This rocket wasn't supposed to die so dramatically.

On Wednesday (Aug. 5) at about 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT), the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will slam into the moon, blasting out a crater about 89 feet (27 meters) wide.

The rocket body has been loitering lazily high above Earth for more than 18 months. What jolted it out of its unremarkable senescence and put it on a kamikaze course for the moon?

It didn't take much, as the rocket regularly crossed into the moon's neck of the woods.

The Falcon 9 launched in January 2025, carrying aloft two private robotic lunar landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, which was built by the Tokyo-based company ispace. (Blue Ghost landed successfully and carried out its historic mission, but Resilience crashed during its touchdown attempt.)

Falcon 9 first stages are famously reusable, but the vehicle's upper stages fly just once. SpaceX usually deorbits these rocket bodies shortly after launch, guiding them back for controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere. That wasn't possible on the Blue Ghost-Resilience launch, however, as getting the lunar probes to their distant deployment point used up almost all of the upper stage's fuel.

As a result, the 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) rocket body "was abandoned in a moon-crossing high-Earth orbit," according to a recent study about the coming impact led by Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

SpaceX performed "a different maneuver [than deorbiting] to ensure that the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said today (Aug. 3) during a press conference discussing the company's Crew-13 astronaut launch to the International Space Station, which is targeted for Sept. 12.

That maneuver did not lock the hunk of space junk into a stable location, however; natural forces still acted upon it and, it turns out, changed its trajectory.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said.

Astronomers and lunar scientists are looking forward to the upcoming impact, even though it will occur on the sunlit side of the moon and therefore likely won't be visible to most observers here on Earth (though skywatchers with good telescopes might be able to catch a glimpse of the resulting ejecta plume).

The event "provides an opportunity to test pipelines for measuring flash properties to locate impact events seismically, and to better understand the multi-modal hazards posed to future lunar infrastructure and astronauts from space debris impacting the moon," Fernando and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

Those hazards won't be purely hypothetical for much longer, if all goes to plan: NASA aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the coming decade via its Artemis program, and to keep that outpost staffed over the long haul. Scheiman said that SpaceX is looking into ways to minimize the chances that spent rocket bodies could rain down on an occupied moon in the future.

"It's one of the things that we're working in partnership with NASA and the other appropriate agencies," she said. "What is the best future disposal path for high-energy missions that are in the sun-Earth-moon system?"

This Falcon 9 won't be blazing an entirely new trail to the moon. The third stage of NASA's Saturn V moon rocket struck the lunar surface on multiple Apollo missions, for example. And, on March 4, 2022, a mysterious rocket body slammed into the moon, blasting out a weird double crater.

That shape revealed the impactor's identity — the upper stage of the Long March 3C rocket that sent China's uncrewed Chang'e 5-T1 mission around the moon in October 2014.

NASA is planning to send two maneuverable probes to lunar orbit in order to learn how spacecraft are affected by the complex gravitational environment near the moon.

The mission, known as CAPSTONE 02, is currently aiming to launch in 2027. It will see the two probes maneuver in close proximity to one another and fly in "formation" so mission operators can better understand the gravitational effects spacecraft experience in cislunar space. This area of space is under the influence of both Earth's gravity and the moon's, meaning spacecraft operating there will have to navigate what are known as "three-body orbits."

While testing spacecraft maneuverability in these complex orbits, CAPSTONE 02 will also study communication and navigation systems that will be used in NASA's planned Artemis missions of lunar exploration and moon base construction. "This mission represents an important step in the maturation of cislunar capabilities," said NASA's Sean Fuller, Moon Base CAPSTONE manager, in an agency statement. "CAPSTONE 02 lays the foundation for lunar infrastructure and commercial services that support Artemis, Moon Base, and future missions to deep space."

The two CAPSTONE 02 probes are being built by Terran Orbital Systems, Inc. Once in space, they will alternate jobs while flying in formation, switching between what NASA calls "chaser" and "target" roles.

The spacecraft pair will use celestial navigation, optical sensors and data collected by telescopes on the ground during these maneuvers. This is similar to how NASA will use a variety of data to help its Orion spacecraft meet up with a lunar lander en route to the moon.

On the upcoming Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2027, NASA will test some of these techniques as Orion will rendezvous with both Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander and SpaceX's Starship, if all goes according to plan.

"Transporting crew to the lunar surface from cislunar orbit depends on knowing how well navigation systems will perform during these operations. Since these conditions can't be fully recreated on Earth, they must be tested in space," NASA wrote in its statement outlining the CAPSTONE 02 mission.

As its name implies, this will be the second mission under NASA's CAPSTONE program, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. The first CAPSTONE probe launched in 2022 and operated for four years before NASA officially concluded its mission in June 2026.

That microwave-oven-sized CAPSTONE spacecraft tested communications tech and became the first spacecraft to test three-body orbits around the moon, according to a NASA statement.

CAPSTONE was tested in what is known as a near rectilinear halo orbit. This is a fairly gravitationally stable orbit, thanks to the nearly equal pulls of both Earth's gravity and the moon's.

On Aug. 5, Earth's moon is due for a human-made, high-speed impact from an identified flying object: a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. The event will lead to a literal "dust up" on the lunar landscape.

That Falcon 9 upper stage is a leftover from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025. Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.

And according to a new study by an international team published on the open-source arXiv server, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon's edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes.

This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets. Indeed, putting aside all the unknowns and modeling uncertainties, some specialists suggest if you've got the time and observational prowess, it might be worth a look.

Visible ejecta spike

Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude.

"Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact," Jo told Space.com. "So the plume should be visible, though I'd stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn't really the story here."

Jo emphasized that there's great slam-dunk science to be had. "Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon," Jo said.

Implications for future moon missions

According to new research led by Benjamin Fernando of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the impact flash and resultant ejecta plume are "potentially observable" from ground- and space-based observational facilities.

"This event provides an opportunity to attempt the recording of an artificial impact in real-time; although many of the properties of the event (such as visual magnitude) are imprecisely predicted at present," Fernando and colleagues report.

Moreover, this rocket stage meets moon occasion yields an opportunity to test a pipeline for localizing impacts on the lunar surface for future seismic experiments, investigating the dust and plume dynamics from impact events on the moon, and considering hazards from artificial space debris impacts that future astronauts on the lunar surface might have to avoid, Fernando and team members point out.

"The maximum ballistic range of resolved particles is found to be slightly under 1,000 km, which is far enough to be significant from the perspective of presenting a hazard to future astronauts or infrastructure across much of the lunar surface," Fernando et al wrote in the study.

