Earthlings have a natural inclination to gaze at the heavenly bodies. Many even dream of reaching for the stars. Mae C. Jemison actually is planning to get humans to other solar systems within the next century. Her goal is not an idle fancy. She has already been to space and back. Now her passion is to unite humanity to focus on traveling beyond our solar system.

On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered the now famous line, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," when he became the first person to set foot on the moon. It fulfilled the almost as famous "We choose to go to the moon" line delivered by President John F. Kennedy to a crowd at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas, on Sept. 12, 1962.

The National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, is honoring the exploits and sacrifices of the Greatest Generation in a new augmented reality exhibit "D-Day: Freedom from Above." This AR experience commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, which helped liberate France and Western Europe from the Nazis and lead to the Allied victory in the Second World War.

Mae Jemison recently shared some illuminating recollections of her astronaut experiences, but they were neither the starting point nor the ending point of our conversation. This extraordinary woman's career is too packed with present and future endeavors to dwell very long on her stellar past. She currently leads 100 Year Starship, which aims to make interstellar travel a reality within a century.

SpaceChain has teamed with the Arch Mission Foundation to use open source technology to launch an ambitious project involving the storage of large data sets in spacecraft and on other planets. Arch Mission will load large quantities of data onto SpaceChain's satellite vehicles with the eventual aim of storing data on other planets. The joint effort will help launch the Earth Library.

I just finished reading an interesting hard science fiction book called The Punch Escrow. The story takes place several decades in the future, and it revolves around the idea of quantum foam and teleportation. It points out why teleportation never may be practical, but it brings up the idea of human 3D printing, which could be used more effectively for space exploration.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has entered more rarefied air, having leapfrogged billionaires Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the second wealthiest person in the world. Bezos -- CEO of the e-commerce retailer and cloud services provider -- last week enjoyed a jump of $1.5 billion to $75.6 billion net worth, after his company announced a deal to acquire Souq.com.

Jeff Bezos on Monday disclosed details about the New Glenn rockets his Blue Origin aerospace company plans to build. "Blue Origin's next step ... meet New Glenn," he tweeted. Bezos released illustrations of two models, the New Glenn 2 and the larger New Glenn 3. They're larger than all other rockets except the Saturn V, which NASA used for the Apollo program to send astronauts to the moon and other missions.

Many, if not most, people I know don't want to talk about it -- the election, that is. Lots of them have views but they don't want to share them, based on a dislike of contentiousness. Who likes conflict? There is an article floating around the Internet that I lost track of that says nobody's mind ever changes in a heated debate about something so vital, so why engage?

One of the most highly anticipated gaming titles ever, No Man's Sky from indie developer Hello Games, has arrived -- and it could have a major impact on the resurgent gaming world this season. The title made its PS4 debut on Tuesday in North America. It will be available for the PC on Friday. The long-awaited game takes players on a mind-bending journey of space exploration.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday returned safely to Earth, touching down at Landing Zone 1 after launching the Dragon spacecraft into low-Earth orbit. "As with previous first stage land and drone-ship landings from SpaceX, this achievement is a testament to the leadership and innovation of America's commercial space industry," said NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner.

Former NASA administrator Dan Goldin last week introduced a 10-year-old startup to the public. Backed by $100 million in private funding, KnuEdge is working to develop breakthrough technologies in voice biometrics and neural computing. KnuEdge launched two new products upon its emergence from stealth mode. KnuVerse offers military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology.

Elon Musk fleshed out his vision for establishing the first colony on Mars in a recent interview. As soon as 2018, Musk's SpaceX venture could launch an unmanned spacecraft to the red planet, he said, and that could be followed by future unmanned flights every two years -- timed for when the Earth and Mars orbits position the planets closest together.

SpaceX last week announced plans to launch a mission for Mars in 2018, with help from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Red Dragon, a variant of the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft, will make the unmanned journey. The Falcon Heavy 9 space launch vehicle will send it on its way. The mission will gain data for NASA as part of its agreement with SpaceX.

Stephen Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner on Tuesday unveiled Breakthrough Starship, an ambitious $100 million effort to send miniature spacecraft to another solar system, but the program might not be quite ready to fly. It calls for a team of engineering and astrophysics experts to develop nanocrafts that could zoom to the Alpha Centauri star system at 20 percent the speed of light.

