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."

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

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

What is it?

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

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

Why is it incredible?

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

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

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

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has experienced some serious wear and tear during its nearly 14 years on the Red Planet.

A new photo posted to Curiosity's raw image server offers a close-up of the damage one of the rover's wheels has experienced as it explores the Martian surface.

What is it?

Curiosity landed in Mars' Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down while hanging under a 'sky crane' that lowered it to the planet's surface. Since then, the rover has traveled over 20 miles (32 kilometers) across the rocky Martian soil, searching for potential signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

All of that mileage has taken a toll on the rover, as these new images show. Curiosity weighs over one ton, and the terrain on Mars can be quite rocky and rugged.

NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) periodically use the rover's cameras to check on the wheels, and despite the holes and cracks, the agency said in a 2024 statement that they're "holding up well despite taking some of the worst abuse from Mars."

Why is it amazing?

We've been exploring Mars for decades now, so it can be easy to take for granted how incredible it is that we get new images beamed from the surface of another planet to Earth daily from NASA's two robotic explorers.

These images of Curiosity's wheels help illustrate the incredible feats of engineering and science it took to place wheeled robots safely on the surface of another planet where they spend years and travel dozens of miles to bring us answers about what other worlds are like.

While they might not be human, Curiosity and Perseverance nonetheless represent humanity's first foray into becoming an interplanetary species. The groundwork laid by the rovers and other Mars orbiters, landers and probes could someday help humanity take its first steps on another planet.

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."

NASA is shaking things up for its next mission to research the sun.

The six satellites of NASA's Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) mission are poised to launch to Earth orbit soon, to serve as an early warning system for incoming solar storms. They were originally slated to lift off on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket but have now been assigned a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, according to a NASA mission update.

SunRISE will fly to space as part of a rideshare mission sponsored by the U.S. Space Force's (USSF's) Space Systems Command (SSC). Though it's not stated specifically in the NASA release, that may be a hint as to why the mission's rocket was changed. On its most recent launch, USSF-87, Vulcan experienced an anomaly in one of its solid rocket boosters — the second such incident to occur during the rocket's four launches to date.

Vulcan succeeded in delivering the USSF-87 payload to its designated orbit on that launch, but the recurrence of the booster issue during ascent prompted the Space Force to pause national security launches on Vulcan until it could be addressed. Which mission SunRISE will be manifested on has not yet been released, but SSC has already shifted other launches between Vulcan and SpaceX's Falcon 9, so NASA's change in rockets for SunRISE could indicate either that the mission has been remanifested on a different SSC rideshare, or that another SSC mission has been shifted from Vulcan entirely.

SunRISE is a heliophysics study under the NASA Science Mission Directorate's "missions of opportunity" umbrella and is part of the Explorers Program run by Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It consists of six small satellites, each about the size of a mailbox. The mini-constellation's mission is led by scientists at the University of Michigan and will be managed out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The half-dozen smallsats will be delivered to an orbit about 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above Earth — just above a geostationary parking altitude — and fly in a giant 10-mile (16-km) "X" formation, each extending its roughly 10-foot (2.5-meter) antenna booms to act as a single large radio telescope to track solar radio bursts. These kinds of bursts travel faster than the energetic particles from a solar storm, and precede their arrival when shot towards Earth.

Powerful solar storms, like the one that hit Earth in January, are capable of disrupting or disabling satellites by interfering with onboard electronics, sensitive instruments and communications systems. If a storm is severe enough, it can pose a radiation threat to astronauts in orbit and even airborne passengers flying near Earth's poles, where the planet's magnetic field is weaker.

SunRISE will help researchers better understand the behavior of incoming solar radio bursts, but the mission won't serve as an alert system by itself. Instead, scientists will use data collected by the spacecraft to improve prediction models for impending space weather, which in turn could lead to mitigation plans to better thwart the effects of such solar events on orbital infrastructure.

Falcon Heavy is SpaceX's heavy-lift launch vehicle, capable of launching up to 58,860 pounds (26,700 kg) to geostationary transfer orbit. It's a triple-booster rocket that consists of three modified Falcon 9 first stages, and has launched 12 times since it debuted in 2018. Four of those have delivered national security payloads to orbit, with the most recent of those, USSF-52, launching in December 2023. Falcon Heavy's most recent flight overall occurred this past April, when it sent the Viasat-3 F3 telecom satellite to orbit.

Falcon Heavy's next mission will lift off with NASA's Nancy Roman Space Telescope, currently set for no earlier than Aug. 30. SunRISE is scheduled to launch later this year, but a more specific launch window has not yet been announced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the case of Artemis II, we sent four.

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned spectacular images of a near-Earth asteroid following a super-close flyby on July 5, but heated debate was needed before teams signed off on the daring attempt.

When images of the asteroid Torifune arrived on the morning of July 6 Japan time, Makoto Yoshikawa and his team at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) got two surprises at once. Torifune turned out to be a contact binary, in which two chunks of rock have come together under gravity, and the returned images were also larger than hoped.

"We did not imagine such a contact binary," Yoshikawa, former mission manager of Hayabusa2, told scientists gathered at the Asteroids, Comets and Meteors conference in Poznan, Poland, on July 10. "Originally, we didn't think we could have such a very big image. Maybe we will take a very small one, but the image was much larger than we expected."

The double surprise was the payoff of months of debate between science and engineering teams, and a last-minute proposal that alarmed some of the scientists it was meant to serve. In the end, the flyby was so close as to be at the very edge of what the aging spacecraft was designed to conduct.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 and rendezvoused with the asteroid Ryugu four years later. The spacecraft collected samples and delivered them to Earth in 2020, completing its primary objectives. JAXA then made plans for an asteroid flyby and a rendezvous with the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031.

