A commercial rocket has blasted off from the US with a load of supplies for the International Space Station.

Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece The Shining is the director's take on the Holocaust. Or is it about the treatment of Native Americans? Or numerology? Or how Kubrick – fresh from filming 2001: A Space Odyssey – was behind the faked filming of the moon landings?

A new private supply ship for the International Space Station remained stuck on the ground today after rocket engine trouble led to a last-second abort of the historic flight.

The launch of a privately owned Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was delayed today when a computer detected a possible problem with one of the rocket's engines.

A Russian-made Soyuz craft carrying three astronauts has docked with the International Space Station, putting the crew in place for the imminent arrival of the first ever privately owned cargo ship to the orbiting lab.

The Mojave Desert stood in for the dry earth of the Red Planet yesterday as Nasa scientists tested an engineering model of their next-generation Mars rover.

Scientists shocked to find greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than CO2 bubbling from deep ocean

Mali named Microsoft's Africa representative as its caretaker Prime Minister yesterday but its path back to civilian rule was thrown into doubt as soldiers arrested key allies of the ousted president, Amadou Toumani Toure.

The space shuttle Discovery made a final voyage around the Washington Monument and the White House yesterday, before landing for the last time.

After three decades of space service, Discovery, Nasa's oldest and most travelled shuttle began its new life as a museum relic today with one final takeoff.

Dealing with climate change is a moral issue on a par with ending slavery, the world's most celebrated climate scientist, James Hansen, of Nasa, believes.

Hackers broke into Nasa systems so comprehensively that they could have compromised US national security, a congressional panel has been told.

The Nasa astronaut Janice Voss, who first worked for the US space agency as a teenager and flew five shuttle missions in seven years, died of breast cancer on 6 February at the age of 55. Voss flew four missions in the 1990s before a flight to the International Space Station in 2000. Nasa said that she was one of six women to fly in space at least five times.

Fifty years after John Glenn ushered in an era of American supremacy in space by orbiting the Earth, Nasa is fishing for tenants to rent disused facilities at its Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.