The leader of NASA's first mission around the moon in half a century is the last to announce what's next for him after retiring from active astronaut duty.

All four astronauts of the Artemis II mission, which flew around the moon in April, have hung up their spacesuits and moved on to greener pastures. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), managed by Caltech, announced yesterday that former NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman will step into the role of Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of JPL, beginning Nov. 30.

"Reid has spent his career at the edge of what is possible, and he has the technical judgment, operational experience, and leadership to help push that edge farther," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a JPL press release.

Wiseman announced his transition to "astronaut emeritus" alongside Artemis II pilot Victor Glover in September. Glover, subsequently, accepted a full-time role as executive advisor to the president of his alma mater, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly).

Artemis II mission specialists, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen, also made the decision to step away from their spaceflight careers. Hansen announced his career change in July, and has since entered into reservist duty with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Koch, more recently, was appointed as NASA's acting deputy chief engineer, effective Nov. 1.

The quartet launched aboard NASA's Orion capsule on April 1, and completed a 10-day flight around the far side of the moon and back. Their mission took them further from Earth than any crewed spaceflight in history, and captured the attention of millions, who were captivated by the astronauts' incredible views and their ability to demonstrate the best traits of humanity, even while being the four people farthest from it.

The mission served as a stepping stone in NASA's Artemis program which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon and eventually establish a permanent base there. NASA is targeting mid-2027 for Artemis III as a flight test with Orion and the two Artemis lunar lander spacecraft (SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon). If everything goes according to plan, that mission will pave the way for Artemis IV, and the program's first crewed lunar landing in 2028.

A Baltimore native, Wiseman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who served as an aviator and test pilot before joining NASA's astronaut corps in 2009. He launched to space for the first time on the on the Soyuz TMA-13M mission to the International Space Station (ISS). He spent 165 days in orbit serving as part of ISS Expeditions 40 and 41, and completed two spacewalks totaling nearly 13 hours.

Before his selection for Artemis II, Wiseman worked as NASA's chief astronaut, overseeing crew readiness, astronaut assignments and flight safety from Dec. 2020 - Nov. 2022.

As JPL's new deputy director, Wiseman will serve under Director Dave Gallagher, helping oversee "strategic leadership, stewardship, and continuous improvement of laboratory operations," according to the JPL release.

JPL is a federally funded research and development center specializing in robotic space exploration. The lab is responsible for some of NASA's most recognizable planetary missions, including the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers, Europa Clipper and the Voyager probes. JPL also operates NASA's Deep Space Network, which provides continuous communications with spacecraft throughout the solar system.

"I've explored the furthest reaches of what a human can explore at NASA — and there were truly no words in the English vocabulary to describe seeing the sun disappear behind the moon from deep space," Wiseman said.

"But that experience was really the jumping off point to go do the impossible things that Caltech and JPL dream, dare together, and do for NASA and the nation.”

U.S. President Donald Trump just met another NASA Artemis crew.

The astronauts of NASA's Artemis III mission visited the Oval Office on Thursday (Oct. 28) and posed for a few photos with the president.

Their visit came nearly six months to the day after that of the Artemis II crew, who stopped by the White House on April 29, 19 days after the end of their historic flight around the moon.

The Artemis III astronauts are NASA's Randy Bresnik (commander), Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio (mission specialists) and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano (pilot). All four — plus backup crewmate Bob Hines of NASA, and agency chief Jared Isaacman — made the White House trip.

"It was a great day at the White House with President Trump and the talented crew of Artemis III," Isaacman wrote via X on Thursday.

Artemis III will launch to low Earth orbit in the summer of 2027, if all goes according to plan. The roughly two-week-long mission will aim to dock NASA's Orion capsule with SpaceX's Starship vehicle and/or Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

NASA selected Starship and Blue Moon to be the crewed lunar landers for the Artemis program, so Artemis III will provide valuable practice: On moon-landing missions, astronauts will launch aboard Orion and then meet up with either Starship or Blue Moon, which will carry them to the lunar surface and back up again.

That's slated to happen for the first time on Artemis IV, which NASA plans to launch in 2028.

We don't yet know which private lander(s) will launch on Artemis III; NASA would like to fly both of them, but it's unclear if both will be ready when the time comes.

That uncertainty applies to Artemis IV as well. We'll have to wait a bit before we know which spacecraft will have the honor of putting astronauts down on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA just gave us our best look yet at its Artemis III moon-lander test flight.

The agency laid out a detailed concept of operations for Artemis III today (Oct. 23) during a press conference at Kennedy Space Center, stressing how important the flight is to its moon plans and how challenging it will be to make everything go right.

"We're launching three of the most powerful rockets in the world, and undertaking what is likely the most complicated launch campaign ever undertaken," Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said during today's event, which lasted more than two hours.

Those three rockets are NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn, all of which will fly from Florida's Space Coast.

If all goes according to plan, New Glenn will lift off first, carrying Blue Origin's Blue Moon lunar lander to low Earth orbit (LEO). SLS will go next, launching the Artemis III astronauts — NASA's Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano — aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft.

SLS will deploy Orion into a highly elliptical orbit, one that gets as close to Earth as 18 miles (29 kilometers) and as far away as 1,122 miles (1,806 km), according to Parsons. The capsule will then maneuver itself into an orbit with an altitude of about 345 miles (555 km).

"That's really about getting thermal stability," Parsons said. "Orion was built as a deep-space vehicle, and so we're going to have to really manage the thermal environments, which are higher in a low Earth orbit."

The Artemis III crew will spend two days checking out Orion and its systems in LEO before meeting up with Blue Moon, which will take place on Flight Day 3 at an altitude of 273 miles (439 km).

"Over the next two days, the crew will conduct operations docked with Blue Moon," Parsons said. "They're going to open up the hatch. They're going to enter the lander. They're going to evaluate the environmental controls, the life support systems. We'll confirm that the spacecraft can maintain the right atmospheric pressure, and we're also going to test emergency scenarios, dual vehicle control, and we're going to put our Mission Control teams through their paces."

After those operations are complete — likely on Flight Day 6 or thereabouts — Starship will launch, with a specially built docking adapter on its nose.

The SpaceX vehicle — the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage of its fully reusable Starship megarocket — will meet up with Orion in LEO on Flight Day 8, at an altitude of about 237 miles (381 km). But this will be a very different encounter than the rendezvous with Blue Moon.

"The demonstration with Starship is shorter, about two hours," Parsons said. "The crew will not enter the Starship during the mission, but it gives us critical data and allows us to really understand the forces of docking, how we're going to push, how we're going to work together."

Artemis III will continue for another six to nine days after Orion undocks from Starship before finally heading back down to Earth for a parachute-aided ocean splashdown. (The nominal mission length is 14 days, Parsons said, but it could last as long as 17 days.)

During that time, the crew will evaluate their survival suits — something that didn't get done during the 10-day Artemis II flight around the moon this past April — and do a variety of other work as well, from detailed health assessments to scientific experiments and technology demonstrations. The main goal is to keep everything on track for Artemis IV, which will land astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2028, if all goes to plan.

"Everything we do on Artemis III is designed to reduce risk for our future lunar landing missions," Parsons said. "We're teaching these teams how to work together, how to make critical real-time mission decisions, all in an environment that is low Earth orbit, where if something goes wrong, we can come home much more quickly."

It's unclear at the moment which of these two privately developed landers — Blue Moon or Starship — will fly on Artemis IV, pulling off the first crewed lunar touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA is still preserving optionality, "to give both of our lunar landing partners the greatest opportunity for readiness in advance of astronauts landing on the moon in 2028," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during today's event.

"We have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so," he added.

No matter what decision NASA makes for Artemis IV, both Blue Moon and Starship should hit the gray dirt relatively soon, according to Parsons. "Regardless of who goes first, both providers are planning for lunar landing missions in 2028," he said.

And those missions will be quite different from each other. For example, on Blue Origin touchdowns, Orion will meet up with Blue Moon in lunar orbit. On SpaceX landings, however, Starship will likely dock with the NASA capsule in Earth orbit and propel it to the moon, Parsons said — the "push" he referred to above.

It remains unclear when exactly Artemis III will launch. NASA is targeting the summer of next year but may find it tough to meet that timeline: Last month, in an internal memo, Isaacman told agency employees that Artemis III was about 90 days behind schedule.

Some of the biggest challenges have involved the supply chain for the mission's lunar landers, Parsons said during today's event. But he and Isaacman both stressed that NASA is confident in its ability to work through such issues.

"We're moving with real speed and purpose right now," Isaacman said.

TENERIFE, CANARY ISLANDS — NASA's Artemis II astronauts were just minutes away from a critical engine burn that would send them toward the moon when an unexpected cabin leak warning threatened to change the course of their historic mission.

"If it had happened five minutes later, we may not have been able to have that burn," Artemis II pilot Victor Glover revealed during an Oct. 18 discussion with Canadian former astronaut Chris Hadfield at the Starmus VIII festival here in Tenerife.

The incident unfolded on April 2, the second day of the Artemis II mission, as the astronauts' Orion spacecraft swooped back toward Earth after traveling some 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers) away. Orion had been completing a highly elliptical orbit around Earth, giving the crew and mission control an opportunity to test the capsule's systems before committing to the journey to the moon. Orion was now approaching its closest point to our planet, roughly 100 miles (160 km) above the surface, ahead of the crucial translunar injection (TLI) burn that would send the astronauts moonward.

"Jeremy looks out the window and says, 'I think we're going to run smack dab into the middle of Earth,'" Glover recalled, referring to Artemis II mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. "Because we were getting so low."

The close approach brought additional challenges, as Orion passed through a region populated by orbital debris and satellites.

"The density of things is going up from where we are, and also an increase in radiation," Glover explained.

It was at this particularly demanding point in the mission that Orion issued a warning that indicated a possible cabin leak, around 15 minutes before the critical TLI burn.

"So, determining whether it was real or not was a big deal," Glover said.

The crew and mission control faced a crucial question: Was it safe to continue heading to the moon, or would they have to abandon the planned maneuver and cut the mission very short? "Are we going to do a TLI and burn to go to the moon, or are we putting on our spacesuits to prepare to come back to Earth right now?" Glover recalled.

The timing was particularly critical. The TLI burn was designed to propel Orion out of Earth orbit and onto its trajectory around the moon, marking the first time astronauts had headed toward Earth's nearest neighbor since the Apollo era.

Luckily, as NASA flight director Judd Frieling told us during an April 2 media briefing, the warning turned out to be a false alarm.

So Artemis II received the go-ahead. Orion fired its main engine for approximately five minutes and 50 seconds, successfully setting the four astronauts on their journey around the moon.

"We're watching the timer count down, velocities go up, and the magenta and green numbers coming together," Glover recalled.

"Everything is tracking. It's looking good."

Before long, the crew had broken free of Earth's gravitational hold and were hurtling toward the moon at around 24,500 mph (39,430 kph).

Despite the tense moments before the burn, Artemis II went on to make history. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (the mission's commander), Glover (pilot) and Christina Koch (mission specialist), along with Hansen, traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them, reaching a maximum distance of 252,756 miles (406,771 km) during their journey around the moon.

The four astronauts returned safely to Earth on April 10, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego after nearly 10 days in space.

NASA will provide an update about its Artemis moon plans today (Oct. 23), and you can watch it live.

The news will come during a press conference at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which starts today at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.

"The update will include details about NASA’s Artemis III mission that will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test critical systems needed for future lunar landings, and how plans to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 are progressing," NASA officials said in an Oct. 14 media advisory.

Three agency officials will participate in Friday's "Artemis Acceleration" event. They are:

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
• Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager

NASA is currently gearing up for Artemis III, which is targeted for mid-2027. The mission will test rendezvous and docking technologies between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the private spacecraft that NASA picked to be the Artemis program's crewed lunar landers: SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

After that will come Artemis IV, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole in early 2028, if all goes to plan. That will be the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 way back in 1972.

It's unclear which lunar lander will fly on Artemis IV; that depends on how the development of each one progresses and what happens on Artemis III.

And there will be other landings after Artemis IV. NASA plans to establish a moon base via Artemis, and doing so will require a variety of missions, both robotic and crewed.

The agency feels some urgency in this quest, for China has similar goals. It's important that the U.S. wins this new space race, military and political officials have said, so that the nation can establish the norms of responsible behavior on Earth's nearest neighbor.

NASA has revealed new details about its plans to return astronauts to the surface of the moon, outlining a series of upcoming milestones for SpaceX and Blue Origin as both companies race to ready their lunar landers for the agency's Artemis program.

During an Oct. 5 presentation at the Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Antalya, Türkiye, Steve Creech, acting manager of NASA's Human Landing System (HLS) Program, laid out development timelines for both spacecraft, with key demonstrations planned through early 2028 that include orbital refueling and uncrewed lunar landing tests to qualify the vehicles to fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.

A more pressing deadline, however, is NASA's Artemis III mission, which is targeted for the third quarter (Q3) of 2027. Artemis III will launch four astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO), where they will rendezvous and dock with test versions of both companies' landers for interoperability checkouts. Those demonstrations will help inform NASA's determination about which lander the agency will choose to carry astronauts to the moon's surface on Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028.

SpaceX and Blue Origin were both awarded NASA contracts to develop HLS vehicles — Starship and Blue Moon, respectively — and have spent the past several years refining their respective lunar lander designs and dealing with various delays along the way. In the face of those delays, and in an effort to better structure its mission progression for success, NASA overhauled its Artemis program architecture in February to maintain its goal of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of 2028 and establish a more regular cadence of uncrewed landings in the meantime.

As part of that shakeup, Artemis III, previously the program's first crewed lunar landing mission, was moved up a year and repurposed for the lunar lander vehicle tests the agency is preparing to fly to LEO next year. The program's first moon landing remains scheduled for 2028, but was shifted to the manifest for Artemis IV.

Between now and then, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have more than a dozen test demonstrations and vehicle milestones to achieve, including success during Artemis III and flights afterward. This will all lead up to a key decision NASA must make: Which vehicle will carry out the first crewed landing on the surface of the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972?

Starship reached for the first time on its most recent test flight, which occurred on Sept. 28 from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. NASA lists several other important goals for the vehicle to achieve in 2026, including (in the order listed during the IAC presentation) the first return and catch of the rocket's upgraded Version 3 (V3) booster at its launch pad; the first-ever return and catch of a Ship upper stage; the first Starship launch from one of SpaceX's launch pads still under construction on Florida's Space Coast; and, possibly, the first V3 booster reflight.

NASA also expects SpaceX to complete the initial build of the crew cabin for its lunar lander Starship variant. SpaceX released renders of Starship's interior last year, as well as images of the test elevator astronauts are using to train for Starship egress on the lunar surface, but little else has been made public about the progress the company has made on the cabin's design.

Should the cabin's initial build wrap up by the end of the year, as NASA's presentation suggested, SpaceX will use Q1 2027 to complete integration of the systems that Starship will need to communicate with Orion during Artemis III, and deliver a cabin simulator for astronauts to train on leading up to the mission. SpaceX plans to continue Starship test flights through Q2 of next year, complete a landing leg demonstration and begin crew cabin airlock tests.

Blue Origin's lunar lander mockup is ready for NASA Artemis astronaut training

For Artemis III, SpaceX plans to fly one of its existing V3 Starship upper stages, with some slight modifications. Starship and Orion will dock as part of Artemis III but the SpaceX vehicle won't be equipped with a crew cabin for the mission's astronauts to enter. Between the end of this year and the beginning of the next, SpaceX is expected to complete the addition of a docking system and nosecone cover to the Artemis III Starship vehicle, which, NASA documents suggest, has already completed its mechanical fit checks.

Other notches on SpaceX's checklist leading up to Artemis III include the first propellant transfer demonstration with Starship in orbit. As the first-ever launch vehicle and spacecraft designed for full reusability, Starship's fuel constraints require that its tanks be topped off in order to fly beyond LEO. For a moon landing mission, this could mean up to a dozen launches of SpaceX's Starship "tanker" spacecraft to an orbiting fuel depot, which the moon-bound Starship will visit. To pull that off, though, SpaceX has to show it can successfully transfer those cryogenic fuels on orbit, and also store them effectively enough to prevent too much boil-off.

Starship won't require any refueling flights to complete its objectives for Artemis III, but SpaceX is expected to launch its first Starship tanker vehicle within a few months of that mission as it gears up for the Artemis IV moon landing mission. To that end, a launch of an uncrewed Starship lunar lander variant is targeted sometime toward the end of Q3/beginning of Q4, with an uncrewed lunar landing mission carried out before the end of 2027.

Blue Origin, meanwhile, has its own set of milestones to meet as it develops its Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lander — a 52-foot-tall (16 meters) spacecraft powered by three BE-7 engines. Unlike the bare-bones V3 Starship that SpaceX will launch on Artemis III, Blue Origin plans to fly a completed test vehicle, incorporating the crew cabin, partial life-support, flight software and other systems needed to allow astronauts to enter the lander from Orion during their time docked in LEO. Astronauts will be able to enter Blue Moon from Orion to get a feel for the lander in zero-g and test some of its systems.

NASA's timeline shows the company working to complete a series of manufacturing and testing milestones in the last few months of 2026, including continued BE-7 testing and qualification of Blue Moon's BT-7 maneuvering thrusters. The company also faces its Artemis III interim design review and a critical design review for an upcoming landing demonstration mission in 2028.

Blue Origin is also working to restore its pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) to operation and return its New Glenn rocket to flight, following an explosion of the rocket in May that caused extensive damage to the facility. NASA's presentation places that milestone in Q4 2026, a timeline the company has also been very vocal about maintaining. A recent Reuters report, however, suggests that may not happen until early 2027.

By early 2027, the company expects to complete the spacecraft's communications systems and finalize its flight software, with assembly, integration and testing continuing into Q2. Q1 2027 is also when Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 lander (a smaller, uncrewed version of its MK2 successor) will launch to the lunar surface as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program of robotic moon missions.

During Q2 2027, as the Artemis III mission approaches, Blue Origin is expected to complete integration of its test lander with New Glenn and conclude qualification of its BE-7 engine. Throughout next year, the company plans to continue construction and refurbishments at its launch facilities and hopes to have a new launch pad ready to support the upgraded, more powerful New Glenn 9x4 rocket l by the end of Q3. The first flight of that rocket variant is scheduled for Q4 2027, alongside a second MK1 lunar mission and the launch of an uncrewed MK2 demonstration lander.

That spacecraft is expected to attempt its own uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2028, around the same time Blue Origin has scheduled a third MK1 flight. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will need to demonstrate that its lander can safely reach the moon's surface,operate there and return to lunar orbit before NASA clears it to carry astronauts on a future Artemis mission.

NASA's overall timeline remains the same as it has been since the February revamp, with Artemis III expected to launch in mid-2027, followed by a crewed lunar landing on Artemis IV in 2028, and possibly another on Artemis V that same year. There may be changes on the horizon, though. NASA will host a press conference on Friday (Oct. 23) with Administrator Jared Isaacman and Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, as well as Artemis program director Jeremy Parsons. During the event, which you'll be able to watch here at Space.com, they will discuss the status of the upcoming moon missions and an "Artemis acceleration."

SpaceX and Blue Origin still face tight schedules to complete their respective uncrewed landing demonstrations before Artemis IV. With SpaceX targeting Q4 2027 and Blue Origin Q1 2028, both are pushing the margins against NASA's hopes to return astronauts to the lunar surface that same year. Which company ultimately gets the green light for that first landing mission will depend on the progress each makes between now and then, and whether their landers can demonstrate the readiness that NASA requires to safely carry astronauts to the surface of the moon and back again.

SpaceX will soon notch a huge spaceflight milestone, if all goes according to plan.

The company will try to catch both stages of its Starship megarocket during the vehicle's next test flight, which is targeted for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced during SpaceX's quarter 3 (Q3) earnings call today (Oct. 20).

If SpaceX succeeds, this "will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered," Musk said. "The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is, I think, a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness."

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.

As Musk noted, both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars settlement and other grand exploration feats economically feasible.

Starship's recovery strategy is different than that for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have expendable upper stages). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters come back to Earth on landing pads near the launch site or on ships at sea downrange. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will steer themselves directly back to their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its "chopstick" arms.

This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and refly Starship at an accelerated rate, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he envisions launching Starship more than 10,000 times per year by 2030.

Starship has conducted 14 test flights to date, and SpaceX has pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of them. The company has not yet tried to catch Ship, which is a more difficult proposition, as the upper stage travels higher, farther and faster than the booster does.

Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will pull off a Ship catch on the first try. (He did not give a specific target date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)

"I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight," he said. "And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and and then accelerating next year."

Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on Sept. 28, Ship reached orbit for the first time ever. It also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first 26 members of a next-gen broadband constellation in low Earth orbit that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft.

The Starship Flight 15 preview was something of an aside during today's call. The event primarily served to announce SpaceX's financial performance during Q3, the three-month stretch that ended on Sept. 30.

And that performance was strong, company representatives said. SpaceX recorded revenues of $14.6 billion during Q3, an increase of 161% from the $5.6 billion earned during Q3 of 2025. The company had a net income of $4.4 billion during Q3, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same stretch last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.

Just $1.8 billion of 2026 Q3 revenue came from SpaceX's launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments — connectivity (services provided by its Starlink megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration has recently rebranded it, "superintelligence").

SpaceX thinks these latter two segments will continue to boom. That's why it's building the infrastructure to support thousands of Starship launches per year — to loft lots of Starlink satellites and AI data centers to Earth orbit. And the company believes that it's positioned to really start raking in the cash, starting as soon as next year.