Usually for flybys, the closest distance is 100 kilometers (62 miles), Yoshikawa said, but in Hayabusa2's case this would not be close enough to gather good images. Hayabusa2 was designed for rendezvous and proximity operations, including hovering, correcting and landing — not for a high-speed pass at 5.3 kilometers per second (3.3 miles per second). Its cameras were also not designed for high-speed slewing.

According to Yoshikawa, science team members pushed back. At a distance of 100 kilometers, Hayabusa2's cameras would barely resolve the asteroid's global shape. Engineering responded with a proposal of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Science said that was acceptable, but the team kept pushing. Eventually, engineers confirmed they could get to within 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) of the asteroid's center. "Science people were very happy, because they could have a nice photo," Yoshikawa said.

Then, just one month before the flyby, extended mission team leader Yuya Mimasu proposed going even closer. "Yuya Mimasu said the closest distance should be 800 meters," Yoshikawa recounted. "Some science people said 'No, it's too dangerous,' and a very heated discussion started."

One major issue was the unknown size and dimensions of Torifune and the safety of the spacecraft. The team had assumed a worst-case asteroid size of 1,400 meters by 400 meters (4,600 by 1,300 feet) based on ground-based observations. A pass 800 meters (2,625 feet) from the center of the target would sit just outside that exclusion zone. The spacecraft's optics had also been affected by dust from sampling Ryugu. The final navigation analysis put the targeting error ellipse at around 200 meters (656 feet). "The distance fixed is 800 meters," Yoshikawa said, "but this is quite a big challenge for us."

Hayabusa2 detected Torifune on June 19. The spacecraft used ground-based guidance up to three hours before the flyby, before switching to onboard guidance. "This is quite new," Yoshikawa said. "We developed software for this, and we sent it to the spacecraft."

The result was the stunning, up-close imagery of the dual-lobed Torifune, captured by the probe's Optical Navigation Camera Telescope (ONC-T). But all four of Hayabusa2's science instruments returned data. The Thermal Infrared Imager (TIR) captured nine seconds of thermal imaging between 09:29:50 and 09:29:59 GMT on July 5, just a second before closest approach, independently confirming the contact binary structure in heat emission.

The Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRS3) and laser altimeter (LIDAR) also got data, with the latter delivering what Yoshikawa described as possibly the first successful LIDAR ranging measurement during an asteroid flyby. But while the most urgent 25 MB of data was downlinked, teams will need to wait months for the rest of the 300 MB of total science data. Hayabusa2's ion engine system restarted on July 9 to begin the cruise toward two Earth flybys in 2027 and 2028 and will fire for around four months. Only after this can the rest of the data be sent to Earth.

Yoshikawa explained that the Torifune flyby was more than just a bonus milestone and photo and science op. The successful super-close flyby means that "JAXA has acquired the technology to collide spacecraft with a small celestial body," he said in his closing remarks at ACM, drawing a parallel to NASA's DART mission. "This flyby mission can be said to serve as a demonstration of the fast reconnaissance concept in planetary defense," verifying the ability to characterize an unknown asteroid rapidly — a capability that could provide crucial information ahead of an impactor mission.

This is not the end for Hayabusa2. The ultimate destination for the spacecraft's extended mission is the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26, a roughly 36-foot-wide (11 m), rapidly rotating rock with which it is scheduled to rendezvous in 2031.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launch (April 1)

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

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

Lunar flyby (April 6)

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

Splashdown (April 10)

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

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

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

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

Websites

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

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

Social media

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

China has announced that it wants to develop a "space-ground" asteroid early-warning network, while providing few details on what it could look like. But recent papers and presentations to the United Nations provide clues as to what the country has in mind for planetary defense.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) made the announcement on June 30 — International Asteroid Day — stating plans to construct a coordinated ground-and-space monitoring system for near-Earth asteroids. Li Mingtao, chief scientist at CNSA's Asteroid Monitoring and Early Warning Research Center, told state media that China is studying the feasibility of an asteroid defense system, with the ground-space monitoring network as its core.

"No asteroid has so far been identified that will definitely collide with Earth in the foreseeable future, but concerns over impact risks are not unfounded. Many near-Earth asteroids remain undetected," the state-run media outlet Xinhua quoted Li as saying in a report by Science and Technology Daily.

Li added that China will deploy multiple large-aperture optical telescopes at carefully chosen sites in order to be able to survey the sky, while adding a space-based monitoring constellation, free from atmospheric disruption and day-night constraints, with a particular focus on threats from the sunward direction, which are, from the ground, lost in the glare of the sun. The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, approached roughly from a sunward direction and was only detected once it entered the atmosphere.

Li told Science and Technology Daily that more than 40,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered so far, including over 95% of asteroids at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) wide, which are capable of causing a globally catastrophic impact. However, only around 45% of asteroids in the 140-meter (460-foot) class have been detected, which are large enough to devastate a small country.

The June 30 reports and CNSA statements were vague on what China's actual plans for its monitoring network may be. However, recent journal papers and a 2025 presentation to the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) give more detail on the country's thinking.

For example, a paper published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration in June 2026, co-authored by Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program and a leading voice on the country's asteroid defense plans, lays out the options under study.

For the space-based component, the paper names four candidate orbital positions for a monitoring network: the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, an Earth-leading or trailing orbit, a Venus-like heliocentric orbit, and an Earth-companion distant retrograde orbit (DRO). The paper also describes ongoing research into each option's monitoring effectiveness.

A similar outline was found in a 2025 technical presentation to COPUOS by Chinese researcher Chen Yongcai. A "basic model" would consist of a single satellite at Sun-Earth L1, an orbit about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) inside that of Earth, paired with northern and southern ground stations. An "extended model" includes spacecraft in the three additional orbits stated in the Wu Weiren paper. The Venus-like option in particular closely tracks an earlier proposal known as CROWN, a constellation of small satellites in Venus-like orbits designed to survey the sunward sky and use its favorable geometry to track other populations of near-Earth asteroids.

