The moon dives towards the glowing heart of the constellation Leo for a spectacular rendezvous with Mars and Jupiter overnight on Nov. 1-2, as the glittering stars of the Beehive Cluster shine nearby. Here's what you need to know.

Look to the eastern horizon an hour after midnight to see the 45%-lit waning moon shining less than 5 degrees from the red light of Mars — roughly the width of your three middle fingers held at arm's length to the night sky.

Jupiter's bright light will gleam just below the red planet, with the bright star Regulus lining up beyond to form a dazzling procession leading back to the horizon. The stars of the Beehive Cluster (M44) can be found twinkling 10 degrees from the unlit side of the lunar disk around this time, in the middle of the constellation Cancer.

Stargazers in Australia, Indonesia and a host of other island nations and territories will see the moon pass directly in front of Jupiter, hiding its light in an event known as an occultation starting at 3:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT) on Nov. 2 , according to In-The-Sky.org. However, the exact visibility and timings depend on location.

The cosmic pile-up serves as a spectacular reminder of the scale and diversity of targets on display in the night sky. After all, the moon appears largest from our Earthly perspective, but in reality it's less than half the diameter of Mars.

Jupiter, meanwhile, is over 20 times wider than the red planet, while mighty Regulus is up to four times larger than the sun, andcould easily fit all the planets of the solar system in its vast expanse.

By moonrise on the night of Nov. 3, the lunar crescent will have leapt past Jupiter and Mars, to appear just 1 degree from the blue-white light of Regulus for viewers in the U.S. Meanwhile, viewers in several South American countries including Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia will see the moon occult Regulus beginning at 6:59 EST (1024 GMT) on Nov. 3. The exact timings for a selection of South American countries can be found below, courtesy of In-The-Sky.org.

Want to get a closer look at the moon and planets of the solar system? Then be sure to check out our picks of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky, including the Celestron NexStar 8SE, which we rank as the best motorized telescope out there.

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

Our time on our "space mission" underwater was coming to an end, and I felt like what I imagine an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) must feel before returning to Earth. On one hand, you are excited to return to your home and loved ones, as well as to fresh food and normal hygiene. On the other, you know you will miss your crew and the incredible experience of being in space.

While my SEA STAR crew and I had not left Earth during our mission, we were separated from the surface of our home planet for five days. All we saw was a green alien water world surrounding us. We did this to live and work like astronauts on the ISS. Instead of dealing with the challenges of space that astronauts face, we problem-solved sometimes equally difficult issues that divers have to manage when performing research in sea water.

Our "wet ISS" was the Jules' Undersea Lab, which is located near Key Largo, Florida, at 22 feet (7 meters) underwater. By the end of our mission, we had all officially become aquanauts. An aquanaut is an undersea explorer who remains underwater for more than 24 hours, without returning to the surface, in a state known as saturation.

In this sense, saturation refers to the physiological condition achieved by a person who breathes underwater long enough for the body's tissues to absorb the maximum possible amount of inert gas (like nitrogen), for a specific depth and pressure. The term aquanaut derives from the Latin word "aqua" (water) and the Greek "nautes" (sailor).

There were a lot of things I wasn't going to miss about being an aquanaut. They included the constant loud noises our life support systems made to keep us alive underwater, as well as bathroom plumbing issues and some health concerns linked to living under pressure. We also had to be very careful when performing our "spacewalks" (scuba dives), due to the low visibility of the environment around us.

Nonetheless, I experienced a sort of "underview effect" during this mission. Most astronauts report experiencing an "overview effect" after seeing our whole planet from space, which usually makes them value our unique planet even more. I felt a similar thing when I saw the sun's rays come through the water. I couldn't reach them, but I enjoyed them from afar. My everyday life felt so close, yet so far away. It gave me both a feeling of longing and more determination to take even more care of our home world than before.

I'm grateful that we were able to perform all of the different scientific projects we planned for our mission. As the Commander of the crew, I usually have my work cut out for me managing the crew and overseeing their research projects, as had been the case for most of the 40 simulated space missions that I led previously. Fortunately, this time my crew was made up of experienced analog astronauts and divers, so the mission was mostly smooth sailing.

The research we chose for this mission was relevant for long-duration space missions. Since we can only send a small number of astronauts to the ISS with a limited number of research activities to perform, underwater stations provide us with a valuable way to conduct analog, or simulated, space missions instead. We also performed some environmental conservation work using a type of underwater vacuum device to help protect the nature around the Jules' Undersea Lab.

My scientific project was focused on studying whether our cognitive abilities and reaction times changed under pressure. This study is part of my collaboration with the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ostrava and City Hospital Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The whole crew definitely felt like their response times to these tests were slower during the mission than before it.

We were also interested in seeing how microgreens seeds were affected by the changes in pressure. Our Health & Safety Officer, Dr. Brandy Nunez, grew some of our kale and super salad mix before we started our mission, while other seeds started their growth journey underwater. All seeds were transferred to our underwater station using two varied pressure settings (gradual and sudden pressure release during their descent). After we harvested them, we could see that the latter types of seeds did indeed experience some barotrauma (damage caused by the sudden increase in air pressure).

Executive Officer Paul Bakken's work was related to managing the internal pressure of logistical transfer containers when they are exposed to significant environmental changes in pressure. The fourth crewmember, Mission Specialist Jenn Pint, worked with Interstellar Performance Labs to develop a taxonomy for analyzing environmental and crew interaction factors during simulated space missions.

On top of these projects, we also performed neutral buoyancy experiments during our underwater spacewalks, as well as the testing of environmental sensors developed by high school and university students in Slovakia. The sensors provided important supplemental information to the cognitive study about our simulated space habitat's living conditions.

Just like astronauts on the ISS, we dedicated some of our time to outreach and educational work, too. In our case, we called Cosmic Region, a simulated space station in Slovakia, and gave the team there a tour of our underwater habitat. My crewmembers kindly went into the water at that time and performed a spacewalk to show what our work during the mission was like.

As I put on my "spacesuit" (scuba diving gear) one last time, I breathed the stuffy undersea air once more and then dove out to return to "Earth." My crewmembers and I then took a long detour around the lagoon around us to help our bodies adjust to lower pressures. Even though we were only 22 feet underwater, there was still a small risk of decompression-related problems that aquanauts can face after living under saturation for some time. The final step was to breach the surface at long last. That's when we all enjoyed breathing fresh air again and feeling the sun on our faces, though the temperature in Florida made us quickly hide away from it again 😉.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

The leader of NASA's first mission around the moon in half a century is the last to announce what's next for him after retiring from active astronaut duty.

All four astronauts of the Artemis II mission, which flew around the moon in April, have hung up their spacesuits and moved on to greener pastures. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), managed by Caltech, announced yesterday that former NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman will step into the role of Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of JPL, beginning Nov. 30.

"Reid has spent his career at the edge of what is possible, and he has the technical judgment, operational experience, and leadership to help push that edge farther," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a JPL press release.

