Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive -- NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster -- has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years).

NASA is launching a spacecraft destined to slam into an asteroid as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission tonight, from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Its purpose ...

Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet of ...

As much as we love Star Trek, we have to admit there are some continuity problems. For example, in Spock’s Brain, the alien-of-the-week’s ion drive gave Scotty engineering envy. However, in The ...