Two NASA astronauts installed the seventh and final set of mounting hardware for new sets of solar arrays during a successful 6.5-hour spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.

Jessica Meir and Anil Menon on Thursday (Aug. 6), assembled the modification kit for one of the space station's eight power channels, which will allow for the future addition of a new ISS Rolll-Out Solar Array (iROSA). Since 2021, astronauts on prior spacewalks have deployed six of the iROSA assemblies, leaving now just two awaiting delivery to the station later this year.

Like building a giant erector set, Meir and Menon worked to assemble and bolt together the triangular brackets on the 3B power channel, located on the far right, or starboard (S6) segment of the station's backbone truss. Menon was positioned on an articulating portable foot restraint (APFR) atop a worksite interface (WIFEX), providing a stable angle to work from the truss.

Once the modification kit structure was built and secured to the 3B mast canister, the two spacewalkers routed cabling that will carry the electricity from the future iROSA into the 3B power channel and then covered the struts with multi-layer insulation to protect them from micrometeoroid strikes.

The iROSA wings sit forward of the legacy solar arrays, augmenting their electricity generation rather than replacing it. The station's eight original arrays began showing degraded power output as they exceeded their 15-year design life. When used in tandem with the new iROSA wings, the upgraded system will increase the station's electricity supply by 20% to 30%.

The other power channel currently without an iROSA deployed is 2A on the left, or port side, of the station.

"Anil, you can see the moon to the — well, I am not sure what way you're facing, but…," said Meir, taking a short break during the spacewalk to notice NASA's next destination for astronauts under its Artemis program.

"To my right. Yeah, I see it — thanks for the heads-up," said Menon. "I can see a future moon base there."

"I can see it, too!" Meir said.

Meir later turned her attention to Mars with her closing words of the day.

"On this day in 2012, NASA's robotic rover Curiosity successfully landed on the surface of Mars with the goal of understanding if the planet could have fostered life. Curiosity achieved that goal within a year," she said. "One day, humans will visit Curiosity, propelled by the groundbreaking science, technology demonstrations and operations conducted here on the International Space Station for almost 26 years now."

"Today, we made one more step toward expanding the ISS power system, further sustaining our human presence in low Earth orbit, as we prepare to take those next steps," said Meir.

Thursday's spacewalk began at 8:33 a.m. EDT (1233 GMT) when Meir and Menon switched their spacesuits to internal battery power. After collecting their tools and reentering the Quest airlock, the spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), concluded at 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), 6 hours and 27 minutes after it began.

This was the 96th U.S. EVA and 281st spacewalk overall in support of the International Space Station's assembly, maintenance and enhancement. It was the first career spacewalk for Menon and the sixth for Meir, bringing her total time on EVA to 42 hours and 33 minutes.

This was the first spacewalk for the space station's Expedition 75 crew. There are two more U.S. outings scheduled for this month: EVA 97 will work to replace a space-to-ground antenna on Aug. 13, and EVA 98 will connect power channel cables and data relay systems as part of ongoing maintenance, including preparations for the station's future deorbit, as well as replace a navigational aid used for spacecraft docking on Aug. 25.

The next crew, spacecraft and rocket to fly to the International Space Station are on schedule to meet their mid-September launch date, mission managers and the astronauts told reporters on Monday (Aug. 3).

SpaceX's Crew-13 astronauts — commander Jessica Watkins and pilot Luke Delaney of NASA, mission specialist Josh Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency and mission specialist Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos — will become only the second crew to fly aboard the Dragon spacecraft "Grace" when they lift off no earlier than Sept. 12 from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

They will then dock with the space station the following day to begin a seven-month stay on the orbiting outpost, as part of the Expedition 75/76 crew.

"We expect a very busy mission with lots of station maintenance, both internal and external, with a few EVAs [extravehicular activities, or spacewalks] on the docket," said Watkins, who is the only member of Crew-13 to have flown into space before and will become the first active NASA astronaut to fly on Dragon twice. "[We also expect] visiting vehicle capture and stowage operations, lots of science — very interesting science experiments that will be flying with us as well — and plenty of outreach."

Kutryk will be the fourth Canadian to serve on an ISS crew and the second from his country to fly this year, after Jeremy Hansen launched around the moon on the Artemis II crew in April.

"Personally, myself, I grew up on a cattle farm in Canada. It's a long way from being here with this mission in front of us, but the one thing that has resonated at every twist and turn in that journey has been the complexity of these missions and the enormity of the teams that go into pulling missions like this off," said Kutryk. "So, we need to say thank you to everyone."

Cybertrucks, spacesuits and mudflats

"Every time we do a human spaceflight mission, it gives us an opportunity to strengthen our understanding of low Earth orbit. It gives us an opportunity to broaden our international relationships and an opportunity to showcase to the world what we can do in low Earth orbit for human spaceflight," said Joel Montalbano, NASA's deputy associate administrator for human spaceflight.

During the mission, Watkins, Delaney, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov will take part in research to combat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem cell-derived tissues. They will also explore crop production that's important for longer-duration spaceflight missions, and help improve scientists' understanding of blood flow abnormalities that are seen on long missions. The crew will also test new diagnostic medical equipment for keeping an eye on their overall health.

First, though, they must get to space.

"Final integration of the Dragon is complete. The capsule was stacked on the trunk just last week and mission preparations are proceeding well for a mid-September launch," said Dana Weigel, NASA's manager for its low Earth orbit program. "Falcon 9 booster maintenance will kick off this month. That same booster was flown on Crew-12. We are not tracking any major issues for this mission campaign."

This Friday (Aug. 7), the crew will don their SpaceX suits — the first "Rev. 3" models with improved donning and doffing capabilities, as well as adjustments to account for spinal growth on orbit — and get their first chance to board "Grace," their ride into orbit and back. This "test drive" will help them gain some muscle memory — some familiarity within the the vehicle mission — and provide them a very big psychological boost, managers said.

"Grace" will also sport new metal "mud flaps" for its Draco abort thrusters, replacing earlier carbon fiber models. In addition, should the crew encounter an emergency before launch, they will be evacuated from the launch pad area for the first time by Tesla Cybertrucks operated by SpaceX, reducing conflicts when SpaceX and NASA want to launch crewed flights at the near or same time.

"There was a lot of certification that had to go into making sure those Cybertrucks would start up with a gloved hand. There were a lot of tests in terms of making sure you could egress the vehicle with a bulky suit on," Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said in a response to a question from collectSPACE and Space.com. "All of those things were proven to be already intact, and they're going to configure those Cybertrucks to be ready."

Departures and arrivals

The four members of Crew-13 will be sharing their time on the space station with outgoing and incoming Russian Soyuz crews, who will launch and land with members of Delaney's astronaut candidate class, "The Flies," selected in 2021.

"It's really exciting to see the class fly," said Delaney. "We're going to be meeting Anil [Menon] up there. He's part of our class. Deniz [Burnham] will come up right behind to replace him. Working closely with both of those two throughout astronaut training, it's really just satisfying."

"I'm slightly hoping we get delayed a little bit, so we have some overlaps, so that way we can have three Flies back to back, he said.

For Kutryk, some timing just cannot be controlled.

"It's about midway through — pretty much perfect timing. That's sarcasm," said Kutryk, referring to the upcoming birth of his third child, who is expected to come into the world while he is on the space station.

"It's been done a couple times before," he said, referring to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke and Randy Bresnik, who both had children born while on the ISS. "I think that my family is ready. I have a wonderful, huge support network, from my wife outwards, around us, and we're looking forward to that challenge and to the uniqueness of this experience."

NASA astronaut Anil Menon captured an incredible photograph of a swirling typhoon in the Pacific Ocean from the International Space Station on Aug. 2, 2026.

What is it?

According to his post on X sharing the image, Menon used an iPhone to capture the photo from the space station's cupola, a domed structure built by the European Space Agency that features six circumferential windows and central nadir viewing window.

The photograph shows a massive swirling typhoon in the Pacific Ocean. While Menon doesn't mention the storm or its location by name, it appears to be Super Typhoon Dolphin, the fifth tropical cyclone to reach category 5 in 2026. It has since been downgraded to a category 3 storm, and is expected to weaken to a category 1 or 2 as it continues to move westward towards Japan's Okinawa island.

Why is it incredible?

Aside from being a reminder of how powerful some storms on Earth can be, Menon's photograph shows just how far astronaut photography has come.

Even equipped with only a phone camera, astronauts can capture breathtaking photos to share with the world. On NASA's recent Artemis II mission around the moon and back, the four crewmembers beamed back incredible images captured with iPhones. They even sometimes used them as "mirrors" while shaving.

Menon's photo, like other space station photography, also drives home just how mind-boggling of an engineering feat the International Space Station (ISS) truly is.

There are currently seven people aboard the football-field-sized orbital laboratory, circling Earth every 90 minutes at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers/hour) at an average altitude of around 250 miles (400 km).

Since 2000, the ISS has hosted international crews and has been the site of countless groundbreaking scientific experiments made possible by its microgravity environment. But the station is reaching the end of its life; NASA plans to retire it and crash it in into the Pacific Ocean around 2030.

NEW YORK — I'm the kind of person who, every so often, falls into accidental daydreams about the concept of space. Usually because I'm listening to some sort of sad girl Spotify playlist, I start feeling infuriated that we may never learn the true meaning of the cosmos and become embarrassingly poetic about our isolation on Earth. I tend to ponder how strange microgravity is and begin Googling things like "what lies beyond the edge of the universe best evidence we have" and "when commercial rocket launch become same price JetBlue flight."

I'm pretty sure I've lived in these clouds ever since I got past the Freddi Fish and Microsoft Paint phase of my internet literacy — but then, a month before my 30th birthday, something huge happened. On a random Tuesday, I woke up, brushed my teeth, made myself an espresso, sauntered over to the Franklin Avenue C, and went to the International Space Station.

Once I got there, it was bizarre to float through the corridors and living quarters I've written about for so long as a science journalist and thought about for even longer. The walls felt lived in. The station's speed in orbit seemed a little too fast for comfort. The highly esteemed cupola — a protruding corner of the station with seven windows arranged in the shape of a daisy — was far larger than I imagined. In fact, the entire ISS was way more enormous than I can explain. Solar panels tower over you like rust-colored billboards and the station's floors threaten to collapse any second, fooling you as you gaze down at Earth. It's a little scary to be so exposed to the void of space, and that's true even when you're there in virtual reality.

Yes, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your caution levels) I launched to the ISS through a virtual reality experience called "Space Explorers: The ISS Experience" shown at Eclipsio in Manhattan. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to the real thing, until of course my dream of a cheap RocketBlue economy seat becomes possible. And most importantly, I'm here to tell you that if you're ever able to do the same, you should do it, too.

Here's what you'd see

The way it works is you put on some VR glasses and follow instructions in your headset to walk a certain direction or move your hands a certain way — your "hands" in the digital world look like floating yellow outlines of hands that correspond to the movements of your actual hands. To be transparent, my glasses were a bit glitchy. My digital hands were quite a bit unstable, for example, which did distract me a little bit but it was easy to get over.

Okay, once you're in the world of space, which is simply darkness, a few things happen (which I won't spoil). Eventually, a life-size structure of the International Space Station (ISS) appears. Suddenly, you're within the station. The interior of this structure isn't totally accurate to reality, to be clear. It's a gray, translucent rendering of the ISS's insides that you can explore. Still, the size is meant to be true to life.

Along the way, you can touch giant floating orbs that bring you a short snippet of video to watch. It is because of these snippets that I think this show is 100% worth it.

Each one corresponds to the location in which the orb sits — a cupola orb might show you a couple of astronauts floating around and looking out the window, while one near the gym equipment might bring you straight into a training session with Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch. Perhaps you'd like to venture "outside" and float eye-level with the station's robotic arm. In your periphery to the left, a spacewalker traverses the exterior of the station. To the right, the Earth is majestic. In front of you, sunlight hitting the laboratory's worn white walls causes a realistic glare. You can't help but squint.

And the reason these snippets are outstanding is that they are made with real footage from the ISS.

A show made by astronauts

I sat down with Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder of Felix & Paul studios — the organization behind the exhibit — to learn how this was possible. What does it take to recreate the ISS with this level of detail, and this level of soul?

"It took about a year and a half to two years to just prepare for this project, and eventually cameras were sent up there in space," he said. "That was the beginning of a three year production."