Wiseman announced his transition to "astronaut emeritus" alongside Artemis II pilot Victor Glover in September. Glover, subsequently, accepted a full-time role as executive advisor to the president of his alma mater, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly).

Artemis II mission specialists, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen, also made the decision to step away from their spaceflight careers. Hansen announced his career change in July, and has since entered into reservist duty with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Koch, more recently, was appointed as NASA's acting deputy chief engineer, effective Nov. 1.

The quartet launched aboard NASA's Orion capsule on April 1, and completed a 10-day flight around the far side of the moon and back. Their mission took them further from Earth than any crewed spaceflight in history, and captured the attention of millions, who were captivated by the astronauts' incredible views and their ability to demonstrate the best traits of humanity, even while being the four people farthest from it.

The mission served as a stepping stone in NASA's Artemis program which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon and eventually establish a permanent base there. NASA is targeting mid-2027 for Artemis III as a flight test with Orion and the two Artemis lunar lander spacecraft (SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon). If everything goes according to plan, that mission will pave the way for Artemis IV, and the program's first crewed lunar landing in 2028.

A Baltimore native, Wiseman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who served as an aviator and test pilot before joining NASA's astronaut corps in 2009. He launched to space for the first time on the on the Soyuz TMA-13M mission to the International Space Station (ISS). He spent 165 days in orbit serving as part of ISS Expeditions 40 and 41, and completed two spacewalks totaling nearly 13 hours.

Before his selection for Artemis II, Wiseman worked as NASA's chief astronaut, overseeing crew readiness, astronaut assignments and flight safety from Dec. 2020 - Nov. 2022.

As JPL's new deputy director, Wiseman will serve under Director Dave Gallagher, helping oversee "strategic leadership, stewardship, and continuous improvement of laboratory operations," according to the JPL release.

JPL is a federally funded research and development center specializing in robotic space exploration. The lab is responsible for some of NASA's most recognizable planetary missions, including the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers, Europa Clipper and the Voyager probes. JPL also operates NASA's Deep Space Network, which provides continuous communications with spacecraft throughout the solar system.

"I've explored the furthest reaches of what a human can explore at NASA — and there were truly no words in the English vocabulary to describe seeing the sun disappear behind the moon from deep space," Wiseman said.

"But that experience was really the jumping off point to go do the impossible things that Caltech and JPL dream, dare together, and do for NASA and the nation.”

U.S. President Donald Trump just met another NASA Artemis crew.

The astronauts of NASA's Artemis III mission visited the Oval Office on Thursday (Oct. 28) and posed for a few photos with the president.

Their visit came nearly six months to the day after that of the Artemis II crew, who stopped by the White House on April 29, 19 days after the end of their historic flight around the moon.

The Artemis III astronauts are NASA's Randy Bresnik (commander), Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio (mission specialists) and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano (pilot). All four — plus backup crewmate Bob Hines of NASA, and agency chief Jared Isaacman — made the White House trip.

"It was a great day at the White House with President Trump and the talented crew of Artemis III," Isaacman wrote via X on Thursday.

Artemis III will launch to low Earth orbit in the summer of 2027, if all goes according to plan. The roughly two-week-long mission will aim to dock NASA's Orion capsule with SpaceX's Starship vehicle and/or Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

NASA selected Starship and Blue Moon to be the crewed lunar landers for the Artemis program, so Artemis III will provide valuable practice: On moon-landing missions, astronauts will launch aboard Orion and then meet up with either Starship or Blue Moon, which will carry them to the lunar surface and back up again.

That's slated to happen for the first time on Artemis IV, which NASA plans to launch in 2028.

We don't yet know which private lander(s) will launch on Artemis III; NASA would like to fly both of them, but it's unclear if both will be ready when the time comes.

That uncertainty applies to Artemis IV as well. We'll have to wait a bit before we know which spacecraft will have the honor of putting astronauts down on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Living underwater was surprisingly peaceful. It was in many ways exactly what I imagine living on Mars would be like one day. There were no humans around us, except for my three SEA STAR crewmembers and me. Apart from the human noises we made, we couldn't hear anything other than the life support systems keeping us alive submerged 22 feet (7 meters) below the surface.

We were living in these extreme conditions to study the challenges astronauts may face on long-duration space missions. Since performing research in space is still rare and expensive, there are numerous facilities around the world that focus on recreating space-like conditions on Earth. One of those stations is the Jules' Undersea Lab, where the SEA STAR simulated space mission took place.

This underwater habitat was called "La Chalupa" when it was built in the 1970s. Its purpose was to allow divers to live and perform research as aquanauts — people who spend more than 24 hours underwater in a so-called state of saturation. Today, the Jules' Undersea Lab is located near Key Largo, in Florida. However, it was originally designed to be mobile — inside a barge 20 feet wide and 60 feet long (6 to 18 meters).

The aquanauts could choose an ideal site for their research expeditions underwater and then have the facility be submerged. They did that by flooding most of its inside space, turning it from a boat to a submarine. Once their work was done, they could remove the water and move "La Chalupa" to another location.

Unfortunately, the funding to keep this facility running ran out over time, and it was moved one last time to its current home. Since then, the now Jules' Undersea Lab served as the research station for tens of different aquanaut missions, including a NASA 30-day project and two missions that set world records for the longest time living underwater (73 and 100 days).

On the inside, the underwater station is made up of a galley with a kitchen and dining/work area. Next to it there is a basic toilet, shower and the "moon pool," which is the equivalent of a door to get inside the habitat. The final area is the bedroom with two bunk beds, which can be split in the middle to create two bedrooms and provide additional privacy. Three windows throughout the habitat provide its dwellers with a view of a mostly green outside world.

To start our SEA STAR simulated space mission, we waved goodbye to our Mission Control team on "Earth" and dove down to enter the Jules' Undersea Lab through the "moon pool" at 25 feet (7.6 m) underwater. After that, we did not return to the surface again until five days later. We lived and worked the whole time underwater, performing our space-related research and "spacewalks" (a.k.a. exploration dives in scuba gear).

We were able to survive all this time in such a challenging environment thanks to a number of important life support systems keeping us alive. The communications and umbilical support cables (providing air, fresh water and power) for the habitat were originally supplied by NASA. All the piping and fittings are inside the submerged barge, protected from the air-sea interface and from encrusting marine creatures. There was also a direct line to Mission Control "on Earth" to help us in case of any emergencies.

Our schedule kept us busy all day every day to simulate what astronauts experience on the International Space Station (ISS). All four of us on the SEA STAR crew had research projects that we were responsible for, as well as daily tasks. These tasks involved cooking, medical checkups, cognitive tests, maintenance work and taking care of unexpected issues. As the Commander of the crew, I also made sure everyone was on top of their work and addressed any problems that came up.

We performed "spacewalks" in between all those other activities. They were pretty physically exhausting, which meant that we did not do additional exercise during the mission. I have been the Commander of 40 simulated space missions, and normally we exercise for at least an hour or two during each mission, just like astronauts on the ISS. Nonetheless, the pressure in the Jules' Undersea Lab was approximately twice as high as it was on the surface at sea level. This caused the crew to experience additional stress to their bodies, which is why no further exercise was required.

