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.

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 next Starship test flight aims to achieve a major milestone by deploying 20 upgraded Starlink satellites, marking the first Starlink Version 3s to deploy in space.

Liftoff for the spacecraft’s upcoming 13th test flight was originally scheduled for Thursday (July 16) from the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. That attempt was aborted at the last second, however; SpaceX is now targeting today (July 24), 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 launch live on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff. Follow our Starship live blog for more mission updates.

The mission follows a nearly two-month pause after Flight 12 ended with the loss of the Super Heavy booster during its return to the Gulf after stage separation. After reviewing the anomaly and SpaceX's corrective actions, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the company to resume Starship launches.

“The upcoming flight will aim to complete similar objectives targeted on the previous flight test, which debuted the Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles, while also carrying next-generation Starlink V3 satellites for the first time,” SpaceX officials said in a statement announcing the test flight.

As with previous flights, Flight 13's primary goal is to gather engineering data while testing upgrades to the world's most powerful rocket. Here's what to watch for:

The mission will begin with all 33 Raptor 3 engines igniting on the Super Heavy booster, generating up to 18 million pounds (about 8,200 metric tons) of thrust at liftoff. About 2.5 minutes later, the booster will separate from the Starship upper stage and begin its return toward the Gulf of Mexico for a controlled splashdown rather than a launch tower catch. SpaceX is continuing to refine its booster recovery procedures following Flight 12's landing burn failure.

One of Flight 13's biggest milestones will come after stage separation, when Starship is expected to deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites for the first time. The satellites are designed to test Starship's payload deployment capabilities and will intentionally reenter Earth's atmosphere after completing the demonstration rather than remain in orbit.

The flight will also continue testing SpaceX's upgraded Starship vehicle, including improvements to its propulsion system, avionics and overall performance. Engineers will closely monitor the rocket throughout ascent to evaluate how the latest design performs under flight conditions.

After completing its satellite deployment, Starship will continue along a suborbital trajectory before reentering Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The spacecraft's descent will provide additional data on its heat shield, flight controls and guidance systems before ending with a planned splashdown roughly an hour after launch.

While Flight 13 remains another developmental mission, it represents an important step toward making Starship an operational launch vehicle. Successfully deploying Starlink satellites would demonstrate the rocket's ability to begin carrying real payloads while continuing to advance SpaceX's goal of building a fully reusable system for missions to Earth orbit, the moon and eventually Mars.

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. It was updated on July 23 with the weather delay and new launch date of July 24.

Landing spacecraft on the moon could contaminate ancient clues about how life may have originated on Earth, a new study finds.

As NASA continues on with its plan of sending astronauts back to the moon with the Artemis program, researchers are exploring what possible unintended consequences may arise from humans visiting the lunar surface. For instance, Artemis IV will land astronauts near the moon's south pole and the agency has future plans for building a longer-term moon base on the lunar surface, which would require many more trips. And indeed, a new study has found the exhaust from spacecraft involved with these landings could expel enough methane to contaminate the moon's surface — possibly destroying molecules that could help to explain how life may have originated on Earth.

"We are trying to protect science and our investment in space," senior study author Silvio Sinibaldi, the planetary protection officer at the European Space Agency, said in a statement. "Our activity can actually hinder scientific exploration."

While experts have had concerns for some time about how rocket launches on Earth pollute our planet and atmosphere, scientists have only really considered this issue with our own planet. This is especially because we haven't been to the moon's surface in over 50 years; concerns of accidental effects of a lunar landing simply haven't been top-of-mind. That's what makes this new study so important. It points to a potential issue that could mean that future moon landings might actually be detrimental to science.

Life's clues on the moon?

So why do we think the signs of life could be hiding on the moon? It's actually hiding in ice. Dark craters near the moon's poles, which exist in perpetual shadow, hold ancient ice. This ice is thought to contain material from asteroids and comets that smashed into the moon billions of years ago. Trapped in lunar ice to this day, these bits of ancient collisions could include what the researchers describe as "prebiotic organic molecules," or molecules that could have preceded life on Earth.

It's thought that these molecules from asteroid and comet visitors could have sparked life on Earth, and by studying those possibly trapped on the moon, researchers could be looking at the molecules that ended up combining and creating life as we know it.

The molecular history of life on Earth is pretty much nonexistent on our own planet, as it was largely destroyed by the billions of years of changes we've experienced. But the moon has remained mostly unchanged, so these wells of ice are a uniquely-preserved sampling of pre-life molecules.

"We know we have organic molecules in the solar system — in asteroids, for example," Sinibaldi said. "But how they came to perform specific functions like they do in biological matter is a gap we need to fill."

This ice exists in a somewhat fragile ecosystem, so left alone in darkness, this ice isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But with Artemis, NASA is planning on sending crewed landers to the moon's south pole. That might pose a problem. With computer models in this new study, researchers have shown that the methane exhaust from these landers could very quickly and permanently contaminate this ancient ice, destroying the molecular evidence sealed within.

Inside the simulations

In those computer models, the researchers simulated how methane, the main organic component expelled by planned lunar landers, would spread across the moon's surface after a landing at the south pole. While the simulations included the effects of solar wind and radiation, the moon's lack of an atmosphere caused the methane to spread incredibly quickly, reaching the moon's north pole in under two lunar days.

Within one lunar week (which is roughly seven months on Earth), over half the methane was trapped at the moon's cold polar areas, with a whopping 42% of the substance trapped at the south pole compared to 12% at the north pole. This methane could collect in the same cold pockets where ice and ancient molecules have been collected for billions of years, possibly contaminating this finite, scientific evidence.

"Their trajectories are basically ballistic," lead author Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, said in the statement. "They just hop around from one point to another."

In better news, there may be a way to circumvent some of this methane disturbance. For instance, the study suggests it's possible that by choosing colder landing sites, scientists can avoid having the methane travel as quickly or as far. Additional simulations are needed to better understand how exhaust compounds travel on the moon, however, as well as the risks that this poses for scientific investigations and if there are other materials lunar trips will involve that could contaminate the environment. Above all, the new study's team emphasizes that as we push toward future lunar exploration, it is key to balance our dreams of settling the moon with preserving its priceless history.

"We have laws regulating contamination of Earth environments like Antarctica and national parks," Paiva said. "I think the moon is an environment as valuable as those."

This work was described in a study published last year in the journal the American Geophysical Union.

The assembly of NASA's next Artemis rocket is well underway, with the recent arrival of one of the launch vehicle's solid fuel booster sections to the agency's integration facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The bottom segment of the left-hand solid rocket booster (SRB) that will help launch Artemis III was transported to KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) this week, according to a NASA social media post. It's one of two SRBs that will be affixed to either side of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which together provide a combined 7.2 million pounds of force — more than 75% of the rocket's power at liftoff.

"Soon, assembly of the rocket will begin as we prepare to send crew aboard Orion to test the rendezvous and docking capabilities needed for future lunar landings," the NASA post said.

It took about one year for NASA to stack the Artemis II SLS once each of the rocket's components were delivered to the VAB. The same timeline gives Artemis III a small amount of wiggle room, as it progresses toward a targeted launch in mid-to-late 2027 — and stacking of the entire rocket may not begin immediately.

The Artemis III SLS core stage arrived in the VAB in May. Unlike the core stage's arrival for Artemis II, Artemis III's was delivered without the engine section. Once that's attached, it may be some time before other components are stacked onto the main vehicle. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has said that the agency aims to complete a wet dress rehearsal on the rocket before the end of the year. In the meantime, other SLS components and SRB segments will continue arriving at the VAB.

Each SRB stands about 177 feet (54 meters) tall. They're packed with polybutadiene acrylonitrile (PBAN), ammonium perchlorate, and aluminum powder, which bring their combined weight to 3.2 million pounds (1.45 million kg). Unlike liquid-fueled rocket engines, once the SRBs' solid propellants ignite, they cannot be turned off. Without them, the four RS-25 engines on SLS's core stage would not be powerful enough to lift the rocket off the launch pad.

Artemis III will be the second crewed mission of the Artemis program — NASA's next-generation push to return astronauts to the moon. And, while Artemis III itself won't actually fly to the moon, it will help progress the hardware and spacecraft technologies the space agency needs to ensure success on future missions to the lunar surface.

Like Artemis II, which flew four astronauts on a 10-day mission around the moon in April, the Artemis III astronauts will launch on SLS aboard the Orion spacecraft — but they won't fly beyond low Earth orbit this time. Instead, the four-person crew will spend about two weeks testing out rendezvous and docking procedures with prototypes for the two Artemis moon landers, both of which have been privately contracted by NASA.

The space agency has partnered with SpaceX and Blue Origin for those vehicles, each of which is expected to launch once the Artemis III crew are on orbit. They'll first meet up with Blue Origin's lander, Blue Moon. After docking, the astronauts will have the opportunity to enter Blue Moon's crew cabin, where they will also have the chance to test parts of the Artemis extravehicular activity (EVA) suit designed for astronauts to wear on the lunar surface.

A rendezvous with SpaceX's Starship will follow Orion's stint with Blue Moon. SpaceX has indicated it will fly a boilerplate Starship V3 (Version 3) vehicle equipped with a docking adapter, but it will not have a crew cabin. V3 is SpaceX's newest version of Starship, which has been upgraded for high launch efficiency and capacity, but it will lack a fully developed life support system in time for the Artemis III launch next year.

If all goes according to plan and NASA is able to maintain its current mission timeline, the first moon landing of the Artemis program will take place on Artemis IV, scheduled to launch in late 2028.

Update for 12:15 p.m. ET on July 20: The July 16 launch attempt was aborted. SpaceX is now targeting Thursday (July 23) for the launch of Starship Flight 13, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

SpaceX is targeting this week for the next launch of its massive Starship vehicle.

Following engine tests on both Starship stages in the last two weeks — igniting all six Raptor 3s on the "Ship" upper stage and all 33 Raptor 3s on the "Super Heavy" first stage — SpaceX is proceeding with the launch of Starship Flight 13, which is scheduled for no earlier than Thursday (July 16), according to a July 11 SpaceX social media post.

It will be the second launch for Starship "Version 3" (V3), a bigger, more powerful upgrade from previous Starship designs, and will come a little less than two months after V3's debut on Flight 12. To validate those upgrades, SpaceX didn't add any major objectives to Starship Flight 12 that hadn't already been proven on the spacecraft's previous V2 configuration. But the new design didn't quite check all the necessary boxes last time around, so Flight 13 will largely attempt an improved outcome of the same mission.

Though still in its development phase, Starship is designed for full reusability. Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 first-stage booster, which is equipped with legs capable of touching the rocket down on coastal landing zones or one of the company's droneships at sea, both Ship and Super Heavy are designed for a return directly to the launch site, where chopstick-like arms on the "Mechazilla" tower catch the stages out of mid-air.

SpaceX has yet to attempt such a recovery with Ship but has succeeded in doing so with Super Heavy three times so far. Two of those caught boosters were then reflown on subsequent launches. When flying the new V3 hardware during Flight 12, though, SpaceX opted for Super Heavy to perform a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, rather than risk launch pad infrastructure on an unproven vehicle, but Super Heavy didn't make it to the planned touchdown zone.

According to a new SpaceX analysis, a sequence change in Ship's engines, which ignite before the two rocket halves physically detach in a maneuver known as "hot staging," led to a 90-degree error in Super Heavy's orientation after separation. Super Heavy's boostback burn was also cut short when five of its 33 engines failed to relight. SpaceX says it has introduced a modified startup sequence for Ship and hardware updates to Super Heavy to address the orientation anomaly and ignition issues, respectively, "along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment."

Ship ran into a bit of trouble during Flight 12 but also managed to pull off some firsts. One of the spacecraft's three vacuum-optimized Raptors was lost 40 seconds after stage separation, but it still reached its designated suborbital trajectory, demonstrating its "engine out" capabilities, according to the SpaceX update. The loss did, however, prevent Ship's in-space engine relight attempt. SpaceX traced the failure to "interconnected causes" and has introduced a number of fixes for the upcoming Flight 13, "with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine."

Flight 12 also featured the first deployment of two of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites equipped with cameras for inspecting Ship's heatshield tiles and exterior conditions while in space. They were deployed with several Starlink V3 mass simulators, a payload that's getting an upgrade of its own for Flight 13.

Stowed inside Ship's payload bay for Flight 13 are the first functional Starlink V3 satellites that Starship will deliver to space. SpaceX plans to eventually launch perhaps 100,000 of the upgraded version of its internet satellite constellation spacecraft, which it says will increase the capacity and speed of its wireless network services. SpaceX is including 20 Starlink V3 satellites aboard Flight 13, which will be released for functionality testing while in space. Six of those will be outfitted with cameras for the same type of heatshield inspection performed during Flight 12. Ultimately, due to Starship's suborbital trajectory on this launch, all of these satellites are expected to burn up in Earth's atmosphere about 20 minutes after they are deployed.

For Flight 13, Super Heavy's main objectives will be the successful launch and separation from the Ship upper stage, a complete boostback burn and a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the deployment of Ship's 20 Starlink V3 payloads, SpaceX is also planning the in-space relight of one of the spacecraft's Raptor engines, followed by the successful descent and soft splashdown of the stage in the Indian Ocean.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the closure of its investigation into SpaceX's Flight 12 mishaps this morning (July 13), approving the compnay's corrective actions and clearing the way for Flight 13.

SpaceX is targeting the launch of Flight 13 during a 90-minute window beginning on Thursday at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT). A livestream of the mission will begin about 30 minutes prior to liftoff and stream on the company's mission page, profile on X and here on Space.com.

If everything goes smoothly, it's very likely that SpaceX will attempt the first Starship V3 recovery back at its Starbase, Texas, launch site for either Super Heavy or both stages on the following mission, Flight 14, but there are a number of other technical achievements Starship has left on its checklist before the vehicle can become fully operational. Those include launching into a stable orbit, demonstrating successful rendezvous and docking with other spacecraft, and conquering the technological hurdle of transferring and maintaining cryogenic fuels for long-term use in zero-g.

SpaceX is hoping to accomplish all that within the year — quite a tight timeline. NASA has contracted Starship as one of two lunar lander vehicles to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on the agency's Artemis program missions and is expecting a crew-capable version to be ready by 2028 for Artemis IV. The company plans to fly a boilerplate Starship V3 equipped with a docking adapter for NASA's Artemis III mission in 2027, which will launch astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft for rendezvous operations demonstrations with Starship, as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, in low Earth orbit.

Nearly 150 million people shared in the "moon joy" of Artemis II on NASA channels, setting a new agency record in the process.

NASA numbers indicate that 149.4 million people used agency platforms in March and April to follow the four astronauts of Artemis II as they prepped for their mission, lifted off aboard the Space Launch System rocket, flew by the moon and finally splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The viewership figure includes the mission's 24/7 livestreams of mission activities and views from the Orion spacecraft.

"Artemis II's human‑spaceflight narrative, real‑time crew updates, and highly visual moments drew millions of new followers across platforms," the agency stated of the historic lunar flyby mission, which ran from April 1 to April 10.

On board were NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The quartet flew farther than any human before them while making the first journey to the moon since Apollo 17's landing in 1972.

Glover, Koch and Hansen became the first Black person, woman and non-American, respectively, to fly beyond low Earth orbit, and the crew engaged repeatedly in live events with politicians, journalists, students and other audiences from afar.

The live broadcast drew praise on social media for showing the work of the astronauts, including struggles with toilet venting, the crew's descriptions of the lunar surface and a moving group hug when the crew suggested naming a lunar crater after Wiseman's late wife, Carroll.

Launch (April 1)

NASA's official Artemis II launch webcast reached a peak of nearly 3.67 million simultaneous viewers. That's a record, surpassing other big launches in recent agency history, NASA stated, including that of the uncrewed Artemis I mission to lunar orbit in November 2022 or the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021. (The agency did not disclose in the release how many views each event received.)

Roughly 16.6 million people watched the Artemis II launch live across agency platforms, with that number rising to 23.9 million views when taking into account those who tuned in after the fact. NASA's Spanish-language broadcast alone received a "landmark peak" of 458,366 simultaneous views, which has since risen to 2.8 million total views, according to the agency.

Lunar flyby (April 6)

NASA's lunar flyby broadcast alone "delivered one of the largest peak audiences ever recorded," according to the agency. As many as 1,471,069 people tuned in at the same time. Nearly 900,000 of those folks watched on YouTube, and about 190,000 viewers tuned in via X or Twitch.

Splashdown (April 10)

The dramatic reentry, splashdown and recovery of the four Artemis 2 astronauts generated a peak of 3,838,418 live viewers on agency platforms — nearly 5% higher than the liftoff's peak viewership.

NASA attributed the increase to interest in the "riskiest moments" that some global news outlets highlighted about the mission, "particularly Orion's re-entry and heat‑shield performance." (Unexpected issues with Artemis I's heat shield drew concerns from some when the agency flew the same design on Artemis II — although all turned out well, partly because NASA modified Artemis II's reentry trajectory.) Some news outlets, however, have said global interest came because the astronauts showed "worldly harmony" and shared their experiences with "heartfelt words."

Total, non-simultaneous live views of the splashdown on agency platforms clocked in at 24.1 million, which rises to 29.5 million when taking into account people who tuned in after the fact. But when bringing in a selection of the major broadcasters who covered the landing, NASA said that viewership rose to "hundreds of millions of potential viewers worldwide."

The agency focused on select streaming platforms in its analysis, including HBO Max, Netflix, Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. News networks were not included. The streaming platforms released subscriber numbers, but not mission viewership numbers. HBO Max had between 120 million and 150 million global subscribers during the mission, Netflix 325 million paid global subscribers (as Netflix allows some account sharing), Peacock between 36 million and 41 million U.S. subscribers, and Amazon Prime Video up to 275 million global subscribers, according to NASA.

Websites

NASA said a "major surge" came in agency website traffic because of Artemis II.

• Entire mission: NASA.gov received 125.1 million page views during the mission, which was a 150% increase over the 50 million who logged in during the entire month of March. A website showing Orion's orbit, called "Artemis II Mission in Real Time," or AROW, "surpassed" 11 million cumulative views since launch, although NASA did not say whether the AROW views continued to be counted after the mission concluded.
• Launch day (April 1): The mission's debut brought 17.6 million page views across all NASA sites, from 8.3 million individual visitors.
• Lunar flyby (April 6): More than 16.5 million page views came to NASA websites from 6.2 million individual visitors. As a part of the total page views, the NASA homepage got 2.3 million, while AROW showed 1.9 million.
• Splashdown (April 10): More than 6.1 million people logged on to NASA websites on splashdown day, generating 16 million page views. Of that figure, AROW alone generated 1 million page views.

Social media

NASA tracked 261 million individuals engaging with its social media accounts (which were not specified) between March 27 and April 13. Splashdown was the only milestone selected for individual analysis, with 35 million engagements shown on April 10.

"Public reaction to NASA's Artemis II mission remained largely steady across launch week, with neutral and positive posts dominating the online conversation. Neutral sentiment consistently led daily discussion, ranging from 47 to 60%, while positive reactions accounted for 30 to 42%, fueled by excitement over the crew's historic lunar journey, striking mission imagery, and renewed interest in deep space exploration," the agency stated of the engagement.

NASA also noted "strong amplification" on social media from "major news outlets, brands, and international partners." The Canadian Space Agency, working with other Canadian government departments and agencies, was the major international partner on Artemis II because of Hansen and backup CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons (who also served as CAPCOM during lunar flyby), among other mission contributions. CSA hosted several live mission events in Canada, and had extensive social media engagement. The European Space Agency, which contributed the service module for Orion, also posted frequently during the mission.

NASA experienced "major social media growth" through Artemis II, with these figures below said to encompass the milestones between liftoff and splashdown. "Collectively, these gains highlight how Artemis II's human‑spaceflight narrative, real‑time crew updates, and highly visual moments drew millions of new followers across platforms," the agency stated.