"In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between 500 billion [dollars] and a trillion," Musk said.

HAWTHORNE, Calif. — A moon buggy carrying a history-making supercomputer is ready to launch to the lunar surface. And it's taking some inspiration from Mars.

Later this year, Astrolab will launch its uncrewed moon rover FLIP to the lunar south pole as part of the Griffin Mission 1, or Griffin-1. The California company is one of two that NASA has selected to develop a drivable rover for the agency's Artemis program. On board FLIP will be Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Spaceborne Computer-4, an advanced computer module built to be used in space.

This will be the first time that high-performance computing and artificial intelligence will be tested on the lunar surface. As NASA gets closer to landing humans back on the moon with Artemis, advancements like this aim to support future human habitation as well as economic activity on and around the moon.

"We're sending the first supercomputer from HPE to the lunar surface later this year, doing the first GPU [graphics processing unit] on the moon [and the] first AI experiments on the moon," Jaret Matthews, founder and CEO of Astrolab, said during an Oct. 14 media event here at Astrolab's headquarters. "They're breaking new ground, and they're ahead of the curve."

The computer is designed to be lightweight, compact, self-contained and fanless. It has a low-power 64-bit CPU (central processing unit) with a GPU. The computer will be attached to FLIP's cooling system and will be powered by a system supported by both batteries and solar cells on the rover. The computer will also be paired with solid state drives from the company KIOXIA that will allow for memory storage.

So, what will a supercomputer and AI accomplish on this uncrewed mission? First and foremost, the flightwill test how the computer works in this extreme environment. The computer is built with heat-conductive aluminum and is designed with the specific conditions of the lunar south pole in mind. But while it was designed and tested to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures and conditions on the moon's surface, the upcoming mission seeks to show that this advanced technology can actually work in this environment.

"NASA's given us a real challenge," Matthews told Space.com at the media event. "We have to design for a full year on the lunar surface. So that means surviving multiple lunar nights, upwards of 150 hours of complete darkness where we're not receiving energy or warmth from the sun. And then, also, there's going to be a long period [in] which we're operating semi-autonomously for [when] the astronauts are not there … and so we're having to develop a semi-autonomous platform that will spend many months [and] travel hundreds of kilometers [on the moon]."

But the computer will more than just prove its durability, if all goes to plan. It will also analyze visual data captured on the mission and enable autonomous observations, process navigation, mapping and terrain analysis. The mission also promises to test AI capabilities, though it's unclear what exact applications we'll see with this lunar AI. HPE shared in a statement that "an AI services container will demonstrate reliable deployment of scalable AI service applications on the moon."

It is also to be determined exactly how, once tested, these capabilities might be used with future crewed missions. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station already use computers for communications, science experiments and other daily tasks while living in space, but we can't say yet exactly how future astronauts might use these capabilities, especially with the addition of AI, on the moon.

From Mars to the moon

One interesting aspect of this new development is where it came from. While HPE has provided computing power to NASA for decades, Matthews is also bringing his previous experience working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) into this new venture.

"One of the experiments [that will be] running on the spaceborne computer on the moon is a localization software experiment from JPL. It has been used on Mars, and this will be the first time it's used on the moon," Matthews said.

"The challenge with the moon and Mars is that there's no GPS, so locating yourself and knowing where you are on the surface [can be difficult]," he added. "So we're going to be running what is essentially a machine learning algorithm that JPL developed to take a map that's stored in memory … and compare it to the local terrain we see around us, and then do a match. So essentially, match features of the local terrain to the map that's stored in memory to help find ourselves on the map and keep ourselves away from dangerous craters."

As its name suggests, Griffin-1 will be the first mission for the robotic Griffin moon lander, which was developed by Astrobotic. The Pittsburgh company is flying Griffin-1 for NASA, under the agency's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program. In addition to FLIP, the mission will carry Astrobiotic's CubeRover, a small, uncrewed rover; LandCam-X, an optical navigation system; and Nanofiche GLPH (Galactic Library to Preserve Humanity), a tiny archive of human history, to the moon's surface.

"The moon presents a challenging environment for advanced computing, and we’re pleased to provide HPE with an opportunity to demonstrate its technology on the lunar surface," Matthews added in a statement. "Our FLIP rover is designed to accommodate a variety of payloads, and this mission will demonstrate how commercial lunar mobility platforms can support technology development and scientific research."

TENERIFE, CANARY ISLANDS — The Artemis II astronauts may have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth to the moon, but they made sure the rest of us didn't miss out on the adventure.

Now, their efforts to bring the wonders of space exploration back down to Earth have earned them one of science communication's most prestigious honors: the Stephen Hawking Medal.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, alongside Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, accepted the award on Saturday (Oct. 17), during the opening ceremony of the Starmus VIII festival. The honor recognizes all four crew members, including NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who wasn't in attendance.

For Wiseman, the experience of seeing our home planet from the vicinity of the moon carried a powerful message.

"If we could take each of you 250,000 miles away from this planet, 400,000 kilometers away from planet Earth, and you would see Earth the size of your thumb. It's tiny," Wiseman told the audience.

"When you're there looking through the moon, back at this tiny Earth, the only thing you feel is love, peace, hope, unity", he continued. "Those aren't the right words, but that is all you feel."

During their historic Artemis II mission, the astronauts did far more than put NASA's Orion spacecraft through its paces. Through live communications, interviews and glimpses into life aboard the spacecraft, not to mention the jaw-dropping photos that just keep on coming, they helped turn an extraordinarily complex mission into something people worldwide could experience and connect with.

And that's exactly what the Stephen Hawking Medal is designed to celebrate.

Established in 2016 by physicist Stephen Hawking and Starmus, the award honors those who have gone above and beyond to make science accessible, engaging and inspiring.

The Artemis II crew joins some pretty impressive company. Previous recipients include Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, naturalist David Attenborough, primatologist Jane Goodall and astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

This year's ceremony marks the medal's 10th anniversary, with filmmaker Ridley Scott also among the 2026 honourees.

"It's a special thrill for us at Starmus to be able to honor the intrepid Artemis II crew members in the same way that we honored the Apollo astronauts who paved the way to the moon over 50 years ago," Starmus co-founder and Queen guitarist Brian May said in a statement ahead of the ceremony.

Wiseman left the audience with one final thought.

"When you come home to this beautiful planet, you realise that it's in every single one of us to choose to make tomorrow better," he said. "So let's all choose to make tomorrow better".

Starmus VIII runs from Oct. 17-22 across Tenerife and La Palma in the Canary Islands. This year's festival, themed "The Search for Truth", brings together leading scientists, astronauts, musicians and artists to celebrate scientific discovery and explore the importance of evidence and scientific thinking.

SpaceX wants to start flying its Starship megarocket a lot more often.

The company has requested permission to launch Starship from its Starbase site in South Texas up to 456 times per year. That's a big jump from the currently allowed cadence of 25.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the early stages of reviewing the request. Today (Oct. 14), the agency announced "its intent to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, open a public scoping period and hold public scoping meetings for SpaceX’s proposal."

Starship, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It's also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX believes will revolutionize spaceflight.

The megarocket has flown 14 times to date, all of them test flights from Starbase, which is near the Texas border city of Brownsville. On the most recent jaunt, which lifted off on Sept. 28, Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first members of a new broadband constellation that could eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Assembling that network will require a lot of Starship launches. And even more will be needed to build SpaceX's planned Starmind AI megaconstellation, which Elon Musk has said will harbor a million satellites. Indeed, the world's richest man has said that SpaceX is targeting more than 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030.

Not all of those flights will originate from Starbase, which hosts two orbital pads. SpaceX is working to get three Starship pads up and running on Florida's Space Coast, and the company aims to break ground on a $100 billion, 12-pad complex in Louisiana next year.

Each operational Starship launch will also feature two landings. Both of the vehicle's elements — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage — are designed to return to the pad after liftoff, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. So SpaceX's proposal for 456 launches from Starbase per year includes a request for approval for 912 landings.

SpaceX plans to work up to this cadence in two phases, according to the FAA. Phase 1 "would include up to 100 annual launches and up to 200 annual landings (100 of Starship and 100 of Super Heavy)," the agency wrote. "Launches and landings could occur any day or time of the week."

Phase 2 covers 456 launches and 912 landings, which would occur only Monday through Friday, though at any time on those days.

The FAA will hold five "public scoping meetings" about the proposal next month, four of them in person in the Starbase area and one of them virtual.

There will be two in-person meetings on Nov. 17 at Texas Southmost College, one from 1-3 p.m. local (Central) time and the other from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Two in-person meetings will follow on Nov. 19, at the same two times but at a different location: the Port Isabel Event & Cultural Center.

The virtual meeting will be held Nov. 18, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Central time. Registration is required for all of these meetings, even the virtual one. You can register here.

Starship just reached orbit for the first time, carrying satellites for SpaceX's Starlink program. Analysts disagree on whether that's a detour or the destination — and what of the company's plans for the Red Planet?

Ten years ago, Elon Musk stood on stage at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, and unveiled plans for a giant spaceship to carry people to Mars. This past Sept. 28 — a decade and a day later — the descendant of that vehicle reached orbit for the first time, on Starship's 14th-ever test flight.

The designs and hardware evolved greatly over those 10 years. For example, the 2016 design, called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), employed carbon fiber, but this gave way to the stainless-steel Starship, which SpaceX began testing in 2019 with short hops from its Texas site. Prototypes flew to high altitude and landed, and some exploded, until SN15 stuck a landing in May 2021. That same year, NASA selected Starship as the first astronaut lander for its Artemis lunar missions.

The full Starship stack — a Super Heavy booster with a Ship upper stage on top — first flew in April 2023 and failed within minutes. Three flights followed in less than a year, each reaching space, and each ending with Ship lost on reentry. During a 2024 test flight, SpaceX moved liquid oxygen between two tanks inside one Ship, the closest it has come to the propellant transfer that any mission to the moon or Mars will require. In June of that year, the company brought both stages down in controlled splashdowns, and that October the launch tower's mechanical arms caught a returning Super Heavy booster for the first time.

Progress wasn't linear, however. After a booster catch in January 2025, a string of Ship failures followed, and one upper stage exploded during ground testing that June. A clean flight in August 2025 helped break the streak, and by that October, SpaceX flew the last of the older design. The first Starship V3 launched in May 2026. Another went up in July, and Flight 14 followed on Sept. 28.

'A different beast'

"ITS was definitely a different beast," said Matija Renčelj of the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). "Yet, we have to acknowledge two trends that both attest to SpaceX's agility and increasingly market-first rather than vision-first outlook."

"The gap between ITS and Starship is real, but I would not consider that a failure," he said.

In his view, the rocket is mainly a business tool. "The rocket is the means, not the end," Renčelj said, adding that its main role now is cutting Starlink deployment costs. SpaceX currently operates a constellation of more than 11,000 Starlink broadband satellites, almost all of which were launched by its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. But Starship Flight 14 lofted the first members of the next-gen Starlink V3 constellation, which will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan. Starlink V3 satellites are bigger and heavier than their predecessors and can only be launched efficiently by Starship.

Renčelj said the moon focus reflects Washington's priorities and SpaceX's interest in staying central to NASA's Artemis program, and in reassuring investors after the company's acquisition of xAI this past February and its IPO, which occurred in June.

Joseph Gonzalez, a University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering aerospace professor who spent about a decade working on Artemis, sees it differently.

"I think SpaceX is still very much targeting Mars," he said. "SpaceX continues to stress making humanity multiplanetary and establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars as long-term objectives." Gonzalez sees the moon as a proving ground rather than a replacement. Just days away from Earth, the moon lets engineers find problems "before committing humans to a Mars mission."

"Space exploration takes time, especially when you are developing a human spaceflight system with this level of complexity," Gonzalez said. "They build, fly, learn, make changes and fly again. That creates very visible successes and failures, but it also allows engineers to accumulate flight experience and data quickly."

Challenges remain

Reaching Earth orbit isn't the hard part for Starship. Gonzalez said that the most underrated gap is the large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer between vehicles once in orbit. SpaceX has moved propellant between tanks in one Ship before, but its architecture requires numerous transfers involving tanker ships to refill a fuel depot, which a Ship must visit in order to make journeys to the moon or Mars. Gonzalez described this depot as a gas station in space, but there are challenges typical gas stations don't face. The fuel is extremely cold, for example, and it needs to be moved in microgravity conditions.

That milestone is yet to happen, and the timeline for an attempt is not clear. It could potentially come with Flight 15 and 16. These were aspirationally scheduled for no earlier than mid and late October, respectively, but have now apparently slipped to mid-to-late November (though there has been no public confirmation of any firm target date).

In 2025, Musk said there was a "50/50" chance of Starship making a run for Mars in 2026. However, with the once-every-26-months Mars launch window — which lasts a few weeks, opening in late October — and no propellant transfer demonstration yet in the books, that is off the table. The next such low-energy orbital transfer opportunity for the Red Planet opens in late 2028, running into early 2029. At the same time, NASA is currently targeting late 2028 for its Artemis IV mission — which involves Starship — to return humans to the lunar surface after an absence of more than 50 years, giving SpaceX a challenging deadline toward which to work. The company will need to dedicate key resources to meet that timeline, including developing life support systems for crew.

For now, Starship's most immediate role is hauling Starlink satellites in orbit. Renčelj noted that startups raising billions are betting on Starship delivering low super-launch prices along with Falcon 9-like reliability. "Their business models are underpinned by what might be a single point of failure," he said.

"Starship still has major capabilities to demonstrate before it can perform the complete missions envisioned for the moon and Mars," said Gonzalez.

"So I would say the timelines are comparable considering the ambition of the vehicles," he added. "The bigger difference isn't necessarily how many years they have taken, but it's where and how each program chooses to learn during those years."

Musk has repeatedly talked of getting thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people on Mars "to make life multiplanetary." Most immediately, SpaceX has a number of business goals and lunar commitments to adhere to ahead of a first uncrewed visit to Mars. Late 2028 appears to be the next real opportunity.

Don't expect any of the Artemis II moon astronauts to fly again soon.

On Tuesday (Oct. 13), NASA announced that Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch will become the agency’s acting deputy chief engineer, effective Nov. 1.

"With this appointment, Koch will transition to management astronaut status and will no longer be eligible for future spaceflight assignments," NASA officials wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

Her three Artemis II crewmates had already shared their next moves, none of which put another spaceflight in play in the near future.

Mission commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both of NASA, became "emeritus" astronauts last month, a role that seems to include planning, advising and mentoring duties but no flights into the final frontier. Glover will also work full-time at his alma mater, the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo.

"I'm grateful they will continue sharing what they learned with our astronauts, flight controllers and engineers as we prepare for Artemis III in 2027 and the missions that follow," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said of Wiseman and Glover in a Sept. 9 statement.

The fourth Artemis II astronaut, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, announced a change of his own in July: He planned to become a reservist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he's also a colonel. That move became official last month as well.

Artemis II sent the four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon in an Orion capsule. It was the first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program and the first human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) since Apollo 17 in 1972.

As Isaacman mentioned, the next mission in the program is Artemis III, a docking test in LEO scheduled to launch next year. The Artemis III crew, which was announced in June, consists of NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik (commander), Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio (mission specialists) and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (pilot).

If all goes according to plan, Artemis IV will land astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2028. We don't yet know who will fly on that historic mission.

Koch will succeed current NASA Deputy Chief Engineer Katherine Van Hooser, who will retire on Oct. 21 after more than 35 years of work for the space agency.

"In her new role, Koch will help lead NASA's engineering community, supporting technical oversight, mission readiness, and engineering excellence across the agency's programs and projects," agency officials said in Tuesday's statement.

Koch is a natural choice for the job, given her education and experience. She holds bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and physics and a master's in electrical engineering, and she began her NASA career as an electrical engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

NASA selected Koch as an astronaut candidate in 2013. She has two spaceflights under her belt: Artemis II and a 328-day-flight to the International Space Station that launched in March 2019. That's the longest space mission ever conducted by a woman, and it featured the first three all-female spacewalks, which Koch conducted with fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir.

"Christina has seen NASA engineering from both sides of the equation: developing complex systems on the ground and trusting them with her life in space," Isaacman said in the Tuesday statement.

"After spending nearly a year living and working aboard the International Space Station and helping lead America back around the moon on Artemis II this year, she brings an extraordinary combination of technical expertise, operational experience, and judgment to this role," he added. "I am excited to see the impact she will have across NASA as we return Americans to the lunar surface, build the Moon Base, get underway on nuclear power in space, and develop the capabilities that will ultimately take us on to Mars."

NASA is asking for ideas to stop static electricity from zapping astronauts or critical hardware during moon missions.

The agency opened a "Lunar Grounding Challenge" to avoid situations where an astronaut on the moon could become "a walking, high voltage capacitor." Submissions for the $150,000 competition are due Jan. 15 and you can see the requirements here.

NASA is hoping to put astronaut boots at the lunar south pole in 2028 during the Artemis 4 or 5 missions, on the first landing mission since NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972. But simulations suggest that both "tribocharging" (electric-charge transfer between two objects) and plasma charging (from ambient gas in the region) could build up electric charge on spacesuits. "This problem is severely compounded when entering lunar shadows and permanently shadowed regions," the agency wrote, referring to deeply cratered areas where the sun does not touch the lunar surface.

The concern is that astronauts' spacesuits could become electrically charged, as there would be an excess of electrons (negatively charged particles) compared with ions (positively charged) in these areas.

"The risk occurs when an astronaut returns to the spacecraft," the agency added. The lander would have a slight positive charge, producing an issue once the "highly negatively-charged astronaut approaches the vehicle."

NASA has asked industry partners for ideas that can help an astronaut avoid "becoming a walking, high voltage capacitor", including issues such as an electrical arc that could damage spacesuits, spark fires in the oxygen atmosphere of a spacecraft, or create electrical shocks. (A Mars simulation in 2018 was reportedly derailed due to a crew experiencing electrical issues, so this problem is not unprecedented.)

The challenge aims to create designs that would safely discharge the astronaut and their spacesuit before an astronaut touches the lander. Among the technical requirements, NASA is looking for something small (in terms of mass, volume and power) that would be able to operate even in the extreme temperature swings of the lunar surface. The technology must also be able to help as many as four extra-vehicular activities (moonwalks) that take place over as long as 10 days.

"In addition, the suspended lunar dust and heavy dust buildup on a suit in these environments significantly increases arcing lengths, allowing sparks to jump across larger gaps than they would in a clean vacuum. Therefore, the solution must aim to avoid a sudden arc that may come into contact with the outer pressure garment — suit — or the lander," NASA wrote in the challenge description.

The challenge will include multiple phases, including a concept design, concept refinement after chatting with reviewers, and then a final selection. NASA did not release a target date in its press release for when the tech would be available for astronauts, but the agency is planning on a long-term moon base for astronaut missions that would be largely ready to go in the 2030s if schedules hold.

Are there secret underground caves on the moon? NASA has a new program that aims to find out.

Though we see it in the sky most nights, the moon still holds an incredible amount of mystery. One such mystery is a large underground cave, or a cavernous tube carved out by ancient lava, that scientists think extends past a particular pit on the moon's surface. And to get to the bottom of it, NASA has selected a project known as GIMLI (the Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation, not the character from Lord of the Rings). GIMLI was selected along with two other programs that are all intended to expand our understanding of the moon to better support a future moon base, which NASA aims to build near the south pole.

"NASA Science is building the ultimate interplanetary survival guide to ensure that science goes first to the lunar surface to provide our future astronaut crews with the vital information, resources, and safety precautions needed ahead of time to survive the night on the moon," Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.

Lunar mysteries

The site of this investigation will be the Marius Hill Pit, which was discovered in 2009 by Japan's Kaguya moon orbiter. You can see the pit clearly in the probe's images. But researchers think that there's more there than just a large hole in the lunar surface.

They think it's possible that the pit is connected to a vast, underground cave likely created by lava flowing in the ancient past. If true, this could shed light on the history of volcanic activity on the moon.

"Confirming a substantial lava tube would give us an insight into how volcanism operated on the moon," GIMLI deputy principal investigator Gareth Morgan said in a different statement. "Lava tubes are a common feature of basaltic volcanism on Earth, so identifying them on the moon means we could use knowledge of such terrestrial caves to better understand lunar history."

Even more, if researchers confirm the presence of this lava tube, astronauts could potentially use it as a natural shelter on the lunar surface. These lava-made caves would provide general shelter as well as protection from the extreme temperatures and radiation exposure experienced on the moon's surface. Lava tubes could also be a safe "bunker" of sorts where future astronauts could be shielded from micrometeorites. While a future moon base will probably have human-made shelters included, natural caves could be an incredible, existing resource that astronauts could tap into.

How to find a moon cave

GIMLI will work directly on the lunar surface, scanning beneath to look for signs of the lava tube. This investigation comes from a proposal led by the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and will be funded through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program.

The investigation is partnering with Honeybee Robotics to help build the equipment and instrumentation that will be necessary for the study. This gear will get to the moon aboard a lander and rover via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, and the data collected will be studied by a team led by PSI associate director and senior scientist Than Putzig. The work done by PSI will be in partnership with the Norwegian Space Agency.

From the lunar surface, GIMLI will gather data using ground-penetrating radar, seismic sensors and a gravimeter to better understand what's really happening underneath the surface. These measurements will allow GIMLI to determine if there is a subsurface lava tube and, if so, how big it is. Could it fit an entire astronaut crew? We will have to wait and see.

