It's unclear when Boeing will be able to send more astronauts to the International Space Station, a new NASA audit warns.

Technical issues with Boeing Starliner's spacecraft, across two uncrewed flights and a two-astronaut test mission known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), come under scrutiny in a new report about NASA's Commercial Crew Program from the agency's Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

"Many of these [Starliner] issues are related to three longstanding technical challenges that have prevented Boeing from obtaining the human-rating certification — helium leaks, propulsion systems failures and parachute anomalies," states the OIG report, which was released today (June 30).

"The helium leaks and propulsion systems failures remain unresolved as of March 2026, and NASA is uncertain as to when this testing will be completed or human-rating certification for the Starliner will be obtained," the report adds.

The NASA OIG performed the audit to evaluate the performance of both companies that NASA contracted to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The auditor found that NASA will need to purchase more flights from those vendors, SpaceX and Boeing, "to continue to fully crew the ISS through 2030," and offered feedback on how the two companies have been doing so far.

SpaceX has been flying astronauts successfully since 2020 and is readying to send its 13th operational crewed mission (known as Crew-13) to the orbiting complex in September. Boeing, however, has just one astronaut flight under its belt — CFT, which launched in June 2024 and encountered multiple problems, resulting in NASA having to bring the two astronauts back home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule instead of Starliner.

Starliner has therefore not been certified to fly astronauts yet. The company has decided that the capsule's next mission will be uncrewed, and there is not yet a launch date for it.

NASA ultimately reclassified Starliner's first crewed flight as a Type A mishap, the most serious type in human spaceflight, in February 2026. The fact that it took 21 months for the agency to do so is concerning, according to both the OIG and the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel for NASA.

OIG said "ambiguity" in NASA requirements for a Type A mishap led to this gap, which also induced "delays, increased costs and potential performance and safety issues on future flights," according to the new report.

The authors added that underperformance on CFT can be traced to NASA's overconfidence in the spacecraft design, "unrealistic launch and flight test schedules" made by Boeing and accepted by NASA, and "pressure to adhere to this aggressive schedule." And these issues were compounded by NASA not exercising "data rights," which would have let the agency look at "flight-simulation-training failures" that likely would have helped with crew safety ahead of launch.

"Going forward, NASA's ongoing workforce constraints may further hinder oversight, resolution of technical issues, and flight certification schedules," the OIG report states, alluding to effects that the auditor foresees from budget-related workforce cutbacks at NASA.

The bulk of the report discusses Starliner, but SpaceX also had "a variety of its own technical challenges" in the earlier days of the Dragon program, OIG noted. That said, SpaceX has helped NASA deal with Boeing's delays, while collecting "$17 million in additional costs to accelerate spaceflights originally planned for the Starliner," the OIG noted.

NASA concurred with all of OIG's recommendations to the agency going forward, which are:

• Delay payments to Boeing until Starliner's human-rating certification completes;
• Create a schedule with Boeing for the next Starliner flights;
• Document and resolve all of the CFT issues in "NASA's mishap information system" and update the schedule for Starliner with these issues in mind;
• Make private company flight-simulation testing on hardware and software changes accessible to NASA;
• Make NASA's mishap-classification requirements more clear;
• Prioritize NASA hiring efforts to focus on "critical skillsets" related to commercial crew and to the expected decommissioning of the ISS.

BOULDER, Colorado — After Earth's moon and Mars, where could humans plant their footprints?

The "Humans to Titan Summit 2026" was held here on June 11 and June 12 to explore the concept of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, as the next human exploration destination, post-Mars.

Researchers looked into how demanding such a trek could be and what would be required to make it, along with next steps to further that ambitious goal.

Normalizing the idea

As a first-of-its-kind gathering of experts, the Humans to Titan Summit 2026 was invigorating, taking seriously the prospect of one day sending humans to Titan, said Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, which is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

Hendrix is also president of the advocacy group Explore Titan and co-author of "Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets" (Pantheon Books, 2016).

"Everyone recognizes that the reality of this is a long way off," Hendrix told Space.com, "but normalizing the idea   — that Titan is actually a very reasonable destination for humans  — is important."

Taking this goal seriously means that "we can have a next destination in our minds, after Mars," she added. "That keeps the momentum going."

Dense atmosphere

The assembly of experts explored an array of Titan topics, from spacesuits and modes of transportation, habitat designs and airlock concepts to light levels and possible encounters with monsoons and floods on the frigid, exotic moon, which has a weather system based on hydrocarbons rather than water.

Additionally, making use of Titan as a hub for launching sample-return missions to other moons within the Saturn system, like Enceladus, was viewed as a big plus.

So too was utilizing the moon's rich bounty of resources — like methane, nitrogen and oxygen — to fuel expansive, far-deeper exploration beyond Titan itself.

"We've got a lot of planning to do," said Hendrix, "but we have time!"

A top priority is figuring out how to either shorten the trip time to Titan or accommodate it and mitigate the negative effects on astronauts, Hendrix said.

"The top reason in my mind that Titan is such a good spot for humans is the dense atmosphere," Hendrix said. That nitrogen-dominated atmosphere provides natural shielding from harmful radiation of many types.

Precursor missions

Appreciation of what human visitors will face on the moon was boosted by the European Space Agency's robotic Huygens probe, which touched down on Titan on Jan. 14, 2005 as part of the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.

Next up for setting down on Titan is NASA's nuclear-powered Dragonfly, now projected to launch no earlier than 2028 for a six-year voyage to the faraway moon.

During its over three-year surface mission, Dragonfly's rotors will carry it for miles across Titan's surface, auto-piloting its way to a variety of areas. The vehicle is designed to snag samples of surface material for analysis inside the rotorcraft by scientific instruments.

Extraordinarily ambitious

Taking part in the two-day gathering was Scot Rafkin, director of the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and a planetary and atmospheric scientist. The summit was held at SwRI's Solar System Science & Exploration Division facilities.

"Everyone recognized that sending humans to Titan is extraordinarily ambitious. But history shows that the greatest achievements in exploration begin when people are willing to pursue goals that seem beyond reach," said Rafkin. Sharing with Space.com his own personal thoughts, he said the summit marked "the beginning of a long-term effort to imagine and ultimately achieve something transformative."

Titan is one of the most compelling worlds in the solar system, Rafkin said; it's a place with rivers, lakes, weather, dunes and complex chemistry unlike anywhere else we know of. Pursuing human exploration of Titan, he said, creates a long-term framework and provides a scientific purpose that transcends the moon and Mars.

'Not a question of physics'

Rafkin said that targeting Titan will also accelerate technologies needed not only for exploring that moon but for voyaging throughout the solar system.

"Human exploration of Titan is not a question of physics," said Rafkin. "It is a question of time, technology, and commitment. We understand most of the major challenges. We know many of the critical science and engineering gaps that remain."

Every advance in propulsion, power systems, manufacturing, robotics, computing, life support and communications, Rafkin said, brings Titan closer while simultaneously enabling exploration throughout the solar system.

Not every solution exists today, Rafkin continued, but the path forward is increasingly clear.

Starting a movement

"Some steps can be taken now, such as sending an orbiter to better characterize the Titan system," said Rafkin. "Other capabilities will require decades or even generations of development. The challenge is immense, but it is achievable."

Rafkin said that the summit was not about planning a mission.

"It was about starting a movement. If space exploration has taught us anything, it is that ambitious goals accelerate innovation in ways we cannot fully predict. The destination is Titan, but the investment is in ourselves," Rafkin concluded.

A second Humans to Titan Summit, said Hendrix, is slated around the launch date in 2028 of the NASA Dragonfly mission.

LOS ANGELES — The space shuttle Endeavour is absolutely breathtaking in its 20-story new home at the California Science Center's brand-new Air & Space Center, which is set to open on Nov. 13, the museum announced on Wednesday (June 24).

After over three decades of ideation, development and construction, the California Science Center has officially announced an opening date for its brand-new Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center, which will feature the space shuttle Endeavour. On Wednesday, I got to peek behind the curtain to see Endeavour's new home inside the center, where it stands in a "ready to launch" position, towering at nearly 200 feet (61 meters) tall — a truly spectacular focal point. The shuttle is even complete with real solid rocket boosters and the last flight-qualified external fuel tank (ET-94).

"It's been a lot of years to get here, and it's a dream come true," Lynda Oschin, the chairman of the board and secretary of the Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Oschin Family Foundation, told Space.com about this massive exhibition finally coming together.

"They're going to be in tears, they're going to be shaking, and they're going to be proud," Oschin added, referring to how she expects guests to react to Endeavour in its new home. And having just seen it for the first time in all its glory, standing upright with its fuel tank and rocket boosters seemingly ready to launch, I can attest: She is absolutely right.

Before you even step foot into the shuttle room, there is a short video that is played that takes you through the history of the shuttle program while bringing to life the fiery excitement of a shuttle launch. In a dramatic cloud of smoke, the shuttle room is revealed and there isn't a single person who isn't in absolute awe. Endeavour is hypnotizing. With the boosters and fuel tank, its already massive stature becomes almost larger than life.

A walkway takes you all the way around the shuttle, which is open on one side so you can clearly peer into its many layers, seeing wires and other details. You can also walk down to a lower floor, where you can stand underneath the shuttle and inspect it from every angle you might want. And surrounding the shuttle itself are a variety of interactive exhibits like a shuttle landing simulator (good luck), the tires from Endeavour's final landing, and more.

"I'm a child of the Apollo era, and I remember having a plastic Apollo Saturn V rocket that I carried with me everywhere, and that was after going to Johnson Space Center, visiting the space center there," retired NASA astronaut John "Danny" Olivas told Space.com. "inspiration happens through exposure, and there's nothing, I think, more impressive than standing next to the space shuttle stacked the way that they've done here at the California Science Center."

And Endeavour is special in this respect: No other museum has a space shuttle orbiter that's mounted vertically, in the launch position.

One aspect of the California Science Center that stands out is its accessibility, as the museum (including the brand-new air and space center) is entirely free to the public — and it's on the metro line, which kids in L.A. can ride for free. Many museums and similar institutions strive for and value accessibility, and this center really takes that to heart, keeping even new installations like the shuttle free to visit. "California Science Center has opened up accessibility for inspiration to the next generation of space explorers," Olivas said.

And while NASA moves forward with its Artemis moon program, Olivas, who flew on two shuttle missions (STS-128 and STS 117), is confident that the lessons and history of the space shuttle program will carry on in inspiring that next generation.

"One of the things that really touches my heart about the space shuttle program is that it ushered in an age of diversity in space exploration that we had not seen prior," Olivas said. "We got an opportunity to see so many firsts — so many firsts of Americans being able to see themselves in the astronauts that flew in space, and that opened the door to so many people like myself, recognizing that wow, yeah, I can become an astronaut."

The new Air & Space Center was first imagined as part of a museum expansion plan all the way back in 1993. Over 30 years later, the futuristic building stands a whopping 20 stories tall to accommodate the towering Endeavour, which immediately grabs the focus of anyone walking into the building.

After NASA's space shuttle program ended in 2011, the agency worked to turn itsretired shuttles into museum attractions. Endeavour first arrived at the California Science Center in October of 2012. Thousands watched as the spacecraft rolled through the streets of Los Angeles on the back of a slow-crawling transporter, a 12-mile (19 kilometers) trek from Los Angeles International Airport to the California Science Center that took the craft 68 hours.

Four years later, in 2016, ET-94, the shuttle's external fuel tank, arrived. And seven years after that, in 2023, two solid rocket boosters arrived and the shuttle was taken off display, where it had sat for over a decade, as preparations began for its new home in the Air & Space Center.

"Now, with the stunning display of Endeavour in launch configuration, the Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center will give us a clear, greater platform than ever before to accomplish our mission to stimulate curiosity and inspire science learning in everyone," said Jeffrey Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center. This "will be the only place in the world to see a complete space shuttle system, with the flown orbiter Endeavour mated to real solid rocket boosters and the only remaining flight-qualified external tank, ET-94."

While Endeavour is the clear centerpiece of the building, the Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center will be chock-full of a wide variety of other space artifacts. The building is split into three sections that guests will be able to explore: air, space and shuttle. Relics from throughout spaceflight history, interactive exhibits, and immersive, educational experiences fill the space. Currently, 1.6 million people visit the California Science Center each year, so even if this number were to remain the same, this building has to be ready for a big and diverse crowd from around the world.

One new mission is setting out to study menstruation in microgravity for the first time ever.

Forty-six years ago, NASA engineers asked Sally Ride if 100 tampons was the right amount to send with her for a six-day spaceflight. Though people laugh at that fact today, there has still never been any scientific study dedicated to studying menstruation in space. But a non-profit called Operation Period aims to change that. Led by Gen-Z researchers, this non-profit works to provide what its founder Manju Bangalore calls "menstrual freedom," which she says would mean everyone can have easy access to menstrual products. Meanwhile, the organization also aims to tackle the wider issues that leave people without such access in the first place. With its upcoming suborbital mission Operation Period-01 (OP-01), this ambitious team is taking their cause into microgravity. On OP-01, the mission's founder will launch to space to conduct the research themselves on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight in 2027.

In conducting their work here on Earth, Operation Period found that "there were still some of those same gaps in spaceflight medicine," Manju Bangalore, the founder and executive director of Operation Period and research astronaut in training for OP-01, told Space.com. " I want all menstruators to be able to live life with their full dignity and reach their fullest potential, and that includes astronauts."

With a background in physics and astronomical engineering as well as with training in bioastronautics and having spent time working at NASA, Bangalore brings her love of space to this cause. She and Priya Abiram, the Director of Research at Operation Period's Redshift Lab, feel so strongly about their message, even 9 years since the pair founded their non-profit; in fact, with this mission, the two will become some of the youngest South Asian women to travel to space.

"On a personal level, I've always been fascinated by space and human space exploration. It's what's always excited me as a child, and I've kept that curiosity going," Bangalore said. "I didn't think those two missions would ever combine into this. It wasn't something I ever planned, but I'm very grateful to lead this historic mission to advance menstrual health in this way."

And just as this team is excited to bring their research into a suborbital environment, Virgin Galactic is excited to be expanding the range of microgravity science the non-profit supports. "This mission with Operation Period is a powerful example of how Virgin Galactic can continue to support real-time, in-flight scientific investigation into long-overlooked areas of human health, helping advance more inclusive and innovative exploration that delivers insight for both space and life on Earth," Virgin Galactic director of system analysis & research Amber Favaregh said in an emailed statement.

Recently, Operation Period expanded to include a research wing, and this mission will be conducted under that umbrella. The team was not yet able to share specific details on the exact protocol that will be conducted during the mission, information they said will be shared at a date closer to launch, but they did share the current issues that this research aims to begin to address.

Currently, astronauts typically choose to fully suppress their periods during their spaceflights, through hormonal IUDs or oral contraceptive pills. While that is a choice astronauts might continue to make in the future, without data to show the reality of dealing with a period in space, astronauts are left with fewer choices with their own bodies. Comprehensive data on menstruation in space will also be important if astronauts are to complete longer spaceflights or even extended stays on the moon. While the mission has not yet revealed its priorities and exactly what data it will collect, with such limited data on menstruation in space, there is a lot of knowledge to be gained.

While "the data that we have, although limited, says that it is generally safe to menstruate, in terms of long duration missions, we don't have quantitative data," Bangalore said. "We don't have enough data to continue to assist with patient resource allocation for mission planners."

Historic missteps like the "100 questions" moment with Sally Ride highlight an issue that could have big effects on future, longer-term missions. Sure, having a ridiculous number of backup products would ensure that there is no need unaddressed, mass considerations for spaceflight are extremely serious and future missions will need to have better data to know what will be needed in a microgravity environment.

And just like with other science in space, the research conducted in microgravity will also be used on Earth. The pair aim to collect menstruation data that will benefit astronauts as well as people back on our home planet. .

"I think on Earth, there's a lot of gaps right now in menstrual health research," Bangalore said. As just one example, she cited recent findings that menstrual product companies were reporting incorrect absorbency of their products because they were testing products with saline, which is very different from menstrual blood. "This was potentially leading to doctors to underdiagnosed heavy menstrual bleeding, which right now the stats say affects 20% of American menstruators," Bangalore said.

With this being the first mission of its kind, OP-01 will not answer every question that remains about menstruation and space, but it will bring data to a conversation decades in the making. "Our hope is to continue to iterate this research so that we can do future suborbital flights, as well as orbital flights, to continue to create larger data sets," Bangalore said. "I think the point of preliminary studies is to be able to know what questions to ask in the future, so we don't expect that this suborbital flight will solve everything or create all the data that we need, right, but we hope that this will be a good stepping stone."

Momentum for this research was actually sparked by many millions of views on a viral social media video in which Bangalore conducted an early version of a menstrual fluid dynamic experiment in a low-gravity environment aboard a parabolic flight.

This viral moment "ended up being a really cool kind of 'in' to continue talking about destigmatizing periods," she said. "Through that, I got to talk more about the gaps in spaceflight medicine, in terms of menstrual health."

The titular cosmonaut training facility in Apple TV's "Star City" is a hive of duplicity, all scrutinized by the KGB's surveillance team and its small army of monitoring minions.

One of the main couples in Apple TV's Soviet-centered spinoff of their flagship alt-history series, "For All Mankind," is portrayed by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis and Adam Nagaitis, who are perfectly cast as Tanya and Valya Mironov. Valya is one of the Soviet Union's primary cosmonauts whose Luna 16 command mission in Sept. of 1969 lands the first woman on the lunar surface, Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert).

But the Mironovs have more than a few secrets of their own as they struggle to stay out of the way of Star City’s prying eyes and ears, monitoring every word and whisper. We connected with Serkis and Nagaitis to hear much more about the core of their connected characters, embracing the essence of late ‘60s and early ‘70s Soviet culture, and playing a married pair under the pressures of the communist regime.

"What I like most about Valya, without any spoilers, is that his internal world was fascinating to me," Nagaitis tells Space. "He’s resilient and dedicated, and he's specific and reliable, and those things are useful for an actor because it gives you a focal point, which is always a good thing."

For Serkis (and yes, she is the daughter of "The Lord of the Rings" star Andy Serkis), there's a certain measure of love and sympathy for Tanya that provides an emotional cushion.

"I have a real soft spot for her, and I feel really sorry for her," she reveals. "I think she's someone who craves freedom and expression and connectivity, and her life at Star City is slightly devoid of that. So she has to seek out what she can in order to make it happen for herself

"I like her place in the show", continues Serkis. "I don't think I have the mental capacity to play a scientist. I’ve always seen her as representative of the Soviet wife and the dreams and hopes and ambitions that young women have growing up that would have been dashed and sacrificed with a husband. I like that she’s solid and she’s humanity, and I love that they include her amidst all the space.