Even though our hands were full with activities during the mission, none of us felt particularly stressed out. Whether it was because of the effects of the pressurized conditions or thanks to good planning, we actually enjoyed our time living underwater. One of the nice surprises of the mission was that the food wasn't too bad, either. We were allowed to use a small crock pot, which meant we could eat soups, stews and overnight oats. Small joys like that boosted our spirits immensely.

Having said all that, the Jules' Undersea Lab did also make the isolation from our lives on Earth feel very realistic. While we didn't have a view of Earth like the astronauts on the ISS, our very green view of a completely different world outside our windows gave us an impression of living on another planet. It was the alien nature of our lifestyle 22 feet underwater and all the challenges that came with it that made this mission feel Mars-like. Our daily schedule grounded us, the extreme environment around us kept us on our toes and our scientific exploration helped us reach new frontiers.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

I have been dreaming of doing research in space as an astronaut my whole life, but for some reason, the thought of working underwater made me nervous. I’ve known for a long time that astronauts train underwater to simulate different scenarios they’re likely to experience in space. Diving was never an issue for me, either — I even made it as far as becoming a certified rescue diver. So what was the problem?

This summer, I led a simulated space mission in an underwater habitat called the Jules’ Undersea Lab. It is a research station that is located 22 feet (6.7 meters) underwater near Key Largo, Florida. You have to scuba dive to get in and out of the station. To become an aquanaut, you have to stay underwater for at least 24 hours in a so-called state of saturation.

I had been preparing for many years for this aquanaut experience, both as a scientist and as an analog astronaut. An analog astronaut is someone who takes part in a simulated space mission, where they live and work in conditions similar to those that astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) experience today, or will one day experience on the moon and Mars.

I’m no stranger to simulated space missions, either; I have been the Commander of almost 40 such missions in different facilities around the world. Almost all of those missions were on land, though, which made them substantially safer than a mission underwater. The risks of something going wrong during a simulated spacewalk or even during basic maintenance activities underwater are significantly higher than during standard analog missions on land.

Despite knowing all of that, a mission underwater was something I definitely wanted to experience to improve my skills as a leader, researcher and diver. However, the closer I got to the start of the mission, the more worried I became. My brain went through all the terrible scenarios that could occur during the mission while I was preparing for it — from someone’s gear malfunctioning during a spacewalk underwater to storms forcing us to evacuate in the middle of the night. Perhaps I still had some trauma from watching "The Abyss" by James Cameron as a child 😉.

Our mission was symbolically called SEA STAR, and I spent over a year organizing it. It took some time to get the right team and research projects together, as well as the necessary funding. My goal was to lead a mission simulating what astronauts go through on the ISS, both in terms of the diverse projects they work on and the challenges they face living in space. Only for us the deadly environment surrounding us wasn’t space, but water.

Since the health and safety of the crew is at higher risk during underwater missions, the team has to adhere to more strict procedures than they would need to during a simulated space mission on land. That, in turn, makes the mission feel more similar to an astronaut’s mission in space. The underwater environment also allowed us to perform neutral buoyancy experiments during simulated spacewalks, as well as scientific research focused on the effects of high atmospheric pressures on humans.

Our SEA STAR crew was composed of experienced analog astronauts and divers. Paul Bakken, an experimental engineer, was our Executive Officer responsible for most of the mission’s logistics. The Health and Safety Officer was Dr. Brandy Nunez, who performed microgreens research on top of overseeing the wellbeing of the crew. Our team’s Mission Specialist was Jenn Pint, who is an industrial safety expert. She was in charge of a project focused on developing a taxonomy for analyzing environmental and crew interaction factors in a space analog environment, in collaboration with Interstellar Performance Labs.

As the Commander of the crew, my main responsibilities were to make sure the crew was safe, in good health and spirits, getting along well and on top of their work. I worked with Paul to plan the mission’s schedule and to tweak it as needed — for instance, when we faced unexpected problems or some things were taking longer than planned. I also brought several research and educational projects with me on the mission, which I performed on top of my Commander duties.

Even though I was a bit concerned about the risks of the aquanaut mission before it started, I trusted my crew. I knew that we would find a way to problem-solve and face the challenges that would come our way, just like astronauts do in space. I was also looking forward to all of the interesting experiments that we had planned for the mission, which ranged from cognitive research under pressure to testing environmental student sensors.

In the end, I mostly had to trust myself that I had what it takes to not only perform this mission, but also to lead it. As I put on my scuba gear, before diving underwater for five days, I focused on the positive aspects of the mission. The nervous voices in my head made themselves heard a couple of times while I entered the water. Nevertheless, I was completely calm by the time I took my last breath of Earth air. I just waved at our collaborators on land, submerged myself and started our intense “space,” a.k.a. underwater, mission.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

NASA just gave us our best look yet at its Artemis III moon-lander test flight.

The agency laid out a detailed concept of operations for Artemis III today (Oct. 23) during a press conference at Kennedy Space Center, stressing how important the flight is to its moon plans and how challenging it will be to make everything go right.

"We're launching three of the most powerful rockets in the world, and undertaking what is likely the most complicated launch campaign ever undertaken," Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said during today's event, which lasted more than two hours.

Those three rockets are NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn, all of which will fly from Florida's Space Coast.

If all goes according to plan, New Glenn will lift off first, carrying Blue Origin's Blue Moon lunar lander to low Earth orbit (LEO). SLS will go next, launching the Artemis III astronauts — NASA's Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano — aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft.

SLS will deploy Orion into a highly elliptical orbit, one that gets as close to Earth as 18 miles (29 kilometers) and as far away as 1,122 miles (1,806 km), according to Parsons. The capsule will then maneuver itself into an orbit with an altitude of about 345 miles (555 km).

"That's really about getting thermal stability," Parsons said. "Orion was built as a deep-space vehicle, and so we're going to have to really manage the thermal environments, which are higher in a low Earth orbit."

The Artemis III crew will spend two days checking out Orion and its systems in LEO before meeting up with Blue Moon, which will take place on Flight Day 3 at an altitude of 273 miles (439 km).

"Over the next two days, the crew will conduct operations docked with Blue Moon," Parsons said. "They're going to open up the hatch. They're going to enter the lander. They're going to evaluate the environmental controls, the life support systems. We'll confirm that the spacecraft can maintain the right atmospheric pressure, and we're also going to test emergency scenarios, dual vehicle control, and we're going to put our Mission Control teams through their paces."

After those operations are complete — likely on Flight Day 6 or thereabouts — Starship will launch, with a specially built docking adapter on its nose.

The SpaceX vehicle — the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage of its fully reusable Starship megarocket — will meet up with Orion in LEO on Flight Day 8, at an altitude of about 237 miles (381 km). But this will be a very different encounter than the rendezvous with Blue Moon.

"The demonstration with Starship is shorter, about two hours," Parsons said. "The crew will not enter the Starship during the mission, but it gives us critical data and allows us to really understand the forces of docking, how we're going to push, how we're going to work together."