We have our first look at the science from Artemis II, and it's as amazing as we might have hoped.

This past April, four astronauts strapped in for a flyby around the moon and back to Earth. The first mission to the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972, this success marked an incredible historic milestone. The Artemis II crew also conducted groundbreaking science, observing parts of the moon no human had ever laid eyes on before. And now, we have our first look at some of the science from the mission.

"It's the science community's job now to take these data and go do magical things with it," David Hollibaugh Baker, a member of the Artemis II Lunar Science Team, said during a Wednesday (10/7) press conference that announced the mission's initial science results.

This is just the first batch of data from the mission, but it includes a whopping 996 new images, 814 GB of observations and 521 minutes of audio from the crew that has never been heard before. Everything from that astronauts' handwritten notes and drawings to photographs and verbal observations have revealed exciting new information — about impact flashes on the moon, for example, as well as the terminator line between the lunar "day" and "night" sides and a whole range of lunar colors and observations from beyond the mysterious far side.

Let's take a quick look at some of the highlights.

Impact flashes

"Dude, no way!" Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman of NASA exclaimed in newly released mission audio.

"It's just like a 'bloop!'" mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency added as the flashes appeared on the lunar surface. .

As Artemis II's Orion capsule flew by the moon, the four astronauts onboard — Wiseman, Hansen and NASA astronauts Victor Glover (mission pilot) and Christina Koch (mission specialist)— started seeing flashes of light on the lunar surface. These were impact flashes caused by small rocks hitting the lunar surface and vaporizing in the impact.

"We have seen three impact flashes so far," Wiseman said to Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It was not sun glint off a particulate from the thrusters or the purge tanks. It was definitely impact flashes on the moon."

"Amazing news," Mission Control responded. "I literally just looked over at the SER [Science Evaluation Room], and they were jumping up and down, literally."

In total, the crew saw five impact flashes on the moon's surface, which the mission's science team was able to confirm didn't come from other sources.

While the Artemis II crew was equipped with cameras, they were also trained to make observations with the unaided eye. And impact flashes happen too quickly to photograph them, so — as you can see above — the crew used a tablet to make annotations and describe their observations.

"We wanted them to look visually, so there are not camera images of that, but we have their annotations of when they saw them," Jennifer Heldmen, science theme lead for the Artemis II mission, said during the briefing.

A rainbow moon

In addition to seeing impact flashes across the lunar surface, the Artemis II crew observed a wide range of colors on the moon.

Looking up in the night sky, it might seem that the moon is just shades of gray. But as the astronauts saw during their flyby, the moon is gray, black, brown, tan, white, green and even blue. This muted rainbow of colors was not only visually striking, as the astronauts' photos show, but it can also help scientists determine what types of rocks and minerals might be found in different regions across the moon's surface.

"The crew reported greens and yellowish hues on top of Aristarchus Plateau, signaling they were seeing remnants of different styles and epochs of volcanic activity, and the crew contrasted those colors to nearby browns and grays of adjacent volcanic plains," Ariel Deutsch, a member of the Artemis II Lunar Science Team, said during the briefing, givingone example of these colorful observations.

"To me, it's primarily like a brownish-green glass, and then if I went up into the mares [dark volcanic deposits] to the north of Aristarchus, I would give that a very muted brown," Wiseman said in mission recordings shared in this release.

"It's like a jaundiced cheek of the moon," Koch remarked in mission audio, describing yellowish colors on the moon.

And while the crew took some amazing photographs of the moon, in this data release we can also see their handwritten notes annotating the colors they saw on the moon.

The far side of the moon

As the moon is tidally locked to Earth, it has one "day side" that always faces us and one far or "night side" that is always facing away. When the Artemis II astronauts flew by the moon, they flew around the entire object, even around the far side. During their flyby, they were able to see a part of the far sidethat has never been observed up close like this before.

"The Artemis II crew were the first people to see this section of the moon illuminated in all of human history," Alex Stoken, a member of the Crew Lunar Observations team, said during the briefing.

When they approached the moon's far side, the crew also came upon the terminator line, or the boundary between the day and night sides of the moon.

At the terminator, the team was able to view the incredible contrasting shadows and textures of the lunar surface, revealing sharp details about the moon's topography.

"The terminator is the most striking thing that I’ve seen so far," Glover said as the crew flew by.

As they rounded the moon's far side, the moon was backlit by the sun, essentially eclipsing it. This allowed for incredibly unique and sharp views of the moon.

"You’ve got to be kidding me," Koch said in the capsule. "You can actually see mountains."

These are just a few highlights from this incredibly thorough and detailed data release. As we dig deeper into this initial science, you can take a dive through the data yourself here and here.

The first Starship launch from Florida may be just a few months away.

All 14 of the SpaceX megarocket's test flights to date have lifted off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas — including the most recent, on Sept. 28, which saw Starship reach orbit for the first time.

But SpaceX is working hard to get three pads on Florida's Space Coast ready for Starship. And one of them, historic Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), is nearly there, according to the company.

"Things are going super well at 39A," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a briefing on Oct. 1 that primarily discussed that day's launch of the Crew-13 astronaut mission to the International Space Station.

The pad's new Starship launch tower is nearly complete, as is most other essential construction at the site, according to Scheiman.

"We've essentially done a lot of the initial build of the structures and the systems needed for launching Starship, and we're beginning to step into the sort of acceptance testing and operational testing prior to activation," she said. "So, we're kind of through the main construction and going into the proofing, testing — activation testing."

The work at Pad 39A began in late 2021. The fact that it's taken so long shouldn't be surprising, for Starship requires some very specialized infrastructure. After all, it's the biggest rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall. For comparison, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles — the only rockets that have flown out of Pad 39A since SpaceX started leasing it from NASA in 2014 — are both about 230 feet (70 m) tall.

Starship is also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and its recovery operations are very different than those of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The first stages of those two rockets touch down either on a ship at sea or on a designated landing pad close to the launch site. But Starship's two stages — its Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to come back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the giant tower's "chopstick" arms. So finishing construction of Pad 39A's new Starship tower will be a very big deal.

Starship also employs different engines than the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy — Raptors rather than Merlins. Raptors burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than rocket-grade kerosene and LOX like Merlins, so the new Starship-friendly 39A needs a new tank farm to feed in this different mix of propellant.

SpaceX plans to launch at least one more Starship test flight from Starbase before flying the megarocket out of KSC, Scheiman said on Oct. 1 — meaning the first Florida Starship launch come come as soon as Flight 16.

The company has not yet announced target dates for upcoming Starship launches, but provisional planning documents identify Oct. 19 and Oct. 30 as possible "no earlier than" dates for Flight 15 and Flight 16, respectively. Those dates may be a bit aspirational, but they suggest that SpaceX aims to fly Starship again soon, and to launch two missions in relatively quick succession. (For perspective: Starship has flown three times so far this year — on May 22, July 24 and Sept. 28.)

Whenever Starship breaks in the new Pad 39A, it will be something of a blast from the past. The launch complex was originally built in the 1960s to host launches of a different megarocket — NASA's Saturn V, which sent the Apollo moon missions skyward. Pad 39A was the jumping-off point for some of the most iconic Apollo flights, including Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 11 in July 1969.

This tradition will continue, if all goes according to plan: NASA picked Starship's Ship upper stage to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.

Ship is scheduled to fly for the Artemis program for the first time on Artemis III, a planned 2027 docking test in Earth orbit between the vehicle and NASA's Orion capsule. And that Ship liftoff will take place from Pad 39A, Scheiman said.

There's more pad work going on in Florida as well. Late last year, the U.S. Air Force gave SpaceX permission to fly Starship from two pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next-door to KSC. Those two pads — SLC (Space Launch Complex)-37A and SLC-37B — could eventually host 76 Starship liftoffs per year between them.

SpaceX has already made considerable progress on SLC-37A and SLC-37B, according to Scheiman. "If you look towards Launch Complex 37, you can see the beginnings of that Starship tower," she said on Oct. 1.

And SpaceX plans to break ground next year on an even bigger Starship launch site — the $100 billion, 12-pad Starbase Louisiana complex. Twelve new pads seems like overkill, unless you know that SpaceX aims to launch more than 10,000 Starship missions per year by 2030.

The vast majority of those liftoffs will serve to assemble two SpaceX megaprojects in Earth orbit: the next-gen Starlink broadband network, which will consist of about 100,000 satellites, and Starmind, an AI data center constellation that will feature a million spacecraft, according to Elon Musk.

The moon is a historical landmark — a celestial body continually peppered with robotic landers shot from our home planet, as well as human footprints planted there by a dozen visiting moonwalkers from 1969 to 1972.

A recent gathering in Italy of the International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage (ISCAH) looked at protecting lunar heritage with an eye toward developing guidelines for spacecraft deorbiting onto the moon's surface.

Particular attention was paid to the risks posed by the impacts of deorbited satellites and rocket stages, recently highlighted by the crash of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage into the moon last August.

As pointed out in the meeting, as lunar traffic increases, controlled crash landings of moon orbiters and rocket stages are becoming an attractive end-of-mission disposal strategy.

And that's a problem.

Limited knowledge

There is limited knowledge regarding ejecta modeling and the effects produced by these impacts, said Luca Forassiepi. He spoke at the Sept. 14 meeting in Piza, which was called "Protecting Lunar Heritage: Developing Guidelines and Recommendations for Controlled Lunar Deorbiting."

"These effects have only been observed, and only partially, in a handful of historical cases. As a result, much of our current understanding relies on simulations, which necessarily involve a number of simplifications compared with reality," Forassiepi told Space.com.

Strong incentive

"Because the moon is an airless world, any movement on the surface is going to stir up sticky, abrasive dust that erodes human materials," pointed out associate professor Alice Gorman, an Australian archaeologist and heritage consultant at Flinders University.

"This is a problem for cultural heritage sites," Gorman said. "Imagine the iconic Apollo 11 landing module, the Eagle, being worn away until it crumbles into dust itself."

"It's also going to be a problem for habitation and mining installations," she added. "So there is a strong incentive for [the] space industry to minimize the impacts of rocket and satellite crashes, protecting both heritage places and new surface missions."

End-of-life planning

Gorman pointed to 51 hard spacecraft impacts on the moon to date, a number that includes nine rocket bodies and 19 lunar orbiters.

"We've reached an inflection point where spacecraft craters aren't just new archaeological sites, they're an environmental hazard that may cause irreversible damage," Gorman told Space.com.

Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, Gorman observed, nations are liable for any damage their space hardware causes to the property of other nations. "We could be looking at a situation where a state could demand compensation for a rocket body crash harming its cultural heritage. End-of-life planning is going to become critical."

Cultural landscape

Also taking part in the meeting was Beth O'Leary, a cultural anthropology and archaeology specialist and college professor emerita at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

"The moon is part of the cultural landscape of Earth," she said. As such, its environment and heritage deserve international attention.

It's now been more than 60 years since the first successful soft landing on the moon, that of the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft in February 1966. And lunar traffic is poised to increase greatly in the coming years, as both the United States and China aim to build bases near the moon's south pole.

Given this landscape, "we seek to address the challenges of lunar traffic from crashes, deorbiting spacecraft, and intentional landings and to understand those risks to our aerospace heritage. Our committee attempts to estimate the real consequences of the impacts," O'Leary said.

With global experts in planetary geoarchaeology, site formation processes and heritage management, ISCAH is analyzing and increasing the knowledge base that could prevent the irreversible destruction of the significant historic cultural resources on the lunar surface.

Far-reaching consequences

"Our recommendations should inform consensus-based decisions and support international best practices and policies," said O'Leary.

The ongoing work of the group provides the best opportunities for lunar preservation and protection by and for humanity, she added.

"In our short three years," O'Leary said, "we will have had three conferences, created a mission statement, received World Monuments Fund listing, and will continue as a delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space."

O'Leary told Space.com that all these issues are complex scientifically and legally, "but it is so important to rely on excellent research and proven heritage management principles in order to make good decisions about preservation which have far-reaching consequences."

Planetary geoarchaeology

One goal the group is addressing is a "post-mission gap," particularly regarding lunar projects.

That is, what happens to lunar heritage following the completion of a successful mission and in the decades that follow?

Also, what are the appropriate end-of-mission practices, and how can we ensure the long-term protection of spacecraft, robotics and other material remains associated with these missions?

Those questions are being deliberated by Justin Holcomb, an assistant research professor with the Kansas Geological Survey, a research unit of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Planetary geoarchaeology provides one way to address this issue, by identifying the natural (geological) and anthropogenic (human) processes operating within these environments "that may threaten lunar heritage, while also identifying environmental settings that are more conducive to its long-term preservation," Holcomb told Space.com.

Lunar practices

Forassiepi said that future points of action are on the agenda.

"There is certainly ongoing and continuous work by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage on this aspect," said Forassiepi.

ICOMOS is the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental organization working to conserve and protect cultural heritage sites on our planet — and off it as well.

"In active collaboration with the World Monuments Fund, we will further refine our research into the potential risks associated with deorbiting and crash landings," Forassiepi noted.

Over the coming months, Forassiepi said, the group will move into a second phase focused on listening and dialogue with all relevant stakeholders in the sector, from space agencies and the scientific community to private actors, heritage experts and communities with social and religious values associated with the moon that could be affected or disrupted by certain lunar practices.

Ultimate goal

"The aim is to initiate an open dialogue and exchange among all these different actors, with a view to collectively developing guidelines based on broad consensus," Forassiepi said.

These will then be presented in the context of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2027, with the hope that, over time, they may evolve into "internationally recognized standards of behavior" and be adopted and followed by all space actors, Forassiepi added.

"The ultimate goal is to build a lunar future that is sustainable not only from an operational perspective, but also in terms of scientific research and the protection of the earliest traces of human presence in the history of space," he stressed. "These are two irreplaceable forms of heritage, and their damage would represent an enormous loss for future generations."

Blue Origin just unveiled its "Power Tower," which is designed to provide solar electricity for an upcoming base on the moon.

The space company, which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, posted an animation of the tower on X on Sept. 25, showing the hardware landing on the moon and then deploying above the lunar surface.

"Our Power Tower is a 20-meter-tall, vertically deployed solar array system designed to provide more than 10 kilowatts of power for Moon Base operations at the lunar south pole," Blue Origin wrote in the post.

The X post also links to a YouTube video, which shows a real deployment test that occurred here on Earth on July 22, 2026. From the low vantage point of the camera, you can see a pole extending up from the base, before arms branch out from the center to deploy solar arrays that fold down.

"Its modular architecture will support future surface networks, extending power beyond the lander to the assets that need it most," reads the Blue Origin post.

The power tower appears to be an evolution of an earlier technology called Lunar Array Mast and Power System (LAMPS), which was developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, and tested at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2024.

Honeybee Robotics is one of the companies that have been working under NASA's Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT) project, which has been developing solar arrays to create the necessary power for a sustained presence on the moon in the future.

The X post mentions that the power tower will be used for operations at the lunar south pole. Blue Origin likely envisions the solar tower as part of NASA's planned moon base, which the agency aims to build in the area via its Artemis program. NASA's Moon Base project is currently in its first phase, which lasts until 2029. The current timeline has the moon base up and running by 2032.

Starship just notched a huge milestone, but it needs to check a few more boxes to get fully up and running.

The SpaceX megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit for the first time ever on Monday (Sept. 28), during its 14th test flight to date. Starship also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink V3 broadband satellites on Flight 14, kicking off construction of a constellation that will eventually harbor 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

These were big successes, but they didn't vault Starship into full technological maturity; the rocket will have to clear a few more hurdles to get there. Here's a brief rundown of the most important ones.

Catching the Ship upper stage

Both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both of these vehicles back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX thinks this recovery strategy will enable fast and efficient reuse, allowing the company to achieve seemingly outrageous launch cadences. Indeed, the company is targeting 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030, Elon Musk has said.

SpaceX has already pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy, doing so on three Starship test flights to date. But the company has yet to attempt one with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship, which has always targeted an ocean splashdown to wrap up its missions.

That could change very soon. During an appearance at the All-In Summit on Sept. 14, Musk said that SpaceX may try to catch Ship on Flight 15, provided that Flight 14 went well.

The company has not laid out a mission profile for Flight 15, but Monday's success would seem to keep a Ship catch in play. We don't have an official launch date for the upcoming mission, either, but provisional planning documents peg Oct. 19 as the earliest possible target.

And another note about that launch cadence: SpaceX aims to achieve it by expanding launch operations of Starship, which has previously flown from just two pads at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. SpaceX is currently building three Starship pads on Florida's Space Coast, and it plans to break ground on the $100 billion, 12-pad Starship Louisiana complex in 2027. So that work will be going in the background of each upcoming Starship flight.

Off-Earth propellant transfer

Most Starship missions will stay in Earth orbit, deploying satellites for the Starlink V3 constellation and the company's even bigger "Starmind" data center network, which will consist of about a million satellites, if all goes to plan.

But some of the megarocket launches will send Ship farther afield — to the moon and Mars, for example. Indeed, NASA picked Starship's upper stage to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next decade or so.

Deep-space Starship missions will be more complicated than orbital ones, because they require more propellant. Ship cannot launch with much fuel onboard — doing so would make it too heavy — so each Ship bound for the moon or Mars will need to visit an off-Earth fuel depot, which itself will be a Ship variant.

This depot will need to be fueled up by special Ship "tanker" vehicles. It's unclear how many tanker flights will be required for each deep-space Ship mission, but the number is not negligible. For example, estimates for a Ship lunar-landing campaign range from eight tanker missions on the low end to 15 or 20 on the high end.

So in-space fueling is a key capability that Starship must demonstrate. SpaceX has taken some baby steps to this end already, successfully transferring propellant from one internal tank to another on Ship during Flight 3 back in March 2024.

But the company has not yet moved propellant from one vehicle to another in space. SpaceX may decide to try this as soon as Flight 15, but that's just speculation; we need to wait for an official mission description.

Getting Starship ready for astronauts

Starship was always envisioned to be a crew-carrying spacecraft. When Musk introduced it to the world back in September 2016, he framed the megarocket — then known as the Interplanetary Transport System — as the key breakthrough that would make Mars settlement feasible.

So SpaceX will need to incorporate a suite of life-support technologies into Starship and test them extensively before putting any people on board. And the clock is ticking on this task, thanks to the timeline that NASA has laid out for Artemis.

The agency plans to launch the crewed Artemis III mission in mid-2027, sending its Orion crew capsule to dock with Ship in Earth orbit. It's unclear if Ship will need to be crew-capable by then — the Artemis III astronauts may not enter Ship — but it will definitely have to be people-friendly by the time Artemis IV rolls around in 2028. That mission will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, in the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.

And the timeline isn't the only driver for SpaceX. There's also competition for these flights; NASA has said it may fly Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander on Artemis III and/or Artemis IV if Ship isn't ready.

SpaceX won't be starting from scratch with its life-support tech; it can (and probably already has begun to) scale up the systems it has used on its Crew Dragon capsule, which has flown 20 astronaut missions to low Earth orbit to date.

As this partial list shows, the next few Starship missions should be just as exciting as Flight 14, if not more so. There will likely be a lot riding on each one.

In case you are feeling the empty hole of moon missions, void since the return of the Artemis II astronauts from their trip around the lunar far side six months ago, NASA has you covered.

The agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launched Artemis II on April 1, carrying a crew of four on the first mission around the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972. SLS lifted off from Launch Complex-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, and, to the awe of hundreds of thousands, climbed a bright blue early evening sky on a trail of smoke left by the vehicle's solid rocket boosters up into space.

More than 300,000 people traveled to the Space Coast to watch the launch from dozens of locations around KSC and surrounding cities. But the best views wouldn't be seen until well after the rocket cleared the pad, when NASA technicians recovered the slew of engineering footage captured by dozens of specialized cameras distributed everywhere from the base of the launch pad to drones positioned in the air to track every detail of the launch. Now, NASA has released that footage to the public.

The newly-released videos include a wide spectrum (literally) of views and angles that follow SLS from just before engine ignition through solid rocket booster separation as the rocket leaves Earth's atmosphere. NASA teams used scientifically calibrated in-flight imaging (SCIFLI) to compile footage ranging from the visible light spectrum, to short-wave infrared (SWIR), near-infrared (NIR), mid-wave infrared (MWIR) and infrared — to give you a few helpful acronyms for context as you pursue these videos on NASA's Artemis II album. These different wavelengths of light captured views imperceivable to the eye and typical camera sensors, and allowed NASA technicians to filter out things like the extreme brightness of the flames from the rocket’s engines.

Artemis II was the first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent base on the surface of the moon in the 2030s. It was also the first flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft with astronauts aboard. Essentially a shakedown cruise for Orion's life support systems, the mission flew NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth.

The next mission in NASA's lunar line up, Artemis III, will last longer, but won't fly as far. Artemis III is scheduled to launch in mid-2027 with NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and Andrew Douglas, as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano of Italy. They will launch aboard Orion to Earth orbit, where their spacecraft will rendezvous with the two commercial lunar landers NASA has contracted for the Artemis program, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

Artemis III is expected to last about two weeks as Orion will rendezvous and dock with each lander separately to test the spacecrafts' interoperability. That mission will serve as a precursor to the program's first actual lunar landing with astronauts on Artemis IV, which NASA is targeting to lift off in 2028.

No need for a quick spray of Windex to get a clear view of this situation.

There's a growing need for windows for rubbernecking space travelers, whether they're making suborbital hops, staying in Earth orbit or conducting far-flung sojourns to the moon and beyond.