"I think it's a really interesting environment to delve into. Ultimately, it's a culture of survival. As terrible and harrowing as things were, people just had to get on with it. And that was something that was useful to try and click into."

Stepping into the skin of a daring cosmonaut raised under that harsh, oppressive environment required more than a little thought as to how that would feel for Nagaitis’s conflicted spacefaring character.

"I read a lot about the Soviet Union, and it's easy to just attach to some Orwellian idea and say, 'okay all my rights and freedoms have been impinged and now what do I do,'" he explains. "That’s a completely useless thing for me because now I’m a dissident. Now I’m feeling things Valya didn’t feel. Valya grew up in this situation. All of his childhood memories are about the Soviet Union, which is what 'Secondhand Time' is about, that book we were all so fond of."

The book in question, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, is an oral history of the Soviet Union and its ultimate end, which became required reading for many of the cast. "It became an important mast for us to remember how deep the double-think and double-speak goes," notes Nagaitis.

“When I think of loving a country — which to me is a bizarre and slightly absurd notion — I can love memories of a way of life, I suppose. I can love stories that people have told me about things. So how did Valya love that? What were Valya’s stories of love that he holds in his memory and that he associates with people? Because everything is people. A country is nothing if it isn’t people."

“Star City” season 1 is streaming now exclusively on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping every Friday.

"For All Mankind's" new spinoff, "Star City," is a certified hit and another brilliant gem in Apple TV’s imposing crown of science fiction shows that includes "Foundation," "Silo," "Pluribus," and "Invasion." Viewers finally get to see the Space Race from the Soviet perspective inside the heavily guarded walls of the secret cosmonaut training city.

Created by Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, "Star City" is nearing the midpoint of its 8-episode inaugural season and its dark and enthralling peek within the heart of the USSR’s space program. We chatted with two of its stars, Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Star City's chilling KGB security commander, Col. Lyudmilla Raskova, and Agnes O’Casey, who portrays her surveillance department protege Irina Morozova (whom we've seen as an older woman in "For All Mankind"), to learn more about absorbing the cold atmosphere of 1970s life behind the Iron Curtain.

"I have loved playing someone who’s so eccentric, because she's got such a lid on things and trying so hard to control everything about herself, that her impulses that do come up are so strong and so left of field at times," O’Casey tells Space. "Like maybe torturing someone.

"We're both very lucky with the characters we've got to play. The way that Matt and Ben write, we're just people. It doesn’t feel too gendered. It's not a big deal that they’re women in their fields. They're just sort of surviving and ruthless. It's a really exciting script to get to work on."

Martin's transformation into the monstrous KGB surveillance chief and decorated World War II veteran is a remarkable achievement, and the actor is relishing her part.

"I love playing Lyudmilla, she's an absolute hoot," Martin reveals before discussing her research process for the role. "I didn't look at fiction. I think we both kind of read about that period of time, that history. There’s a book we both delved into, which was a sort of verbatim account of people living in the Soviet Union, and that gave you a flavor of what it was like to be a Soviet person. I also read a book about — it wasn’t a gulag, but it was a female prison — and that was a pretty awful book. Mind you, there’s female prisons everywhere, but that wasn’t a very jolly book."

In terms of costumes helping to achieve an authenticity from which to establish their personas, O'Casey and Martin ponder the questions of wardrobe choices and the necessity of whether or not to break character once the cameras stopped rolling.

"If Irina is completely disembodied, I think she'd like to be in trousers and flats, but she dresses the part and wears her pencil skirts," O’Casey adds. "She’s not thinking about fashion. Her life is as convenient as it can be. She’s wearing a costume and not thinking about how she looks. We would’ve had a terrible time if we'd stayed in character. We would have crawled home."

Martin's crowded schedule of off-screen tasks gave her ample excuses to step away from Lyudmilla’s brutal regimen of torture, and she was not going to wear a skirt!

"I'm too busy doing things like organizing transport for my children, locating their whereabouts, doing online shopping, and seeing if the dog has been walked that day," she notes. "So I can’t possibly stay in character, and I couldn’t do those things as Lyudmilla. I could, and actually, if I did those things as Lyudmilla, they might be done more efficiently, actually, now thinking on that.

"I really pushed and was insistent that I was not to be in a skirt. And I think at first Matt and Ben were like, 'Uh, she’s in a skirt.' She’s not, she's in trousers. And I fought really hard for that, as did Nicole [Fischnaller], our head of costume. Lyudmilla was a tank commander, I just don’t think she’d be wafting around in a skirt. I wanted her to feel genderless. I had a furry hat at one point that I also fought for. In hindsight, now that I see it on the big screen, I think maybe it was a mistake."

"Star City" season 1 streams exclusively on Apple TV.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir captured a breathtaking view of auroras on Earth from orbit while sheltering with her fellow astronauts in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft as a pair of cosmonauts attempted to fix a concerning air leak on the International Space Station.

What is it?

Last week on Friday, June 5, the four Crew-12 astronauts on the ISS took shelter in the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that carried them to the station. They did this as a precaution as cosmonauts attempted to fix a leak in a tunnel leading to a Russian module.

But Meir made good use of her temporary surroundings, capturing truly incredible images (and even video) of auroras over Earth from the Dragon.

"There is a lot going on right now on the @Space_Station, but fortunately we are all safe and witnessed a spectacular southern aurora show yesterday thanks to a recent solar event," Meir said in a post on X.

Why is it incredible?

While these images, and the video that Meir shared are stunning on their own, the context behind their capture is fascinating. Meir wasn't just in the Dragon capsule for fun, her and the rest of the Crew-12 astronauts were told to shelter in the capsule as the cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, attempted to fix an ongoing leak on the station.

They hunkered down "out of an abundance of caution," according to NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens, while two cosmonauts went out on a spacewalk to attempt to fix an air leak on the station.

This has been a persistent, ongoing leak caused by cracks in the PrK transfer tunnel which connects to the Russian Zvezda service module. But while Russia's space agency Roscosmos manages the leak with occasional repairs, according to Stevens, the leak started presenting as more of an issue recently.

A former Paralympic athlete could end up breaking some records in the final frontier.

The U.K. government and the California company Vast have signed an agreement that aims to get John McFall, a reserve astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), on a research mission aboard Vast's Haven-1 space station.

McFall, 45, is a surgeon with the United Kingdom's National Health Service who lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident when he was 19. He won a bronze medal in the 100-meter dash at the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing.

Vast is developing a line of Haven outposts, and Haven-1 is set to be the first in low Earth orbit (LEO). It will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as soon as next year.

The newly signed memorandum of understanding is not a guarantee that McFall will fly to Haven-1. Rather, it "will see the U.K. Space Agency support Vast to secure sponsorships to fund a spaceflight for John," U.K. officials wrote in a June 2 statement announcing the agreement.

If McFall does indeed get to fly, he will work on research related to physiology, as well as prosthetics and movement in space. The U.K. government noted that his work could directly benefit millions of people, and also further ESA's goal of expanding access to space, as well as Europe's role in enabling private interests to work in LEO.

"The findings could have significant benefits for disabled people here on Earth, such as the design of lighter, more adaptable prosthetics on Earth," U.K. officials wrote in the statement. "They could also deepen our understanding of conditions like osteoporosis or muscle wastage that affect many disabled people and provide new insights into rehabilitation techniques for amputees."

"Signing this agreement with Vast is incredibly exciting," McFall said in the announcement. "If we can make this mission happen, it won't just be a milestone for human spaceflight, it will send a powerful message about what people with disabilities are capable of, and that there should be no limit to what you can achieve — on Earth or in space."

U.K. Space Minister Liz Lloyd said that McFall's history of accomplishments in sports, medicine and science show his extraordinary determination.

"The UK is committed to being at the forefront of inclusive human spaceflight," Lloyd said in the same announcement. "This builds on the groundbreaking work John has already done and opens the door to a genuine flight opportunity. I look forward to seeing what we can achieve together."

Vast also made some other news recently: The company signed a two-mission deal with the government of France, to fly one French astronaut to the ISS and another to Haven-1.

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.

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.

In Soviet Russia, you don’t watch "Star City," "Star City" watches you!

Apple TV"s stellar spinoff of "For All Mankind" has blasted off to enthusiastic reviews with its first two episodes and we’re all being indoctrinated into the dehumanizing Cold War oppression and super-secret town near Moscow where cosmonauts and their families lived and worked under intense control.

Rhys Ifans, who plays the stoic Ser Otto Hightower on HBO's "House of the Dragon," portrays the Soviet space program’s Chief Designer in "Star City," a designation left intentionally anonymous due to the notoriously paranoid Russian regime of the era. It's based on the real-life father of the USSR’s push to the moon, Sergei Korolev, who died in 1966, ending their lunar mission plans. But he's alive in "Star City's" alt-history plot.

We connected with Ifans plus "Star City" co-creators and showrunners Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert ("Fargo") to learn more about the inspirations and production secrets behind this instantly-absorbing 8-episode show.

"It's always exciting for any actor to play a character that has obstacles," Ifans tells Space. "Obstacles are wonderful things. Things that make that character's life difficult are always the most pleasing things to play. In this story, in this world, that's the case for all the characters.

"From dawn until dusk, every waking moment is about navigating their way safely through a very very hostile environment. And how one does that while keeping one's own sense of ethics and morality intact, while by necessity sometimes having to behave in ways and make decisions that in a normal world you’d never have to make. Every day is a kind of moral labyrinth for these people. But they get on with it. And I think ultimately the show is a show about resilience."

Ifans considers the Chief Designer role to be a joyous character to play, and he brings a certain dignity, warmth and keen intelligence to his craft that's a pleasure to watch in every scene he's a part of.

"It's such a unique thing to be, a genius like this who ordinarily would be a national treasure and a hero, but in this case no one even knows not just his name, they don’t even know of his existence. And that goes for the whole of Star City. Everyone working there and all the work that was being done there, none of the larger population had any knowledge of its existence."

For Nedivi and Wolpert, the element that wasn’t as focused on in "For All Mankind" is the alarming presence of secrecy and intelligence gathering of the surveillance state in Soviet Russia.

"That's the added element that 'Star City' has and that’s something we wanted to be as accurate about as we are with space exploration in 'For All Mankind,'" Nedivi explains.

"A lot of the contraptions and stuff you see being used on Star City is based on actual spycraft contraptions that were used in that time. That was one of the key elements we wanted to capture here.

"And the fact that the space program for the Soviet Union was their crown jewel. That for them was the thing they were most proud of. And you'd think that pride would mean they’d want that celebrated and the cosmonauts to be celebrated, but really it was quite the opposite. They wanted them even more controlled. They were so worried about their celebrity and success, making them feel like they were bigger than the state, that it put them under even more pressure when they came back to Earth. If 'For All Mankind' the danger is in space, in 'Star City' it's on the ground."

Stylistically, "Star City" nails the darkened mood and iron-fisted environment of life behind the Iron Curtain. The detailed production design was inspired by Cold War flicks like "The Manchurian Candidate," "Mission: Impossible," and James Bond movies.

"I’d add 'The Lives of Others' and 'The Conversation,'" notes Ifans. "I do remember watching these great '70s movies in my father's lap in a smoke-filled living room in North Wales or the cinema. For me it was any number of paranoid thrillers there seemed to be in the '70s and early '80s."

Wolpert echoes those same sentiments that define the overall immersive authenticity of "Star City."

"Especially even in the visual approach and the approach to how the show uses sound and the sort of filmmaking of it, we really wanted it to feel like it was one of those paranoid thrillers from the '70s like 'The Conversation,' like 'The Parallax View,' or 'All The President's Men,'" he adds.

"Those grainy, gritty films. You can feel the film stock and feel the playfulness with the approach to sound that we felt would really put people in that place and time."

"Star City" streams exclusively on Apple TV each Friday at midnight Pacific Time. through July 10.

NASA ordered five astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter in an attached SpaceX Dragon spacecraft today while Russian cosmonauts tried to fix a concerning air leak on the orbiting lab.

"Out of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency's SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is underway," NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said via X this morning.

The persistent leak, Stevens explained, is in the PrK transfer tunnel, which leads to Russia's Zvezda service module, one of the oldest parts of the station. This leak, apparently caused by small cracks in the tunnel, has been an issue for years, and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, manages it "through operational mitigation measures and periodic partial-repair efforts," Stevens wrote.

Those efforts were working until a few months ago, when the leak sprung up again. That development spurred today's action, which Stevens termed a "more extensive repair operation."

The four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission are NASA's Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. They arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in mid-February for a six-month stay.

They took shelter today in Crew-12's Dragon capsule "Freedom," along with NASA's Williams, who arrived at the station in late November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Williams flew with two crewmates on that Soyuz — cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. They're presumably the ones who attempted the PrK leak fix today. (Stevens' X post did not mention who performed the repair or what exactly the operation entailed.)

Their work didn't last long, however.

"Roscosmos has paused Friday’s structural repair efforts inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, as more measurements and data is assessed," Stevens wrote via X at 10:57 a.m. EDT (1457 GMT) today, just an hour after her original post about the shelter order.

"Given this development, NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station," she added.

The PrK leak is a reminder of the ISS' advanced age. Construction of the complex began in 1998, and It has been continuously occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000. And Zvezda is one of its older pieces: The module launched to orbit in July 2000.

But the ISS still has a fair bit of runway left. It will operate through at least 2030 and potentially until 2032, giving more time for private successors to get up and running in low Earth orbit.

Editor's note: This is a developing story and will be updated when more information becomes available.

In June of 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly to space.

Today, we celebrate not only that historic flight but also Sally Ride's enduring legacy, which is especially meaningful during Pride Month. While Ride's sexual orientation and relationship with surviving partner Tam O'Shaughnessy weren't revealed until after Ride's death in 2012, her life and achievements remain inspirational to people around the world.

What is it?

On June 18, 1983, NASA's STS-7 mission sent five astronauts on a mission to Earth orbit aboard the space shuttle Challenger. Sally Ride flew as a mission specialist alongside mission commander Robert Crippen, mission pilot Frederick Hauck and fellow mission specialists John Fabian and Norman Thagard. After just over six days and two hours in space, the crew landed back on Earth at Edwards Air Force Base in California before eventually returning to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

STS-7 carried and deployed communications satellites. The crew also supported a variety of scientific experiments, including a study on the social behavior of ants without gravity, how metal alloys form in microgravity, and even a study on space sickness.

Why is it incredible?

When STS-7 launched, Ride did what no American woman had been allowed to do before: fly to space. After decades of human spaceflight missions and advancements that left out women as astronauts, this mission was the first of many to start evening the playing field. But this was only one of many historic firsts for Ride.

Following her death in 2012, for example, the astronaut came out in her own obituary.

"In addition to Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years, Sally is survived by her mother, Joyce; her sister, Bear; her niece, Caitlin, and nephew, Whitney; her staff of 40 at Sally Ride Science; and many friends and colleagues around the country," Ride's obituary read.

"I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them," Bear Ride, who also identifies as gay, said in a statement following this news.

Today, over 40 years since Ride flew to space and 14 years since her passing, there are still no astronauts who have intentionally come out as being a part of the LGBTQ+ community during their lifetime. This fact highlights the tremendous obstacles that still remain for so many, and it reinforces that remembering Ride's legacy is as important today as it ever has been.

Hundreds of students came together to design, build, and test rovers on an Earth obstacle course to prepare for the moon.

Space exploration starts with a lot of hard work on Earth. And in this new photo, we can see a hardworking student team putting the pedal to the metal in a rover their team designed and built for NASA's Human Exploration Rover Challenge (HERC).

What is it?

Every year, hundreds of students from around the world participate in HERC, a nine-month long challenge to design and build human-powered or remote-controlled rovers that could be capable of traveling across the moon's surface.

After months and months of designing, developing, building, and testing, the teams put their rovers to the ultimate challenge with a final event in Huntsville Alabama where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located. At this event, which took place in April, 2026, the students drove and/or remotely operated their rovers through a specially designed half-mile obstacle course to see how they might really fare on the lunar surface.

Why is it incredible?

HERC is open to students ranging from middle school to college-age. This year, students from 28 colleges and universities, 13 high schools, and one middle school from around the world participated. This year, the 32nd year of HERC taking place, 600 students as part of 44 different teams took part in the challenge.

This event gives students of all different ages and from a variety of backgrounds the opportunity to work with real-life space science problems like "how will we get around on the moon?" And as part of this challenge, NASA provides the student teams with access to NASA subject matter experts and space industry professionals to help guide them through their project.

These teams, in addition to thinking big and working together on their rovers, also have to complete a design review, an operational readiness review, a mission readiness review, and an excursion readiness review before competing in this obstacle course  — similar to how real spaceflight hardware is developed. This challenge gives these students a uniquely realistic look at what it might take to really get a piece of technology ready for the moon.

It’s done already? Tonight, "For All Mankind" launches into its 10th and final episode of an eventful fifth season filled with romantic gestures, explosive action, a Happy Valley rebellion, major food shortages, heartbreaking sacrifices, and a Titan discovery of illuminating proportions.

Wrenn Schmidt and her extraordinary portrayal of Margo Madison, from a bright NASA engineer who becomes the first woman at Mission Control, then director of the Johnson Space Center, to trading Soviet secrets, stealing an asteroid, living as a Russian refugee, then landing in a U.S jail, has to be one of the wildest character arcs ever witnessed in the history of television.

We connected with Schmidt to look back at Margo's remarkable journey in Apple TV’s flagship sci-fi series, and her five-decade onscreen transformation.

"We didn’t talk a ton about Margo coming back in season five," she recalls regarding word of her traitorous character's return from creators Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, and Ronald D. Moore.

"She's in the slammer. We talked about it being about Margo being back in jail serving her sentence, and she really hangs her hat on these visits with Aleida. That was kind of it. I've always been someone who doesn’t want to know anything ahead of time. I’d get the scripts and just see what was there. It was a weird season because Margo was so integral to everything before. Now she's more of a supporting character. It was a big shift for all of us."

After spending the last eight years on "For All Mankind" from the onset, there’s a synchronicity that evolves naturally from being part of an ensemble cast.

"It’s pretty extraordinary to get to play a character like this for that long," Schmidt explains. "When I wasn’t playing Margo, I really missed her. One of the things that happens when you're playing a character for such a long time and you’re working with a lot of the same actors, there becomes a shorthand you don’t even realized gets layered in. Like, who is Aleida to me? It was just there. The same was true with Ed Baldwin [Joel Kinnaman] and pretty much everyone I acted with. It gives you a wonderful freedom to focus on other things."