Before and after

Brent Garry is a project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LRO will be passing over the projected rocket stage crash site about seven days prior to the impact and about seven days after the impact, Garry explains.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," said Garry, as noted in earlier Space.com reporting.

Meanwhile, Jo at the University of Texas, Austin underscores the fact that a spent rocket stage is a hollow, spacecraft-like body, and there are very few impact models for human-made objects like it. They seem to produce very different plumes than natural impactors, like asteroids or comets do. But Jo stresses that the real scientific contributions will come by studying the moments after the impact.

"My concern is that most observers will stop at the sub-second flash and never track down the ejecta, which is the part that should actually be visible, and where the science is."

China's Chang'e-8 moon lander mission scheduled for 2029 could send Africa's first space exploration mission to the lunar south pole.

Under the Africa2Moon venture, the Bounced African Low Lunar Sphere, or BALLS for short, is a technology demonstrator in which a trio of spherical probes on the lunar surface will form a radio astronomy array at the moon's south pole region. Each of the metal spheres contains low-frequency radio telescope antennas that will search for signals from some of the oldest and most distant parts of the universe.

Astronomers say the lunar far side is the most radio-quiet site in Earth's vicinity, a location perfect for "listening" to the universe without interference. The BALLS array will work together to observe low frequency radio signals from space that are not observable from the surface of the Earth, according to Carla Mitchell, mission director of the Africa2Moon initiative and Africa Program manager at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). The moon is an ideal place to perform such studies, they said, as the low frequency signals to be measured are unobservable from Earth due to interference created by our planet's atmosphere.

Pathfinder

The Africa2Moon project was selected by the Chinese National Space Administration in April 2025 as one of nearly a dozen of Chang'e-8's international payloads.

BALLS will enable observations below 20 megahertz (MHz) that are inaccessible from Earth due to ionospheric distortion and radio interference. Low-frequency radio waves (below about 50 MHz) come from some of the oldest and most distant parts of the universe.

The BALLS array will serve as pathfinder hardware for future lunar technologies and radio astronomy experiments. They will also act as a technology demonstrator for the full Africa2Moon mission, which plans for an array of 55 antennas to be deployed on the far side of the moon.

From paperwork to hardware

"As a little girl I thought space was not possible for people in Africa. I never thought I would be here today, presenting our lunar mission at NASA," said Mitchell.

Mitchell detailed years of team work on the BALLS initiative, rolling forward from paperwork to hardware, speaking July 22 at the NASA Exploration Science Forum 2026, held at NASA's Ames Research Center and staged by the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).

SARAO is the national radio astronomy facility of South Africa, operating and managing such facilities as MeerKAT and the South African Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project. SARAO is involved in a range of cosmic inquiries, from pulsar research to studying fast radio bursts, dark matter and dark energy.

Spaced out

Once deployed on the moon, the BALLS trio would be spaced out on the lunar surface. Signals captured from the BALLS array are to be communicated to the Chinese lander and then relayed back to Earth for further processing.

Each of the BALLS consists of a spherical gyroscope-like frame made of interlocking rings, encasing two large triangular solar panel arrays with a grid-like surface texture. The panels are oriented in opposite directions — one pointing upward and one downward — giving the structure a tetrahedron-like inner form.

The mission is led by the Foundation for Space Development Africa in collaboration with SARAO, the South African National Space Agency, the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, as well as institutions in Kenya, Ghana, Botswana and across the continent.

Teams at Petrawell in Cape Town, Aerospace Systems Research Institute at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Electronic Systems Laboratory at Stellenbosch University were involved in manufacturing the components of the structural and functional BALLS models. They were assembled in April 2026, to be delivered to China's Chang'e-8 team for testing.

"The power of collaboration, education and hope cannot be underestimated for Africa's future in space science and technology," she said.

Looking to a second mission

As for the full Africa2Moon mission consisting of 55 antennas emplaced on the far side of the moon, Mitchell said they would require a launch as with the first mission.

"So yes, it would probably be contingent on China partnering again with us," Mitchell told Space.com.

The design of the second mission instruments would be a little different too.

"We would want to have them a little larger in diameter and so they would have to go in a flat version that will deploy into a ball versus the current version that travels as a ball, due to space constraints," Mitchell said.

"The deployment onto the lunar surface would also be different, as in self-deploying from the lander as opposed to a robot deployment. This would enable a faster and more random and further dispersed deployment pattern, which enhances the science," she said.

Shoe-string budget

"I am amazed that it is being done on a shoe-string budget by volunteers. This demonstrates the inspiration of space and if this is successful, it will ignite the reality of space on the African continent," said Clive Neal, a lunar science exploration specialist and professor in civil and environmental engineering and Earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame.

Attending Mitchell's talk at the recent forum at Ames Research Center, Neal said the broader lunar exploration community is willing to help if needed.

"Her talk was inspirational," Neal said, "especially as the broader planetary science community over here [in the U.S.] is moaning about the lack of funding!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK — Madison Square Park in midtown Manhattan is home to some 44 tree species. And on a Thursday afternoon blanketed in wildfire smoke, a small crowd gathered to see one in particular. The slender American sweet gum looked unassuming, especially compared to the enormous English elm neighboring it. But this tree had a secret: it had traveled 1.3 million miles before landing in New York.

The sapling was germinated from one of 1,000 seeds NASA sent aboard the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which saw a space capsule orbit the moon in 2022. Just a few years later, the same kind of capsule would take the famous Artemis II crewmembers on the same journey. Hundreds of these "moon trees" have been planted across the U.S. in the last two years as the space agency drums up excitement for future Artemis missions, which aim to return humans — and not just seeds — to the lunar surface by 2028.

Steph Lucas, director of horticulture for the Madison Square Park Conservancy, applied with NASA for a moon tree seedling in 2023. The request was finally granted in 2025. "We were so thrilled," Lucas told Space.com. The tree grew quietly for a year before the conservancy unveiled its presence with a "birthday party" extravaganza on Thursday (July 16).

Madison Square Park's moon tree is part of a legacy spanning back to NASA's original lunar program. In 1971, astronaut Stuart "Smoky" Roosa brought about 500 seeds aboard the Apollo 14 moon mission. These seeds later grew into saplings that NASA distributed to parks, arboretums and historic sites across the globe. A seed from one of these first-generation moon trees even attended the new tree's birthday party.

The event also featured a celestial-themed garden, poetry reading, a gallery of children's artwork, launch-able foam rockets and, of course, birthday cake — enough for about 100 people.

