Jason Davis

NBC News — A colossal telescope with the potential to revolutionize astronomy and reveal extraterrestrial life is set for construction atop a dormant volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. But protesters have blocked the road to the summit since July, saying the planned telescope - called the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) for the diameter of its huge light-collecting mirror - would desecrate a place that Native Hawaiians deem sacred.

NBC News — A day after their spidery lunar lander touched down on the moon in December 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt hammered a 16-inch-long aluminum cylinder into the lunar surface and extracted roughly a pound and a half of the rocky soil known as regolith.

NBC News — The Greek god who became the namesake of NASA's Apollo program in the 1960s and '70s had a twin sister named Artemis, and NASA says she'll lead humans back to the moon. The Artemis program, unveiled by NASA in mid-May, aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2024 - and give us the first female moonwalker.

NBC News — Don't panic - it was just a test. A make-believe asteroid 200 feet wide just plowed into a simulated New York City, sent there by NASA as part of an exercise to study what might happen if astronomers found a giant space rock heading toward Earth.

NBC News — Maybe 'Oumuamua wasn't the first visitor from another star system after all. When the mysterious, stadium-size object sped past our sun in 2017 before disappearing from view, scientists believed they were witnessing a rare event. But a new paper suggests that a pint-sized 'Oumuamua-like object came our way in 2014, briefly blazing as a meteor in the skies over Papua New Guinea.

NBC News — NASA has been toiling away on a monster rocket for the past eight years - but how much action the skyscraper-size Space Launch System will see once it's completed is now anybody's guess.

NBC News — No one has walked on the moon in almost 50 years, but NASA says the long dry spell will come to an end by 2028. And if things go according to plan, astronauts will do more than leave flags and footprints.

NBC News — Spaceflight has traditionally been a government-led activity - and it's never been cheap. But the stratospheric cost of putting people and payloads into space is finally starting to fall, thanks in part to the rise of SpaceX and other private spaceflight companies.

NBC News — In a live event held Monday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, Elon Musk said Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire founder and CEO of Japanese fashion retailer Zozo, would be the first private passenger to fly around the moon on a mission the company has planned for 2023.

NBC News — How do you get something from Earth into space? Most of the time, the answer begins with a rocket on a launch pad. Paul Allen has a different idea. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has built the world's biggest airplane - a twin-fuselage, six-engine beast with a wingspan wider than the length of a football field.

NBC News — NASA astronauts are trained to handle just about any problem that arises during a mission - but that doesn't mean they're on their own. From the dawn of human spaceflight through the Apollo and shuttle eras to today, the men and women who venture into space know that, when problems arise, dozens of engineers, flight controllers, doctors and other experts back at mission control in Houston are just a radio transmission away.