Often told by her acting coaches to choose ingenue-type roles, Schmidt slipping into Margo’s skin has been a career-defining opportunity. "From playing Margo, I'm actually in a place where now somebody can say, 'play seventy.' I’m getting to do a lot of things that are really hard. It was the pleasure and honor of my career to play Margo in her Sixties in Russia. That's an extraordinary challenge that you don't come across very often."

There’s a definite physicality to senior citizen Margo this season, with her shuffling gait in prison-issued orthopedic shoes and her Tootsie Rolls.

"There’s so much to think about when it comes to being in an aging body," she notes. "Where does she feel good? Where are things painful? I feel like these are things that I’m just beginning to experience. It feels like your body starts to betray you in a way. Especially if you’re someone who’s not been physically active or is physically fit. Margo has time to have hobbies.

"She has time to be interested in stuff maybe she never would have come across before. She listens to Dolly Parton now. She’s exposed to all kinds of things being in jail, because she’s got nothing but time. I always envision that she watches 'The Price is Right' every day. That's her show."

“For All Mankind” season 5 streams exclusively on Apple TV along with previous seasons. You can also catch Star City, the Soviet-set spin-off show, which debuts on May 29.

Get ready to watch 'Star City' and see the alternative-history space race from behind the Iron Curtain.

Everyone is familiar with NASA's Apollo Program and its endeavor to land the first person on the lunar surface when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man on July 20, 1969. But Apple TV's "For All Mankind" gave us a look into an alternative history version of the historic mission, one where Russia landed on the moon first, and the Space Race accelerated further than true-life events transpired.

Now we're headed over to Star City, the Soviet Union’s secret cosmonaut training city located just an hour outside Moscow, to see how this fictional feat was accomplished by the forbidden city’s population of cosmonauts, security thugs, scientists, engineers, aerospace aces, KGB operatives, and double-agent spies.

With "For All Mankind" season 5's finale airing this week, it’s time to switch sides to "Star City" and learn how the USSR beat the Americans at their own game despite oppression, near-disasters, sabotage, love triangles, paranoia, and some really bland food.

Let’s brave the Cold War chill, comrades, and march right into Apple TV's "Star City!"

When does "Star City" come out?

The debut season of "Star City" starts on May 29, 2026 for its first 8-episode outing at 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time (ET), with the initial two chapters titled "The Eyes" and "A Bear on a Chain" kicking things off.

Subsequent weekly episodes will arrive each Friday until the season finale is broadcast on July 10, 2026.

How To Watch "Star City's" Inaugural Season?

"Star City" and its dark espionage saga, paired with harsh life inside the Soviet space program’s clandestine headquarters encircled by concrete and razor wire, can be seen exclusively on the Apple TV streaming platform, along with all five seasons of the original "For All Mankind" flagship series from which it was spawned.

If you're going to be out of the country when the show debuts, you can still watch it on your streaming service of choice using a VPN. You'll be able to connect to your streaming services, no matter where you are on Earth (though it won't work on Mars, sorry).

What Is The Plot Of "Star City?"

More than just a Space Race story set in the early 1970s when the Cold War was still heating up, "Star City" is actually closer to a classic Hollywood spy thriller with the Soviets' secret cosmonaut training base at the core of the tense (and often quite violent) new series.

In many ways, Apple TV's advertising campaign sums it up perfectly with the truthful motto that "as dangerous as it is in space, it's more dangerous on the ground." It's grim, cold, calculating, severe, and humorless, exhibiting an authentic peek into the Soviet side of human spaceflight.

"A bold new chapter inspired by the critically acclaimed space-race drama, 'For All Mankind,' 'Star City' is a propulsive paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon," states the official synopsis.

"But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they took to propel humankind forward."

"Star City" Teasers And Trailers

The first bleak teaser dropped on Mar. 25, and opens on a b&w TV broadcast of a Soviet lunar landing, accompanied by the voice of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who becomes the first man to walk on the Moon.

A montage of images from the heart of Star City proceeds to paint austere conditions and the constantly unsettling setting in a forested town not on any map to see how it was all accomplished.

A second full trailer arrived April 23, and begins with an abrupt wakeup by Lyudmilla Raskova, the KGB’s security chief in Star City, dragging a frightened woman out of bed, then sets the stage for the unnerving paranoid environment that exists within the Chief Designer's space program and the Soviets' solemn desire to keep beating the Americans.

Electronic bugs are installed, secretaries listen in on every phone call and conversation, and rock 'n roll is banned in this cruel culture of absolute secrecy.

Who Are The "Star City" Cast And Creators?

"Star City" is truly blessed with an outstanding ensemble cast of international actors that rivals the impressive assembly of talent seen in "For All Mankind." And that's not really a surprise since the spinoff series was conceived by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore, the same competent creative team behind its Emmy-winning sister series, "For All Mankind."

The show is headlined by "House of the Dragon's" Rhys Ifans as Chief Designer, a character patterned after real-life Soviet space chief Sergei Korolev, and "Motherland's" Anna Maxwell-Martin portraying the emotionless KGB security boss Col. Lyudmilla Raskova.

"Star City's" killer cast also includes Agnes O’Casey, Alice Englert, Priya Kansara, Solly McLeod, Adam Nagaitis, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, and Josef Davies.

An astronaut captured a view from the International Space Station (ISS) that will take your breath away.

Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) snapped this photo from a window aboard the ISS, capturing a piece of the station itself, a sliver of Earth's atmosphere, and a peek out at the cosmos beyond.

What is it?

In January, Yui returned from space after completing the nearly five-month SpaceX Crew-11 mission to the ISS.

While this mission, like all spaceflights, was jam-packed with science and hard work, Kui took a moment to snap a truly astounding photograph of the southern sky from the window of the "Kibo" Japanese Experiment Module on the ISS.

This view "only happens when the ISS is oriented with its front and back reversed from the usual direction of travel — it's a very rare sight," Yui wrote in a May 14 post on X.

Yui participated in Crew-11 alongside NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.

Why is it incredible?

This "rare sight," as Yui described it, is as multi-faceted as it is stunning. Rather than a view of just Earth, space, or the space station, it's a mesmerizing combination of all three.

In the foreground, the hardware of the space station stands rigid in space, the station's solar panels extended as the outpost orbits hundreds of miles above Earth.

Just under this orbiting hardware, you can see the edge of Earth and our glowing, colorful atmosphere, lit up with red and green auroras.

Yui further described the view beyond, which includes our nearest solar system neighbor Alpha Centauri in the upper right-hand corner. Additionally, the cosmic view reveals a dark patch that is the Coalsack nebula. Next to that, you can see the Southern Cross constellation, the star Eta carinae, and more.

"This scene lets you feel the three-dimensional depth of the universe, from the window frame just a few centimeters from the camera, to the solar panels dozens of meters away, to the auroras," Yui said. "With the ISS truss extending toward the abyss of space, this composition seems to symbolize the future where humanity's wisdom will challenge the deep cosmos — it's one of my favorites lol."

Note: Yui's comments have been translated from Japanese to English.

On May 29, Apple TV will launch "Star City," their 10-episode spinoff of "For All Mankind" that depicts an alternate history of the space race from the Soviet perspective as they become the first nation to land a human on the moon instead of the United States.

But far from being pure fiction, "Star City" is based on the real-life hidden Russian city just outside Moscow where cosmonauts lived and trained alongside engineers, scientists, and the ever-present eyes and ears of KGB agents keeping a lid on Soviet secrets.

As a primer for Apple TV's upcoming show starring Rhys Ifans, Anna Maxwell Martin, Agnes O’Casey, Alice Englert, Solly McLeod, Adam Nagaitis, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, and Josef Davies, we're heading behind the Iron Curtain to glean more info on how this location became the nexus for the USSR's human spaceflight endeavors. Along the way we'll pop in with a NASA expert and space history author to hear their thoughts on Star City, which is still operating today as a bustling international hub of cosmonaut activity. Break out the vodka and come along, dear comrades, while we drink a toast to Star City!

A forbidden city in the trees

At the tail end of the 1950s it was apparent that the Soviet's nascent manned spaceflight program needed a permanent home, something slightly off the grid (and maps!) yet close enough to the country’s capital and its political infrastructure. The secret location chosen was located roughly 40km northeast of Moscow, nestled within a thick evergreen forest, and became the main training facility and home to Russia’s cosmonauts. Nicknamed Zvezdny Gorodok, or Star City/Starry Town, this clandestine base of operations was built beside the Tsiolkovskaya railway station served by the Yaroslavl Railroad.

Founded in 1960 as Military Unit 26266, Star City evolved into the core of cosmonaut development for the next three decades until the fall of the USSR in 1991. Upon the 1968 death of Russia’s first man in space, this closed city was then renamed the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) in honor of their pioneering hero.

Like Hogwarts with heroes in spacesuits instead of wizards in robes

This Soviet-sanctioned Cosmonaut School contained all the necessary living and training equipment for the country’s initial class of candidates during the Cold War to learn the required knowledge and gain hands-on experience to travel into space. These pre-selected fighter pilots and their families moved into their apartments during the summer of 1960 after residing at the Frunze Central Airfield in Moscow. They joined dozens of civilian personnel assigned to the compound who were all part of the monumental endeavor.

Renowned Soviet pilot and polar explorer Nikolai Kamanin became the director of training for all cosmonauts in the program. Besides the Vostok spacecraft simulators and actual classrooms, Star City, also became its own self-sustaining community over the years with the addition of parks, schools, gym, church, post office, pharmacy, rehab facilities, and a movie theater.

"Star City is the same species of town as Baikonur—a purpose-built space community that is equal parts industry and inspiration," Jeffrey Kluger, New York Times bestselling co-author of "Apollo 13" with Jim Lovell and author of "Gemini: Stepping Stone To The Moon," tells Space. “Think of Ford's Dearborn plant but with the target not on the roads but off the planet.”

It wasn't the Ritz-Carlton, but it was cozy

Once you got past humorless armed guards at checkpoints leading to Star City, what workers found were cold clusters of austere buildings and apartment blocks designed for practicality that held a sterile architectural purity so often seen on display in Cold War-era structures.

During the historic Apollo-Soyuz Project in the mid-1970s, Star City welcomed Americans for the first time, adding college-style dormitories for NASA's astronauts while they trained with cosmonauts for that historic 1975 mission. After the dissolving of the Soviet Union, NASA constructed several duplexes for housing during the Shuttle–Mir program completed from 1994-1998.

Today the once-forbidden, concrete-walled town is populated by engineers, scientists, current and retired cosmonauts, training specialists, scientists, doctors, and administrative staffers. NASA has had permanent presence here since ’94 and there's evidence everywhere of the history of the country’s storied space program, Yuri Gagarin, and the future graduates of the GCTC.

"The early Soviet space program was responsible for so many of the major 'firsts' of the Space Race, and it’s fascinating to look at how the U.S. responded during those early years - something I explore in my most recent book," NASA historian and author Andy Saunders tells Space. "One of the clearest differences between the two programs is embodied by Star City itself, which began as a top-secret military facility. American successes and failures played out in front of the world, while the Soviets often celebrated their triumphs and concealed their setbacks.

"That secrecy gives Star City an almost mythical quality even today. Despite the political rivalry and different public images of the two programs, behind the scenes both were driven by the same extraordinary ambition - to push human beings further than ever before."

Last one in the buoyancy pool is a bowl of borscht

The Cosmonaut Training Center and its simulation facilities within its borders also include a soccer stadium, a heating complex that warms Star City during Russia’s harsh winters, a children's space camp, and a metal fabrication factory. 600 employees work at the GCTC, training the next generation of cosmonauts whose eyes are aimed at the stars.

Specific facilities include: A 12-meter-deep hydro-lab pool for spacewalk practice equipped with full-scale mockups of essential components of the Russian International Space Station Segment and a 20-ton MIR module; full-size mockups of every spacecraft developed by the old USSR; a massive TsF-18 centrifuge and downsized TsF-7 centrifuge, a deluxe planetarium which can project up to 9,000 stars, and a new integrated pilot simulator for Russia's next-gen PTK-Orel transport spacecraft. And did we mention the tribute statue to Laika the space dog?

Another attraction in Star City is the Museum of Cosmonautics, which contains an impressive collection of documents and materials chronicling the history of manned cosmonautics. Its exhibit halls detail a range of space programs over the decades from Vostok to Mir. Also available for viewing are spacecraft mockups, simulators, cosmonaut spacesuits, personal items belonging to legendary space figures, and even a reproduction of Yuri Gagarin's actual office.

Pack your suitcase for a star city vacation!

Well, we wouldn't start packing your bags quite yet, but it is possible to visit this highly restricted Russian village that's still lightly guarded at checkpoints  — but now using only civilian personnel rather than military. Today, Star City is home to just under 7,000 people. It's relatively tiny, encompassing about 7 square kilometers (2.70 square miles) adding up both the city itself and its Space Center.

Since 2009, Star City's training center is no longer under the Russina' Ministry of Defense's strict military control and is currently run by the Russian Federal Space Agency known more commonly as Roscosmos.

There are several Star City tourism companies that offer packages to take an excursion to Moscow or have an extended stay in this strange remnant of another age. But to begin the process, a special permit is required which must be approved a month before your visit by Russian authorities. This can be handled by private travel firms that organize vacations to the area, as well as jet rides, zero-G flights, or a Baikonur cosmodrome side-trip!

For an easier route to Star City, virtual tours can be experienced at the official GCTC site. Nostrovia!

The rocket boosters from NASA's Artemis 2 mission appear in striking unison in this photograph.

This dual-booster moment was captured following the boosters' separation from the rocket's core stage, which you can see on the left, heading off to set the Orion spacecraft on its way around the moon.

What is it?

On April 1, 2026, NASA's Artemis 2 mission blasted off carrying four astronauts on a journey around the moon and back. The mission sent the crew — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch of NASA and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen — to space aboard the Orion spacecraft (named Integrity).

The capsule launched atop NASA's SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, a heavy-duty launch vehicle designed for missions just like this that propel humans to the moon.

SLS features two solid rocket boosters that add power behind this massive rocket. In fact, these two boosters provide 75% of the initial thrust that the mission needs to escape Earth's gravity. But once their fuel is used up, which happened just two minutes and 8 seconds after liftoff on this flight, the boosters' 16 different separation motors ignite to push the boosters away from the rocket and one another. Ultimately, the boosters fall into the Atlantic Ocean and are discarded.

Why is it incredible?

It is amazing to see these boosters separating so perfectly and elegantly in Earth's upper atmosphere as the mission travels into space.

The SLS rocket has been a massive undertaking for NASA. But despite all of the time and budget concerns that have plagued the rocket's reputation over the years, this photograph shows a brilliant execution of separation.

Between the Orion spacecraft seamlessly motoring onward on the left of this image and two boosters mirroring one another on the right, this booster separation is picture perfect.

China has named the three astronauts due to fly on the Shenzhou 23 mission on Sunday (May 24), including Hong Kong's first astronaut.

A Long March 2F rocket is due to lift off at 11:08 a.m. EDT (1508 GMT, or 11:08 p.m. Beijing time) on Sunday (May 24) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, sending the Shenzhou 23 spacecraft into orbit to dock with China's Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit.

Aboard Shenzhou 23 will be commander Zhu Yangzhu, pilot Zhang Zhiyuan and payload specialist Lai Ka-ying. Zhu flew for the first time on the Shenzhou 16 mission in 2023, while Zhang and Lai, from China's third and fourth batches of astronauts, will be making their first trips to space. The crew were revealed at a press conference at Jiuquan on Saturday (May 23).

Lai is set to become Hong Kong's first astronaut to fly to space, having previously worked in the Hong Kong Police Force before being selected as an astronaut candidate in 2024.

Another major first from the mission will see one Shenzhou 23 astronaut carry out China's first continuous year in orbit. The astronaut was not named, but a China Manned Space Agency representative stated that the pilot and payload specialist are able to perform each other's roles, suggesting that one of the two will stay for a full year in space.

The extended stay for one astronaut will pave the way for yet another first for the Shenzhou 24 mission, due to launch in six months' time. Aboard will be a Pakistani astronaut, who will spend a few days aboard Tiangong before returning to Earth on the outbound Shenzhou 23 vehicle, taking the seat of the astronaut selected to stay for a full year in orbit.

Hours after launch, the Shenzhou 23 crew will be greeted aboard Tiangong by Shenzhou 21 astronauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang, who are completing an extended seven-month-long mission and will be returning to Earth at the end of the month.

Shenzhou 23 also features enhanced protection for its portview windows, in response to damage to the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft's window by a suspected debris impact. The incident triggered an emergency response, seeing the Shenzhou 20 crew return to Earth aboard the Shenzhou 21 spacecraft for safety reasons, and the uncrewed Shenzhou 22 launched to serve as a lifeboat and ride home for the Shenzhou 21 crew.

The Shenzhou 23 mission follows shortly after the launch of the Tianzhou 10 cargo spacecraft, which arrived at Tiangong on May 11, delivering nearly 7 tons of supplies. The Shenzhou 21 crew will return to Earth on May 29, after handing over control of Tiangong to the incoming Shenzhou 23 astronauts.

Acclaimed actor Costa Ronin ("The Americans," "Homeland") is another fresh face in Apple TV’s "For All Mankind" season five; his Soviet ex-cosmonaut politician, Leonid "Lenya" Polivanov, has the dubious honor of presiding over Happy Valley as the official governor of Mars.

"The entourage makes the king, right?" Ronin tells Space. "The colony has grown so much, and with any growth of any colony, there’s more to do and more responsibility and more political intrigue."

It can be challenging for an actor to join a show so late into its run, but Ronin has embraced that challenge. "It has been incredible to walk into a show that's been TV royalty for so many years. You walk in on set, and you get to play with your favorite actors, your favorite characters, and favorite world. It's really quite remarkable."

Regarding Polivanov's ultimate allegiances on the Red Planet, the series has made the most of Ronin's instinctive skills to present a mercurial, multidimensional personality who is much craftier than he first appears. Often leveraging his powers at will as Mars is being cut off from aid, even as he’s secretly hoping to become the USSR's next President.

"I approach it as if you imagine a bow and arrow,” explains Ronin on his artistic process. "You know where the shot is going to come from; this is where we meet that character. Then I try to go as far as I can to create as much backstory as possible so that by the time it's day one of filming, I kind of release him into the world and let him make his own decisions.