Retrofire back decades ago when the first Mercury space capsule offered a tiny porthole for its single seat occupant, Alan Shepard. Similarly, the first human in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, had but a small window to take in the view.

Oddly, in those early years of pioneering space treks, nobody knew what microgravity would do to the human eye and a person's vision. Talk about floaters!

That aside, sightseeing in space has meant an evolution of safe and sound windows and tackling the engineering challenges to produce them. But what's the outlook ahead for space voyagers?

Earthgazing

"Based on my experience of interviewing professional and commercial astronauts, I would say that the windows are key to the 'Overview Effect' experience," said Frank White, who coined the phrase and is author of "The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987).

White called attention to the deep shift in cognitive awareness that most space travelers undergo in viewing our planet from Earth orbit and beyond.

It's clear that, for NASA astronauts, transitioning from space shuttle missions to the International Space Station (ISS) was critical to a more meaningful opportunity to view Earth from a distance, White said.

"This shift intensified with the advent of the ISS Cupola, where astronauts spend a great deal of time ‘Earthgazing,'" he told Space.com.

Customer experience

White said that, because Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have focused on having their suborbital space tourism customers experience the Overview Effect, "both companies have ensured great views from the windows of their spacecraft. As a result, commercial astronauts have had profound experiences, even though they are weightless and looking at the Earth only briefly."

It is no accident that SpaceX installed a special "cupola" on its Crew Dragon capsule for the Inspiration4 astronaut mission in September 2021, and it paid off, White observed. Anyone who doubts this fact, he said, should watch the video of the unveiling of that window by the Inspiration4 crew.

"The story goes that the engineers for the Mercury flights did not want the spacecraft to have windows," White said. "The astronauts insisted and eventually prevailed. Fortunately, their precedent continues to this day, to the benefit of the astronauts and the people of Earth. The Overview Effect is one of the most important 'spinoffs' of space exploration."

Human comfort

Similar in view is Samuel Coniglio IV, author of "Creature Comforts in Space: Designing Enjoyment and Sustainability for Off-World Living" (BookBaby, 2024).

Coniglio also points to that scene from the 1983 film "The Right Stuff," in which the original Mercury astronauts were arguing with the engineers for a need to see outside their capsule. After all, they were an elite set of pilots and may have needed to take manual control of their craft at some point.

"Just as plants and taking a shower play a critical role in human comfort, so do windows," said Coniglio. "Being able to see the vast heavens allows you to become one with the universe, and to see all the cool stuff going on outside. We can't just live in a box — we need to be part of the outside world as well."

Structural reliability

Lynda Estes is the spacecraft transparencies discipline lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. She's an engineering expert who has been integrating windows into crew-carrying spacecraft for decades.

Estes has worked with many vehicles during her NASA career — the space shuttles, the International Space Station, the Artemis program's Orion capsule and every private human-rated spacecraft developed by companies partnering with the agency's Commercial Crew Program.

Estes is an internationally sought-after resource for design, development, engineering, testing and operations for high-risk, human-rated pressure cabins in both aviation and spaceflight. She's the author of the governing NASA requirements document that ensures high structural reliability in spacecraft glass window designs.

Starting as a stress analyst for mechanisms, "windows are a whole new PhD," Estes told Space.com. "Glass is a brittle material. It breaks. That's what it likes to do. But it's also beautifully transparent as well."

Room with a view

In earlier NASA programs, windows were made of multiple panes of different types of glass. For example, the European-built Cupola on the ISS — offering the "best room with a view" — consists of six trapezoidal side windows and a circular top window. Each window consists of four panes for protection from astronaut-induced scratches, as well as outside dings from space debris.

The entire window, or the individual scratched or debris-pocked panes, can be replaced. Reinstating an entire window requires a "big, fancy ballet," said Estes — one that is well-choreographed, with an astronaut first fitting an external pressure cover over the window during a spacewalk.

Overall, the ISS Cupola serves as an observation and work area when the crew operates the station's robotic arms or observes visiting vehicles. But it's a lure during leisure time as well, as it affords astronauts extraordinary views of Earth and celestial objects.

Static fatigue

But there are troubling features of glass, too. For one, tiny flaws affect its strength. And glass actually loses structural capability over time, according to Estes.

"We call that static fatigue," she said, referring to cracks that grow microscopically under a load.

"We're working hard to remove glass because of those two features," Estes said, explaining that NASA wants to move to an all acrylic window design for the Orion spacecraft. "Acrylic, when seeing reentry temperatures, acts like a heat shield."

As a structural engineer, Estes advises that windows are worrisome.

"We come at it from, How do we keep everybody alive? Cutting a hole in the side of your pressure vessel and installing something like glass to replace that hole is a really poor choice," said Estes. "That's why we are trying to move contractors and our partners to acrylic. That is a much more structurally stable material."

Buying risk

One of the challenges with glass is that it produces shards when it breaks. "And the first place those shards want to go is to that human body that just went over to the window to see what happened," Estes pointed out.

With glass you are buying risk, said Estes. On the other hand, NASA has a written requirement, she said: "If you are going to put humans inside and send it to space, it must have a window."

Estes and her team are now providing guidance for spacecraft windows to be utilized for future moon operations, including the human landing systems for the Artemis program.

Back down here on Earth, does she clean windows at home?

"I do not," Estes responded.

Could we find alien technology embedded in moon dust?

The bold idea, not yet peer-reviewed, suggests checking out the lunar surface for "microscopic technosignatures." The SETI Institute — or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute — describes these technosignatures as "tiny engineered particles" that may have come from interstellar space before settling on the moon.

The institute recently highlighted a paper on the topic, published on arxiv in August, and added the research is undergoing peer review for consideration in the International Journal of Astrobiology. The study is led by SETI Institute Affiliate Scientist Lewis Pinault.

"The moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the moon itself," said Pinault in a statement. "We're asking whether that ancient collection might contain microscopic traces of technologies that existed long before humans ever looked up at the sky."

Even if no aliens turn out to be there, the search could help advance models of how dust goes through interstellar space, as well as effects on lunar geology or impact science, the institute added.

"The study reports no evidence of extraterrestrial technology," the institute added in the statement. "Instead, it demonstrates that searching for these microscopic technosignatures is now scientifically testable."

That's in large part because the NASA-led Artemis program, which will ultimately bring astronauts to the moon, as well as China's Chang'e robotic series, would provide opportunities to return samples, the institute said. (China is also eyeing bringing its taikonauts to the moon by 2030.)

SETI is best known for looking for artificial radio signatures in space that may have come from extraterrestrials. This new study, the institute added, is focusing more on past alien communities that may have preserved their knowledge in "durable particles," even if the communities are no longer in existence.

The study examines how these particles could (in theory) move from star to star, stay viable over long distances and periods, embed themselves in the lunar surface and then — if humans could find them — use AI-assisted imaging, materials analysis and microscopy to take a closer look, among other techniques.

Helping in that search is the environment of the moon itself, which — compared with Earth, at least — has slow-moving geology. As the institute points out, the surface has no flowing water or substantial atmosphere like our planet does. What's more, the moon has picked up dust in its environment for about four billion years (from not long after the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago), presenting a potential archive of dust in the solar system and interstellar space.

"The researchers argue that if advanced civilizations produce durable microscopic debris — whether intentionally or as a byproduct of space exploration or large-scale engineering — a tiny fraction of those particles could eventually become embedded in the lunar regolith," the institute stated.

The goal is to start these studies with about 35 cubic feet (one cubic meter) of lunar regolith, which is maybe the equivalent size of a fridge. Researchers would try out a series of careful investigations using multiple tools to "begin placing meaningful limits on the amount of durable artificial material produced by technological civilizations over the history of the Milky Way."

And as mentioned, even if this small sample doesn't turn up technosignatures, the researchers say the work is still important. It's another way to search for "extraterrestrial artifacts," to look at various aspects of solar system science, and to try out newer tools for examining moon samples that weren't available in the Apollo years.

"This is a novel addition to the search methodologies applied to seeking evidence of technology as a proxy for life and intelligence beyond our solar system and we are excited at the prospect of bringing this to fruition," stated Bill Diamond, SETI Institute president and CEO.

NASA astronaut Victor Glover is now "astronaut emeritus." He's hanging up his spacesuit for a position he hopes can guide the future engineering and science leaders of tomorrow.

Glover, who served as pilot on NASA's Artemis II mission that flew around the moon in April, officially began his new role as executive advisor to Jeff Armstrong, president of the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly),on Sept. 1, and is stepping away from the majority of his duties at the space agency.

NASA announced on Sept. 9 that Glover, as well as Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, are transitioning to emeritus status beginning this month, but are not retiring from the agency outright. Even astronauts who do fully retire from NASA are still retained "in the system," Glover told Space.com, "but I actually get to have a badge that is a little bit different. I can come back. I have a NASA email address. I still work closely with the agency. I'm considered a special government employee."

"It allows me to have just a slightly more robust and meaningful relationship with NASA," Glover said — but "more robust" won't necessarily equate to the same daily commitment. His role at Cal Poly will be full-time, according to the university, but he's not exactly going to be putting in typical work hours there either.

"We're still figuring it out," he said. "It's not going to be nine to five. I'm not a faculty member. I don't have a class I have to teach or a board that I oversee. It'll be where the school needs me the most and where I can highlight what great work they're already doing."

Glover's connection to Cal Poly runs deep. He's a Cal Poly alum who graduated with an engineering degree in 1999. A two-sport athlete, he wrestled for the university and played on its football team. And it's where he met his wife, Dionna, who also graduated from Cal Poly. The two have since raised four daughters, all of whom have either graduated or are currently attending their parents' alma mater. With Glover's multifaceted connection to the university, Cal Poly sees his potential contributions as equally diverse.

The university says that Glover, in his position as executive advisor, will work with the gamut of university leadership, including the president, provost and college deans. He will help "identify, develop and accelerate strategic initiatives, partnerships and philanthropy aimed at expanding the university's leadership in engineering, applied computing, aerospace, aviation, maritime, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, autonomous systems and national defense," according to Cal Poly's statement.

How that will manifest into Glover's actual contributions is still being figured out. "There's just so much potential," he said, adding that he wants to serve in an additive role for Cal Poly where he can "get in and help, and do the most good."

Cal Poly has been undergoing a period of significant change and expansion over the past several years. This fall, for the first time ever, the university transitioned from a quarter system to a semester-based one. It also recently completed its integration with the former California State University Maritime Academy, whose Vallejo campus is now Cal Poly's Solano Campus and home to the Cal Poly Maritime Academy.

"They're hitting on all cylinders in so many areas," Glover said. "There's so many areas where Cal Poly is doing amazing things, and each of those things by themselves have been a big deal."

The university operates on a "Learn by Doing" philosophy, which emphasizes hands-on, real-world experience alongside classroom instruction. Glover credits his professional successes to this system, and his experiences over a decade at NASA have reinforced his belief in that kind of educational approach.

"Putting energy and time into building trust is just as important, or more important, as building technology, and so I think there's a lot of areas where my NASA experience will also feed back into Learn by Doing," Glover said. "I think everything I did at NASA has a place here."

"At NASA we do some pretty challenging things, pretty risky things, but we have a really strong scientific and technical understanding of what we're doing," Glover said. "That kind of risk-informed decision making is an important part of what we do here [at Cal Poly], whether it's professional development or helping these students to become the next generation of leaders."

Glover cited Charles Lindbergh's book "We," and its perspective on learning to fly a plane, as an example for Learn by Doing's effectiveness. "You teach yourself to fly," Glover said. "An instructor is really there to keep you from having ultimate mistakes. But you teach yourself to fly. It's something that you have to work out yourself. And I think that this school really understands that … We want to make sure that these students can critically think and analyze, but we also want to make sure that they can do the work with their hands."

Flying is something with which Glover has an extensive familiarity. Before he joined NASA in 2013, he was a U.S. Navy aviator and test pilot with 4,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft who flew 24 combat missions, though he is now best known for piloting NASA's Orion spacecraft around the moon on Artemis II.

Glover launched aboard Orion on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on April 1 with three crewmates — Wiseman, NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The quartet spent approximately 10 days aboard the Orion capsule and flew a course around the moon's far side. Their mission was the first to fly a crew to lunar space since Apollo 17 in 1972, and it captured the attention of millions across the world as the astronauts sent back views of the moon unlike any humanity had ever seen.

Artemis II was the first crewed mission in NASA's Artemis program, which has the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent base on the lunar surface. The next time Orion launches, on Artemis III, the spacecraft's crew will be tasked with testing out docking hardware with the program's lunar lander vehicles in Earth orbit. NASA is targeting mid-2027 for that mission. If it's successful, Artemis IV will follow in 2028 as the program's first lunar landing attempt, with subsequent missions with more crew and cargo to incrementally assemble an outpost on the surface of the moon in the 2030s.

As the only people to fly aboard Orion in space so far, the Artemis II crew's experience and insight into the spacecraft, and how future Artremis astronauts can best train to fly it, are invaluable to NASA — hence Glover and Wiseman's emeritus status.

Hansen, who trained at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) and lived in Houston since his induction as a CSA astronaut in 2009, announced in July that he's stepping back from active astronaut duty beginning this month and moving back to Canada. On Sept. 8, the day before NASA made the announcement about Glover and Wiseman, Hansen posted a video on X stating that his Artemis II duties officially concluded on Sept. 2.

That leaves Koch as the only Artemis II crew member on an active astronaut roster, but Glover and Wiseman, as emeritus flyers, aren't out of the agency entirely. "With our experience flying Orion in space, the agency knows that we can still make a meaningful contribution to Artemis and human spaceflight in general, without having to be there full time," Glover said. "We can still support our colleagues and their families and the mission while we go off and pursue other other opportunities."

Supporting other astronauts on NASA's roster, and the teams that run the missions, are the parts of the job that Glover enjoyed the most. "[The emeritus status] allows us to still support our colleagues, which is the best part of being an astronaut. It's not flying in space," Glover said.

"I told [NASA leadership], ‘Nothing has really changed,'" Glover said. "If they call me and say, ‘Hey, we need this,' they can count on me to be there because they are so fantastic. I will always be there to carry the water for them when they need it."

Though he'll still be helping astronauts prepare for future missions every now and then, Glover said his own spaceflight days are behind him. Glover had flown to space once before, prior to Artemis II, as pilot of SpaceX's Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Glover spent 168 days in orbit on that stint, serving as flight engineer for Expeditions 64 and 65, and completed four spacewalks.

"I didn't make this move planning to go back to space," Glover said. "I was pretty satisfied after my first space mission, so I don't have this hole in my heart that needs to be filled by going to space again."

A few NASA astronauts who've left and moved on to the private sector have ended up going back to space, like Peggy Whitson, who retired from NASA in 2018 before joining Axiom Space and later commanding the company's Ax-2 and Ax-4 private astronaut missions to the ISS. But Glover doesn't see a move like that in his future.

"If I wanted to go to space, I would have stayed at NASA. It's the gold standard," Glover said. "I love our corporate partners and what they're doing. There's some really amazing things, including what Jared Isaacman himself has done … But I would have stayed at NASA full time as an active astronaut if I was trying to go back to space."

Isaacman was sworn in as NASA administrator in December 2025. His spaceflight experience came before that: In September 2021, he commanded SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight, and later performed the first commercial spacewalk during the private Polaris Dawn mission in September 2024.

In fact, Glover said it was harder walking away from his career flying fighter jets than it was to walk away from the opportunity to maybe one day fly in space again. Harder still might be leaving behind the place he's called home for more than a decade, but ultimately he said it was an easy choice. He's lived in Houston and worked at JSC since his selection into NASA's astronaut class in 2013, but expects he and his family will make the permanent move to the West Coast, to be closer to Cal Poly.

"One of the reasons why this was just such an easy decision to make is that both NASA and Cal Poly … and everybody understands that we need time to get used to this new reality, and they're all giving us a lot of grace and space as we just kind of figure out what the right rhythm, what the right ops tempo is," Glover said. He thinks he and the family will make the move sometime after the New Year.

In the meantime, though you may not see him quite as much on NASA's social media channels, he has made a few appearances in posts on his daughter Maya's TikTok profile. In posts celebrating his return from the moon and recent career shift, Glover can be seen performing dance routines with his family — but don't bother refreshing your feed to load more any time soon.

"Don't expect to see a whole lot more of that, because I would do anything for my kids, but you know, well, I guess almost anything for my kids," Glover said jokingly. When asked which was harder to train for, between piloting Orion and the dance moves, he said, "Oh, clearly the dance moves."

Rocket Lab still holds out hope that it can build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency picked Blue Origin for that job earlier this month, awarding Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company $700 million to develop, launch and operate the Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN).

Today (Sept. 11), however, Rocket Lab announced that it has challenged that decision, filing a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

"NASA's award decision appears to be inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by Congress. In addition, the agency’s punitive review of Rocket Lab's technical volume was inconsistent, making incorrect assertions and conclusions," Rocket Lab said today in an X post that laid out its argument.

"Procurement standards exist to ensure fair competition and protect public investment," the California-based company added. "We are pursuing this review to ensure those standards are upheld for critical infrastructure that will underpin American exploration at Mars for decades to come."

As its name suggests, the MTN orbiter will serve as a communications link between mission controllers here on Earth and other NASA spacecraft studying the Red Planet. Just two agency orbiters fulfill that relay role these days, and both are quite old: Mars Odyssey launched in 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off in 2005.

NASA had been eyeing a new Mars telecom orbiter for years and finally got Congressional funding for it in July 2025 — $700 million, to be precise. The agency issued a request for proposals this past May, drawing considerable interest from the private sector.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were widely considered the front-runners, and NASA ended up going with Blue. The award calls for the company to deliver MTN (which, despite the "network" in its name, is a single spacecraft) to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028. It's expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

Blue Origin has been in Rocket Lab's shoes before, and has behaved similarly. Bezos' company filed a protest with the GAO in 2021 after NASA picked SpaceX to provide the first crewed moon lander for the agency's Artemis program.

The GAO denied the protest in July of that year. Blue Origin then sued NASA but lost in court in November 2021. The story has a happy ending for the company, however: NASA decided to select a second Artemis lander as well, and Blue Origin won that contract in 2023. We'll see how this story plays out for Rocket Lab...

Three of NASA's Artemis II astronauts are starting off the school year with new assignments.

Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both NASA astronauts, will transition into "emeritus status" in September, the space agency announced on Wednesday (Sept. 9). Meanwhile, Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen shared a video on X on Tuesday (Sept. 8) concerning his already-announced transfer from active duty to reserve status in the Canadian military.

The fourth Artemis II astronaut, NASA mission specialist Christina Koch, appears to still be on active duty, as no announcements have been made saying otherwise.

The Artemis II quartet flew around the moon in April, becoming the first people to go beyond low Earth orbit since 1972. The historic journey was widely expected to be the last step in active astronaut duty for at least some of the mission's four astronauts, especially Hansen, who had waited for a flight assignment for 17 years in part due to how Canadian Space Agency funding is allocated. (Robotics provided by the CSA form a minority share of international space partnerships with NASA, and astronaut flight rates are tied to funding.)

The Artemis II astronauts made a series of public appearances together this summer, culminating on Aug. 28 when President Trump awarded them the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. Hansen was only the second non-American to receive the award, which had previously been given to just 30 astronauts total.

While NASA's Wednesday announcement about Glover and Wiseman did not explicitly state that the duo are exiting active astronaut duty, their new role is described as allowing the astronauts to assist NASA as consultants and "individuals with a high degree of technical and professional knowledge," while allowing them to do other things.

The two astronauts are expected to help NASA plan future Artemis program missions. "I'm grateful they will continue sharing what they learned with our astronauts, flight controllers and engineers as we prepare for Artemis III in 2027 and the missions that follow," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in the statement.

Glover, who also retired from the U.S. Navy recently, will now assume a full-time role at his alma mater, California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, which has aerospace and space programs. The news was announced by the university on Wednesday, but the position took effect on Sept. 1. Glover will be an administrative leader providing advice to senior leadership on education, research and workforce strategies, according to Cal Poly.

"The most meaningful moments of my NASA career were supporting astronauts and their families through missions, and mentoring interns and new hires as they began their own journeys in technical and public service," Glover wrote Wednesday in a post on X about the career change.

Wiseman did not share any specific updates about his career plans on social media. The astronaut also exited active astronaut duty temporarily between 2020 and 2022 when he was chief of the astronaut office for NASA, a role that precludes flying in space as the chief is involved in flight assignments. Wiseman left that role and resumed active astronaut duty before being assigned to Artemis 2, which occurred shortly before the public announcement of the mission's crew in April 2023.

"NASA gave me tremendous responsibility, supported me through two space missions — and my time as chief astronaut — and was always there for my family when we needed it most," Wiseman said in the NASA statement about his career change. "I'm thrilled to continue serving future missions and programs through the emeritus program."

Hansen's Artemis 2 duties officially concluded on Sept. 2, according to his X account, and the astronaut — who has been based out of Houston since 2009 — posted a new video of himself Wednesday walking in the woods in Canada. Hansen said he has retired as a colonel with the Royal Canadian Air Force and is now a reservist working with 3 Canadian Space Division, which is essentially Canada's Space Force.

"The intention of that is to continue to serve Canada and government — the Canadian Space Agency — when it makes sense, to help us take advantage of some of the extraordinary opportunities that are before us right now," Hansen said in the video, adding that he will divulge more details about that work shortly.