More specifically, the footage you see in this VR show was filmed across six NASA expeditions and involved shipping three cameras to space — two cameras operating inside the ISS and one camera designed to function in the vacuum of space. That latter camera was attached to the Canadian robotic arm on the exterior of the station and operators on the ground could remotely control it to achieve the cinematic quality they wished. The astronauts first put it on the sliding table of the ISS's Japanese module. Then, the camera was egressed from the station and the robotic arm could pick it up.

When it came to the interior cameras, however, that's where the astronauts themselves stepped in.

"It's not a traditional camera — it's a virtual reality camera," Lajeunesse said. "So, if you're going to be around a table, for example, having coffee together in the morning, well, this camera is not going to be in the middle of the table because no one would ever be there. It will be at the same height as the rest of you around the table because in the end it's going to be replaced by a person being there with you."

"This kind of anthropomorphic idea that the camera is a person really resonated with them," he added.

In order to ensure the camera didn't interfere with the many experiments and procedures on the station Lajeunesse and his team made sure to send the astronauts what he calls a "shooting script" for each day of work. This script explained which different camera positions were desired; if anything wasn't possible, the astronauts would offer suggestions of better locations. "We had this ongoing conversation with them during the production, as if it was on a real set, essentially," Lajeunesse said.

And speaking with Lajeunesse, it became remarkably clear that this show wouldn't have been as heartfelt as it is without the astronauts' own desire to create it. It seems like the astronauts wanted to be able to share their indescribable experience of living beyond our planet with those stuck on it. This is a way for them to show their families the place they used to call home.

The team even made sure to premiere the U.S. version of the show at Houston, Texas, often called "Space City" because that's where NASA astronaut training happens at the agency's Johnson Space Center.

"Our first audience in the United States were the astronauts," Lajeunesse said. "It was quite an extraordinary and emotional turnout — almost all of them referred to experiencing this as going back home."

A time capsule for future generations

As upsetting as it is, the International Space Station isn't forever. Unless a potential boosting mission reaches fruition, it'll be de-orbited and mostly lost in the flames of reentry in the year 2030. Its charred remnants will probably be placed in museums. One day, those museums will be visited by people who never lived during a time when you just knew the iconic lab was up there somewhere in the sky.

When that day comes, this ISS show will grow in sentimental value. It may end up offering the only way for ISS astronauts to go "home."

"VR points to the capacity to create simulations that are just as rich and vibrant and open and possibilities than reality itself." Lejeuneusse said, comparing it to console video games or movies. "I think it's probably the most human medium there's ever been."

He hopes that, someday, VR will improve to the point where it becomes possible to generate open worlds that we can all be a part of together. Perhaps, he says, artificial intelligence will be a big part of that.

"This feeling of witnessing the Earth, this sense of the overview experience is something pretty special, pretty emotional for people, and something that could not be communicated through any other media," he said.

As for what's next? The team is working on a show in Las Vegas called Interstellar Arc, a science fiction futuristic VR experience that Lajeuneusse says is even more interactive than this International Space Station one. But still, he emphasizes that while future VR shows may continue to increase in capabilities, there will always be something profound about the ISS project.

"You know, the International Space Station is one of the most extraordinary examples of human collaboration; human cooperation. It's many different countries, some of them which are opponents at the political stage, that kind of all came together to build this enormous structure in space habitat where humans can go and live," he said. "It was all built through cooperation, and it's all maintained through cooperation."

"When they're up there, they're kind of like a microcosm of humanity," he added. "Just the fact that it exists, just the fact that it continues to exist. We should marvel at that."

A U.S.-Russian crew returned to Earth from the International Space Station early Sunday morning (July 26), after 241 days in orbit.

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos undocked from the orbiting lab on Sunday at 3:03 a.m. EDT (0703 GMT).

The Soyuz, known as MS-28, landed on the steppe of Kazakhstan 3 hours and 24 minutes later, at 6:27 a.m. EDT (1027 GMT).

The crew's departure activities began on Saturday morning with a change-of-command ceremony aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Kud‑Sverchkov handed over the reins of the orbiting lab to NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, part of the transition from ISS Expedition 74 to Expedition 75 (which officially began when Soyuz MS‑28 undocked).

The crew then gave their farewells and closed the hatches between the ISS and Soyuz MS-28 on Saturday night.

Soyuz MS-28 launched to the ISS on Nov. 27, which was Thanksgiving Day. That liftoff kicked off the first space mission for Williams and Mikaev and the second for Kud‑Sverchkov, who now has logged 426 days and 9 minutes in space.

The MS-28 trio orbited Earth 3,856 times and traveled a total of more than 102 million miles (164 million kilometers).

Now back on Earth, the three spaceflyers were first flown by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where recovery teams were based. Williams then will return to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Kud‑Sverchkov and Mikaev head back to their training base in Star City, Russia.

Astronauts just flew to Earth orbit space atop a rocket emblazoned with an energy-drink ad.

The Soyuz MS-29 launch to the International Space Station on Tuesday (July 14), from the Russian-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, used a Soyuz rocket festooned with ads for Лимонад ("Lemonade") LIT ENERGY. The ads are visible in shots of the rocket's rollout on July 11, published here and here via NASA's Flickr account.

The Soyuz used for the launch also featured drawings from children with cancer — as well as the phrase "Life has no end" — to advertise the Unity Charitable Foundation, according to a Russian-language state media report machine-translated into English. The campaign is part of a series in support of the foundation that began in November 2025, the media report added.

To be sure, the Russian space agency Roscosmos (like other space agencies) often adorns its rockets with colorful artwork and logos that may not necessarily result in payment. In June 2018, for example, a Soyuz launched with a FIFA World Cup logo that may have been a publicity campaign to advertise the soccer competition, which was occurring that month in Russia.

While there have been some experiments by other space agencies regarding advertising — anyone remember the space cola wars? — here are a few notable examples from Russia and its predecessor state, the Soviet Union.

• A 1990 cosmonaut launch, partly for the Tokyo Broadcasting Service, carried a Japanese journalist from TBS — as well as advertisements on the side of the Soviet Soyuz rocket. Sony, Unicharm and Pocari Sweat patches were also reportedly flown on the mission.
• After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Mir space station featured advertisements for companies like RadioShack, Pepsi and Israel's Tnuva Milk.
• A Pizza Hut ad flew on a Russian Proton rocket in 2000 for roughly $1.25 million (nearly $3 million in today's dollars). The restaurant chain then followed up in 2001 with a special space pizza delivery — but using salami, as it is more shelf-stable than pepperoni.

So Russia's practice of launching ads into space is not new. However, Ars Technica has suggested that contractions in the Russian economy led to very recent changes in the country's laws for space advertising that could lead to more examples like this.

Russia's unsanctioned invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused many international partnerships in space (and other projects) to fall apart, which Ars believes may have led to Russian President Vladimir Putin's authorization for recurring space ads. The new legislation was cited on Roscosmos' Telegram account in October 2025, the Ars report added.

"According to the amendments, Roscosmos has been granted the right, effective January 1, 2026, to place advertising on space objects owned by both the state corporation itself and federally," said the Roscosmos statement, according to Ars. "The amendments will create a mechanism for attracting private investment in Russian space exploration, and reduce the burden on the state budget."

Roscosmos and NASA continue to work together on the ISS despite sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine, which is ongoing. And Tuesday's launch marked a milestone in that cooperation, as NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman became the first with his title to attend a Soyuz launch in eight years.

SpaceNews noted that Isaacman and Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov had the first reported face-to-face meeting between the agency heads since the last in-person NASA chief visit, for an October 2018 launch. After the meeting between Isaacman and Bakanov, Russia announced a two-year extension of its ISS commitment, to 2030, as well as an agreement in principle to continue offering NASA astronauts seats on the Soyuz in exchange for seats on commercial U.S. vehicles, among other developments.

Towering glaciers flow down the Himalayas' northern slopes like icy giants cascading onto China's Tibetan Plateau.

What is it?

Back in May, from aboard the International Space Station 259 miles (417 kilometers) above Earth, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir peered out the station's windows with her camera and captured a breathtaking sight.

In that fleeting moment from space, she captured the northern slopes of the Himalaya mountains stretching into China. And atop the mountains, slow-moving rivers of glacial ice carve their way downhill.

This view shows the enormity of this mountain range, which separates Nepal from China's Tibetan Plateau. The Himalayas have the highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest, with over 110 mountain peaks surpassing 24,000 feet (7,300 meters) of elevation above sea level. Ranging across five countries (Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and Pakistan) the mountain range is about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) wide.

Why is it incredible?

With the range being so incredibly expansive, this view from space offers a unique vantage point from which we can see a large swath of the mountains in motion. Even in a helicopter, you would get a fairly localized view of individual mountains in the Himalayas. This view provides a striking scene that you cannot see from the surface of our planet.

This view is also a reminder of how important space is in our evolving understanding of climate change. As our planet continues to change and sea levels rise with warming temperatures, we can see glacial movement from space. This is an important resource to researchers fighting to better understand climate change so we can better fight it. With access to information about glaciers and how they melt, move and flow across the world, we can be better prepared to protect our planet and its inhabitants.

The International Space Station has three new residents.

NASA's Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina lifted off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT; 7:47 p.m. local time in Baikonur), heading toward the orbiting lab.

Their Soyuz executed nominal side booster separation about two minutes after launch, followed by second stage separation about 2.5 minutes later, as the rocket flew at 105 miles (169 kilometers) in altitude. Third stage orbital insertion and separation was completed at about 8 minutes and 46 seconds, putting Russia's Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft and crew on course to chase down the International Space Station (ISS).

The trio caught up to the ISS after just two orbits, docking with the outpost at 1:52 p.m. EDT (1752 GMT). The two spacecraft were flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Mediterranean Sea at the time, NASA officials said during the agency's docking webcast.

That webcast will resume at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) ahead of the opening of the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS, which is expected around 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT).

The MS-29 trio will join the seven astronauts already living aboard the ISS — NASA's Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

This is the first spaceflight for Menon, who was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in December 2021, in the agency's Group 23. He's married to Anna Menon, who was picked in the next astronaut candidate class, Group 24, in September 2025.

Anna Menon has already been to space, though not with NASA. In September 2024, while an employee of SpaceX, she flew on the company's Polaris Dawn mission to Earth orbit. That five-day flight, which was funded and commanded by current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, featured the first-ever commercial spacewalk and reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) — higher than any previous crewed Earth-orbiting mission had gotten.

Anil Menon is a former SpaceX-er as well; he was the company's first-ever flight surgeon.

MS-29's flight is the second-ever space mission for both Dubrov and Kikina. Dubrov lived aboard the ISS from April 2021 to March 2022, and Kikina spent five months on the outpost, from October 2022 to March 2023.

Kikina, the only female member of Russia's active astronaut corps, flew to and from the ISS back then on SpaceX's Crew-5 mission. That was a big deal: She was the first Russian ever to fly on a private U.S. spacecraft, and the first cosmonaut to fly on any American space vehicle since December 2002, when cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergey Treshchov came back to Earth from the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour.

The MS-29 trio will spend about eight months living and working on the orbiting lab. Menon will help conduct a wide variety of scientific experiments during that stretch.

"He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices," NASA officials wrote in a July 9 media advisory.

"Menon also will perform ultrasound using augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods that could eliminate the need for medical support from Earth on future space missions," they added.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:55 p.m. ET with news of successful docking.

A company just produced kidney and liver tissue in space for the first time, using a method called bioprinting, which 3D-prints living tissue.

The announcement comes from California-based Auxilium Biotechnologies, whose AMP-1 orbital bioprinter made the breakthrough. The bioprinter used cell and tissue designs from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina.

"The ability to manufacture multiple tissue types alongside clinically relevant medical products highlights both the versatility and scalability of our technology," Auxilium CEO Jacob Koffler said in a statement today (July 9).

The experiments took place aboard the International Space Station in June. In addition to bioprinting kidney, liver, and cartilage tissues, the AMP-1 machine also created 28 nerve repair implants. The bioprinted materials returned to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on June 17.

"Successfully bioprinting living liver and kidney tissue aboard the International Space Station marks an important step forward for regenerative medicine," WFIRM director Anthony Atala said in a statement today (July 9). "The uniform cell distribution achieved aboard the space station points to real possibilities for manufacturing medical devices and tissues in space."

This wasn't the first bioprinting experiment to be conducted on the ISS. For example, in 2018, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko tested a machine called the "Bioprinter Organ.Aut," which successfully assembled cartilage cells using a magnetic field.

However, Auxilium’s AMP-1 bioprinter is the first tool that has produced multiple types of tissue in space, as well as the first to make kidney and liver tissue in the final frontier. Auxilium says this flexibility will be important as commercial interests expand manufacturing hubs in space for biotech, healthcare and advanced materials development.