"I had multiple conversations with the creators of the show and the writers to get an idea of where the character was going and, more importantly, where he's coming from" notes Ronin. "What he says ultimately is dictated by what he thinks, and what he thinks is dictated by what he knows."

That meant homework for Ronin before he could step into the role.

"It was important for me to read those books that he perhaps would have read about the Soviet space program. Because he comes from being a cosmonaut. He does not come from a nepotism environment of political powers. I created a cosmonaut who then later, through his wife’s relationships and ambitious family ties, became a politician, which led him to be the governor of Mars."

Ronin composed his Martian governor role with absolute precision, assembling the character from the inside out and harkening back to his early cosmonaut days. His fashionable wardrobe was selected by costume designer Esther Marquis. until it came to one essential accessory.

"I know how to tie a tie, and there are ten or twenty ways to do it,” he admits. "And the only way I don’t know how to tie a tie is exactly the way they tie it in the show. So I always had to have somebody come do it. "

Beyond his own styling, Ronin also leaned on the prop department to help him get into the character of Polivanov. "There’s a scene in the governor’s office where there were a few things I wanted to have there from his past days as a cosmonaut," Ronin explains. "I wanted him to have two clocks and two watches to know this was the time on Mars, and this was the time in Moscow. So there were little things that may not necessarily be visible to the audience, but I, as a character, knew."

As to how he wrapped his mind around the notion that his Lenya Polivanov was residing on another planet? Ronin felt it wasn’t too tough because he didn’t really get to play outside.

“So I didn’t get to play with zero gravity or any of the elements that space brings into our life," he notes. "To me, the fact that the sets were built with such incredible attention to detail helped tremendously. It didn’t matter if you were in an actual building or in a spaceship because everything was functional. The only thing that spaceship didn’t do was actually fly. Every button had a function and a purpose. We have tremendous consultants, and we were always able to refer to them.

"There's a scene where Celia and I fly in a transport hopper, and we had a conversation with the consultants to make sure this was the actual sequence of how it would happen in real life. These are the buttons that would get us there. So when you are in the pilot’s chair in your scene, you don’t have to think about it because the character would be able to do that in his sleep."

"For All Mankind" season 5 is streaming now exclusively on Apple TV, where you can also find the previous four seasons.

China launched its next crew to the Tiangong space station on Sunday (May 24), on a mission that will relieve astronauts who have been in orbit a month longer than planned, and send one astronaut on China's first year-long spaceflight.

A 203-foot-long (62 meters) Long March 2F rocket launched the Shenzhou 23 mission on Sunday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 11:08 a.m. EDT (1508 GMT; 11:08 p.m. local time at Jiuqan).

Shenzhou 23 is sending the next trio of astronauts to Tiangong to begin a six-month-long stay aboard the space station. That trio consists of Zhu Yangzhu (the mission's commander), Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying. Lai is the first astronaut from Hong Kong to reach space.

The launch also marked the start of a historic human spaceflight for China: One of the three astronauts is starting a one-year stay in orbit, a first for the country. This is because Shenzhou 24, due to launch late this year, will be used to send a Pakistani astronaut to Tiangong for a short-duration visit.

This first international visitor to Tiangong will arrive on Shenzhou 24 but then take the seat of one of the Shenzhou 23 astronauts days later when the spacecraft returns to Earth, leaving one Shenzhou 23 astronaut to complete a year in orbit. (Chinese space officials have not yet said which astronaut will fly this extra-long mission.)

The launch of Shenzhou 23 also heralds the end of what has become China's longest human spaceflight mission to date — the emergency-impacted Shenzhou 21.

The new crew will take control of Tiangong from the Shenzhou 21 astronauts, who saw their Shenzhou 20 colleagues use their Shenzhou 21 spacecraft to get home after a suspected debris impact damaged the Shenzhou 20 vehicle. The uncrewed Shenzhou 22 was later sent to Tiangong to provide a lifeboat for the Shenzhou 21 astronauts — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — and is now scheduled to carry them back to Earth on May 29.

Shenzhou 23 is the 11th crewed mission to fly to Tiangong. The first such flight took place in June 2021, when Shenzhou 12 visited the station's Tianhe core module; two further crewed missions aided assembly of the three-module facility, which was complete by late 2022. Shenzhou 22 was launched uncrewed in an emergency response to provide a lifeboat.

The Shenzhou 23 mission follows shortly after the launch of the Tianzhou 10 cargo spacecraft, which arrived at Tiangong on May 11, delivering nearly seven tons of supplies.

Editor's note: This story was updated at noon ET on May 23 with the launch date and time and the identities of the three Shenzhou 23 astronauts. It was updated again at 1 p.m. ET on May 24 with news of launch success.

Apple TV's "For All Mankind" is setting up for an explosive season 5 finale as hungry Marsies are growing impatient, and Earth's M-6 Alliance just dispatched an inexperienced military fire team to commandeer the all-important Goldilocks asteroid and its precious Iridium resources.

Avery "AJ" Jarrett (Ines Asserson) and Lily Dale (Ruby Cruz) are two of this season's newest young adult characters. They were last seen as children in season 4, but they are all grown up now with the show’s time jump to the 2010s. We connected with Asserson and Cruz to learn more about their journeys on Apple TV’s flagship sci-fi series and the rigors of zipping up a spacesuit!

“We had so many different costumes because of their development in her association with the Marines," Asserson tells Space. "It was so cool, and I felt really powerful in the uniforms during the space travel to Mars. We weren't in them very long. It was easy to physically enter the headspace of a Marine wearing them. The first time in a spacesuit was really cool, then I realized they're not that easy to wear. They're heavy and clunky, and you want them to look cool. I mean, when else would I get to wear a spacesuit?"

Asserson's Off-Planet Expeditionary Force (OPEF) marine is a complex individual whose family legacy is a generational aspect of the hit show. She's the daughter of Danny and Amber Stevens, and granddaughter of astronauts Gordo and Tracy Stevens, who sacrificed themselves in season 2's finale to save the Jamestown lunar base by taking a suicidal moonwalk.

"There’s so many tensions with AJ; there’s this rigidity and so much desire and emotion and loneliness within her," explains Asserson.

"She’s really fighting such a battle with herself that speaks to that kind of yearning for belonging and friendship and family as well, and to embrace her family history. Her struggling wth her past is always going to be a difficult thing for Avery. I think that’s going to take shape in many different situations. Everything is going to make her see another side of herself."

In crafting her Earth-based soldier character, Asserson talked to a number of veterans, which was something that became incredibly informative to understand the mindset of combat and camaraderie.

"Then we did a lot of CQB (Close-Quarter Battle) training with a real Green Beret," she adds. "He was phenomenal. We learned to clear rooms, operate guns in a way that's realistic, and to work together as an OPEF group. Those friendships have really become super important to me in my real life, actually, which I think is that Marine mentality."

Ruby Cruz portrays Lilly Dale, the daughter of Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), and an ambitious journalist who helped leak the secret Happy Valley automation documents to the press with Alex (Sean Kaufman).

"Building Lilly was really fun because I got to watch Miles Dale in season 4 and build the daughter that that father would raise," Cruz tells Space. "It's so cool thinking about the different qualities in him that she would really admire and look up to and want to embody. And the different qualities in him that really frustrate her and that she would want to reject. Building out with Toby was really fun because he's one of the funniest people.

"I really like that Lily is a young person discovering her voice in fighting for what she believes in. She has this very rebellious, fiery, impulsive nature that I can somewhat relate to. I don’t like the establishment. I don't like organized systems," notes Cruz.

"And I do relate to her in that way, but she's harsher than I am, and I liked being in that headspace. She also has a very big heart and has a lot of care for people. I think her journalistic tendencies are really cool. She cares about the truth, and it was inspiring to be reminded that it's a very important thing."

Filming in multiple sound stages on the historic Sony Pictures Studio lot in Culver City, California, was particularly rewarding for Cruz, as was trying to absorb the production’s insane scale.

"Nothing shoots in L.A., so it’s cool shooting at home. But also to film on these historic stages. 'The Wizard of Oz' filmed there!" exclaims Cruz.

"Then, to be in such immersive sets made it easy for an actor to be immersed immediately, and that was a rare experience. The spacesuits are like real spacesuits! They're so complicated and much heavier than you'd ever expect. [Costume Designer] Esther Marquis is so well versed in making space suits that space companies have approached her in helping design their suits."

"For All Mankind" season 5 streams exclusively on Apple TV, along with the previous four seasons.

NASA's Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft rests after its flight around the moon, charred from the return to Earth.

The Artemis 2 mission launched four astronauts on a journey around the moon aboard an Orion capsule that its crew named "Integrity." Looking at the capsule now, you can see what it went through to get home.

What is it?

On April 1, NASA launched four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and back to Earth. This mission, called Artemis 2, was the first time humans have traveled to the moon in over 50 years, since NASA's final Apollo mission in 1972.

On their trip home, the crew — NASA astronauts commander Reid Wiseman, mission pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen — hurtled back through Earth's atmosphere before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10.

This return trip was no picnic. During its descent, temperatures around the capsule reached up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). And while the capsule's heat shield kept the astronauts inside safe, this picture clearly shows the extreme environment that the craft had to ensure.

In the photo, the capsule sits, burned by its return journey, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Multi-Payload Processing Facility in Florida.

Why is it incredible?

Launching to space is a spectacular feat. To have a rocket launch with astronauts on board go perfectly well is even more amazing. But once you're in space, whether it's on a mission to the moon or the International Space Station, at some point you have to come home to Earth. And returning can be just as tricky as getting there.

The Orion capsule, sitting propped up at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, is a charred testament to the challenge of that return trip. You can see the dark tiles on the capsule's side, and underneath it is entirely burnt.

Moving forward from Artemis 2, experts at NASA will take a closer look at the aftermath of this fiery return to better understand if and how the spacecraft and its heat shield might have to change with the program's upcoming mission, Artemis 3, which will stay in Earth orbit to perform rendezvous and docking tests.

After "re-booting" the moon and establishing a base there, followed by dispatching expeditionary crews to Mars, where should humanity go?

Next month, a first-of-its-kind gathering will blueprint an eventual crewed trek to tantalizing Titan, the largest of Saturn's many moons. That inaugural "Humans to Titan Summit" will make the case for an astronaut outing to that far-off moon, detailing the science goals and concepts of human missions to Titan as well as necessary forerunner robotic efforts.

And there is already a robotic Titan mission on the books — NASA's nuclear-powered Dragonfly octocopter mission, which is targeted to launch in 2028. Could it help fuel a human leap?

Foundational talks

"It's not too soon to begin thinking about this," said Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. She is also president of the advocacy group Explore Titan and co-author of "Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets" (Pantheon Books, 2016).

"The idea of the summit is to bring together people from different communities — engineers, scientists, industry, academia, robotic and human spaceflight experts," Hendrix told Space.com. "We're having foundational talks about what precursor missions do we need in order to get us on the road to Titan, eventually with humans."

Hendrix noted that, after Apollo's last human foray to the moon in 1972, there was a gap of decades, a lull in launching astronauts beyond Earth orbit — a pause just filled by NASA's recent Artemis 2 mission, which sent four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth.

"Now we are, hopefully, back on track [with] humans going to the moon, with NASA talking about Mars as the next human destination," said Hendrix. "I think having a concept in our mind after Mars can guide our thinking, give us a path and keep us motivated for the future."

Visits, past and future

The Saturn moon has had visitors already. On Jan. 14, 2005, the European Space Agency's robotic Huygens probe — part of the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn — touched down on Titan.

Making a 2.5-hour descent through Titan's atmosphere, the Huygens probe provided a stream of data for 72 minutes once on the moon's surface. It set the still-standing record as the most distant landing from Earth.

"Huygens showed us many things," Hendrix said. She cited the dynamics of Titan's atmosphere, the look of its surface — which features water-ice "rocks," dry river beds, lakes and dunes — as well as the overall haziness at the landing locale.

"It does look otherworldly," Hendrix said.

Next up for Titan is Dragonfly, now scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 for a six-year voyage to Titan. Once landed, the craft will spend three years flying from spot to spot to investigate a range of sites, perhaps revealing its potential to host life.

A dynamic world

"Dragonfly is an awesome, super-important mission to a fascinating and active world," said Hendrix. "Titan is not a static place. It is a dynamic world," she said, "probably a place that's very close to an early-Earth kind of environment."

Dragonfly will give us a leg up in the effort to send humans to Titan, Hendrix said, "but there's still a lot to do and learn."

"Ultimately, we're trying to get humans on the surface and living there. I think that's doable in the long-term, for sure," she said. A precursor mission might involve robotic orbiting of Titan — perhaps even a human crew circuiting the Saturn moon. Radar and infrared scanning of its surface could be done, she said, along with gauging what impact Titan's changing seasons have on the moon's atmosphere.

"A lot can be done, and should be done, robotically. But with humans on the surface, there's work only humans can do," Hendrix said.

Surmountable issues

So, how best to strut the right stuff on Titan?

First, there's more atmospheric pressure than here on Earth. "You don't need a pressure suit like you do on the moon or Mars. What you do need to do is keep warm. It's very cold there. There's also a little more gravity than the Earth's moon," said Hendrix.

Because of Titan's atmosphere, "you can strap wings to your arms and move through the atmosphere under your own power, or strap on a jet pack and power yourself around. You've got that atmosphere and low gravity. There are many options for transport on Titan, which Dragonfly is taking advantage of," Hendrix said.

Also, you'd have to make your own oxygen, Hendrix said, which is not available in Titan's thick, nitrogen atmosphere laced with methane. A Titan-based habitat would need a power source. And, given the precipitation of molecules and gunk that rains down and settles on the surface, there's a need to protect equipment, she said.

"This is all surmountable," said Hendrix, saying that Dragonfly and other precursor missions could yield information useful for human visits to Titan.

The Humans to Titan Summit 2026 is being held June 11-12 in Boulder, Colorado. The goal is "to explore the concept of Titan as the next human exploration destination after Mars, how it could be done and what we would need to do now," according to the event's website.

"We want the workshop to invigorate the community to think about what we need to do and what the possibilities are … to plant the seed that this is a real possibility," Hendrix concluded.

The human heart shrivels away in space, but researchers have found that mini-hearts grown from human stem cells sprout in space significantly faster than in labs on Earth.

Weird things happen to astronauts' hearts in microgravity. Without the sense of up and down, the flow of blood in the body changes. More of the fluid gathers in the head, and there is suddenly less of it not just in the legs but also in the heart itself. Not having to push the body against the resistance of gravity, the heart shrinks, weakens and even changes its shape, becoming more circular.

Even heart muscle cells flown in petri dishes to the International Space Station (ISS) deteriorate. Their ability to contract declines and their metabolism changes. Yet, when researchers tried to grow human mini-hearts from stem cells on board the ISS, they found they could produce them more easily and in higher quantities, Arun Sharma, director of the Center for Space Medicine Research at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, told Space.com.

"On one side, you have things that have already been made before that are being exposed to low gravity and potentially deteriorating and getting weaker over the course of being exposed to microgravity," Sharma said. "On the other side, you are actually making those things from scratch in space. It's possible that the production process is facilitated by low gravity."

Sharma, who has been sending heart cell experiments to the ISS since 2016, presented the results of his team's latest work at the 46th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation in Toronto on April 25.

In the past five decades, researchers have learned how to make human stem cells grow into human heart organoids — essentially proto-hearts made of self-organized clustering heart cells that begin to behave like an actual heart. Stem cells are the universal cells found in human fetuses that can turn into any kind of human cells as the baby body develops. Stem cells can also be reverse-engineered in labs from adult skin or blood cells. With the addition of the right proteins at the right time, these stem cells can be prompted to grow in labs into beating, three-dimensional heart organoids in just a couple of weeks.

To make those mini-hearts at scale, Sharma said, researchers use bioreactors that effectively mimic microgravity.

"We use these things called suspension bioreactors, which force [the heart cells] to float around," said Sharma. "The cells love being grown in this way. But to force them into suspension, you typically have to spin them around and introduce some sort of a force, which the cells can sense. And they don't like being always agitated this way."

In space, however, floating happens naturally without any uncomfortable stirring. And the cells seem to love that.

"We have seen a very significant increase in terms of organoid production," Sharma said. However, he declined to specify how many more heart organoids the space experiments produced compared to Earth-based reactors, as the results have not yet been published.

"I can say that the scale of production is something that's been very impressive," he said. "Just the number of organoids that we can make in this way."

Launching stuff to space is obviously expensive, but Sharma thinks that in the future, organoids or heart tissue 3D-printed in space could be used to help patients with heart damage who are awaiting heart transplants.

No space-grown proto-hearts have been used in human patients yet, and no tests are being planned so far, said Sharma. Researchers are currently testing heart muscle patches made of induced human stem cells bioengineered on Earth to ease the lives of patients with heart damage. The human heart cannot repair its broken muscles on its own, so outside help is needed. Based on the latest research results, Sharma thinks that patches and organoids made in space may be of superior quality.

"The microgravity environment offers the potential to produce thicker, more robust patches less prone to collapse under gravity when brought back to Earth," he said.

Due to regulations, it may take years for space-grown mini-hearts to make it to human trials. Sharma thinks that the organoids will first be used to test new heart disease drugs.

Heart disease is a leading cause of premature death worldwide. Millions of people around the world die every year because of heart disease. Stem cell therapies that regenerate the damaged heart muscle are among the most promising innovative treatments on the horizon.

Sharma's team plans to send more heart cell experiments to the space station on board NASA's SpaceX CRS-35 resupply mission, which is scheduled to launch no earlier than August.

A group of former NASA astronauts are banding together with a new organization called "Astronauts for America."

"Our country is the mission," their tagline reads. And in speaking with co-founder NASA astronaut Ron Garan, it is clear how serious they are about this mission. "We need to come together as a crew and nudge the trajectory of our nation back onto a course that's leading to a better future," Garan told Space.com. "As astronauts, we're trained that when we see something that's wrong, we speak up and we fix it."

Astronauts for America is a new, explicitly nonpartisan organization made up of former NASA astronauts who aim to "defend the Constitution of the United States," their website reads. Currently, there are over 100 astronauts as part of this mission, though not all are publicly listed on the website for their privacy, according to Garan.

So where did this all come from?

"There's been a steady erosion of adherence to constitutional norms," Garan said. "And there's been an erosion of rule and law following."

These concerns are shared by other organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which has stated growing concerns of violations of the U.S. Constitution by lawmakers.

Garan's concerns also extend to an observed trend in recent years of distrust in science.

"There's been a steady erosion of people with political power either ignoring or suppressing scientific evidence […] we need to make sure that people are using facts and evidence," Garan added.