Hansen also said he accepted a role as honorary national president with the Canadian military's Air Cadet League of Canada, which the astronaut has often said helped equip him with both flying and leadership skills when Hansen was growing up.

Additionally, Hansen pledged to "continue to share the moon joy" both as an individual and with his crew. For example, he recently joined a Canadian keynote-speakers bureau in which he plans to speak about how to accomplish personal "moonshots." In October, Hansen will also co-release "Earthrise: A Canadian Astronaut's Journey Into Deep Space" (HarperCollins Publishers, 2026) — a book that discusses his career and Artemis 2 — which he co-wrote with Canadian author John Larsen.

Blue Origin will build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 1) that it has selected Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company to develop the $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN), which is expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

"The award marks a milestone in NASA's strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades," NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

As its name suggests, the MTN — previously known as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter — will primarily serve to aid NASA science missions rather than gather data of its own.

The MTN is "a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions," NASA officials said in the statement.

The need for such a data-relay craft is expected to become acute in the coming years as NASA's fleet of current Mars orbiters ages and the agency works to prepare the Red Planet ground for crewed missions in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

At the moment, just two NASA orbiters relay data and commands between the agency's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers and their handlers on Earth — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The European Space Agency's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft help out as well.

All four of these orbiters are gathering science data of their own, however. The MTN will not have a split focus; it will be a dedicated communications craft.

NASA got $700 million for a Mars telecom orbiter in July 2025, when Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill. The agency laid out requirements for the spacecraft in February of this year, then issued a request for proposals in May.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were viewed as the front-runners for the contract, and both pushed hard for it, touting their bona fides and expertise.

Blue Origin won out in the end, however. The company will base MTN on its Blue Ring spacecraft platform, which it describes as "an all-in-one, high-powered hybrid solar electric and chemical propelled spacecraft that provides unmatched mission maneuverability, versatility, and capacity at dramatically lower profile costs."

Blue Ring has not flown a mission yet, but a prototype version of it went to space on the first-ever launch of Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket in January 2025. Though Blue Ring can fly on other rockets as well, MTN will presumably launch on a New Glenn; the newly announced NASA contract calls for Blue Origin to "design, develop, integrate, launch and operate" the Mars telecom mission.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to deliver the spacecraft to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028.

Four astronauts just received the United States' highest space honor.

President Donald Trump gave the astronauts of NASA's Artemis II moon mission the Congressional Space Medal of Honor today (Aug. 28) during a ceremony at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"This is a very rare thing. It's for courageous people, brilliant people, bestowed on astronauts who have distinguished themselves with exceptional service to the nation and all of mankind," Trump said during the event.

Artemis II launched on April 1 and came back to Earth nine days later. It was the first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term base near the moon's south pole in the coming years.

The flight sent four people — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — on a looping journey around the lunar far side. It was the first crewed trip beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and its astronauts got farther from their home planet than any people ever had before.

Artemis II engaged folks around the world thanks to its importance, its historic nature and the charisma of its astronauts. And some fortuitous orbital dynamics didn't hurt, either: The Artemis II crew were lucky enough to observe a total solar eclipse from beyond the moon, something human eyes had never seen firsthand before.

The Congressional Space Medal of Honor is awarded "to any astronaut who in the performance of his duties has distinguished himself by exceptionalIy meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of the Nation and of mankind," NASA wrote in a description of the award, citing Congress' stated criteria.

Though the president gives out the medal, he does so on the recommendation of the NASA administrator, the agency added. Before today, just 30 people had received the award, and most of them are pretty big names. Past honorees include Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong; Alan Shepard and John Glenn, who were the first Americans to reach space and orbit Earth, respectively; Gemini astronaut Ed White, the first American to perform a spacewalk; and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell.

The award was also given to each of the 14 astronauts who died in the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters.

Hansen therefore wasn't the first non-American to receive the medal. Ilan Ramon, one of the seven people who perished when Columbia broke apart upon reentry to Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003, was from Israel.

During his speech at today's ceremony, Trump said that the United States is entering a golden age of spaceflight and exploration. And he thanked the Artemis II astronauts for being a guiding light.

"Thanks to the crew of Artemis II, those dreams are closer than ever before," the president said. "We're on the cusp of an adventure and something that's so special, people have really not imagined anything. It's really, civilization is into the stars. The stars are up there and they're beautiful, and you're right next to them. You have the courage to be right next to them. Few people do, but you're leading the way. It's great, great bravery."

The astronauts reciprocated the warmth. For example, they gave the president a blue flight jacket commemorating the mission. And Wiseman, Artemis II's commander, thanked Trump for calling the crew during their mission.

"The one thing that really sticks out to us is, you said how proud you are and how proud our nation is of the job that we have just accomplished," Wiseman said during the ceremony. "And for us, that is what we set out to do. We wanted to inspire this nation and inspire the world, and for us, that showed us we were on the right track. So, thank you for that call."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on Aug. 28 with quotes and information from the medal ceremony.

A new spaceport will bring 10 launch pads to Louisiana's Gulf Coast and support thousands of Starship launches per year.

SpaceX and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry announced Tuesday (Aug. 25) a $100 billion investment in the state's Vermilion Parish to build "Starbase Louisiana," a sprawling new manufacturing and launch facility for SpaceX's massive Starship rocket. It will be one of the biggest projects in the state's history, and serve as SpaceX's largest center for spaceflight operations.

Once complete, the new site will feature five complexes that feature two Starship towers each, for a total of 10 launch pads across the facility, each with its own propellant farm. That fuel will also be produced onsite as well.

"We're planning to build a self-sustaining spaceport with its own propellant production, power generation, deep water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and probably an airport," SpaceX President Gwynn Shotwell said during the announcement event. "And thanks to the abundant resources here in Louisiana, we have ready access to the natural gas that fuels these rockets to get to orbit."

SpaceX and Louisiana officials say the site will eventually support thousands of launches per year and will be central to SpaceX’s effort to dramatically increase Starship’s flight rate. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk recently estimated that Starship will be launching more than 30 times per day by 2030, which equates to more than 10,000 flights per year.

Landry framed the project in historic terms, saying."This will be the place [from] which America reaches farther than it has ever reached before. In 1803, Louisiana gave America a continent. Today, Louisiana and SpaceX will give America the stars.”

Starship is SpaceX's next-generation, fully reusable launch vehicle. The giant rocket is still under development, but the company is quickly making strides to mature the rocket to operational status. SpaceX is preparing for Starship's 14th test flight in September, and is on a tight timeline to qualify the rocket for operational missions.

Shotwell said SpaceX's existing infrastructure can't support the number or cadence of Starship launches the company anticipates reaching, and tied Starbase Louisiana to SpaceX's long-term goal of using Starship to make human life interplanetary. In the nearer term, Starship is also tasked with returning astronauts to the surface of the moon.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to design a lunar lander version of Starship for the agency's Artemis program. Artemis III is scheduled for mid-2027, and will launch NASA's Orion spacecraft to Earth orbit to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one of SpaceX's current "Version 3" Starship test vehicles. The first moon landing of the program is planned for Artemis IV in 2028, giving SpaceX a fast-approaching deadline to mature Starship from test article to crew-certified lunar lander.

For the Artemis IV Starship to carry out its mission of landing astronauts on the surface of the moon and then launching them back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with Orion, and for any Starship mission beyond low Earth orbit, the spacecraft requires refueling launches of additional "tanker" Starships. Artemis IV's Starship may need up to a dozen such refueling flights. But Starbase Louisiana's 10 launch pads will be for more than propellant delivery.

SpaceX plans to launch its next-generation Starlink internet satellite constellation aboard Starship. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 300 Starlink missions aboard its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has delivered more than 11,000 of the satellites to orbit. Already preparing for the transition to Starship, SpaceX just launched its last Falcon 9 Starlink mission from Florida, and plans to fly the remaining Falcon 9 Starlink launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. SpaceX intends to retire Falcon 9 entirely once Starship is fully operational.

The company is also planning for Starship to launch its huge artificial intelligence network and build out an orbital infrastructure to “move supercomputing to space,” Shotwell said, as artificial intelligence drives greater demand for resources.

“Put all of this together, and these tasks will require thousands of launches,” Shotwell said. “Starbase Louisiana is being designed from day one to support this dramatic increase in launch cadence.”

Construction on the new Starbase is expected to begin in 2027, with the first launch from the site targeted for 2029, SpaceX said. According to an outline of the plan from Louisiana Economic Development, the state agency overseeing the project’s economic development efforts, the project is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs over the next decade, and thousands of additional jobs indirectly tied to its development.

Already having gone through the processes in Texas and Florida, SpaceX has also already begun working with Louisiana wildlife and coastal agencies to assess the impacts of such a large industrial complex along the Gulf Coast.

"We are committed to doing our part to ensure that this land doesn't disappear," Shotwell said, viewing the area as a unique opportunity to fly the world's most powerful rocket, while supporting Louisiana's coastal resilience. "SpaceX is partnering with state and federal agencies to expand Louisiana's coastal master plan, including shoreline protection, marsh restoration, and wildlife conservation," she said.

Starbase Louisiana will be SpaceX's biggest undertaking ever, and likely the eventual hub of the company's launch operations. "This will be a project like no other," Shotwell said, "another piece of science fiction transported into reality."

The rumors are true. SpaceX plans to retire its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket once the company's giant next-generation Starship begins regular operational flights.

SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 for the first time in 2010, and the rocket soon chiselled itself a place in spaceflight history. The Falcon 9 has lifted off nearly 700 times to date, and it's the first orbital rocket ever to land and refly its first-stage booster. Russia's Soyuz rocket, which has been in operation since 1957, is the only launch vehicle with more missions under its belt, but the Falcon 9 is on track to pass it next year.

However, "winding down Falcon" — both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, a triple-booster variant that has flown 12 times to date — is inevitable, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said in an Aug. 22 post on X. "Once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift … production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day," he wrote.

The impact of Falcon 9's absence from the launch market can't yet be known, but industry reports suggest that SpaceX may discontinue all but a few Falcon 9 missions beginning in 2028. The ones that remain will likely include crew and resupply missions for NASA to the International Space Station (ISS), which is expected to continue flying until at least 2030, meaning that commercial operators will have to start looking to Starship to deliver their satellites to space.

When exactly SpaceX will begin to wind down Falcon 9 will depend on the continuing development of Starship. Unlike its predecessor, Starship is built for full reusability, with the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage both designed to return to Earth for recovery and reflight. (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy upper stages are expendable.)

And Starship is bigger than Falcon 9, too. The current Version 3 (V3) Starship stands 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, towering over the 230-foot tall (70 m) Falcon 9, and is capable of launching substantially heavier payloads to space. Starship is expected to be able to deliver more than 100 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). By comparison, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy can carry about 25 tons and 63 tons to LEO, respectively.

The majority of Falcon 9 missions over the past few years have been dedicated to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet network, with more than 300 launches since 2023 adding to the growing constellation of over 11,000 spacecraft. The more powerful next generation of Starlink satellites, however, are bigger, and designed to fit in Starship's payload bay, not atop the Falcon 9. And once Starship is launching reliably (and even before then), SpaceX plans to begin upgrading its Starlink network with the newer satellite version.

That will likely kick off an exponential upward trend for Starship launches. This happened with the Falcon 9, after all. SpaceX launched the rocket just 11 times in 2019, the year the company began assembling its Starlink constellation. In 2025, Falcon 9 flew a whopping 165 missions, and 122 of them were Starlink flights.

NASA has also contracted SpaceX to design a version of Starship for use as a lunar landing vehicle for the space agency's Artemis missions. A Starship V3 is in line to launch on the Artemis III mission next year, which will practice docking operability in LEO with NASA's Orion spacecraft. Starship has also been slated to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis IV in 2028. That's also when SpaceX has told NASA that it plans to end commercial Falcon 9 launches, according to Ars Technica.

One thing Starship has not yet been contracted or designed for is docking with the ISS. NASA is positioned to continue purchasing flights of SpaceX's cargo and Crew Dragon spacecraft to deliver astronauts and supplies to the space station through 2030, and would be hard pressed to shift those tasks to Starship. Cost and contract logistics aside, the mere size of Starship poses significant engineering risks outside the station's safety margins.

Regardless of the timeline for the ISS, SpaceX's planned sundowning of Falcon 9 also hinges on Starship's success. The launch vehicle has flown 13 suborbital test flights to date. Another is poised to lift off within the next month, and may be the rocket's first attempt at fully reaching orbit. But that's just one of many milestones that Starship must hit before it can begin "flying reliably several times per week," as Musk stipulated in his post.

That kind of turnaround time has already been achieved by Falcon 9, but building up Starship's infrastructure is a much bigger enterprise than the dozen or so successful test flights the vehicle has under its belt. And how quickly SpaceX can scale Starship to match Falcon 9's reliability will ultimately determine how soon the legacy rocket is largely phased out of commission.

NASA's Artemis II moon astronauts will join a very exclusive club next week.

President Donald Trump will award those spaceflyers the Congressional Space Medal of Honor next Friday (Aug. 28) at Johnson Space Center in Houston to recognize their historic journey around the moon this past April.

The ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) and will feature NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, President Trump and the Artemis II astronauts. You'll be able to watch it live when the time comes.

Artemis II sent NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day trip around Earth's nearest neighbor. It was the first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, when the Apollo 17 astronauts returned home from the moon.

The mission's success was a huge step for NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a base near the lunar south pole in the coming years.

The Congressional Space Medal of Honor is the highest award that the U.S. government can bestow upon an astronaut. It's possible that only Wiseman, Glover and Koch will receive it next week; NASA's media advisory about the event states that Trump will give the medal to "each of NASA's Artemis II crew members," suggesting that Hansen might not be included. (The award is not limited to American citizens.)

Thirty people have received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to date. They are:

• Neil A. Armstrong
• Frank Borman
• Charles "Pete" Conrad, Jr.
• John H. Glenn, Jr.
• Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom
• Alan B. Shepard
• John W. Young
• Thomas P. Stafford
• James A. Lovell
• Shannon W. Lucid
• Roger B. Chaffee
• Edward H. White, II
• William M. Shepherd
• Rick D. Husband
• William C. McCool
• Michael P. Anderson
• Kalpana Chawla
• David M. Brown
• Laurel B. Clark
• Ilan Ramon
• Francis R. (Dick) Scobee
• Michael J. Smith
• Judith A. Resnik
• Ronald E. McNair
• Ellison S. Onizuka
• Gregory B. Jarvis
• Sharon Christa McAuliffe
• Robert L. Crippen
• Douglas G. Hurley
• Robert L. Behnken

SpaceX is picking up the pace of preparations for the next launch of its giant Starship rocket.

On Wednesday night (Aug. 19), the company completed a single-engine static fire test with its Ship 41 vehicle, the upper stage that's in line to fly Starship's upcoming Flight 14 mission. As its name suggests, Flight 14 will be Starship's 14th test flight, but it will be the rocket's first launch into orbit, if all goes according to plan.

The recent engine burn was designed to prepare for that jaunt. "Starship completed a single engine static fire demonstrating a deorbit burn for upcoming orbital missions," SpaceX wrote in an X post on Thursday (Aug. 20).

Video included in the post shows Ship 41 standing at SpaceX's Massey's test site, near the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. The clip shows the moment of ignition of one of the spacecraft's six Raptor 3 engines, which burns for approximately 15 seconds.

SpaceX followed up Wednesday night's test with a full six-engine test on Thursday (Aug. 20). That burn lasted approximately 60 seconds, as seen in video posted by the company the next day.

With the completion of Ship 41's first static fires, SpaceX could be on track to launch Flight 14 sometime in early to mid-September. However, there are still a number of prelaunch activities for the ship and its Super Heavy first-stage booster to clear before SpaceX will declare them launch ready, and, with Flight 14 tasked with placing Starship in orbit for the first time, the company is likely to be extra cautious.

Flight 14 will be Starship's third launch of 2026, and the third to feature the upgraded "Version 3" (V3) of the vehicle, which SpaceX introduced in May. SpaceX is also modifying a Starship V3 to dock with NASA's Orion spacecraft as a part of the Artemis III mission to Earth orbit next year.

NASA contracted SpaceX as one of two commercial moon lander providers for the Artemis program. The agency plans to land astronauts on the surface of the moon aboard a Starship lunar landing vehicle on the Artemis IV mission in late 2028.

SpaceX had apparently originally intended to attempt a return-to-launch-site recovery for Ship 41, but company founder and CEO Elon Musk recently said that milestone will now likely happen "in a few months."

Ship 41 will instead likely attempt a soft ocean splashdown at the end of its flight, and its Super Heavy counterpart, Booster 21, is expected to do the same. SpaceX has returned three of its Super Heavy boosters to Starbase for successful catches using chopstick-like arms on the rocket's "Mechazilla" launch tower, and it has managed to refly two of those. But a V3 Super Heavy catch has not yet been attempted.

Returning and reflying both Starship stages is a key component in SpaceX's design for the giant rocket, which will be the largest, most powerful launch vehicle in history once the company works out all its kinks. If it can, Musk said on a recent earnings call that he expects the rocket to launch "at least one flight a day, possibly more." In an Aug. 20 X post, Musk said SpaceX aims to support 30 Starship launches per day, or more.

Blue Origin plans to return its Florida launch site to a dual-pad facility to support its bigger, more powerful New Glenn "9x4" rocket, which is still under development.

As facility repairs continue following the explosion of one of Blue Origin's New Glenn "7x2" rockets during tests at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Launch Complex-36 in May, the company has announced its intent to expand the site with an additional pad. The company also plans to build operations infrastructure for the complex on land nearby, which will include a Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) for the New Glenn 9x4 vehicle, and a Payload Processing Facility (PPF).

Blue Origin has expressed confidence in its ability to complete repairs at its existing LC-36 pad (LC-36A) in time for New Glenn 7x2 to return to launch by the end of the year, but the company did not state a timeline for the readiness of LC-36B or an expected debut of New Glenn 9x4.

The 7x2 and 9x4 designations are a denotation of the rockets' engine configurations. It's similar to SpaceX's name for the Falcon 9 rocket, which is powered by nine Merlin 1D engines on its first stage, arranged in a circle of eight around a single engine in the center. New Glenn's first stage is powered by Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, and the rocket's second stage uses BE-3Us.

Both New Glenn first-stage configurations are designed for landing and reusability. The 7x2 flies with seven BE-4 engines on its first stage and two BE-3Us on its second stage. Subsequently, the taller, yet-to-debut New Glenn 9x4 will be powered by nine BE-4 engines on its first stage and four BE-3Us on its second stage. It will therefore be capable of launching larger, heavier payloads into space.

For roughly four decades beginning in the 1960s, LC-36 was home to two pads that supported the Atlas-Centaur family and, later, the Atlas I, II and III rockets. In that time, the pads hosted launches of NASA's Surveyor, Mariner and Pioneer probes, as well as commercial and national-security payloads. But that era ended in the mid-aughts as those Atlas rockets reached retirement. LC-36A hosted its final launch in 2004, LC-36B launched its last rocket in 2005, and the complex was decommissioned and demolished.

Blue Origin took over the lease for LC-36 in 2015, began construction of its own launch facility in 2016, and launched the first New Glenn 7x2 rocket from the facility in 2025. Since that debut, New Glenn has flown two more missions, with the most recent lifting off in April. The company had planned for as many as eight to 12 launches in 2026, but May's static test fire explosion has reduced that number to a hopeful one (1).

The fourth New Glenn rocket (NG-4) was slated to deliver a stack of Amazon Leo wireless internet satellites to orbit before its destruction during testing on May 8, which also resulted in extensive damage to LC-36 facilities. Less than a month later, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp provided a repair update with the assurance that New Glenn would fly again before the end of 2026. He also outlined some early upgrades that would be integrated into LC-36 as a result of the unexpected repairs, including the replacement of New Glenn's transporter erector with "an alternative vertical conop (operational concept)," for transporting the rocket to the pad.

"LC-36 has served as a cornerstone of American spaceflight for decades, supporting a broad range of missions for NASA and commercial partners," Blue Origin said in a statement. "Now, this historic site is entering a new era, furthering New Glenn operations."

According to Limp, the additional pad will require as much as 2,500 tons of steel, much of which will go toward building a700-foot-tall (213 meters) launch tower.

"Proud to honor the legacy of Launch Complex 36. Rebuilding LC-36A and flying again this year remains our priority. Alongside that work, a separate team is beginning work on LC-36B, the operational home for New Glenn's 9x4," Limp said in an Aug. 12 social media post.

MORRISON, Colorado - The Artemis II crew that circuited the moon earlier this year came full circle, dropping by a distinctive spot on Earth that's visually reminiscent of both the moon and Mars.

On Aug. 3, the vast and stunning Red Rocks Amphitheatre served as both an inoculation of near-term nostalgia and heart-felt congratulations to the crew for the impressive journey of Artemis II. The 10-day mission began on April 1 of this year, flew around the moon and back, and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10. It was the first crewed flight to saunter spaceward beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years.

Some 8,500 people packed the open-air venue at Red Rocks to make eye-contact with space travelers Reid Wiseman, commander, Victor Glover, pilot, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as mission specialists – all of them clearly awestruck by the crowd reaction. The event was a broader post-flight campaign for the foursome, also spotlighting the region's contributions to the sojourn of Artemis II. A science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fest was also part of the early morning affair.

Iconic location

"I can't imagine a more iconic location on Earth to hear about the trip to the moon," said Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space and a major aerospace contractor for the Artemis program. There were hundreds of suppliers across the rocky mountain region, over 10,000 employees, that supported the Artemis II mission, he told the gathered throng.