However, the party had fewer guests than expected. A thick plume of smoke from wildfires raging in Canada blew southward and tinted the sky above New York orange. The air quality plummeted, and many people chose to remain indoors for their health. Some of those who did turn up wore KN95 masks.

In a strange way, the atmosphere was fitting. The specter of climate change hung heavy over the city, and it was very much on Lucas' mind as she was vying for the conservancy's moon tree selection. NASA offered five different species of moon tree: Douglas fir, Loblolly pine, Sequoia, London plane and American sweet gum. Lucas requested an American sweet gum over a more cold-hardy London plane tree, even though its current range falls slightly south of New York City. Sweet gums are well-adapted to wet, temperate conditions, and as the climate warms in the coming decades they will likely feel right at home in Manhattan. "We think that this will be a better selection as the future goes on," said Lucas.

Stuart Roosa himself was a former smokejumper for the US Forest Service, a job that involves dropping from a helicopter into the heart of an active wildfire to fight it. He agreed to bring along those first moon seeds as a love letter to future generations on Earth. That's the spirit the Madison Square Park Conservancy hopes to channel.

"Space inspires us, right? And plants can be inspiring too," Lucas said. After a year of growth, the park's moon tree is now firmly rooted and standing tall without supports. Gazing at it through the wildfire haze, Lucas mentioned that the young tree seems by all accounts to be thriving. Its progress, she said, brings her hope. "We can always work towards a better future."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucky Flight 13

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

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

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

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

Starlink V3 makes a debut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for now, SpaceX is clearly celebrating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few new objectives, however.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Aug. 12, I get to fulfil a lifelong ambition. I'll take a flight to Madrid and travel northwest to the city of Valladolid by rail, before striking out for Valoria la Buena — a charming town in central Spain with a population of less than 1,000.

There, I'll bear witness to one of the most spectacular naked eye shows that the solar system has to offer: a total solar eclipse. My first total solar eclipse.

Don't get me wrong. I've been obsessed with eclipses my entire life. I just haven't found myself in the right place at the right time to experience totality until now. 10-year-old me came pretty close during a deep partial eclipse in 1999, when I caught a fleeting glimpse of the moon's silhouette taking a bite out of the sun in the cloud-ridden skies over the United Kingdom.

Smash cut 20-something years later and I'm inexplicably the Skywatching Writer for Space.com, where one of the major perks of the job is being sent to report on eclipses. Things aligned quite nicely.

For the 2026 eclipse, I'll be joining a volunteer team from NASA's Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast (DEB) Initiative led by citizen scientist Charles Greenwald.

The DEB is a network of enthusiastic solar observers led by professional astronomers who use standardized telescopes and software to share inspiring eclipse imagery to the public, while also capturing valuable scientific data on the sun's disk and golden atmosphere.

It was Greenwald who scouted Valoria la Buena as a prime location to observe the eclipse. He's since been hard at work liaising with DEB initiative leadership to test software updates and troubleshoot other issues, while also travelling to Mexico to help train student members of the team ahead of their expedition to Spain. Two more eclipse enthusiasts are due to join the group once it arrives in Madrid, making it a wonderfully international affair.

Less than a month out, things are pretty settled, and a kind of nervous anticipation has taken hold. Flights and trains are booked, and I have a pair of Celestron EclipSmart 10x42 binoculars and the EclipSmart 3-Piece Solar Eclipse Observing and Imaging Kit, courtesy of Celestron. Also hats and an ungodly amount of suntan lotion. I'm bald after all, so the sun is my greatest natural predator.

Of course, preparations can only get you so far. Once we get to Valoria la Buena on Aug. 10 there'll still be important work to do. The first order of business for Charles and his DEB team will be to stake out a location with a clear line of sight to the west for their equipment. Totality will occur with the sun less than 10 degrees above the horizon — roughly the width of your clenched fist held at arm's length — so line of sight will be everything.

We'll also be at the mercy of the weather. Clouds could easily arrive to hide the cosmic show from view — especially with the eclipse so low on the horizon. The DEB team also has to find a spot with good connectivity, which will allow them to broadcast near-live images of our parent star for the public to enjoy and scientists to pore over.

All being well, myself, the DEB team and over 15 million others in the path of totality will bear witness to a heartstopping display of orbital mechanics that crescendos with the fleeting artificial night of totality, as the moon blocks the last sliver of the sun from view. Space.com's Skywatching Editor Daisy Dobrijevic will also be on hand to report on the total solar eclipse as it unfolds in the skies over Greenland.

We can't wait to share our experiences with you. Be sure to stick with Space.com to discover everything there is to know about the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse, along with details on how to watch it online, which will be published closer to the event!

You should also read our guide to safely observing the sun, to ensure that you're ready to enjoy the eclipse, and our roundup of the best solar viewing equipment available in 2026 if you're looking for safe, quality gear.

Editor's Note: Want to share your eclipse photography with Space.com's readers? Then please send your photos and comments, along with your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

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

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

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

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

A potentially revolutionary rocket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan for Starship Flight 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miniature X-ray machine is set to transform astronauts' health prospects following a successful test in orbit. As a bonus, as well as checking for broken bones on the moon, the technology could also be distributed to small towns and villages in rural areas to provide enhanced medical care far from major hospitals.

For much of the Space Age, astronauts have only had access to ultrasound machines as tools to diagnose injuries. Unlike ultrasound, which requires a medium through which sound waves can pass, X-rays can be used in a vacuum. The problem with X-ray machines is that traditionally they have been big and bulky, they use a lot of power, they have difficulty imaging something that isn't perfectly stationary (resulting in blurred images), and they tend to get damaged when jostled about during launch and atmospheric re-entry. Yet, as human spaceflight and voyages beyond Earth-orbit come to prominence once more, with proposals for an outpost on the moon, there is a greater chance of an astronaut being injured and therefore a greater need for medical X-rays in space.

Technology has now reached the stage where small-scale, portable X-ray devices are commonplace on Earth.

"Portable X-ray machines are in use everywhere — at the Kentucky Derby, on the sidelines of the Super Bowl and around the globe in low-resource areas — because they can run on solar power and can be operated by individuals with no medical expertise," Sheyna Gifford, who is a medical doctor and assistant professor of aerospace medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said in a statement.

Gifford wanted to put one of these portable X-ray devices to the test in space. The first chance her team got to simulate taking an X-ray in space conditions was during a parabolic flight in 2022 (when an aircraft simulates microgravity by climbing high on a parabolic trajectory, as in the famous "Vomit Comet") when members of the flight crew used a portable X-ray machine to produce an X-ray image of someone's hand.