Artemis III will continue for another six to nine days after Orion undocks from Starship before finally heading back down to Earth for a parachute-aided ocean splashdown. (The nominal mission length is 14 days, Parsons said, but it could last as long as 17 days.)

During that time, the crew will evaluate their survival suits — something that didn't get done during the 10-day Artemis II flight around the moon this past April — and do a variety of other work as well, from detailed health assessments to scientific experiments and technology demonstrations. The main goal is to keep everything on track for Artemis IV, which will land astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2028, if all goes to plan.

"Everything we do on Artemis III is designed to reduce risk for our future lunar landing missions," Parsons said. "We're teaching these teams how to work together, how to make critical real-time mission decisions, all in an environment that is low Earth orbit, where if something goes wrong, we can come home much more quickly."

It's unclear at the moment which of these two privately developed landers — Blue Moon or Starship — will fly on Artemis IV, pulling off the first crewed lunar touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA is still preserving optionality, "to give both of our lunar landing partners the greatest opportunity for readiness in advance of astronauts landing on the moon in 2028," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during today's event.

"We have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so," he added.

No matter what decision NASA makes for Artemis IV, both Blue Moon and Starship should hit the gray dirt relatively soon, according to Parsons. "Regardless of who goes first, both providers are planning for lunar landing missions in 2028," he said.

And those missions will be quite different from each other. For example, on Blue Origin touchdowns, Orion will meet up with Blue Moon in lunar orbit. On SpaceX landings, however, Starship will likely dock with the NASA capsule in Earth orbit and propel it to the moon, Parsons said — the "push" he referred to above.

It remains unclear when exactly Artemis III will launch. NASA is targeting the summer of next year but may find it tough to meet that timeline: Last month, in an internal memo, Isaacman told agency employees that Artemis III was about 90 days behind schedule.

Some of the biggest challenges have involved the supply chain for the mission's lunar landers, Parsons said during today's event. But he and Isaacman both stressed that NASA is confident in its ability to work through such issues.

"We're moving with real speed and purpose right now," Isaacman said.

The robotic Griffin lunar lander has passed a host of critical tests ahead of its first-ever moon mission, which is scheduled to launch later this year.

What is it?

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, Voyager Technologies' Griffin Mission One (or Griffin-1) lunar lander has gone through an absolute gauntlet of tests. The spacecraft was put through environmental testing that explored how the vehicle will fare in the extreme conditions it will experience on its ride to the surface of the moon.

This testing simulated the extreme temperatures, shaking and even the sounds that the spacecraft will experience from launch to landing. And, as JPL announced recently, the lander passed this series of tests with flying colors, as we can see in this image snapped Aug. 31 of the lander inside the 25-foot-wide (7.6 meters) space simulator at JPL.

"NASA JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory has been putting robotic explorers to the test since the Ranger program gave us NASA’s first up-close views of the moon's surface in the mid-1960s. We’re proud to provide our expertise and facilities to support this new phase of commercial lunar exploration," Charles Whetsel, manager for the Exploration Systems Development Office at JPL, said in a statement.

Why is it incredible?

Griffin-1 is expected to launch to the moon later this year as part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. The spacecraft will carry over 1,100 pounds (455 kilograms) of cargo to its landing site near the lunar south pole.

In this cargo will be science experiments and new technologies that will be tested on the moon's surface, including Astrolab's FLIP rover, which will explore the lunar surface with a history-making supercomputer onboard.

This suite of experimental hardware won't just expand our understanding of the moon up close. Griffin-1's exploration will also help set the stage for a future, crewed moon base, which NASA aims to build near the south pole over the next half-decade or so.

Researchers think they might have pinpointed the exact night sky that we see depicted in Vincent van Gogh's iconic painting "The Starry Night."

Perhaps one of the most famous paintings in modern history, Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" carries a legacy that continues to inspire and mystify generation after generation. But while you might see in its swirls of color and bright spots of starlight a night sky derived purely from imagination, some scientists think it represents an actual view — one that includes a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades cluster. And they may know exactly when this sky appeared..

In a new study, researchers suggest that "The Starry Night" depicts the pre-dawn sky seen around July 22, 1889 from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh painted it. But while this sky happens to perfectly match the one depicted in the artwork, art historians have long thought that Van Gogh painted this piece in June. Could these findings shift the date of this legendary artwork?

Finding a painted sky

This investigation started decades ago with art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell at UCLA in 1984 and continued in the following years with astronomer Charles Whitney at Harvard University. However, these earlier analyses did not agree with one another, and there was no true consensus about exactly when the sky matched with the painting.

So the question remained, lingering in the minds of those with a shared love for both art and space. And a team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the CEO of South Korean robotic telescope company SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University's School of Space Research, picked up the search once more.

"When they see a fragment of a starry sky, observational astronomers like me and amateur astronomers alike will want to solve the puzzle. I am simply someone who pursued that process a little more actively," Kim told Space.com.

But how did Kim's team come to their conclusion, after others had failed to nail down a date over the decades? In short, "we analyzed the painting astronomically, analyzed documents about his situation in July 1889, and then carried out ecological and meteorological investigations," Kim said.

To start with, the team analyzed the sky from the exact location in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh is said to have painted "The Starry Night." They then used observational geometry to map the historical night sky.

"Modern telescopes are equipped with a function called astrometry, which compares an image of the night sky with celestial coordinates stored in a computer and automatically extracts the coordinates of the image," Kim said. "We used Procrustes analysis, a method that compares only the 'shape' of two sets of points. After matching their position, size and rotation, it measures how similar the two shapes are from the differences that remain (the residuals)."

"Because a star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality and slightly tilted, this method was the right fit. It allowed us to explain, in quantitative terms, what earlier studies had described only qualitatively as 'resembling a certain constellation,'" Kim added.

But this quantitative analysis wasn't enough to say for sure that this was the right-fitting sky, as different constellations could fit to a similar degree, Kim explained. To get closer to their answer, the team combined their analysis with a deep dive through history.

"We also checked whether the stars were actually in that part of the pre-dawn sky on that date, whether they fall within the painter’s field of view, and whether the appearance of the moon and Venus matches the painting. It was the Hyades that satisfied all of these conditions," Kim said.

Exploring astro-art history

As mentioned, the date of this matching sky comes in late July, a month after art historians think Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night." But the researchers suggest that their findings could provide evidence to support the idea that the work was actually painted in July.

Letters written by Van Gogh as early as 1888 describe his desire to paint a star-filled sky. A letter dated April 12, 1888 reads: "A starry sky, for example, well — it’s a thing that I’d like to try to do, just as in the daytime I’ll try to paint a green meadow studded with dandelions."

Kim followed these letters through the months to try and find more information that could potentially alleviate the discrepancy between the matching skies and the actual month the painting was created. Kim pointed to a letter from between late May and early June 1889 that reads: "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big."

Kim drew on "personal imagination" to find ties between Van Gogh's sky observations in these months and what they might mean for the painting's timeline, Kim shared, so this doesn't definitively change the view of this painting's history. However, Kim suggested that these records could indicate that Van Gogh was repeatedly looking up and watching the pre-dawn sky, which could have led to him seeing this exact sky on July 22.