The status and timelines of these plans are unclear, but they do indicate a clear interest in and commitment to planetary defense by China. The country's 15th Five-Year Plan, approved in March, states that an asteroid defense engineering project is under study, while China is developing a kinetic-impact and observation demonstration mission, similar to NASA's DART mission and the European Space Agency's (ESA) follow-on Hera project, which is scheduled to launch in 2027.

While China's apparent plans are not unique, they could augment global efforts. Anne Virkki, an asteroid researcher at the University of Helsinki who's familiar with international monitoring efforts, noted that NASA and ESA have plans to send missions to Sun-Earth L1 to search for asteroids in infrared light — NEO Surveyor and NEOMIR respectively.

"If China launches a similar mission, hopefully it has some capability that the other two do not, and that it shares the data internationally and not only for Chinese scientists," Virkki said.

Virkki noted that asteroids approaching from the sun's direction aren't physically unusual, but they are simply harder to track, which statistically makes them more likely to produce a surprise. She also pointed to the persistent, less-discussed gap in radar tracking capacity. That capacity took a serious hit with the 2020 collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with no U.S. successor in the works.

China has discussed building its own radar capability, which Virkki said would be a welcome addition, provided the data is shared openly. China has built the "China Compound Eye" or Fuyan project near Chongqing in the country's southwest, which can be used for near-Earth asteroid monitoring. Wu's paper also notes ground-based radar in the proposal for asteroid monitoring.

"Hopefully, as China's planetary defense plans become more specific, we'll see telescopes and space telescopes that complement the existing or planned capabilities of other countries, rather than repeat redundantly, and contribute data openly and collaboratively," Virkki said. She noted that there are likely about 100,000 near-Earth asteroids that could cause significant local damage if they hit Earth, and we know the orbits of less than half of all such space rocks.

2029 will mark the International Year of Planetary Defense, when the infamous asteroid Apophis will fly past the Earth just within the orbit of geostationary satellites. "There is a lot of work left to do, and international collaboration is crucial," said Virkki.

NASA's nuclear-powered mission to Mars is taking shape with the selection of Firefly Aerospace to design and manufacture the protective aeroshell that will shield the Skyfall spacecraft's descent stage during its plummet through the Martian atmosphere.

Skyfall, slated to be NASA's first-ever nuclear powered interplanetary probe, is scheduled to launch in 2028 with three helicopters similar to the Ingenuity drone that landed on the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover. The mission is being managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in California, which just awarded Firefly a $13 million subcontract for the spacecraft component.

It will be the company's first project to be developed in its expanded Texas facility, Gloworks, and will lean on engineering expertise gained from its Blue Ghost lunar lander and Firefly's Alpha and Eclipse rockets, according to a company statement.

"We've proved our ability to execute off-Earth missions at a fraction of the cost and timeline through our successful Blue Ghost lunar mission," said Ray Allensworth, Firefly's vice president of spacecraft. "Now we’re applying these lessons learned and utilizing our proven technologies to continue accelerating and lowering costs for future missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond."

Blue Ghost launched in January 2025, and successfully touched down on the moon about two months later, as only the second commercial lander to ever soft land on the lunar surface. For its Mars contract, though, Firefly will be aiming higher.

Firefly's aeroshell design will include the Skyfall capsule's heatshield and its backshell, providing the thermal protection it needs from the Martian atmosphere and the aerodynamic characteristics to guide it safely and accurately out of its exit from the vacuum of space. Unlike Blue Ghost, however, Firefly won't need to worry about an actual landing.

Instead of delivering its helicopter trio to Mars' surface, Skyfall will release them mid-descent, where they will take to immediate flight through the Martian sky to begin their resource mapping mission. NASA is calling it the "SkyFall Maneuver."

The mission aims to demonstrate the applicability of the helicopters' onboard prospecting instruments. NASA plans to use that data to scout for water ice on Mars' surface to study potential landing sites for crewed missions in the future.

Once Firefly completes aeroshell development at Gloworks, work will move to the company's Rocket Ranch in Briggs, Texas, where it will begin manufacturing and testing before being transported to JPL for spacecraft integration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long road to space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moon work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China's first-ever asteroid sampling mission has sent home a picture of its first target, the "quasi-moon" Kamo'oalewa.

The Tianwen-2 probe launched in 2025 and traveled 620 million miles (1 billion kilometers) to reach a safe distance about 12 miles (20 km) away from Kamo'oalewa, more formally known as asteroid 2016HO3. The spacecraft will spend nearly a year studying the asteroid with a suite of 11 different scientific instruments before attempting to collect a sample from its surface, which will be sent back to Earth.

The new photo was taken on July 2, according to China's Xinhua news outlet, and reveals the asteroid to be a small, asymmetrical rock measuring around 50–65 feet (16–20 meters) in diameter. While its origin isn't known, some scientists believe this quasi-moon could have been created when a massive impact knocked a chunk of our own moon into space between 1 million and 10 million years ago.

So-called quasi-moons (or quasi-satellites) are small bodies like Kamo'oalewa that circle the sun on orbits that keep them close to our planet. Earth has at least seven known quasi-satellites, and our planet's gravity will occasionally capture others temporarily before they are flung back out into orbit around the sun. In general, the orbits of these quasi-moons are less stable than the orbits of true moons.

Unlike most near-Earth asteroids that are thought to originate from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Kamo'oalewa could have come from much closer to home. A 2024 study published in Nature Astronomy proposes Kamo'oalewa could be material ejected from the moon by the impact that formed Giordano Bruno crater.

Sample of the asteroid collected by Tianwen-2 could help prove that hypothesis, if the mission is successful.

Tianwen-2 launched on May 28, 2025 atop a Long March 3B rocket from Xichang spaceport in southwestern China. The appearance of the spacecraft wasn't revealed until China's space agency released an image beamed home by Tianwen-2 when it was 1.8 million miles (3 million km) away from Earth. This occurred just over a week past launch.