The real test, though, came on March 31, 2025, with the launch of the private Fram2 mission, which took four first-time astronauts on a 3.5-day mission around Earth on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The astronauts, none of whom were medical experts, received four hours training on the portable X-ray device before launch, and then while in orbit they were tasked with taking X-rays of a smartwatch, a hand, an abdomen, a pelvis and a chest. These X-ray images were recorded digitally, enabling the astronauts to review them straight away without having to develop film.

Back on Earth, three independent medical experts compared the Fram2 X-rays with similar X-rays taken prior to launch. They found that while the ground-based X-rays were better quality, the space-based ones were good enough to be used to diagnose injuries such as broken bones.

Furthermore, the X-ray device made it back to Earth on board the Crew Dragon with only minimal damage to its exterior after being buffeted around. The Fram2 crew members all reported that the X-ray machine was easy to use, and they recommended that in future it be designed to be easier to clamp securely into place inside the crew cabin.

"We believed an off-the-shelf portable system would stand a very good chance of surviving pre-launch testing and be operational in space by crew members with minimal training," said Gifford. "By acquiring the first human and equipment X-rays in space, our study demonstrates the feasibility of in-orbit radiography and expanded diagnostic capabilities for crew health and hardware evaluation."

The usefulness of X-ray machines in space extends beyond just applying them to human health. X-rays can be used to inspect potential damage to electronics and spacesuits, to diagnose problems with malfunctioning satellites, and even be strapped to lunar rovers for analyzing the surface of the moon.

The next step, says Gifford, is to make the portable systems even smaller.

"It is my hope that we can further reduce the size of portable imaging systems and improve their ruggedness and usability so they can be included in future missions," she said.

The technology can also prove its value here on Earth. Easy to use and highly portable X-ray devices that can produce digital images that can be scrutinized on a tablet or even a smartphone would be invaluable to rescue teams in remote areas or tight spaces. It would also transform medical care in rural towns and villages that are far from large hospitals — reducing the burden on those large hospitals in the process.

"Disseminating autonomous miniature X-ray systems around the globe could also change the game in public health," said Gifford. "The sky is not the limit when it comes to X-rays in space and here on Earth."

The findings from the X-ray tests were reported on July 14 in the journal Radiology.

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

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

Liftoff for the spacecraft’s upcoming 13th test flight was originally scheduled for Thursday (July 16) from the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. That attempt was aborted at the last second, however; SpaceX is now targeting today (July 24), during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time).

You can watch the launch live on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff. Follow our Starship live blog for more mission updates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:15 p.m. ET on July 17 with the new target launch date of July 20, then again at 12:15 p.m. ET on July 20 with the new target date of July 23. It was updated on July 23 with the weather delay and new launch date of July 24.

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

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

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

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

Life's clues on the moon?

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the simulations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launch (April 1)

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

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

Lunar flyby (April 6)

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

Splashdown (April 10)

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

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

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

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

Websites

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

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

Social media

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before dawn on July 11, early risers will be treated to a striking celestial scene low in the east-northeast sky.

A slender waning crescent moon, softly glowing with earthshine, will appear to align with the orange light of Mars, the orange-red star Aldebaran, with the sparkling Pleiades and Hyades star clusters close by. Together, they will form a beautiful morning tableau in Taurus — one well worth setting an alarm to see.

First: the moon

Most obvious is, of course, the moon, appearing as a lovely waning crescent, 14% illuminated. It rises around 2:00 a.m. local daylight time and will likely appear as a thin arc of light enclosing a ghostly ball. Here is one of nature's beautiful sights and fits the old saying, "the old moon in the new moon's arms." Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the first to recognize it as earthshine. That faint bluish-gray light is light from Earth reflected toward the moon. Earth's light, of course, reflects sunlight, so earthshine is really sunlight that is reflected off Earth to the moon and reflected toward Earth.

Next: Mars

The second object is a planet: Mars. It will appear as an orange-yellow star roughly five degrees below and slightly to the right of the moon. Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees in width, so Mars will hover roughly 'half a fist-width" below the lunar disk.

Mars rises around 2:40 a.m. local time and is about 15 degrees above the east-northeast horizon by dawn. So as the eastern sky begins to lighten up, Mars will be about "one and a half fist-widths" above the horizon.

It currently resides within the boundaries of the zodiacal constellation of Taurus the Bull. Mars remains rather inconspicuous, but its luminosity continues to increase as we gain on it in our smaller, faster orbit, though it is a very slow process. The planet moves from 17.5 light minutes away on July 1 to 15.4 light minutes by Sept. 1, brightening ever-so-slightly from magnitude +1.3 to +1.2. At its closest approach this coming February, Mars will be only 5.6 light minutes from Earth and will appear to shine fully 10 times brighter than it does now.

Finally: Aldebaran

Shining about 5.5 degrees below and slightly to the right of Mars will be a similarly hued, orange-red star, appearing to shine nearly twice as bright as the planet. That will be Aldebaran, marking the angry right eye of Taurus. Aldebaran is the fourteenth brightest star in the sky and lies 67 light-years from Earth. This is a red giant star, 45 times larger than our sun, 1.6 times more massive and over 400 times as luminous. Aldebaran is older and redder than the sun and is preparing to fuse its lightweight core into heavier elements, which are common among stars of its type. Aldebaran has a surface temperature of about 6,760 degrees F (3,738 degrees C). And Aldebaran is really a double star; its companion is much smaller and far dimmer, with an overall mass less than half that of the sun and only about one-third as large.

Incidentally, although it appears among them, Aldebaran is not actually a member of the V-shaped Hyades cluster. But it's much closer to us in space than the other Hyades stars, so it's simply an "innocent bystander," but nicely completes the V-shaped face of the Bull in our sky. Henry M. Neely (1879-1963), a long-time lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, wrote in his book: A Primer for Stargazers:

"When Taurus is in the night sky, it is well worth the while of any stargazer to beg, borrow or steal a pair of binoculars. . . because the most dazzling of the stars are not visible to the naked eye. This is particularly true of the area inside the V of the Bull's face. Someday I hope an imaginative designer of jewelry will duplicate this superb setting of celestial gems, matching them in color, sparkle and design."

And completing this lovely early morning tableau, is the beautiful Pleiades star cluster. They'll glitter, as Tennyson imagined, "like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." They'll sparkle about six degrees to the moon's upper right. Good binoculars will reveal a score of stars in this little group, while long-exposure observatory photographs show about 1000 in the area — all suffused in great clouds and streamers of nebulous light.

What a great way to start the second weekend of July!