"This mission marks an exciting step forward for in-space biomanufacturing and demonstrates what can be achieved when innovative technology is paired with strong collaboration," Isac Lazarovits, Auxilium's engineering vice president, said in the same statement.

"Demonstrating multiple product classes and meaningful production volume within a single mission is an important milestone as we continue advancing toward routine manufacturing operations in orbit," Lazarovits continued.

The U.S. just celebrated its 250th birthday, and Americans living off the planet had a great view of some of the parties down below.

"The International Space Station orbited over Los Angeles on July 4th as America marked 250 years of independence with a burst of fireworks lighting up the city below — a celebration so bright it reached all the way to space!" NASA officials said on Monday (July 6) via the agency's ISS X account.

That post featured a 15-second video captured from the orbiting lab, which showed hundreds of firework shows flickering across the L.A. area at night like cameras flashing in quick succession at a concert or a football game.

There are seven people living in Earth orbit at the moment, members of the ISS' current Expedition 74. Three are Americans: NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway, Jessica Meir and Chris Williams, all of whom serve as flight engineers.

The others are the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot and cosmonauts Andrey Fedyaev, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. Kud-Sverchkov is Expedition 74's commander, while Adenot, Fedyaev and Mikaev are flight engineers.

NASA didn't just passively observe celebrations of the United States' 250th birthday; the agency marked the occasion in multiple ways as well.

For example, NASA painted big "America 250" logos on the Space Launch System rocket that launched the Artemis 2 astronauts around the moon this past April. The four Artemis 2 crewmates also wore special patches commemorating the anniversary.

In addition, NASA conducted a series of airplane flyovers in the Washington, D.C. area over the July 4 weekend and will perform more in the coming weeks and months. You can learn more about the agency's anniversary activities in this Space.com story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Two NASA astronauts gave a robotic arm a hand up — or rather, a replacement wrist joint — during a successful spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday (June 30).

Chris Williams and Jessica Meir, both flight engineers on the station's Expedition 74 crew, spent seven hours and 20 minutes repairing the Canadarm2 remote manipulator system (RMS) after it was observed drawing current but not moving as expected in late May. The 58-foot-long (18 meters) arm has been in regular use since it was installed on the orbiting outpost in April 2001.

"For over 25 years, the Canadarm2 has been a crucial part of the International Space Station. The arm was key to our orbiting laboratory and continues to be a workhorse that we rely on. Whether it is performing maintenance or replacing equipment, moving and operating payloads, catching cargo vehicles or helping us out during spacewalks, the arm has played and will continue to play an essential role in our work on orbit," Williams said as the spacewalk ended.

"It is also a testament to international cooperation," he added. "Canada, the U.S. and the world have come together to make this program a success. We are honored … that we were able to give the arm a helping hand."

Williams and Meir, each wearing a NASA extravehicular mobility unit (EMU), ventured outside the Quest airlock soon after switching the spacesuits to battery power at 8:20 a.m. EDT (1220 GMT) on Tuesday. They made quick work of transitioning to their work station, where they retrieved a spare wrist joint by using a power tool (pistol grip unit) to unbolt it from an exterior equipment panel.

They then turned their focus to the arm, which was positioned nearby. They removed the old unit and installed the new joint (no. 5), bolting it in place. Williams and Meir brought the faulty joint back into the space station to be returned to Earth for analysis and possible refurbishment.

The astronauts completed their work on the arm by reattaching its latching end effector, or hand, which the arm uses to grapple objects and inchworm across the exterior of the station. Mission Control confirmed that the arm had good power connections after the astronauts' work.

Williams and Meir returned to the Quest airlock and began its depressurization at 3:40 p.m. EDT (1940 GMT), marking an end to the spacewalk.

Tuesday's EVA (extravehicular activity) marked the fourth time in history that spacewalkers have worked to service the Canadarm2. Previously, another wrist joint was replaced and both of the arm's end effectors were swapped out for spares.

"We are thrilled to have repaired the mighty Canadarm2 just in time for Canada Day tomorrow! We hope that all in Canada and everyone around the globe can celebrate this achievement," said Meir.

Expedition 74 flight engineers Jack Hathaway of NASA and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency assisted Williams and Meir by helping them to don and doff their spacesuits and maneuvering Canadarm2 into position for the astronauts' repair work.

This was Williams' second spacewalk and the fifth for Meir. Williams has now logged 14 hours and 22 minutes, including a previous EVA with Meir. Meir has totaled 36 hours and 6 minutes, including the first all-female EVA in 2019.

Tuesday's spacewalk was the 280th in support of International Space Station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades since 1998.

NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Jessica Meir will fix the International Space Station's Canadarm2 during a spacewalk today (June 30), and you can watch the action live.

Chris Williams and Jessica Meir will perform a roughly 6.5-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) today, starting at about 8:35 a.m. EDT (1235 GMT).

You can watch here at Space.com courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).

Williams and Meir will replace a 200-pound (90-kilogram) wrist joint, which malfunctioned "during normal Canadarm2 operations on May 27 after the arm drew elevated motor current and did not move as expected," NASA officials wrote in a June 22 spacewalk preview.

The spare joint was already on board the ISS, which has been continuously occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000.

"Repairs to robotics, like Canadarm2, are normal and expected after more than 25 years of continuous operations, as the system was designed with replaceable components and planned maintenance in mind," NASA officials added in the preview.

Canadarm2 is nearly as old as the ISS. The 56-foot-long (17-meter-long), 3,300-pound (1,500-kg) robot arrived at the orbiting lab aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in April 2001.

Today's extravehicular activity (EVA) will be the second for Williams, who will be "spacewalk crewmember 1" and will wear a spacesuit with red stripes. It will be the fifth for Meir, who will be "spacewalk crewmember 2" and will wear a suit with no stripes.

The duo performed an EVA together this past March, spending seven hours prepping the orbiting lab for a new solar array.

Astronauts have performed a total of 279 spacewalks outside the ISS to date.

China is set to expand its space station from three to six modules in the coming years and add a co-orbiting Hubble-class space observatory, even as the International Space Station approaches the end of its lifetime.

The three-module, T-shaped Tiangong space station was assembled in orbit across 2021 and 2022 and has hosted numerous three-astronaut Shenzhou crews, but China is now set to expand the orbital outpost with new modules, citing growing research demands and more frequent crew and cargo missions. As previously reported by Space.com, the planned expansion will see Tiangong grow into a "double-T" shape, with the addition of the multipurpose module and two new experiment modules, and allow China to extend the scale of operations aboard the station.

"This expansion has always been part of the original plan," Qian Hang, a researcher with China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), told Chinese media. State media Xinhua reported that the first phase of the expansion will see the launch of a new 20-ton-class multifunctional module, which will dock with Tiangong's Tianhe core module.

Additional docking ports on the new modules will allow Tiangong to welcome more spacecraft and provide greater operational flexibility when needed. "If the missions get more intensive, we risk 'queuing' for docking ports and lack sufficient emergency buffer space," Qian said.

China is developing new, low-cost cargo options for Tiangong, while its new Mengzhou spacecraft, which could debut later this year, can carry seven astronauts to low Earth orbit. The Shenzhou spacecraft, which is currently used for China's crewed missions, can carry three astronauts to Tiangong.

Before the arrival of a new module, however, the first new addition to Tiangong is expected to be Xuntian, a bus-sized space observatory with a 2-meter (6.6 feet) diameter primary mirror, slightly smaller than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Xuntian is scheduled for launch in 2027 and boasts a field of view around 300 times larger than that of Hubble, meaning it will be able to study and map around 40% of the heavens during its planned 10-year lifetime using its 2.5-billion-pixel camera. Xuntian will share a similar orbit with Tiangong, meaning it will be able to dock with the space station for maintenance, refueling, repairs and potentially upgrades.

China's plans to expand Tiangong are coming at the same time as NASA is planning for the end of life of the much larger International Space Station (ISS). The agency plans to launch the SpaceX-developed U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) in the coming years, and drag the ISS into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in late 2030 or early 2031.

While the U.S. is mulling a variety of plans for commercial stations that host astronauts in orbit after the ISS is retired, China would have the largest permanent outpost in orbit with Tiangong. According to Yang Hong, chief designer of the space station system, the planned expansion would take Tiangong from a mass of 90 tons to 180 tons.

If you've ever seen auroras in the night sky, then you are one of the lucky few who has enjoyed a view of one of nature's most colorful and spectacular phenomena. But for the very lucky, very few who've seen auroras from space, the view is on a whole other level!

What is it?

When charged particles streaming constantly from the sun, also known as the solar wind, reach Earth and interact with our atmosphere, it creates what we call auroras. Seeing these spectacular, colorful displays in the sky is on many people's bucket list, as auroras can light up the sky in a rainbow of colors. But this beautiful phenomenon happening in our atmosphere can also be seen from space.

European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, who is currently aboard the International Space Station as part of the εpsilon mission, spotted the aurora australis, or auroras over the Southern Hemisphere. (Lights in the Northern Hemisphere are known as the aurora borealis.)

And the image she captured of the moment really speaks for itself. Neon green swirls look truly otherworldly against a haze of bright purple blanketing Earth, which also seems enveloped in a ruby red glow. The reddish glow of the auroras can even be seen against the outside of the space station in this photograph.

Why is it incredible?

While her photograph speaks for itself, Adenot actually shared her own thoughts on the view via social media. One incredible thing about human spaceflight in the modern world is that, even from an orbiting laboratory, astronauts can share their experiences with the world in real time.

"Day 127, orbit 1968 — That aurora was absolutely spectacular… shimmering and dancing beneath us, stretching as far as the eye could see, and so intense it lit up the Station in shades of green," Adenot said. "We’ve seen several since the beginning of the mission, but this one was on a completely different level — far too bright for my usual aurora camera settings. Moments like these never get old up here; the whole crew suddenly find themselves vying for a good spot at a window!"

Astronauts on the ISS had an epic microgravity kickoff with a FIFA soccer ball, as the agency highlighted how soccer balls are influenced by space research.

NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts got the official FIFA World Cup ball rolling, zero-G style, in the Kibo module of the International Space Station. The impromptu match, published on X June 20, formed part of NASA's push to explain how space relates to soccer.

As NASA explains, soccer has been studied scientifically on the ISS. The orbital laboratory has hosted "studies that improve understanding of the aerodynamics and physics involved in soccer ball flight," the agency stated in a June 8 release about soccer tech. An example study in 2019 examined how the mass of a soccer ball influences the rotation, stability and motion of the sphere. NASA did not name the study, but the date lines up with the Adidas OS SPIN experiment that ran between 2019 and 2021, as described in an agency database of ISS experiments.

Adidas has put electronics in official match balls since 2022, NASA noted, which allows broadcasters and officiators to monitor speed, position and contactor. "But those sensors also add mass in specific locations inside the ball, and uneven mass distribution can affect how a ball moves through the air," the agency pointed out.

Watching soccer ball movements in microgravity can therefore lead to better design to account for the sensors, the agency noted. "The findings have improved understanding of how embedded technologies, including match-ball sensors, can influence performance during play," NASA stated. "The research contributed to studies used in the development and evaluation of soccer balls for major international tournaments, including FIFA World Cup competition."

More recently, ISS astronaut Jessica Meir showed students how soccer ball mass and spin works in microgravity. "What you see here is a soccer ball that passes one of the most important tests in sports engineering: balanced mass distribution," the Expedition 74 NASA astronaut said, floating alongside a spinning ball, in a YouTube video posted last month.

The agency has also studied soccer balls on the ground. At NASA's Ames Research Center in California, researchers examined Adidas' Brazuca ball in a wind tunnel. They particularly examined a phenomenon known as "knuckling", which happens when the airflow on the seams makes the ball move unexpectedly in mid-air.

"NASA engineers measured the speeds and flow conditions where this effect was most pronounced," the agency stated of the Brazuca ball, which was used in the 2014 world cup. "Adjustments in panel shape, seam depth, and surface texture can influence flight consistency, helping determine whether a ball curves, dips, or holds its line during play."

NASA has showed up a lot at the celebrations already. On June 20, Artemis 2 moon astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover delivered the ball for a Netherlands-Sweden match in Houston (nearby NASA's Johnson Space Center for astronaut training).

This year's world cup is jointly hosted by the U.S., Mexico and Canada and will wrap up on July 19. On June 11, NASA held an exhibit at Fan Festival Houston about FIFA, pledging to open the event during every tournament match held in Houston's east downtown.