While Tianwen-2 marks China's first asteroid sample attempt, Japan and the United States have already performed successful space-rock-sample missions of their own. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft executed the world's first asteroid sample return mission when it sent material from asteroid 25143 Itokawa back to Earth in 2010.

The United States accomplished the feat in 2023 with the OSIRIS-REx mission that snagged material from asteroid Bennu. Those samples have already produced surprising scientific data, including the fact they contain the amino acids we consider vital for life here on Earth.

Tianwen-2 is China's first-ever mission to an asteroid and its second planetary exploration mission overall. Its first interplanetary endeavor, Tianwen-1, saw an orbiter and a rover reach Mars in 2020.

More Tianwen missions are in the works. China plans to launch the Tianwen-3 Mars sample-return mission in 2028 and Tianwen 4 two years later to study Jupiter and Uranus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you stop a large, threatening asteroid on its way to Earth? A new Chinese paper, investigating the issue, suggests a "pre-excavation detonation" could be the solution if there's enough warning time.

There may be millions of asteroids in our solar system, with a tiny percentage of them posing a possible, very tiny threat to our planet. NASA and many other entities keep an eye on the skies, and continue discovering new asteroids, but have found no imminent threats yet; Apophis, previously believed to be a small threat during its 2068 flyby of Earth, has now been ruled out as a problem for the foreseeable future.

But Earth has been smacked by space rocks in the past, with even the moderate-sized Chelyabinsk incident of 2013 causing reported property damage near its blast site in Russia. And as the researchers of a new paper point out, asteroids tens of meters in size and larger have been tracked flying safely, but closely, by Earth.

Assuming a theoretical space rock is on an imminent collision course and exceeds about 330 feet (100 meters) in size, simply blasting it (or even guiding it away) may not be a viable option, the researchers said in a peer-reviewed study in the journal Space: Science and Technology.

"Traditional kinetic impact, or long‑term force deflection methods, offer limited energy and cannot achieve effective deflection within short timeframes," the researchers said in a press release, adding they found few comprehensive analyses of how to do so. (NASA did successfully deflect an asteroid moonlet's orbit with the DART spacecraft in 2022, for example, but that was a unique test case in space.)

So the team, led by Xiaowei Wang from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, instead proposed using one of two "defense modes" for large incoming asteroids.

The first mode is a more simple impact detonation — simply put, smacking the asteroid's surface to create a shallow crater, in which a nuclear device is exploded. The other mode is a "pre-excavation detonation", or using a penetration device to create a deeper crater before exploding a nuclear warhead to "achieve deep detonation" in the interior of the asteroid.

The researchers' modeling included the energy of a launch vehicle, the velocity of the impact spacecraft, and changes to the velocity of the asteroid, in each of these two modes. The two modes were also tested against a "virtual threat asteroid database" assuming warning times of anywhere between one year and 20 years.

All in all, assuming enough time is available, it seems the deep-crater method wins out. "The flyby pre-excavation detonation mode, due to its ability to autonomously select the cratering location and achieve deep detonation, offers stronger energy coupling," the researchers wrote in the press release.

Such an impact could "destroy" asteroids that are roughly 330 feet (100 meters) or of that range, and push away asteroids of a size reaching about 0.6 miles (1 km) by imparting a velocity change of roughly 1 m/s in about 60 days.

While a shallow-crater mission could be launched more quickly, the researchers added, "the impact location is random, energy coupling is weak, and requirements for the nuclear device's impact resistance and detonation timing are extremely stringent."

Real-world missions would also have to take into account the composition of an asteroid (as a pile of rubble would likely require a different approach than a solid rock), whether the pathways of any pieces generated by an impact pose a threat, and how to safely get the nuclear warhead into space in the first place, among many other technical issues. The researchers did not raise these considerations in the press release.

They did, however, provide "recommended solutions" for when to use each of the two options. The shallow impact might be preferable "for emergency defense" on a huge asteroid if there is an extremely short warning time, because that mission is less complex. Otherwise, the "deep impact" would be the way to go.

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.

A Japanese spacecraft has gotten up close and personal with yet another asteroid, beaming home stunning new imagery of the distant space rock.

On Sunday (July 5), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s Hayabusa2 probe performed a close flyby of asteroid Torifune, a 1,475-foot (450-meter) space rock currently traveling through space some 62 million miles (100 million kilometers) from Earth. It was expected to be one of the closest-ever high-speed passes a spacecraft has had with an asteroid.

During the flyby, Hayabusa2 captured this breathtaking new image of Torifune using its optical camera, and was able to transmit it back to JAXA controllers. The probe captured additional scientific data about the asteroid, but will beam those results home at a later date, according to JAXA.

Hayabusa2 also imaged asteroid Torifune using its Mid-Infrared Camera (TIR), which allows scientists to measure asteroids' surface temperatures, thermal inertia and surface roughness, according to JAXA. This mid-infrared image reveals Torifune to be much cooler in what appear to be shadowed regions seen in the optical image, and much warmer where the surface faces the sun.

Torifune orbits the sun every 383 days and rotates every 5 hours. It belongs to the Apollo group, a classification of near-Earth asteroids whose orbits cross Earth's as they make their way around the sun.

Hayabusa2's flyby of Torifune was not part of its original mission, and one of the members of the probe's scientific team previously told Space.com the flyby was a "risky operation" due to the unknowns surrounding the asteroid.

These new images add to the growing list of incredible accomplishments the Hayabusa2 probe has notched on its now nearly 12-year mission.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 on an ambitious mission to collect asteroid samples and return them back to Earth. The probe did just that in December 2020 when JAXA successfully landed samples of asteroid Ryugu in the Australian desert.

Since then, scientists have used the samples to peer back in cosmic time at the history of our solar system and have even discovered that Ryugu contains all five nucleobases found within DNA and RNA.