• NASA's Instagram added 4.6 million followers. (The agency did not include the baseline number of followers during the mission in April, but as of July 7 it stands at 104 million).
• NASA's Artemis account on Instagram grew by 2 million, which was said to be "a 66 percent increase" while the mission was ongoing.
• The agency also noted "significant gains" on X, Facebook and YouTube. Numbers were not released for X. YouTube subscribers increased by 2 million during the mission in April; the baseline number was not disclosed, but as of July 7 numbers stand at 15 million. Facebook reached 1.7 million more people; as of July 7, the agency has 28 million followers on that platform.

Miscellaneous

NASA also highlighted a selection of its campaigns before and during the mission to engage the public's interest but released few metrics about how these contributed to overall viewership and engagement.

• The moon-mascot campaign: Thousands of people from 50 countries contributed ideas for a zero-gravity indicator for Artemis II, which ultimately ended up being "Rise" from eight-year-old Lucas Ye.
• Sending public names to the moon: Rise carried an SD card containing 5.6 million names submitted, from individuals around the world, to fly around the moon.
• Other partnerships: Artemis II was also highlighted on a Google Doodle on April 1, a Spotify playlist that featured the crew's wakeup songs, and on Merriam-Webster's Facebook page.

It looks like SpaceX's next Starship flight is on the horizon, and it may lift off sooner than you might think.

SpaceX today (July 10) completed a brief static fire of the Starship Super Heavy booster tapped to launch the 13th test flight of the massive, mega-lift vehicle.

Booster 20 — the latest Super Heavy to roll off the assembly line — was transported to the pad at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, facility yesterday (July 9) and hoisted onto its support stand using the launch tower's stalwart "Mechazilla" chopstick arms. By early Friday, SpaceX began preparations leading up to the prelaunch engine test, including closing Boca Chica beach around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) and transferring fuel to the pad's tank farm ahead of loading propellant onto the vehicle.

This is the second "Version 3" (V3) booster to reach the pad at Starbase for testing, and is equipped with 33 of SpaceX's upgraded Raptor 3 engines. Those engines ignited in a blazing heat on Friday just before 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), and underwent a roughly 25-second burn simulating on the launch stand the duration and flight conditions for an actual launch.

The successful completion of Booster 20's static test fire paves the way for Starship's upcoming test launch, Flight 13. That could launch as early as Wednesday (July 15), according to a notice from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Compared to Version 2 (V2), Starship V3 packs a much stronger punch. The rocket was upgraded with enhanced avionics to reduce mass and increase launch capacity, a taller fuel tank with a larger volume, and equipment for transferring propellant between spacecraft, which will be needed to fulfill many of the missions Starship is being designed to carry out.

A handful of those missions will be for NASA's Artemis program, and the agency's plans to return to the moon. Starship is one of two lunar landers currently contracted to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface, so, its success and timely demonstration of the technologies needed to do so are coming under a microscope as the timeline for those missions shrinks.

Flight 13 will follow the same basic timeline as Flight 12, which lifted off in May with mixed success. Flight 12 was the first launch of Starship V3, and prompted SpaceX to fly a slightly more conservative mission than many previous tests, which have built on previous successes with increasingly expanding goals. Starship's last flight sent the vehicle's upper stage, Ship, on a suborbital trajectory with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX ran into some issues, though, when the rocket's Super Heavy booster (Booster 19) failed to maneuver itself for a soft ocean splashdown of its own. Ship (Ship 39) also ran into an engine anomaly that caused SpaceX to forgo the stage's in-space engine relight demonstration.

Ship 40 and Booster 20, the Starship vehicles that will fly on Flight 13, will follow the same set of mission objectives to shake out the remainder of kinks in Starship V3. Spacex hopes the mission will pave the way for further technology demonstration tests the vehicle needs to complete before reaching full operational status. That includes the retrieval of both stages back at their Starbase launch pad, for refurbishment and reuse on future flights.

Starship is designed to be fully reusable, and capable of delivering over 100 tons to low Earth orbit. Once the rocket begins regularly delivering payloads, Ship and Super Heavy will be able to both return to Starbase to be caught by the Mechazilla arms on both of the site's two launch towers. SpaceX has succeeded in a handful of V2 Super Heavy catches during its previous flight tests, and managed to launch two of those recovered boosters on subsequent missions, but has not yet attempted to do the same with a Ship upper stage.

That's because landing Ship is much different than landing Super Heavy. SpaceX has a lot of practice landing and reflying rocket boosters. The company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launches several times a month, and is routinely recovered, refurbished and reflown within a short few weeks. A batch of Starlink satellites recently launched on one of SpaceX's most-flown Falcon 9 boosters, which broke a reflight record as it touched down for the 36th time after delivering its payloads to orbit. Though it lacks the landing legs of Falcon 9, Super Heavy's descent back to Earth is very similar to a Falcon 9 booster, and therefore less complex an engineering question to have to solve compared to Starship's upper stage.

Ship drops through the atmosphere belly-first, allowing the black, hexagonal heat shield tiles that cover half the vehicle to absorb the blazing temperatures of reentry. Fins near the spacecraft's nose and base control its orientation and attitude, which remains mostly horizontal during its freefall. To an extent, Ship's descent profile is not very unlike the space shuttles, except for its actual touchdown, which differs significantly.

As Ship's altitude decreases toward sea level, the vehicle performs a "flip and burn" maneuver that swings the whole stage upright and arrests its descent for a soft touchdown — eventually back at the Starbase pad on future launches, but once again in the Indian Ocean for Starship's upcoming mission.

Flight 13 will give SpaceX a chance to demonstrate that descent profile again using Ship 40, while also working through the booster and engine issues encountered during Flight 12. If all goes according to plan, the launch will bring Starship V3 closer to more ambitious tests, including orbital insertion, propellant transfer and the recovery of both stages back at Starbase.

The success of NASA's future moon base depends in large part on mission design, which should allow astronauts to work together well in a way independent from psychological training, a new study asserts.

The goal of the study was to identify "specific conditions" for mission success and to look for any "red flags" that may stand in the way, lead investigator Anamaria Berea, a computational social scientist at George Mason University (GMU), told Space.com via email. (The first author of the PLOS ONE study, which was published in May, was GMU's Raymond Vera.)

The team conducted the research using agent-based models, which are tools for computational simulations in fields ranging from the study of bird flocks to the spread of disease, Berea said. While a lot of modern-day AI "trains" or "learns" to extrapolate from information provided in a data set, agent-based modeling instead uses a data set to "understand emergent phenomena that don't have one single cause or direct cause," she said.

The study team considered scenarios for how many astronauts would be on the moon base and how often resupply missions would occur. In an "initial case," for example, the assumed mission duration was three months, with a single resupply run at Month 2 with food, water, air and a fresh group of astronauts.

Using a complex probability analysis known as a Monte Carlo simulation, the model astronauts in this scenario showed a productivity rate of about 20% against their expected tasks, "which is acceptable for a typical manufacturing process," the authors noted.

This productivity rate doesn't take into account anything unexpected that may crop up during the mission, the authors added. "The low task completion rate suggests that, on average, teams are having challenges to overcoming psychological stressors and environmental disruptions," they wrote.

Lessons from the International Space Station

NASA tracks productivity a little differently on the International Space Station (ISS). The agency uses a metric called "utilization," which largely refers to the amount of crew time and number of scientific investigations that are performed on the space station during an increment or expedition. As of 2014, the ISS program suggested that ideal utilization should be 35 hours per crew per week when there are three people working on the U.S. part of the space station, and 68.5 hours if there are four or more. (The Russian side of the ISS works largely independently in this respect.)

"NASA has generally met or exceeded this goal and set a high of 120 average hours per week devoted to research from October 2019 to April 2020," NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has been tracking all of these productivity figures, stated in a report published in September 2024.

"Starting March 2022 through March 2023, the latest published data, we have seen utilization near 90 hours per week," the OIG noted. "In addition to the hours spent per week on research, the number of scientific investigations performed on-orbit has increased."

Figure 1 of the OIG report also shows both crew time and scientific investigations increasing, as a trend, between 2000 and 2023, suggesting that utilization of the space station is continuing to grow. And this is despite periodic and documented disruptions that required astronauts to take a step back from being productive, such as emergency ammonia leaks requiring spacewalks, the 9/11 disaster, or sheltering in place during brief contingencies such as space debris passing within a few miles of the station.

Not all crew time can be used for utilization even if all goes well, however, as the station requires normal maintenance like cleaning, and astronauts also need daily time for sleep, meals and a little relaxation. Additionally, utilization tends to increase with larger crews on the space station compared with smaller ones, as maintenance becomes less of a burden with more hands to take on these tasks.

But "lack of redundancy" in key supply items to the space station does pose a risk to utilization, the OIG has noted. As just one example, SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules and Roscosmos Soyuz spacecraft are the only two vehicles that bring astronauts to the station right now. "The lack of redundancy and limited capabilities of both cargo and crew transportation increase the risk to NASA's current and future ability to bring critical supplies, science, and crew to and from the station to maintain safe operations and full utilization of the ISS," the OIG wrote in the report.

Isolated environments

Those of us who have been on long car rides in a group, or who remember being in tight quarters with roommates or family during the pandemic, have some idea of what an isolated, confined environment (ICE) feels like: crowded, with limited resources, and possessing few connections with the outside world. Space serves as just one example of a true ICE; isolated research bases (like in Antarctica) or submarines have also been studied in the literature, according to a separate 2021 study in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Put simply, ICE refers to a location where humans must work to a high standard in isolated and often dangerous circumstances, with only long-distance support (if possible) from a mission control or its equivalent. And, as the new study points out, a moon base would be a complex example of an isolated environment — one featuring not only resident astronauts but also rovers, other robots and occasional visiting crews.

"The premise for our modeling approach came from trying to understand better the human factors involved in crewed space missions, particularly the deep-space ones, for which we don't have a lot of historical data," Berea said.

That's because only a handful of people have traveled beyond low Earth orbit — the two dozen who flew to lunar realms on Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 flight around the moon this past April.

"We ran various scenarios of space mission durations, number of astronauts, potentially unforeseen circumstances that can happen on the lunar surface or the habitat," she said. The model suggested the missions with the highest probability of success would include six astronauts working on the moon at a time, with fresh supplies coming from Earth every two weeks, and no extreme fluctuations in the environment from things like radiation or a micrometeorite impact.

"In contrast, the worst-case scenario consists of four astronauts on the moon at one time, only one month resupply window between Earth and moon, and moderate to high adverse environmental probabilities," Berea said. And, when asked if training is a factor in mitigating adverse effects, she did not necessarily agree that the years of work NASA and other agency astronauts put in would be more effective than shorter-duration training used for moon base analogs.

"People can be very, very well trained, but for long-duration or deep-space missions, there will always be a human factor involved," she said. "We looked at combinations of skills and personalities in a team of astronauts, and there is a fine line between having a team that is too small and a team that is too large, and there are synergies and emergent behaviors that come from people interacting with each other and with their environment.

"The team is more than the sum of its people," she continued. "The best ways to overcome these is not by more training, but by fine-tuning other aspects of the missions: the duration of the mission, the frequency of resupply missions, and the contingency plans for accidents and unforeseen conditions in extreme environments."

NASA, however, puts its ISS crews through many years of remote environment training long before they float through the space station hatch — and Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman told The New Yorker that extensive psychosocial training led to the obvious closeness seen live among his own four lunar crewmates despite tight quarters (and vent line issues that led to occasional toilet trouble).

That psychological intervention during training was by design. "Preparation starts by recruiting mentally healthy people and then providing training to help them deal with potential situations and issues," wrote the Canadian Space Agency of this training, citing NASA protocols. "Astronauts repeat this training often enough that they can anticipate their own reactions and those of their teammates. They also receive constant support from teams on the ground and have access to a variety of tools to help them deal with potentially difficult situations."

Berea noted, however, that psychology forms a part (but is not the focus) of her teams' simulation, including considering NASA TLX (task load index) scores and data, which measures coping and stress for astronauts. The researchers also considered case studies from analogs including Antarctic research missions and time aboard submarines or oil rigs, as some examples.

"We need to pay attention not only to the astronauts, but the team as a whole, and each team and space mission are unique. We will not be able to model these with statistics or AI," she said. "But what we can do is to make sure that before we send any human to live and work on the moon, that we understand well the complexity of interactions and scenarios they will face during the mission, and we can help with that."

ispace is expanding its already extensive moon plans to include SpaceX's Starship megarocket.

The Tokyo-based company announced today (July 8) that it has booked 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of cargo capacity on Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, for a moon mission that could launch as soon as 2030. The deal is worth $50 million, according to Tokyo Brief.

"We are very pleased to be able to offer the new Lunar Access Integration service utilizing Starship's payload space through our collaboration with SpaceX," ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in a statement today. "High-capacity, relatively low-cost lunar transport, such as that provided by Starship, is essential to realizing the sustainable lunar economy that ispace aims to create."

As that quote suggests, ispace may become a regular Starship customer over the years, using the giant vehicle to carry its new "Mobile Cargo System" to the lunar surface. The MCS is a pallet-like flat rover capable of transporting up to 1,100 pounds (500 kg) across the lunar terrain.

The newly announced Mobile Cargo System moon mission aboard Starship will launch no earlier than 2030, according to ispace. The timeline will depend largely on SpaceX's ability to progress Starship into an operational vehicle. (Starship has flown 12 test flights to date, all of them suborbital.)

ispace has flown with SpaceX before; Falcon 9 rockets launched the Japanese company's robotic HAKUTO-R moon rover in both 2022 and 2025. Both times, HAKUTO-R reached lunar orbit successfully but crashed during its landing attempt.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy-lift launch vehicle, which is designed for full reusability and capable of launching up to 150 tons (136 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. The rocket has been in development for a while; SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk first announced the vehicle during the International Astronomical Congress in Mexico in 2016. Expectations for its operational readiness have been an ever-moving goal post.

In 2021, for example, SpaceX was targeting sometime "before 2024" for the spacecraft's first mission to the moon, but development delays have continually pushed that date back. 2024 was also the year NASA originally targeted for the first crewed lunar landing mission of the agency's Artemis program, though that's no longer the plan.

NASA contracted Starship as the lunar lander for that touchdown, which is now slated to take place during Artemis IV in late 2028. Agency officials have cited Starship as part of the reason that Artemis' schedules have slipped.

NASA and ispace aren't the only customers that have signed up for a Starship ride to the moon. For example, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced the #dearMoon project in 2018, booking Starship to fly himself and a handful of artists on what would have been the spacecraft's first crewed mission around the moon. As Starship delays continued to mount, though, Maezawa canceled the flight in 2024.

But momentum is building for Starship moon missions. After all, NASA now has two successful Artemis missions in the books — the uncrewed Artemis I to lunar orbit in late 2022 and the four-person Artemis II flight around the moon this past April. The agency is gearing up for Artemis III, which will test rendezvous and docking operations with NASA's Orion capsule and two crewed lunar landers — Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon — in Earth orbit in mid-2027, if all goes to plan.

So ispace is positioning itself to be a key player in a possible lunar goldrush.

"The emergence of rockets with the capability of transporting large-scale payloads to the moon is expected to accelerate deployment of lunar infrastructure, including power, communications, construction, data and mobility," ispace said in today's statement.

"The establishment of this core infrastructure on the lunar surface will reduce barriers hindering subsequent infrastructure projects, leading to a rapid expansion in the transport of relatively small lunar payloads for purposes such as technology validation, exploration and business development," the company wrote, adding that, as mission demand grows, so too will the payload capacity of its Mobile Cargo System units.

In addition to the new Mobile Cargo System design, ispace is also planning three lunar landing missions with its ULTRA Lander vehicle, which are scheduled for 2028, 2029 and 2030.

The next American flag to be planted on the moon has been placed in the hands of one of the last astronauts to walk on the lunar surface.

Late into the night during the America 250 celebrations in Washington, D.C. on July 4, President Donald Trump delivered the keynote address from the National Mall, praising the country's history and accomplishments. The speech also acknowledged several American heroes in attendance, from military veterans, descendants of notable American historical figures like Davy Crocket, and the crew of NASA's Artemis II mission that flew around the moon in April.

Each honoree was invited briefly on stage, and recognized in front of an array of historical American flags, like the oldest known one in existence from 1777, the flag draped over the casket of Abraham Lincoln and one carried by Lewis and Clark in 1803. The Artemis crew were joined by Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt, and presented before the flag flown aboard the Wright brothers' plane on its first flight in 1903. They were also given a flag to take with them before walking off stage.

"Within 66 years of inventing the airplane, Americans planted our flag on the moon. Just three months ago, we sent American astronauts back to the far side of the moon, and this time they flew further from Earth than anyone has ever flown before," Trump said of the astronauts, and told the crowd, "I have a special gift for these patriots."

As he spoke, U.S. Air Force Maj. Kaitlyn Tinkham joined the astronauts, carrying a folded flag in her hands. "This morning, on America's 250th birthday, a new flag was flown above the United States Capitol," Trump said. "Tonight I present it to you, to soon be planted by American astronauts on their upcoming return to the moon."

Tinkham handed the flag to Schmitt. Standing next to him, Artemis II commander NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman put an arm on Schmitt's shoulder as the two stood in recognition of the symbolism of the flag being held by a member of the Apollo generation alongside the astronauts currently taking on NASA's return to the moon.

Wiseman was joined by his Artemis II crewmates, NASA astronauts Victory Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (who recently announced his retirement). The four-person crew launched aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft on April 1, and flew a 10-day mission around the far side of the moon. Their journey took them farther from Earth than any crewed spaceflight in history, and captivated millions of people following their mission from launch to splashdown.

It was the only flight of Orion with astronauts aboard, and the first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program, which endeavors to return astronauts to the surface of the moon and eventually establish a permanent base. With the success of Artemis II behind it, the agency has shifted into full gear for preparations for Artemis III and Artemis IV.

NASA is currently targeting Artemis III for mid-to-late 2027, which will launch Orion into low Earth orbit for a rendezvous and docking operations validation flight with the program's two commercial lunar lander vehicles, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. Artemis IV is scheduled for 2028, and is slated to be the first Artemis mission to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface.

And, while we don't yet know the crew that will fly that mission, the flag they will plant on the moon once they land is now officially in the hands of NASA's astronauts.

The first non-American to reach the moon is ready for a new mission.

Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, best known for his flight around the moon in April on NASA's Artemis 2 mission, will step back from active astronaut duty in September.

Hansen, who's also a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), will next serve as a reservist to "enable the vital work happening in Canada with respect to space," the astronaut wrote Monday (July 6) in a statement on X.

"Our future depends on a fierce continuation of Canadian innovation and exploration in space," Hansen added. "The technological breakthroughs and economic benefits born from this sector are vital for our country and the world, and I am as determined as ever to push that work forward."

Space sovereignty has come under renewed focus in recent months in Canada. Long-standing efforts at a homegrown launch capability, for example, received a wave of Canadian defense funding in March, with $200 million CDN ($140 million) offered to an in-development spaceport in Nova Scotia over 10 years, plus additional money to eventually get Canadian-made rockets into orbit. Hansen, an astronaut for 17 years, went to the Maritime Launch Services spaceport to attend a suborbital launch last month.

But Hansen's role in recent years also includes significant strides in space diplomacy: In 2026 alone, he and his three Artemis 2 crewmates have been seen at the White House, with congressional committee representatives and at the president's State of the Union address, also making similar-tier stops in Canadian politics. Just last week, he attended both Independence Day and Canada Day national celebrations.

Part of Hansen's messaging at these events is evident in this June 11 X post: "Canada and the United States have been close collaborators in space exploration for over six decades," he stated.