This trend has seen political decisions which do not align with scientific evidence, such as legislation concerning vaccines and climate change. Even long-debunked myths in science such as the conspiracy that the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked (hint: it wasn't) as well as UFO conspiracies have seen a resurgence in popularity. Across the board, this divide between science and public or political opinion has continued to grow.

How to protect the Constitution

To take on defending the U.S. Constitution, the group plans to first raise awareness through public platforms like social media. They further plan to meet with members of Congress, "to urge them to use their constitutional powers to ensure checks and balances," Garan said.

"We are going to support leaders publicly that use data and science in policy making," he added. "And what we really want to do is build community, because what the main objective of this organization is to unify the American people around this idea that we are greater than the sum of the parts […] if we work together as crewmates, as we do on space missions, we can steer the trajectory of our nation to a future where we will all thrive."

One main facet of the group's approach is that it is an explicitly nonpartisan organization, so astronaut members are not affiliated with any specific political party; rather they are together focused on supporting a constitutional government. As Garan described, astronauts are taught to fix incredibly challenging problems, and to do so when it comes to the U.S. government, "we have to work together despite any differences we might have."

"When we see things from two different perspectives, we see it in stereoscopic vision," he added. "We start to see the depth of a solution. So one of the reasons why bringing in all this diversity of perspective is so important is because it leads to better solutions."

This isn't the first time that NASA astronauts have tangled with politics. There have been many astronauts who became politicians or vice versa, for example. Former NASA administrator Bill Nelson was in politics before becoming an astronaut, while currently we have former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly serving as a senator for Arizona.

Because this is a private, activist organization, current employees of the U.S. government cannot participate, so you won't see any current astronauts or astronauts-turned-politicians as members. However, even though current astronauts cannot participate directly, it is possible that the awe inspired by NASA's recent Artemis 2 mission around the moon could play an indirect role in the group's ultimate goal, Garan shared.

"The Artemis 2 mission filled the world, not only the nation, with awe and wonder," Garan said. "And when we build things on wonder, it naturally opens the mind. It brings down the defenses, it puts fear on the back burner and it allows us to have rational conversations about how to really solve our problems."

The Artemis 2 heat shield looks like a sunken treasure from the Titanic in an underwater shot following splashdown.

The mission's Orion capsule splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10, safely returning its astronaut crew home. Now, we can see the aftermath of that landing in a striking new photograph.

What is it?

On April 10, NASA's Artemis 2 mission ended its historic 10-day journey around the moon and back. This was the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972, which is when the final mission of NASA's Apollo program wrapped up.

Following splashdown, U.S. Navy divers helped extract the crew from the capsule so the astronauts could continue on their way home. The Orion capsule will be returned to NASA's Kennedy Space Center for additional study following the mission — but before it was plucked from the ocean, the divers managed to capture images of the capsule and its heat shield underwater.

Why is it incredible?

This image is eerie and captivating. Against the dark blue of the ocean, the scorched tiles of the heat shield float like details on a forgotten relic lost at sea.

But most importantly, this striking image represents an incredible feat.

While hurtling through Earth's atmosphere at nearly 35 times the speed of sound, the Orion capsule endured incredibly hot temperatures. In fact, on that journey home, it may have reached temperatures upwards of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 degrees Celsius). To protect the crew inside, the capsule was equipped with this heat shield, which thankfully did its job. Analysis of the returned capsule and heat shield will continue as the agency prepares for its next crewed mission: Artemis 3.

The Lyrid meteor shower peaks tonight (April 21). And, if you spot any Lyrid meteors, you have something cool in common with an astronaut!

Yesterday (April 20), NASA astronaut Jessica Meir shared a photograph that she took of the Lyrid meteor shower from aboard the International Space Station (ISS). But her view was a bit different from yours, as she saw a Lyrid streaking through Earth's atmosphere from above.

What is it?

The Lyrid meteor shower is at its peak this week, with prime viewing happening overnight from April 21 to April 22.

The Lyrids are made up of bits of debris trailing the long-period comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, which was discovered in 1861. Long-period comets have very long orbital periods, taking hundreds of years or more to orbit the sun.

Every year around this time, Earth passes through this comet's debris field. Pieces of it burn up in our atmosphere, creating the spectacular meteors that streak across the sky.

The shower produces up to 15 to 20 Lyrid meteors per hour. You can see the Lyrids radiating from around the constellation Lyra (hence their name). If you can, find dark skies for optimal viewing.

In a photograph snapped from aboard the ISS, Meir revealed that she was able to see a Lyrid meteor shower lighting up the dark night skies over Earth.

Why is it incredible?

This photograph is so much more than just proof of a successful meteor shower watch.

It is a stunning visual reminder that our planet is protected by a surprisingly thin atmosphere. As Meir shared in her post, you can see below the horizon where the meteor is streaking.

The experience of living in space aboard the ISS is unique for so many reasons. But what a remarkable moment, for astronauts in space to be able to look down at their home planet and watch our atmosphere interact with a comet like this.

It turns out that living in space can have a lasting impact on how your brain works, researchers have found.

In space, astronauts have to learn to live without gravity — whether they're aboard the International Space Station (ISS) or on a journey to the moon, such as with NASA's Artemis 2 mission. While space adventurers do experience microgravity conditions beyond Earth, that gravitational influence is so minimal that you can think of it as a virtually weightless environment. But while floating around might sound fun, even simple tasks like holding an object can post unique challenges. So, scientists have wondered, how does the brain adapt to this kind of lifestyle?

In a new study, researchers from the Université catholique de Louvain and Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science, explored how astronauts' brains adapt to weightlessness. The team studied changes in how astronauts grip objects when going from Earth to space and then back to Earth again.

The results were a little stranger than you might expect, and could have serious consequences for future astronaut safety.

“What we observed was totally unexpected,” lead author Philippe Lefèvre, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Université catholique de Louvain, told Space.com.

The researchers found that months after returning to Earth from space, astronauts had trouble exerting the correct amount of force to properly grip an object. In fact,their brains were so used to gripping weightless objects in space that it took them months back on Earth to readjust.

Similarly, the team also found that, while in space, astronauts actually exerted more force than necessary to grip objects because their brains still expected the presence of gravity.

Essentially, both during a mission in space and after returning to Earth, astronauts "misinterpret sensory feedback," Lefèvre said.

Grip vs gravity

To conduct their study and investigate the ways human brains adapt to major changes in gravity, researchers analyzed grip force and movement in a total of 11 European Space Agency astronauts both on Earth and in space. In both scenarios, the astronauts performed repetitive movements while gripping an object, which were later studied by the team (back on Earth).

Living on Earth with the force of gravity, we know that if we let go of an object, both inertia and the weight of the object (a combination of mass and gravity) will cause it to fall. In space, only inertia causes objects to move. For instance, simply letting go of an object won't make it "fall," but tapping down on it would have the same visual effect because you've added a manual force. But while we might know this intellectually, it turns out that it takes some time for our brains to catch up to our gravity (or gravity-less surroundings).

These findings, which show how astronauts in space and then again back on Earth exert an incorrect amount of force to grip objects, suggest it takes our brains time to gradually adjust to a sudden lack of or a return in gravity — at least, in terms of grip strength. This could have significant implications for future astronauts traveling to the ISS, the moon, and maybe even beyond someday.

Having the right grip on an object could be the difference between conducting a routine procedure without a hitch or having a piece of that experiment slip away and into something fragile aboard a spacecraft. The correct grip could be the deciding factor in whether an astronaut correctly maneuvers a robotic arm or successfully performs a medical procedure.

Understanding how the brain and grip are affected by gravitational changes could also have safety implications, especially during events like spacewalks or even moonwalks. Even exercising aboard the ISS could be dangerous if someone’s grip were to slip.

"Even if the risk of slippage is low, the consequence of slippage would be really dramatic," Lefèvre explained. "If you move at high speed [with] a big object onboard the ISS, and you lose the grip, the object will keep going. It's gonna hit something, and it could be dramatic in terms of safety."

Both in space and on Earth, it's important to keep a grip on things.

A study about these results was published Today (April 20) in the Journal of Neuroscience.

I've been imagining what it would be like to go to the Moon ever since 1961 when I was five years old, staring at the artists' conceptions in my childhood space books. When Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to actually go there, during Christmas week of 1968, I was a 12-year-old space fanatic camped out in front of the TV with models of the spacecraft I'd built from kits, maps of the Moon, and articles about the flight — my own personal mission control.

For me, the highlight of the 20 hours Apollo 8 spent in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve came when Borman and his crew made two TV broadcasts with their small onboard black-and-white camera. I was absolutely mesmerized by the images of craters gliding slowly past the spacecraft's windows. I loved their fuzzy, almost dreamlike quality; somehow that fit the momentousness of the event and the almost unimaginable distance between the three Moon voyagers and all of us on their home planet.

This was nothing less than the most exciting thing I could possibly imagine. I wanted to be those men, and over the next four years I took my place in front of the TV for every one of the Apollo missions, right up through the end of the program in December 1972. Witnessing humanity's first voyages to another world became my life's defining experience. I couldn't have imagined then that I would grow up to become a space historian and that I would spend eight years writing a you-are-there account of the lunar missions, based on my in-depth interviews with the Apollo Moon voyagers. But even as I re-immersed myself in Apollo, I had to face the reality that the first era of human lunar exploration was receding ever further into history, with nothing on the horizon to replace it. Since then there has always been a part of me drawing sustenance from the distant past, especially when I began teaching the lessons of Apollo to NASA engineers in 2016.

As the time for Artemis 2 drew near, my anticipation was mixed with uncertainty. Would this new Moon mission spark the feelings of wonder and excitement I'd had so long ago? Those doubts didn't last long. When astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen headed for the Moon in the Orion spacecraft they named "Integrity," I felt like parts of my brain that had been dormant since 1972 were being reactivated. I listened to every minute of their seven-hour lunar flyby — but this was nothing like the Christmas Eve I'd experienced more than 57 years before. Now NASA's coverage featured extended views from inside the cabin while the astronauts worked, so clear that they could have been aboard the International Space Station 250 miles (400 kilometers) up instead of a thousand times farther away.

As I listened to the astronauts' voices, I felt as if a veil had been lifted: Instead of the restrained, "Right Stuff" delivery of the Apollo 8 crew's transmissions, I heard expressions of exhilaration and even joy. And I was amazed at the richness of detail about the lunar experience that was available to everyone in real time. Even the astronauts' geologic descriptions were filled with human moments that put me in the spacecraft alongside them. As "Integrity" rounded the Moon, Christina Koch likened the appearance of the smallest, freshest lunar craters to "a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through. They're so bright compared to the rest of the Moon." Victor Glover described peering at the long shadows of the lunar terminator through a telephoto lens and suddenly feeling transported down to that airless, forbidding landscape and imagining himself off-road driving among jagged peaks.

For me, the most awesome moment of the entire mission happened when "Integrity" flew into the Moon's shadow, creating a nearly hour-long total eclipse of the Sun — more than 10 times longer than most total eclipses visible from Earth. I was transfixed by video from the spacecraft's external cameras showing the glow of the solar corona slowly disappearing behind the Moon's darkened limb. Aboard "Integrity," the astronauts let their eyes adapt, and soon they could see the Moon's night side set against a dim glow, with a crescent-shaped slice of the cratered globe illuminated in the soft light of Earthshine. I heard Victor Glover say, "We've just gone sci-fi." Suddenly I was filled with curiosity, hungry for more description.

But this was one sight that was beyond their ability to convey in the moment. "It's just, it's indescribable," I heard Reid Wiseman say. "No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular. Surreal. There's — I know there's no adjectives. I'm gonna need to invent some new ones to describe what we are looking at out this window."

The morning after the flyby, I opened my laptop to find that the astronauts had beamed down their photos of the encounter, and I felt like Rip Van Winkle awakened from a half-century nap. For decades after Apollo, there was no such thing as hi-def scans of the missions' photographic film, but now, just hours after the event, I was looking at full-resolution digital images of stunning beauty, including new portraits of a brilliant blue and white crescent Earth setting and then rising behind the lunar far side's lifeless expanse, taken from the farthest point in deep space that humans have ever reached. I felt a wave of excitement and relief come over me at the realization that a new era of human deep space exploration has finally begun. Now, instead of just looking back, I'm looking ahead.

Andrew Chaikin is the author of "A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts" (Viking, 1994). His website is www.DoSpaceBetter.com.

Even in space, we love to make our friends laugh.

On April 13, NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Jack Hathaway worked to capture Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL spacecraft from aboard the International Space Station (ISS) using the Canadarm2 robotic arm. But before the successful capture, the pair had a bit of fun.

Williams played on an optical illusion, reaching his hand out and appearing to "hold" the Cygnus XL from the ISS' cupola alongside Hathaway as the pair smiled and laugh.

What is it?

On April 11, NASA's Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 24 mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission sent over 11,000 pounds of cargo, including scientific investigations, to the ISS aboard a Cygnus XL spacecraft, identifiable by its two, round solar arrays.

On April 13, Williams and Hathaway captured the spacecraft using the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Once captured, they positioned it for installation on the ISS' Earth-facing port.

As you can see in the image, while the Cygnus was visible outside of the cupola, the pair had some fun pretending to "hold" the spacecraft between their fingers with a classic optical illusion.

Why is it incredible?

Space is hard. With the Cygnus XL's arrival, Williams and Hathaway accomplished a challenging feat, capturing and installing a spacecraft carrying thousands of pounds of cargo to another orbiting spacecraft.

But what's amazing is that, despite the constant and plentiful challenges of outer space, astronauts still manage to find the joy. And their fellow astronauts shared in the joy with them.

"Congratulations to @Astro_ChrisW and @astro_hathaway on their first cargo vehicle capture using the @csa_asc Canadarm on the @Space_Station! Mission accomplished today. Hatch opening and cargo ops, including many scientific experiments (and even some fresh food!), commence early tomorrow. Well done, @northropgrumman, @NASA, @SpaceX teams!" fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir shared on X on April 13 X.

In the wake of NASA's triumphant Artemis 2 mission to the moon, which safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean to return its four-astronaut crew home last week , NOVA is launching a one-hour documentary to reveal an inside look at the historic spaceflight.

Directed by British filmmaker Tim Lambert ("Guns, Germs and Steel," "Alien Worlds"), the new documentary "Return to the Moon" will air on PBS stations tonight (April 15) at 9 p.m. (8 p.m. Central). It provides a captivating behind-the-scenes examination of NASA’s Artemis program and its engineering challenges as the endeavor moved from 2022’s uncrewed Artemis 1 mission and its unexpected Orion heat shield concerns, to April 1's liftoff of Artemis 2.

"We wanted to somehow do justice to the extraordinary ambition of the Artemis program and try to chart and chronicle the mission from beginning to end, from soup to nuts, or design to splashdown if that’s more appropriate," Lambert tells Space.com. "To be an observational documentary eye and follow what’s going on. It's difficult doing that with NASA because it's hard getting access to all the things you need access to. Everything has to go through protocol and export control and then it’s just a matter of finding the right moments and piecing bits together."

"Return to the Moon" targets the design and manufacture of NASA's massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with an attention to detail that delivers the titanic core stage right into your living room. We're also treated to an in-depth look at Artemis 1’s Orion capsule, the post-flight investigation into its partially compromised shielding tiles, the abandonment of the first mission’s double dip skip-entry maneuver, and the remaining risks as Artemis 2's liftoff arrived.

“When we started, we wanted to get very close to the astronauts and the whole idea that we’re heading toward the first woman and the first person of color on the moon and it seemed like a diversity project when we were back in the Biden days,” he explains. "That's sort of downplayed now in the Trump days. NOVA's executives were more interested in the idea of the engineering, and we realized this is kind of a science and engineering show.

"So that nudged us more towards talking to engineers and see behind the scenes, and in a way it's a very good thing. The astronauts are the rock stars of the project, but the real heart of the story, the question marks about the architecture of Artemis, are all connected to engineering ultimately. That's what slowed this whole process up, not the astronauts. And that was a moment for us, to read the Inspector General's report in May of 2024. No one really had any sense of how serious the capsule issue was and how bad the damage was."

Lambert is old enough to remember the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969. As a kid his parents dragged him out of bed to witness that event live on TV.

"They landed on the moon at night time here in England," he recalls. "We were woken up and told it was really important. I became an Apollo nut after that even though I was only six or seven. Like every other kid I wanted to be an astronaut. So for me it's like, 'Wow, we're certainly going back there.' We wonder why it took so long, but now we're here. It feels like a new age of inspiration. Whether Artemis and its huge ambitions can deliver or not remains to be seen. Not to plant a flag and pick up some rocks, but to actually put down a moon base is like science fiction. That to me is the inspiration, and I hope we get a little of that across in the film."

Nova’s “Return to the Moon” premieres on PBS Wednesday, April 15, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT on PBS and will also be offered for streaming at pbs.org/nova, NOVA on YouTube, and the PBS App.

The unbridled international spirit generated by NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission knows no bounds, as evidenced by the historic event making the cut as a subject for this past weekend's episode of the Saturday Night Live show broadcast on NBC on April 11, 2026.

Just one day after the world watched billowing orange-and-white main parachutes deliver the lunar voyagers' Orion capsule safely into the Pacific Ocean for a perfect splashdown on Friday (April 10), the venerable comedy program made it a point to mark the occasion with a hilarious skit that captured the endearing personalities of the actual crew.

In the timely space spoof, the four Artemis 2 astronauts, portrayed by Colman Domingo, Mikey Day, Marcello Hernández, and Sarah Sherman offer an update on their moon mission at Day 9. It's a funny old-school bit that harkens back to the show’s signature physical comedy made famous by the series’ original "Not Ready For Primetime Players" that included Bill Murray, John Belushi, Laraine Newman, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Garrett Morris.

Prepare for a goofy fun video log filled with profound thoughts, clogged toilet troubles, a battle of the Pringles can, extreme Canadian pride, a spoof on Christina Koch's sea monster-like tangle of hair, zero-g "pee-pee" difficulties, a Harry Potter prank, and an amazing "No Hands Hat" trick.

"Hey guys, Christina fell asleep un-Velcroed again! Someone stick her ass to the wall, please," Colman Domingo explains while performing his rendition of real Artemis 2 pilot Victor Glover.

The zero gravity effects here work extremely well and there's a genuine good-naturedness on display that enhances the true silliness of the moment. We can all relate to things like what it would be like to sneeze in a weightless environment to produce a scary strand of snot, right?