NASA's plan to deorbit the International Space Station in coming years has fallen under the scrutiny of a government watchdog group and stirred up a wave of reaction by a leading ocean conservation organization.

As presently blueprinted by NASA, the International Space Station will be de-orbited via a series of actions. Firstly, in early to mid-2028, the ISS will start to be lowered through a combination of Earth's natural atmospheric drag and the execution of re-entry maneuvers by the ISS's Russian segment. Then, in mid-2029, NASA plans to launch a SpaceX-supplied, government paid for, U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) and attach that craft to the ISS, which will fire its 46 Draco thrusters and push the station down to a watery grave.

But there's one issue that has ecology experts concerned. The Ocean Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-headquartered group with a mission to improve global ocean health and the human relationship with the sea via carefully chosen strategies and projects, says the planned deorbit of the International Space Station "raises serious concerns for ocean health that the space community has not adequately grappled with," according to Mark Spalding, president of the foundation.

A troubling gap

A just-issued U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has focused on issues related to NASA's plan to bring down the International Space Station (ISS) and transition from the ISS to commercial space stations, namely NASA's concern about having a "gap" in continuous human presence in low Earth orbit.

The GAO report explains that, at the end of 2030 or early 2031, the USDV is to perform a re-entry burn. That would push the ISS through the Earth's atmosphere and into a pre-determined spot – an ocean zone called Point Nemo.

"As part of the reentry process, NASA expects portions of the ISS and deorbit vehicle to break up and fall into the remote part of the ocean to minimize the risk to populated areas," states the GAO report.

But as for using Point Nemo or any part of the ocean as a convenient dumping ground, Spalding told Space.com that "there is a troubling structural gap in international law that the ISS de-orbit throws into sharp relief."

Under the Space Liability Convention of 1972, if space debris falls on another nation's territory or damages property, Spalding said, the launching nation owes compensation - absolutely and without needing to prove fault. "But no equivalent protection exists for the ocean," he said.

"As a result, when space agencies have control over where debris falls, they aim for the high seas, and in doing so, they incur no legal obligation to pay for cleanup or environmental remediation," said Spalding.

The Ocean Foundation leader said he understood the legitimate safety rationale for targeting Point Nemo, the point on Earth farthest from any populated area. "But the ocean's remoteness from human infrastructure should not be mistaken for a lack of value or vulnerability," Spalding said. "The ocean and its creatures deserve the same protection that international law affords to national territories."

Concerning the ocean's ecosystems, Spalding asks what happens to the marine ecosystems and creatures on the seafloor where the ISS leftovers land?

"The honest answer is, we don't fully know. That is deeply troubling for a structure the size of a football field. We do know that not everything burns up on reentry. Denser components will survive and reach the seafloor," Spalding added.

The problem: uncertainty

What denser, specific materials from the ISS re-entry will be, and what harm they may cause to marine life, Spalding said, "has not been adequately studied or disclosed. That uncertainty is itself the problem."

Additionally, what environmental harm may begin before the debris hits the water is worrisome. As the largest reentry in history, the cumulative atmospheric impact of down-falling ISS hardware deserves serious study, he said.

For one, Spalding flagged a newly negotiated High Seas Treaty (BBNJ Agreement) that is relevant to downing the ISS. It requires parties to conduct environmental impact assessments for activities that may affect the marine environment beyond national jurisdiction when effects are unknown or poorly understood.

"It is fair to ask whether the ISS deorbit  — the largest such reentry in history, targeting the high seas  — should trigger that obligation," Spalding said.

Position statement

As for the Ocean Foundation's position on the ISS deliberate crashing into the Pacific Ocean, the group believes that discussion points prior to the ISS downing include:

• A full environmental impact assessment of the anticipated seafloor debris field and atmospheric effects;
• Public disclosure of all materials that will survive reentry and reach the ocean floor;
• A rigorous legal analysis of obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS,) the London Protocol of 1996 that provides an international standard and framework for countries to individually and collectively protect and preserve our oceans from pollution caused by the dumping of wastes and other matter into the ocean, along with the BBNJ Agreement.

The high seas have no sovereign who can demand accountability, concluded Spalding. "We believe this gap in international law needs to be closed, and the ISS de-orbit is a vivid illustration of why."

SpaceX's Cargo Dragon capsule shines in the sunlight over Earth as it departs from the International Space Station in a new image snapped from onboard the station.

What is it?

Peering through the window of the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronaut Jessica Meir snapped a striking photo as she watched a SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule depart from the station.

With sunbeams gleaming downward, reflecting off of the spacecraft's hull, the Dragon can be seen backing away from the station mere moments after undocking from the port on the station's Harmony module. The undocking is so recent that you can clearly see both the docking port and the hatch of the Dragon where the two connected.

The Dragon disconnected from the space station on June 16, and just one day later, parachuted into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California where it was retrieved, chock-full of cargo and finished science experiments.

Why is it incredible?

The space station has been in orbit since 1998 and continuously occupied since November, 2000. With decades of work in orbit, it can be easy to take for granted the incredible transport system that supports cutting-edge research hundreds of miles above Earth's surface.

The work done on the station is impressive, but this system is just as mind-boggling. In addition to launching and returning astronauts who perform critical maintenance and repair work on the station on top of their research duties, cargo missions keep the station stocked.

From food and clothing to medical equipment and intricate science experiments, these missions are essential for both keeping astronauts safe and healthy on station as well as continuing the progression of science in-orbit. This back-and-forth between Earth and the space station is an impressive feat, and this photo shows the system fully in-motion.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is back on Earth.

The robotic Dragon undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday (June 16) at 12:25 p.m. EDT (1625 GMT), while the two spacecraft were flying about 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the northern Pacific Ocean.

The freighter's trip home was relatively brief: It splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California city of Oceanside today (June 17) at 8:11 a.m. EDT (1211 GMT; 5:11 a.m. local time), NASA officials said in an update.

The Dragon launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 15, kicking off CRS-34, the company's 34th commercial resupply services flight for NASA. It was the sixth such mission for this particular capsule, according to a SpaceX mission description.

The capsule arrived at the ISS two days later, delivering nearly 6,500 pounds (2,950 kilograms) of food, scientific hardware and other equipment to the astronauts aboard the orbiting lab.

The freighter hauled thousands of pounds of cargo back home as well, "carrying samples that could shape future space exploration and life on Earth," NASA officials wrote in a June 12 media advisory.

"Research returning includes bioprinted organ and cartilage tissue, data on improving cryogenic fuel storage for future space missions, and DNA‑inspired materials to develop new cancer treatments," they added. "The returning hardware includes an ocular imaging device used to monitor crew members' eye health, an absorbent bed that filters trace contaminants from cabin air, and a separator pump from the waste and hygiene compartment."

Dragon is the only operational ISS cargo spacrecraft that can survive the fiery downward trip through Earth's atmosphere.

The other active freighters — Northrop Grumman's Cygnus, Russia's Progress and Japan's HTV-X — are all expendable, burning up in our air at the end of their missions.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:30 p.m. ET on June 16 with news of undocking from the ISS, then again at 11:15 a.m. ET on June 17 with news of splashdown.

One of the space station's robot arms, crucial for catching cargo ships and doing a share of maintenance duties, is offline for at least a few weeks for repairs.

Canadarm2, which just passed 25 years of service in April on the International Space Station (ISS), will require a spacewalk to fix an apparently broken part that seized up during routine work on May 27, NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (June 10).

The arm is in a stable spot, but it is awaiting help from spacewalking astronauts on June 30 — the day before Canada Day, a national holiday in that country. "The system demonstrated an elevated motor current in a wrist joint, and arm motion did not occur as expected," NASA officials wrote of the issue. Consultation with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which funds the arm and supports its operations with MDA Space, showed a spacewalk will be needed to replace the affected joint. Luckily, a spare is already on station.

"Canadarm2 was designed with these kinds of potential issues in mind: it is made up of several segments that can be pulled out and replaced in space," the CSA wrote in a Wednesday update on its website. "Knowing that parts would eventually have to be replaced, the CSA planned shipments of key spares to the station well in advance. In 2017, a similar repair happened with one of the robotic arm's 'hands' after it started to show signs of normal wear and tear."

NASA plans a news conference at a to-be-announced date to discuss the spacewalk and to share more about the assigned spacewalkers. The two astronauts will likely be drawn from the Expedition 74 crew on the U.S. side of the station, which include NASA's Chris Williams, Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, and the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot.

Getting Canadarm2 back online will be critical to berth some cargo ships at the space station, which carry food, equipment and other supplies to the astronauts, as well as to perform a share of maintenance on the orbiting complex. The last Canadarm2 berthing took place in April with Williams controlling the arm, and Hathaway supporting, to pick up the arriving Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft.

Notably, Canadarm2 was not originally designed for ship arrivals (it flew to station in 2001, long before the rise of commercial spacecraft), but it made a milestone 50th "cosmic catch" in 2024 and has kept going despite being now 10 years past its design life as of this year.

Moreover, tasks over the decades have increasingly transferred to the ground, both at NASA in Houston and at the CSA headquarters near Montreal, Quebec. Controllers in Canada alone support more than 100 days of work a year for Canadarm2 and other Canadian ISS robotics (including the Dextre "hand"), which includes picking up equipment, transferring experiments, and performing other duties that don't require precious astronaut time.

The CSA's robotics on station represent its share of the ISS funding arrangement, allowing CSA astronauts and science to fly. The next CSA astronaut to go there will be Josh Kutryk, flying aboard SpaceX Crew-13 no earlier than September; the last was David Saint-Jacques in 2018-19.

Canadarm2 forms part of a long line of Canadian space robotic arms, originating in part with Canada's National Research Council technology that underlay early satellite antennas and the "legs" of Apollo lunar landers.

The first Canadarm made its debut flight on the second space shuttle mission in 1981. Canadarm2 helped build the ISS and supports station activities, and Canadarm3 is a next-generation arm being constructed to support the Artemis program, which saw CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen fly around the moon on Artemis 2 in April.

One of Canadarm2's biggest moments in history was a near-emergency repair of a torn solar array in 2007, which required NASA spacewalker Scott Parzaynski to ride on the arm and a Canadian robotic "boom" extension to reach the faraway, live solar panel part for a fix.

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.

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.

Two Russian cosmonauts worked to install and retrieve science experiments while on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Wednesday (May 27).

Expedition 74 commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergei Mikaev spent 6 hours and 5 minutes outside the space station, conducting an extravehicular activity (EVA) that ran from 10:18 a.m. to 4:23 p.m. EDT (1418 to 2023 GMT). The two spacewalkers installed a solar radiation experiment on the exterior of the Zvezda service module and removed science hardware from the Poisk and Nauka modules on the station's Russian segment.

The Solntse-Teragerts telescope that the duo mounted outside Zvezda was designed to observe and collect data about strong solar flares emanating from the sun. The instrument will help scientists improve their prediction models and better understand solar flare activity at different frequencies. The device is expected to operate through 2028.

Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev then rode at one end of the European Robotic Arm (ERA), a 40-foot-long (11.3-meter) remote manipulator, to retrieve a cassette holding semiconducting material produced by an experiment mounted outside the Nauka mini-research module. The Ekran-M molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) experiment uses gallium arsenide to form ultra-pure, ultra-thin films that can only be borne under the microgravity environment of space.

The cosmonauts ran into some difficulty retrieving the cassette, including losing a pair of pliers and commands sent from the ground failing to move the experiment's interior mechanisms. However, with some workarounds, they were able to collect the sample for its return inside the station.

Before moving on with their other tasks, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev took a moment to recognize the 80th anniversary of RKK (RSC) Energia, Roscosmos' design bureau founded in August 1946. The spacewalkers held up a card printed with a commemorative logo and posed for photographs.

Not long after, Kud-Sverchkov asked Mikaev if he knew what day it was.

"The 27th," replied the flight engineer.

"Today is the birthday of St. Petersburg," said Kud-Sverchkov. "So, congratulations to all of the residents of St. Petersburg, on the day of the city. Our northern capital of Russia."

The two cosmonauts then moved over to the Poisk module to inspect, photograph and secure one of the Kurs rendezvous antennas on the Progress MS-33 (ISS 94P) cargo spacecraft. The antenna failed to deploy when the vehicle launched to the space station in March, resulting in a manually controlled docking.

Wrapping up the EVA, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev retrieved a Biorisk science container holding samples of bacteria, seeds and other organisms and then jettisoned a bundle of used window cleaners before heading back inside the space station. All the activities planned for the outing were successfully completed.