Leadership from industry prime contractors including Lockheed Martin, Amentum, Boeing, L3 Harris and Northrop Grumman took part in the salute to the Artemis II voyage.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis pointed out that "here in Colorado, we're a mile closer to space." As the best and biggest homecoming for the Artemis II crew, he added, "keep reaching for the stars."

Lori Glaze, NASA associate administrator for the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said today "is a truly revolutionary and exciting time for NASA and America's space program. We are going to reach farther. We're going to dream bigger. And we're going to secure America's leadership in deep space exploration and discovery."

What next?

In a pre-event press gaggle, Space.com asked the Artemis II crew members how their Orion spacecraft named Integrity performed and would help the upcoming Artemis III crewed flight in Earth orbit.

"It handled incredibly well," said Reid Wiseman, Artemis II commander. "Just from habitability, I think that is where we learned the most, putting four humans in the spacecraft. We knew that the machine was technically competent and capable of getting to the moon … Artemis I taught us that," he told Space.com.

"We had some heat shield things we needed to sort out on Artemis II. But putting the four of us in there, seeing how the life support system worked and how is it for habitability, to eat, live, work, and sleep in there, we definitely learned a lot that we've handed on to Artemis III," said Wiseman.

Sense of gratitude

The Red Rock Artemis II stage event had the four Artemis II crew members facing a huge gathering of supportive spectators. In excess of 1,300 questions were submitted by the attendees.

The Artemis II crew entrance was marked by roaring footage of the Artemis I launch scored by music from thunderous Metallica's "Fuel."

"The biggest thing that this mission has given us is an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I think we've got to figure out how to keep this going," Glover said.

For Christina Koch, the Red Rocks gathering spurred a call and response audience participation. "I say moon, you say joy," to which the throng promptly called back three times. She also asked the audience to put their thumb out in the air. From a distance, "you can cover the entire Earth with your thumb. That's how small it was to us," she said, "but what you knew was that was home."

Proximity operations

Victor Glover, the pilot of Artemis II, focused on a proximity operations demonstration during the flight. That entailed the crew guiding the spacecraft through a series of controlled approach and retreat maneuvers using the detached upper stage, the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, as a reference target.

"That is when we had a chance to fly the spacecraft by hand, not just using the computers," Glover told Space.com. "We actually got to fly. One of the most amazing aspects of that is looking out the window or through the cameras on the [cockpit] displays to determine how far we were from the upper stage," he explained.

That task made use of all four sets of eyes onboard Orion, Glover said. "We did not have radar, or some other type of digital ranging system between us and that vehicle. But the Artemis II team trusted us to fly like that. I'm still blown away by that trust," he said, "and it flew marvelously."

South pole ambitions

NASA's Glaze added that Artemis III is to fly sometime mid-year in 2027.

"We are going to demonstrate docking with one or both of our two landers, the Blue Origin and the SpaceX lander. They've got some demonstration versions that they are preparing right now. We're working on that mission to prove out, not just going back and forth at a target, but actually docking and doing that hard job," Glaze told Space.com.

Space.com pressed Glaze on the term "demonstration versions" of the Blue Origin and SpaceX lunar landers.

Would the fidelity of those demos be good enough to green-light an actual human moon landing on the Artemis IV mission?

"I do," Glaze responded. "We're working really hard with both of our lander providers on development of the demo pathfinder versions of their landers that we will dock with […] to assure that the docking systems are the same docking system we're going to work with when we are going for the landing mission," she said.

Glaze said that "this is one of the key risks. This allows us to buy down that risk and at least work through that part of the mission. So when we do the landed mission we've got that part out of the way.

"We've got our lessons learned from those docking demonstrations. And then we are really focused on all the risks associated with the landing on the moon … we can really focus our efforts there."

According to Space.com sources, however, there is active discussion of whether the lunar south pole is an advisable location for the first human landing of the Artemis Program. Indeed, Artemis II pilot Glover recently stated that he thinks there's a need to be realistic and progressively work our way to the south pole locale rather than land there first.

"We've had a lot of conversations with both of our lander vendors. The designs they have are for the south pole," responded Glaze. "We're working really closely with them on those designs. And we are very focused on landing at the south pole."

Over the moon

Canada's Artemis II mission specialist, Jeremy Hansen, told the audience that their space trek was a very human experience for the four crew members, "but we came to see and feel you. You shared the moon joy," he said.

Hansen underscored the international character of Artemis II. "It was one of those deliberate contributions to the planet," he said, because billions of us on Earth have to join forces. "We have to work together. We can no longer believe that our end-state is not working together. Not acceptable. We have to collaborate," he said.

Asked by a young audience member about items taken on their excursion around the moon, mission specialist Koch replied: "I took handwritten letters that I hadn't read before from my family, and also a very tall cow figurine. My dad had the idea of having a cow jump over the moon."

NASA has formally invited India to participate in its effort to build a permanent base near the moon's south pole, adding a new dimension to the deep-space cooperation between the two countries.

The invitation was extended last week at the Indian space agency ISRO's headquarters in Bengaluru during the ninth meeting of the U.S.-India Civil Space Joint Working Group. The CSJWG was established in 2005 as a mechanism for bilateral space cooperation and for addressing challenges and pursuing mutual spaceflight goals.

"Building on our successful collaboration in science, NASA reaffirmed its interest in @ISRO joining Moon Base. We're going back to the moon to stay — and we're bringing our partners with us," NASA officials said via X on Tuesday (Aug. 11).

Beyond the lunar base invitation, "the two sides also agreed to advance discussions for cooperation on open scientific data sharing under the Accords," reads a Tuesday statement by the U.S. Embassy in India.

"The Accords" are the Artemis Accords, the U.S.-led diplomatic framework outlining principles for safe and responsible exploration of the moon and beyond. India signed on as the 27th signatory in 2023, joining a coalition that has now grown to 70 nations.

Official statements have provided few details on what India's participation in the Moon Base program would entail in practice. The meeting, however, brought together senior space officials from both countries, including V. Narayanan, the chairman of ISRO and secretary of India's Department of Space, and Sergio Gor, the U.S. Ambassador to India, who addressed the opening session, according to the statement.

The meeting was co-chaired by M. Sankaran, director of ISRO's U.R. Rao Satellite Centre, on the Indian side, and two people on the U.S. side — Wesley Brooks, assistant secretary of state for the U.S. Department of State's Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, and Kathleen Karika, NASA associate administrator for International and Interagency Relations, the statement reads.

Over the coming decade, via its Artemis program, NASA plans to build out a sprawling, city-like base near the moon's south pole, a region of particular interest thanks to permanently shadowed craters there that are thought to contain substantial deposits of water ice.

Details of the planned architecture shared by NASA in May envision hilltop habitats to take advantage of sunlight and nuclear power systems located farther away to mitigate radiation risks. The space agency also plans to use small, hopping robots starting in 2028 to scout the south polar region ahead of moon base construction.

This effort to gather information and secure access to the surface is the first of three planned phases. Phase 2, from 2029-2032, is intended to establish the base's initial operating capability. Phase 3, from 2032 onward, aims to achieve a semi-permanent crew presence on the lunar surface, NASA said during the May update.

To prioritize infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the moon's surface, increase launch cadence and keep pace with China's lunar ambitions, NASA earlier this year paused development of its long-planned Gateway space station.

For India, the invitation to join NASA's Moon Base program comes as the country pursues its own ambitious lunar exploration and human spaceflight roadmap. Its plans for the 2040s include developing a moon base, establishing a space station in lunar orbit and sending Indian astronauts to the moon, with the broader goal of building long-term human presence beyond Earth.

The moon dust has settled after a 4.5-ton SpaceX rocket body slammed into terrain near Einstein Crater on Aug. 5.

That impact site was imaged by South Korea's moon-orbiting Danuri spacecraft, as well as by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Reportedly, a Chinese commercial space debris monitoring satellite tracked and recorded the 5,400-mph (8,690-kph) moon punch, too.

Wandering through space for over a year, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost-1 lander on its way to the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Also sent moonward on that flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2's Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. While the moon has reclaimed its serenity, the implications of the uncontrolled collision continue to reverberate.

Close encounter

Interestingly, there was also the prospect of a too-close-for-comfort conjunction of the Falcon 9 upper stage and Danuri.

"We noticed roughly late June that there is an incoming Falcon 9 upper stage toward the moon, and also knew that it would be close to Danuri," Eunhyeuk Kim, a senior researcher at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), told Space.com.

There was a huge uncertainty in the predicted trajectory of the upper stage, Kim said, while the orbit information of South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter was quite accurate. "Therefore, we could not neglect the probability of an incoming and close encounter."

Spacecraft maneuver

However, around mid July, the KARI/Danuri team performed a maneuver of the spacecraft in preparation of a near-total lunar eclipse on Aug. 28, said Kim. That eclipse will see 96% of the moon's visible surface passing through Earth's dark umbral shadow.

Kim said that the orbiter's maneuver brought a slight change in the phase of the spacecraft's orbit, which canceled the probable conjunction between the upper stage and Danuri.

At the time of the Aug. 5 impact, Danuri was flying over the moon's south pole area, far away from the hit zone, said Kim.

High-speed ejecta

Dean Sladen is a quality manager and aerospace engineer in the United Kingdom for Accu Components, a high-precision manufacturing firm.

"As space agencies and private companies build out permanent lunar infrastructure, uncontrolled rocket stages evolve from a minor nuisance into a tangible operational risk," Sladen told Space.com. "A direct hit is the obvious worst-case scenario, but distant impacts also generate ground shocks and high-speed ejecta that can degrade sensitive equipment over time."

Sladen noted that lunar impacts have been a constant throughout history, with meteorites and comets bombarding the surface unhindered by an atmosphere. "Over the past 65 years, artificial objects have added a new dynamic to these events," he added.

Genuine hazard

Even modest hardware impacts permanently alter the lunar landscape, said Sladen. Given the moon's lack of a substantial atmosphere, there is no air resistance to slow debris down. An impact therefore hurls high-speed ejecta (fine regolith and rock fragments) across vast distances at bullet-like speeds.

"While this isn't a major threat to isolated missions today, as we establish permanent lunar infrastructure, high-velocity ejecta poses a genuine hazard to surface habitats, solar arrays and working astronauts," Sladen said.

To mitigate this issue, Sladen suggested that the industry will likely need designated impact zones or strictly controlled, targeted de-orbit protocols to ensure that spent hardware lands far from active installations.

"That said, human-made debris is only half the equation," Sladen continued. "Natural meteorites remain an ongoing background threat, and, while massive natural strikes are rare, they hit at significantly higher speeds and carry far more energy," Sladen said. "Controlling our own hardware is simply the part of the risk profile we actually have the power to manage."

Plume detections

In the meantime, while the Falcon 9 impact was tough to see from Earth, several observations from our planet reported the detection of sodium and lithium gas above the crash site.

The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, for example, saw the aftermath of the impact. The ESO reported that a chemical fingerprint of the impact was visible for five to 10 minutes, with an enormous plume of lunar material stirred up due to the hard-hitting hardware.

"I'm happy that ESO recorded some evidence of it through VLT, and Danuri has found the exact impact location," said William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin who performed some pre-strike computer simulations.

"What we've learned so far is that the plume was too faint to see against the bright lunar surface, and only a large observatory telescope could pick some parts of it out against the dark sky, which is exactly what happened," Jo told Space.com. "The plume must have shot out high," he said, "and I'd like to know how high, or even whether we can replicate the signals."

Targets of opportunity

"Telescopes make the best spaceships," pointed out Elaina Hyde, director of the Allan I Carswell Observatory at York University in Canada. "We are always on the lookout for 'targets of opportunity' like this event."

Hyde organized a livestream event, training the observatory on the collision locale. They were unable to spot the impact, however.

"The lunar collision was not on our regular research program, but when it happened, we put it as a high-priority item to observe if the weather was clear," Hyde said. "Anything that happens quickly like this is often a target of opportunity, because you do not get a long time to plan the observation."

"However, since it was not visible from our location in Toronto, our 'null' or non detection can actually help to limit the estimates on how big the dust plume was and perhaps some of its properties," said Hyde.

Impact response

Also on the moon impact watch were observers using Lowell Observatory equipment in Arizona.

These researchers managed to measure a response from the rocket stage impact, spotting a sizable sodium and lithium gas plume that lasted between five and 10 minutes after impact, reported Carl Schmidt, an assistant research professor at Boston University's Center for Space Physics.

Observers at the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) in Happy Jack, Arizona used a long slit spectrograph to detect the plume. Graduate students from Boston University continue to analyze data gleaned from the moon wallop.

Bright lithium plume

"At LDT, we saw a bright lithium plume from the rocket body and fainter sodium [signature], likely from the surface itself," Patrick Lierle of Boston University told Space.com. "The bright lithium plume extends more than halfway up our field of view." The LDT results are also credited to Emma Lovett, a Boston University graduate student.

William Jo said he's looking forward to the release of observational data about the impact before he and colleagues can refine their lunar ejecta simulation model.

"That data, combined with our simulations, could tell us things like the composition of the lunar material, what orientation the impact hit at, and so on," Jo said.

Not every canceled NASA program earns a halo after its demise, but one scrapped project is finding new life by contributing its parts to help the space agency achieve its moon base goals faster.

Northrop Grumman is repurposing hardware and technology from the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) space station module for use on a new series of Lunar Infrastructure Demo (LID) missions. HALO was originally designed as the habitation module for NASA's since-cancelled moon-orbiting Gateway space station but found itself on the chopping block when the agency restructured the Artemis program architecture earlier this year.

Rather than scrap the unfinished module outright, Northrop Grumman will adapt HALO's electrical and mechanical components to support the development of technologies for a moon base that can survive the cold, weeks-long night at the lunar south pole while sustaining the long-term habitation of astronauts inside.

Part of NASA's reasoning for canceling Gateway was the need for expedience. As the agency's vision for Artemis and the return of astronauts to the lunar surface has evolved, China's plans to land the first taikonauts on the moon have steadily taken shape. Those ambitions, and the continued progression of China's lunar program, have kicked off a new space race in which the U.S. and NASA are intent on maintaining their first-place position.

In March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a shakeup to the Artemis program designed to enable a more step-by-step approach toward developing the technologies needed for a next-generation crewed lunar landing, and to achieve that landing on the shortest timeline possible.

That timeline currently puts the first Artemis lunar landing with astronauts on the Artemis IV mission, scheduled for late 2028. Before then, however, NASA is planning nearly two dozen uncrewed missions to the moon to lay the groundwork for the infrastructure needed to precede astronauts' return. And, rather than let HALO rust in a warehouse, Northrop is doubling down on its commitment to the cause.

"To help NASA move faster … HALO’s power, data and mechanical interfaces will enable NASA to move with speed and begin gathering real lunar surface performance data sooner," the company said in a press release on Aug. 4.

Northrop announced 3 LID missions to "reuse HALO-derived technologies to rapidly mature lunar surface power, thermal, autonomy, communications and hosted payload services," which will help NASA gather data to better protect robotics and crews during long-duration stints near the moon's south pole, where the agency plans to establish its Artemis moon base. Neither the company nor NASA gave a target timeline for these missions.

NASA is targeting the south pole specifically because of the abundance of water ice that scientists have detected in that region on the moon. When harnessed appropriately, such ice concentrations can be used for a variety of applications to enable sustainable habitation on the lunar surface — the ultimate goal of the Artemis program — including potable water, radiation shielding and rocket fuel.

NASA believes that overcoming the technological hurdle of "in-situ resource utilization" (ISRU), or the ability to rely on materials locally available to you in order to sustain your survival, is the gold standard of spaceflight that will open the door to humanity's long-term exploration of the cosmos. Manufacturing propellants off Earth, for example, would mean a substantial increase in the distance any particular mission to space can fly, because nearly 95% of a rocket's mass at launch is fuel. So, the ability to refuel in space, circumventing the burden of launching to orbit fully fueled, would give satellites and crewed spacecraft the ability to fly much farther into the solar system than current launch systems allow.

As much as Artemis is, in itself, a program to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, NASA also sees it as the proving ground for technologies that could one day sustain astronaut missions to Mars. There is worry, however, over the national security and economic consequences that could accompany China beating the U.S. to the moon, so speed is top of mind for those tasked with the country's lunar return.

"As America embarks on the next chapter in human space exploration, our Lunar Infrastructure Demos will help turn the moon into a place where astronauts can stay, work and make discoveries that benefit humanity,” said David Schiller, Northrop Grumman's vice president of civil space and sciences, in a statement. “Our ready‑to‑fly, reliable HALO technologies allow NASA to move faster, putting in place robust infrastructure that can endure the lunar night and establish a strong blueprint for a future moon base.”

A radiation-shielding vest might one day protect astronauts from dangerous, random outbursts from the sun, a new study finds.

More than 50 years after the final Apollo mission, NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon. To succeed, this project must protect astronauts from solar radiation, especially the intense and unpredictable radiation from solar storms. Coating an entire spacecraft with a meaningfully thick layer of radiation shielding remains impractical due to weight constraints, but wrapping astronauts in protective garments may potentially be helpful.

In the new study, researchers experimented with the AstroRad vest, which was designed by the Israeli startup StemRad with support from the Israel Space Agency and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. The garment was created to protect astronauts from explosions from the sun known as solar particle events.

"Radiation in space is unavoidable, and a single major solar particle event can make a substantial contribution to an astronaut's lifetime risk of radiation-induced cancer," study co-author Oren Milstein, CEO and co-founder of StemRad, told Space.com. "By significantly reducing that contribution, personal shielding could be particularly important for future lunar and Mars missions."

When it comes to protection against radiation, lead is excellent at blocking hazardous forms of light, such as X-rays and gamma rays. However, lead is much less effective at defending against the kinds of dangerous particles that can hurtle through space. For instance, when fast high-energy electrons known as beta particles strike dense lead atoms, they can trigger a shower of X-rays that are more harmful than the beta particles themselves. And if neutrons strike lead atoms, they can knock loose a spray of neutrons from the atoms' nuclei, worsening the impact from the radiation.

Instead, AstroRad relies on a high-density plastic rich in hydrogen. Among the elements, hydrogen possesses the highest density of electrons per atom, which can help create a dense shield to protect against incoming particles. At the same time, hydrogen atoms normally do not have neutrons, so if neutrons hit them, they cannot generate the kind of dangerous neutron sprays that can happen with lead atoms.

Moreover, the plastic in AstroRad is much lighter than lead. This makes it easier to move around in garments incorporating the plastic, and more practical for space missions in which weight is a major limitation.

The scientists combined thousands of hexagonal rods of the rigid plastic together like scales to create a flexible garment. All in all, each vest weighed about 57 pounds (26 kilograms).

The scientists developed a vest rather than a full-body suit or a helmet because "different organs and tissues have very different sensitivities to radiation, so shielding every part of the body equally is not the most effective approach," study co-author Jordan Houri, lead scientist for space exploration at StemRad, told Space.com. "At the same time, a full-body suit would be much harder to put on and move around in."

The shielding thickness of the AstroRad vest was based on how sensitive to radiation the underlying organs were. This strategy provides about a 30% greater reduction in the dose of radiation a person receives compared with distributing the same amount of shielding uniformly across the body, Houri said.

The researchers tested their vest during NASA's uncrewed Artemis I moon mission in late 2022 using a pair of extraordinarily complex dummies called phantoms. These artificial torsos were constructed of plastics that mimicked the density of human tissue, bone and organs, and each was equipped with more than 5,600 radiation sensors on and in them.

The two phantoms were designed to be adult females, since previous research found that breasts and ovaries are especially susceptible to radiation damage.

"Women are predicted to face a higher risk of radiation-induced cancer," Milstein said. "Targeted shielding could help narrow that difference in risk between male and female astronauts."

Since the phantoms mimicked women, they were given women's names, Zohar and Helga. "Helga was contributed to the experiment by the German Aerospace Center, and Helga is a traditional German name," Milstein said. "Zohar was contributed by the Israel Space Agency, which selected the name through a public outreach campaign. Zohar is a traditional Hebrew name meaning 'radiance,' which we thought was particularly fitting."

Zohar and Helga flew seated in NASA's Orion spacecraft; Zohar was equipped with an AstroRad vest, while Helga was not. Although Orion did not encounter a significant solar outburst during its 26-day mission to lunar orbit and back, the researchers were able to extrapolate how much solar radiation astronauts might experience based on what the phantoms encountered passing through the inner Van Allen belt of radiation surrounding Earth.

When the scientists analyzed past solar particle events, they found the AstroRad vest would have significantly reduced the dose of radiation a person during those outbursts — for instance, by nearly 60% for a solar particle event that happened in August 1972.

"We had originally anticipated something closer to 45%, so when we first saw the result, we thought we needed to go back and find an error," Houri said. "Instead, the detailed analysis showed that AstroRad's approach of providing targeted shielding to the most radiation-sensitive organs and tissues was even more effective than we had projected."

Such a reduction could spare astronauts the equivalent of up to 193 days of deep-space radiation exposure. "The most important implication is that AstroRad could help overcome one of the major health challenges limiting long-duration human exploration beyond Earth," Milstein said.

AstroRad is not something astronauts would wear continuously throughout an entire mission, Houri said. "AstroRad was developed as an emergency countermeasure for solar particle events, so astronauts would only wear it when radiation levels are elevated, typically for periods of hours or days," he explained.

Still, "although it is not something astronauts would need to wear throughout an entire mission, we designed the vest to remain usable for many hours at a time," Milstein said. During tests with the vests on the International Space Station, "several crew members even slept with it on."