So, rise before the first blush of dawn, seek out a clear east-northeast horizon, and let the morning sky reward your early vigil. With binoculars in hand, linger a little longer among the Pleiades and the nearby celestial jewels—an ancient sparkle waiting quietly above the waking world.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons from the International Space Station

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isolated environments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between July 7 and July 17, Venus will put on two evening-sky shows: first passing close to Regulus, the brightest star in Leo the Lion, and then appearing near a waxing crescent moon.

Both events are easy to see with the naked eye and offer excellent opportunities for casual skywatchers and photographers alike.

Look low in the western sky after sunset for both events. Viewing times and positions are best suited for observers at mid-northern latitudes; check a local skywatching app for exact timing in your area.

When to look: Around 9:45 p.m. local daylight time in mid-twilight.

Where to look: Low in the western sky for Venus and Regulus; west-northwest for Venus and the crescent moon.

Best tools: Both events are visible to the unaided eye, but binoculars will improve the view.

Venus meets Regulus

The first celestial meeting will be when Venus aligns with the blue-white star Regulus, the brightest star of Leo, the Lion. Six stars in Leo form a large backward question-mark shape, popularly known as the Sickle. Regulus is at the end of the handle. It was one of the four "royal stars" which were supposed long ago to rule over the four quarters of the heavens. On the list of the 21 brightest stars, Regulus is number 21, but at least it's on the list.

Key dates

Silvery white Venus and blue-white Regulus will be 3 degrees or less apart from July 7 through 12th and will be closest — just one degree apart — on July 9.

July 7: We see them side by side, Venus on the right, Regulus on the left.

July 9: They're somewhat closer, with Venus to the upper right of Regulus.

July 11: The gap between them will be noticeably wider with Venus sitting to the upper left of Regulus. Look low toward the west around 9:45 p.m. In late twilight, both planet and star will be readily visible to the unaided eye. The difference between the two is considerable: Venus will outshine Regulus some 158 times; binoculars will enhance the view.

Venus pairs with the moon

Then, on July 17 comes the second meeting, this time with the moon. The moon will be 3.5 days past new phase, a slender crescent 17% illuminated, sitting to the left of Venus. They will not be particularly close together, being separated by about 6 degrees by mid-twilight. Regardless, both will attract attention, calling even casual observers to look at them as they descend toward the west-northwest sky, finally setting at around 10:30 p.m. As was the case with Regulus, binoculars will enhance the view of Venus with the moon. You'll no doubt notice earthshine — sunlight reflected from off the Earth toward the moon, which will faintly illuminate its dark part with a greyish-blue glow, seemingly imparting a three-dimensional effect.

What's next for Venus?

Near the start of this year, Venus was situated behind the sun at superior conjunction (on Jan. 6) and entered the evening sky, yet it was hidden from our view for many weeks due to its proximity to the sun. But Venus rapidly climbed out of the bright evening twilight during March, becoming by far the most brilliant of all the "stars," and by mid-June it stood nearly 30 degrees above the sunset horizon and was setting 2.5 hours after the sun.

Since then, Venus has taken a track placing it increasingly to the south of the sun's path across the sky. The result of this is that although its angular distance from the sun continues to increase, this is balanced out by its southerly track, which in the coming days and weeks will cause it to become progressively lower and set gradually earlier relative to the sun.

As such, compared to now, Venus will be noticeably lower in the western evening sky at its greatest elongation (46 degrees) on Aug. 15. Come the end of September, it rapidly sinks, appearing as an increasingly large, thinning crescent through telescopes and steadily held binoculars. At mid-northern latitudes, we'll have to struggle to catch it very low in the west-northwest soon after sunset during the final nights of September. It falls past the sun on October 24th — well south of it (6 degrees) at this inferior conjunction, so any chance of trying to get a glimpse of it on those evenings and mornings of adjacent days will be solely for those who reside south of the equator, in the Southern Hemisphere.

But during November, it will dramatically sprout up into the morning sky, ultimately grabbing the attention of early risers and providing us with a perfect "Star in the East" adorning the predawn sky during the Christmas season.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long road to space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moon work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A vibrant in-space economy

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

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

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

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

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

Asteroid mining, too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living off Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The search for intelligent life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Americans declared independence on July 4, 1776, a waning gibbous moon rose in the night sky. To the people celebrating the birth of a new nation, it would have looked much the same as the moon we see today. But there was one subtle difference: 250 years ago, the moon was about 31 feet (9.4 meters) closer to Earth than it is now.

"The moon is currently drifting away from Earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters [1.5 inches] per year, which is coincidentally roughly the same speed at which human fingernails grow," says Seth McGowan, president of the Adirondack Sky Center & Observatory in Tupper Lake, New York.

That 31 feet may sound significant, but against the moon's average distance from Earth of 238,855 miles (384,400 km), it's effectively nothing. In fact, the moon's elliptical orbit causes its distance from Earth to vary by about 26,000 miles (43,000 km) every month as it moves between perigee, its closest point to Earth, and apogee, its farthest. "The tiny 31-foot shift over 250 years is entirely swallowed up by that massive monthly variance," says McGowan. But while the moon itself looked much as it does today, the world beneath it was very different.

How Americans used the moon in 1776

Colonial Americans depended on the moon in ways that are easy to forget in an age of electric light and digital clocks. Travelers planned journeys around how much moonlight would be available on a given night. Farmers and Indigenous peoples consulted lunar cycles to anticipate seasonal changes. Mariners tracked the moon's pull on the tides. Even military planners considered lunar illumination — during the Revolutionary War, a moonlit night could aid troop movement and navigation, but it could also expose an army's position to enemy forces. The moon helped people organize their activities in an era when daily life remained closely tied to the natural world.

One of the most popular publications of the colonial era was the almanac. Long before weather apps — or even standardized timekeeping — Americans turned to these annual guides for practical information about moon phases, moonrise and moonset times, eclipses, tides, and seasonal events. Publications such as Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" helped popularize the format decades before independence, while later titles, such as "The Old Farmer's Almanac," first published in 1792, continued the tradition.

What astronomers knew about the moon in 1776

By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, astronomers already understood a surprising amount about Earth's nearest neighbor. More than 160 years earlier, Galileo's telescopic observations had revealed mountains, valleys, and craters on the lunar surface, overturning the ancient notion that heavenly bodies were perfect spheres. Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravitation had since explained why the moon orbited Earth and why tides occurred.

While astronomers could predict eclipses and chart the moon's movements with impressive accuracy, they had never seen the moon's far side, had no idea how it formed, and couldn't say with confidence what it was made of. All of that would come centuries later — and there are still many lunar unknowns today.