The spacewalk on Wednesday was the second for Kud-Sverchkov and the first for Mikaev. Kud-Sverchkov now has logged 12 hours and 11 minutes working in the vacuum of space.

It was the 279th spacewalk in support of International Space Station assembly, maintenance and upgrades since 1998.

Two cosmonauts will venture into the void today (May 27), and you can watch the action live.

Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will perform a five-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) today, starting at about 10:15 a.m. EDT (1415 GMT).

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT).

Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev "will install a solar radiation experiment on the Zvezda service module and remove other science hardware from the Poisk and Nauka modules of the orbiting complex's Roscosmos segment," NASA officials wrote in a May 22 description of the spacewalk.

"If time allows, the duo also will photograph one of the Progress 94 cargo spacecraft's Kurs rendezvous antennas, which failed to deploy in March following its launch to the space station," they added.

It will be the second extravehicular activity (EVA) for Kud-Sverchkov, who commands the ISS' current Expedition 74 mission, and the first for Mikaev, a flight engineer. You'll be able to tell them apart: Kud-Sverchkov's spacesuit will have red stripes, and Mikaev's will have blue stripes.

Today's EVA will be the second of 2026; NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams conducted a seven-hour spacewalk on March 18 to help prepare the ISS for a new solar array.

To date, astronauts have performed 278 spacewalks outside the ISS, which has hosted rotating crews continuously since Nov. 2, 2000.

Vast isn't just about private space stations anymore.

The California startup, which is developing the "Haven" series of private space stations, announced today (May 19) that it will build and sell satellites as well.

The new Vast Satellite line will consist of "high-power satellite buses built for operators across communications, Earth observation, national security and orbital data center satellite constellations," the company said in a statement today.

Vast Satellite will leverage technology that the company has already demonstrated in space, on a test flight called Haven Demo.

Haven Demo launched to low Earth orbit (LEO) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket this past November, charged with verifying the performance of systems that will be key to the Haven orbital outposts — propulsion, power and avionics, for example. Everything went well, according to Vast, and the demonstrator performed a controlled deorbit into Earth's atmosphere in February.

Haven Demo turned out to be a pathfinder for Vast Satellite as well, because Vast builds its core systems in house and will use them for the newly announced spacecraft buses, too.

"We believe Vast is uniquely positioned to compete in the high-power satellite market through the combination of our world-class engineering team, large-scale manufacturing capabilities and the on-orbit success of Haven Demo," Vast CEO Max Haot said in the same statement.

"Customers can benefit from our experience designing, building and operating flight-proven large-scale spacecraft while gaining access to highly capable, flexible spacecraft platforms backed by operational expertise," he added.

And Vast already has a customer — a confidential one that has committed to buy four satellites, with an option to purchase 200 more, according to the statement.

The first offering in the Vast Satellite line will be a 15 kilowatt-class bus "designed to support a wide array of power-intensive missions through flexible configurations," Vast wrote in the statement.

That bus will weigh about 1,540 pounds (700 kilograms) unfueled and be capable of carrying more than 770 pounds (350 kg) of payload. It's designed to operate for five years in LEO, though other orbits will be possible in the future. Vast plans to launch a batch of these spacecraft — 10 of them — to orbit for the first time in late 2027.

Meanwhile, the company continues to work on its Haven project, which aims to have the multimodule Haven-2 space station up and running by the time the International Space Station retires in the early 2030s.

The company plans to launch a pathfinder called Haven-1 in 2027. If all goes well, Haven 2's first module will lift off in 2028, with additional modules going up every six months thereafter for the next four years.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule carry tons of science and supplies for the International Space Station crew successfully docked to the orbiting outpost on Sunday (May 17), two days after its launch.

The company's 34th mission under NASA's commercial resupply services (CRS) contract arrived at the space station at 6:37 a.m. EDT (1037 GMT). The Dragon autonomously docked to the forward-facing port of the Harmony module.

"Dragon contact and soft capture complete," reported NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway to Mission Control.

Hathaway and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot monitored the arrival of the Dragon from inside the station's Cupola.

The two, together with their Expedition 74 crewmates, will spend the next few weeks unpacking the craft of its nearly 6,500 pounds of cargo and then repacking it with science results, returning hardware and refuse for the trip back to Earth in mid-June.

Among the science delivered by the SpaceX CRS-34 (or SpX-34) mission include "a project to determine how well Earth-based simulators mimic microgravity conditions; a bone scaffold made from wood that could produce new treatments for fragile bone conditions like osteoporosis; and equipment to help researchers evaluate how red blood cells and the spleen change in space," according to a NASA media advisory.

The Dragon also delivered a new instrument to study charged particles around Earth that can impact power grids and satellites; an investigation that could provide a better understanding of planetary formation; and a device created to take highly accurate measurements of sunlight reflected by Earth and the moon.

The SpaceX Dragon lifted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Friday.

The aurora australis shone brilliantly over Earth as astronauts watched from above.

In a new image captured by European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot from aboard the International Space Station, you can see a spectacular aurora above the Indian Ocean off the coast of Perth, Australia.

What is it?

On May 7, 2026 at approximately 10:20 p.m. aboard the ISS, Adenot snapped a photo that looks straight out of a sci-fi movie. She captured the image as the space station orbited 268 miles (431 kilometers) above Earth.

The aurora australis can be seen below as a stream of green and pink light hovering over our planet against the blackness of space.

Adenot arrived at the space station on Valentine's Day of this year, as part of SpaceX's eight-month-long Crew-12 mission. She flew to the station alongside mission commander NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, mission pilot NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedaev.

Why is it incredible?

The aurora australis is better known as the southern lights. It occurs in the Southern Hemisphere and, while it's most often seen above the Antarctic Circle, people in places including Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and some southern regions of South America can sometimes spot the aurora, as we can see in this image.

Auroras are spectacular natural fireworks that happen in the night sky. They are created when charged particles emitted by the sun — either during events like flares and coronal mass ejections or just during regular solar activity — interact with Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere.

To see an aurora on Earth is a bucket-list item for many people. Getting this view from space goes beyond even that, shining a uniquely spectacular light on the phenomenon as you can almost see where exactly in our planet's atmosphere these solar particles are hitting, interacting, and creating this colorful display.

SpaceX launche its Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station today (May 15) after a weather delay.

The robotic Dragon lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today at 6:05 p.m. EDT (2205 GMT).

That amounted to a three-day delay; NASA and SpaceX called off attempts planned for both Tuesday (May 12) and Wednesday (May 13) due to weather, then waited until today for the next chance.

The launch kicked off the CRS-34 mission, so named because it's the 34th flight that SpaceX has conducted for NASA's Commercial Resupply Services program.

Dragon is loaded up with about 6,500 pounds (2,950 kilograms) of supplies, hardware and scientific experiments for CRS-34. Among the scientific gear are "a project to determine how well Earth-based simulators mimic microgravity conditions, a bone scaffold made from wood that could produce new treatments for fragile bone conditions like osteoporosis, and equipment to evaluate how red blood cells and the spleen change in space to protect future astronauts," NASA officials wrote in a CRS-34 media advisory.

This stuff will get to the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday (May 17) around 7:05 a.m. EDT (1105 GMT), when Dragon docks autonomously to the forward port of the orbiting lab's Harmony module. You can watch this rendezvous live via NASA when the time comes.

CRS-34 is the sixth spaceflight for this particular Dragon capsule — a new record for a SpaceX cargo craft. One of the company's astronaut-carrying Crew Dragon capsules, named Endeavour, also has six missions under its belt.

The capsule will stay attached to the ISS for just a month, coming back down to Earth in mid-June "with time-sensitive research and cargo, ahead of splashing down off the coast of California," NASA officials wrote.

Dragon is the only ISS resupply ship that can haul material down to Earth. The other three operational robotic freighters — Japan's HTV-X, Russia's Progress and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus — are all designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere when their time in orbit is up.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a landing at Cape Canaveral about 7.5 minutes after liftoff today as planned. It was the sixth liftoff and touchdown for this particular booster, according to SpaceX.

Dragon separated from the rocket's upper stage on schedule about 9.5 minutes after launch and began chasing down the ISS.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:35 p.m. ET on May 12 with the new target launch date of May 13, then again on May 13 with news of the weather scrub that day and the new target of May 15. It was updated again at 6:20 p.m. ET on May 15 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and spacecraft separation.

On the International Space Station, you look down to see shooting stars.

NASA astronaut Chris Williams just reminded us of that mind-bending fact, sharing footage of a spectacular fireball he saw from the orbiting lab.

"On April 27th at about 10:40 PM GMT, I was in the @Space_Station Cupola and saw something really neat.I was scanning the sky to try to catch a glimpse of the approaching Progress MS-34 vehicle bringing new supplies," Williams said via X on Thursday (April 30), in a post that featured three photos and a short video.

"Just as we were passing over West Africa, I saw a bright object directly below us, streaking through the upper atmosphere," he added. "I saw its tail grow and then split apart into a shower of smaller pieces. I think it must have been some piece of orbital debris or a satellite breaking up as it entered the atmosphere. It was quite a light show!"

Progress MS-34, also known as Progress 95, launched on Saturday (April 25) and arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) two days later, delivering about three tons of food, supplies and scientific experiments. The cargo vehicle will stay attached to the station for about seven months, then depart to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Interestingly, the fireball that Williams saw may have been caused by the Progress launch: The upper stage of the Soyuz rocket that carried Progress 95 to orbit apparently reentered at the right time and place to generate the sky show.

Williams is a rookie spaceflyer serving an eight-month stint aboard the ISS. He arrived at the orbiting lab on Nov. 27 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft that also carried two cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev.

The trio is sharing the station with the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission for NASA, which launched on Feb. 13. That quartet consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

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.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir snapped a striking photo of a river snaking through the Amazon rainforest from space.

What is it?

The Ucayali River in central Peru was captured in a new image by Meir while aboard the International Space Station.

The Ucayali, a lower extension of the Apurímac River, is thought to be one of the main sources of the Amazon River. More than 1,600 miles (2,700 kilometers) long, the Ucayali is home to a diverse indigenous population and an amazing variety of plants and animals.

Pink dolphins swim through this river which is home to wildlife ranging from manatees to taricaya turtles, jaguars, giant river otters, catfish and a variety of monkeys, reptiles and birds.

Meir snapped this photo from the space station, which she reached via Crew-12, a SpaceX mission that launched this past February. The four Crew-12 astronauts were welcomed to the station by the Expedition 74 crew and will continue to conduct research throughout the duration of their roughly eight-month stay.

Why is it incredible?

For all of its natural splendor and incredible biodiversity, this river, the surrounding region, and the people living there continue to be impacted by illegal logging and commercial fishing. And this area is no stranger to exploitation; it was a hot spot during the rubber boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The photo by Meir is visually stunning. It shows the river like a swirling ribbon across Earth's face. But it also reminds us of the incredible power of being able to see Earth from space.

This vantage point is more than aesthetics, and photographs like this as well as satellite imagery of Earth help us to better understand the progress of things like deforestation and climate change.

Russia launched its latest Progress cargo ship toward the International Space Station on Saturday (April 25).

A Soyuz rocket topped with the robotic Progress 95 freighter lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today at 6:21 p.m. EDT (2221 GMT; 3:21 a.m. on April 26 local time).

The Russian freighter, known as Progress 95, hauled about 3 tons of food, propellant and other supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).

Progress 95 docked with the orbiting lab on Monday (April 27) at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT on Tuesday, April 28) as planned.

Saturday's launch kicked off the second Progress mission of the year. Progress 94 lifted off from Baikonur on March 22 and reached the ISS two days later, overcoming the failed deployment of one of its docking antennas.

Progress 94 remains attached to the station. Progress 95 docked to the port previously occupied by Progress 93, which departed on April 20 to make room for the newcomer.

Progress 93 burned up in Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, the fate that awaits all Progress craft when their missions are over. That time will come for Progress 95 about seven months from now.

Progress is one of four cargo spacecraft that resupply the ISS these days, along with Japan's HTV-X, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus and SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

All are expendable except Dragon, which — like its astronaut-carrying counterpart, Crew Dragon — makes parachute-aided ocean splashdowns.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on April 25 with news of successful liftoff, then again at 10:45 p.m. ET on April 27 with news of docking.

Here's another record that Artemis 2 broke.

For a few moments on April 6, the four Artemis 2 moon astronauts and the three crewmates aboard China's Tiangong space station were farther away from each other than any other humans had ever been.

Astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell noted the occasion in a series of X posts, in which he calculated the distances between Artemis 2's Orion capsule, named "Integrity," and Tiangong.