A long road to space

Hansen, 50, has been flying since the age of 12, first with the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, according to his official CSA biography. He graduated quickly to gliding and private piloting before serving as a fighter pilot for the RCAF. After growing up in the London, Ontario area somewhat near Toronto, Hansen served in multiple locations across Canada, most prominently as a CF-18 fighter pilot with the 441 Tactical Fighter Squadron and 409 Tactical Fighter Squadron. Hansen also worked on NORAD (North American Air Defense) projects as combat operations officer at 4 Wing Operations.

In May 2009, at age 33, Hansen was one of two recruits for the Canadian astronaut corps selected that year, and he became fully qualified as an astronaut in 2011. To the surprise of many, he did not receive his first flight assignment for an incredible 14 years after initial selection, when the Artemis 2 crew was announced on April 3, 2023.

The wait was in part because Canada's approximately 2% contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), through robotics programs like Canadarm2, means a CSA astronaut gets to fly a long-duration mission there just every five or six years at current flight rates. (Some Canadians have also reached the station as private astronauts, or on behalf of NASA.)

For perspective: During Hansen's tenure, he was not fully qualified for a CSA mission when Robert Thirsk flew to the ISS in 2009 (before the space shuttle's retirement, when long-duration missions were allocated differently), or for most of the training that Chris Hadfield did ahead of his own 2012-13 mission to the orbiting lab.

David Saint-Jacques, Hansen's slightly older classmate from 2009, flew in 2018-19. The next ISS mission, by CSA astronaut Josh Kutryk this September, will have a longer gap because — ultimately, and very simply put — he was switched from a delayed Boeing Starliner mission to SpaceX's Crew-13.

But astronauts never sit idle. Aside from the usual mission support and background work at NASA, Hansen helped develop the tools and procedures for a complex spacewalk to repair a an instrument outside the ISS designed to hunt for elusive dark matter, which NASA once described as "four years in the making."

Hansen also served as what he called a "den mother" for NASA's 2017 astronaut class, an approximately two-year posting to be the first-ever Canadian manager of their training schedules.

"The buck stops with me," he told Space.com back then. "If we get to the end and they don't have the training they need, I'll be the one answering the questions about why was that not completed."

Moon work

Then program changes intervened. NASA's human spaceflight plans beyond the ISS sharpened in 2017 into returning humans to the moon, and luckily for Artemis (as this has not always been the case) the change has stuck through several presidential administration changes.

CSA was an early signatory to the Artemis Accords, with a commitment of hardware as well. (The initial promise was a Canadarm3 robotic arm to operate on a planned moon-orbiting space station called Gateway. However, with NASA recently deciding to build a moon base in Gateway's stead, what happens next with international partners is under negotiation, although Canadarm3's CSA contract continues with the company MDA Space.)

CSA's commitment secured two Canadian astronaut seats aboard Artemis missions, and the consortium decided to award Canada a seat on the very first crewed mission: Artemis 2. Canadian space industry representatives widely expected that would be Hansen's mission, not only due to his qualifications, but because Canada recruited Kutryk and Jenni Gibbons in 2017, who alongside Saint-Jacques were the only active astronauts at this time. Gibbons would go on to serve as CSA's backup astronaut for Artemis 2, as well as the CAPCOM (Capsule Communicator) during the mission's lunar flyby, in which she served as the direct voice link between mission control in Houston and the crew in the Orion spacecraft.

But Hansen, visited by Space.com in Houston on the day he was announced as an Artemis 2 crewmate, expressed modesty. "It really isn't about me. I feel a great sense of pride for Canada," he said, adding words he would often repeat in the following few years: "It was so awesome to see NASA, the United States, showcasing Canada as part of this mission. It's not as a gift, but because we bring real value."

In between training for the first moon mission in 50 years alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, Hansen's message through the three years before liftoff was one of international and national collaboration. His mission patch, as the CSA noted in a description, included contributions with "elements of Anishinaabe culture" as well as from Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation, where Hansen did a vision quest during his mission training. Numerous Canadians played front-line roles on Artemis 2, including Gibbons serving as capcom during the lunar flyby.

Artemis 2's 10-day mission included numerous scientific, historic and cultural milestones. The astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any people ever had, for example, and witnessed a unique solar eclipse not long after passing beyond the far side of the moon. They observed flashes of meteors on the lunar surface, took high-definition photos of the regolith, and spoke with politicians, reporters and school children about their experience from space.

Moreover, what we now know as "moon joy" was evident among the four astronauts. As one example, they shared an emotional group hug on camera on April 6, when the world learned a nomination would be put forward to name a lunar crater for Wiseman's late wife, Carroll.

At a NASA event shortly after the April 10 mission splashdown, Hansen said staying on the "joy train" as a crew took effort, but he added that what everyone witnessed among the crew was also possible on Earth. "We are a mirror, reflecting you," he said.

The former head of NASA is questioning the agency's plans to return astronauts to the moon, asking whether the crewed landers selected for the Artemis program are the right vehicles to get the job done.

Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA administrator during President Donald Trump's first term, joined Space.com's Tariq Malik and co-host Rod Pyle on the This Week in Space podcast on June 12 to discuss his recently appointed position as CEO of Quantum Space and current events in the space industry. During the show, Bridenstine voiced skepticism about the architecture of NASA's Artemis moon landers, both of which are trailing in development compared to the Orion spacecraft with which they're being designed to fly.

"The architecture is extraordinarily complicated," Bridenstine said. He compared the Artemis plan unfavorably to NASA's approach during the Apollo program, which he argued was much less complex.

"They designed that thing to be as simple as you could possibly make it, and because of that they were able to land on the moon eight years after John F. Kennedy declared that we were doing it," Bridenstine said of the Apollo architecture.

NASA has contracted both SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon to be the crewed lunar landers for the Artemis program, and plans to use one of them to perform the first Artemis moon landing in 2028, on the Artemis 4 mission. That's a tight timeline for SpaceX and Blue Origin, whose spacecraft have faced ongoing delays in their development.

Neither lander has managed to make it to orbit yet, and both have a number of qualification tests to accomplish before NASA will certify the vehicles to fly with astronauts aboard, including uncrewed lunar landing demonstrations. For some development perspective, Bridenstine brought up NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which, though also severely delayed for years leading up to its debut, managed a completely successful mission right out of the gate. "The first time SLS launched, it was rated for crew, and it was ready to go to the moon on the first launch. That's hard to do, and yet it did it," he said.

"This is the challenge," Bridenstine said. "We still don't have a lander, and without a lander, you can't land on the moon. It's really that simple, and I worry that over time that's going to come back and bite us."

During NASA's Apollo missions to the lunar surface in the 1960s and '70s, the Saturn V rocket launched the astronauts aboard their return capsule, with their moon landing vehicle stowed beneath. In contrast, NASA's Artemis missions, which launch Orion on SLS, require separate launches on different launch vehicles to get the moon landers off Earth.

"The genius of Apollo was its simplicity," Bridenstine said.

The architecture for the Artemis missions is much more complex. Starship and Blue Moon will both require refueling flights in order to land astronauts on the lunar surface and then launch them back to orbit around the moon to rendezvous with Orion. The exact number of refueling flights for each lander is unknown, but a recent report from NASA's Office of Inspector General estimated Starship will need at least 15 additional launches to replenish its tanks enough for a full lunar landing mission.

Ahead of the planned Artemis 4 landing, NASA will launch a practice run with Orion and both of the two landers in low Earth orbit (LEO) in mid-to-late 2027. That mission, Artemis 3, will see the astronauts rendezvous and dock with both landers over the course of about two weeks. According to NASA's current plan, Artemis 3 astronauts will have the opportunity to board Blue Moon during their mission, but Starship will fly with a docking adapter only, and not a functional crew cabin — a likely sign of Starship's development progress, and what NASA expects of the spacecraft's capabilities within the next year.

NASA had previously tapped Starship as the lunar lander for Artemis 4, but its performance, as well as Blue Moon's, during Artemis 3 could possibly spur a change in that decision. The agency already voiced dissatisfaction with Starship's development last year, when it announced the possible reopening of the Artemis 3 lander contract due to SpaceX delays. "They're behind," Sean Duffy, who was then NASA's acting administrator, said at the time. "They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China."

Bridenstine voiced a similar sentiment. "Whatever it takes to build a lander soonest is what we ought to be doing as a country," he said.

Humanity has likely dreamed of flight since the very beginning, marveling at birds soaring overhead and trying to puzzle out their seemingly magical secret.

We made some halting steps over the centuries — getting kites aloft in ancient China, for example, and drawing up ambitious but unrealized flying machines during the Renaissance — but our boots were still firmly rooted on the ground when the United States of America was born on July 4, 1776.

Things changed just a few years later, however. In November 1783, a hot-air balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers carried two men on a 25-minute flight over Paris, beginning our species' exploration of the heavens.

Another 120 years passed before we managed to fly with a powered, heavier-than-air craft, a milestone notched by the Wright brothers in North Carolina on Dec. 17, 1903. Remarkably, it took us less than half that long to make the jump from the sky to the final frontier, which cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin did for the first time on April 12, 1961.

Eight years later, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon — a remarkable achievement that was the climactic moment of the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Over the next three and a half years, five more Apollo missions landed on Earth's nearest neighbor, leaving behind flags, footprints and defunct machinery. Now, more than half a century later, our species is gearing up to go back — but this time, in a much different way.

NASA wants to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next decade or so, an ambitious project the agency is undertaking via its Artemis program. And this is not an end in itself; NASA believes the knowledge gained from establishing such an outpost will help humanity make the next giant leap — to Mars.

The ball is rolling on Artemis, with two successful missions already in the books. Artemis I launched an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back in late 2022, and Artemis II sent four astronauts on a loop around the moon this past April. Next up is Artemis III, which will test docking procedures with one or both of the Artemis program's lunar landers (SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon) in Earth orbit in 2027. If all goes well with that flight, Artemis IV will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole, possibly as soon as 2028. (That timeline is far from guaranteed, however, as much development work remains. For example, neither Starship nor Blue Moon has yet reached Earth orbit or been cleared to carry humans.)

This is all happening in the context of a new space race, this time with China. The nation plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and has been ticking boxes that keep this timeline within reach. And China aims to build a base of its own — also near the moon's south pole, which is thought to be rich in water ice — in collaboration with Russia and other partners.

What does all of this mean for the United States? Well, the nation came of age industrially after the Wright brothers' historic flight and has been a leader in aerospace tech and exploration ever since. The U.S. can accomplish amazing things in the final frontier, especially when pushed by a rival, so the years just after its 250th birthday may be quite eventful indeed. Stay tuned!

The United States has taken some significant steps into the final frontier during its first 250 years.

The nation has put people on the moon, helped build and operate a long-running space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) and sent fleets of robotic explorers to many corners of the solar system — and even beyond it, into interstellar space.

All of this work has been done relatively recently, as the space age didn't dawn until 1957; when the U.S. was born on July 4, 1776, humanity was still seven years away from even balloon-borne flight. Where might we be another 250 years from now, on the nation's 500th birthday, should it be fortunate enough to live that long? Trying to see that far into the future is so difficult as to be a fool's errand, but it's fun. So let's have a brief and far from exhaustive crack.

A vibrant in-space economy

The United States and other space powers have already established an off-Earth economy — one based on the activities of communications satellites. Companies like Vantor and Planet sell imagery to a variety of customers, for example, while others like SpaceX (via its subsidiary Starlink) and Viasat provide internet service from above.

That nascent industry will doubtless expand greatly over the next 250 years, and we're already seeing some of the directions it may go. For instance, space tourism has gotten off the ground; wealthy people can book trips to suborbital space, and the super-rich can fly all the way to Earth orbit, as the experience of NASA chief Jared Isaacman shows. (Isaacman, a tech billionaire, has funded and commanded two missions around our planet using SpaceX hardware.)

We've also seen the dawn of in-space manufacturing, with companies such as Made In Space making stuff off Earth and bringing it down for analysis (and eventually, if all goes to plan, sale). This is a field that could really explode over the coming years and decades, according to Dava Newman, director of the Human Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2015 to 2017.

"If you give me a nice big time horizon to look at, I've actually always thought it would be a pharmaceutical breakthrough — manufacturing, more medical-related," Newman told Space.com.

That's because the microgravity environment is great for growing flawless crystals, potentially enabling a newly efficient and effective production line for a wide range of pharmaceuticals and other high-value goods. The California company Varda Space recently demonstrated this potential, successfully crystallizing a stable form of the HIV drug ritonavir in one of its orbital "minifactories" and bringing the drug safely down to Earth.

Asteroid mining, too

There are other potential drivers of a booming off-Earth economy as well. Futurist, astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin pointed to asteroid mining, which several American companies, including AstroForge and TransAstra, are investigating seriously already.

"That's where the riches are," Brin told Space.com.

Those riches come in several forms. For starters, many asteroids are thought to harbor considerable amounts of water, which humanity could leverage for life support and split into oxygen and hydrogen, key components of rocket fuel. Space-rock mining could therefore enable the operation of off-Earth propellant depots, which would allow voyaging spacecraft to top off their tanks on the go and explore the solar system more deeply and ambitiously.

Then there are the metals — industrial-grade stuff like iron and nickel, which could feed the off-Earth manufacturing industry, and precious species such as platinum. So there are huge economic opportunities for us in the asteroid belt, according to Brin.

“The question is, will we be able to leverage asteroidal resources to get a takeoff industry out there?" he said. "And will we remain friends with the robots out there that are doing all of the work?”

That latter question is a serious one, for robotics and artificial intelligence will advance a great deal over the next 250 years. Indeed, humanity will likely merge with robots in meaningful and ethically confounding ways, according to Brin.

"There will be fuzzy boundaries between us and the robots," he said. Our species, Brin added, may eventually "range from residual totally organic types through cyborgs and multilinked clusters all the way to robots who either think of themselves as human citizens, or at least know that it's in their best interest to fool us into thinking they think that."

Living off Earth

There's no guarantee that the U.S. will be able to exploit the plentiful resources of the asteroid belt by 2276. For instance, Brin stressed that the nation, and the world at large, are in danger of falling into a sort of "lobotomized feudalism," which could derail most of our spaceflight hopes and dreams.

If we can avoid that trap, however, Brin thinks that asteroid mining could fuel our expansion into the solar system over the coming decades.

"I have no doubt that, if we restore a rational, scientific civilization, there will be city lights on the moon," Brin said. "I am hoping there will be city lights on the asteroids."

Newman has a different outlook. For starters, she's opposed to the idea of transplanting human civilization on a large scale to pristine worlds.

"I'm not a fan, of course, of colonization," she said. "We should never do that. History should teach us something."

She also doesn't see a business case that would drive companies to spend large amounts of money on moon and Mars activities, which could be prerequisites for the establishment of large human settlements there. And she's skeptical that many people would want to pack up their lives and move to Mars or the moon permanently.

"There's a reason Antarctica is not populated," Newman said. "I love it, I can't get enough of it, but that's pretty crazy. Most people don't want to be in a very isolated, confined environment."

Mars settlement, she added, "doesn't make any sense. It's not Option B. We have to take care of this planet."

Newman still thinks that we should (and will) explore the moon and Mars in the not-too-distant future. But she envisions a much smaller-scale effort that's driven by ambitious science goals — a committed search for signs of life on Mars, for example. This effort will likely start with small outposts on the moon, which will serve as stepping stones for similar activities on the Red Planet.

This vision is not exactly far-fetched; it's the approach that NASA is currently taking with its Artemis program. The agency plans to build an astronaut outpost near the lunar south pole over the next decade or so, then use the information gained to send astronauts to Mars in the late 2030s or 2040s.

A moon or Mars base would be a huge breakthrough, of course, but it wouldn't be our species' first toehold in the final frontier. We've had one since November 2000, when the International Space Station — a partnership involving the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan — began hosting astronauts on a continuous basis. The orbiting lab has been occupied by rotating crews ever since.

Are we alone?

The U.S., and the world at large, will doubtless make great strides in space science over the coming years as well. Indeed, Newman thinks we will answer perhaps the biggest question of all — and doing so won't take anywhere close to 250 years.

"I think definitely we will have found [alien] life," she said. "I think we might find the evidence of life — and it's probably going to be past life — in the coming decade."

Her optimism is based on a number of data points. One is the example of our own planet: Life sprang up here about four billion years ago, not long after Earth had cooled enough to support oceans on its surface. That suggests it doesn't take a miracle for a world to go from habitable to inhabited.

And our solar system hosts multiple worlds that could be habitable. Multiple moons in the outer solar system — Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa, for example — host big liquid-water oceans beneath their icy shells. Titan, Saturn's biggest satellite, hosts hydrocarbon lakes and streams on its surface and likely has a buried water ocean as well, raising the possibility that it could support two entirely different types of life.

Then there's Mars. Scientists know that the Red Planet had lots of surface water in the distant past, around four billion years ago. They see evidence of lakes and streams in many Martian locales, some of which have been explored by rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance. And both of those NASA robots have discovered complex organics, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. Such molecules are not convincing evidence of life, but they're suggestive and intriguing. And humanity aims to follow up on such finds — possibly by astronauts working out of a research base. Mars is therefore the place where we'll likely make the big discovery, Newman said.

Brin was similarly optimistic, predicting that we'll find evidence of alien life in the next 20 years "if we reclaim our potential as an exploratory culture." Mars could be the place it's found, but he thinks the chances are perhaps even greater on Titan and "ice roof" worlds like Europa and Enceladus.

"I would bet 3 to 1 odds we'll find life under ice roofs," Brin said.

If multiple icy moons have life, and we can confirm that each one represents an independent origin, that would tell us something very profound: That life is exceedingly common across the universe.

"It would mean that every star you can see, except perhaps the blue supergiants, has life," Brin said.

The search for intelligent life

The first alien lifeforms we find will probably be microbes, because most life across the universe is likely microbial. That's an inference we can take from Earth, the only inhabited world we know of: Life here remained single-celled for about three billion years, suggesting it's tough to make the leap to more complex organisms.

Becoming a technological civilization is another big leap, one that humanity made just a few centuries ago. But given the vastness of the universe, in both time and space, life has probably made this leap in other places as well, and Brin is bullish on our chances of crossing paths with such aliens — provided we make the right choices in the near future.

“If we restore a dynamic and scientific civilization, we might get some answers to that within 20 to 30 years," he said.

Those answers might come close to home, in the form of long-hidden "lurker" probes sent to our solar system to monitor us on the sly. Or we might pull a world-changing SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal from the sky, one that could not have come from a natural, astrophysical source.

Given how young humans are technologically, however — we started launching things to space less than 70 years ago, after all — we probably won't get the drop on advanced aliens, if they're out there.

"Is it likely that intelligent life will actually find us before we find them? I think that's a pretty good probability," said Newman, who sits on the SETI Institute's board of directors.

And we have a chance to mature greatly as a spacefaring civilization over the next 250 years, Brin said. If everything goes well — we don't fall back into feudalism, for example, and we fully exploit the resources of the asteroid belt — the U.S., and humanity overall, we will likely be able to explore other star systems in a meaningful way. He cited laser sailing as a promising propulsion method, one that could send robots — and perhaps cybernetic versions of ourselves — very far afield on reasonable timescales.

"If we make a dynamic, enlightenment civilization, then it's 100% that we'll send somebody out there," Brin said.

Less than a week after its last test, SpaceX's latest Starship spacecraft went back to the stand for engine checkouts ahead of a coming test flight.

The upper stage for SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, referred to simply as "Ship" — Ship 40, in this case — underwent a static-fire test of all six of its Raptor engines at the company's Massey site in Starbase, Texas. Ship 40 is in line for the 13th test flight of a fully stacked Starship, which is expected within the next month or so.

SpaceX posted a video of the engine test to its X account on Thursday (July 2), showing several angles of the ignition sequence and all six engines (Ship is equipped with three sea-level and three vacuum-optimized Raptors) firing to simulate flight-like conditions on the vehicle.

