The coming decades of space exploration hinge on a single, stubborn number: the 225 million kilometres between Earth and Mars. Chemical rockets, the workhorses of every space programme to date, take ...

In the endless pursuit of faster, more efficient travel, engineers have been cooking up all kinds of new forms of propulsion. One of the most interesting to emerge in the last decade is the electric ...

A laboratory in Troitsk, Russia, may have just nudged humanity closer to interplanetary commuting. Scientists at Rosatom, the country's state nuclear corporation, have revealed a working prototype of ...

In the relentless quest to make journeys to Mars shorter and safer, Russian scientists have recently turned heads with a bold claim: A plasma-based propulsion system could cut the Earth–Mars transit ...

The big picture: In deep-space travel, the race is no longer about who has the biggest rocket – it's about who can build the smartest plasma engine. As the competition to reach Mars intensifies, ...