The level of radiation protection the AstroRad vest provided was similar to that supplied by the Orion spacecraft's onboard storm shelter, "while allowing the astronaut wearing it to leave the shelter and continue mission-critical tasks," Houri said. "AstroRad can be used on its own or together with a shelter, but one of its main advantages is that an astronaut can remain protected while moving around the cabin and carrying out essential mission operations rather than remaining inside the shelter."

The scientists are now investigating whether it is possible to manufacture radiation shielding in space using onboard materials. For instance, in collaboration with Florida aerospace company Redwire, "we have already demonstrated that it is possible to 3D-print AstroRad components from recycled polyethylene aboard the International Space Station," Milstein said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (Aug. 12) in the journal Science Advances.

Blue Origin is close to figuring out why its New Glenn rocket went boom a few months ago.

The explosion — which destroyed the rocket and some key pieces of pad infrastructure — occurred on May 28 during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working hard ever since to determine the cause of the anomaly, and it has made considerable progress, according to a new update.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Wednesday afternoon (Aug. 5). "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn features a reusable first stage, which is powered by seven BE-4s and designed to launch at least 25 times. The heavy lifter is a big part of Blue Origin's ambitious plans, which include helping humanity establish a foothold in the final frontier.

"The rocket is engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly humans, and will enable our vision of building a road to space for the benefit of Earth," Blue Origin's website states.

The company, and NASA, are counting on the rocket to get important hardware to the moon. New Glenn will be the ride for Blue Origin's Blue Moon, one of two crewed landers that NASA picked to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

And there's an important Blue Moon mission coming up: the first test flight of the prototype Mark 1 lander, which is scheduled to make an uncrewed lunar touchdown by the end of this year, if possible. That mission will help prove out the vehicle's capabilities ahead of crewed flights.

New Glenn debuted in January 2025 and has flown two more times since, in November 2025 and April 19 of this year. There was an issue on that most recent launch, which carried up AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite: New Glenn failed to deploy the payload into the proper orbit, and it was lost.

Despite that issue, and the May 28 explosion, Limp expressed confidence that Blue Origin will soon get New Glenn up and running again.

"The path forward is clear," he added in Wednesday's X post. "We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis."

Sometimes to go to the moon, you first have to go underwater.

NASA is currently developing the training program for NASA's Artemis astronauts, some of whom could set foot on the moon during the agency's planned Artemis IV mission. As part of that development, two agency scientists recently donned Artemis moonsuits and took to NASA's underwater training facility.

What is it?

These photos show two NASA exploration geologists and Artemis science officers practicing using the same types of geology tools that astronauts might use when they explore the moon.

The scientists also "deployed a mock lunar payload under low-angle lighting conditions," according to a NASA statement accompanying the photo. NASA is currently aiming to place astronauts at the lunar south pole, where many areas remain in permanent shadow. As such, future lunar explorers may have to operate in near-total darkness and learn how to carry out their missions with very little light.

Why is it incredible?

The fact that NASA is preparing to send humans back to the moon is incredible in itself. Humanity hasn't set foot on our natural satellite since 1972. While NASA still has many technical hurdles to cross when it comes to developing and selecting a moon lander, the agency is pushing ahead with developing the training it will use to prepare its astronauts to explore the lunar surface.

For this particular part of Artemis training development, NASA placed two scientists in its Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), a 40-foot-deep (12-meter) pool at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The particular test in these photos was "the first time that two geologists were suited up simultaneously for lunar geology training in the NBL," according to NASA's statement.

For these tests, a portion of the underwater laboratory was outfitted with soil and rocks that simulate the surface of the moon. The buoyancy of the pool can be manipulated in order to simulate different levels of gravity, helping astronauts train for spacewalks or for exploring other worlds like the moon.

The 13th test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket went pretty well — and provided some amazing visuals, too.

Flight 13 launched on Friday (July 24), sending the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle aloft from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.

Starship's Super Heavy booster had some engine issues on its way back to Earth. But the Ship upper stage hit all of its marks, successfully deploying 20 next-gen Starlink satellites, re-igniting one of its Raptor engines in space as planned and splashing down softly off the coast of Western Australia. So softly, in fact, that Ship didn't explode after hitting the water — a first for a Starship flight.

SpaceX shared these milestones with us in real time, via the company's Flight 13 launch webcast. And the company highlighted a few of them after the fact as well, with some stunning imagery published on its X account.

One Friday post, for example, shows footage from Super Heavy of Ship cruising away shortly after stage separation, its six Raptors glowing with exertion against the backdrop of a gorgeously blue Earth.

Another Friday X post provides a Ship's-eye view of the vehicle's descent toward the Indian Ocean, steering its way from sky to sea. The video switches over to drone footage just before Ship hits the water, capturing from above the dramatic splashdown — and Ship's survival, despite the outbreak of a sizeable fire around its nose.

Both Ship and Super Heavy are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Eventually, both vehicles will return to the launch site shortly after liftoff, for capture with their launch tower's "chopstick" arms, refurbishment and reflight.

SpaceX has already caught Super Heavy on three Starship test flights and will try to do the same with Ship for the first time on Flight 14, provided no red flags emerge during Flight 13 data review, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Starship conducted its first test flight in April 2023. Flight 13 was the second launch Version 3 of the vehicle, the first iteration of the vehicle that's designed to be operational.

SpaceX is working hard to get the giant rocket up and running soon. Starship is slated to fly on NASA's Artemis III astronaut mission to Earth orbit next summer and to land astronauts near the moon's south pole on Artemis IV in late 2028.

SpaceX launched the world's most powerful rocket on a critical 13th test flight late Friday, but there was no triskaidekaphobia on this mission.

The July 24 test launch, Space's Starship Flight 13 mission, sent a towering rocket the size of a 40-story skyscraper into space from South Texas, returned its massive Booster to Earth, and then — in a feat perhaps none saw coming — gently landed its Starship upper stage in the Indian Ocean, where it tipped over to float belly up on the sea.

"Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X.

"That is a first," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot added in live commentary as a drone beamed stunning views of Starship bobbing in the waves. "That is the softest splashdown we have ever had with Starship in the Indian Ocean."

The splashdown capped what appeared to be a mostly successful test flight of SpaceX's biggest Starship ever. With a mighty roar, Starship Flight 13 lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas launch site at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT) on a test flight that lasted just over one hour.

It was only the second flight of the company's new Starship Version 3 design, or V3, and SpaceX was hoping for a better outing than its first attempt in May. During that previous test, the Starship Flight 12 mission, the massive Super Heavy first-stage Booster suffered engine problems after stage separation and failed to make a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico. It crashed instead.

Lucky Flight 13

Friday's Starship Flight 13 mission fared a bit better.

SpaceX initially tried to launch Flight 13 on July 16, but the rocket aborted the try at the last second due to engine issues. SpaceX replaced some first-stage Raptor engines in time for a July 23 launch attempt, but waved off due to weather, setting the stage for Friday's successful liftoff.

Minutes into the flight, the Super Heavy Booster successfully separated from its Ship upper stage, aced a flip maneuver and returned to Earth. There was a problem during the landing burn. Only five engines appeared to fire when 13 were required to slow the Booster to landing speed. It hit the Gulf waters harder than planned, its camera views cutting out.

"It didn't look like we lit all 13 engines that we were planning for that initial landing burn," Huot said. "We were targeting a softer splashdown and, as you saw, it came in with quite a bit of velocity."

Starlink V3 makes a debut

Despite the Booster's rough landing, there were clear successes on Starship Flight 13.

While sailing on its suborbital trajectory, Flight 13's Ship upper stage deployed 20 next-generation Starlink Version 3 internet satellites — large, flat satellites equipped with laser communications links and expansive solar arrays that will replace SpaceX's current Starlink internet megaconstellation.

Starship is designed to launch 60 Starlink V3 satellites at a time, spitting them out through a slit-like payload bay door like a giant PEZ candy dispenser. All 20 Starlink V3 satellites deployed smoothly, with the last two switching on flashlights and looking back at their Ship carrier before floating off into orbital darkness. The satellites did not stay in space. They fell to Earth and burned up (by design) due to their suborbital flight path.

The Ship upper stage (which SpaceX also refers to as Starship) then reignited one of its six Raptor engines to test a critical engine relight capability that will allow future Starships to enter and leave orbit. The burn went off without a hitch — a milestone since SpaceX had not always performed the burn if a test didn't go smoothly.

Then it was time for reentry, with cameras beaming back stunning views of Starship wrapped in super-hot plasma as it fell back to Earth. The spacecraft executed a three-engine burn to flip over into a vertical landing position, but did shift down to two engines, then one before it toppled over to rest on the waves.

The sight of a floating Starship triggered a cacophony of cheers from SpaceX teams at Starbase and its Hawthorne, California rocket factory in the company's livestream. After all, Starships usually explode after they tip over.

"This is just the first time we've put a Starship into the water," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during live commentary. He called it SpaceX's "softest splashdown" ever. "This is a dream scenario for this team that's trying to get this heat shield data."

The heat shield isn't the only thing SpaceX's recovery team will be looking at.

Live views from Starship showed its six engines intact along with its flaps and other systems. Teams will be poring over what they can retrieve from the sea to help improve future Starship upgrades.

SpaceX is developing Starship to be a fully reusable launch system, a 407-foot-tall (124 meters) megarocket capable of taking Starlink fleets to orbit as easily as it lands NASA astronauts on the moon. That part is key.

NASA has tapped SpaceX's Starship to land its Artemis IV astronauts on the moon in 2028, but SpaceX has yet to ever complete an entire Earth orbit with Starship after 13 test flights and three years of launches. It's been a decade since Elon Musk first unveiled what SpaceX now calls Starship during a 2016 speech.

Over the next two years, SpaceX must not only send a Starship into orbit. The company also aims to return a Ship to Earth to catch it in the "chopsticks" of its Mechazilla launch pad at Starbase. (The company has already done so with its Super Heavy Booster stages.)

SpaceX also must successfully demonstrate in-space Starship refueling, complete an orbital tanker version of Starship, and finish a crewed lander version complete with a life support system that can keep astronauts alive on the moon. That's a lot on the Starship to-do list and NASA is watching.

"Congrats on getting Flight 13 underway," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on X after the launch. "Excited for what will be learned from this mission. When Starship comes online, its capabilities will be game-changing, not least of which will be ensuring we never give up the Moon again!" In a lunar coincidence, Friday's launch coincided with the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts' return to Earth after their historic moon landing flight.

But for now, SpaceX is clearly celebrating.

"I'm a little over the moon right now," Huot said. "Wow. Lucky number 13. Hell of a great day for Starship."

The moon's south pole has long been the target of NASA's Artemis lunar landing missions, but one Artemis astronaut is questioning if that's still the best plan.

NASA's Victor Glover, who piloted the Artemis II mission around the moon this past April, proposed a different approach while speaking at the NASA Exploration Science Forum at the agency's Ames Research Center in California on July 21, according to a report published on Space News. "I think we need to be realistic and work our way to the south pole, and maybe not try to go there first," Glover said.

Instead, Glover suggested aiming closer to the moon's equator, where missions can land in areas not at risk of falling out of daylight, and in regions reachable by orbits that allow for quick transfers back to Earth in case of an emergency, according to Space News. That argument aligns with other recent Artemis program changes that NASA has introduced to gradually expand successive mission goals, but whether space agency officials will take his advice depends on what the top priority for Artemis moon landings is deemed to be.

NASA has long targeted the lunar south pole due to its abundance of water ice. Permanently shadowed areas inside craters in this region are believed to harbor large ice deposits, which scientists believe can be used as a resource in the production of several space-travel essentials, like potable water, radiation shielding and rocket fuel. That goes a long way toward achieving the Artemis program's ultimate goal of creating a sustainable, long-term base on the surface of the moon, and using the lessons learned in building that outpost to enable the eventual occupation of Mars.

There is, however, a secondary motivation behind NASA's ramped-up urgency to see its Artemis missions succeed in a timely manner. China has also set its sights on the lunar surface, stoking fears in some U.S. officials about the implications of Chinese astronauts staking some sort of claim at the moon's south pole before American astronauts are able to get there.

During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last year, several space industry experts, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, urged lawmakers not to let that happen. Mike Gold, president of civil and international space at Redwire, told senators that China beating the U.S. back to the moon would mean "a global realignment that will impact our economy, our tax base, our ability to innovate and our national security."

If not just getting back to the moon first, but being the first with boots on the ground at the south pole, is the priority, Glover's suggested approach may not get NASA there in time. China is making fast progress with its lunar program; it has already demonstrated robotic landings and sample returns on both the moon's near and far side and begun developing hardware for a crewed landing by 2030.

NASA's next Artemis mission, Artemis III, is scheduled for next year. It will launch four astronauts aboard the Orion space capsule for rendezvous and docking tests with the program's two commercial lunar lander vehicles, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. If all goes according to plan on that mission, NASA is targeting late 2028 for the program's first moon landing on Artemis IV. To pull that off, one of the two landers has to be up to the task, and both have faced significant delays that have raised questions about their readiness on NASA's timeline.

To facilitate south pole landings, NASA previously laid out a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) — a high-altitude, elliptical polar orbit — where Orion would dock with the lunar Gateway space station, and then crews would transfer to and undock aboard one of the Artemis landers to descend to the surface. Gateway is no longer part of the picture, however; the agency has sidelined that outpost to push ahead with a surface base.

But NRHO on its own also introduces some complications that SpaceX and Blue Origin have raised while developing their lunar landers, as well as safety concerns for astronauts facing a potential emergency situation on the moon's surface. Because of its highly elliptical shape and long orbital period, opportunities to launch from the moon's south pole to rendezvous with Orion in NRHO open up just once a week.

To highlight the potential risks imposed by relying on an NRHO, Glover brought up a hypothetical situation — an astronaut health issue that requires a medical evacuation just after landing at a lunar south pole moon base.

"You’re stuck for a week," Glover said. "That’s a big deal to me, and I don’t like that plan … The equator gives me opportunity to save that person."

If the point of Artemis' returning astronauts to the moon as soon as possible is landing there at all, then there's no need for the first of those missions to aim for the south pole, Glover argued. "If you want to go fast, go familiar … If we want to land soon, familiar, daylight, equator."

"I think we need to be realistic and work our way to the south pole, and maybe not try to go there first," he added.

SpaceX is also eyeing an equatorial orbit when Starship flies on the Artemis IV mission, and NASA may already be quietly shifting the mission's landing site to a higher latitude. During a June 9 event that revealed the Artemis III, SpaceX Customer Operations and Integration Vice President Jessica Jensen outlined an Artemis IV mission plan with Starship that didn't involve NRHO.

"We have an updated plan with NASA that includes docking Starship with Orion in Earth orbit instead of NRHO, and then we use Starship to actually do the translunar injection with Orion attached," Jensen said, stressing the same benefits that Glover expressed during the July 21 forum.

"The crew can also abort off the lunar surface nearly any time, versus waiting up to days from NRHO," she said. "In addition to improving crew safety, these new Artemis IV orbits also significantly lower the amount of propellant Starship needs to aggregate in space, since we now just have a more direct route to the moon, and this lower schedule risk overall."

Orion is getting an upgrade on Artemis III, and the astronauts aboard are getting WiFi (sort of).

NASA is partnering with SpaceX to equip the Orion spacecraft for Artemis III with a pair of Starlink mini laser terminals, designed to operate on SpaceX's existing Starlink network. The two panels will be installed on Orion's exterior, and will augment the spacecraft's existing communications systems.

The added capability is expected to provide a greater data capacity from Orion to NASA's mission control in Houston, which may include high-definition live video from orbit. The mission is currently scheduled for the second half of 2027, and will also include another sizable contribution from SpaceX: a Starship rocket.

SpaceX currently operates more than 10,000 Starlink spacecraft in LEO, which provide satellite internet coverage across nearly the entire globe to commercially-available wireless terminals about the size of a laptop. Combined, those more than 10,000 and counting satellites are equipped with over 25,000 lasers currently in operation in LEO to maintain the network's interconnectedness, according to a NASA update.

The company previously demonstrated the Starlink constellation's use as a communication relay network during the privately funded Fram2 mission that launched the first human into a polar orbit around Earth in 2025. SpaceX frequently utilizes its high-data capabilities to stream high-definition live views of its Falcon 9 and Starship rocket launches from orbit.

Artemis III is the third in a program of NASA missions with the goal of returning astronauts to the moon and establishing a permanent base on its surface. Artemis III is designed as a practice run for NASA's Orion capsule to rendezvous and dock with the program's commercial lunar lander vehicles, Starship, and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft, in low Earth orbit (LEO). That's a lot closer to home compared to the Artemis II mission that NASA launched in April of this year.

Artemis II was Orion's first flight with astronauts onboard, and flew a 10-day mission around the far side of the moon. NASA used laser communications during Artemis II as well, using terminals on Orion and ground stations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California and White Sands Complex in New Mexico to transmit data loads too big for the agency's Near Space and Deep Space radio networks. With flight sticking to LEO during Artemis III, communication limitations become a lot easier to surmount.

If all goes according to plan during Artemis III, NASA has scheduled the first Artemis moon landing on the following mission, Artemis IV. NASA is targeting 2028 to launch Artemis IV, and has selected Starship as the lunar lander that will return astronauts to the lunar surface.

SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back a few more days.

Elon Musk's company is now targeting Thursday (July 23) for Flight 13 of Starship, the giant, fully reusable vehicle it's developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other spaceflight tasks.

If all goes to plan, the 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Thursday during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.

It will be the second launch attempt for Starship Flight 13. The first came last Thursday (July 16) and ended in an abort, which occurred just as the giant rocket's 33 first-stage Raptor engines were firing up.

"To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week," Musk said on July 16 via X, the social media platform he owns.

SpaceX first targeted today (July 20) for Flight 13's second try. On Sunday (July 19), however, the company announced that it had pushed that date back to no earlier than Thursday.

Flight 13 will be the second launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), the latest, most advanced iteration of the megarocket. V3 is the variant that will land astronauts on the moon for NASA's Artemis program and fly SpaceX's first Mars missions, if all goes to plan.

The plan for the upcoming suborbital launch is similar to that of Flight 12, which lifted off on May 22. Starship's Super Heavy first stage will aim to steer itself back to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Ship upper stage will do the same halfway around the world, off the coast of Western Australia.

SpaceX accomplished the latter objective on Flight 12 but not the former; Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth and ended up hitting the Gulf waters hard.

Flight 13 will do a few new things, however. For example, it will carry 20 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 internet satellites, which have never flown to space before. SpaceX plans to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft in low Earth orbit over the coming years, and Starship will do all of the heavy lifting.

These 20 Starlinks won't stay aloft for long, however. Since Ship is flying on a suborbital trajectory, the satellites will come back to Earth relatively quickly — about 20 minutes after deployment, according to SpaceX's Flight 13 mission description.

Starship debuted in April 2023. All of its test flights to date have been suborbital.

NASA has never flown a mission like Artemis III, and it's shaping up to become one of the most elaborate spaceflights in history.

NASA has provided more details about the Artemis III flight scheduled for next year, and, if all goes according to plan, the objectives the astronauts will be checking off their list will contain more than a few "firsts" for the Artemis program and human spaceflight overall. That includes the first crewed NASA mission to rendezvous and dock with two separate designed to carry crews of their own.

Artemis is NASA's next-generation program to return astronauts to the surface of the moon. Artemis III is designed as a test run for NASA's Orion spacecraft in which it will dock and perform operations with the program's two commercial lunar landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. The mission will launch a crew of four aboard Orion on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket into Earth orbit, where the capsule will rendezvous with each lander separately over the course of about two weeks. Their success will set the stage for a crewed moon landing on Artemis IV, but NASA must first master the complicated demands of Artemis III in order to confidently set its sights on the lunar surface.

"Artemis III will be a highly choreographed dance with a demanding launch sequence across multiple launch pads and equally demanding mission operations for our ground and flight crews, making it one of the most complex and ambitious missions NASA has ever undertaken," said Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons in a NASA update on July 15.

Only one mission in the course of human spaceflight has flown astronauts to rendezvous with multiple spacecraft capable of supporting crews of their own: Soyuz T-15 in 1986, which launched cosmonaut Leonid Kizim to the Salyut 7 space station, and then flew him to, what was at the time, the Soviet Union's MIR space station.

America's space program has come close to such a milestone. NASA's Gemini 10 mission in 1966 launched NASA astronauts John Young and Michael Collins to rendezvous and dock with the uncrewed Agena 10 probe. After undocking, they flew their Gemini capsule to rendezvous with Agena 8, but did not dock with the probe. Two shuttle missions, STS-72 and STS-51A, also managed to rendezvous with separate satellites during their missions, but none of these required the complex coordination and multiple launch vehicles lined up to pull off Artemis III.

Orion, Blue Moon and Starship are all designed to launch on different rockets from different launch pads at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), which will all require cross-agency and commercial collaboration for range availability, resource use constraints like nitrogen gas availability across the various ranges and the alignment of several other overlapping hierarchies of infrastructure in order to ensure Artemis is successful.

Blue Moon will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket from Space Launch Complex-36 (SLC-36), which it leases from the Space Force at CCSFS. Blue Moon is the first of the three spacecraft set to make it to orbit, and is capable of remaining in space for up to 30 days, according to the NASA update. That will give Blue Origin and NASA an opportunity to confirm the lander's condition and functionality before committing the Artemis III crew and Orion to launch and join it on orbit.