Ship 40 conducted its first-ever static fire last week, lighting a single Raptor for about 15 seconds. This more recent test involved all six Raptors and lasted a full minute, according to SpaceX.

Ship 40 will take part in the second "Version 3" (V3) Starship launch; SpaceX debuted the updated rocket prototype during a test flight on May 22. That mission went smoothly, for the most part, but it wasn't a complete success; the rocket's Super Heavy booster failed to maneuver its way to a soft ocean splashdown as planned. So the upcoming Flight 13 will likely mirror much of the flight path and mission objectives as Flight 12, including relighting one of Ship's Raptor engines in space.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy lift rocket, designed for seamless landing and reuse. The more capable V3 stands 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall — about 5 feet (1.5 m) taller than V2 — and is the biggest, most powerful rocket ever to fly.

Once development is complete and the vehicle is fully operational, SpaceX has big plans for the rocket, including the expansion of its Starlink satellite-internet network in low Earth orbit and landing NASA astronauts on the moon as a part of the Artemis program. The spacecraft will also be capable of delivering heavier payloads to orbit than any other rocket in history.

The success of this most recent engine test puts SpaceX one step closer to Starship Flight 13. Next steps ahead of that launch will include rolling the mission's Super Heavy booster to the pad at Starbase for engine tests of its own. Super Heavy sports 33 Raptor engines at its business end, which produce nearly 20 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Should Super Heavy's static fire tests go smoothly, Flight 13 could happen as early as August.

It doesn't get more America than giant rockets and missions to the moon.

That's why NASA painted two giant "America 250" logos on the rocket that launched the Artemis 2 astronauts around the moon earlier this year. The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket lifted off on April 1, carrying the Orion spacecraft to orbit with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen.

Their 10-day mission around the moon and back to Earth began with the roaring ignition of SLS's four RS-25 engines and two massive solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Together, they produce 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of force at liftoff, and lofted the 5.75-million-pounds (2.61 million kg) SLS spaceward on what could be the brightest candle lit for America all year.

Each SRB is integrated into a sectioned stack that stands 177 feet (54 meters) tall on either side of the core SLS booster, which, itself, is supported by the SRBs. With the SRBs securely clamped to the launch pad, SLS hangs in the center between them, held up only by the strength of the interstage bolts at their connection points.

At liftoff, the strength of those bolts gets thrust in the opposite direction. SLS's four RS-25 engines aren't powerful enough to carry the rocket through its initial phase of flight, so the SRBs supply the extra force needed to lift SLS off the launch pad.

The Artemis 2 SLS spent much of 2025 under assembly inside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket was completed and fully stacked by October last year, but the "America 250" was added later and unveiled on Dec. 2.

The Artemis 2 crew (including Hansen) sported some America 250 swag as well. On their flight suits, each wore a red-outlined patch featuring SLS blasting off toward the moon and Mars above a United States flag and the phrase, in all caps, "THE ROCKET'S RED GLARE," quoting lyrics from the U.S. national anthem.

The patches first made an appearance in January, during the first Artemis 2 SLS rollout from the VAB, and were worn by the crew before, during and after their mission.

"America’s spirit of discovery is alive, and Artemis is carrying it to the moon and beyond," NASA said in a statement after the "America 250" SRB reveal last year.

The space agency is celebrating America in other ways this summer, as well. Check out NASA's America 250 website for a full list of events.

Jared Isaacman is doing his best to spur his country on to sporting glory.

The NASA chief announced on Tuesday (June 30) that the agency will send a FIFA World Cup 2026 soccer ball to the moon if the U.S. men's national team manages to win the tournament, which is going on right now.

"So, a little bit of motivation for the United States here on this one," Isaacman said during a livestreamed press event on Tuesday. "We're going to one-up Alan Shepard in the golf game on the lunar surface, and we're going to get the soccer ball there."

Shepard famously smuggled two golf balls and an improvised club onto the Apollo 14 mission, which he commanded. On Feb. 6, 1971, the NASA astronaut hit those balls on the moon, becoming the first person ever to play a sport on another world.

The soccer-ball plan, by contrast, would be a sanctioned affair; Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, manager of NASA's Moon Base program, are both behind it.

"I don't know which lander it'll wind up going in," Isaacman said during Tuesday's event, the second of the agency's monthly updates about its plans to build a crewed outpost near the lunar south pole via its Artemis program.

Turning to García-Galán, he added, "I'll leave that to you guys, to handle the payload."

"We will take on that challenge," García-Galán replied. "It will be super exciting to do that if they win. Good luck."

The U.S. men's team will probably need some luck to win the World Cup, an every-four-year event that's currently being jointly hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The American men have won just two knockout-round games in the entire history of the tournament, and one of those came in 1930, during the first-ever World Cup.

The 2026 team has performed better than most of its predecessors to this point, however; the Americans won their four-team group to advance to the single-elimination stage, beating both Paraguay and Australia before losing a meaningless game to Turkiye. (The U.S. had already clinched the group win at that point.)

The U.S. plays Bosnia-Herzegovina in a Round of 32 match on Wednesday (July 1). To hoist the World Cup trophy, the Americans would have to win that game, then four more after that, likely against some perennial soccer powers.

If they make it to the quarterfinals, for example, they'll likely face Spain, which won the World Cup in 2010 — a potential matchup flagged by García-Galán, who's from Málaga.

The U.S. women's soccer team has enjoyed a great deal more success at the international level, winning four of the nine FIFA Women's World Cups to date. (The women's tournament, which is also held every four years, was first played in 1991.)

A moon mission wouldn't be the first trip off Earth for the official FIFA World Cup 2026 soccer ball. NASA also sent one of the balls to the International Space Station, where astronauts played with it in the Kibo module.

"We're working to inspire the next generation by showing how space exploration inspires innovation in sports science — and everyday life," the agency said via X on June 20, in a post that included video of the off-Earth action.

NASA provided an Artemis update today (June 30), announcing new lunar landing contracts for its Moon Base initiative and a surprise new possible rover mission that could be headed to the moon's south pole.

During the second monthly update that NASA has provided for its moon base plans, the agency named Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines as the providers of four robotic landers that will deliver scientific payloads to the surface of the moon, as NASA tests and expands the technologies needed for a permanent human outpost.

"This is this drawing on the playbook that worked very well for NASA during the 1960s," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the livestreamed update, explaining the experiential approach to a crewed lunar return. "We didn't just jump right to Apollo 11."

Isaacman also announced the potential repurposing of an engineering development model built to mirror the agency's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars. "There is another," Isaacman said, quoting Yoda's line from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back."

That test rover is called PROMISE, short for "Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration" (though it was formerly known as Optimism). PROMISE was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where it has been used as a test platform for fixes or commands that engineers want to try on the ground before permanently sending them to Perseverance and Curiosity. Now, NASA wants to send PROMISE on a mission of its own.

Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity — both of which remain active on Mars — without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it.

"We've had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we've got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in," he said. "So the question was posed: 'What if we send it to the moon?'"

With a little refurbishment, PROMISE would help advance NASA's lunar plans, Isaacman added. Like Perseverance and Curiosity, the test rover is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts heat from naturally decaying radioactive material into electricity. So it wouldn't require sunlight to operate — a real benefit on the moon, where most locations experience long stretches of darkness. (NASA plans to build its Artemis base near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor an abundance of water ice and also has a relatively complex lighting environment.)

The other robots currently in the works to launch on future missions to the moon, including the landers announced during today's update, are all solar powered. Through 2029, NASA hopes to launch up to 20 such missions as part of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative to support the first phase of the agency's moon base plans, and the landers announced today will be some of the first in that lineup.

Already expected this year was Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander. It's slated to launch on the company's New Glenn rocket, which exploded last month during an engine test. That anomaly has complicated the Blue Moon timeline, though Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has voiced confidence that New Glenn will launch again this year.

Two lunar deliveries were awarded to Astrobotic's Griffin 1 lander, one of which will fly Astrolab's FLIP rover the surface of the moon in the second half of 2026. Contracts to Firefly and Intuitive Machines call for the use of their Blue Ghost and Nova C landers, respectively, on CLPS missions in the next few years.

Each CLPS lander mission will carry at least three NASA payloads. The Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) array will study lander engine exhaust plume effects on lunar dust, to better predict landing requirements and prevent erosion and dangerous ejecta; a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) will test landers' ability to determine positioning and navigate using lasers and reflectors; and a Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) will measure radiation in the space around the moon and different areas on its surface.

"We know a lot about the moon, some of the south pole, but nothing like what we need to learn before we send humans there and we actually build a moon base," Carlos Garcia-Golan, NASA's Moon Base program manager, said during today's event. "So putting different assets on the surface, prospecting, understanding the environment and the places where we want to go [is] super critical."

Garcia-Golan is on board with the PROMISE moon plan as well. While it might sound crazy to send a spare Mars rover to the moon, it's the kind of crazy that NASA should be doing, he said. After all, JPL's motto is "Dare mighty things."

"We are in the business of the near impossible, so why not?" Garcia-Golan said.

Blue Origin has started rebuilding the launch pad damaged by an explosive accident last month, but the company is working from a very different blueprint this time around.

The company's huge New Glenn rocket exploded on May 28 during a routine engine test at Launch Complex 36A (LC-36A) at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket was destroyed, as were some important pieces of pad infrastructure, including the lightning tower and the transporter-erector, which hauled New Glenn from its integration facility to the pad and raised it vertical upon arrival.

Blue Origin has vowed to bounce back quickly, aiming to fly the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn again by the end of the year. Getting LC-36A rebuilt is a high priority, for the pad is currently New Glenn's only jumping-off point. And Blue Origin has made significant progress on this front the company announced today (June 30).

"Hardware recovery and debris removal operations are complete, and reconstruction of the pad has started," the company's CEO, Dave Limp, said in a statement today.

Reconstruction will not create a facsimile of the original LC-36A, however. Blue Origin is building a new version of the pad, one that lines up with a new concept of operations (ConOps) for New Glenn launches.

"We're moving to a horizontal/vertical hybrid configuration to get us flying again this year at 36A," Limp said via X today. "Let me explain what that means. We mate the stages horizontally in the Integration Facility (IF). Then we bring the integrated vehicle out to the pad, use a crane to perform the vertical breakover, and mate the payload once New Glenn is vertical. This new ConOps has the added benefit of increasing our flight cadence as well."

So the refurbished LC-36A will have a crane rather than a transporter-erector, and payload mating will occur at the pad rather than inside the IF.

According to Limp, Blue Origin had already been planning to employ this "hybrid" ConOps for the super-heavy version of New Glenn that it's developing, called the 9X4. That name references the engine configuration of the coming vehicle: nine of Blue Origin's BE-4s on its first stage and four BE-3Us in its upper stage.

The current version of New Glenn is a 7X2. It can haul about 50 tons (45 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit. The 9X4 will be able to carry 77 tons (70 metric tons) to LEO and will also feature a bigger payload fairing — one that's 28.5 feet (8.7 meters) wide rather than 23 feet (7 m).

Blue Origin had already been developing another Cape Canaveral pad, LC-36B, to accommodate 9X4 launches. That pad is being readied for the "hybrid" ConOps as well, according to Limp.

Today's update also let us know that Blue Origin has made some progress in its investigation into the May 28 anomaly, though more work needs to be done.

"The vehicle is highly instrumented with extensive data from multiple camera angles and sensors, giving us confidence in our ability to identify and correct the root cause," Limp wrote. "Early analysis points to the aft section of the first stage."

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET on June 30: During its Moon Base update today (June 30), NASA revealed a handful of new lunar-lander contracts and announced that it's considering launching a spare Mars rover to the moon. Read all about it here.

NASA will provide an update about its moon base plans this afternoon (June 30), and you can watch it live.

Agency chief Jared Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, the manager for NASA's moon base program, "will discuss the next set of awards for new lunar lander missions and preview upcoming opportunities as the agency works toward building a sustained presence on the moon," NASA officials wrote in a media advisory.

The event will begin today at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency.

The moon base is a core piece of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent, sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor over the next decade or so.

The Artemis architecture previously called for the assembly of a small space station in lunar orbit called Gateway. In late March, however, Isaacman announced that NASA was pausing its Gateway plans and instead focusing on building a surface outpost.

That base will be constructed near the lunar south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice, a key resource that can be used for life support and also be split into hydrogen and oxygen to provide rocket fuel.

Construction of the base will require a variety of work by robotic lunar rovers and landers. Presumably, today's press conference will shine some more light on that work and reveal which companies will be contracted to do it.

NASA has launched two Artemis missions to date. Artemis 1 sent an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back in late 2022, and Artemis 2 launched four astronauts around the moon this past April.

NASA is currently gearing up for Artemis 3, a crewed mission that will test docking procedures between Orion and one or two privately developed lunar landers in Earth orbit.

The agency aims to launch Artemis 3 in mid-2027. If all goes well with that flight, Artemis 4 will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, potentially as early as late 2028.

NASA is taking the "America 250" birthday celebration to new heights.

The agency has big plans for July 4 — the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence — which involves both aircraft and spacecraft.

"From the earliest days of exploration, to the first steps on the moon and the missions shaping our future, NASA represents the spirit of discovery that defines our nation," the agency wrote on a webpage marking the milestone anniversary.

The party was already underway in April, when the Artemis 2 mission circled the moon. The four Artemis 2 astronauts — three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency — sported "America 250" patches among their gear.

The patch shows NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launching into the black, near a "250" surrounded by stars. Around the edges of the patch are the words "NASA: The rocket's red glare," alluding to the U.S. national anthem.

Another version of the America 250 emblem, prominently featuring the numbers in red and blue, also was mounted on each of the solid rocket boosters of Artemis 2's SLS.

There's a lot more planned in the coming weeks to ramp up to Independence Day and beyond. NASA said it will have a "series of special aircraft flyovers" at the following locations and times:

• July 3-5: The Great American State Fair, Washington, D.C.
• July 4: Salute to America: The Nation's 250th Birthday Fireworks Celebration, Washington, D.C.
• July 23-24: EAA AirVenture, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
• Aug. 23: Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.
• Oct. 3-4: Pacific Air Show, Huntington Beach, California
• Oct. 31-Nov. 1: Commemorative Air Force Wings Over Houston Air Show

The agency also plans to make a special appearance at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., between June 25 and July 10. NASA will host a pavilion featuring Artemis, a model of its planned Moon Base and a crew survival suit for the Orion spacecraft.

Other pavilion exhibits include "authentic spacesuit tools, immersive pop-up visuals, the X-59 experimental aircraft model, interactive tabletop demonstrations, astronaut food, and life-size astronaut cutouts for photos," NASA officials stated.

NASA has also celebrated America 250 by displaying the event logo on the countdown clock at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Artemis 2 launch site, and lighting up the Washington Monument with an SLS rocket projection around New Year's Eve.

Meanwhile, NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is offering a "250 Space Dreams" contest between July 1 and Aug. 2. The Space Coast facility will randomly select visitors to receive an envelope with a certificate and QR code inside.

Prizes will vary, but winners could receive NASA merch, spots on a bus tour, a free ticket to an astronaut chat, or grand prizes for things such as signed astronaut gear or $250 for on-site souvenirs.

Blue Origin is hard at work at its Cape Canaveral launch pad, collecting debris and repairing the damage after an explosive accident last month.

The company's New Glenn rocket exploded during a fueling test last month at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36). The resulting fireball laid waste to the surrounding facility, and erupted in a burst with a glow visible more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away. In the aftermath, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp voiced confidence that, despite the setback, the company would bring New Glenn back to the pad for a launch before the end of the year.

He doubled down on that assessment in an X post on Thursday (June 25), which featured a timelapse video of the work done at LC-36 over the past few weeks. "Huge shoutout to the team who have been working 7x24" Limp said. "We have started reconstruction and still plan to fly again this year."

In his post, Limp said that all the debris has now been cleared from LC-36, and that all the wreckage from New Glenn and the surrounding facilities was collected within nine days of the explosion.

The speedy cleanup is a positive step toward Blue Origin's goal of launching New Glenn again by the end of 2026, but it's still an ambitious undertaking. Similar incidents, like the explosion of SpaceX's Falcon 9 at LC-40 in 2016, have taken up to twice as long to recover from. For Blue Origin, though, there's a lot on the line.

NASA has contracted the company's Blue Moon spacecraft as one of the agency's crewed Artemis lunar landers, and Blue Moon has been designed to launch on New Glenn. NASA is targeting late 2027 for the launch of Artemis 3, which depends on astronauts aboard an Orion capsule rendezvousing with Blue Moon in low Earth orbit to demonstrate docking maneuvers and spacecraft interoperability ahead of future missions to land astronauts on the lunar surface.

Orion will also dock with SpaceX's Starship during Artemis 3, if all goes to plan. NASA initially selected Starship as the lunar lander for Artemis 4 and 5, but delays in the development of the huge vehicle prompted NASA to reopen its considerations about which lander would fly the landing missions ahead. Should either Starship or Blue Moon not be ready in time to launch for Artemis 3, their builders risk losing out on the chance to return American astronauts to the moon.

About a month has passed since the first launch of SpaceX's "Version 3" Starship rocket, and the spaceflight company has already begun testing on its next such vehicle.

SpaceX recently transported Ship 40, the upper stage in line to launch Starship's upcoming Flight 13 demonstration mission, to the Massey test site at its facilities in Starbase, Texas. Secured at its base, Starship performed a full-duration burn of one of its central Raptor 3 engines that lasted about 15 seconds.

The test, called a static fire, is meant to confirm that the spacecraft's engines are in working order ahead of an actual launch. SpaceX posted a video of the test on X today (June 26). The Ship upper stage is equipped with six Raptor 3 engines — three sea-level engines, and three configured for optimized flight in the vacuum of space. The vehicle uses all six during ascent, but only a single sea-level engine during the final phase of its landing burn.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy lift rocket, designed to be completely reusable. Its most recent test flight launched on May 22, completing a mostly successful demonstration of the vehicle's upgraded V3 hardware. At 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, Starship V3 is the biggest, most powerful iteration of the launch vehicle to date, and is the first to sport SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engines.

Despite a few malfunctions during the V3 debut last month, including failure of the rocket's Super Heavy booster to maneuver its way to a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX deemed the launch a successful test of the upgraded vehicle's new systems. In addition to the full outfit of Raptor 3s, V3 is equipped with enhanced aerodynamic grid fins, refined thermal protections, an increased fuel capacity and docking nodes to facilitate propellant transfer in space.

That last capability is especially critical for Starship's success. Ship is capable of reaching low Earth orbit (LEO) using its onboard fuel, after Super Heavy lofts the stage through Earth's atmosphere, but once there, it can't fly much farther. (Note: Starship hasn't actually reached orbit yet. All of its launches to date have been suborbital.) To fly beyond LEO, Ship requires refueling from additional Starship launches designed to top off its tanks, a critical function of the giant spacecraft that SpaceX has yet to demonstrate, but that's expected to change this year.

SpaceX has been contracted by NASA to provide Ship as the lander to deliver astronauts to the moon as a part of the agency's Artemis program. To get there, NASA says the spacecraft will require at least 15 refueling flights. The first of those landing missions, Artemis 4, is scheduled for late 2028. Ship is also scheduled to launch as part of Artemis 3, during which astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft will dock with the lander to practice maneuvers with the mated vehicles, but is not expected to require refueling flights for that mission.

The recent static fire with Ship 40 means SpaceX is progressing toward Starship's next full flight campaign, which will feature engine tests with all six of Ship 40's Raptors and all 33 of Super Heavy's. The company hasn't yet released any details about the upcoming Flight 13, but the company will likely attempt to launch the mission before the end of the summer.

A new memo from NASA's Office of Inspector General has revealed how major pieces of Artemis program hardware became costly components of lunar missions that no longer align with the agency's new plans to return astronauts to the moon and have since been canceled.