The painting itself even ignites uncertainty among art historians. As the researchers cite in their new paper, leading art historians see "The Starry Night" as stylistically different from Van Gogh's other works during the month of June, drawing further questions over the date painted.

"What our study shows is that the sky in the painting matches, in both observation and shape, the real pre-dawn sky around July 22. So, what we propose is the possibility that Vincent conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22," Kim said.

However, "I think further research in art history and conservation science could shed more light on this question," Kim added.

This work was described in a study published Oct. 22 in the journal Scientific Reports.

TENERIFE, CANARY ISLANDS — NASA's Artemis II astronauts were just minutes away from a critical engine burn that would send them toward the moon when an unexpected cabin leak warning threatened to change the course of their historic mission.

"If it had happened five minutes later, we may not have been able to have that burn," Artemis II pilot Victor Glover revealed during an Oct. 18 discussion with Canadian former astronaut Chris Hadfield at the Starmus VIII festival here in Tenerife.

The incident unfolded on April 2, the second day of the Artemis II mission, as the astronauts' Orion spacecraft swooped back toward Earth after traveling some 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers) away. Orion had been completing a highly elliptical orbit around Earth, giving the crew and mission control an opportunity to test the capsule's systems before committing to the journey to the moon. Orion was now approaching its closest point to our planet, roughly 100 miles (160 km) above the surface, ahead of the crucial translunar injection (TLI) burn that would send the astronauts moonward.

"Jeremy looks out the window and says, 'I think we're going to run smack dab into the middle of Earth,'" Glover recalled, referring to Artemis II mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. "Because we were getting so low."

The close approach brought additional challenges, as Orion passed through a region populated by orbital debris and satellites.

"The density of things is going up from where we are, and also an increase in radiation," Glover explained.

It was at this particularly demanding point in the mission that Orion issued a warning that indicated a possible cabin leak, around 15 minutes before the critical TLI burn.

"So, determining whether it was real or not was a big deal," Glover said.

The crew and mission control faced a crucial question: Was it safe to continue heading to the moon, or would they have to abandon the planned maneuver and cut the mission very short? "Are we going to do a TLI and burn to go to the moon, or are we putting on our spacesuits to prepare to come back to Earth right now?" Glover recalled.

The timing was particularly critical. The TLI burn was designed to propel Orion out of Earth orbit and onto its trajectory around the moon, marking the first time astronauts had headed toward Earth's nearest neighbor since the Apollo era.

Luckily, as NASA flight director Judd Frieling told us during an April 2 media briefing, the warning turned out to be a false alarm.

So Artemis II received the go-ahead. Orion fired its main engine for approximately five minutes and 50 seconds, successfully setting the four astronauts on their journey around the moon.

"We're watching the timer count down, velocities go up, and the magenta and green numbers coming together," Glover recalled.

"Everything is tracking. It's looking good."

Before long, the crew had broken free of Earth's gravitational hold and were hurtling toward the moon at around 24,500 mph (39,430 kph).

Despite the tense moments before the burn, Artemis II went on to make history. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (the mission's commander), Glover (pilot) and Christina Koch (mission specialist), along with Hansen, traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them, reaching a maximum distance of 252,756 miles (406,771 km) during their journey around the moon.

The four astronauts returned safely to Earth on April 10, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego after nearly 10 days in space.

NASA will provide an update about its Artemis moon plans today (Oct. 23), and you can watch it live.

The news will come during a press conference at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which starts today at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.

"The update will include details about NASA’s Artemis III mission that will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test critical systems needed for future lunar landings, and how plans to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 are progressing," NASA officials said in an Oct. 14 media advisory.

Three agency officials will participate in Friday's "Artemis Acceleration" event. They are:

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
• Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager

NASA is currently gearing up for Artemis III, which is targeted for mid-2027. The mission will test rendezvous and docking technologies between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the private spacecraft that NASA picked to be the Artemis program's crewed lunar landers: SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

After that will come Artemis IV, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole in early 2028, if all goes to plan. That will be the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 way back in 1972.

It's unclear which lunar lander will fly on Artemis IV; that depends on how the development of each one progresses and what happens on Artemis III.

And there will be other landings after Artemis IV. NASA plans to establish a moon base via Artemis, and doing so will require a variety of missions, both robotic and crewed.

The agency feels some urgency in this quest, for China has similar goals. It's important that the U.S. wins this new space race, military and political officials have said, so that the nation can establish the norms of responsible behavior on Earth's nearest neighbor.

NASA has revealed new details about its plans to return astronauts to the surface of the moon, outlining a series of upcoming milestones for SpaceX and Blue Origin as both companies race to ready their lunar landers for the agency's Artemis program.

During an Oct. 5 presentation at the Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Antalya, Türkiye, Steve Creech, acting manager of NASA's Human Landing System (HLS) Program, laid out development timelines for both spacecraft, with key demonstrations planned through early 2028 that include orbital refueling and uncrewed lunar landing tests to qualify the vehicles to fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.

A more pressing deadline, however, is NASA's Artemis III mission, which is targeted for the third quarter (Q3) of 2027. Artemis III will launch four astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO), where they will rendezvous and dock with test versions of both companies' landers for interoperability checkouts. Those demonstrations will help inform NASA's determination about which lander the agency will choose to carry astronauts to the moon's surface on Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028.

SpaceX and Blue Origin were both awarded NASA contracts to develop HLS vehicles — Starship and Blue Moon, respectively — and have spent the past several years refining their respective lunar lander designs and dealing with various delays along the way. In the face of those delays, and in an effort to better structure its mission progression for success, NASA overhauled its Artemis program architecture in February to maintain its goal of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of 2028 and establish a more regular cadence of uncrewed landings in the meantime.

As part of that shakeup, Artemis III, previously the program's first crewed lunar landing mission, was moved up a year and repurposed for the lunar lander vehicle tests the agency is preparing to fly to LEO next year. The program's first moon landing remains scheduled for 2028, but was shifted to the manifest for Artemis IV.

Between now and then, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have more than a dozen test demonstrations and vehicle milestones to achieve, including success during Artemis III and flights afterward. This will all lead up to a key decision NASA must make: Which vehicle will carry out the first crewed landing on the surface of the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972?

Starship reached for the first time on its most recent test flight, which occurred on Sept. 28 from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. NASA lists several other important goals for the vehicle to achieve in 2026, including (in the order listed during the IAC presentation) the first return and catch of the rocket's upgraded Version 3 (V3) booster at its launch pad; the first-ever return and catch of a Ship upper stage; the first Starship launch from one of SpaceX's launch pads still under construction on Florida's Space Coast; and, possibly, the first V3 booster reflight.

NASA also expects SpaceX to complete the initial build of the crew cabin for its lunar lander Starship variant. SpaceX released renders of Starship's interior last year, as well as images of the test elevator astronauts are using to train for Starship egress on the lunar surface, but little else has been made public about the progress the company has made on the cabin's design.