At first, McDowell highlighted the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as contenders for the farthest folks from the Artemis 2 quartet. But he amended that statement in a later post, noting that Tiangong was actually slightly more distant.

On April 6, as Integrity flew around the moon's far side, it got a maximum of 260,754 miles (419,643 kilometers) from Tiangong, according to McDowell. The max Integrity-to-ISS distance, meanwhile, was 260,715.5 miles (419,581 km).

Space.com asked McDowell what made him think to calculate these distances in the first place. "When NASA announced the distance-from-Earth record, I immediately wondered if the ISS distance was even further," he said via email.

"I was going to be too lazy to calculate it, but several people soon after asked the same thing, on social media and in emails to me. So, I went ahead and did it," he said, adding that NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston — Mission Control for Artemis 2 and other crewed NASA spaceflights — may be interested in verifying his work.

The previous record was set in April 1970 during NASA's near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission, whose astronauts pulled off a daring maneuver that used lunar gravity to slingshot them back toward Earth after suffering an explosion en route to the moon.

There were no space stations orbiting Earth back then, so the greatest potential distance between humans and crewed moon missions has been extended by a few hundred miles.

Space.com also asked McDowell if he thought this new Artemis 2 record would be significant when future historians look back on it hundreds of years from now.

"To some extent," McDowell said.

"I think the significance is that it's the beginning of a shift from 'How far from Earth are our most distant people' to 'How spread out is human civilization?'" he added. "There may come a day when it's Mercury to the moons of Saturn."

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.

What do astronauts near the moon do when it's time to talk to their colleagues orbiting the Earth on a livestream?

They talk a lot about the view and food, apparently.

Astronauts aboard Artemis 2 and International Space Station (ISS) astronauts shared in a call broadcast live (audio only) on April 7, spanning the vast distance between Earth and the moon distance. NASA later released the video version with edits to align the audio with the video and remove pauses, highlighting the first-ever ship-to-ship call between crews so far apart.

It's hard to translate into metaphors just how far the crews were from each other. But looking at the Artemis 2 and Earth distance alone, it was the equivalent distance of sailing between Boston and the Panama Canal, a mind-blowing 92 times, based on distances provided by NOAA. That's roughly 232,141 miles (373,595 km) apart, according to the crew during the livestream.

But even from so far away, the crews shared companionship.

"It's fun to be up in space with you at the same time," said the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen, who waited 17 years for his spaceflight (or should we say, moonflight?) aboard Artemis 2.

"We know how fortunate all of us are as humans, to come up here and look down at the Earth from above," answered NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, on her second long-term ISS stay as a part of Expedition 74. "We really wanted to hear what that felt like — how different that felt — now from your new perspective around the moon."

Next at the mic, moonside, was NASA's Christina Koch, who performed the first, second and third all-woman spacewalks with Meir at the ISS in 2019, during Expedition 61. "We do miss the ISS," said Koch, speaking also on behalf of Artemis 2's Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, who flew to the orbiting complex on separate NASA missions in 2014 and 2020-21, respectively.

"The views there [at the ISS] are awesome. Being able to see specific places, being able to see your home, specifically … I miss them every day, almost," Koch continued. "The thing that changed for me, looking back at Earth, was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it — and how it just made it even more special.

"It truly emphasized how alike we are," she said, "how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet. We have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal, and the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it."

To a follow-up about how ISS experience comes in useful at the moon, Koch first shared that she had "sat console" at NASA's mission control in March, while Meir and Christopher Williams were getting ready to do a solar array prep spacewalk on March 18. (Artemis 2's astronauts had completed their training at this point, and the crew was awaiting their delayed mission liftoff on April 1, which is presumably how Koch found the time.)

"I was just filled with pride," Koch said of watching the suit-up, as Meir and Williams exchanged a high-five on camera. "But it also really re-instilled in me those flight operations principles that we live by, in a real-time, high-dynamic and risky environment. So having that kind of impression in my mind right before this [Artemis 2] flight was huge, and basically, every single thing that we learned on ISS is up here. And then, of course, there's the funny and practical: how to eat, how to do silly things with water, how to flip around. We're bringing that with us, too."

With Koch's comments finished, Wiseman quickly grabbed the mic to speak with Williams. "I've just got to add, C, that just before you launched, you said you can't wait to talk to us on the space-to-ground [loop]. And it is happening, brother. I cannot believe it."

"Face to face, we said," Meir responded, referring to the video between the astronauts, before she handed the mic to Williams.

"Yeah, I can't believe it," Williams said. "I mean, I remember having coffee and sitting with you guys just before I walked [did crew walkout] to fly up here, and it's just so awesome being able to talk to you right now. It's such a special opportunity."

Glover, next at the mic, said one of his most interesting insights in moving to the moon from ISS was not having an extra module to "deconflict" activities, which means "everything we do, essentially, starts with a spatial conflict and we have to take the time to work it out in every activity. And so we've been just having fun working through that."

Hansen added that as the rookie, he is having an "awesome experience" on his first flight, even coming through on a dare from Meir to grow a moustache during his training. One of the things that has kept Hansen smiling, he said, was having the record "so far" among the Artemis 2 crew for keeping the potable water dispenser open a little too long. Hansen noted, however, that he wasn't the only one with these failures — although he didn't name names.

Wiseman, next up, said that Hansen's new eyes to space led to another fun moment among the crew. Due to orbital mechanics reasons, the crucial translunar injection burn had to happen about when the crew was a dizzying 115 miles (185 km) above Earth, less than half the altitude of the orbiting ISS.

And to get there, the crew was coming down in a steep, but planned, orbit that had taken them to roughly 46,000 miles (74,000 km) above the Earth, double that of a typical geostationary satellite. As such, Wiseman recalled "looking at the entire Earth just growing rapidly in the window," and Hansen's reaction.

"Jeremy turns around at us and goes, 'I'm not sure. I think we're going to run right into it," The comment was meant as a joke and got the entire crew laughing, Wiseman said, but he said watching Earth "grow" so swiftly was fascinating. "It is crazy up here, and it does bang your mind."

With the call drawing to a close, the astronauts exchanged their menus. The Artemis 2 crew had items such as sweet and sour chicken, Kona coffee with cream, butternut squash and spicy green beans. Members of the ISS crew also had spicy green beans — heat is a popular food item in space as taste sensations fade in microgravity — along with mango salad.

Then came the farewells.

"Jessica, I always hoped we would be in space again together, but I never thought it would be like this. Congratulations to you on being [ISS] commander, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your trip out in space," Koch said.

"Totally share all the same sentiments," Meir responded. "I'm so happy that we are back in space together, even if we are, you know, a few miles apart."

She added that the ISS crew jokingly ran to the far side of the space station as the Artemis 2 crew achieved their record-setting furthest flight distance from Earth at 252,756 miles (406,771 km), beating the mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The ISS crew did that to say "we could claim you were the furthest away from you in that moment," Meir joked.

"We were doing the same shenanigans here when we got to the furthest point for the moon; I tried to get to the furthest point in the spacecraft, and my crewmates were clawing me down," Wiseman answered." He clarified it was a joke, as the crew was busy doing science, but he said it was good to hear the same conversation was taking place at the ISS. "It was a lot of fun."

Other members of the ISS on the call were NASA's Jack Hathaway and the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot. Not present on the call were NASA's Anil Menon and the Russian Roscosmos Andrey Fedyaev and Pyotr Dubrov.

The S.S. Steven R. Nagel has arrived at the International Space Station.

The second of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft to deliver supplies to the orbiting outpost, the vehicle was captured by the space station's Canadarm2 robotic arm at 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT) on Monday (April 13).

"Cygnus capture is complete," radioed Chris Williams, a NASA astronaut and Expedition 74 flight engineer, to Mission Control. "The S.S. Steven Nagel, welcome aboard the ISS!"

Williams was at the controls of the arm when the spaceship was grappled. Assisting him was fellow NASA ast Jack Hathaway. Flight controllers on the ground will next take control of the arm to berth the Cygnus on the Earth-facing port of the station's Unity Node 1 for unloading.

On board the S.S. Steven R. Nagel, which was named for a late space shuttle-era astronaut, are about 11,000 pounds (5,000 kg) of science equipment and logistics for the Expedition 74 crew. Among the specific research studies being delivered are quantum science module that could advance the hunt for dark matter, as well as improve computing technology and the equipment needed to increase therapeutic stem cell production to treat cancer and blood diseases.

Cygnus is also carrying a gut microbiome study and a receiver that could help protect space-based GPS and radar systems by improving our ability to predict space weather.

Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on Saturday (April 11), the S.S. Steven R. Nagel is scheduled to stay attached to the space station until October. The flight is Northrop Grumman's 24th under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-24) contract.

SpaceX launched launch a massive cargo ship packed with over 5 tons of gear for astronauts on the International Space Station early Saturday (April 11), then aced a rocket landing minutes after the Florida liftoff.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soared into a blue sky over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7:41 a.m. EDT (1141 GMT) on Saturday, sending Northrop Grumman's "Cygnus XL" resupply freighter toward the International Space Station (ISS). The mission, called NG-24, is Northrop Grumman's 24th resupply flight to the ISS for NASA.

"And liftoff! Science and supplies soaring to the International Space Station aboard the S.S. Steven R. Nagel," NASA spokesperson Sandra Jones said during live commentary.

"This Cygnus spacecraft is named the S.S. Steven R. Nagel in honor of the astronaut who flew four space shuttle missions and logged more than 720 hours in space," Jones added.

The robotic Cygnus XL will arrive at the ISS on Monday (April 13), when it will be grappled by the orbiting lab's Canadarm2 robotic arm. That capture is scheduled for 12:50 p.m. EDT (1650 GMT), NASA said.

Nagel, an Air Force test pilot, served as a NASA astronaut from 1979 to 1995. His first flight was as a mission specialist; he then flew once as a pilot and twice as a commander. Nagel died in 2014 at the age 67 after a long illness, according to NASA.

Nagel's namesake Cygnus XL freighter will deliver about 11,000 pounds (4,990 kilograms) of science equipment and supplies to the astronauts aboard the station. That load-carrying capacity explains Cygnus XL's name: The original version of the freighter, which flew more than 20 missions to the ISS, maxed out at about 8,500 pounds (3,856 kg) of payload.

Saturday's launch was the second flight of the Cygnus XL to date. The first one launched last September, also atop a SpaceX Falcon 9. It stayed attached to the ISS for six months, departing on March 12 to burn up in Earth's atmosphere. The mission profile is roughly the same for this second Cygnus XL.

Saturday's mission was the seventh flight for the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage that propelled the cargo ship toward orbit. It returned to Earth about eight minutes after liftoff to make a smooth landing at a SpaceX pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The booster launched Northrop Grumman's previous cargo flight, NG-23, NASA's Crew-11 astronaut flight, the Axiom Space Ax-4 astronaut flight and three Starlink missions, according to a SpaceX description.

Just over 14 minutes after liftoff, the NG-24 Cygnus XL cargo ship separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage to enter its initial orbit. It should deploy its solar arrays about one hour after liftoff to continue its journey to the ISS.

The Northrop Grumman vehicle is one of four robotic cargo spacecraft that service the ISS, along with Japan's HTV-X, Russia's Progress and SpaceX's Dragon.

Dragon is the only one of these freighters that's reusable. The other three die fiery deaths in Earth's atmosphere when their time in orbit is up.

Just as the Artemis 2 astronauts are preparing to return home from their epic moon trip, a very different crew is readying to launch to the International Space Station.

British scientists have packed a container full of worms aboard Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo vehicle, to be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday morning (April 11), to study the effects of long-duration spaceflight on biological organisms. The researchers hope the results will help mission planners keep human astronauts healthy on future space trips.

The worms, a species called Caenorhabditis elegans, are tiny creatures about 1 millimeter long that are commonly found in soil and have been used in biology research for decades. Dozens of them are travelling to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the experiment, enclosed in petri dishes inside a pod that measures 4 by 4 by 12 inches (10 by 10 by 30 centimeters).

The pod will first spend some time inside the station to allow the worms to adjust before being mounted on an experimental platform outside the orbital outpost, where it will remain for up to 15 weeks.

During that time, researchers will keep an eye on the worms' health using automated miniature cameras capturing microscopic fluorescent signals emitted by the organisms' cells in real time. The automated nature of the experiment means the study won't require any time or specialist skills from the astronauts aboard the ISS.