The Artemis 2 crew captured a spellbinding photo of the crescent Earth shining above the moon's horizon on Flight Day 6 of their mission, shortly before our planet was lost behind the lunar horizon.

What is it?

White clouds can be seen swirling on Earth's sunlit arc above the line separating night from day while the cratered expanse of the lunar disk stretches out below. The 590-mile-wide (950-kilometer-wide) Orientale basin can be seen darkening the upper right of the lunar crescent, while prominent features such as the Chebyshev, Vavilov and Hertzsprung impact sites dominate the shadowed lunar far side in the lower half of the image.

The photo was captured on Monday (April 6), as Artemis 2's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen executed their successful flyby of the lunar far side. The mission marked the first time astronauts had visited lunar space since Apollo 17 departed in 1972. Artemis 2 also set a new record for the most distant crewed mission in the history of spaceflight, surpassing the previous record set by the crew of Apollo 13 in April 1970.

Why is it incredible?

Every human being that has ever lived is contained within the scope of this single image, with the exception of the four crewmembers of the Artemis 2 Orion capsule "Integrity".

Prior to Artemis 2, only 24 people — the astronauts of Apollo 8 through Apollo 17 — have had the privilege of seeing the far side of the moon with their own eyes. That number has now risen to 28, with NASA's Christina Koch making history by becoming the first woman to join the ranks, while Victor Glover became the first Black man to perform the feat.

Artemis 2's Orion spacecraft is now racing towards Earth on a return journey that will see the four-person crew splash down off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10 (0007 GMT on April 11), and you can watch it unfold live right here at Space.com.

Be sure to stay up to date with all the latest news with our Artemis 2 liveblog and discover the answers to all your Artemis program questions with our in-depth explainer article!

NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Artemis 2 crew just completed their awe-inspiring loop around the moon on Monday, April 6, as the world watched this historic record-breaking endeavor.

Now Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen are heading home to Mother Earth, where they’ll end their space adventure by splashing down safely in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, April 10.

But let’s rewind before their initial April 1 liftoff to the four astronauts’ Kennedy Space Center quarantine period in Houston, where they were treated to a viewing of Amazon MGM Studios' "Project Hail Mary" to bolster their spirits ahead of their monumental 10-day lunar voyage.

"We were all really lucky," Hansen shared during a live interview on Sunday. "We got to watch 'Hail Mary' when we were in quarantine. That was a real treat that they sent us a link to view that at home with our families, getting us ready to go on our own space adventure."

In the blockbuster sci-fi adventure directed by Chris Miller & Phil Lord and adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, Ryan Gosling portrays Ryland Grace, a middle-grade teacher and molecular biologist who reluctantly ventures into deep space to unravel a cosmic mystery and hopefully save Earth from sun-eating alien microbes. The movie's message of friendship, cooperation, sacrifice, and hope deeply resonated with the Artemis 2 team as a refreshing tonic before their big moon launch.

"I would just say to Ryan, art imitates science and vice versa, it seems," he added during the Canadian Space Agency’s Q&A press chat.

"He did a great job in that movie. It's wonderful to see people really leaning into those roles. I thought it was just such an inspirational example, and somebody who goes out there and just gets what was done to save humanity. It’s a pretty extraordinary example that we can all follow. We all thought that movie was really uplifting and inspiring."

Marking the occasion and providing encouraging words to the three American astronauts and one Canadian astronaut, Ryan Gosling recorded a brief encouraging video for the moon-bound foursome.

"The Artemis 2 astronauts are going to space for real, and they will travel farther from Earth than any humans in history," the Canadian actor stated. “Sending all our best wishes to the Artemis 2 crew.”

Artemis 2’s Orion capsule and its four astronaut crew members are scheduled to splash down off the coast of San Diego at roughly 5:07 p.m. PDT on Friday, April 10.

Project Hail Mary is still available to watch in theaters, and you can also check out the book that it's based on, written by "The Martian" author Andy Weir.

Artemis 2 astronaut Christina Koch starred in an out-of-this-world selfie with the zero-gravity indicator "Rise" on April 4, captured from a camera mounted on a solar panel as the crew were half way to the moon ahead of their historic lunar flyby.

What is it?

Koch can be seen smiling alongside Rise in an illuminated Orion viewport, with the spacecraft's service module bathed in bright sunlight on Flight Day 4 of their 10-day lunar mission.

The NASA photo was captured using a modified GoPro camera mounted on the end of a 7-meter-long (23-foot) solar panel — one of four such "wings" that power the Orion spacecraft by transforming sunlight into usable electricity.

Why is it incredible?

Zero-g indicators are traditionally flown on space missions as both a mascot and a simple way for astronauts to confirm they have reached microgravity.

NASA held an open competition to design the Artemis 2 zero-g indicator, receiving more than 2,600 entries from over 50 countries. The winning design from Californian 3rd grader Lucas Ye was inspired by astronaut Bill Anders' iconic Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photo and features a smiling moon-like head and Earth-themed cap.

Safely tucked within the adorable mascot is a tiny SD card bearing the names of the 5,647,889 people who applied for an Artemis 2 "boarding pass". Artemis 2 astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are due to return to Earth on April 10, enduring a fiery atmospheric re-entry before finally splashing down off the coast of San Diego to bring an end to their 10-day space odyssey.

Want to know more? Then be sure to keep up to date with the latest news with our Artemis 2 liveblog and read up on NASA's efforts to establish a sustainable presence on the moon with our Artemis program explainer.

The Artemis 2 crewmembers captured a spectacular view of Earth setting behind the moon through the window of their Orion spacecraft on Flight Day 6 of NASA's historic 10-day mission, as they passed over the far side of the lunar surface. They called it "Earthset," in reference to the iconic image captured by Bill Anders on Christmas Eve in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission.

What is it?

The photo was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT (1041 GMT) on April 6, as the majority of Earth's surface was veiled in shadow from the perspective of the Artemis 2 crew. Just a crescent of our planet could be seen illuminated by direct sunlight, revealing white clouds swirling over Australia and Oceana.

Countless craters can be seen scarring the moon's ancient surface, including the 40-mile-wide (64-kilometer-wide) expanse of Ohm Crater, which can be seen close to where the lunar horizon meets the shadowed night side of Earth. The crater features a prominent central peak and a sloping "terraced" rim.

NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — the crew of the Orion spacecraft they named "Integrity" — witnessed Earth slip silently from view shortly after, as they passed over the far side of the moon.

They would later experience a planned 40-minute communications blackout while traveling beyond the range of NASA's relay satellites. But then, they witnessed an iconic "Earthrise" even more similar to what Anders saw in the 60s, as our Blue Marble emerged from behind its natural satellite.

Later that day, the crew would be treated to one of the rarest sights in human history, a total solar eclipse witnessed from a free-flying spacecraft, as Orion's trajectory placed the moon between the NASA spacecraft and our parent star.

Want to know more? Then be sure to stay up to date with the latest news with our Artemis 2 liveblog. You can also find out what the Orion crew will be getting up to over the rest of their 10 day lunar trip with our day-by-day breakdown of the trailblazing mission, which has seen humans travel farther from Earth than ever before.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

In April 2026, four astronauts are scheduled to fly around the Moon. As part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, they will become the first humans to do so in half a century. One crew member, pilot Victor Glover, will become the first Black astronaut to ever orbit the Moon.

Glover’s achievement is worth celebrating. But it’s also worth remembering that he belongs to a long and underappreciated history. America’s first Black explorer didn’t fly an Apollo rocket or sail with the U.S. Exploring Expedition. He traveled with Lewis and Clark, and he was known by a single name: York.

I’m a historian who spent five years writing a book about Lewis and Clark, and I found new documents that show York was one of the most important people on their expedition. Even in a party that could number as many as 45 men, York stood out – for his courage, his skill and his sacrifices that helped the famous captains reach the Pacific Ocean.

York's life as a slave

York was born in Virginia around 1770. Growing up, he was a creative and sociable child, unusually tall with dark hair and a dark complexion – “black as a bear,” a contemporary noted.

He was also enslaved by the Clarks. William Clark, who was around the same age, was also unusually tall, though his hair was a rusty red, and sometimes the boys played together. But the playing stopped once York turned 9 or 10. That’s when he joined the adult slaves in working full time. That’s also when he began to note the differences between his life and William’s – differences that became only clearer once William started ordering him around.

In the 1780s, the Clark household headed to Kentucky. York met a Black woman there and married her. He also became William’s “body servant.”

A body servant was a slave who stayed close to his owner and prioritized his comfort, laying out his clothes and serving his meals. When Meriwether Lewis asked Clark to join his expedition, in 1803, Clark ordered York to accompany him.

Perhaps York was excited for this adventure. Perhaps he was not – it would be punishing, and he would be separated from his wife.

Either way, York didn’t have a choice.

The Corps of Discovery

York proved his worth from the start. Once they reached St. Louis, the soldiers, later known as the Corps of Discovery, rushed to raise winter quarters. Working in hail and snow, York and the others built log huts. They needed rough planks for their tables and bunks, but the carpenters had only a single whipsaw to make them. They chose two men to operate this crucial tool. One of them was York.

On May 14, 1804, the corps began ascending the Missouri River. York helped row and tow the party’s barge, which was the size of a semi-truck trailer. He carried a rifle and hunted – according to the expedition’s journals, he was only the fifth named member to bring down a buffalo. York cooked for the captains. He collected scientific specimens. He nursed the sick, including several soldiers and, later on, Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman who would also prove essential to the expedition’s success.

The soldiers were not always kind in return. During this period, officers rarely brought along enslaved body servants. York’s race probably made some of the men angry or uncomfortable. One day, someone threw so much sand in his face that it nearly blinded him. Clark claimed it was “in fun,” but he also wrote that York was “very near losing his eyes,” and no one else got cruelly sprayed with sand.

That fall, during councils with Native leaders, York played a surprising and vital role. The Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa all crowded in to see him and to touch his skin. They had never met a Black person before, and York showed off his strength and played with the Native children. Later, the Arikara said York was “the most marvelous” thing about the corps.

The next year, the expedition crossed the Rockies and the Continental Divide. York’s most important – and most overlooked – contributions came soon after. On the Columbia River and its tributaries, the party had to dig out five new canoes and then paddle them through treacherous rapids.

Lewis and Clark allowed only their best rivermen on these foaming, rock-riven waters. One of them was almost certainly York. During my research, I found an unpublished letter in which Clark praised York’s ability to “manage the boats.”

Just as important, York was a strong swimmer, a rare thing in an era when many people never learned to swim.

York’s life as an explorer

On the Columbia River, the corps survived a series of terrifying choke points – soggy hazards they referred to as the “Long Narrows” and the “Great Chute.” After that came the ocean. They had traveled together for more than 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers), and when the captains asked the men to vote on where to put their final winter quarters, they made sure to ask York, too.

It was the latest sign that his role had changed during this epic journey. But those changes began with York. In the West, he found ways to make choices and assert himself. He sent a buffalo robe to his wife in Kentucky. When Clark told him to scale back his performances for Native people, York ignored him – because he wanted to, and because he could.

York’s vote was also evidence that, like Victor Glover today, he was an official American explorer, a key member of a sprawling, federally funded mission. From 1804 to 1806, the government devoted a larger percentage of its budget to the corps than it devotes to NASA today.

Part of that money was earmarked for York. The Army gave officers who brought along their slaves a monthly ration or its cash equivalent. When the corps made it home, the government paid US$274.57 for York’s labor, a sum similar to what the privates received. But that money didn’t go to York. It went to Clark.

The hidden history of Black explorers

There have been many Black explorers in American history. Thomas Jefferson launched other expeditions besides Lewis and Clark’s, and those expeditions also included enslaved people, though their names have not survived. Isaiah Brown served on the Wheeler Survey, which mapped the West in greater detail after the Civil War. Matthew Henson accompanied Robert Peary on his Arctic expeditions, which received some federal support. More recently, NASA has depended on Black astronauts such as Guy Bluford, Mae Jemison and Jeanette Epps, among others.

York and Victor Glover are, for now, the first and most recent examples of this inspiring tradition. But their contributions go beyond that. When the captains asked York to vote on the winter quarters, they were acknowledging in some small way that he’d proven he was more than a body servant.

Of course, York had always been more than that. It just took 4,000 miles for Lewis and Clark to see it.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen has a special mission patch for his historic moon flight, which could launch as soon as April 1.

Jeremy Hansen, who is with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will fly as a mission specialist on the Artemis 2 mission alongside three NASA astronauts: Reid Wiseman (the Artemis 2 commander), pilot Victor Glover (who will become the first Black person to leave low Earth orbit, or LEO) and mission specialist Christina Koch (the first woman to do so). Hansen will become the first non-American to leave LEO.

There are many mission patches flying with the astronaut quartet, with all four sporting the Artemis 2 main mission patch as well as a "Freedom 250" commemorative patch marking the year 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And Hansen's flight suit patches include a special one symbolizing the meaning of the Artemis 2 mission for himself and his country, including Indigenous communities with whom he has spent time as a CSA astronaut.

"For the past decade, Jeremy has been fortunate to be invited by numerous Indigenous communities to sit with Elders and Knowledge Keepers," the CSA said in an April 2025 explainer describing the patch. "They have blessed him with knowledge and teachings that he carries with him as he prepares for his mission. These precious experiences have given Jeremy a profound appreciation for Indigenous ways of knowing."

Hansen reflected on these journeys, including a 2023 vision quest with Turtle Lodge in Manitoba, during a livestreamed Q&A with entrepreneur Fred Bastien on the CSA's YouTube channel in November 2025.

"I've had the privilege, just in my travels across Canada, I've been invited by numerous [Indigenous] Elders to sit with them," Hansen said in that interview. "Sometimes I participate in traditional ceremonies, sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, and then just sitting and chatting with Elders. Anybody who's had more time on this planet, the wiser you are."

The patch, CSA explains, has "elements of Anishinaabe culture." These are not meant to represent all aspects of First Nations, Inuit and Métis culture, but they do show "the importance of traditional knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in Canada." The patch was created by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba. Dave Courchene III (Sabe), the leader of the Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation, also contributed to the patch.

Hansen said the patch incorporates one element of Anishinaabe perspectives — the culture's seven sacred laws, as represented by the heptagonal shape of the patch, as well as seven animals.

"Just quickly: The buffalo represents respect. The eagle, love. The bear is courage. The sasquatch is honesty. The beaver is wisdom. The wolf is humility, and the turtle is truth. None of us are perfect. We're not always able to walk in that integrity, but if we strive to, they will bring a rich life for each of us." (More information about the animals' meaning is available on the CSA webpage.)

These are some of the other significant elements of the mission patch. Information in the bullet points below comes from that same CSA explainer.

• The bow is meant to represent the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, from which the Artemis program takes its name. Artemis is depicted launching both an arrow and the astronauts around "Grandmother Moon, who conveys the cycle of life … the arrow launches from Turtle Island, which refers to the continent of North America in the creation stories of some Indigenous peoples."
• Hansen's lifelong affiliation with the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he serves now as a colonel, is shown in the service's astronaut wings. The wings also "recognize the sacrifice of Jeremy's fellow service members and their families."
• The Canadian flag not only represents people from the nation who have worked directly on the mission but "also to symbolically bring all Canadians along on this mission around the moon."
• The famous asterism of the Big Dipper, as well as the North Star, are both depicted to show "a reminder that humanity exists amongst an unimaginably expansive universe." These sky sights are also an allusion to all cultures — including Indigenous peoples — who have navigated by them in the past.
• The North Star is depicted with five points, to represent the five members of Hansen's immediate family (him, his wife and three children) as well as the state of Texas, where Hansen and his family have been living since he was recruited as a CSA astronaut in 2009. (The Texas state flag features a five-pointed star.)
• The silver border of the patch is meant to represent the Orion spacecraft that will house the four astronauts on Artemis 2. The border also honors the CSA, which supported space exploration through "the extraordinary efforts of both its past and present members to … bring its benefits back to humanity."
• The thin blue line inside the silver border "represents the light or spirit that is in all of us — in all humankind, plants and animals. This spirit will travel with the crew aboard the capsule."

Artemis 2 will be Hansen's first mission; he was selected for the Canadian astronaut corps in 2009 but has waited to fly in large part because the CSA contributes a less-than-3% share to International Space Station activities. That works out to an astronaut mission to the orbiting lab about every six years at current flight rates.

Hansen's seat is funded separately to the ISS agreement, however. It came after Canada committed to the Artemis program by contributing the Canadarm3 robotic arm, which is expected to fly to NASA's planned Gateway moon-orbiting space station later this decade.

Hansen is the only spaceflight rookie among the Artemis 2 crew, but he is widely recognized within both NASA and CSA for significant program contributions on the ground. These include managing the training schedules for an entire astronaut class (the 2017 class), helping to create tools for the tricky repair of a dark matter detector on the ISS, and helping to advise space policymakers in Canada.

Humankind is bound to become a space-faring species, expanding beyond the bounds of Mother Earth, just as it, millions of years ago, spread out of its cradle in Africa.

At least that's what space exploration leaders such as the world's richest man Elon Musk would like you to believe. However, there may be biological hurdles that could forever confine this vision to the realm of science fiction and human civilization to our Earthly soil. A new study found that sperm cells of mammalian species including humans, mice and pigs struggle to find their way through a female reproductive tract in microgravity to reach and fertilize an egg. Even when the sperm makes it to its destination, the study found that embryos formed in these conditions develop poorly compared to those evolving in normal gravity.

The study, from researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia, is just the latest addition to a growing pile of evidence that suggests mammalian reproduction in space might be quite complicated, if not impossible.

There have been some previous studies with headlines stating mouse babies were born from stem cells subjected to months-long spaceflight, but most earlier research, conducted either in space or in microgravity simulators on Earth, has revealed a plethora of negative effects the space environment has on reproductive cells and embryos.

"When you think about the future of space exploration and space settlements, it's happening. It's happening now," Nicole McPherson, a reproductive biologist at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and lead author of the paper, told Space.com. "I think people forget that for us to maintain these settlements without having to continually colonize them from Earth, we need to be able to reproduce in space."

McPherson, whose previous work covered the effects of obesity and diet on the success of conception, got intrigued by the question of the possibility of in-space reproduction after watching a documentary hosted by British physicist Brian Cox. A discussion with her partner then spawned an idea for a unique research experiment.