Should the cabin's initial build wrap up by the end of the year, as NASA's presentation suggested, SpaceX will use Q1 2027 to complete integration of the systems that Starship will need to communicate with Orion during Artemis III, and deliver a cabin simulator for astronauts to train on leading up to the mission. SpaceX plans to continue Starship test flights through Q2 of next year, complete a landing leg demonstration and begin crew cabin airlock tests.

Blue Origin's lunar lander mockup is ready for NASA Artemis astronaut training

For Artemis III, SpaceX plans to fly one of its existing V3 Starship upper stages, with some slight modifications. Starship and Orion will dock as part of Artemis III but the SpaceX vehicle won't be equipped with a crew cabin for the mission's astronauts to enter. Between the end of this year and the beginning of the next, SpaceX is expected to complete the addition of a docking system and nosecone cover to the Artemis III Starship vehicle, which, NASA documents suggest, has already completed its mechanical fit checks.

Other notches on SpaceX's checklist leading up to Artemis III include the first propellant transfer demonstration with Starship in orbit. As the first-ever launch vehicle and spacecraft designed for full reusability, Starship's fuel constraints require that its tanks be topped off in order to fly beyond LEO. For a moon landing mission, this could mean up to a dozen launches of SpaceX's Starship "tanker" spacecraft to an orbiting fuel depot, which the moon-bound Starship will visit. To pull that off, though, SpaceX has to show it can successfully transfer those cryogenic fuels on orbit, and also store them effectively enough to prevent too much boil-off.

Starship won't require any refueling flights to complete its objectives for Artemis III, but SpaceX is expected to launch its first Starship tanker vehicle within a few months of that mission as it gears up for the Artemis IV moon landing mission. To that end, a launch of an uncrewed Starship lunar lander variant is targeted sometime toward the end of Q3/beginning of Q4, with an uncrewed lunar landing mission carried out before the end of 2027.

Blue Origin, meanwhile, has its own set of milestones to meet as it develops its Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lander — a 52-foot-tall (16 meters) spacecraft powered by three BE-7 engines. Unlike the bare-bones V3 Starship that SpaceX will launch on Artemis III, Blue Origin plans to fly a completed test vehicle, incorporating the crew cabin, partial life-support, flight software and other systems needed to allow astronauts to enter the lander from Orion during their time docked in LEO. Astronauts will be able to enter Blue Moon from Orion to get a feel for the lander in zero-g and test some of its systems.

NASA's timeline shows the company working to complete a series of manufacturing and testing milestones in the last few months of 2026, including continued BE-7 testing and qualification of Blue Moon's BT-7 maneuvering thrusters. The company also faces its Artemis III interim design review and a critical design review for an upcoming landing demonstration mission in 2028.

Blue Origin is also working to restore its pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) to operation and return its New Glenn rocket to flight, following an explosion of the rocket in May that caused extensive damage to the facility. NASA's presentation places that milestone in Q4 2026, a timeline the company has also been very vocal about maintaining. A recent Reuters report, however, suggests that may not happen until early 2027.

By early 2027, the company expects to complete the spacecraft's communications systems and finalize its flight software, with assembly, integration and testing continuing into Q2. Q1 2027 is also when Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 lander (a smaller, uncrewed version of its MK2 successor) will launch to the lunar surface as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program of robotic moon missions.

During Q2 2027, as the Artemis III mission approaches, Blue Origin is expected to complete integration of its test lander with New Glenn and conclude qualification of its BE-7 engine. Throughout next year, the company plans to continue construction and refurbishments at its launch facilities and hopes to have a new launch pad ready to support the upgraded, more powerful New Glenn 9x4 rocket l by the end of Q3. The first flight of that rocket variant is scheduled for Q4 2027, alongside a second MK1 lunar mission and the launch of an uncrewed MK2 demonstration lander.

That spacecraft is expected to attempt its own uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2028, around the same time Blue Origin has scheduled a third MK1 flight. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will need to demonstrate that its lander can safely reach the moon's surface,operate there and return to lunar orbit before NASA clears it to carry astronauts on a future Artemis mission.

NASA's overall timeline remains the same as it has been since the February revamp, with Artemis III expected to launch in mid-2027, followed by a crewed lunar landing on Artemis IV in 2028, and possibly another on Artemis V that same year. There may be changes on the horizon, though. NASA will host a press conference on Friday (Oct. 23) with Administrator Jared Isaacman and Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, as well as Artemis program director Jeremy Parsons. During the event, which you'll be able to watch here at Space.com, they will discuss the status of the upcoming moon missions and an "Artemis acceleration."

SpaceX and Blue Origin still face tight schedules to complete their respective uncrewed landing demonstrations before Artemis IV. With SpaceX targeting Q4 2027 and Blue Origin Q1 2028, both are pushing the margins against NASA's hopes to return astronauts to the lunar surface that same year. Which company ultimately gets the green light for that first landing mission will depend on the progress each makes between now and then, and whether their landers can demonstrate the readiness that NASA requires to safely carry astronauts to the surface of the moon and back again.

SpaceX will soon notch a huge spaceflight milestone, if all goes according to plan.

The company will try to catch both stages of its Starship megarocket during the vehicle's next test flight, which is targeted for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced during SpaceX's quarter 3 (Q3) earnings call today (Oct. 20).

If SpaceX succeeds, this "will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered," Musk said. "The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is, I think, a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness."

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.

As Musk noted, both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars settlement and other grand exploration feats economically feasible.

Starship's recovery strategy is different than that for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have expendable upper stages). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters come back to Earth on landing pads near the launch site or on ships at sea downrange. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will steer themselves directly back to their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its "chopstick" arms.

This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and refly Starship at an accelerated rate, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he envisions launching Starship more than 10,000 times per year by 2030.

Starship has conducted 14 test flights to date, and SpaceX has pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of them. The company has not yet tried to catch Ship, which is a more difficult proposition, as the upper stage travels higher, farther and faster than the booster does.

Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will pull off a Ship catch on the first try. (He did not give a specific target date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)

"I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight," he said. "And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and and then accelerating next year."

Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on Sept. 28, Ship reached orbit for the first time ever. It also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first 26 members of a next-gen broadband constellation in low Earth orbit that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft.

The Starship Flight 15 preview was something of an aside during today's call. The event primarily served to announce SpaceX's financial performance during Q3, the three-month stretch that ended on Sept. 30.

And that performance was strong, company representatives said. SpaceX recorded revenues of $14.6 billion during Q3, an increase of 161% from the $5.6 billion earned during Q3 of 2025. The company had a net income of $4.4 billion during Q3, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same stretch last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.

Just $1.8 billion of 2026 Q3 revenue came from SpaceX's launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments — connectivity (services provided by its Starlink megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration has recently rebranded it, "superintelligence").

SpaceX thinks these latter two segments will continue to boom. That's why it's building the infrastructure to support thousands of Starship launches per year — to loft lots of Starlink satellites and AI data centers to Earth orbit. And the company believes that it's positioned to really start raking in the cash, starting as soon as next year.

