Gui Haichao, a professor at Beijing’s top aerospace research institute, will join two others on a mission to the Tiangong space station.

China will send its first civilian astronaut to orbit with the latest crewed launch to the country’s Tiangong space station.

The mission, scheduled to launch tomorrow morning, May 30, will lift a crew of three aboard the Shenzhou 16 spacecraft attached to a Long March-2F rocket, a report from South China Morning Post reveals.

On Tuesday, the CEO of the UK Space Agency Graham Turnock announced the UK would be working more closely with Australia in a “world-first Space Bridge” agreement which will focus on delivering a plane—or rocket, really—to shuttle passengers from continent-to-continent in just four hours. While flights from London to the Big Apple will reportedly take a skerrick over 60 minutes.

It’s all courtesy of a new hypersonic engine SABRE (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine)—which the scientists at Reaction Engines are currently developing. Fueled by a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, SABRE is capable of powering a plane to Mach 5.4 (4,000 mph) for speedy commercial travel—that’s around five times the speed of sound—or Mach 25 (19,000 mph) when soaring in space. It’s supposedly greener and cheaper than current air travel, too.

The firms claim they want to set up a “constant supply chain to Mars” by sending missions every 26 months.

Two private space companies, Impulse Space and Relativity Space, recently announced that their private Mars mission is now expected to launch sometime in 2026, a report from SpaceNews reveals.

Good things come to those who wait, the saying goes, and the two firms announced the delay to the mission at the Humans to Mars Summit, held in Washington DC from May 16 to May 18.

Forever intrigued by attempting the impossible, we’ve made traveling faster than the speed of light a staple of our works of science fiction. Most science fiction stories feature some way of getting from point A to point B faster than light, whether it’s via activating the warp drive or jumping into hyperspace.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) is gearing up for a critical test firing of its next-generation rocket after a recent fueling check, and it could happen as soon as this week.

On Monday morning (May 22), Bruno stated on Twitter that the company’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket was returning to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Now that the rocket is back at the pad, Vulcan’s static fire test (in which the rocket’s engines are ignited while it remains on the ground) could happen any day. “We are targeting as soon as tomorrow for the Flight Readiness Firing,” a representative from ULA told Space.com on Tuesday (May 23), “but it will depend on range availability.” On Wednesday (March 24), ULA CEO Tory Bruno intimated on Twitter that the test could happen as soon as Thursday (March 25).

Virgin Galactic has released a video introducing the public to the pilots who fly the company’s VSS Unity space plane, which is gearing up for its final test flight.

The suborbital flight, known as Unity 25, is set to take off on Thursday (May 25) and will be the final step on Virgin Galactic’s long journey to realizing commercial space flight.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying four private astronauts arrived at the International Space Station early Monday (May 22) after a record-setting trip to the orbiting laboratory.

The Dragon spacecraft, named Freedom, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday (May 21), kicking off the private Ax-2 mission to the orbiting lab for Axiom Space. It linked up with the station a day later at 9:12 a.m. EDT (1312 GMT) as both spacecraft sailed 262 miles above the Pacific Ocean, northeast of Japan.