A chance encounter with the founder of space medicine company Firefly Biotech a week later allowed her to acquire a 3D clinostat for her lab. This device is a high-tech centrifuge that simulates microgravity by spinning vials with samples around two axes, effectively confusing the cells inside as to their position in space. In her experiment, McPherson and colleagues created a set-up holding human, mice and pig sperm cells in one part of the compartment and egg cells in the other, divided by a thin channel simulating the female reproductive tract. The researchers observed that 30% fewer sperms were able to make it to the egg compared to those in normal gravity.

Scientists know sperm relies on a complex set of signals to find its way to an egg. Part of that navigation is driven by chemical cues, such as concentrations of the female hormone progesterone, but gravity seems to play a significant role too, McPherson said.

"We know that sperm responds to chemical cues, but we also know that they like to swim near surfaces," she said. "Obviously, to know where surfaces are, you need to understand your position in time and for that you need gravity."

The struggle of sperm to make it to the egg was only one part of the findings. When sperms managed to reach the eggs, the ensuing early-stage embryos, called blastocysts, initially appeared stronger than their counterparts conceived in gravity. However, when microgravity exposure continued, the superior quality of microgravity-conceived blastocysts deteriorated and the embryos started to lag behind their normal counterparts.

McPherson thinks the initial quality gain observed in embryos formed after only four hours of microgravity exposure was due to the natural selection process that had occurred, allowing only the fittest sperms to reach the eggs. The subsequent deterioration in embryos that had been in microgravity for up to 24 hours was likely due to negative effects the absence of gravity has on the processes taking place in the quickly dividing embryonic cells.

"There are so many changes that happen in those first 24 hours of embryo development," McPherson said. "You have the maternal and the paternal DNA coming together. You have lots of epigenetic remodeling that goes on to drive early foetal development. And that being exposed to zero gravity is actually really detrimental."

McPherson said the researchers would, in the future, want to conduct similar experiments in reduced gravity, such as that of the moon or Mars, to see whether partial gravity might mitigate the problem. She thinks the findings have implications not just for the visions of space settlements, but also for commercial space tourism and babies potentially conceived on lunar and orbital honeymoons. The natural selection leading to the formation of stronger embryos after short microgravity exposures, on the other hand, could lead to advances in human IVF technologies that help treat infertility on Earth.

In the future, the researchers would like to expose the embryos to longer microgravity spells to gain deeper insights into the processes taking place in space-like conditions.

The study was published in the journal Communications Biology on Thursday (March 26).

It’s go for launch for the fifth and penultimate season of "For All Mankind," Apple TV’s engrossing sci-fi series that shows us a "What-If" future where the Soviets dropped boots on the lunar surface before America, and NASA’s Apollo space program never ended in December of 1972.

Since its inception back in 2019 as one of the flagship series on the then-fledgling Apple TV+ (now rebranded as just Apple TV), the sci-fi series from creators and executive producers Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, and Ronald D. Moore has been steadily attracting a loyal viewership thanks to the excellent story, tense drama and renewed interest in the space industry due to NASA's upcoming Artemis 2 moon flights.

So what's in store for the pioneering folks of Mars' Happy Valley colony? Earth's increasing animosity towards the Red Planet inhabitants is sure to boil over as "For All Mankind's" latest outing arrives starting March 27. Let's open the hatch and take a peek inside the mission plan for this season 5 showdown!

When Is "For All Mankind" Season 5's Release Date?

"For All Mankind's" newest season will deliver its payload of 10 episodes beginning on Friday, March 27, 2026, with a single-chapter premiere.

The subsequent nine episodes will air on Fridays, running through to the season finale on May 29, 2026.

How To Watch "For All Mankind" Season 5

"For All Mankind" Season 5 streams exclusively on Apple TV each Friday at 12 a.m. PT/ET.

You can also watch the previous four seasons on Apple TV, along with a bunch of other amazing sci-fi shows, including Pluribus, Invasion, Silo, and Foundation.

If you're going to be out of the country when the show debuts, you can still watch it on your streaming service of choice using a VPN. You'll be able to connect to your streaming services, no matter where you are on Earth (though it won't work on Mars, sorry).

What Is The Plot Of "For All Mankind" Season 5?

Things in Happy Valley might not be so happy if the Earth vs Mars clash keeps heating up!

Season 5 takes place in the 2010s in the aftermath of the iridium-rich Goldilocks asteroid heist from last season. In the intervening nine years since 2003, Mars' Happy Valley community has flourished and grown into a burgeoning colony with thousands of residents trying to establish a cultural identity on the Red Planet without Earth's overbearing presence.

Plus, a new Martian base will catapult humanity even deeper into our solar system and someday beyond. However, restless Earth-bound nations are insisting upon law and order on their rebellious neighboring planet, and tensions are reaching a boiling point. Will cooler heads eventually prevail, or will we see an eruption of violence?

Sure, we know there’s going to be the inevitable comparison to "The Expanse" and its own Earth-versus-Mars interplanetary embroilment that played out over the years in that smash sci-fi series, but the compelling drama remains in this alt-history narrative despite the similarities.

"For All Mankind" Season 5 Teaser & Trailers

Surprisingly, there has not been an abundance of teasers and trailers for this newest installment of the distinguished series. However, each sneak peek provides a compelling glimpse at the interplanetary turmoil ahead.

The first teaser was pretty light on plot and dropped on Jan. 21, 2026, with Kinnaman's Ed Baldwin narrating the brief 30-second promo. It mostly revealed Baldwin’s grandson, Alex Poletov Baldwin, now older, zooming over ruddy dunes on a Martian motorbike.

A main trailer landed on February 24, 2026, highlighting more of the mounting tensions between Earth and Mars and showcasing harsh, inflammatory rhetoric from President Jim Bragg delivering fighting words.

"Without allies, without aid, without your home planet, let’s see how long you can survive!"

Also highlighted here is Edi Gathegi’s Dev Ayesa, the charismatic Helios Aerospace visionary, and his insistence that Happy Valley must stand up and become masters of their own destiny.

Who Are The "For All Mankind" Season 5 Cast and Creators?

Joel Kinnaman ("Altered Carbon," "Robocop") returns to his role with a lot more grey hair dye this season as the venerable superstar ex-astronaut Ed Baldwin, beside previous cast members Toby Kebbell, Edi Gathegi, Cynthy Wu, Coral Peña, and Wrenn Schmidt.

Additional co-stars reprising their parts in the ensemble sci-fi show are Costa Ronin ("Homeland"), Sean Kaufman ("The Summer I Turned Pretty"), Ruby Cruz ("Bottoms"), and Ines Asserson ("Royalteen").

New to the scene is Mireille Enos ("The Killing"), who’ll be portraying Celia Boyd, a tough officer of Mars' Peacekeeper Security Force who tries to maintain civility with a full-scale rebellion brewing just over the horizon.

Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, and Ronald D. Moore created the series and also act as executive producers in partnership with Maril Davis of Tall Ship Productions, Kira Snyder, David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, and Seth Edelstein. Wolpert and Nedivi will share showrunner duties with Sony Pictures Television aboard once more as the series producers.

Will There Be A "For All Mankind" Season 6?

Indeed, there will be, as Apple TV reaches for the stars one final time. For All Mankind season 6 was just confirmed by the streaming giant, which also stated that this will be the final outing of the show. The news dropped on March 24, 2026.

This sixth and final season will arrive sometime in 2027.

How Does "For All Mankind" Connect To "Star City?"

"Star City" is a new 1960s-set prequel spinoff of "For All Mankind" premiering May 29, 2026.

It focuses on the international space race from the USSR’s perspective, following Soviet scientists, engineers, cosmonauts, and intelligence officers all teaming up to beat Americans to the moon.

All four previous seasons of "For All Mankind" are now available to stream and binge exclusively on Apple TV.

Apple TV's impressive roster of sci-fi series is second to none, with acclaimed shows like "Foundation," "Silo," "Murderbot," "Invasion," and "Pluribus" filling out the lineup. Now, one of its longest-running efforts, "For All Mankind," has been given the green light to proceed on a sixth and final season, as season five is primed for launch starting on March 27.

Created by showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, "For All Mankind" posits an alternative future where the USSR landed on the moon first. This sends the space race into overdrive, propelling NASA's program into high gear far beyond Apollo 17 and onward to the Red Planet, where a permanent Martian colony is thriving.

"Getting to explore the 'For All Mankind' universe over six seasons has been an amazing privilege, and we're thrilled to have the opportunity to finish the story the way we’ve always hoped," noted Wolpert and Nedivi, who conceived the hit show with "Battlestar Galactica's" Ronald D. Moore.

The fresh season premiering this week is set in 2012 and finds Earth and Mars' Happy Valley settlement locked in an escalating economic and political conflict. Stars Joel Kinnaman, Toby Kebbell, Edi Gathegi, Cynthy Wu, Coral Peña, and Wrenn Schmidt are returning alongside newcomers Mireille Enos, Costa Ronin, Sean Kaufman, Ruby Cruz, and Ines Asserson.

"From being one of the first Apple originals to launch on Apple TV in 2019, 'For All Mankind' has remained an innovative, epic sci-fi series that has enthralled fans season after season," said Matt Cherniss, Apple TV’s Head of Programming.

"As one of Apple TV’s most enduring and celebrated series, it has delivered time and again because of the extraordinary artistry of visionary storytellers Ron, Matt, and Ben, along with our partners at Sony, and we can't wait for people to experience how this story comes to its exhilarating conclusion when the final season debuts next year."

"For All Mankind's" upcoming fifth season arrives on Apple TV starting March 27, 2026. Subscribers can binge all four previous seasons on the popular streaming service now to catch up on all the space action!

With NASA’s Artemis 2 rocket and spacecraft rolling back out to the launch pad for an upcoming moon mission launch, and March being Women's History Month, now is the ideal time to go see "Spacewoman."

This brand new feature-length documentary showcases the inspirational accomplishments of pioneering astronaut Col. Eileen M. Collins, who rose to become the first woman space shuttle pilot and commander. Directed by British filmmaker Hannah Berryman and based on Collins's 2021 memoir, "Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars" (Arcade), "Spacewoman" follows the remarkable trajectory of a true American hero from humble small-town beginnings.

"Spacewoman" arrives in theaters on March 20, 2026 for a limited run and serves as a poignant portrait of a person who bucked the odds to become a living legend. We had the chance to sit down with Collins and Berryman to talk about the documentary, and the incredible woman whose story it tells.

Collins retired from the Air Force in 2005 and from NASA's astronaut corps in 2006, having tallied over 6,751 hours piloting thirty different aircraft types and logging 872 hours in space.

"I had read Eileen's book and I really loved the story," Berryman tells Space. "There were certain things that stood out for me apart from obviously her being the first pilot and commander of the shuttle as a woman, which was amazing."

While her achievements speak for themselves, it was Collin's struggle to get there that really inspired Berryman to make this movie.

"If it had felt like a straightforward path from a certain kind of background, straight in doing it all, it would have felt less interesting to me as a story", explains Berryman. "But because Eileen didn't have the easiest of backgrounds, I thought that was interesting. Also, when she was commanding the first mission right after the Columbia disaster, I felt like there was a way we could create a dramatic and really human emotional narrative from the book."

Collins is a naturally shy individual despite her bold achievements in human spaceflight, setting the stage for more women entering NASA’s astronaut program who followed in her footsteps.

"I don't like to promote myself and Hannah knows that," Collins admits. "I've always just wanted to be a pilot, be an astronaut, do a great job, go explore. I like to go places and read books and do new things."

"When I retired in 2007, I decided to just work on boards and advisory groups and I wanted to raise my kids. I had no intention on writing a book. Now this documentary would not have happened without it." explains Collins. "But then the pandemic hit in 2020 and I had nothing to do other than sit around and Skype meetings. Over the years I’d been approached by my co-author Jonathan Ward and I finally called him in April of 2020 and said, 'Okay, let's write the book.'

Even after having published her book, Collins was reluctant to step further into the spotlight when approached.

"The month after it was published I was contacted by producer Keith Haviland, he's from London. He did 'The Last Man on the Moon' on Gene Cernan and several others on space and aviation," Collins recalls. "And I told him, 'No, I didn't want my life up there on the big screen.' A couple months went by and I changed my mind, knowing this was going to be a big deal. There was going to be a lot of work and I had to decide how much of my personal life do I want to put out there."

She first met director Hannah Berryman in her home town of Elmira, New York on the front porch of her father's old house. Once she’d made the commitment to the project, she was in.

"I don't make a decision and do something half-way. I think we had a great team," Collins recalls. "Everybody got along and we just worked fabulous together."

One of her first milestones seen in the documentary came aboard Discovery in 1995 on STS-63 when she assumed piloting duties under Commander Jim Weatherbee to make history. It might have been an anxiety-inducing moment, but Collins was totally cool under pressure.

"I'm a test pilot so that's what I do. NASA actually interviewed me in 1989 as a mission specialist," she notes. "NASA was like, 'We're going to hire you as a pilot because that's what you are.' I've been flying since I was 20 years old. To me, I was just doing my job."

The New York native was also the Atlantis pilot on 1997's STS-84 when her crew docked with the Russian Space Station MIR. In 1999, Collins became the first woman commander of a U.S. spacecraft with Columbia's STS-93 mission that deployed the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Her last flight was 2005's STS-114 as commander of Discovery, the critical "Return to Flight" mission following the catastrophic loss of Columbia in 2003.

"It's all about staying focused on what you’re doing and not thinking about who's watching me" explains Collins. "Both of my shuttle landings were at night. I will say it's a lot harder to land at night. I'd much rather do a day landing. You have to have very good depth perception and you have to be very well trained.”

Distilling down all the distinguished dates in Collins's time with NASA required Berryman to focus in on composing the material to present it for maximum emotional resonance with audiences.

"One of the challenges with any sort of story like this is you need to be slightly on the edge of their seats, even though they can see Eileen in front of them and know that she's okay," Berryman adds. "You want to be in those missions in the moment of it, feeling like you've still got that jeopardy like any film. And also the balancing act between the family story and the mission stories. If you do a film about someone who's done some great things and you just did that, that's not interesting. We want to know about real people."

Berryman reminds us that we're all a mixture of things, and we're never going to be good at everything at every point, and that makes everything in end even more impressive.

"It was really important to keep that human fallibility that they’re all just a family going through this. Then when you feel the resolution you really care. I was pleased when we had cinema screenings in the UK in the autumn because people seemed to be very moved and thought Eileen was amazing. You're more amazing as a real person than if you're some cypher of wonderfulness. If you've had challenges in life like the rest of us that makes it even more moving and impressive."

Encapsulating one's lifetime and career in under two hours might seem like a daunting task for the creative team, and also for Collins, as she strolled down memory lane during the production. "Spacewoman" employs a variety of intimate scenes curated from archival mission footage, TV shows and news appearances, and an old VHS camcorder.

"My husband Pat and I gave Hannah and her team all of our many VHS tapes that we had converted to DVDs and we had all the NASA stuff," says Collins. "On the family side, probably one of the happiest times of my life was raising my kids. It was fun to look back at the videos. I just watched the film again on Friday night. We showed it in March Air Force base out in Riverside , California. They wanted me to come in person and we got a standing ovation.

"My daughter, Bridget, has a huge part in the film and people came up to me afterwards and said, 'Your daughter is amazing and she really made the film.' It's funny, for some reason we don't ever pull those video out and show them. I like to tell people that I had the two best jobs in the world. I was a parent and I was an astronaut. There's a joke I used to tell that the best training to be a shuttle commander is to be a parent. Because you have to know how to say no."

"Spacewoman" launches on its theatrical engagement on March 20, 2026.

A pair of Chinese astronauts ventured outside the Tiangong space station on Monday (March 16) — and one of them made some history.

Shenzhou 21 commander Zhang Lu and colleague Wu Fei worked for around seven hours outside Tiangong and completed their tasks at 7:25 a.m. EDT on March 16 (1125 GMT; 7:35 p.m. Beijing Time), according to China's human spaceflight agency.

Zhang and Wu, wearing Feitian spacesuits, carried out a number of tasks, including installing debris shielding to the exterior of the three-module outpost, before returning to the airlock of the Wentian experiment module. Astronaut Zhang Hongzhang supported the extravehicular activity (EVA) from inside the station, while teams on the ground and Tiangong's robotic arm assisted operations.

It was the pair's second EVA, or spacewalk, during the Shenzhou 21 mission. It followed a first EVA in December 2025, during which Zhang and Wu inspected a crack in the viewport window of the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft. The Shenzhou 20 crew had already returned home in the Shenzhou 21 capsule due to the suspected debris damage to their own Shenzhou 20 spacecraft.

The EVA brings Zhang's career total to six, tying him with Chen Dong for the most spacewalks by a Chinese astronaut. The 49-year-old Zhang made his first trip to space on Shenzhou 15 in late 2022 and participated in four spacewalks during that 186-day-long mission. Chen Dong performed three EVAs on Shenzhou 14 in 2022 and three more on the recent Shenzhou 20 mission.

The overall record for most spacewalks is held by cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev. He performed 16 of them during his spaceflight career, which ran from 1988 to 1999. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson holds the American record with 10.

China aims to keep Tiangong permanently occupied for at least a decade. It plans to launch the Shenzhou 23 and Shenzhou 24 crewed missions to the space station this year, along with a Tianzhou cargo spacecraft. The uncrewed Shenzhou 22 spacecraft was launched to the orbital outpost late last year to provide a lifeboat for the Shenzhou 21 crew due to the Shenzhou 20 crisis.

China's next-generation Mengzhou crew capsule could also make a first visit to Tiangong this year, following the success of a major test in February.

The International Space Station could keep flying a bit longer than we thought.

The orbiting lab, which has hosted rotating astronaut crews continuously since November 2000, is currently slated to be deorbited in late 2030. However, a newly advanced NASA Authorization bill pushes that retirement back by two years, to Sept. 30, 2032.

The goal of the extension is "to avoid a gap in continuous human presence and capabilities in LEO [low Earth orbit], thus avoiding ceding leadership to China before commercial stations are ready," the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation wrote in a summary of the bill, which it approved on Wednesday (March 4).

Staying ahead of China in human spaceflight is a key priority of the committee and its chairman, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Last September, for example, the committee held a hearing titled "There's a Bad Moon on the Rise," which stressed the importance of returning astronauts to the lunar surface with NASA's Artemis program before China can pull off the feat (which the nation plans to do by 2030). But it wasn't all moon talk.

"This is a pivotal moment for our nation's space program," Cruz said during the September hearing. "America must maintain leadership in low Earth orbit while also embarking on a new era of exploration with Artemis."

And U.S. leadership in LEO is under threat.

China got a crewed foothold in LEO in 2021, when it launched the core module of its Tiangong space station. The nation finished building the T-shaped, three-module Tiangong in late 2022 and apparently plans to operate it into the mid-2030s.