After collecting its precious samples, Hayabusa2 left Ryugu in 2019. It's ultimate goal is now to flyby asteroid 1998 KY26, which could become the smallest asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. 1998 KY26 is just 36 feet (11 meters) across, close to the size of the asteroid that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.

Hayabusa2 is expected to reach 1998 KY26 in the year 2031. Once there, the probe will orbit the space rock before attempting to touch down on its surface. JAXA hopes the mission will help scientists more about the structure and composition of small asteroids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A spacecraft orbiting Mars watched as its "friend," the Perseverance rover, finished its first marathon on the Martian surface. There weren't any medals handed out, and there wasn't any competition, but we're proud either way.

What is it?

On June 14, 2026, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover completed the equivalent of a marathon, having driven 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometers). After landing in the ancient lakebed Jezero Crater in 2021, the rover has been hard at work exploring, sampling, and collecting information to help scientists put the pieces of Mars' history together.

NASA's Opportunity rover also managed to reach a marathon distance on Mars, though it took over 11 years to make it that far. Perseverance managed to make it to this marathon milestone in just 5 years and 4 months, and the rover is still going strong.

But Perseverance isn't making history alone; it has the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) watching from orbit. In this image captured on June 13 by MRO, we can see Perseverance in the home stretch of its marathon, rolling toward that finish line in a region of Jezero Crater called "Arbot."

While the rover is barely a speck from this orbital distance, this additional vantage point allows researchers a different perspective on the robotic explorer. With the speed at which the rover completed this marathon, and how well it continues to explore on Mars, who knows, maybe Perseverance will be the first to manage an ultramarathon on the Red Planet.

Why is it incredible?

While crossing the marathon finish line on Mars is an exciting milestone, Perseverance has done so much more than just travel this impressive distance.

In the past 5 years, and over 26.2 miles, Perseverance has accomplished quite a lot. The rover has captured an incredible wealth of imagery, data, and even samples of Martian material.

Last year, observations made with the rover revealed the most-compelling possible biosignature found yet on the planet. And more recently, the rover found even more evidence of possible past life in a similar location.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What's shaking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inherent uncertainties

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

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

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

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

Design practices

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

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

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

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

NASA has announced a new commercial partnership for the next satellite headed to the Red Planet.

California-based Relativity Space will design, build and launch the spacecraft that carries NASA's Aeolus instrument suite to orbit around Mars, where the probe will be the first to provide daily measurements of the planet's global environment. Aeolus will collect data on Martian dust and cloud cover, winds and temperatures, according to a NASA release.

"Public-private partnerships like this are a force multiplier for science," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement on Wednesday (June 17).

The newly announced relationship, and others between NASA and private industry, is designed to allow the agency to concentrate its resources on important science discovery. "By pairing NASA’s world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars," Isaacman said.

Aeolus consists of four instruments, designed to work in tandem to create a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its behavior. In addition to refining scientific models for the Martian environment, NASA plans to use the data to reduce risks to future robotic and crewed missions landing on Mars' surface.

The science suite includes the Doppler Wind and Temperature Sounder (DWTS‑Ozone), in collaboration with GATS, designed to measure wind speeds and temperatures present up to 37 miles (60 kilometers) above the ground. The Thermal Limb Sounder (TLS), designed with Xiomas Technologies, will create vertical temperature profiles and provide data on atmospheric dust and cloud cover, while the Surface Radiometric Sensor Package (SuRSeP) collects compositional data on those clouds and dust, and tracks how the Martian surface absorbs, stores and releases energy, like heat. Finally, Aeolus' Wide‑Field Context Camera (WFCC) will take daily images to assess atmospheric activity across the whole of Mars.

NASA is targeting 2028 for the launch of the Aeolus mission, which will be designed and built at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where it will also be integrated on Relativity's spacecraft for testing ahead of launch. NASA has committed to support Aeolus' scientific operations for at least one Martian year (approximately 687 Earth days). However, the agency has historically extended its missions to Mars, when able.

NASA was recently forced to end operations of its MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) probe around Mars, after an anomaly led to a loss of communications with the satellite, but the spacecraft ran for more than a decade beyond its original one-year mission. The agency's only two active satellites orbiting the Red Planet are the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey, which are both operating nearly two decades or more, respectively, beyond their initial mission timelines.

For its part, Relativity will be in charge of designing the Mars-bound spacecraft and will also be responsible for launch and for satellite operations in space. The company's pathfinder launch vehicle, the Terran 1 rocket, lifted off for the first and only time in March 2023, but it failed to reach orbit. The company then pivoted to development of the bigger, partially reusable Terran R rocket, which is expected to debut sometime later this year. Eric Schmidt, who served as Google CEO from 2001 to 2011, was appointed to lead Relativity in March 2025.

A bold telescope-rescue mission is set to launch later this month, and you can learn all about it today (June 17).

That mission will be conducted by Link, a robotic servicing spacecraft built and operated by the Arizona-based company Katalyst Space Technologies. Link will meet up with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in the final frontier, raising the telescope's orbit to give it more time to study the heavens.

NASA and Katalyst representatives will discuss the plan today, during a press conference that starts at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT). You can listen live here or directly via NASA.

Participants will be:

• Shawn Domagal-Goldman, division director, Astrophysics, NASA Headquarters in Washington
• Brad Cenko, principal investigator, Swift, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
• Kieran Wilson, principal investigator, LINK, Katalyst Space
• Robert Lamontagne, vice president, strategic partnerships, Katalyst Space
• Wes Collier, vice president, launch systems, Northrop Grumman

Swift launched to low Earth orbit in 2004 to hunt for gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. The telescope is still perfectly capable of doing this important job, but Earth's atmosphere is dragging it down toward a fiery death.

Swift doesn't have a propulsion system to fight this downward pull, so it needs some help — which is where Katalyst comes in. Last fall, NASA announced it had tapped the company to raise Swift's orbit.