"In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between 500 billion [dollars] and a trillion," Musk said.

Daniel Biedermann is a partner at NewSpace Capital. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, recently said that Blue Origin, his space technology company, is likely to go public in the coming years. The announcement has (unsurprisingly) attracted considerable attention, not least because Bezos has spent more than two decades financing the company largely from his personal wealth. He has invested billions of dollars in developing rockets, spacecraft and other forms of technology, often with very little prospect of an immediate return. But although Bezos has now raised the possibility of an initial public offering, he has given no firm indication of when one might happen. He may be right to keep his options open.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. Because he has financed so much of its development by himself, the company has been able to pursue ambitious engineering projects without the financial pressures that publicly listed businesses typically face. But developing reusable rockets, manufacturing spacecraft and building the infrastructure needed for future lunar missions requires extraordinary amounts of capital: These projects can take decades to complete, and even the wealthiest investors must think hard about how best to finance them over the long term. Bezos, then, has good reasons to seek additional sources of investment — particularly as Blue Origin prepares to expand its commercial operations.

An IPO would give Blue Origin the means to raise substantial capital from public investors and reduce its dependence on Bezos's personal wealth. The company could then use that money to expand manufacturing, develop new technology and compete for a greater share of the growing space market. Public ownership would also give existing investors the power to sell some of their holdings and could make it easier for Blue Origin to finance acquisitions. But the company would also have to meet the expectations of shareholders, who would expect to see regular evidence of commercial progress. This, I suspect, is why Bezos wants to establish a stronger business before committing to a listing.

It might have much to prove commercially, but Blue Origin’s technical progress has been remarkable. In January 2025, its New Glenn rocket reached orbit for the first time — a significant achievement for a vehicle built to compete in the heavy-lift launch market. The company has also secured government and commercial contracts and continued developing its lunar capabilities. But it will eventually have to demonstrate that it can launch New Glenn frequently, reliably and at a commercially competitive cost, and it is still some way away from that point.

Some will be asking whether Bezos wants to raise money to accelerate growth or simply to reduce the amount he himself must invest. Such doubts could affect the company's valuation and make it harder to attract investors who share its long-term ambitions. But again, this suggests Bezos is playing the long game. And given the enthusiasm that has surrounded some billionaire-led space ventures, this is sensible. Investors have sometimes attached extraordinary valuations to companies with ambitious plans but limited commercial experience. Space businesses certainly require ambition: engineers will often spend years developing technology before they can sell it. But investors have to distinguish between technical achievement and commercial performance. At the end of the day, they are seeking a strong rate of return.

What’s also worth considering is how Blue Origin's progress could benefit the wider space industry, particularly the specialist companies that supply technology to larger manufacturers and operators. SpaceX has achieved remarkable success in part by developing and manufacturing much of its technology internally. This includes its rockets, spacecraft and satellites. Blue Origin also does something similar, undertaking substantial engineering and manufacturing work itself, but it is not quite so vertically integrated, and thus may have greater scope to work with external suppliers as it expands. It already buys parts, equipment and services from hundreds of businesses. If it can successfully increase its production and launch activity, these suppliers could receive more orders and gain opportunities to develop new technologies. That’s to the good of the sector as a whole.

Why? Because a successful space industry needs more than a handful of large launch providers. It needs companies specializing in satellite communications, propulsion, electronics, software and other areas. Such businesses may have developed highly sophisticated products, but they need bigger customers and predictable demand to expand and produce more. Blue Origin could become an important customer for some of these, particularly if it chooses to buy specialist technology rather than make everything internally. Greater competition between the bigger space companies could translate to more potential customers for suppliers and fewer dependent commercial relationships.

Investors would benefit. There’s real potential in businesses that provide the technology and services on which larger space companies depend — the ‘picks and shovels.’ These can sometimes serve several customers and markets, making them less dependent on the success of a single program. A growing Blue Origin would create more opportunities for companies like these — although, of course, much will depend on how Bezos chooses to organize its supply chain. We shouldn’t assume that Blue Origin will become more open to external suppliers than its competitors, but the possibility is at least worth entertaining.

As it is, Bezos still faces substantial challenges. Blue Origin is not yet a commercially mature business. The company must increase its launch activity; it must demonstrate its reliability; and it must compete for customers in the public and private sectors. It must also decide how much technology to manufacture internally and whether and where third parties can provide better products or products at a lower cost. Bezos has the resources to give the company time to answer these questions, and he appears to be willing to use them. If he continues to prioritize commercial performance before pursuing an IPO, then Blue Origin could eventually enter the public markets in a much stronger position.

The moon is shrinking, and scientists are narrowing in on exactly how much our natural satellite has dwindled over the years.

The moon is thought to have formed from a violent collision between a massive object and our young Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago, and its interior is still gradually cooling off from this ancient collision. As it cools, the moon contracts, leading to a long, slow shrinking process. Now, in a new study, scientists think that they have figured out how much smaller the moon is actually getting.

In this new study, scientists analyzing images snapped by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have spotted over 10,000 young faults, or cracks across the moon's surface. This helped them to figure out how much the moon has contracted over time, and they now estimate that the moon's radius has decreased by about 148 feet (45 meters) over the past 400 to 800 million years.

"The number of these young faults revealed in LROC images is much greater than I ever imagined," study lead Thomas Watters, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, said in a statement. "As the interior of the moon continues to cool and contract, it is expected that the growth of existing faults and formation of new faults continues today."

With these LROC observations, researchers in this study saw a variety of different types of cracks and landforms across the lunar surface. This included lobate scarps, or long, curved structures that form when the moon's surface contracts, cracks and is pushed upwards; and small mare ridges, or narrow "wrinkles" in the lunar surface, across the dark plains on the moon.

Tectonic activity on the moon looks a lot different than it does on Earth. On our own planet, there are about 15 major tectonic plates. On the moon, there are no tectonic plates at all. Instead, the moon has a single-plate body meaning its outer shell is a single piece only broken by faults or other such cracks created by the moon contracting. This means that instead of faults or cracks appearing at tectonic plate boundaries, they are instead scattered all over the moon.

By mapping these thousands of different features, all created from the moon cooling and contracting over time, the researchers are piecing together lunar history. In addition to finding the extent to which the moon has shrunk over time, they also found that some areas of the moon are covered in many more faults than other areas, and the areas with fewer cracks and faults have thicker moon crust.

This led them to conclude that not only are these areas with thicker crust more stable, but they suggest that a great deal of the widespread cracks in the lunar surface were created later in the moon's history as, in its earlier years, its thick crust would have insulated the moon's warm interior and prevented cooling, contracting and cracking.

This work was described in a study published Oct. 14 in The Planetary Science Journal.

For as long as humans have watched the night sky, we have wondered about the moon, pondering everything from its alien appearance to its influence over phenomena on Earth such as ocean tides, climate stability, and even the natural rhythms of many organisms.

Among the many questions we have about Earth's lone natural satellite, one remains preeminent: what are the moon's origins, and how long has it orbited Earth?