NASA announced a major shakeup to its Artemis plans earlier this year at its "Ignition Day" event, restructuring its mission goals in order to streamline the return of astronauts to the lunar surface and simplify the architecture needed to get them there. Most notably, the program's first crewed moon landing was shifted from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4, and upgraded variations of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket were abandoned for a single uniform design. The Gateway space station planned for lunar orbit was also canceled in favor of a stronger focus on establishing a base on the moon's surface.

The switch-up left behind a trail of expensive hardware, including SLS's upgraded Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) and the adapter meant to fit it to the SLS rocket, a larger launch tower, and Gateway's Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module. Now, an interim Office of Inspector General (OIG) memo released June 24 offers a striking snapshot of just what NASA is walking away from. It calculates that NASA's final investment into the canceled hardware, which was originally contracted at a combined $2.9 billion, reached $5.9 billion by the time work was ceased, and concludes that, had NASA continued its support, costs and timelines would have continued to grow.

The report outlines rising costs and developmental delays for each of the aforementioned pieces of hardware, and shows how some Artemis systems were years late, billions of dollars over their original estimates and facing major technical problems. NASA is currently targeting 2028 for the program's first lunar landing on Artemis 4. Had the agency not restructured its mission plans, NASA's goal of landing astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade would have very likely been unobtainable.

Under the old Artemis plan, the Boeing-built EUS was intended for bigger, future versions of SLS, and would have increased the rocket's capabilities to send Orion and heavier cargo to the moon by 40%. Boeing is also responsible for developing and assembling the SLS core stage, and was selected to design and manufacture EUS in February 2017. EUS was added to Boeing's existing SLS contract, and folded into the work order to the tune of $962 million, with a delivery date set for March 2021.

In March 2026, after NASA announced its new Artemis plans, Boeing still had not delivered EUS, nor could it specify when it expected to do so and was issued a stop work order. By that time, the EUS allocations in Boeing's contract had risen to nearly $2 billion, with the company estimating that the number would rise to $3.7 billion by the project's completion. According to the OIG report's findings, Boeing wouldn't have been able to deliver the first flight-ready EUS to NASA until the end of 2028 — 7.5 years after its original due date.

Part of the continued EUS delays were a result of NASA's reprioritization of Boeing's efforts in 2018 to expedite completion of the SLS core stage, according to the OIG. The memo also cites the evolving design of Artemis missions, supply chain shortages and development issues that eroded the agency's confidence in Boeing. "NASA noted significant weaknesses related to EUS production efficiency, including unrealistic production schedules and the lack of a clear plan for improvement," the memo states.

Another scrapped component of the now-canceled SLS variants — and, perhaps, one of the most jaw-dropping, given the component's size and apparent simplicity — is the Universal Stage Adapter (USA). Designed by Dynetics, Inc., the USA was a conical section of SLS positioned to connect EUS to Orion and carry additional mission payloads. NASA contracted Dynetics to manufacture the USA for $131 million in 2017, and added another $9 million for the incorporation of the adapter's environmentally-controlled secondary payload deployment capability in 2022. That number had reached $353 million when NASA issued Dynetics' stop work order in February, and would have climbed to $497 million before the USA's completion, which the OIG report estimates would have been delayed to May 2030.

"The USA contract's cost and schedule estimates grew beyond original estimates due to both NASA directed modifications and Dynetics' performance issues," the OIG memo concluded, but notes that NASA's satisfaction with Dynetics steadily declined from "very good" in 2024, to "unsatisfactory" by the end of 2025.

Mobile Launcher 2 (ML-2), the huge tower connecting power and fuel umbilicals to SLS during assembly and prior to liftoff, followed a similar pattern. ML-2 was being constructed to support the taller SLS configurations that would have been incompatible with the current mobile launcher. That contract was awarded to Bechtel National, Inc. in June 2019 for $383 million.

NASA expected delivery in March 2023, but increasing cost evaluations from Bechtel delayed ML-2's completion and ballooned the contract to $1.6 billion by the start of 2026. The company was expected to complete ML-2 by this summer, but the OIG report estimates it would have been closer to December, with another one to two years of validation testing for NASA to ready the tower to support a launch, and costs reaching $2 billion.

The OIG asserts that Bechtel was unprepared for the intricacies of ML-2 design needs, and placed an additional financial burden on NASA during an extended development process. "Bechtel's reluctance to utilize NASA expertise, failure to track risks, challenges with managing the launcher's weight, and lack of a certified earned value management system impacted the contractor's cost, schedule, and performance," the report states.

The HALO module for the defunct Gateway space station was another casualty of NASA's altered Artemis plans, but had already incurred some injuries along the way. After its delivery to the United States from subcontractor Thales Alenia Space, in Turin, Italy in April 2025, Northrop Grumman discovered "widespread corrosion throughout the module," the OIG report says.

NASA's contract for HALO with Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems began as a $187 million sole-source acquisition in 2019, which had increased to $1.8 billion by September 2024. It reached $1.9 billion by the time NASA issued their stop work order in April, but was projected to continue to rise as delivery estimates were pushed to 2031.

Some of the blame for HALO's mismanagement falls on NASA, which the OIG memo says put unrealistic expectations on Northrop's progress. "Driven by the necessity to meet Artemis launch schedules, the Gateway Program worked toward unrealistic schedules throughout the life cycle of HALO," OIG's memo states, and cites a quote from Gateway's own independent Standing Review Board that says, "lack of schedule realism may be driving suboptimal engineering decisions during development."

The OIG report was issued amid an audit of "NASA's management of developed assets for programs and projects terminated prior to launch or operations," it says.

The OIG release included NASA's reply to a draft of the memo, acknowledging the role of shifting mission parameters, resource shortages and issues within each contractor that contributed to rising costs and ongoing delays, but maintained that the restructuring of Artemis was designed specifically to move the agency away from such costly practices.

"These projections rely on past performance under outdated architectural assumptions that do not reflect the Ignition Day principles of discipline, affordability, simplification, and speed," NASA's response says.

NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon and bolster a rapidly growing commercial space industry is facing an infrastructure obstacle.

A new report from NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) warns that launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia are approaching capacity as demand accelerates across the agency and the private sector. Support infrastructure — such as roads, electricity, and gas and fuel pipelines that laid the foundation for KSC's network of launch pads built to support the Apollo program in the 1960s — are being increasingly stretched by the demands of NASA's Artemis missions, SpaceX, Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance (ULA) and other users.

"Based on current launch projections, Kennedy and Wallops are expected to operate near capacity in the 2028 to 2029 time frame," states the report, which was released on Monday (June 22). Though it credits NASA for already taking steps to address these issues, agency officials estimate it will take at least $1 billion to complete all the necessary upgrades, of which only $250 million was provided as part of NASA's funds allocated in last year's 2025 H.R.1 reconciliation bill.

On Florida's Space Coast, the assessment encompasses launch facilities at KSC as well as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), which saw an increase of NASA-supported launches from 31 in 2020 to 109 in 2025, according to the report. Wallops, where there are fewer and smaller launch pads, doesn't traditionally see as many missions compared to KSC. But the Virginia site has experienced an even sharper jump, percentage-wise, over the same timeframe — from three launches in 2020 to 17 in 2025 (a 467% rise). By 2030, NASA expects traffic at both sites to increase by another 150% or so. And NASA officials told auditors that raw launch counts don't fully capture the strain on infrastructure, because launch campaigns require days or weeks of support activity before liftoff.

The report outlines launch infrastructure shortcomings at both facilities, but notes that Wallops' challenges have been partially mitigated by recent upgrades across its seven active launch sites. Wallops generally hosts small and medium-lift launch vehicles, like Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and Rocket Lab's Electron, but has taken steps to support Rocket Lab's upcoming Neutron, as well as Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket, which is expected to launch from the site sometime this year.

The major launch pads in question at KSC and CCSFS include Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) and LC-39B, used by SpaceX and NASA, respectively; Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40), also used by SpaceX; SLC-41, used by ULA's Atlas and Vulcan rockets; and SLC-36, used by Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

SpaceX has transitioned to launching its Falcon 9 rocket primarily from SLC-40 and has reserved LC-39A for Falcon Heavy launches while construction of the first Florida launch tower for its Starship rocket is underway at the same pad. SpaceX hopes to start launching Starship from this pad before the end of 2026.

The company also has plans for a second Space Coast pad for Starship, at SLC-37. Once Starship, which is still under development at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, facility, becomes fully operational, the company expects up to 44 launches a year from KSC, with an additional 76 launches per year projected from SLC-37 at CCSFS. That equals about one Starship launch every eight days for LC-39A, but a higher cadence will be needed to successfully support NASA's Artemis program.

Artemis missions utilize NASA's Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts from the Earth to the moon, and the agency has contracted Starship, as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, to be the program's crewed lunar landers. All of these vehicles require heavy-lift rockets.

Orion launches on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from LC-39B. For Artemis 4, currently scheduled for 2028, NASA plans to dock Orion with Starship in Earth orbit, and use Starship to propel the two spacecraft to orbit around the moon. Starship will then undock from Orion, carry a set of astronauts down to the lunar surface, and then launch them back to orbit around the moon to rendezvous and dock again with Orion.

To accomplish this, Starship will require at least 15 refueling flights to top off its tanks before its initial burn for the moon, which would fly in addition to the company's projected eight-day launch cadence, according to the report.

Growing demand for heavy-lift rockets is also increasing pressure to find additional launch sites. Blue Moon is designed to launch on New Glenn, and will also require refueling launches to reach the moon. Setting aside the fact that New Glenn recently exploded during a fueling test that severely damaged SLC-36, the report indicates that Blue Origin officials have told NASA that the pad alone may not provide sufficient long-term capacity and resiliency for the company's future plans, and noted that the constraints have already forced the company to delay launches.

Much of the infrastructure between KSC and CCSFS facilities is considered "common-use," the report says, which puts added stress on available resources shared across different launch providers. That includes a massive electrical grid; 231 miles (372 kilometers) of roadway, much of which was paved in the 1960s without consideration for the weight and frequency of super heavy rocket stages being transported to and from launch pads; and more than 40 miles (64 km) of gaseous pipeline supporting nitrogen (GN2) and helium distribution, which is unable to supply high-flow operations from multiple users in its current state.

"This issue created a major scheduling challenge during preparation for the New Glenn-1 mission that launched in January 2025," the report says. It also anticipates further Artemis mission launch constraints if the issue is not addressed.

Artemis 3, targeted for 2027, will require launches of SLS, New Glenn and multiple Starships all within a small handful of days. The mission will see both private landers — if they're both ready — rendezvous with Orion to practice docking maneuvers in low Earth orbit over the course of about two weeks, but the OIG report calls the feasibility of those back-to-back launches into question.

"Kennedy will be unable to provide GN2 for future Space Launch System launches for Artemis from LC 39B while simultaneously supporting Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle launching from Space Launch Complex 36 at CCSFS," the report says. It projects a possible one- to two-month blackout period of GN2 availability as a result of future SLS launches.

The report further found that NASA has struggled to maintain and modernize its launch infrastructure, partially due to declining maintenance budgets and poor funding structures that prevent an equitable recoupment of costs from commercial providers leasing the launch facilities. "Significant statutory funding barriers prevent the Agency from receiving money directly from commercial partners for use of the Agency’s launch infrastructure," the report says. And, as it currently stands, any commercial investment in NASA's infrastructure is deducted from the agency's budget appropriation, in addition to being a violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the agency from spending federal funds without Congressional approval.

Ultimately, the report recommends prioritizing improvements to NASA's transportation networks, utility systems and resource distribution infrastructure while exploring additional funding mechanisms to support future upgrades. It also suggests three key action items for the space agency:

1. Perform an assessment and create a mitigation strategy to address roadway degradation caused by the increased traffic from heavy-lift launch vehicle transportation and commercial providers.
2. Prioritize the allocation of available funds for the maintenance of common-use launch infrastructure, including roads, electricity distribution, and gaseous pipelines and resource reserves.
3. Explore alternative funding mechanisms and evaluate commercial partnership policies to charge an "Other Approved Indirect Rate" to contribute to upgrades necessary to maintain the aforementioned infrastructure.

"While NASA’s goal is to renew — replace, repair, or upgrade — its infrastructure every 66 years, the current renewal rate, based on the available budget, is over 260 years," the report says.

A lot has changed since NASA last sent astronauts to the moon — including the attitudes of those space explorers.

That's the view of Victor Glover, the NASA astronaut who served as pilot on the Artemis 2 mission around the moon's far side this past April.

"When you look back on the Apollo missions, there was a lot more competition back in the office. Everybody wanted to be the first, and then everybody wanted to be the next," Glover told Angels Broadcast Television on June 12, shortly before he threw out the first pitch before a baseball game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Tampa Bay Rays.

"I think our office learned a lot from them," he added. "There are some good things about that. It makes you work really hard, but it also can create some unnecessary conflict. And so my office really wants to support everybody — wants you to be the guy that does it, and somebody just gets picked to do it, and that's OK."

Glover and his Artemis 2 crewmates — NASA's Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — did indeed seem to forge a very strong bond during their training and their time in space.

For example, shortly before Artemis 2's April 1 launch, Glover, Koch and Hansen came up with a plan to name a crater on the moon after Wiseman's wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

"They said the three of them had talked, and they would like to do this," Wiseman said on April 6, the day Artemis 2 looped around the moon and got farther from Earth than any crewed mission ever had. "That was an emotional moment for me. And I just thought that was just a total treasure, that they had thought through this, and they had offered this."

Wiseman, Artemis 2's commander, said he broke down when Hansen radioed mission control with the naming request. In fact, all four astronauts were overcome with emotion at that moment.

"That was, I think, where the four of us were the most forged, the most bonded, and we came out of that really focused on that day ahead," Wiseman said.

The atmosphere was a bit different during the 1960s and early 1970s, as Glover noted; undercurrents of competition and rivalry reportedly ran through the Apollo crews.

For example, multiple people, including Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, have said that Buzz Aldrin lobbied to be the first person to set foot on the moon, an honor that eventually went to Apollo 11 crewmate Neil Armstrong. (Aldrin has disputed this version of events, saying he didn't want to be the first-ever moonwalker.)

There are other big differences between Artemis and Apollo, of course. Apollo was designed to get people to the moon before the Soviet Union could do so, a goal that was regarded as a national security imperative because it would demonstrate American technological supremacy. As a result of this need for speed, Apollo did not build anything permanent on the moon, leaving behind only flags, footprints and defunct spacecraft.

Artemis, on the other hand, aims to establish a permanent and sustainable presence on Earth's nearest neighbor. If all goes to plan, NASA will build one or more moon bases near the lunar south pole, then use the skills and knowledge gained from this endeavor to get astronauts even farther afield — to Mars.

GOLDEN, Colorado — The moon is in need of good and accurate artists!

As NASA's Artemis program hits its stride, and in a few years "reboots" our moon with a human presence, there's an urgent need to guard against artistic misrepresentations of the lunar landscape, experts say.

We've all seen those alluring lunar renderings of vehicles and astronauts bounding about while setting up equipment and putting in place a moon base.

Reality versus depictions

"We are telling the public the moon is easy — it is not!"

That's the matter-of-fact warning from Daniel Britt, the Pegasus Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida. He's also the director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science.

Britt spoke about and showcased artists' misconceptions during a "reality versus depictions of the lunar surface" talk here at a Space Resources Roundtable, held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.

"I wish I could say that engineers and managers know better, but they don't. We are training a generation of engineers to not worry about terrain. If the artists are getting it wrong, it is our fault. Let's stop fooling ourselves," Britt said.

Well versed in what the lunar surface truly offers, Britt scolded a number of arty accounts of lunar territory promulgated by both NASA and commercial space ventures. He spotlighted what's wrong with those pictures — for starters, small craters and ever-present lunar dust, along with dirty astronauts, dirty equipment and dirty habitats.

Facts of life

A flat, dustless moon is not the one we are sending Artemis astronauts to, said Britt. Crews will experience coarse terrain, pervasive dust, and a surface unlike anything here on Earth. These are the facts of life on the moon, he said.

The Apollo moon-landing missions learned this first hand. But those astronauts explored equatorial areas. The Artemis program is targeting the lunar south polar region, which will be tough to deal with thanks to the low angle of the sun.

"When you look into the sun, it will be blasting into your face. But at least you'll see the shadow of that crater you are about to trip into," said Britt. "But looking down-sun, you won't see diddly squat."

"There's need to stop deluding ourselves," Britt told Space.com, advocating the creation of a 1-to-10 scoring system for lunar art, with prizes for the worst and best visualizations

"What I want to do is land on the moon way safer and easier," he added, "so you need to ask yourself what's missing from these depictions. We are training the public to think this is easy."

False impression

To support his concern, Britt spotlighted both Apollo moonwalker-taken imagery and the scenery as projected by artists, be it using paint brush or artificial intelligence-guided computer work.

"The sun angle washes out the rough terrain. Almost all the pictures taken from the surface give the very false impression of a flat, gentle terrain," Britt said. "The reality is that the lunar surface is heavily cratered, rough, very dusty and covered in regolith."

Most Apollo surface images were taken "down-sun" because looking "up-sun" was hard. "This leaves a very false impression of a flat moon with gentle terrain," Britt said.

Tilt problems

Apollo was pretty lucky, Britt said, observing that several of the six human moon landings experienced tilt problems. For instance, Apollo 14 experienced a 7-degree tilt on landing, and Apollo 15 had an 11-degree tilt on touchdown.

Apollo 11 had to dodge a boulder field. Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 landed on the edge of big craters. "Even small craters can be meters deep," said Britt, recalling problems encountered by astronauts on their descent to the moon.

"The dust went as far as I could see in any direction and completely obliterated craters and anything else … I couldn't tell what was underneath me," astronaut Pete Conrad said during an Apollo 12 debriefing. "I knew I was in a generally good area, and I was just going to have to bite the bullet and land, because I couldn't tell whether there was a crater down there or not."

Similarly, Apollo 16 commander John Young said: "I couldn't judge slope out the window worth a hoot, and that's the truth. Even down low. The ground looks flat, but I'm sure it would look flat if it had been a 6-8 degree slope, too. I don't see any way around that."

Getting it wrong

A flat, crater-free, dustless moon is a staple of imagery issued by NASA, the European Space Agency, other space agencies, and even private space firms, said Britt.

"Yes, these are artists' impressions," Britt said, "but somebody is telling the artists what to draw. I love the idea of landing and operating on a moon without dust, small craters, and rough terrain. However, we see the misconception of a flat, gentle moon everywhere."

"Commercial providers are just as bad. No dust, almost no small craters, no tipping problems. Yes, these are artists' impressions, and they are getting it wrong," said Britt. "NASA knows better. All these people should know better, but don't. Let's not fool the public. We owe them better data."

GOLDEN, Colorado – Here on Earth, centuries of accumulated engineering knowhow, hard-learned lessons, and societal evolution have shaped a robust framework of building standards that govern how we build and maintain buildings today.

But now, as humanity prepares to put in place a "sustained presence" on the moon, how do we guarantee the safety and integrity of structures built in an environment for which no such tradition exists?

At the 26th Space Resources Roundtable held June 2-5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines, one expert says what's needed is a lunar building code, the development of specific design criteria for the moon.

What's shaking?

Both NASA and China's space agency are planning to build habitats, landing pads, equipment shelters, and tall towers on the moon. But all that construction could be off to a shaky start, suggests Nerma Caluk, an engineer and lunar specialist for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architecture and structural engineering firm in San Francisco, California.

Caluk said there's a need to leverage terrestrial building experiences.

"On Earth, structural systems rely on strong gravitational acceleration to resist seismic lateral forces through both foundation friction and overturning stability. However, on the moon, the gravitational field strength is reduced to just one-sixth of Earth's surface gravity," Caluk told Space.com.