It's an unprecedented ask: No private spacecraft has ever linked up with a robotic U.S. government satellite. And time is of the essence; some models predicted the observatory could come back to Earth as soon as this summer.

Katalyst has acted fast, getting Link ready for a launch later this month from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. (NASA has not yet announced a target date). Link will fly aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, an air-launched vehicle that will be carried aloft by a plane.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A complex selection process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Mars graveyard just welcomed another corpse.

On Wednesday (June 3), NASA officially declared its MAVEN orbiter dead, closing the book on a highly successful mission that studied the Red Planet's atmosphere for nearly a dozen years.

The MAVEN team didn't script this ending; the orbiter went dark without warning this past December, and it remained silent despite repeated attempts to hail it. But MAVEN's ultimate fate would have been roughly the same even if its handlers had been able to shut it down in a controlled fashion.

"The nominal plan for disposing of the spacecraft at the end of its mission was just to leave it in that nominal orbit, where it would remain for a period of 50 to 100 years before entering the Martian atmosphere," MAVEN Project Manager Mike Moreau, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during a press conference on Wednesday.

"So, the spacecraft's basically in a configuration, in an orbit, that's very similar to what it would have been if the mission had ended nominally," he added.

And that's what happens to dead Mars orbiters: They generally keep circling for a half-century or more, until the planet's thin atmosphere drags them down and burns them up. Or the end could come considerably sooner, if they're unlucky enough to slam into one of their brethren or into Phobos or Deimos, the two moons of Mars. (Indeed, MAVEN had to perform a maneuver in February 2017 to avoid a potential collision with Phobos.)

Some of these probes may already have been pulled down, considering the long timeline of Mars exploration. Here's a brief rundown of the orbiter missions that have successfully arrived at the Red Planet to date:

• Mariner 9 (NASA; arrived November 1971)
• Mars 2 (USSR; November 1971)
• Mars 3 (USSR; December 1971)
• Mars 5 (USSR; February 1976)
• Viking 1 (NASA; June 1976)
• Viking 2 (NASA; August 1976) 
• Phobos 2 (USSR; January 1989)
• Mars Global Surveyor (NASA; September 1997) 
• Mars Odyssey (NASA; October 2001)
• Mars Express (European Space Agency; December 2003); 
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO (NASA; March 2006)
• Mars Orbiter Mission (India; September 2014)
• MAVEN (NASA; September 2014)
• ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, or TGO (ESA; October 2016)
• Emirates Mars Mission, or Hope (UAE; February 2021)
• Tianwen 1 (China; February 2021)

Only Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, MRO, TGO, Hope and Tianwen 1 remain operational today, meaning the orbital graveyard has up to a dozen bodies in it. (It's tough to track unresponsive spacecraft in Mars orbit, so we generally don't know which dead ones are still aloft.)

There's a Mars graveyard on the surface, too. Among the many robots being buried by the wind-blown red dirt are NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Ingenuity helicopter and Pathfinder lander (which Mark Watney finds and uses in the book and movie "The Martian"), and Zhurong, a rover that was part of China's Tianwen 1 mission.

Just two Mars surface craft remain operational today: NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, which landed in August 2012 and February 2021, respectively.

But let's end with an appreciation of MAVEN (whose name is short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution"). The probe's data has helped scientists better understand Mars' dramatic transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the frigid desert we know today.

That change occurred because Mars lost most of its once-thick atmosphere. (The planet's air is now just 1% as dense as that of Earth at sea level.) Thanks to MAVEN, we know that loss was driven by the solar wind and occurred between 4.2 billion and 3.7 billion years ago — around the time that life was getting started here on Earth.

It's getting to be crunch time for a groundbreaking satellite-rescue mission.

A private spacecraft called "Link" is set to lift off late next month to meet up with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which launched to low Earth orbit (LEO) in 2004 to hunt for powerful space explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.

Swift is still working just fine. But atmospheric drag is pulling it down at an ever-increasing rate, and the telescope is powerless to resist; it doesn't have a propulsion system. Link will be the scope's savior, if all goes to plan, meeting up with Swift in LEO and boosting it to a higher altitude.

This plan is bold and unprecedented. Link, built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies, aims to become the first private spacecraft ever to capture a robotic satellite operated by the U.S. government.

Doing so will not be easy, especially since it's unclear where exactly Swift will be in the coming months. That's because Earth's atmosphere — and therefore the drag it imposes on orbiting spacecraft — is not static. Our blanket of air expands when the sun is active and contracts during times of solar quiescence.

Solar activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle, the most recent of which peaked in 2024. That intense round of space weather put the Swift team on notice: Modeling work performed in early 2025 predicted that the telescope would reenter the atmosphere by the summer of 2026.

That dire prognosis laid the groundwork for Link's rescue mission, which NASA funded via a $30 million contract with Katalyst. The modeling work has continued, too, as NASA and the company flesh out their "fast-paced plan" to raise Swift's orbit.

"These predictions evolve over time, based on space weather forecasts and other factors like Swift's current height and orientation," Michael Shoemaker, deputy flight dynamics lead in SSMO (Space Science Missions Operations) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a May 26 statement.

Shoemaker and his team aren't doing this just for Swift; they make such predictions for a variety of satellites, both active and defunct. Their models incorporate a wide range of data, including details from each satellite team, tracking information collected by the U.S. Space Force and solar activity research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Shoemaker and his colleagues are now generating weekly orbital predictions for Swift, which the mission team has used "to make decisions about when to halt science observations and how to steer the spacecraft to reduce drag as much as possible," NASA officials said in the same statement.

"This innovative new approach to operating Swift has allowed them to successfully slow its orbital decay," they added.

As a result, Swift will likely stay at least 185 miles (300 kilometers) above Earth — the "critical altitude" giving Link's orbit-boosting mission the best chance of success, according to NASA — into early fall.