How Apollo astronauts revealed the moon's slow escape

During the Apollo missions, we learned an extraordinary amount of new information about the moon, including the rate at which it's moving away from Earth. Apollo astronauts installed retroreflectors — special mirrors designed to bounce light directly back toward its source—on the lunar surface. Scientists then fired lasers at those reflectors to measure how long it takes the light to return, allowing them to calculate the Earth-moon distance with extraordinary precision. (Fun fact: We continue to use the retroreflectors today!) Those measurements revealed that the moon is receding from Earth at about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) per year.

"The moon's gravity pulls on Earth's oceans, creating a tidal bulge," says McGowan. "Because Earth rotates faster than the moon orbits us, that ocean bulge pulls slightly ahead of the moon, acting like a cosmic gravitational leash that accelerates the moon into a higher, wider orbit. In doing so, the Earth's rotation slows ever so slightly — about 2.3 milliseconds per century. "Back in 1776, a day on Earth was about 5.75 milliseconds shorter than it is now," says McGowan.

This effect is imperceptible on human timescales, but over millions of years, it will have dramatic consequences. Eventually, the moon will appear too small in Earth's sky to completely cover the sun, ending the era of total solar eclipses and leaving only annular, or "ring of fire," eclipses in their place. The moon will never completely free itself from Earth, though — physics dictates that the drift will stop after about 15 billion years. And well before that, in about 5 billion years, the sun will expand into a red giant, consuming both the Earth and the moon entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normalizing the idea

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

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

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

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

Dense atmosphere

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precursor missions

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

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

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

Extraordinarily ambitious

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

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

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

'Not a question of physics'

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

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

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

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

Starting a movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first full moon of summer, June's Strawberry Moon, wowed skywatchers worldwide with a spectacular display.

June's full moon was the lowest-hanging full moon of the year for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. That's because a full moon always sits opposite the sun in the sky. During the summer solstice that just passed on June 21, the sun was following its highest path of the year; that means this full moon took the opposite route, skimming low across the southern sky.

It rose in the southeast, remained low above the horizon throughout the night and set in the southwest, delighting photographers around the world. Here are some of the best photos.

Photographer Davide Pischettola captured the Strawberry Moon behind the sailing ship Nave Italia in the Port of Molfetta, Italy, on June 29, 2026.

The June Full moon rises behind the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City in this vibrant image captured by photographer Gary Hershorn.

Hershorn was also in the right place at the right time to capture this well-positioned photograph of the Strawberry Moon atop the Empire State Building.

Even Lady Liberty appeared to embrace the Strawberry Moon in another striking image by Hershorn, with the full moon seemingly cradled in the Statue of Liberty's hand.

Meanwhile, in California, photographer Tayfun Coskun captured the Strawberry Moon emerging above San Francisco Bay in dramatic fashion.

The Strawberry Moon peeked through a thin layer of cloud as it rose above an ornate rooftop in Meishan, China.

The rich orange Strawberry Moon looks particularly striking in this image captured in Qingzhou, China, on June 29, 2026.

Photographer Robert Nemeti captured this dark and moody image of the Strawberry Moon rising above a Reformed Church in Abaújvár, Hungary, from a vantage point just across the border near Kechnec, Slovakia.

A glowing Strawberry Moon rises behind the ancient Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in this remarkable image captured by photographer Ayhan Mehmet.

Photographer Veysel Altun captured the June full moon rising above a dolphin sculpture on the waterfront in Samsun, Turkiye.

A curious feline stole the spotlight as photographer Osmancan Gurdogan captured the Strawberry Moon rising over the skyline of Istanbul, Turkiye.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the moon, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals are here to help. Interested in capturing the night sky? Check out our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.

Fancy taking a more in-depth moonlit tour of our rocky companion? Our ultimate guide to observing the moon will help you plan your next skywatching venture, whether it be exploring the lunar seas, mountainous terrain, or the many craters that blanket the landscape. You can also see where astronauts, rovers and landers have ventured with our Apollo landing sites observing guide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Astrophotographer Efrain Morales captured spectacular footage of China's Tiangong space station as its silhouette buzzed Tycho Crater during a lunar transit on May 29, one night before May's Blue Moon.

Morales recorded the outlines of Tiangong's vast solar panels and habitable modules using a 12-inch telescope and astronomy camera as it passed silently across the lunar surface in the skies above Puerto Rico at 11:33 p.m. EDT on May 29 (0333 GMT on May 30).

"It is a challenge in less then a second to capture this event," Morales said in an email to Space.com. "Using a program the ISS Transit Finder helps in giving information to capture the space station. Adjusting the FOV and at times calculating last minute deviations in time and positions in which makes it more challenging."

The orbital outpost appeared to dive directly toward Tycho Crater, whose 53-mile-wide (85 kilometer) impact site and bright ejecta dominate the southern region of the lunar disk on the nights surrounding the full moon phase.

The dark expanses of Mare Nubium (the Sea of Clouds) and Mare Nectaris (the Sea of Nectar) can also be seen scarring the lunar disk to the left and upper right of the footage, respectively, where ancient lava flows hardened to form basaltic plains billions of years ago.

What is the Tiangong space station?

The Tiangong space station, which translates to "Heavenly Palace" from Mandarin, is made up of the core module Tianhe and theMengtian and Wentian laboratory modules, which orbit Earth at an altitude ranging between 217 and 280 miles (340 to 450 km).

Tiangong is currently crewed by the three taikonauts of the Shenzhou 23 mission — commander Zhu Yangzhu, pilot Zhang Zhiyuan and payload specialist Lai Ka-ying — who launched to the orbital station atop a 203-ft (62 m) Long March 2F rocket on May 24.

Want to see the Tiangong space station for yourself? Then be sure to read our guide to tracking and photographing the orbital outpost, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your night sky photography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earth's moon is due for a human-made impact this August courtesy of a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage.

The Falcon 9 upper stage is left over from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025 by way of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Also sent moonward on that flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.

This striking event is expected to occur close to Einstein Crater near the moon's western limb and could be visible by ground and space-based telescopes. Varying forecasts have sparked debate on whether or not we'll be able to see the rocket body slam into the moon on Aug. 5, and, if so, how both citizen scientists and astronomers can best observe it it.

'This wonderful environment of the moon'

The consequences of this rocket mission's leftover hardware is on target for a "limb shot," meaning it could strike the far western edge of the moon. Another possible impact site is Bell Crater, just out of sight on the moon's far side.

