Articles by William Harwood

A saucer-shaped capsule carrying asteroid fragments that may hold clues about the birth of the solar system slammed into Earth’s atmosphere Sunday and descended to an on-target parachute-assisted touchdown in Utah in the final chapter of a dramatic seven-year, four-billion-mile voyage.

If NASA had asked astronaut Frank Rubio, well in advance, if he would like to spend a full year aboard the International Space Station, he likely would have turned it down. But that’s how it turned out anyway, when trouble with his crew’s Soyuz ferry ship forced them to extended a six-month stay to 12.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry ship docked at the International Space Station Sunday after a 29-hour rendezvous, bringing four fresh crew members to the lab to replace four others wrapping up a six-month stay in orbit.

Running a day late, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying a NASA commander, a Danish co-pilot, a Japanese astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut rocketed into orbit early Saturday and set off after the International Space Station for a six-month tour of duty.

A mother and daughter from Antigua and Barbuda, along with an 80-year-old British Olympian who suffers from Parkinson’s, two pilots and a passenger escort rocketed out of the lower atmosphere and into space Thursday in Virgin Galactic’s first up-and-down sub-orbital flight featuring sight-seeing space tourists.

The first piloted launch of Boeing’s oft-delayed Starliner crew capsule is slipping to next March at the earliest because of ongoing work to test and replace the capsule’s parachute system and to resolve issues with a flammable adhesive used in protective electrical tape, officials said Monday.