That's good news, but the modeling team still has work to do.

"We're also working on predictions for where Swift will be when Link is set to launch in June aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket," Russell Carpenter, the deputy project manager in SSMO, said in the same statement.

"The project to re-boost Swift has generated intense interest across the flight dynamics community," he added. "The Swift team is grateful that so many people have been willing to pitch in to help with refining these predictions."

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.

The next big Artemis announcement is just hours away.

In Houston today (June 9), NASA will reveal the four-person Artemis 3 crew and provide a progress update about the mission, agency officials said on Tuesday evening (May 26).

The crew reveal will take place at NASA's Johnson Space Center, during an event that starts at 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT), about 30 minutes later than previously announced. You can watch it live here Space.com when the time comes, as well as directly on the Space.com YouTube channel.

Artemis 3 was originally supposed to be the first landing mission of the Artemis program, which aims to establish a lasting human presence on the moon over the next decade or so.

In late February, however, NASA chief Jared Isaacman announced a big change to the Artemis architecture: Artemis 3 will test rendezvous and docking operations in Earth orbit between NASA's Orion crew capsule and one or both of the program's crewed lunar landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

"The mission will test critical rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial human landing systems needed to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface," NASA wrote in a statement. "Building on the successful Artemis II crewed test flight in April, Artemis III will pave the way for future surface missions."

Artemis 3 is scheduled to launch in mid-2027, so we'll learn about the crew about a year before liftoff if all goes to plan. For perspective, NASA announced the four astronauts of the Artemis 2 around-the-moon mission, which launched on April 1 of this year, in April 2023.

If all goes well with Artemis 3 and other developments, Artemis 4 will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole in late 2028. It's unclear at this point whether Starship or Blue Moon will fly on that mission.

NASA gave us some other Artemis news on Tuesday. The agency announced more than $1 billion in contracts for rovers, lunar landers and other vehicles that will help build out a planned base near the moon's south pole.

NASA also told us that it wants that base to cover hundreds of square miles.

Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect the new time for NASA's Artemis 3 mission update and crew reveal.

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.

The Artemis generation has to deal with conspiracy theorists, too.

The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 mission were accosted on Capitol Hill earlier this month by an aggressive man, who accused them of faking their moon mission.

"Stop lying! Stop acting! You all never went to space," the man said from just a few feet away during the incident, which was recorded on video. "Follow Jesus! God's watching you all."

It was reminiscent of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's encounter with the moon-landing denier Bart Sibrel in September 2002. Aldrin, who was 72 at the time, punched Sibrel in the face.

The Artemis 2 crew — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — showed much more restraint.

They mostly ignored their accuser, though Glover did give him a slight wave and a smile. "Take care," the Artemis 2 pilot said as he walked away.

Artemis 2 launched on April 1, sending the quartet on a 10-day loop around the moon and back to Earth. It was the first crewed flight beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17 put astronauts on the lunar surface in December 1972.

It takes some mental gymnastics to believe that this highly anticipated, incredibly well-documented mission was a hoax. NASA livestreamed the entire thing, from liftoff to splashdown, and thousands of people watched the launch in person on Florida's Space Coast.

Denying the reality of the Apollo moon missions is just as silly. Robotic moon orbiters have spotted the Apollo landing sites on the lunar surface. And, if you think that's all part of the same psy-op: Scientists still bounce lasers off reflectors that the Apollo astronauts implanted in the gray dirt, using the data to calculate the distance between Earth and the moon with incredible precision.

In addition, the United States' Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, was capable of tracking the Apollo spacecraft through the final frontier. If those craft didn't make it to the moon as advertised, the Soviets certainly would have called out the deception.

There's also the small matter of keeping the thousands of people involved in the Apollo "hoax" quiet — surely at least one of them would have blown the whistle to get a book or movie deal?

Right now, a spacecraft named Psyche is headed to its namesake asteroid, 16 Psyche. The theory is that 16 Psyche, which lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may be made of precious metals that, on Earth, would be worth more than the entire world economy. However, we'll only know for sure once this probe gets there in 2029. So, we'll have to wait.

But in the mean time, this spacecraft has been keeping us entertained. On its way to that tremendously exciting asteroid, Psyche just made a memorable pit stop: It flew by Mars, getting within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the planet's surface. That's very, very close — indeed, close enough to bring us some marvelous imagery of our neighbor, the Red Planet.

The image of Mars above was taken at about 8:03 a.m. EDT (1203 GMT) on May 15 during the flyby. The planet's crescent shape is due to Psyche approaching Mars from what's known as a "high phase angle," in reference to the angle formed between the sun, the target being imaged (Mars, in this case), and the spacecraft itself.

NASA also explains that one of Psyche's instruments, the multispectral imager, saw the crescent appearing brighter and extending farther than expected due to the dusty Mars atmosphere scattering light. The multispectral imager is special because it can take images in both visible light (light we can see as humans) and near-infrared light (the kind of invisible light the James Webb Space Telescope famously specializes in).

That kind of imaging will be important once Psyche gets to 16 Psyche, because it'll reveal better detail about the asteroid's surface features. In fact, it would appear that a lot of asteroid-specific gear meant to help NASA decode the true composition of 16 Psyche and let us know whether or not it lives up to its proposed price tag of many (many) quadrillions of dollars was turned on during the Mars flyby. This includes instruments like the magnetometers that may have found a "bow shock" on Mars, which relates to solar wind dynamics near the planet.

But to keep our eyes on Mars for a minute: As breathtaking as that crescent is, it isn't the only image Psyche's operators managed to process during the probe's close approach to the planet.

"We've captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet's surface and atmosphere at close approach. This dataset provides unique and important opportunities for us to calibrate and characterize the performance of the cameras, as well as test the early versions of our image-processing tools being developed for use at the asteroid Psyche," Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

For instance, NASA also released the flyby images below. And agency officials say we can expect further analysis of Psyche's Martian views in the coming days as more opportunities arise.