Earlier this month, NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) hosted a discussion with experts regarding the approaching impact. Taking part in the meeting of moon-watching specialists was Brian Day, SSERVI's lead for citizen science and community development.

"One of the things that is really important here with this impact that is coming up is it serves as a reminder to us that the moon is a dynamic environment. We think of it as being static. It is not. It is being whacked. It is changing," Day said.

Citizen scientists can actually get involved to help understand the dynamic environment of the moon thanks to the Impact Flash! program, said Day.

"And that can be done either with instrumentation you have in your own backyard or you can use ours in orbit around the moon," Day added. "This impact is a great reminder of this wonderful environment of the moon."

Moon viewing maybe

But will the impact be visible from Earth? Any assured answer is in a hedge-your-bet, yes/no mind bender.

"I've gone from 'probably' to 'probably not,' and more recently, to 'maybe,'" said Bill Gray of Project Pluto, creator of a telescope-tracking application used worldwide by professional and amateur astronomers alike to keep tabs on asteroids, comets, and other near-Earth objects.

It was Gray's work with Project Pluto that got the word out about the roughly four metric ton Falcon 9 upper stage intersection with the moon at over two kilometers a second. In September 2025, his software for computing orbits analyzed the observations and projected an impact with the moon on Aug. 5, 2026.

"Even though we have tracked it since launch, our idea of when and where it's going to hit are currently fuzzy by minutes and dozens of kilometers," Gray said. "But we will refine that and get an idea of where it's going to hit."

Out on a limb

"I think it's going to be very subtle. I think it's going to be very, very hard to see, if not impossible. But there's always a chance," said William Cooke, program manager of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Cooke quickly added that, along with a rapid-fire impact flash, the upper stage impact will kick up huge amounts of lunar regolith, the dust that coats the surface of the moon.

"It will excavate that out of the crater and this may create a plume that will be illuminated by the sun," Cooke said. "So, it's not only important to look for the impact flash, but if this occurs close enough to the limb, you may be able to see that plume of material rising, and that would be significant as well."

Time and inclination

Still, concerning the spotting of that over-the-limb plume, it remains a guessing game.

How much material might be lofted, and how high will it go? Given the moon's one-sixth gravity, how long will it take for that material to fall back onto the lunar surface?

"So, no good feeling for how long the plume will be up there," Cooke said.

Putting aside all the unknowns, it is Cooke's view that "if you've got the time and the inclination, it might be worth a look."

Regarding the possibility of seeing the ejecta plume, Gray of Project Pluto, later told Space.com he agreed. "We pretty much shrugged about this and said "we dunno' and we should look and see if we can observe it."

On-location orbiters

Speaking of time and inclination, there is an on-location witness to the before and after results from the rocket stage plummeting into the moon.

Brent Garry is the project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LRO will be passing over the projected crash site about seven days prior to the impact and about seven days after the impact, Garry said.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," said Garry.

Different observers

This event emphasizes that when you're looking for impact flashes on the moon, either anthropogenic or natural, there's a need for as many observers as possible, said SSERVO's Day.

"Because these flashes are so short, they can very much mimic a cosmic ray impact on your detector and just be a sudden blip," said Day.

What really helps researcher's distinguish between cosmic ray impacts and actual flashes on the moon is to have different observers in different locations observing that flash at the same time, Day said.

"And if you see that, if you have that coincidence of events," Day said, "that's one of the reasons why we like to have as many people looking as possible."

If you stand outside the old Corn Exchange in Bristol, you'll see a clock with two minute hands above the entrance. One hand is set to London time, the other to Bristol's — ten minutes behind. The lag is because the sun reaches its peak over the second city a little bit after the first.

Of course, when it comes to scheduling anything with bounds beyond one city, having two poses an issue. This is why, in 1840, the British company Great Western Railway imposed what it called "Railway Time" across its whole network of trains, establishing Greenwich Mean Time as the first standardized time. And it's still the time zone used in the U.K. today. However, when several towns refused to adopt the time established by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the solution was to use two minute hands instead of one. And so the three-handed clock came to be.

That compromise could soon repeat itself in a less likely location: the moon.

The U.S. and China, the two largest space powers, disagree on what time it is on the moon. That's a problem because experts say satellites from one country will be unable to coordinate with spacecraft from the other during future space missions — which could risk accidents.

The White House has tasked NASA with establishing Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) as a universal time on the moon, which would set the standard for NASA's LunaNet satellite system. But China has other ideas.

China's Chang'e Program, named after the Goddess who flew from the Earth to the moon in Chinese folklore, is the only space program with active lunar relay satellites, Queqiao-1 and Queqiao-2. These relay satellites are the first basis of a moon-wide GPS system meant for future space missions could rely on, meaning they compete with NASA's LunaNet — and because of the way GPS works, these satellites will need a standardized time situation. China is also the only space power to have landed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, where radio signals from Earth are blocked, proving it can coordinate landings without relying on commands from home.

In other words, while the U.S. surpasses China in terms of total space missions, the relay satellites could give China the edge when it comes to establishing the first lunar GPS system for future moon landings. China also hasn't agreed to use LTC for this system, raising the prospect that timekeeping standards could diverge.

Moon Race 2.0

Last year, experts warned U.S. Senators that China is set to win the moon race — the 21st century race to secure lunar resources establish a human presence on the moon — unless space operations receive more funding. Scientists further pointed out funding issues that could impact U.S. leadership in the lunar arena and wavering political commitment to Gateway, the space station intended to serve the Artemis moon program.

Private space-faring companies are also looking to governments to set international standards before spending money on expensive equipment. If China sets the standards before the US, private companies might gear with investments for Chinese customers, giving the country the edge over competitors.

"If everybody has their own standards, the complication increases for the user and manufacturers," says Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "So there is a chance of making some mistakes, errors, and interchanging, and then having a mishap."

GPS works by having satellites broadcast time signals. If the clocks on the satellites disagree, even by a microsecond, the GPS positioning can shift by hundreds of meters. In an emergency landing, that difference could prove expensive, or even fatal in the case of a human spaceflight mission.

If you take out the cellphone in your pocket, or look at the right-hand corner of your laptop to check the time, the precise time has been coordinated by hundreds of atomic clocks.

Atomic clocks created by NIST measure the oscillation of microwaves, the upwards and downwards swings of energy. Cesium atoms in the clocks absorb microwave energy only when oscillations reach 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.

Because all cesium atoms are the same, every atomic clock measures the exact same second as every other atomic clock. Their invention led to the universal standard of time we use today, superseding the time set by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the 1800s.