SLS will be next to get off the ground, lifting off from KSC's Launch Complex-39B carrying the Orion spacecraft. Orion will rendezvous with Blue Moon in low Earth orbit (LEO), and will spend about two days docked with the lander. Part of the purpose of Artemis III is to give both lunar lander providers the chance to mature their designs based on actual in-flight data, so neither the Blue Moon nor Starship that fly on the mission will be the spacecrafts' final, landing-capable versions.

Blue Origin will launch the Blue Moon Mark 2 (Mk2), a graduated design of the company's smaller Mk1 cargo lander, which was scheduled to launch a demonstration mission this year. That may be delayed, however, due to an explosion of one of the company's New Glenn rockets during an engine test at SLC-36 in May. With repairs now well underway, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has voiced confidence that New Glenn will return to flight by the end of 2026.

Completing that Mk1 mission this year will be just as critical to NASA's moon plans as the launch of Blue Moon Mk2 will be during Artemis III. Among the list of requirements each lander must meet in order for NASA to certify the vehicles to land astronauts on the moon, successfully demonstrating an uncrewed lunar landing is of chief importance.

"SpaceX and Blue Origin have put forward a list of aggressive objectives and goals intended to complement upcoming uncrewed demonstration missions at the moon so that we can gain both understanding and confidence in the spacecraft and launch vehicles prior to a crewed landing," said NASA's Steve Creech, Artemis' Human Landing System program manager, in the mission update.

Once Orion docks with Blue Moon on Artemis III, two of the mission's astronauts will be able to board the lander to test out its environmental control systems, avionics and the interoperability between the two spacecraft in flight. A test article EVA (extravehicular activity) spacesuit designed to mirror what astronauts will wear during future excursions across the lunar surface will launch aboard the Artemis III Blue Moon, and provide engineers data about how the suit will interact within the lander's crew cabin.

Starship won't launch until after Orion and Blue Moon have undocked. SpaceX is currently constructing two Starship towers on Florida's Space Coast, one at KSC's LC-39A, and another at SLC-37, but it's not yet clear which pad will support Artemis III. NASA contracted SpaceX to design a lunar lander version of the spacecraft to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis IV, but SpaceX has that and more in mind for the massive vehicle.

SpaceX has performed test flights of its Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, collectively known as Starship, since 2023. The rocket is designed to be fully reusable, and will provide SpaceX a big upgrade from the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Once operational, SpaceX says Starship will be capable of delivering more than 100 tons to LEO. But SpaceX is still chasing that operational status.

Despite its dozen launches to space, and counting, Starship is still very much in a developmental stage, and has yet to meet many of NASA's requirements to fly a crewed lunar landing. SpaceX introduced the "Version 3" (V3) Starship on its Flight-12 launch in May, and intends to fly the same design when it launches Starship on Artemis III, with a docking adapter for connecting with Orion. For the astronauts, that means no crew cabin to enter. Instead, Orion and Starship will test communications and maneuvering systems between both vehicles.

Starship's V3 upgrade includes hardware that will be needed for an actual moon landing mission, like docking ports to perform propellant transfers in space — Starship requires refueling from tanker Ships on orbit in order to fly beyond LEO, and NASA estimates at least 15 Starship refueling launches will be needed for Artemis IV. Transferring and storing those cryogenic fuels in space is another capability Starship (and Blue Moon) needs to demonstrate before it can perform crewed lunar landings.

For Artemis III, though, Starship and Blue Moon will each only require one launch to get the job done, and NASA wants to give them ample room to do so. "All three rockets will have more launch opportunities than are available for a lunar mission and will be able to reach the designated mission altitude in a single launch," the NASA update said.

Orion and the Artemis III crew will stay docked with Starship for about a day before detaching to begin preparations for their return to Earth. Similar to the return of Artemis II in April, the Artemis III astronauts will target a parachute-assisted splashdown aboard Orion in the Pacific Ocean, off the United States' West Coast.

Successful operations with both landers on Artemis III would pave the way for NASA's lunar landing plans on Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Barring any development delays or complications during Artemis III, Starship is the vehicle NASA has selected to carry out the Artemis IV moon landing, the first return of astronauts to the lunar surface in more than half a century.

For ten glorious days starting on April 1, 2026, one human endeavor captivated our home planet across continents and time zones: the NASA Artemis II mission to orbit the moon, the first crewed mission to cislunar space since 1972. In an Easter-Passover week that had especially demoralizing headlines on global conflicts, this mission presented a powerful vision of what journeying together and taking enormous risks for a shared purpose towards a shared future could look like.

Much has been spoken and written about the scientific and personal achievements of the Artemis II mission and its trailblazing astronauts. Their humanity, and what it did for humankind at large, is perhaps a quieter yet just-as-celebratory achievement.

In a time of trillion-dollar AI IPOs, when the seemingly planned obsolescence of humanity itself looms on our collective horizon, the Artemis II astronauts reminded us that they considered it the honor of a lifetime to do this for us - and as us - while transmitting daily that they couldn’t wait to come home to us. As Christina Koch shared at the end of the translunar injection burn (TLI) on day 2, while Artemis II set its course to leave Earth's orbital space for the moon as well as its return trajectory: "With this translunar injection burn, we do not leave Earth. We choose it."

From their morning wake-up music playlists (which inspired many to enquire about submitting their compositions for future crewed missions), to the reading out of their menus and details of their daily workouts or sleep schedules, we were reminded that these astronauts were navigating with us in real time the humdrum work of staying alive while conducting amazing science. This signal reached Earth as a continuous invitation to fellowship, and the record-breaking viewership of Artemis II built like a slow cooker feast, with global engagement increasing from launch to splashdown.

The Artemis II livestream introduced many viewers to the unavoidable aspects of spaceflight missions, such as the timing lag and blackouts in communications that will endure regardless of future technological advancements.

Sometimes this was wonderfully funny, like when the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sought reassurance from the Artemis II astronauts that they preferred maple syrup to Nutella over their pancakes, with the astronauts bursting into laughter a few seconds after the media in-room chuckles.

At other times, it was the quiet anticipation of unprecedented history like the 40-minute communications blackout when the Orion spacecraft traveled behind the moon, or the heart pounding nailbiters of the 6-minute blackouts during the TLI or re-entry to Earth. In an era that rewards instantaneity over pauses, the globe watched and waited together. Such communication lags will compound dramatically for more distant worlds we explore, yet will still tether us profoundly in real time to one another despite our attention- and time-deprived schedules.

The Artemis II livestream also brought home the challenges of human bodily functions far from home. An inordinate amount of media attention and communications airtime was devoted to the brand new model of NASA toilet which developed issues just hours after launch and later became unfunctional on day 3 of the mission. Panels of NASA and space studies experts were asked by journalists about whether the astronauts were able to do either one or both of "#1" or "#2", or why the toilet gave off burning smells, highlighting the very human realities of boldly going where no one has gone before.

We also saw the rocking of the Orion capsule framed by the darkness of space and the background of the moon or Earth. We watched as each astronaut took their turn with the mandatory daily exercise routine to prevent bone density loss, cardiovascular issues and other health declines in a microgravity environment (only one astronaut can work out at a time, owing to space restrictions and to prevent buildup of exhaled carbon dioxide in an enclosed environment).

The Artemis II mission was full of deeply personal experiences and observations shared by the astronauts, made even more powerful by their unscripted nature. Commander Reed Wiseman's impromptu words of gratitude to the thousands of engineers and staff involved with the successful TLI, and the spontaneous naming of craters on the far side of the moon including - as the astronauts wept and hugged - one for his deceased wife Carroll, connected us in real time to their, and therefore our, evolving scientific and human perspectives.

This gratitude was echoed in a recent interview at the Kennedy Space Center, in which Wiseman shared that he had just received a handwritten note at the airport written on a boarding pass, stating "Thank you for reminding us about joy and hope in the universe again", which he expanded on to thank all the hands that helped the Artemis II mission succeed.

There were also moments during the mission when they simply ran out of words, like when they saw shades of colors on far-side lunar craters on what appears from Earth as a gray barren world. They called for new language to describe what they were seeing.

NASA recently issued a call for filmmakers, documentarians, songwriters, and poets to contribute to mission storytelling, especially encouraging in the wake of the cancellation of the artist-focused dearmoon mission. Perhaps a Dictionary of the Moon and an Embassy of the Moon, as Dutch artist Marjolijn van Heemstra has proposed, will become possibilities in the future.

Towards the end of the 1997 movie "Contact," based on the 1985 book by Carl Sagan, astronaut and SETI scientist Dr. Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) is overcome by the experience of interstellar travel and the dazzling views it brings. She says in a choked voice "they should have sent a poet."

In the case of Artemis II, we sent four.

Update for 12:15 p.m. ET on July 20: SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 23) for the launch of Starship Flight 13, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

Starship wasn't quite ready to fly today (July 16).

SpaceX tried to launch the Starship megarocket on its 13th test flight today but couldn't quite pull it off. Something went wrong just as the giant vehicle's 33 first-stage Raptor engines started to fire up, and an abort was triggered.

"We'll take some time, dig into what triggered that abort once the booster was igniting to launch, and then we'll figure out what our path forward is going to be," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the company's launch webcast today.

It didn't take long for SpaceX to narrow in on the root cause and address it.

"To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said this evening via X, the social media platform he owns.

Starship Flight 13 will fly from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. Today's attempt occurred at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local time), right at the beginning of a 90-minute launch window.

Flight 13 will be the second test launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), an upgraded variant of the megarocket designed to get it up to operational status.

V3's first jaunt, Flight 12 on May 22, was mostly successful, but there were a few issues. For example, Starship's Super Heavy first stage didn't steer itself back for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned, and the Ship upper stage wasn't able to relight one of its Raptor engines in space.

Starship V3 will get a second chance on Flight 13, whose goals are similar to those of Flight 12: Get Super Heavy down on target in the Gulf and send Ship most of the way around the world, for a controlled splashdown of its own off the coast of Western Australia. (Ship pulled that off on Flight 12.)

There are a few new objectives, however.

The most notable is the payload suite flying on Flight 13 — 20 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 internet satellites. The company wants to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft in low Earth orbit using Starship, and Flight 13 will mark the satellites' first-ever trip to space.

They won't stay up there, however; the spacecraft will be deployed on Ship's suborbital trajectory and will crash back to Earth after about 20 minutes, according to SpaceX.

Six of the 20 Starlinks going up on Flight 13 will be equipped with cameras, to image Ship's heat shield. SpaceX did this with a couple of V2 Starlinks on Flight 12 as well.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:38 p.m. ET on July 16 with information from an Elon Musk X post.

Starship is about to take to the skies on a bold new test flight of the world's most powerful rocket.

After several days of testing, SpaceX has stacked and readied its massive Starship rocket for its 13th test flight. The company tried to launch on Thursday (July 16), but that attempt was aborted at the last second. SpaceX is now targeting Thursday (July 23), during a 90-minute launch window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT), from pad 2 at SpaceX's facility in Starbase, Texas.

Both stages had been in their respective Starbase hangars for final checkouts following successful engine tests. Booster 40, the Super Heavy first stage launching on Starship Flight 13, was returned to the pad on Wednesday (July 15). Ship 40, the mission's upper-stage spacecraft, was rolled from the hangar beginning on Wednesday evening. The rocket was stacked overnight, according to a SpaceX post on X, and now awaits prelaunch procedures ahead of the beginning of Flight 13's launch countdown.

Flight 13 will launch the second "Version 3" (V3) Starship, a new iteration featuring extensive design upgrades to help mature the rocket toward clearing the vehicle for official operation. Compared to its Version 2 predecessor, V3 is taller, carries more propellant, and has lost significant mass around its engine section due to upgraded avionics systems. V3 is also equipped with 33 of SpaceX's upgraded Raptor 3 engines on Super Heavy, and another six (three sea-level, three vacuum-optimized) Raptor 3s on Ship.

Starship is designed for full reusability, with both Super Heavy and Ship capable of returning to their launch site for landing and refurbishment, which means making sure there's enough fuel in the tank to make the journey back. One critical upgrade for Starship V3 involves the propellant transfer docking ports that have been added to Ship's dorsal side (opposite the heat-shield tiles on its belly, or ventral side). Ship uses the majority of its fuel getting to space and will therefore require propellant transfers from various refueling flights in order to fly beyond low Earth orbit.

NASA is eyeing the development progress of Starship very closely, with a vested interest in the spacecraft's yet-unproven ability to transfer and maintain the types of cryogenic fuels that power its Raptor 3s. NASA has contracted SpaceX to design a lunar lander version of Starship to return astronauts to the moon as a part of the agency's Artemis program, and effectively managing its onboard propellants is one of the requirements on NASA's checklist to certify the vehicle to fly with crews.

SpaceX plans to complete such a demonstration later this year in preparation for Artemis III, targeted for mid-to-late 2027, which will fly a crew of four aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft to dock with Ship in Earth orbit ahead of the program's first moon landing mission on Artemis IV in 2028. NASA contracted Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft as an additional Artemis lander, which will also launch to Earth orbit for docking operations with Orion during Artemis III.

Starship's readiness to fly those future missions will largely be determined by the rocket's performance on Flight 13, and its subsequent test launches in the coming months. The launch aims to smooth over a few rough patches that the vehicle ran into during V3's debut on the mostly successful Flight 12, which occurred on May 22. Those hiccups included Super Heavy failing to steer itself back to Earth for a controlled splashdown and Ship not relighting one of its Raptor engines in space as planned.

If all goes according to plan on Flight 13, Super Heavy will perform a boostback burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Ship will carry on with a suborbital trajectory, and is expected to release 20 Starlink V3 satellites — the first of the upgraded Starlinks to fly to space. Six of those spacecraft are equipped with cameras to inspect Ship's heat-shield tiles during flight. The satellites, though, will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Ship, and are expected to burn up during reentry through Earth's atmosphere. Ship is scheduled to perform a landing burn and soft splashdown of its own a little more than an hour after liftoff, and will meet a watery demise in the Indian Ocean.

Live coverage of Starship Flight 13 will begin about 30 minutes prior to liftoff, and can be streamed here on Space.com or directly on SpaceX's website and social media channels.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:15 p.m. ET on July 17 with the new target launch date of July 20, then again at 12:15 p.m. ET on July 20 with the new target date of July 23.

Editor's note: SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 test mission succesfully launched at 6:51 p.m. EDT. READ OUR WRAP and see launch videos and photos. You can see our blow-by-blow coverage here.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will take to the skies again on Friday (July 24), and you can watch the thundering action live.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Friday during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). It will be Starship's 13th flight overall and its second mission of 2026. SpaceX originally tried to launch Flight 13 on July 16, but that attempt was aborted at the last second when several engines did not ignite as planned. A July 23 launch try was delayed 24 hours due to bad weather.

You can watch Starship Flight 13 live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX; coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff. Follow our Starship live blog for updates and other news about the test flight.

A potentially revolutionary rocket

Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage vehicle known (somewhat confusingly) as Starship, or simply Ship. Both elements are made of stainless steel and are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

The stacked vehicle stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall and can carry more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to Earth orbit. SpaceX thinks Starship's combination of power and reusability will revolutionize spaceflight, allowing humanity to settle the moon and Mars, among other bold exploration feats.

Starship debuted in April 2023 and has flown 11 more suborbital flights since, most recently on May 22. That Flight 12 test was the first mission for Starship Version 3 (V3), an advanced iteration of the megarocket that was many months in the making. (Flight 11, the last launch of Starship V2, lifted off in October 2025.)

Starship V3 will be the first operational variant of the vehicle. It will fly on NASA's Artemis III mission to Earth orbit in 2027, for example, and land the agency's Artemis IV astronauts on the moon a year later, if all goes to plan.

Starship V3 performed quite well during its launch debut in May. During Flight 12, Ship successfully deployed 22 payloads via its "PEZ dispenser" slit — 20 dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites and two actual Starlinks equipped with imaging sensors — and came back to Earth in one piece, splashing down as planned off the coast of Western Australia.

There were a few hiccups, however. Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth, for instance, and ended up crashing in the Gulf of Mexico rather than making a controlled splashdown there.

SpaceX will run it back on Flight 13, shooting mostly for the same objectives that Flight 12 targeted — with a few notable exceptions.

The plan for Starship Flight 13

Eventually, SpaceX plans to return both Super Heavy and Ship directly to the launch pad after liftoff, catching each with the "chopstick" arms attached to Starbase's two launch towers. (Starship will also fly from Florida and perhaps other places as well in the coming years; these future pads will have chopstick arms, too.) This strategy will allow each vehicle to fly multiple times per day, according to the company.

SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times to date, but it's been a while; the last such snag came on Flight 8 in March 2025. And the company has never tried a chopsticks catch with Ship.

Those trends will continue on Flight 13. If all goes to plan, Super Heavy will steer its way to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (which the Trump administration has renamed the Gulf of America) about seven minutes after launch.

"The booster’s primary test objective will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 13 mission description. "There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight."

Ship will again target a splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, which will occur about 65 minutes after launch. And the vehicle will again deploy some objects into suborbital space — but here's where Flight 13 will break new ground.

Those objects will be 20 V3 Starlink satellites — next-gen versions of the broadband spacecraft, which will "greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds," SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to operate up to 100,000 V3 Starlinks in low Earth orbit — a bold plan, considering that the current megaconstellation, the largest such network ever assembled, contains "only" about 10,800 spacecraft.

The Starlink V3 plan will require thousands of launches — a load that's beyond even the capabilities of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which flew 165 times in 2025. (Adding to the difficulty: Starship V3 satellites are considerably heavier than their predecessors. Each one will apparently weigh around 4,400 pounds, or 2,000 kilograms.)

The 20 Starlink V3 satellites "will extend solar arrays and antennas and will attempt to connect with the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers," SpaceX wrote in the Flight 13 description. "The Starlink satellites will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to demise upon reentry approximately 20 minutes after deployment."

Six of the 20 spacecraft are equipped with cameras, which they will use to scan and study Ship's heat-shield tiles. SpaceX wants to gather more data about the heat-shield system before it attempts to bring Ship back to the launch pad for a chopsticks catch.

And SpaceX won't just passively observe the heat shield during Flight 13; it will conduct some experiments as well.

For example, the shield "will have load-sensing tiles to take measurements as the vehicle experiences higher dynamic pressure on ascent than previous flights, putting added stress on the tile attachments in exchange for increased payload-to-orbit capability," the mission description reads.

So there will indeed be some new things to look out for during Flight 13. And watching the world's biggest and brawniest rocket lift off is a treat no matter what sort of mission it's flying, so be sure to tune in!

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:10 a.m. ET on July 20 with the new target launch date of July 23. It was updated on July 23 with the weather delay and new launch date of July 24.

NASA is picking up the pace on its Artemis III mission preparations, pressing forward on multiple fronts to assemble launch vehicle hardware and beginning routine simulations inside Artemis mission control.

The agency is "full steam ahead," according to a July 13 NASA update. Across Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, components of Artemis III's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket are coming together, undergoing tests and awaiting transportation for final integration ahead of next year's launch. NASA is targeting mid-to-late 2027 for Artemis III, which will launch four astronauts into low Earth orbit (LEO) aboard the Orion spacecraft. It will be the second crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent human presence on the moon.

Artemis III will be a critical stepping stone in NASA's lunar landing architecture, despite the mission not actually flying to the moon. Instead, SLS will launch Orion and its four-person crew into LEO for rendezvous and docking operations with the program's two commercial lunar lander vehicles: SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft.

With the completion of the massively successful Artemis II mission that flew astronauts around the moon in April and the second half of 2026 beginning to count down, NASA has shifted into full gear to complete assembly and testing of the hardware that will launch Artemis III.

Several components for the mission's SLS rocket have arrived in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at KSC. The SLS core stage was delivered at the end of April, and it was connected with the rocket's engine block section in May. The first two of the core stage's four RS-25 engines arrived in June and will be installed on the SLS engine block once the remaining two are delivered, after which NASA plans to begin integration with the mobile launch platform (MLP) and launch operations tests. A temporary weather cap was also delivered in June, which will protect the stage when NASA transports it to the launch pad for tests before the full vehicle is stacked.

The bottom segments of both SLS solid rocket boosters (SRBs) were delivered over the last week, and they have been mounted on the MLP, according to NASA's update. The upper SRB segments arrived at KSC via train in June and will undergo inspection and testing before the twin boosters are fully stacked.

Inside KSC's Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building, the Artemis III Orion is making significant progress — engineers have now finished installation of the spacecraft's heat shield.

Artemis III will be the first Orion mission to use an upgraded heat shield, featuring design improvements gleaned from analysis of unexpected wear on the heat shield flown on Artemis I. Orion's service module is also currently inside the Operations and Checkout Building and recently completed acoustic testing. Both the service module and Orion capsule are now being prepared for joining and eventual transportation to the VAB for stacking.

On the personnel side of things, Artemis III team members at KSC have begun monthly launch simulation tests to hone procedures for SLS propellant loading, terminal count operations (the final 10 minutes prior to liftoff) and launch day operations. Those tests will continue regularly leading up to Artemis III's launch next year, according to NASA.

As teams across NASA are busy readying all the pieces for Artemis III, others are looking ahead to the program's first lunar landing, planned for Artemis IV. That mission, scheduled for late 2028, will deliver a crew of astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972. The SLS that will get them there is also coming together piece by piece.

The liquid oxygen (LOX) tank for the Artemis IV SLS core stage was recently relocated within NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, positioning the tank for testing as it enters its next phase of production.