Because seismic inertial forces are governed purely by a structure's mass rather than its weight, the lateral demand on a structure remains fully active while its gravitational restoring capacity is substantially diminished, Caluk added.

"Low-profile surface structures risk translational sliding across poorly characterized regolith interfaces, while taller vertical structures face significant overturning vulnerability, as the moon provides only a fraction of the gravitational restoring moment available in a terrestrial seismic environment," said Caluk.

Here on Earth, structural engineers routinely design typical building systems to yield, crack, and sustain permanent inelastic deformation during a design-level seismic event.

They intentionally leverage "inelastic energy dissipation" as the primary mechanism for managing seismic demand, Caluk said. But this design philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with a crewed lunar environment, she said.

Take for example a hatch distortion or pressure seal misalignment. They constitute a mission-critical failure, and any structural breach risks catastrophic depressurization, said Caluk.

A group taking on the challenge of shaping guidelines on the building of lunar infrastructure is the aerospace division of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The group's technical committee on space engineering and construction has crafted "Infrastructure Engineering, Design, Analysis, and Construction (LIEDAC) guidelines" for the moon, Caluk said, to tackle seismic issues imposed by moonquakes.

The LIEDAC guidelines, Caluk said, characterize the unique lunar hazard environment, classify operational consequences through a risk-categorization hierarchy, and establish target performance objectives "so that safe commercial development can proceed on a defensible technical basis."

Inherent uncertainties

Caluk also outlined a "Response Spectrum Analysis" supported by NASA Small Business Technology Transfer funding that looked at the inherent uncertainties of the lunar subsurface.

The output of the analysis has developed criteria emphasizing the necessity of a local geotechnical site investigation for all structures, regardless of their seismic design category.

"These investigations are critical for identifying and mitigating risks such as seismic slope stability, seismically induced total and differential settlement, and other geotechnical hazards that may be triggered or amplified by moonquake ground motions," she reported here at the School of Mines gathering.

Moreover, the framework that Caluk and her associates have pulled together, acknowledges that lunar site conditions are not yet fully understood on a global scale.

Design practices

Not knowing ahead of time what lunar explorers may face is an unsure, shuddering proposition.

"Therefore, responsible design practices must account for this uncertainty through rigorous subsurface investigation whenever feasible," Caluk added. "By prioritizing localized data collection, engineers can ensure that structural foundations are robust enough to handle the unique physical properties of the lunar regolith and the specific seismic demands of the deployment site."

Caluk and her team members looked at the maximum considered moonquake, representing a more severe shaking level, to verify collapse prevention and ensure overall structural integrity under extreme lunar seismic events.

"NASA's deep institutional knowledge of human spaceflight operations and crewed mission safety," Caluk concluded, "provides the critical foundation upon which structural performance criteria for lunar infrastructure can now be formally established, with terrestrial engineering precedent offering a proven methodology for doing so even under evolving geotechnical and seismic data conditions."

HOUSTON — Ever had a mysterious meeting with management show up on your work calendar? Unannounced and unprompted? With invitees from parts of the company you don't normally sit in on meetings with?

That kind of calendar event might send spikes of panic down the spines of some recipients, but it's not always the dreaded meeting with HR you may fear. In this case at NASA, the unsuspecting attendees were not handed their pink slips and shown the door. Quite the opposite. They were gathered to learn the crew assignments for Artemis 3, the agency's next mission progressing its efforts to return astronauts to the moon. Turns out, the five astronauts sitting in the room that day were to become the primary and backup crew for Artemis 3.

"Historically, I think most of us have been told in the past individually," Artemis 3 backup crew member NASA astronaut Bob Hines told Space.com. "There was some fake meeting name that showed up on a calendar, and we all ended up in a room together," he said.

NASA announced the Artemis 3 crew to the public during a reveal ceremony at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) on June 9. It includes NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik as mission commander, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano from the European Space Agency as pilot, NASA's Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas as mission specialists, and Hines as backup.

The quartet will lift off aboard an Orion spacecraft on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and spend about two weeks in low Earth orbit. There, Orion will rendezvous and dock with two different lunar lander designs to test the vehicles' compatibility in space. It's the follow-on mission to NASA's Artemis 2, which flew Orion and a crew of four on a 10-day mission around the moon in April, and the precursor to the Artemis program's first planned lunar landing mission, Artemis 4.

Near the end of Artemis 2, NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya told reporters the Artemis 3 crew announcement would come "soon" — and now that the picks have been revealed to the public, we're also gaining a little more insight into how the astronauts found out the news themselves.

Sitting together around a table in a room at JSC about two weeks before the public announcement, not knowing why they had been called in, NASA's chief astronaut Scott Tingle told the group: "'Look around. This is your Artemis 3 crew,'" Hines said. "That was a really, really cool way to find out."

"We know that there's a cast of thousands that make it happen," he said. "There are a lot of astronauts that are qualified and capable of doing it, and it is an incredible responsibility that not just the astronaut office or NASA, but that the country bestows upon us."

NASA announced a group of 18 astronauts up for consideration for Artemis mission assignments in 2020. Since then, however, the eligibility pool has grown as NASA's broader astronaut cadre has gained more experience, widening the possibilities leading up to the Artemis 3 crew selection. The commander for Artemis 2, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, was one of those from outside the original 18 — and now, only one astronaut from the original list, Rubio, wound up being assigned to Artemis 3.

Even though he is designated as the mission's backup, Hines and his Artemis 3 colleagues see themselves as a single group. "We're really looking at it as a crew of five and making sure that everybody's ready to go come launch," Hines said. In fact, as the sole backup astronaut for the Artemis 3 crew, Hines' training will cover the needed skills for each mission crew member, rather than the individualized responsibilities of any one of them.

"The intent is that I can substitute in for anybody if they drop out at any time," Hines said. "So, as you can imagine, that's a lot of things to cover."

Now that the Artemis 3 crew selection has been made, the group will begin training for their mission ahead. NASA is targeting the latter half of 2027 to launch Artemis 3, putting the astronauts on a time crunch leading up to liftoff.

By comparison, NASA announced the astronauts for Artemis 2 in 2023. Their three years of training will be cut in half for the Artemis 3 crew, if it launches on schedule, and for a much more complex mission than its predecessor.

Both lunar lander vehicles for the Artemis program, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, have faced significant development delays, and neither has yet made it to orbit. So, for NASA to launch Orion to rendezvous, dock and perform maneuvers with two unproven spacecraft makes Artemis 3 one of the agency's most complicated missions it's ever taken on.

For his part, Hines doesn't mind being the backup for Artemis 3's primary crew, even if it means not getting to fly to space as a part of the mission. "We all are really excited to play any role in it," he said. And his role on Artemis 3 gives him a potential advantage when NASA chooses the crew for Artemis 4.

Prior to his selection as mission specialist for Artemis 3, Douglas served as the backup astronaut for Artemis 2. So Hines could very well be positioned for an upcoming lunar landing.

"I think any astronaut is lying to you if they say they don't hope they're not on the next mission," Hines said. "The best mission is the current mission, and the next best mission is the next mission … Certainly, everybody would like to have a role in upcoming missions, and so that's an exciting thing to look forward to. And whether or not my name is on it, if I can contribute to making it successful, that's the most important thing. Because there's certainly an urgency in getting NASA back to the moon — getting America back to the moon — and trying to do that as soon as we can, as successfully as we can, is really important."

The four astronauts comprising the Artemis 3 crew announced this week are all male, but NASA officials emphasized they were selected based on qualifications and not to exclude any genders. The selectees, announced yesterday (June 9), were NASA's Randy Bresnik (commander), the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Luca Parmitano (pilot), and NASA mission specialists Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio. NASA's Bob Hines, a past SpaceX pilot and ISS astronaut, is backup.

All-male crews are a rarity these days. Out of the 37 active NASA astronauts, 15 are women, or around 40%. With the exception of the SpaceX Crew-6 mission in 2023 and the half-empty Crew-9 'rescue mission' in 2024, there has always been at least one woman on NASA missions to the International Space Station (ISS) since SpaceX began flying NASA crews to the ISS in 2021. 11 of the 15 active NASA female astronauts have flown to space in the past five years, according to a Space.com analysis.

In the wake of NASA's announcement, several science communicators (such as Emily Calandrelli, who was a passenger on Blue Origin tourist rocket launch, as well as Camille Bergin, a space marketing professional posting on a personal account) have criticized the lack of women on the crew. Another commenter was Sian Proctor, who flew with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman aboard the Inspiration4 mission in 2021. "Your success will pave the way for the all-women Artemis 4 crew!" Proctor posted to Instagram.

With regard to choosing the Artemis 3 astronauts, Isaacman praised NASA's Astronaut Office, as well as Norm Knight (who heads the agency's flight operations directorate that oversees astronaut training), for together choosing what he described as the best astronauts to complete the Artemis 3 mission.

"I don't think anyone should be reading into this," Isaacman told reporters at a press gaggle following the crew announcement. "Our last astronaut candidate class was greater than 50% female. We'll assemble the best astronauts to undertake and complete the objectives."

On Wednesday (June 10), Isaacman wrote a longer rationale on X in response to what he said was "reactions ranging from disappointment to outrage." The billionaire cited spaceflights he has paid for and commanded, noting he flew twice on SpaceX with crews that are 50% female (Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn). NASA crew selection has no political appointees, he added, and leadership in agency centers and mission directorates is nearly 50% female.

"The Astronaut Office assigns the crew that gives the mission the best chance of meeting its objectives, taking into account many factors, including the background and expertise of the astronauts, such as test pilot experience, development work on specific programs, and availability," Isaacman wrote in the post. "For example, those raising this concern may not be aware of the pipeline of crews already preparing to launch to the Space Station, or those who have been undergoing lunar-specific training that would be a better fit for a future surface mission."

The prime crew has significant space-related experience between them. Bresnik is a past shuttle and ISS astronaut as well as NASA manager, Parmitano and Bresnik were commanders of the ISS, Rubio set a 371-day U.S. record on a single ISS spaceflight, and Douglas (on his first mission) was backup for Artemis 2.

At least two of them overcame significant obstacles in space, as well: Parmitano survived water coming into his spacesuit during a 2013 spacewalk, and Rubio saw his six-month ISS mission unexpectedly double in 2022-23 after his first ride home was canceled due to a spacecraft coolant leak.

Hines told Space.com's Josh Dinner during on-site interviews at this week's crew reveal event that in general, based on past crew selections he has witnessed, the agency prioritizes capabilities in making the selection — but noted that diversity is important.

"I know that they look and they try and find the best capabilities of people that we have available in the [Astronaut] Office in order to accomplish the mission," Hines said in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, following the crew announcement.

While Hines did not get into specifics about crew qualifications, Artemis 3 is heavily a test-piloting mission as the astronauts may be meeting with both SpaceX and Blue Origin moon landers to get the machines ready for the real deal. That may be why all four Artemis 3 astronauts are drawn from the military, with considerable flying experience between them.

That said, Hines also noted the Artemis 3 crew includes a variety of backgrounds, other than gender. While again, he did not discuss in what way, the crew biographies show Bresnik has Slovenian ancestry, Parmitano is Italian, Rubio has Salvadorian parents and Douglas is African-American.

"You know, diversity comes in a lot of forms," Hines said. "If you look at this crew, it's a pretty diverse crew, and if you look at the Astronaut Office, it is an incredibly diverse astronaut office that absolutely represents the diversity of America, and that's just the way it fell out on this one."

A complex selection process

NASA's first astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s were drawn from the U.S. military, simply put, for security requirements — which limited the gender and the ethnicity of the astronaut pool. Adding scientists to the corps in the late 1960s, and deliberately recruiting women and Black astronauts in the 1970s, were widely hailed as steps the agency was taking back then towards diversity. The agency also gradually opened the door to international astronaut participation during the space shuttle era, further widening the pool of people who could be considered.

Early in the newer Trump administration, officials ordered U.S. agencies (including NASA) to end initiatives related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

NASA also removed Biden-era references on its website to landing the first person of color and the first woman on the moon, among other measures, although the agency told Space.com in March 2025 that "it is important to note that the change in language does not indicate a change in crew assignments."

Crew selection involves a complex range of factors — most of them not discussed with the public to protect the privacy of the process and of all astronauts being considered for a mission. The astronauts must be unassigned to other missions, available for flights (for example, by not being on parental leave or on a military assignment), not in a management position precluding their participation, and in the presence of skills relevant to the mission, among other things.

An early ISS "crew criteria" document, for example, set out various general requirements considered in selecting the space station crews, which goes before a multilateral crew operations panel composed of the ISS partners. Astronaut conduct, behavior, medical history, and ability to speak English (and presumably, Russian) were some of the factors cited in 2002.

Additionally, international partners on the ISS are assigned based on their member contributions —Europe and Japan relatively frequently, for example, with smaller funders like Canada about every five or six years. The Artemis program, like the ISS, is an international partnership and as such, the input of other countries would be included in selection. Canada was the first non-NASA partner to select an Artemis astronaut, with the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen flying on Artemis 2.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who was the only woman to fly on the moon-circling Artemis 2 and the first woman to leave low Earth orbit, repeatedly said in interviews that the astronaut corps is made up of diversity. When asked by Harper's Bazaar in 2023 about why it took several extra decades to get a woman on a moon mission (after the all-male, mostly military astronauts who made up the Apollo corps in the 1960s and 1970s), Koch said Apollo was "a very different time."

"But I'm happy to say that long ago, NASA made the decision that it was important to represent all of humanity when we answer humanity's call to explore," she continued. "And now, the astronaut core looks like all of humanity. So it was pretty clear that no matter what kind of crew you picked for this mission, it was gonna have that characteristic — and I'm happy to say that it does."

HOUSTON — When you get down to brass tacks, NASA's Artemis 3 mission in 2027 looks to be one of agency's most complicated missions ever — one that relies on not one but three giant rockets and a pair of private moon lander prototypes that haven't even been built yet.

If NASA's schedule holds, four Artemis 3 astronauts will launch aboard an Orion spacecraft sometime in the second half of next year. Once in Earth orbit, they'll test Orion's capability to fly and function with two Artemis moon lander designs. NASA introduced that crew on Tuesday (June 9) during a ceremony here at the Johnson Space Center that also included new details on how the Artemis 3 mission will work.

"Artemis 3 is an incredibly exciting, complicated, and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign," NASA Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons said Tuesday. "It's going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world's most powerful rockets."

Artemis 3 will be commanded by NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, with the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano as pilot. Mission specialists Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas, both of NASA, round out the crew. They will fly Orion's longest crewed flight yet, and move NASA's Artemis program one step closer to returning astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2028.

Here's what we knew before Tuesday's mission update:

NASA planned to launch Orion to orbit to rendezvous and dock with at least one of the commercial lunar lander vehicles contracted for Artemis. SpaceX's Starship, and Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander have each faced development delays, with explosive accidents for both companies occurring within the last year. The agency had previously suggested Orion would fly with whichever lander was ready when the time came to launch the mission, even if that meant leaving one behind.

Now, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman says both landers will fly with Orion on Artemis 3.

"Additional powerful rockets will launch to place the Blue Origin and SpaceX Starship landers into orbit throughout the duration of the Artemis 3 mission," he said during Tuesday's ceremony. Isaacman said NAS will coordinate Artemis 3 with launches of SpaceX's massive Starship rocket and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket that will launch their respective landers after NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) launches Orion.

"We're not going to launch if we don't feel like we can get enough out of it in order to ensure a follow-on lunar landing is successful," Isaacman said to members of the media afterward. NASA plans to land astronauts on the moon on Artemis 4, sometime in 2028.

Other new information delivered Tuesday includes an update on the Artemis spacesuits. A spacesuit prototype built by Axiom Space will launch aboard Blue Moon on Artemis 3, and will then be tested out by Artemis 3 astronauts once Orion docks with the lander. That was also a new piece of info — NASA expects Blue Moon to launch with the ability to sustain astronauts onboard.

"On this mission, NASA and Blue Origin will demonstrate rendezvous, docking, hatch operations, ingress, and life support systems in low Earth orbit," said John Coulouris, Blue Origin's senior vice president of lunar permanence, on Tuesday. "This will allow the crew to gain familiarity with our lunar module and practice operations, such as suit donning and zero gravity." Construction of that Blue Moon Mark 2 spacecraft (Mark 1 will be an uncrewed moon lander slated to launch later this year) is well underway, he added.

Starship will apparently only launch with docking hardware, and no crew cabin for the astronauts to enter.

"Next year we'll support Artemis 3 and the planned rendezvous and docking with Orion in low Earth orbit," said Jessica Jensen, SpaceX's vice president of customer operations and intergration. "For that mission, we're going to be using a V3 vehicle off the line with an added docking adapter." V3, or Version 3, is SpaceX's latest Starship design, which the company launched on its first test flight in May.

Jensen said SpaceX aims to launch two Starships to conduct an in-flight refueling demonstration by the end of the year. "We're also actively building our first flight fidelity Starship HLS [Human Landing System] cabin at Starbase," Jensen said. "The primary structure is assembled and prepared to be outfitted with key functional systems like avionics, power, life support systems, and more to come in the next few months." SpaceX unveiled the Starship crew cabin design last year.

Axiom plans to include an Artemis spacesuit in a launch to the International Space Station in 2027, sometime before the Artemis 3 mission, for longer term testing on orbit. The prototype on Artemis 3 will be a "mass simulator" and allow for the testing of hardware interface checkouts, NASA and Axiom officials have said.

The mission timeline was also clarified during the crew announcement ceremony.

"In total, we expect the mission to last around two weeks," Parsons said.

The mission will begin with Blue Origin's launch of the Blue Moon moon lander on a New Glenn rocket. The Artemis 3 crew will launch next and dock their Orion spacecraft with Blue Moon for tests. They'll stay connected for about two days for technology demonstrations and tests inside the new spacecraft.

"After docked operations, Orion will detach and await Starship," Parsons said. "SpaceX's Starship lander test article will launch and meet up with Orion and our crew." They'll stay docked for about a day before the Artemis 3 crew undocks and prepares for landing.

After the end of their two-week orbital stay, Orion will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean for a similar recovery operation that was performed when Artemis 2 astronauts returned from their trip around the moon in April.

"The complexity of our integrated operations across multiple launches, spacecraft, rendezvous, docking, is greater in many ways than Artemis 2," Parsons said. "Human spaceflight is not for those who want to chart an easy course, but every decision we make about Artemis 3 will be informed about how it can help us ensure our mission success for the lunar surface."

HOUSTON — NASA has announced the astronauts who will launch to space on the Artemis 3 mission next year.

The international crew consists of three spaceflight veterans and one first-time spaceflyer, all with backgrounds specially suited for their upcoming mission. The three NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut of Artemis 3 include commander Randy Bresnik of NASA, ESA's Luca Parmitano as pilot, and NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio as mission specialists. All were present at the announcement ceremony today (June 9) here at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

"You carry the fire of exploration from generations past, the confidence of this agency, and the support of this nation, and the dreams of millions who will be cheering you on, knowing that what others believe to be impossible happens to be what we do best here at NASA," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during the proceedings.

Each Artemis 3 astronaut comes from a unique background, with expertise that will contribute to the mission's success, and an array of experiences in aerospace engineering, piloting, EVAs and spacecraft development.

Here's a quick look at the newly announced Artemis 3 crew:

The diverse group was chosen from a wide range of possible candidates, including NASA's original 2020 Artemis astronaut cadre and a number of potential picks from more recent astronaut classes.

Today's announcement comes just two months after the end of Artemis 2, which flew NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day mission around the moon's far side and back to Earth. Artemis 2 was the first mission with astronauts aboard NASA's Orion capsule. It flew farther from Earth than any crewed spaceflight in history.

During today's ceremony, the three NASA astronauts of the Artemis 2 crew passed the (literal) Artemis baton to the new crew.