The United States, meanwhile, plans to replace the aging ISS with one or more commercial outposts. NASA has been encouraging the development of such stations via its Commercial LEO Destinations program, which has awarded more than $500 million since its establishment in 2021, most of it to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Voyager Technologies, two companies leading the planned Orbital Reef and Starlab space stations, respectively.

Other outposts are in the works, too. The California startup Vast, for example, just raised $500 million for its planned Haven-2 station. And the Houston company Axiom Space aims to operate its own LEO outpost, which will consist of modules that originally launched to, and docked with, the ISS.

The companies behind all of these commercial outposts plan to get them up and running before 2030. But the newly advanced NASA Authorization bill suggests the Senate committee is skeptical of its ability to meet that timeline.

Indeed, it instructs NASA not to begin phasing out the ISS until a successor is operational.

"When one or more commercial space stations is capable of providing services to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Administrator shall begin the process of an orderly, managed transition of operations from the International Space Station to commercial providers in such a way as to maintain a continuous human presence," the bill states.

There's quite a bit else to chew on in the NASA Authorization bill, which was introduced in March 2025. (The version that the Senate committee just passed is a revision of that original bill.)

For instance, it rejects President Trump's planned 24% cut to NASA funding, allocating $24.7 billion to NASA for fiscal year 2026 and $25.3 billion for fiscal year 2027. (Trump's budget request allocated just $18.8 billion to NASA for the current year.) The bill also directs NASA to start building a crewed base on the moon, which is already a key objective of the Artemis program.

"The lunar base will be capable of long-duration habitation, as well as robotic and human-tended industrial operations to advance science, technology and strategic interests," reads a press release issued by the Senate science committee on Wednesday.

"A sustained human and robotic presence at the lunar base will support priority scientific investigations that lay the foundation for a successful mission to Mars," the release adds.

Advancing out of committee is just one step for the NASA Authorization bill. To become law, it will also have to be approved by the full Senate and the House of Representatives, then be signed by President Trump.

Published in January by Random House Worlds, "Detour" is the new mystery sci-fi novel from veteran TV writer Jeff Rake ("Manifest") and bestselling author Rob Hart ("The Warehouse")

Laced with mind-warping essences of "The Twilight Zone" and "Lost," this eerie outer space adventure is a perfect read for fans of books like Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary", as a spaceship crew returns from Saturn's blue-green moon of Titan to discover that the Earththe left behind has become a very different place.

We connected with Rake and Hart to dip into the origins of their twisted thriller and how this fortuitous creative partnership formed to produce one of the year's most compelling reads. Check out the interview below, then stay tuned for the short exclusive excerpt from "Detour" at the end.

"I've been writing TV for about 25 years and was brainstorming high-concept ideas that could be a potential sci-fi show,” Rake tells Space.

"I was coming off 'Manifest,' a show I created that started on NBC and ended up on Netflix. That show wrapped up three years ago, and I was asking myself what's next. I landed some broad strokes for 'Detour' and went in to talk to my agent.

"We pitched it out, and one of the agents said it felt sort of novelistic and asked what I thought about developing it as a book, then down the line, maybe adapting it for television. That was incredibly intimidating to me. I didn't know how to write a book, so they ended up finding me a partner and sent me a bunch of books to read. I stopped reading after I got to Rob Hart's 'The Warehouse.'"

Being familiar with Rake's "Manifest" series, Hart absorbed the initial "Detour" pitch and immediately knew he had to be the one to work on it.

"The thing that Jeff is so good at, and the thing I love so much, is when you take a really big-swing, crazy sci-fi idea and then humanize it with really strong characters," says Hart.

"But obviously the big question was were we going to be able to work together. I have plenty of talented friends who I'd never work with in a million years because I want to continue those friendships. I was emboldened by the fact that Jeff is a TV guy and TV is a very collaborative medium. We hopped on a Zoom and just hit it off, and we were on the same wavelength. I started riffing and hitting him with ideas for things we could do with the story, and he said, 'This sounds awesome, let's do it.' From there, it was pretty much off to the races."

Rake was particularly interested in coming up with another idea similar to "Manifest," one that combined science fiction and grounded family drama, something centered around parents and children and all the things you might consider when talking about emotions and families.

"This is near future, like 2030," Hart adds. "I will say that if Neil deGrasse Tyson read this book, he would not be thrilled. I definitely took liberties in terms of the technology, but it's a new kind of ion engine that's roughly based on technologies we're looking at now that would cut down the trip drastically. It was to drop a satellite in orbit around Titan to collect data about potential colonization."

As to why they chose Titan as the crew's destination?

"I've always been a geek about the fact that Mars kind of sucks in terms of colonizing for a bevy of reasons," declares Rake. "Whereas Titan is more reasonable for establishing a colony. It was fun to play in that space of like, 'Everybody always does Mars, let's do something different.'"

Taking on the first book in a space odyssey series no doubt required a generous commitment of research time, looking into human spaceflight, astrophysics, and orbital mechanics to lend an air of authenticity to the project. Fortunately for Rake, he got paired with a true research nerd.

"I'm a big fan of space travel stuff and recently rewatched 'Interstellar,'" admits Hart. "They literally made new discoveries about black holes based on the research and special effects that movie did."

"I didn't necessarily do what Andy Weir does, where all the science in his book checks out; that's insane. But I've got enough of a general understanding of the importance of artificial gravity in maintaining bone density for an astronaut while they’re in space [...] I always live by this adage that things don't need to be 100% correct, but they do have to be believable within the confines of the story."

Reaching Titan is no mean feat, and getting the story off the ground required a plausible method of traveling to Saturn's moon and back. "The thing that I was most excited about is I got to design a ship for deeper travel in our solar system," explains Hart.

"I envisioned it as having turning wheels to create artificial gravity, and we hired an artist to do a rendering of the ship to put into the book, and that made me so unbelievably happy. I knew right off the bat I wanted there to be a diagram of the spaceship in the book."

"Detour" is available via bookstores and online retailers now. You can read an exclusive excerpt below!

"THE CASE FOR TITAN" BY PADMA SINGH

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For decades, humanity has looked to Mars as our next stop in the solar system. Over the last several years, technology in ion propulsion drives has increased exponentially, shortening a potential trip from years to months. As such, politicians and the general public alike have been asking: when will we finally step foot on the Red Planet, made famous in these circles by scientists like Carl Sagan and writers like Ray Bradbury and Andy Weir?

But as the scientific community is widely aware, Mars is an inhospitable, barren desert. While we know the planet has ice, and therefore water, the effort of accessing that resource remains monumental. Not to mention the planet’s thin atmosphere, which would not protect humanity from cosmic radiation.

To survive, humans would need to wear shielded, pressurized suits. And to thrive, we would have to spend billions just on mining equipment, to dig up resources and construct underground habitats. We’re looking in the wrong place. We should instead be focusing about 400 million miles past Mars, to Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Titan is roughly half the size of Earth, and it’s so far out that a year on Titan would be roughly 29 years on Earth. But it has a nitrogen-rich atmosphere, 50 percent thicker than Earth’s. The surface may seem inhospitable: covered in ice as hard as granite and sand dunes made of plastics, with lakes of ethane and methane. The atmosphere is hazy, limiting visibility, and the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface is much smaller, creating a perpetual orange twilight.

But humans wouldn’t need pressurized suits; they’d only need temperature-controlled suits to combat the freezing temperatures. The atmosphere would provide ample protection from cosmic rays, meaning habitats could be built on the surface. Those plastic dunes could be used to construct surface-level habitats, and the ethane and methane lakes could power them. Because of the weaker gravity, a rocket launching from the surface of Titan would take far less fuel than it does on Earth—and fuel is already in ample supply there.

In order to settle a new world, we need accessible resources, and we need to protect the first humans to take that step. We can do both of those things on Titan. I believe, over time, smaller settlements can be linked together, and in the space of a few decades, we could have a thriving colony living and flourishing on Titan’s surface. Thanks to Horizons’ newly-developed ion thrust engines and Starblazer, the ship John Ward has been constructing in low-Earth orbit, we could be there in a year—as compared to seven under previously available technology.

In the following paper, I will make the case that Titan, not Mars, should be humanity’s focus as we look beyond Earth…

Reprinted from "Detour" by Jeff Rake and Rob Hart.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

Going to space is harsh on the human body, and as a new study from our research team finds, the brain shifts upward and backward and deforms inside the skull after spaceflight.

The extent of these changes was greater for those who spent longer in space. As NASA plans longer space missions, and space travel expands beyond professional astronauts, these findings will become more relevant.

Why it matters

On Earth, gravity constantly pulls fluids in your body and your brain toward the center of the Earth. In space, that force disappears. Body fluids shift toward the head, which gives astronauts a puffy face. Under normal gravity, the brain, cerebrospinal fluid and surrounding tissues reach a stable balance. In microgravity, that balance changes.

Without gravity pulling downward, the brain floats in the skull and experiences various forces from the surrounding soft tissues and the skull itself. Earlier studies showed that the brain appears higher in the skull after spaceflight. But most of those studies focused on average or whole brain measures, which can hide important effects within different areas of the brain.

Our goal was to look more closely.

How we do our work

We analyzed brain MRI scans from 26 astronauts who spent different lengths of time in space, from a few weeks to over a year. To focus on the brain’s movement, we aligned each person’s skull across scans taken before and after spaceflight.

That comparison allowed us to measure how the brain shifted relative to the skull itself. Instead of treating the brain as a single object, we divided it into more than 100 regions and tracked how each one had shifted. This approach enabled us to see patterns that were missed when looking at the whole brain, on average.

We found that the brain consistently moved upward and backward when comparing postflight to preflight. The longer someone stayed in space, the larger the shift. One of the more striking findings came from examining individual brain regions.

In astronauts who spent about a year aboard the International Space Station, some areas near the top of the brain moved upward by more than 2 millimeters, while the rest of the brain barely moved. That distance may sound small, but inside the tightly packed space of the skull, it is meaningful.

Areas involved in movement and sensation showed the largest shifts. Structures on the two sides of the brain moved toward the midline, which means they moved in the opposite direction for each brain hemisphere. These opposing patterns cancel each other out in whole brain averages, which explains why earlier studies missed them.

Most of the shifts and deformations gradually returned to normal by six months after return to Earth. The backward shift showed less recovery, likely because gravity pulls downward rather than forward, so some effects of spaceflight on brain position may last longer than others.

What’s next

NASA’s Artemis program will mark a new era of space exploration. Understanding how the brain responds will help scientists assess long-term risks and develop countermeasures.

Our findings don’t mean that people should not travel to space. While we found that larger location shifts of a sensory-processing brain region correlated with postflight balance changes, the crew members did not experience overt symptoms – such as headaches or brain fog – related to brain position shifts.

Our findings do not reveal immediate health risks. Knowing how the brain moves in spaceflight and subsequently recovers allows researchers to understand the effects of microgravity on human physiology. It can help space agencies to design safer missions.

Vast wants to extend humanity's footprint into the final frontier, and it now has a lot more money to funnel toward that goal.

The California startup, which is developing a line of private space stations called "Haven," announced today (March 5) that it has raised $500 million in new funding.

"This investment underscores the market's strong conviction in both our strategy and our engineering," VAST CEO Max Haot said in a statement. "The low Earth orbit economy is at a pivotal inflection point, poised for rapid growth. Vast's Haven stations are engineered to deliver safe, cost-effective access to microgravity research and in-space manufacturing, empowering government and commercial partners to unlock the full commercial promise of this next era for space."

The financing consists of $300 million in "Series A" equity and $200 million in debt, according to Vast. (Series A funding is the round that follows initial "seed capital.")

"The funds will be used to expand facilities, grow the team, and advance the company's proposed successor to the ISS, Haven-2, designed to ensure continuous human presence in low Earth orbit for the United States and its allies," Vast wrote in the statement.

Balerion Space Ventures led the financing round, with participation from IQT, Qatar Investment Authority, Mitsui & Co. Ltd, MUFG, Nikon Corporation, Stellar Ventures, Space Capital, Earthrise Ventures, and Jed McCaleb, Vast's founder and first investor, according to the statement. A.C. Charania, current Balerion advisor and former NASA chief technologist, will join the Vast board as part of the transaction.

"Vast was founded with a long-term vision of billions of people living and thriving in space. Achieving a goal of this magnitude requires deliberate stepping stones, and our strategy of building, testing and iterating with real hardware is delivering results," McCaleb said in the same statement.

"It is exciting to welcome additional investors who recognize Vast's long-term potential and share our belief in making this vision a reality," he added.

The International Space Station is scheduled to retire at the end of 2030. Vast plans to launch the first Haven-2 module in 2028 and add another module roughly every six months thereafter until 2032.

The company, which was founded in 2021, will get some practice before then: It plans to launch the single-module Haven-1 pathfinder station next year atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And NASA recently selected Vast to operate the sixth private astronaut flight to the ISS, which will launch no earlier than summer 2027 and employ SpaceX hardware (a Falcon 9 and a Dragon crew capsule).

Vast has already tested some of Haven-1's key technologies on the uncrewed, 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) Haven-Demo spacecraft, which launched to low Earth orbit this past November.

Vast isn't the only company working to get a private space station up and running in Earth orbit.

For example, Houston-based Axiom Space plans to launch a handful of modules to the ISS beginning in 2027; these modules will then detach and become a free-flying private outpost. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Sierra Space are developing an outpost called Orbital Reef, and a consortium that includes NanoRacks and Voyager Space are working on a different one known as Starlab.

If you ever happen to see an eager seller on ebay or Craigslist offering authentic moon rocks or lunar dust hauled back during the glory days of the Apollo moon landing missions, it's probably best to view that sale with extreme skepticism as any NASA astromaterials are not exactly available on the open market, and there are serious legal ramifications to anyone caught peddling these precious objects.

One of the most notorious and brazen cases of astromaterials theft took place in 2002, when three NASA interns, Thad Roberts, Tiffany Fowler, and Shae Saur stole 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of moon rocks worth nearly $21 million from a safe at the Johnson Space Center. The heist used a combo of tampered cameras, neoprene body suits, and official NASA badges to pull off the cape . But selling Apollo treasures on the black market proved to be not so easy, and the culprits finally put them up for sale on the Mineralogy Club of Antwerp's online site. Tampa Division FBI agents acted as interested buyers that met at an Orlando-area hotel where the thieves were nabbed and the moon rocks recovered. Roberts, as the mastermind, received an 8-year prison sentence while the others were given house arrest.

But are there conditions where it is allowed to possess, sell or borrow lunar material and under what instances can educators, researchers and museums gain access? Let's dig in and find out!

NASA's Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility is located in Building 31N at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It opened in 1979 to provide a non-contaminating, permanent repository environment for NASA's precious lunar sample collection.

Inside the secure enclosure, geologic astromaterials returned from the moon by six Apollo lunar surface exploration missions spanning the years between 1969 and 1972 are held with all related data records. A total of 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of moon rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust came back to Earth. Apollo 17's mission alone returned a whopping 243 pounds (110.4 kg) of lunar regolith and rock samples.

Folks working at the Lunar Sample Laboratory are extremely careful about what they can say and not say relating to this subject. Try as we might, we were unable to obtain any direct comment laying out the laws regarding those types of transactions. NASA and the Johnson Space Center have exacting records of each lunar sample and have carefully catalogued everything that has been aboard any Apollo capsule ever to splash down in Earth's oceans. Pristine lunar samples are stored and handled in stainless steel glove cabinets, separated by triple layers of gloves, and purged by high-purity nitrogen gas to reduce sample degradation.

So to answer the basic question of buying and selling of Apollo materials returned from the moon, the obvious answer is that no, it is absolutely not legal in any circumstance under severe penalty of law. It is a serious Federal crime that carries with it prison time and costly fines. Apollo moon rocks are NASA and U.S. government property which cannot be sold or exchanged to any private citizen, not even astronauts themselves. Lunar meteorites don’t apply since they have dropped to Earth naturally and were not transported by government-employed astronauts.

Here are the three federal statutes that apply to Apollo astromaterial trafficking:

• 18 U.S.C. § 641 – Theft of Government Property Moon rocks gathered by intrepid astronauts are federal property belonging to NASA. This law makes it a felony to steal, convert, or embezzle any U.S. government-owned property.
• 18 U.S.C. § 668 – Theft of Cultural Heritage or Major Artwork Even though they’re considered scientific in nature, lunar samples can be labeled as objects of historical and cultural significance. This specific law prohibits theft from any museum or government institution and also bans possession or sale of these stolen heritage items.
• 18 U.S.C. § 2314 & § 2315 – Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property If those stolen items are worth more than $5,000 (such as moon rocks/lunar dust) move across state lines, additional federal charges for trafficking stolen property apply.

Although NASA guards these invaluable items under the most rigorous security measures, it is still the agency's policy to allow public access to lunar samples from the Apollo Program by providing loans to approved individuals or groups in the United States and foreign countries.

To be eligible for sample examination, educators and scientists at universities or research centers need to complete NASA’s Lunar and Meteorite Certification Workshop at the Johnson Space Center. Candidates need to be officially certified to borrow any Lunar and Meteorite Sample Disks encased in Lucite plastic, and retain a copy of their certification form that was legally signed by a NASA Authorized Sample Certifier. Those certified educators or museum curators must also follow strict protocols of handling, protection, contamination, and specific return packaging and mailing requirements which are outlined at NASA's Curation Site.

NASA's ARES (Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division) performs the physical science research at the Johnson Space Center and is curator for all NASA-held extraterrestrial samples. These free-of-charge, 5 to 7-hour workshops include hands-on sessions and detailed security training regarding proper handling of the Sample Disks. Researchers are allowed to open and handle display samples in air if their experiments necessitate it. Leftover sample material is required to be sent back to NASA, where it's reclassified as "returned" and stored separately from pristine examples.

"The material is still actively used," NASA digital restoration expert and "Apollo Remastered" author Andy Saunders told Space.com. "In 2022 an Apollo 17 core sample, that had remained sealed for 50 years, was opened for the very first time at JSC. How wonderful - we're still learning from the Apollo missions. JSC also stores all the original film from Apollo, in the freezer in Building 8. Mercury and Gemini were moved to the National Archives at College Park, Maryland back in 1997."

While everyone would love to own some small token of astromaterial from the moon, the U.S. government decrees were put in place to halt any black market activity for genuine samples that might escape the government's possession.

Simple rule: If it was brought back by a NASA Apollo mission, don’t even think about it. That little illegal lunar rock or dust grain just might launch you on a trajectory straight to prison!