

By Andrea Shalal-Esa WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government believes a Chinese missile launch this week was the first test of a new interceptor that could be used to destroy a satellite in orbit, one U.S. defense official told Reuters on Wednesday. China launched a large missile on Monday that reached 10,000 km (6,250 miles) [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China launched a large missile on Monday that reached 6,200 miles above the earth, its highest suborbital launch since 1976, according to a U.S. scientist at Harvard University. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the rocket was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in western China, [...]