"The conditions of space, including microgravity and radiation exposure, are known to alter cells and genes in potentially harmful ways, yet the extent and causes of these changes are still a rich topic of study," a spokesperson for the U.K. Space Agency told Space.com in an email. "By measuring such changes in living organisms in real time, we can gain more precise data on the direct causes of human health hazards in space, informing new prevention strategies and potential pharmaceutical solutions."

The experimental pod, engineered by scientists from the University of Exeter and the University of Leicester, both in the U.K., maintains a comfortable environment for the worms, including temperature and atmosphere maintenance and provision of food and water via an agar carrier.

The team hopes the low-cost experiment will open new avenues for biological research in space and help improve our understanding of the effects the harsh conditions of space have on the health of biological organisms, including humans.

"NASA's Artemis program marks a new era of human exploration, with astronauts set to live and work on the moon for extended periods for the first time," Tim Etheridge, a life sciences researcher at the University of Exeter and one of the designers of the experiment, said in a statement.

"To do that safely, we need to understand how the body responds to the extreme conditions of deep space," he added. "By studying how these worms survive and adapt in space, we can begin to identify the biological mechanisms that will ultimately help protect astronauts during long-duration missions — and bring us one step closer to humans living on the moon."

Astronauts in space suffer from a wide range of ailments, including bone and muscle loss, vision problems and reduction in the number of red blood cells. In addition, the high radiation levels that their bodies absorb during spaceflight increases the risk of cancers and DNA damage. With global space agencies discussing ambitions to establish permanent human bases on the moon and possibly on Mars, researchers have to find a way to protect future space explorers from those potentially devastating effects of long-term space trips.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:45 p.m. ET on April 9 with the new target launch date of April 11.

Traveling far from her home planet helped Artemis 2 astronaut Christina Koch appreciate it even more.

Koch and her crewmates talked with some of their International Space Station (ISS) counterparts on Tuesday (April 7), a day after Artemis 2's epic flyby of the moon. And the station astronauts had lots of questions for the deep-space explorers.

The first one came from NASA's Jessica Meir, who knows Koch well: The duo performed the first-ever all-female spacewalk outside the ISS back in 2020.

"We know how fortunate all of us are as humans to come up here and look down at the Earth from above; every astronaut that comes to space remarks on that," Meir said.

She was referring to the "overview effect," the often life-changing shift in perspective that comes from seeing our planet as it truly is — a fragile world that looks very alone in a vast and dark cosmos.

"We really wanted to hear what that felt like, and how different that felt now from your new perspective around the moon," Meir continued.

"I'll start by saying we do miss the ISS," Koch responded. (Wiseman and Glover have also lived aboard the station; Hansen is a spaceflight rookie.) "The views there are awesome, being able to see specific places — being able to see your home, specifically. So y'all's views are absolutely incredible, and I miss them every day, almost."

Then she described the difference, as Meir requested.

"The thing that changed for me looking back at Earth was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it, and how it just made it even more special," Koch said.

"It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive," she added. "We evolved on the same planet, we have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal, and the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it."

All four Artemis 2 crewmates — Koch, fellow NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — took part in the 15-minute call.

On the ISS, Meir shared the microphone with NASA's Chris Williams and Jack Hathaway, and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency. The three cosmonauts currently living on the orbiting lab — Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev and Andrey Fedyaev — did not participate.

Adenot asked the Artemis 2 astronauts what has surprised them during their mission so far.

"I don't mean to give you such a short answer, but I can truly say 'everything,'" Glover replied.

He cited many of the mission's major milestones, from its April 1 liftoff atop a Space Launch System rocket to its maneuvers in Earth orbit to its journey to, and flyby of, the moon.

"This entire journey has been interesting," Glover said.

Artemis 2 — the first crewed mission beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972 — is now headed back to Earth. The four astronauts will get here on Friday (April 10), splashing down that evening off the coast of San Diego.

NASA will then start gearing up for Artemis 3, which will test docking and rendezvous technologies in Earth orbit in 2027. After that will come Artemis 4, which aims to land astronauts near the moon's south pole in late 2028.

As the historic Artemis 2 mission toward the moon roared off the Florida coast earlier this week, it wasn't just people on the ground watching.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) also stayed up to witness the April 1 launch from orbit, cheering on their colleagues as the rocket carved its path skyward and began a journey that will take humans farther into space than ever before.

And soon, as the four-person Artemis 2 crew journey toward the moon, they will, for the first time, be able to look back from such a distance and see other humans circling Earth on the space station — a sight that did not exist when Apollo astronauts made their trips to the moon.

It's a striking measure of how much humanity's presence in space has evolved since the Apollo era, which ended with the Apollo 17 crewed moon landing in 1972. There have been more than 25 years of continuous human occupation aboard the ISS alongside the silent sweep of thousands of satellites.

That expanded space presence was on display during Artemis 2's launch, as both astronauts and satellites observed the moment from orbit, offering a rare, layered portrait of humanity watching the journey beyond. The event was seen from the ground, from space, and even from the sky as some lucky airplane passengers got glimpses overhead.

At the time of liftoff, the ISS — currently home to the seven-member Expedition 74 crew — was passing over the northern Pacific Ocean, too far away for the astronauts to see the launch directly. They instead followed it on NASA TV, staying past their bedtime to watch the launch, astronaut Chris Williams shared in a post on X.

About 30 minutes later, as the ISS swept closer to Florida, Williams said he caught sight of the lingering trail left by the rocket as it tore through the atmosphere — seen in the image below as a white plume twisted by winds at different altitudes.

Among the mission's many firsts, the ISS crew will speak with the Artemis astronauts in an audio-only conversation scheduled for Tuesday (April 7), according to NASA.

Those silent satellites also captured sweeping views of the historic launch. The GOES-19 weather satellite recorded the rocket's exhaust plume as a brushstroke-like arc seen in the video below.

Finally, this short video from the GOES-18 satellite shows the rocket launching into space, appearing to arc as it follows its planned trajectory along Earth's curvature.

How do you eat on the way to the moon, in a spacecraft that doesn't have a fridge or a stove?

The Artemis 2 crew will demonstrate just that when they launch on their historic moon mission no earlier than April 1. The four astronauts — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — will bring along food that can be stored safely for weeks in their Orion spacecraft, then prepared quickly.

"Food selections are developed in coordination with space food experts and the crew to balance calorie needs, hydration, and nutrient intake while accommodating individual crew preferences," NASA officials wrote in a March 3 statement about the Artemis 2 menu.

Additionally, the foods must produce few crumbs and be easy to prepare in microgravity. "The crew uses Orion's potable water dispenser to rehydrate foods and beverages and a compact, briefcase-style food warmer to heat meals as needed," NASA added.

While the moon crew has a packed schedule testing Orion and performing lunar observations, meal time will be allocated for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Aside from the food, the astronauts can have up to "two flavored beverages" a day, which could include coffee for the ones used to a caffeine fix.

Food science has advanced considerably since the last Apollo astronauts flew to the moon in 1972. The space shuttle program in particular allowed for bigger menus and more onboard preparation capabilities, NASA officials said.

But any Artemis 2 astronauts hoping for something similar to the International Space Station's (ISS) menu had to reset their expectations, because the orbiting lab features refrigeration. In addition, the orbiting lab is in low Earth orbit, within easy reach of cargo ships ferrying fruit, vegetables and other perishables. No freighters will meet up with Artemis 2 in deep space, however.

As a result, "Artemis 2 uses a fixed, pre-selected menu designed for a self-contained space vehicle with no resupply," NASA officials said. However, the astronauts had ample time to weigh in on their preferred meals. "Crew members sample, evaluate and rate all foods on the standard menu during preflight testing, and their preferences are balanced with nutritional requirements and what Orion can accommodate."

NASA offered some flexibility in packing. Each Artemis 2 container has about two to three days' worth of food, allowing astronauts to pick from a few options during the mission while only opening one box. There will be some limitations depending on what Orion is doing, however.

"Menus are tailored based on the spacecraft's food preparation capabilities during each phase of flight," NASA officials stated. "Certain foods — such as freeze-dried meals — require hydration using Orion's potable water dispenser, which is not available during some phases, including launch and landing. As a result, foods selected for those phases must be ready-to-eat and compatible with the spacecraft's operational constraints, while a broader range of food options are available once full food preparation systems are up and running."

A NASA infographic provides some details about the Artemis 2 menu. For example, there are 189 unique food or drink items flying on the mission, including more than 10 types of beverage. There are five different hot sauces, 58 tortillas and a variety of sweet treats, from pudding and cobbler to cake, chocolate and cookies.

Flying on Orion is a bit like camping from a dining perspective: The spacecraft is an environment where foods must be simple to store and prepare, eating requires a minimum of fuss, and preparation is done using simple ingredients and processes.

Two of the Artemis 2 crewmates said in a NASA video that they are encouraged by the food selection. Koch, who spent about a year aboard the ISS, said she is impressed by the variety: "Different entrees that you wouldn't imagine could be rehydrated, and actually good in space, are completely fair game."

Hansen added that mealtimes are a great opportunity for the crew to come together as a community. He's looking forward to enjoying "that necessary thing you have to do, the thing that you should be grateful for" because sharing mealtimes with his friends and family "has always been meaningful for me."

The European Space Agency is planning to buy a dedicated SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to send its astronauts to the International Space Station to boost their time and experience in space.

European Space Agency (ESA) Director General Josef Aschbacher announced the plan to charter a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on March 19, following a decision at an ESA Council meeting in Interlaken, Switzerland. The ESA Provided Institutional Crew (EPIC) project is planned to launch in early 2028 with the aim of providing more opportunities for the agency's astronauts to get to space before the International Space Station is retired, SpaceNews reported.

"We have five career astronauts that I intend to fly in the next few years, and EPIC is one way of making sure that these career astronauts can go to the space station, do research and certainly also enlarge our experience and our work on the International Space Station," Aschbacher said in the March 19 ESA press briefing.

The move would create new opportunities for Europe's astronauts before the International Space Station (ISS) is retired. As European Spaceflight reported, ESA unveiled its latest group of five career astronauts in November 2022, but has only secured long-duration flights to the ISS for two of the five, including Sophie Adenot, who is currently aboard the space station as part of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission.

The mission will likely include international astronauts, not just those from ESA, however.

"ESA will buy launch capability for four professional astronauts," Aschbacher said. "We plan to implement this with international partners. That means ESA astronauts plus international partners." He added that ESA will work closely with NASA, but ESA will lead and fully operate the mission.

Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA's Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, stated that EPIC would not be similar to recent, short-term private missions to the ISS. The selected EPIC crew will be career astronauts who will spend around one month in orbit. They will conduct research and utilization activities aboard the ISS, but they will also participate in maintenance and repair and support logistics operations. Private astronauts typically focus on research activities and the missions have lasted around two weeks on average.

The ISS is currently scheduled to be deorbited in 2030, by which time it will have been permanently occupied for 30 years. However, a number of U.S. senators are calling for the lifetime of the ISS to be extended two years to September 2032, aiming to avoid a gap in continuous U.S. human presence in low Earth orbit and thus "avoiding ceding leadership to China before commercial stations are ready."

A Russian cargo spacecraft encountered a problem shortly after launching toward the International Space Station on Sunday morning (March 22), but it should be able to power through.

A Soyuz rocket topped with the robotic Progress 94 freighter lifted off from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday at 7:59 a.m. EDT (1159 GMT; 4:59 p.m. local Baikonur time).

The launch went well, but Progress 94 suffered an issue shortly after deploying from its rocket ride: One of the antennas it's supposed to use for automatic docking did not deploy, according to NASA.

"All other systems are operating as designed, and Progress will continue toward its planned docking at 9:34 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, March 22," agency officials said via X on Sunday. "Troubleshooting will continue and if the antenna cannot be deployed, Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov will manually pilot the spacecraft through a backup system for rendezvous and docking at the space station."

Progress 94 is carrying about 3 tons of food, propellant and other supplies to the astronauts currently living and working on board the International Space Station (ISS).

As NASA's update notes, the freighter is expected to dock with the station's Poisk module on Tuesday morning. Progress 94 will take the place of Progress 92, which undocked from Poisk on Monday (March 16).

You'll be able to watch Progress 94's arrival, with coverage beginning Tuesday at 8:45 a.m EDT (1245 GMT).

Progress 94 will spend about six months docked to the ISS. It will then be loaded up with trash and sent to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Two other currently operational ISS cargo craft are similarly expendable — Japan's HTV-X and Cygnus, which is built by the aerospace company Northrop Grumman. The only reusable freighter is SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:45 a.m. ET on March 22 with news of launch and the antenna-deployment glitch.