"I know all of us are very touched by the thoughtful symbolism of the passing of the baton, but I think now, after your mission, you're passing us something far greater," Bresnik said. "The world watched your mission, and over the course of those 10 days, we saw how you inspired people worldwide. You saw how something was ignited within people. It was ignited within all of us by watching your mission."

"We, the Artemis 3 crew, are honored to be able to carry this torch forward, to be able to execute our mission, to make that flame burn brighter and pass that flame on to the next crew," Bresnik added.

NASA is targeting mid- to late 2027 for Artemis 3, which will fly a very different mission that will last longer than Artemis 2 while remaining much closer to home. The ultimate goal of the Artemis program is to return astronauts to the surface of the moon, where NASA intends to establish a permanent base.

Artemis 3 will be a significant stepping stone toward that endeavor, but won't fly beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). If all goes according to plan the four newly assigned astronauts of Artemis 3 will rendezvous and dock the Orion spacecraft with one or both landers NASA is developing, and lay the groundwork for future Artemis missions to the moon that will follow. Ultimately, the mission will allow NASA to test out much of the most cutting-edge hardware in the American spaceflight portfolio.

"Artemis 3 will be an extraordinary demonstration of what is possible when the greatest aerospace companies across the United States, alongside our European partners come together to showcase the technological might and ambition of the free world," Isaacman said during the event. "This seems like the beginning of the future that we imagined as children. This seems like the very beginning of Earth's first Starfleet to me"

Artemis 3's Orion crew capsule will launch on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket into LEO, where it will rendezvous with Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander (which will launch on one of the company's New Glenn rockets) and SpaceX's Starship. "Artemis 3 is an incredibly exciting, complicated, and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign. It's going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world's most powerful rockets," NASA's Jeremy Parsons, Artemis Program Manager, said during today's event.

The goal will be to practice docking maneuvers and operations between the vehicles. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin were awarded contracts through NASA's Human Landing System (HLS) program, but each has faced developmental delays that have prompted NASA's willingness to fly Artemis 3 with either or both landers, depending on their availability.

Blue Origin, in particular, faced a significant setback in May 2026 when its New Glenn rocket exploded spectacularly on the launch pad during a test. "We've redoubled our efforts and are moving forward," Blue Origin's John Couluris said during today's event. "We will measure ourselves not only by our successes, but how we respond to setbacks."

If Blue Origin can in fact recover from the damage to its launch infrastructure in time, the company will launch its Blue Moon lunar lander atop one of its New Glenn rockets. Once Blue Moon is in low Earth orbit, the Artemis 3 crew will dock its Orion spacecraft with the lander in low Earth orbit for two days. While docked, the crew will open the hatch into the lander and test its systems including life support.

From there, the crew will undock from Blue Moon and begin rendezvous maneuvers with SpaceX's Starship. Orion will meet up with Starship for one day, testing docking procedures. There will be no crew cabin on the Artemis 3 Starship lander, only docking hardware.

Another goal of Artemis 3 is to have the astronauts test out new spacesuits built for extravehicular activities (EVAs) on the lunar surface. Whether or not Artemis 3 will actually include an EVA while in Earth orbit is yet to be determined. Artemis' EVA suits are being designed by the Houston company Axiom Space and have faced their own delays. The suit tests performed during Artemis 3 could potentially use a prototype not yet ready for use in the vacuum of space, though any data gathered from use of the suit in zero-g will be valuable for its development.

Now that the quartet is formed, the Artemis 3 crew will begin transitioning from the roles in which they've been serving to training for their upcoming mission. The four astronauts will spend the next 1.5 years or more practicing procedures and real-time scenarios aboard the Orion simulator at JSC, as well as the recently installed Blue Moon training mockup.

Other prep work for Artemis 3 is well underway. For example, elements of the mission's SLS rocket are already taking shape at NASA centers and commercial partner facilities. The main stage propellant tank arrived at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida in April, and the final segments of the launch vehicle's solid rocket boosters recently departed Northrop Grumman's manufacturing facility on a train ride to KSC for stacking and SLS integration. Orion is also at KSC, undergoing final assembly and testing inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building.

NASA officials have voiced confidence in their ability to ready SLS in time for a 2027 Artemis 3 liftoff. The agency already had to shift that target from "early 2027," to "late 2027," as a result of development delays for Starship and Blue Moon (though Isaacman recently stressed that NASA is targeting mid-2027) . Whether that date slips further will depend on each lander's readiness, and could result in one of the two getting left behind.

If that happens, whichever lander launches with Artemis 3 will very likely be the one that delivers astronauts to the lunar surface for the program's first moon landing on Artemis 4, which NASA is hoping to launch in 2028. Should neither lander be ready to launch by NASA's 2027 window for the upcoming mission, a moon landing the following year would be unlikely, and would probably shift NASA's entire timeline for establishing a permanent lunar base at the turn of the decade further into the 2030s.

New York — This weekend, I watched as Prada and Axiom Space unveiled the next-generation Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment for astronauts on the moon. This is a critical piece of Axiom's new AxEMU spacesuits the company is designing with Prada for NASA's Artemis lunar missions. And it comes complete with stirrup pants and thumb holes.

High fashion hit the Artemis program when designer fashion house Prada and aerospace company Axiom teamed up to create AxEMU, the spacesuits that NASA astronauts will be wearing on the moon. And in a reveal on Sunday (June 7), we finally got a look at the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG for short).

"This is the garment that astronauts wear inside the suit," Axiom Space Senior Vice President Russell Ralston told Space.com during a press event at Prada on June 7. "It provides them comfort, cooling, and those kinds of things ... really proud of the design."

Checking out the design

The LCVG looks like a really cool piece of activewear. From the v-neck to the thumbhole sleeves, throwback stirrup pants, tech-y tubing and Prada's signature red stripe, this thing looks cool. But it does a lot more than look cool.

"It's not oftentimes that astrophysics [and] aeronautics develops things that are aesthetically pleasing," Axiom Space CEO and President Jonathan Cirtain said at the event. But, he added, "while aesthetically pleasing, this is a safety suit ... it's a really remarkable piece of technology."

The garment is made with built-in channels in which small tubes carrying cooling liquid are placed. These tubes will circulate this liquid around the suit, providing temperature control. This design is an upgrade on previous designs which have had such tubes threaded through mesh material, a time-consuming task, Ralston said. The suit also has larger, black tubes that carry air first over the wearer's face and then around the body, "providing carbon dioxide management as they exhale, and providing oxygen back to the astronauts as they inhale," according to Cirtain.

The garment is intended for use by future moonwalking astronauts, though Cirtain noted that it might be tested first with astronauts onboard the International Space Station, and some testing might even occur with NASA's upcoming Artemis 3 mission, though this mission will not land astronauts on the lunar surface.

This new garment (and modified iterations of the garment and spacesuit) have gone through a variety of temperature, gravity, and other environmental testing. In addition to possible ISS testing time, the suit is also likely to be tested in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (the giant swimming pool where astronauts practice for space).

AxEMU along with its undersuit the LCVG isn't just the newest moon-bound spacesuit, it has major improvements over the Apollo spacesuits, the last suits to protect humans on the lunar surface. And this is for good reason. Not only has there been significant technological progress in the 54 years since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972, but the Artemis 4 mission (the first Artemis mission slated to land humans on the moon) will send astronauts to the lunar South Pole, which is notably colder than previously explored regions on the moon.

The moon's South Pole where Artemis astronauts will land is "a very complex environment, and so there's a lot of interesting upgrades we've made to what's been available in the past," Cirtain told Space.com during this press event.

"The South Pole is not always in sunlight; sometimes it's in shadow," Cirtain added, "The temperature differential from sunlight to shadow can be over 400 degrees [Fahrenheit]."

In addition to being more technologically advanced to both keep with the times and contend with the extreme lunar environments, the pair also intend for these suits to fit better, possibly offering bespoke fits for each astronaut, and also be easier to customize than previous spacesuits. They intend to accomplish this using a combination of Prada's existing manufacturing practices and by making the suits modular, so individual components could be both uniquely sized and individually swapped out, a more economical process than swapping out an entire suit.

"I think that that's something that's important for this new era of spaceflight, where we want to see thousands and millions of people go to space," Ralston told Space.com. "We can't keep doing things the way they were done in the past, that's not going to get us there."

While this is the first sight of the LCVG, this isn't our first look at the AxEMU spacesuit. Initial reveals showed the suit first in orange and blue to shield not-yet-revealed details, and then in its final coloration in bright white. This light color helps to reflect sunlight and heat, helping astronauts to maintain a comfortable body temperature, and the white material also makes lunar dust very visible, allowing astronauts to more easily keep track and dust off.

While Prada's involvement in spacesuit design might seem unusual, the pair appear to be in lock-step with not just the style, but the engineering of the suit as well. For example, Prada's materials expertise enabled them to contribute "the ballistic material on the outside of the suit," Cirtain told Space.com. This material allows the suit "to maintain its integrity and not tear while in that unique environment."

This fashion and aerospace partnership also follows in the footsteps of spacesuit history. When NASA set out to find the right contractors to work with on the Apollo spacesuits, they ended up working with ILC Dover, a small company in Delaware connected to famous bra maker Playtex. ILC Dover used their expert sewists and knowledge in materials like nylon to create a suit that astronauts could actually move around in, while Hamilton Standard (now Collins Aerospace) provided the life-support hardware to complete the suits.

Update for June 9: NASA's Artemis 3 crew reveal and mission update is now scheduled for today at 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT), about 30 minutes later than originally announced. You can watch it live on Space.com's homepage and on our preview page here.

NASA is about to reveal the astronauts who will launch to space on the Artemis 3 mission.

Speculation about who will be in that four-person crew has been high since the return of the Artemis 2 mission, which flew four astronauts around the moon in April. At the time, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said the announcement of the Artemis 3 crew would come "soon," but he didn't specify a target date.

We have one now: The announcement is scheduled for June 9. Until then, we can make some educated guesses that point to some likely, and also some unlikely, candidates for this very high-profile mission. And the picks might not necessarily all come from the group of 18 astronauts that make up the original Artemis cadre announced in 2020. Here's a look at which astronauts are eligible, and which are probably not up for consideration.

Before we dive into the full list, however, we can whittle it down some by ruling out those least likely to be up for a spot on Artemis 3. NASA is targeting mid- to late 2027 for Artemis 3, so timing and crew schedules aboard the International Space Station (ISS) play a big part in who will be available for the training leading up to the mission. Technical specialties and backgrounds may also have a hand in deciding who is chosen for Artemis 3, which differs significantly in its objectives compared to Artemis 2.

Artemis 2 launched NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as the Canadian Space Agency's (CSA) Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day mission aboard an Orion capsule, which flew a single figure-eight loop around the far side of the moon and back to Earth. The mission was Orion's first test flight with astronauts aboard. Now that it's proven that capability, the crew of Artemis 3 will be tasked with a very different mission.

Artemis 3 won't fly to the moon. Instead, it will launch Orion into low Earth orbit (LEO), where the crewmates will practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one or two privately developed lunar lander vehicles. Artemis 3 astronauts will also have the opportunity, to some extent, to test new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits designed for missions to the lunar surface. So NASA will most likely be looking for astronauts with experience piloting new or unproven vehicles, and at least one or two candidates who've completed a spacewalk.

NASA has contracted SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft as Human Landing System (HLS) landers to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on the first several Artemis missions to the lunar surface. But the agency hasn't yet decided which of them will be awarded the program's first crewed landing, which is scheduled to take place in late 2028 on Artemis 4.

That decision will largely depend on the outcome of Artemis 3. Both landers have faced development delays, and NASA has indicated a willingness to fly Artemis 3 with either or both vehicles, should one of them not be ready to launch in time. And there's already a big risk of that — one of Blue Origin's New Glenn rockets, the launch vehicle for Blue Moon, recently exploded on the pad during an engine test.

In any case, the goals of Artemis 3 are much more focused on things like spacecraft piloting and operations than they are on lunar exploration, which is definitely something NASA will have kept in mind when deciding its crew.

Because they just flew on Artemis 2, it's unlikely Wiseman, Glover, Koch or Hansen will be up for consideration for the upcoming mission. Historically, NASA does not schedule astronauts for back-to-back flights. With that in mind, some of the Artemis cadre currently aboard the ISS and those scheduled to launch to the station in the coming months can probably be ruled out as well. That includes original NASA Artemis cadre astronauts Jessica Meir, currently in space, and Jessica Watkins, who is scheduled to launch to the station as commander of SpaceX Crew-13 sometime in late summer or early fall. NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Chris Williams are also currently aboard the ISS, and spaceflight rookie Luke Delaney is launching on Crew-13 as well, and can all likely be ruled out.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Jonny Kim both returned from the ISS in 2025, which is relatively recent, but their backgrounds and experience make both of them possible contenders for Artemis 3.

Kim joined NASA as a part of the agency's 2017 astronaut class. He spent eight months aboard the ISS last year and has an extensive background that includes experience as a special-operations Navy SEAL, pilot, physician, combat medic and flight surgeon.

McClain came home from a five-month mission to the ISS last summer as commander of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission. Its return wrapped up her second stint aboard the station and a cumulative 350 days on orbit, which also featured two spacewalks totaling almost 19 hours. Before being chosen for NASA's 2013 astronaut class, she had a background in aerospace engineering and served as a U.S. Army aviator and test pilot, logging more than 2,000 flight hours in more than 20 aircraft.

Some of the remaining members of the 2020 NASA Artemis astronaut cadre that could be ruled out include Kate Rubins, who retired from NASA in 2025, as well as Joe Acaba, Kjell Lindgren and Scott Tingle. They are each listed as NASA "management astronauts," who the agency says are no longer eligible for flight assignments in their current role. However, Tingle currently serves as chief of NASA's astronaut office, which is the same position Wiseman held prior to his selection for Artemis 2, so while their selection remains less likely, it's not impossible.

As for those remaining on the list, a few rise to the top.

Since his mission to the ISS as commander of SpaceX's Crew-3 ended in 2022, Raja Chari has led astronaut development and testing for HLS at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which includes lunar lander hardware integration with Orion and Artemis EVA suit designs. That, combined with the two EVAs Chari performed during his time aboard the space station and his background as an Air Force test pilot and aerospace engineer, make him a top-tier choice for Artemis 3.

Another possibility with similar credentials is Jasmin Moghbeli. She also has aerospace engineering and test piloting experience, served in the Marine Corps and has played a role in HLS development since her return after commanding the SpaceX Crew-7 mission to the ISS. But she has one fewer EVA on her record than Chari and seems not to have as much hands-on time with HLS, so between the two of them, Chari might have a slight advantage.

Nicole Mann is also among those likely under serious consideration for Artemis 3. She spent about 5.5 months aboard the ISS as commander of SpaceX Crew-5 in 2022, during which she completed two EVAs. Mann was part of NASA's 2013 astronaut class and joined the agency with a test pilot and mechanical engineering background. She also flew F/A-18 fighter jets as a Marine Corps colonel. In addition to her spaceflight experience, Mann has served as NASA's assistant to the chief astronaut for exploration, helping with Orion, SLS and the exploration ground systems division that oversees launch infrastructure.

Kayla Barron, from NASA's 2017 astronaut class, is also highly qualified for Artemis 3, probably with as much chance of selection as Mann. Barron launched on SpaceX's Crew-3 mission to the ISS, completed two EVAs, and has worked to support operational concepts for the Artemis program, including its next-generation spacesuits and lunar rovers. Her experience helping develop Artemis rovers, however, may make her more suited for Artemis 4, Artemis 5 or a later mission that's expected to include a rover on the surface of the moon.

Other Artemis astronaut cadre members include Matthew Dominick, Frank Rubio and Warren "Woody" Hoburg. Hoburg served on NASA’s independent Orion heat shield review team but hasn't had as much hands-on experience with the spacecraft's operations as other possible picks for Artemis 3. Dominick and Rubio both have piloting experience, but their post-spaceflight public resumes don’t show the same Orion-focused assignments as some of their Artemis cadre counterparts.

The last original Artemis cadre member is Stephanie Wilson. Hers is a slightly more unique consideration compared to her peers. Wilson has three launches under her belt, but those were all aboard the space shuttle, and she flew her last mission in 2010. The 16-year gap between spaceflights doesn't necessarily worsen her chances of selection for Artemis 3, though. Wilson was previously scheduled for a mission to the ISS as a part of SpaceX Crew-9 in 2024. However, issues with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which was docked with the space station at the time, necessitated that Crew-9 launch with only two of its four original astronauts, and Wilson was moved off the mission.

Given the training she's already undergone to launch on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft for a rotation aboard the space station, it's possible Wilson will be reassigned to a future ISS expedition crew, but her rescheduled spaceflight may also position her for readiness to fly the Artemis 3 mission as well.

Because Wiseman wasn't part of NASA's original Artemis cadre when he was chosen for Artemis 2, other astronauts in the agency's directory may also warrant some consideration. At least four astronauts fit the bill for relevant Artemis 3 experience, whether that be through long-term stints aboard the ISS, EVA experience or assignments with strong leadership positions. Loral O'Hara, Nichole Ayers and Zena Cardman all fall into those categories in at least one way and shouldn't be counted out.

The fourth non-cadre astronaut may, in fact, be one of the strongest candidates for selection on Artemis 3. Andre Douglas trained as part of the backup crew for Artemis 2. This means he trained alongside the Artemis 2 astronauts right up until the day of their launch. He's a spaceflight rookie from NASA's 2021 astronaut class, but his extensive familiarity with Orion and mission procedures make him a very likely contender for Artemis 3. It was common for members of backup crews for NASA's Apollo program to be assigned as the main crew for later missions. While none flew on the missions directly following their backup crew assignments, Douglas stands as one of NASA's most experienced astronauts when it comes to Orion training, and is speculated as one of Artemis 3's top potential picks.

CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons also served as Hansen's backup crew member for Artemis 2, and whether or not she will be considered for Artemis 3 raises the question if NASA will include any international astronauts for the upcoming mission. Nearly 2.5 years before the Artemis 2 crew announcement (which occurred in April 2023), NASA committed to flying a CSA astronaut on Artemis 2 as part of its agreement for Canada to supply critical components for the lunar Gateway space station. NASA reached a similar deal with Japan's space agency, JAXA, which committed to contribute critical components for Gateway's life support systems in exchange for seats on future missions to the cislunar outpost.

Plans for a space station orbiting the moon, though, have since been scrapped, and NASA has not indicated how that cancellation may affect its arrangements to include crews from outside agencies. Without Gateway, Japan’s clearest crew path is probably tied to contributions to lunar surface infrastructure, and a Japanese astronaut will therefore not likely be included on the first four Artemis flights.

If NASA does opt to give an Artemis 3 seat to an international partner, an astronaut from the European Space Agency (ESA) likely has the best chance of getting chosen. ESA builds Orion's service module, which is responsible for supplying the space capsule with power, propulsion, water, oxygen and thermal control. With a spot on Artemis 2 already given to CSA, ESA may be next in line.

Some strong ESA astronaut possibilities include Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti, as well as Matthias Maurer and Alexander Gerst, both from Germany. Germany is ESA's biggest financial contributor, and ESA officials have previously stated that a German will fly as ESA's first astronaut on an Artemis mission to the moon. But Gateway's cancellation, and the restructuring of Artemis 3 from a moon landing mission to one flying to Earth orbit, may have complicated those arrangements as well.

The inclusion of an ESA astronaut on an Artemis mission that doesn't fly to the moon may alter Europe's approach to crew selection. If ESA still wants to reserve a moon mission for a German astronaut, Gerst and Maurer would likely be at the front of the line. Gerst's background in geophysics and volcanology, and Maurer's involvement in ESA's planetary geology and astrobiology programs, make them both excellent candidates for Artemis' future lunar excursions.

So, if ESA manages to get a seat on Artemis 3, Cristoforetti could emerge as a compelling option — a veteran astronaut with Crew Dragon, ISS and EVA experience who would give Europe a high-profile Artemis presence.