International Atomic Time developed from the atomic clock, set by NIST’s optical "lattice clocks" and "cesium fountain clocks”, with the recently invented “nuclear clock” set to make the standard even more precise by ticking according to the fluctuations of thorium-229 nuclei.

The time on our screens comes from over 80 countries working with their own atomic clocks to work out the time. The U.S. Naval Observatory is one of these, submitting the time of its atomic clocks in Washington D.C. and Colorado to an international timekeeping organization in France.

Based in a suburb of Paris, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) collects the time from dozens of scientific labs across the world and uses the input from their atomic clocks to produce the weighted average time, what we call Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

BIPM sends back corrections to each country, which recalibrate their own clocks to UTC. Countries beam these corrections to their satellites, which then transmit the standardised time to cell towers. The result appears on our phones.

But while our timekeeping methods are universal, time itself is not.

Spacetime

If the international atomic standard had been running since the Big Bang, NIST claims, it would not have gained or lost a single second since the universe began.

The way we experience time depends on gravity. The gravity we feel on Earth is determined by the mass and radius of our planet. Away from the Earth's gravity, spacetime behaves differently.

If one identical twin stayed on Earth, but the other travelled to a black hole, where matter is compressed, then both would experience time differently. Should the twin in the black hole take an atomic clock, and somehow survive, they would return to Earth to find that their twin had died, along with everyone they knew. Hundreds of millions of years would have passed by, according to the clock that remained on Earth, whereas their atomic clock would have ticked away only a short time.

"That person's time is being slowed down by gravity, their time is ticking slower," says Patla. "It's the same thing with the Earth and the moon. The clocks really tick faster."

Because of the physics of spacetime, coordinating missions with satellites away from the Earth's gravity gets increasingly difficult.

On the moon, clocks run around 56 microseconds faster than clocks on Earth. While everyone agrees on the math, not everyone agrees on who should wind the clock.

Because of the difference, space powers need to agree to convert the discrepancy into UTC, or an equivalent that works on satellites coordinating space missions. Without agreement, engineering equipment that relies on GPS could diverge, and missions could prove dangerous in the years ahead, particularly with the projected increase in space landings.

Aiming to land a crew on the moon by 2030, the Chinese space agency plans to establish a moon base by 2035, from which asteroid mining operations or future missions to Mars could be prepared. Atomic clocks on Mars tick about 477 microseconds faster per day, leading to suggestions of a Mars time zone. But Patla says a separate time zone for Mars may prove too complicated.

About time

Almost all space powers are targeting the south pole of the moon, where loads of frozen water presumably found there can be converted to hydrogen to use as rocket fuel for future space missions. Exiting the moon is less fuel-consuming than exiting the Earth's atmosphere, though assembling rockets on the moon has never been attempted.

But the south pole of the moon is scarred by impact craters and jagged mountains, which could make landing there more risky. In a historic moment, India was the first nation to land a spacecraft there in 2023 — and hundreds of launches from various countries are scheduled over the coming decades to achieve the same feat. As these launch attempts start to happen, converting between differing satellite times in an emergency could prove dangerous.

Luckily, there's more collaboration between the agencies than some might suspect. NIST has check-ins with China's Purple Mountain Observatory, which according to Patla are purely advisory, so the two countries can better coordinate their activities in space.

China has announced its own mathematical framework for timekeeping, the Lunar Time Ephemeris (or LTE440), which could complement NASA’s Lunar Time, building towards a more robust conversion between the two countries. The math and physics are not in dispute, Patla adds, a fact that should give policymakers some comfort.

"Most of the world uses UTC, and so there is an incentive for everybody to take the best route to get there," says Patla. "If we want to have a lunar economy and if we want to have a sustained presence on the moon, then the standards would be helpful to link moon time to Earth time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality versus depictions

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

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

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

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

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

Facts of life

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

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

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

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

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

False impression

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

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

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

Tilt problems

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

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

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

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

Getting it wrong

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

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

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

The moon passes directly in front of Venus during a rare daylight occultation on June 17, 2026, creating one of the month's most unusual and technically challenging skywatching events.

For most of North America, the moon will slide over Venus in the mid-afternoon. The chances of witnessing this rare event are good, provided the skies are clear and deep blue.

There is one important catch: the event takes place in broad daylight. Between roughly 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. EDT, the sun will still be high in the sky, while the moon and Venus will sit about 38 degrees away from it. Anyone using binoculars or a telescope must be incredibly careful not to accidentally sweep across the sun, which can cause instant and permanent eye damage.

Never sweep the daytime sky with binoculars or a telescope without knowing exactly where the sun is. To view the occultation safely, place your telescope in the physical shadow of a building so the sun is completely blocked by the roofline.

Read more: How to observe the sun safely (and what to look for)

The moon will be a very thin waxing crescent, about 2 to 3 days old and roughly 11% to 14% illuminated. Venus, meanwhile, will be blazing at magnitude -4.0.

While Venus is technically bright enough to be seen with the naked eye during the day if you have 20/20 vision and know exactly where to look, daylight washes out much of the contrast. Binoculars or a telescope are exactly what you want here. The crescent moon acts as a perfect celestial guidepost to help locate the planet, and the optics will provide a spectacular view of Venus slipping behind the unilluminated edge of the lunar disk.

Through a telescope, watching the jagged, unlit edge of the lunar crescent slowly consume the brilliant white disk of Venus against a blue daytime sky is an unforgettable sight.

If you would rather not explore the sky during the daytime, the evening sky has another treat in store. The waxing crescent moon will be sitting near the Beehive Cluster (M44) in the constellation Cancer.

Once the sky is fully dark — about 45 to 60 minutes after sunset — look toward the moon. Just a few degrees away, you'll find a faint, fuzzy patch of light. That's the Beehive Cluster. Through binoculars, it completely transforms into a sparkling scattering of dozens of faint blue-white stars. Spanning about the width of three full moons, the cluster and crescent moon will fit comfortably into the same binocular field of view, creating a spectacular sight.

The bright sunlit sliver of the moon will be dazzling, but the rest of the lunar globe will be visibly glowing from sunlight reflected off Earth's oceans and clouds back onto the moon. Known as earthshine, the effect makes the moon appear strikingly three-dimensional through binoculars.

The moon and Beehive Cluster also provide an excellent target for a quick, wide-field astrophotography project. Mount a DSLR camera with a 135 mm lens on a tripod and expose long enough to capture the glittering swarm of Beehive stars while keeping the exposure short enough to preserve the earthshine on the dark side of the lunar crescent.