Two NASA astronauts prepared the International Space Station (ISS) for the addition of a new solar array on the first U.S. spacewalk in almost a year.

Expedition 74 crewmates Jessica Meir and Chris Williams ventured outside of the space station's Quest airlock at 8:52 a.m. EDT (1252 GMT) on Wednesday (March 18) to install a mount for an advanced power-producing solar panel. The pair worked on the left (or port) side of the space station's backbone truss, where they first assembled and then attached the bracket structure that will support an ISS Roll-Out Array (iROSA), to be installed on a future spacewalk.

Once unfurled, it will be the seventh of eight rollout arrays to be deployed since the upgrades began in 2021. The iROSA assemblies are smaller than the legacy four solar wings on the U.S. segment of the International Space Station. They also require no motor to unfurl to their 63-foot (19 meters) full length. The potential energy held by the rolled-up carbon composite booms is enough to unroll the panel in about six minutes.

The space station's original solar arrays have degraded, having exceeded their 15-year service life. When all of them are in place, the new iROSAs will increase the orbiting lab's electricity supply by 20% to 30%.

The use on ISS also paved the way for NASA to use the technology for deep-space missions, including the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that demonstrated a method of planetary defense by changing the orbit of a small asteroid in 2022. NASA has also been planning to use roll-out solar arrays on its Gateway moon-orbiting space station, but it looks like that outpost may be canceled.

The additional power on the ISS will help support expanded commercial activities and the upcoming transition from the ISS to commercially operated space stations.

After completing work on the iROSA modification kit about five hours into the EVA, Williams moved over to photo-document the gears for the port-side SARJ, or solar array rotating joint, that allows the attached wings to track the sun. Meir concurrently worked on installing an electrical jumper to enable robotic servicing of the components that comprise the 2A power channel.

Meir and Williams then cleaned up their respective work areas and stowed equipment they had used before reentering the Quest airlock.

Citing the limited time remaining — the spacewalk had been planned to last about 6.5 hours — EVA managers in Mission Control deferred the planned swabbing for microorganisms on the exterior of the space station and the installation of a lens cover on a camera on the Canadarm2 robotic arm for a future outing. Neither of the two tasks was considered mission critical.

Wednesday's spacewalk ended at 3:54 p.m. EDT (1954 GMT), 7 hours and 2 minutes after it began.

"Well done!" said Meir to Williams just before he reentered the station's hatch.

"It was a lot of work and a lot of fun," Williams replied.

NASA had originally scheduled for the iROSA kit to be installed during an EVA in May 2025, but it was postponed in favor of relocating an antenna. NASA next planned for the same task to be accomplished during a spacewalk in January, but one of the then-assigned spacewalkers, Mike Fincke, had an undisclosed medical issue that required the excursion to be canceled and he and his crewmates to return to Earth a month early.

This was Williams' first spacewalk and Meir's fourth. She has now logged 28 hours and 46 minutes working outside in the vacuum of space, including being a part of the world's first all-female EVA in 2019.

"Today, March 18, is exactly 61 years since Alexei Leonov became the very first human to step out boldly into the vacuum and blackness of space. Our international efforts in space exploration have evolved considerably since then, but the enormity of venturing outside the hatch in your own mini-spacecraft remains," said Meir after closing the hatch.

"I can report that my fourth spacewalk feels even more special than my previous ones. That is because I shared the experience with first-time spacewalker Chris Williams. It is a tremendous experience to pass the torch to the next generation of explorers who will keep this space station running," she said.

"Leonov said he felt like a grain of sand in the universe, a perspective one gains from the privilege of looking down on Earth from above like we did today. Like grains of sand, at least we are here drifting together. The view is always better when you are sharing it with a friend," concluded Meir.

Wednesday's spacewalk was the 278th EVA in support of the assembly, maintenance and upgrade of the International Space Station, totaling 1,760 hours and 28 minutes. It was also the first ISS spacewalk of 2026, the first by Expedition 74, and the first by American astronauts since May 1, 2025, when NASA's Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers ventured outside the orbiting lab.

Two NASA astronauts will conduct a long-delayed spacewalk today (March 18), and you can watch the action live.

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams will venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) today at around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), kicking off a spacewalk expected to last about 6.5 hours.

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Coverage will start at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT).

Today's spacewalk was originally scheduled for Jan. 8, with NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman supposed to suit up. But that plan was nixed when a then-unnamed member of SpaceX's Crew-11 astronaut mission to the ISS experienced a medical issue.

That issue led to Crew-11's departure on Jan. 15, about a month earlier than originally planned. It was the first medical evacuation in the long history of the ISS.

Fincke later revealed he was the one who experienced the problem on orbit. Neither Fincke nor NASA has revealed details about the concern, but both have stressed that the astronaut is doing fine.

Today's spacewalk will be the fourth for Meir and the first for Williams. The duo will help prepare one of the station's power channels for the future installation of an iROSA (International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array).

Another spacewalk with similar goals will follow in the near future; NASA officials have said they will announce the astronauts involved and the target date after completion of today's EVA (extravehicular activity). This other spacewalk was also a casualty of the Crew-11 medical evacuation; it was originally supposed to take place on Jan. 15.

The two upcoming spacewalks will be first ISS EVAs of 2026, the first for the orbiting lab's current Expedition 74 and the 278th and 279th overall in the outpost's lifetime.

NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission will put its astronauts in danger — but just how much danger is tough to say.

The agency announced on Thursday (March 12) that it's targeting April 1 for the launch of Artemis 2, which will send four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and back to Earth.

All crewed space missions are risky. But Artemis 2 will be just the second flight of the Artemis program and the first to carry astronauts, so there's not enough data to properly quantify the risks involved, NASA officials said.

"I wouldn't actually put a number on it," Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during a briefing on Thursday (March 12) following completion of the Artemis 2 flight readiness review.

Reporters repeatedly pressed Glaze and John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis 2 mission management team, for numbers during that briefing. And a few did come up.

For example, Honeycutt noted that new rockets have historically launched successfully on their debut flights about 50% of the time. So that may have been the expectation for Artemis 1, the first flight of the Artemis program's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. (Artemis 1 was a success, sending an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back in late 2022.)

Human spaceflight programs that are launching regularly could probably expect a failure rate of about 2% — 1 in 50 — on their second or third liftoffs, Honeycutt added. But Artemis' cadence isn't exactly regular, given that there will be about a 3.5-year gap between the first and second missions if Artemis 2 does indeed get off the pad in early April.

"That basically means we're probably not 1 in 50 on the mission going exactly like we want to, but we're probably not 1 in 2 like we were on the first flight," Honeycutt said.

"That's what I would tell you," he added. "I think we're being really careful not to really lay probabilistic numbers on the table for this mission, just given the small amount of data."

The range Honeycutt cited is consistent with numbers released recently by the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG), in a report about NASA's handling of its Artemis Human Landing System Contracts — awards given to SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop and operate crewed moon landers for the program.

In the report, which was posted online Tuesday (March 12), the OIG estimated that there's a 1-in-30 risk of failure overall during a crewed Artemis mission to the lunar surface, and a 1-in-40 risk during the moon operations phase.

The OIG report also puts this risk threshold into context, comparing it to that of other NASA human spaceflight programs. For example, the relevant number is 1 in 200 for a 210-day commercial crew mission to the International Space Station — that is, one flown by SpaceX with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. (Boeing also holds a NASA commercial crew contract but has yet to fly an operational astronaut flight to the orbiting lab.)

The risk of crew loss during the Apollo moon missions was a rather frightening 1 in 10, according to the OIG report. And the managers of NASA's space shuttle program, which flew from 1981 to 2011, "thought they were operating at a 1 in 100 loss of crew threshold, but years later determined the actual number was 1 in 10 for the early flights," the OIG report reads.

Honeycutt's reluctance to put a hard number on the Artemis 2 risk therefore makes a lot of sense. As that example from the space shuttle days shows, estimates made using scant data are likely to be imprecise and in need of future revision.

There are other complications as well, which are related to the relatively small sample sizes and diversity of dangers involved in human spaceflight.

"We have pursued loss of mission, loss of crew-type number assessments, but I'm not sure we understand what they mean," Honeycutt said.

As an example, he explained that the agency's modeling work identifies micrometeors and orbital debris (MMOD) as the biggest single risk to the human spaceflight enterprise.

"It's real, right? But when have the last two bad events occurred? Going uphill, in that highly energetic event," Honeycutt said, presumably referring to the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents in 1986 and 2003, respectively, which killed a total of 14 astronauts. (Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, and Columbia broke apart during reentry due to damage the orbiter sustained during launch.)

"So, you know, we can fool ourselves sometimes into thinking, 'Really? Is that the biggest risk to the mission — MMOD?'" he said.

Honeycutt seemed to realize that such admissions, valid and honest as they are, would probably spawn stories like the one you're reading now. "Well, this oughta make for some good reading over the next few days," he said with a smile, drawing laughter from the journalists in the room.

A new extra-large spacecraft loaded with garbage prepares to meet its fiery demise in Earth's atmosphere in this shot from the International Space Station.

What is it?

In this screenshot from one of the live cameras aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the new Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL freighter is being jettisoned away from the station.

Cygnus XL arrived at the ISS on Sept. 18, 2025, carrying around 11,000 pounds (4,990 kilograms) of supplies to the astronauts aboard the station, making it the largest-ever cargo spacecraft to arrive at the orbital laboratory.

After docking at the station for seven months, Cygnus XL was released from its berth on the Earth-facing port of the ISS's Unity module on Thursday (March 12) while over the south Atlantic Ocean. It will now deorbit into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, carrying thousands of pounds of garbage produced on the ISS, according to NASA.

Why is it amazing?

Images like this one are a reminder of the mind-boggling technological achievement that is the International Space Station.

The ISS measures around 356 feet (109 meters) end-to-end and weighs close 925,000 pounds (420 metric tons) and orbits Earth at a speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), or about 4.8 miles per second (7.7 km/s) — all while 260 miles (420 km) above the surface of Earth.

Even at such an altitude and orbital velocity, cargo spacecraft like Cygnus XL  —  not to mention crewed spacecraft like SpaceX's Crew Dragon  —  routinely launch from the surface and dock with the orbital laboratory.

The ISS is currently scheduled to be deorbited into a spacecraft graveyard in the Pacific Ocean around 2030, although some U.S. lawmakers would like to see its operations extended to 2032 while commercial replacements are still being developed.

The first mission of Northrop Grumman's big new cargo spacecraft is nearly over.

That freighter, known as Cygnus XL, left the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday morning (March 12), ending a nearly six-month orbital stay for the 23rd Northrop Grumman (NG-23) resupply mission to the orbital laboratory.

Secured on the station's Canadarm2 after detaching from its berth on the Earth-facing port of the Unity module, the spacecraft was released at 7:06 a.m. EST (1105 GMT).

The NG-23 Cygnus XL launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sept. 14, carrying about 11,000 pounds (4,990 kilograms) of scientific gear and other supplies toward the ISS.

That big cargo load explains the new freighter's name: Earlier versions of Cygnus hauled about 8,500 pounds (3,856 kg) to the orbiting lab.

Cygnus XL had a bit of a hiccup on its debut mission, suffering an engine glitch on its way to the station. The spacecraft — named the S.S. William "Willie" McCool, after one of the seven astronauts who died in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident — overcame the problem, however, arriving at the ISS on Sept. 18, a day later than originally planned.

The orbiting outpost's Canadarm2 grappled Cygnus XL that day, berthing it to the Unity module. The big robotic arm was put to work again Thursday as well, removing S.S. William "Willie" McCool from Unity and then releasing it 260 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean. The release was followed by a six-minute thruster burn by Cygnus, backing away from the ISS and its approximately 650-foot (200 meters) safety perimeter "keep-out sphere."

"From all of us here in Houston and our partners at Northrop Grumman and our robotics team in Montreal, we want to thank you for your assistance with the departure today," mission controllers said to French astronaut Sophie Adenot, operator of the Canadarm2 this morning, adding, "missions like this don't happen without the dedication and teamwork of so many people across NASA and our partners."

Cygnus is one of four robotic cargo spacecraft that service the ISS these days, along with SpaceX's Dragon capsule, Russia's Progress vehicle and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) HTV-X. Dragon is reusable, but the other three burn up in Earth's atmosphere when their missions are over.

HTV-X — a more advanced version of the Japanese HTV freighter — just wrapped up its first-ever visit to the orbiting lab, departing on March 6 after a four-month stay. That cargo craft will remain in orbit as a free flyer for the next three months or so, hosting a suite of JAXA science experiments.

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.