There is the chance, though, that all four seats aboard the Artemis 3 Orion spacecraft will be filled by NASA astronauts. In that case, the list of names to look out for include the following:

• Top tier:
  • Raja Chari
  • Nicole Mann
  • Kayla Barron
  • Andre Douglas
• Middle tier:
  • Jasmin Moghbeli
  • Frank Rubio
  • Zena Cardman
  • Stephanie Wilson
  • Matthew Dominick
• Bottom tier:
  • Anne McClain
  • Jonny Kim
  • Woody Hoburg
  • Nichole Ayers
  • Loral O’Hara

Meteor showers are among the most beautiful phenomena to brighten Earth's sky, but could the fast moving space rocks that accompany major events threaten or delay future Artemis moon missions as NASA and its partners plan for a lunar landing attempt?

NASA estimates that approximately 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of naturally occurring space debris falls into Earth's atmosphere each day. These fragments range in size from tiny micrometeoroids a fraction of a millimeter in diameter to larger particles that create spectacular shooting stars and fireballs as they burn up during atmospheric entry.

The space around Earth gets even more crowded during meteor showers, as Earth careens through one of the many debris streams continuously shed by asteroids and comets as they make lazy circuits around the sun.

Can micrometeoroids endanger a spacecraft?

Micrometeoroids travel through space at hypervelocity speeds averaging 22,000 miles per hour (34,405 kilometers per hour), according to NASA. At that pace, even a tiny micrometeoroid has the ability to impart a significant kinetic blow upon striking a spacecraft en route to the moon, with potentially disastrous results for the astronaut crew inside.

Fast moving debris has the potential to penetrate or deform a spacecraft's hull, damaging critical systems or even triggering a catastrophic rupture. There is also the risk that a micrometeoroid could punch a hole in one of the heat-resistant outer tiles on the Orion spacecraft, NASA's crew capsule for the agency's Artemis moon missions, undermining its ability to survive the intense furnace of reentry, per NASA.

The Chinese Space Agency was given a stark reminder of the dangers posed by space debris in November last year, when taikonaut Chen Dong discovered a crack in the viewport of his Shenzhou-20 spacecraft, which forced the three person crew to use a different return craft for their journey.

Thankfully, modern spacecraft such as the Orion capsule used for NASA's Artemis moon missions have been designed to mitigate the threat posed by micrometeoroid impacts, in so far as is possible. "Orion spacecraft material selection and thicknesses have been optimized for [micrometeoroid and orbital debris] (MMOD) protection and risk balancing," said Mike Heckwolf, Orion crew and mission risk integrator at Lockheed Martin's in an email to Space.com.

"Hypervelocity impact testing is conducted to confirm impact physics, to characterize damage survivability, and verify performance of the Orion spacecraft MMOD design," continued Heckwolf. "The Artemis mission trajectory and Orion flight attitude are carefully assessed to minimize MMOD risk."

Meteor storms and outbursts raise the stakes

As is so often the case, the best protection against disaster is prevention. NASA and its partners regularly perform risk assessments on the micrometeoroid environment both ahead of and during a mission, though only the most severe events present cause for concern.

"Only a handful of the more than 1,000 known meteor showers exceed the sporadic background by more than 5% — like the Geminids, for example — [which is] the strongest annual shower," explained NASA Meteoroid Environments Office lead Bill Cooke, in an email to Space.com.

The major mission disrupters come in the form of meteor storms and outbursts, which see a dramatic increase in the quantity of interplanetary debris choking the Earth-moon environment. "If a major meteor shower outburst or storm is forecast during a mission or crew activity, the mission would be delayed or the crew kept inside until the outburst or storm is over," said Cooke.

Storm forecasts on the horizon

Hundreds or even thousands of shooting stars may be seen burning through Earth's skies each hour during one of these intense meteor storm events, though the distance separating micrometeoroids in space would still likely be measured on the order of miles.

Thankfully, forecasters are able to predict when meteor storms or outbursts are likely to occur, many years before they brighten our skies.

"Currently there are four possible meteor outbursts predicted to occur during the next ten years," said Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society in an email to Space.com. "These involve the Perseids (August 12, 2028) and the Leonids (November 17, 2033 and November 18 & 19, 2034. The strongest of these appears to be the Perseid outburst, which could range from 500 to 1000 meteors per hour."

Artemis 4 — NASA's first crewed mission to the lunar surface since the Apollo-era — is currently slated to launch in early 2028, though it's possible that an unforeseen delay could push that window backwards.

In the unlikely event that Artemis 4, or any subsequent mission's launch should fall close to a projected outburst, they could well be delayed in the name of safety, and it wouldn't be the first time that NASA has postponed a mission to ensure its success in the face of a micrometeoroid risk.

As noted by Cooke, the STS-51 space shuttle Discovery mission was delayed in 1993 to avoid the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, and an uncrewed science mission out of Vandenberg Space Force Base was delayed in 2000 to sidestep a Leonid meteor shower outburst.

The agency also has protocols in place to reduce the threat of micrometeoroid impacts to its flagship orbital telescopes during major meteor showers. The James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope, for example, routinely point their large primary mirrors away from meteor showers radiants (the points in space from which they originate) during intense events.

NASA's strategies for dealing with micrometeoroid impacts will be further tested in the coming decade, as the agency and its partners seek to establish a permanent presence on and around Earth's moon.

Would you like to know more? Then be sure to read our explainer article on NASA's Artemis Program, along with the latest on the agency's upcoming Artemis 3 mission to test vital technologies for the Artemis 4 landing near the lunar south pole.

After its rocket explosion, Blue Origin wants to complete repairs and put another New Glenn on the launchpad before the end of 2026, according to CEO Dave Limp. That's very ambitious.

The company's New Glenn rocket stood at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station last Thursday (May 28) for a static hot fire test ahead of the vehicle's fourth launch. Blue Origin has yet to complete an investigation into the incident, but whatever the cause, New Glenn exploded on the launchpad in an enormous fireball visible for more than a hundred miles, destroying the launch vehicle and spreading damage across LC-36 and the surrounding vegetation.

Now that the smoke has settled, Limp has shed some light on the extent of that damage, and thinks the company can have New Glenn ready for launch before the end of the year. "before the end of this year," he said in a post on X, which ended with the phrase, "Gradatim Ferociter," the company's motto that means "step by step, ferociously."

Limp said that amongst the ruins of LC-36, which can be seen from space, there was still some promising news to share. In addition to the facility's water tower, "the propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG (liquid nitrogen) tanks are all in good shape," he said. But the pad didn't survive unscathed.

The large tower that helps coordinate systems and ground infrastructure at the pad sustained significant charring in the blast, but is in fine-enough shape that Limp said it can be repaired rather than needing to be torn down and rebuilt. The transporter-erector — the strongback that delivers and erects New Glenn at the pad — was destroyed beyond repair, but instead of rebuilding the structure, it will be replaced by "an alternative vertical conop (operational concept)," Limp said, which Blue Origin "had already been working for some time."

Setting the goal to return New Glenn to flight before the end of 2026 is an ambitious one, and with a timeline nearly half as long as comparable undertakings at other launch facilities.

For example, SpaceX launched its first Starship rocket test flight in April 2023, before building a flame trench under the launchpad at its Starbase facility in South Texas. As a result, the 33 Raptor engines of the vehicle's Super Heavy booster blasted a crater in the pad's concrete, spewing heavy debris throughout the pad and surrounding area as the rocket lifted off.

The second Starship test flight occurred about seven months later, in November 2023, aligning with Blue Origin's hopeful timeline for LC-36, but damage from the power of a rocket's engines, and damage from that entire rocket exploding on the launchpad are different levels of destruction.

In 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Launch Complex-40 exploded during the same type of static hot fire test that New Glenn was undergoing, and facilities there didn't support another launch for a year. And it was almost two years between launches at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility after the Orb-3 mission in 2014, when an Antares rocket failed seconds after liftoff and crashed back down to its pad just below.

LC-36 is Blue Origin's only launchpad, meaning each day that it remains out of operation is another delay to the company's efforts to prove New Glenn's reliability not only to its customers, like Amazon, which has contracted Blue Origin to launch several Leo wireless internet satellite missions, but also NASA, which is relying on New Glenn for critical parts of the Artemis program and the agency's efforts to return astronauts to the moon.

NASA has contracted SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft as the first two lunar landers for Artemis, and a delay in Blue Origin's ability to launch Blue Moon to orbit could mean the company takes a backseat to humanity's return to the moon.

It could also lead to a delay in that return all together. Starship and Blue Moon both have a ways to go before NASA will certify the vehicles to fly astronauts, so any time lost on that front by Blue Origin could further narrow NASA's options and increase the risk of setbacks to the agency's lunar landing timeline.

NASA is currently targeting 2027 for Artemis 3, a mission to low Earth orbit for astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one or both lunar landers, based on their availability. The first Artemis lunar landing mission is scheduled for 2028, and whatever role Blue Origin plays between now and then will likely be heavily influenced by its ability to get LC-36 up and running again.

The dust has settled in the aftermath of last week's giant New Glenn rocket explosion, which shook Florida's Space Coast and the space industry itself.

Blue Origin was conducting a fueling test on May 28, ahead of New Glenn's fourth mission, when a yet unknown event led to the total destruction of the vehicle and significant damage to the ground infrastructure at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36). No one was hurt in the incident, but the loss dealt a serious blow to Blue Origin's ability to meet NASA's timeline to support the Artemis missions to return astronauts to the moon, and further stalls the growth of the Amazon Leo wireless internet constellation meant to compete against SpaceX's Starlink satellite network.

The explosion caused extensive damage to LC-36, Blue Origin's only launchpad capable of supporting a rocket as large as New Glenn. So extensive, in fact, that the damage can be measured from space, as seen in images captured by Planet Lab's SkySat-C9 satellite, and processed by Spacefromspace.

Satellite imagery shows charred vegetation stretched out in nearly every direction around the half-mile-wide (1 kilometer) New Glenn pad. Blue Origin leases LC-36, which is located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). Visible damage across the scorched facility, now in ruin, can be seen on the launch tower, flame trench and other support systems.

Blue Origin is currently working out how to repair the damage. "We will start clearing the pad soon and have a good rebuild plan in place," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a post to X on May 31. Limp and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos toured LC-36 with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman on May 30, according to Isaacman, who promised the agency's full support in the investigation ahead.

New Glenn is one of the rockets NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon during future Artemis missions. Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander is one of two spacecraft contracted by NASA to carry out those landings — the other is SpaceX's Starship — and until Blue Origin can complete repairs to LC-36, Blue Moon doesn't have a ride to space.

Blue Origin had planned to launch the first Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), a smaller cargo variant of the eventual MK2 model designed to support a crew, on a mission to the lunar surface this fall, and stood to deliver a suite of NASA payloads as part of the agency's Moon Base 1 phase to establish a future permanent outpost. But the restoration of LC-36 will very likely delay that launch for several months. That will have ripple effects for Blue Origin's readiness to supply a Blue Moon vehicle for the upcoming Artemis 3 mission to launch the lunar landers to Earth orbit to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with the Orion spacecraft. That, in turn, could either delay Artemis 3 or create an untenable timeline for Blue Moon to gain its certification to carry astronauts in time for the first Artemis mission lunar landing on Artemis 4.

When an Antares rocket exploded and damaged its launchpad in 2014, it was nearly two years until the affected facilities at NASA's Wallops Space Flight Center supported another launch. SpaceX suffered a similar static test fire accident to New Glenn's in September 2016, when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded at CCSFS's Launch Complex-40 leading up to the launch of the Amos-6 communications satellite. SpaceX spent just over a year repairing its facilities there, launching a mission from LC-40 in December 2017.

Blue Origin hasn't come out with an estimated repair time for LC-16, and has yet to release an overall assessment of the damage. Following his tour with Isaacman, Bezos voiced his determination for the company to press onward, and his appreciation to the administrator for NASA's support. "Thank you for being here today," Bezos said in a post on X. "We will get back to flight, and we will get to the moon. Gradatim Ferociter."

The recent explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket during a routine test is a big setback for the private spaceflight company, and will likely have implications for NASA's Artemis program timeline and the nation's efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.

The May 28 incident, in which no one was injured, occurred while Blue Origin prepared its fourth New Glenn rocket for launch. A static test fire of the vehicle's engines at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36), located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Florida, was the rocket's last major milestone before a liftoff targeted for June 4. During that test, however, an explosion destroyed the rocket and severely damaged launch infrastructure on the ground. (The payload for that flight, a group of 48 Amazon Leo internet satellites, was not aboard the rocket when it exploded.)

The mishap is a major blow to Blue Origin's progress with New Glenn, which was only cleared to proceed with the upcoming flight a week ago. New Glenn had been grounded pending a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigation after the NG-3 mission in April, when a failure of the rocket's second stage stranded AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite payload in an unstable orbit. Now, with another investigation opening, and extensive repairs needed at LC-36, New Glenn may be grounded for a while, potentially forcing NASA to change its expectations for how Blue Origin will support upcoming Artemis missions.

"This is a pretty significant incident to happen to Blue Origin," Kathleen Curlee, a commercial space industry research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Space.com in an interview.

New Glenn is Blue Origin's partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle, designed to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Starship rockets. Before New Glenn, New Shepard was the only rocket Blue Origin ever launched to space, and each of those flights was suborbital. Though long delayed in its initial debut, New Glenn made it to orbit on its first launch in January 2025 and performed a successful landing of the rocket's first stage during its second mission (NG-2). And, despite the second stage shortfalls of NG-3, that mission managed to reuse NG-2's landed booster core (with new engines), which performed a second successful landing on Blue Origin's recovery droneship "Jacklyn," in the Atlantic Ocean.

All that progress now comes to a screeching halt while Blue Origin investigates the cause of New Glenn's explosion and faces the task of rebuilding LC-36. In the meantime, the 2027 target to launch the next mission in NASA's Artemis program, Artemis 3, inches ever closer, and the time for Blue Origin to RSVP to the party draws nearer.

The Artemis program aims to create a sustained human presence with a base on the moon, and eventually develop technologies that can support crewed missions to Mars. The agency selected Blue Origin and SpaceX to support that effort, contracting each company to design and build lunar landers capable of delivering astronauts to the moon's surface and launching them back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with NASA's Orion spacecraft.

The first of those lunar landing missions is Artemis 4, which NASA hopes to launch in late 2028. Artemis 3 is a stepping stone to that achievement, but one which relies on at least one lunar lander making it to space. And right now, Blue Origin's contribution, the Blue Moon lander, has no way of getting there.

Blue Moon is designed to launch on New Glenn. The first prototype for that lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), was scheduled to launch in fall 2026 to deliver the first building blocks for NASA's Moon Base 1 mission phase. With a delay of that mission now likely, the development and qualification timeline for the crew-capable Blue Moon MK2 may now slip as well.

"It's a good lander, it's a good system, but they cannot get it to the moon without their New Glenn, and their New Glenn is grounded," Curlee said.

The goal of Artemis 3 is to launch Orion with a crew of astronauts into Earth orbit to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the program's lunar landers. Before a program architecture redesign earlier this year, NASA chose Starship to fly the first Artemis lunar landing mission. But development of SpaceX's megarocket spacecraft faced its own delays, and NASA has since indicated a willingness to fly with whichever lunar lander can be ready when the time comes to launch the missions ahead. The loss of New Glenn and the damage to the rocket's only launch pad now give SpaceX a potential leg up in that competition.

Starship has faced its own delays over the past several years — even explosions in flight and on the test stand. The spacecraft's 12th overall test flight launched on May 22, for instance, and experienced issues with the vehicle's new Raptor 3 engines that led to a failure in the first stage's boostback burn, and its subsequent fiery plunge into the Gulf of Mexico. But that incident, during an otherwise successful flight, doesn't quite stack up against New Glenn's explosive mishap, Curlee said.

"In the launch industry, it is a success if you get your rocket off of the launch pad," she said. "Yes, [SpaceX] had anomalies … but they did not blow up their launch pad, and they were able to achieve flight. For Blue Origin, this exploding on the launch pad is a pretty significant failure."

SpaceX is no stranger to destroying launch pads, however. In September 2016, the company experienced an accident similar to New Glenn's explosion: A Falcon 9 rocket exploded at CCSFS's Launch Complex-40 (LC-40) during the static fire test for the Amos-6 communications satellite launch. (The satellite was aboard the rocket at the time and was destroyed.) According to Curlee, though, that loss wasn't as hard a blow to SpaceX as this fresh one will be to Blue Origin.

Following an incident investigation at the time, SpaceX was able to return Falcon 9 to flight about four months later, but only because of the company's additional launch pads at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which is next door to CCSFS, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Launches didn't return to LC-40 until December 2017.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman toured LC-36 Friday, alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Dave Limp. "NASA is committed to helping the Blue team recover, continue to advance their lunar lander and get New Glenn back to launching as soon as safely possible," Isaacman said in a post on X.

Blue Origin has no other launch pads for New Glenn, so regardless of the length of the company's investigation into the cause of the explosion, New Glenn is grounded until LC-36 can get back up and running.

"Launch pads are a pretty high-value real estate item," Curlee said. "There's only a few launch pads that can handle the size of the New Glenn, and the one that [Blue Origin] had was LC-36, which has now been destroyed. So this is a pretty significant setback."

Still, she doesn't think it heralds the end of NASA's lunar ambitions. "I think overall this doesn't mean that we've lost the moon … but NASA is going to have significantly readjust its Artemis and Moon Base programs to account for the fact that this happened."

An explosion on Florida's Space Coast last night lit up the sky more than 100 miles away.

During a test of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket in the evening hours on May 28, ahead of an upcoming mission to deliver a batch of Amazon Leo internet satellites to low Earth orbit, the launch vehicle experienced an anomaly that led to its complete loss and what is likely significant damage to the Launch Complex-36 (LC-36), at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos confirmed in a post on X that no one was hurt in the accident, and said, "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." Dozens of other posts to social media quickly spread views of the explosion seen from nearby Cocoa Beach all the way to Tampa, on Florida's west coast.

A flyover image taken this morning (May 29) of LC-36 gives an idea to the extent of damage sustained by the launchpad infrastructure.

One X user, @leesteapleton, posted a video sent to him by a patron of Cocoa Beach restaurant Coconuts on the Beach, located about 11.5 miles (18.5 kilometers) from the launchpad.

Farther north near Jetty Park, a popular launch viewing location in Port Canaveral about 5.5 miles (8.9 kilometers) from LC-36, X user @JConcilus called the explosion "absolutely enormous."

The incident was also captured in nearby waters off the shore. Instagram user @gofly2 saw the explosion while aboard a yacht on the way back into Port Canaveral.

This Ring doorbell footage from @huntermanely, on X, caught the explosion lighting up the night sky as a delivery driver dropped off some food.

X user @ItsAlexQuinn, who happened to be in the sky at the time of the incident, posted a video from his airplane window seat while flying above Orlando, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the launchpad.

The glow from the New Glenn explosion was so bright, in fact, that it could be seen all the way on the opposite end of the state. X user @radiolassi shared a video from Tampa, FL, showing the sky illuminating in a bright flash from more than 100 miles away.

"120 miles away. That's the distance between Tampa and the New Glenn explosion in this video. Yet the blast was still visible across Florida's night sky. Moments like this remind you just how powerful modern rockets are," they said in their post.

Both Blue Origin and Space Force officials are instructing the public to report any debris that may wash up on nearby shores. "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety," Blue Origin said in a post on X.

People are urged to call Blue Origin's Wreckage Management Hotline if they should happen upon such debris, but also to call 911 if items pose "an immediate public safety hazard," Space Force's Space Launch Delta 45, who oversee Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, said in their post, directing the public "not touch or attempt to recover suspected debris."