"As the spacecraft continues its journey after the flyby, we'll continue calibration imaging of Mars for the rest of the month as it recedes into the distance," Bell said.

This image just above showcases Psyche's view of a nearly "full Mars." The white blob toward the left is actually the planet's south pole, depicting a high-resolution view of the water-ice-rich area in this region on Mars. That cap is over 430 miles (700 kilometers) in width, NASA says.

The first image below shows wind streaks over craters on the Red Planet, with the streaks extending to about 30 miles (50 km) in length. The craters average around 30 miles (50 km) in diameter as well.

Meanwhile, the second image below is blue because it's an enhanced color view of Mars, showing Huygens crater, which is about 290 miles (470 km) in width.

As to why Psyche made this little detour on its way to its final target? It's because of something called a "gravity assist," which is a popular maneuver taken by spacecraft headed into the depths of our solar system.

Basically, a gravity assist allows a probe to harness the gravitational influence of different objects in space (usually planets) and slingshot onto a planned trajectory that brings it toward an ultimate target. According to NASA, it would appear this gravity assist of Psyche was as effective as hoped for.

"We've confirmed that Mars gave the spacecraft a 1,000 mile‑per‑hour boost and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the sun. We are now on course for arrival at the asteroid Psyche in summer 2029," Don Han, Psyche's navigation lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement.

Han also explained that the Psyche flight team came to this conclusion by taking advantage of the Doppler Shift effect. The Doppler Shift has to do with the way wavelengths from an object moving away from you stretch out while those from an object moving toward you compress.

NASA's Deep Space Network, which the agency uses to communicate with far-flung spacecraft, is able to tap into this effect and thus figure out the locations of spacecraft. It's also worth noting that Psyche is testing out a cool new form of spacecraft communications that involves laser-beaming information back to Earth with its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) software. That has, so far, been knocking it out of the park — even transmitting an image of a cat named Taters across 19 million miles (30 million km) of space.

"We've been anticipating the Mars flyby for years, but now it’s complete. We can thank the Red Planet for giving our spacecraft a critical gravitational slingshot farther into the solar system," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the statement.

"Onward to the asteroid Psyche!"

A new approach that riffs on the classic Traveling Salesperson problem could enable more efficient space missions to multiple objects that are in motion — like asteroids.

The researchers behind the fascinating solution to the problem are Isaac Rudich of the Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal in Canada and Michael Römer, who is a decision analyst from the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics at Universität Bielefeld in Germany. "Our research is foundational, in the sense that it develops mathematical machinery that can be used by space agencies to plan missions," the duo told Space.com.

The Traveling Salesperson problem is a mathematical approach to determining the shortest route for visiting multiple destinations before returning to the point of origin. That's fine when you're a double glazing salesperson visiting a dozen stationary towns and cities, but how do you calculate the optimal route when your destinations are perpetually in motion?

This is the problem faced by spacecraft that are on a mission to visit multiple celestial objects. Sometimes the decision is obvious, necessitated by the availability of gravitational slingshots from planets, as illustrated by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions.

However, a mission that skips from one asteroid to the next, relying on fuel stored on board rather than gravitational slingshots, is more problematic. The asteroids are constantly moving in their orbits and the distances between the asteroids, and therefore the travel time, are not static.

This seemingly intransigent problem now has a solution, thanks to a team led by Rudich and Römer.

They reframed the puzzle as the "Asteroid Routing Problem," or ARP, which asks the question: In what order should a spacecraft visit multiple asteroids if both travel time and fuel consumption are to be minimized? To do so, the optimal departure time and trajectory between each pair of objects has to be calculated.

"The ARP is particularly challenging because determining the exact cost and travel time requires solving another challenging optimization problem, which is Lambert’s problem," said Römer and Rudich.

Lambert's problem was first posed all the way back in the 1700s by the Swiss polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert, who pondered how to find the optimal trajectory between two moving objects. The problem was solved mathematically later that century by Joseph-Louis Lagrange — yes, of Lagrange point fame.

Solving Lambert's problem for two objects is one thing, but when many more objects — or in this case, asteroids — are involved, it very quickly becomes computational complex because the calculation must be conducted for every possible route between every possible pair of objects.

To get around this, Rudich and Römer's team employed something called Decision Diagrams. These are a variation on Decision Trees, which map a decision problem to a graph by listing each possible set of decisions as a path on that graph, all starting from the same root, or origin. In a Decision Diagram, all the various choices that lead to the same destination in time and space are represented as a single node on the graph, making things simpler and reducing the amount of times Lambert's problem has to be solved.

"Our approach typically achieves solutions that are about 20% better than those using standard approaches, and solutions up to 20% better for larger problems," said Rudich and Römer. That percentage is a combination of total travel time and fuel consumption.

There aren't many missions that visit multiple asteroids. NASA's Dawn mission visited both Ceres and Vesta, while the Lucy mission is currently on its way to Jupiter, via the Asteroid Belt, to explore the Jovian Trojan asteroids. Lucy has flown relatively near several asteroids in the asteroid belt and will pay visits to five Trojan asteroids.

Employing their mathematical approach to see how optimal Lucy’s mission plan is “would certainly be interesting,” said Rudich and Römer, but they emphasize that the ARP is a very stylized, almost synthetic, problem that considers some, but not all, aspects of astrodynamics.

"To precisely model a real-world mission would probably require the consideration of a lot of additional aspects," they said.

However, even if it could just bring about a 1% improvement, it would still represent a substantial saving of time, money and fuel. Their research could also be applied to terrestrial problems, such as bus routes, supply chains and shipping routes, where variable weather and traffic congestion provide the dynamic properties rather than moving destinations.

The research was published on April 2 in the INFORMS Journal on Computing.