What happens when you're 220 miles above Earth on the International Space Station and you need a tool you don't have? You can print one yourself. In 2014, American astronauts for the first time printed a tool -- a ratchet wrench -- using a design file sent from NASA on the ground to the 3D printer spinning about in space. The feat was only the first step to much larger miracles in space.

To many, 3D printing is little more than a toy. A toy that mostly prints toys. To others, it's a prototyping tool good for a hands-on feel of a manifested idea but not much more. Yet for a select few, 3D printing is the heart of innovation, and each new iteration is pumping the future's lifeblood. Here are some of the innovations 3D printing is bringing to life.

SpaceX this week failed in its third attempt to land a rocket on an ocean platform. The company has landed a reusable rocket on land successfully, but it has stepped up its efforts to land at sea. The latest attempt, though not successful, was a step forward, SpaceX said. The Falcon 9 rocket was supposed to deliver its payload, then land on a drone ship out in the Pacific Ocean.

NASA last week announced that it has established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to formalize its efforts to detect and track near-Earth objects. The PDCO will supervise all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that pass near Earth's orbit around the sun. It will issue notices of close passes and warnings of any detected potential impacts.

DLR, the German Aerospace Center, this week vainly tried to reawaken the dormant Philae robotic probe, which achieved the first-ever soft landing on a comet nucleus in 2014. The center, known as DLR, sent a command to Philae to spin up its flywheel, which had stabilized the lander during its descent onto the comet. DLR hoped that might give Philae some angular momentum to align itself with the sun.

President Obama last week signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which governs ownership of asteroid resources, possibly triggering a new battle in the commercial space race. Section 5103 of the Act gives U.S. companies the right to resources mined from asteroids, although it does not give them rights to the asteroids themselves.

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket this week made history when it landed intact in Texas. The unmanned crew capsule returned safely from a test flight that took it 330,000 feet into the air. The New Shepard could become the first reusable booster -- it's scheduled to return to space in a few months. It's now tucked into a storage facility at a launch site in West Texas.

NASA on Tuesday announced it has awarded one R5 humanoid robot each to MIT and Northeastern University to conduct research on adapting them for use in space. The universities were selected from U.S. entries in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge held in June. Each team will receive up to $250,000 a year for two years. They also will get technical support from NASA.

Facebook and Eutelsat have entered a partnership to leverage satellite technology to provide Internet access to remote parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative, which includes a multiyear agreement with Spacecom, will utilize the entire broadband payload on the future AMOS-6 satellite as the backbone of a dedicated system that will include satellite capacity, gateways and terminals.

Dark, narrow streaks going downhill at four locations on Mars are evidence of water flowing on the planet. Called "recurring slope lineae," the streaks are approximately the length of a football field, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They are believed to have been formed by the seasonal flow of water. A report on the research was published Monday in Nature Geoscience.

Blue Origin on Tuesday announced plans to launch rockets from a Cape Canaveral launchpad, which it has leased from NASA. "The site saw its last launch in 2005, and the pad has stood silent for more than 10 years -- too long. We can't wait to fix that," said Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder of Amazon. It's the sort of thing the folks at NASA like to hear. People are interested in space again.

NASA earlier this month entered an agreement with Arx Pax to use its Magnetic Field Architecture technology in hardware that will let astronauts move tiny satellites without touching them. Arx Pax CEO Greg Henderson and his wife, Jill Henderson, last year launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund development of a functional hoverboard based on the technology.

Thoth Technology last month won patents in the U.S. and UK for a space elevator -- a 12-mile-high tower that could herald a new era of space transportation. If all goes as planned, the freestanding ThothX Tower will be the tallest structure in the world by far. Dubhai's Burj Khalifa, currently the world's tallest building, is a mere half mile in height.

Space fever seems to be catching on. Stephen Hawking and a group of other high-profile space scientists joined with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner this week to announce a new $100 million effort to search for intelligent alien life. The funding will go to the Breakthrough Initiatives' Breakthrough Listen program. Breakthrough Initiatives is a 10-year multidisciplinary effort.

Photos transmitted from 4 billion miles away by NASA's New Horizons Pluto space probe have sparked fresh interest in space exploration. New Horizons traveled more than 3 billion miles over a nine-and-a-half year stretch to reach the Pluto system. A close-up image of a region near Pluto's equator shows mountains reaching 11,000 feet in height. The lack of craters suggests they're relatively new.