Today, the leading theory among astronomers is that deep in our planet's past — perhaps within roughly the first 100 million years of solar system history — Earth collided with a planet-sized object, creating the moon within a period that may have been as short as just a few hours. Known as the giant-impact hypothesis, this proposed event involves a hypothetical Mars-sized protoplanet astronomers call Theia. The material ejected into orbit by the powerful impact in question would have accumulated afterward, forming the moon that we observe today.

What do we know?

Birth of a lunar origin hypothesis

The evolution of this striking solution to one of the moon's most enduring mysteries goes back to 1946, when geologist Reginald Aldworth Daly was among the first to suggest that an impact event might explain the formation of the moon.

Before Daly, scientists had been leaning toward theories that involved Earth's rapid spin billions of years ago, when each day may have at one time lasted as little as 2 or 3 hours. Decades later in the 1970s, researchers William Hartmann and Donald Davis developed their own models involving collisions of large bodies left over from planetary formation, which could collide with younger planets.

Building on such ideas, other researchers went on to propose similar scenarios between the early Earth and a Mars-sized object. Early in the following decade, the concept eventually claimed its place as the leading lunar-formation process during a landmark conference held in Kona, Hawaii, in 1984.

Evidence of a planetary-scale collision

The popularity of the giant-impact hypothesis can be attributed to the multiple lines of evidence supporting the impact scenario. For instance, researchers have long recognized the similar stable-isotope ratios between both moon rocks and those from Earth, strongly suggesting a link between their origins.

Additionally, the unusually high angular momentum (or spin) of the Earth-moon system, when compared to observations of other rocky planets, also could be explained as one of the effects of a massive collision.

Further clues can be found in the moon's composition, which reveals a relatively small iron core and lower density. This is significant to astronomers, since a hypothetical giant impact would have seen the suspected Theia protoplanet's metallic core merging with the young Earth's interior — meanwhile, lighter mantle and crust material from both worlds would have become dislodged and blasted into orbit, eventually helping form the moon.

Another important piece of evidence involves the relative depletion of volatile substances (a chemical that easily turns into gas or vapor at room temperatures) in lunar material, which again suggests that it might have been lost during an extremely energetic event, an idea further supported by evidence that the early moon once possessed a substantial magma ocean.

What remains unknown?

New research expands on the Theia hypothesis

Still, several significant questions remain, including what precise conditions led to the impact, and how the resulting planetary material evolved into the moon as it appears today.

Recently, a new study by Adeene Denton of Southwest Research Institute and colleagues at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory put a new spin on the Theia hypothesis, suggesting that the suspected ancient impact may have been significantly influenced by the heat and physical strength of the two colliding bodies.

The team's findings challenge some long-held views about the giant-impact hypothesis, while lending new support to others. For instance, the team's simulations revealed that while some impacts lead to the creation of a disk of debris that later coalesces into a moon, under other conditions, simulations support the idea that the moon could have been formed in a remarkably short period of time — perhaps within around five hours.

However, one of the primary issues with determining the exact conditions of the giant-impact hypothesis involves the ongoing debate over the moon's age.

"There is a large controversy regarding the age of the moon," said Dr. Erik Asphaug, a planetary science professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and one of the new study's co-authors.

In an email to Space, Asphaug explained some of the issues arising from this, since current estimates place the timing of the moon's formation anywhere from around 40 to 120 million years after the formation of the solar system. Therein lies part of the issue, according to Asphaug, who says this timing could have significant implications for models of the Theia impact.

If it had been an earlier collision, Asphaug says this would have involved a hotter Theia due to the greater degree of radiogenic heating; by contrast, a later impact would have meant a cooler and stronger Theia.

"I don't think we know enough yet to say the moon (and by corollary, the Earth) formed this way or that way," Asphaug told Space. "But knowing how temperature affects the result opens up a new dimension for viewing the problem, and that is always helpful because it shifts our frame of reference, like getting out of the car to have a walk around."

A lunar enigma in time and space

For researchers like Asphaug, understanding the moon's formation requires looking at it as more than just an event in space, but also as one in time. Doing so allows comparisons between three different metrics: isotopic decay, temperature-dependent material strength, and the geological record of debris striking other planets — a process through which he believes tighter constraints could be placed on precisely when the moon-forming impact might have occurred.

Adeene Denton, the study's lead author, also emphasized the introduction of the time component her team's research brings to the table, telling Space in an email that the outcome of the moon-forming impact could have depended significantly on the timing of the collision.

"Before, scientists have generally assumed that the outcome of the collision will be the same regardless of when it takes place," Denton wrote. "But now we know that temperature's effect on material properties, which is dictated by how old and/or cold the proto-Earth and Theia might be, alters things substantially."

By connecting impact simulations to data related to the moon's geochemical record, as well as models of early solar system formation, Denton thinks her team's work could help scientists better constrain precisely how and when the moon formed.

The mystery continues

For now, in terms of which possible scenario — an earlier or later collision event — emerges as being the most likely, Denton says it's still difficult to say.

"It depends on which scenarios for solar system formation you favor," Denton told Space.

"I am generally in favor of an earlier formation of the moon, consistent with a rapid planet-building phase in our solar system," Denton said, "but we can't neglect the possibility that the moon formed late."

While much work remains to be done, Denton and Asphaug believe their findings help significantly advance present efforts to resolve some of the questions about the giant-impact hypothesis — a few of which have lingered now for many years.

For Asphaug, however, such lingering questions may simply be part of the scientific process.

"Science has a way of wandering around for a long time until finally it all comes to focus," Asphaug said.

"I believe that will happen, in part thanks to this work, in the coming decade."

Dean Robbins is a journalist and children's author. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, who died on Sept. 30 at age 90, played a key role in putting astronauts on the moon. She was a problem-solver extraordinaire, and it all started in early childhood.

Considering the name "daddy longlegs" unfair to female arachnids, young Margaret decided to call half of them "mommy longlegs." Wondering why the neighborhood baseball players were all boys, she determined to join the team herself.

As she grew up in the 1940s and '50s, Margaret noticed a similar problem with various professions. Why were doctors, judges and scientists almost always men? The solution: she would study hard in school and prepare herself for any job she might care to do.

It's no surprise that a born problem-solver would gravitate to computers. In the late 1950s, the new technology offered mind-bending possibilities, and this college math major saw a chance to put her skills to use on a cosmic scale.

Hamilton had long been a stargazer, thanks to a philosophical father who taught her to love the night sky. In 1965, after stints in meteorology and satellite tracking, she became interested in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology project that designed in-flight computers for NASA's moon mission.

The team, of course, consisted solely of men. But, just as with her neighborhood baseball team, Hamilton refused to accept limitations for herself or anybody else. She kicked open the door and quickly rose to director of software engineering.

With her knack for devising novel solutions to seemingly insoluble problems, no one was better suited for the job. Working with the era's primitive technology, Margaret thought through the various mishaps that could occur on a spaceflight and designed the software to handle every contingency.

The epochal Apollo 11 moon mission of 1969 put her planning to the test. As astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin neared the moon's surface in their lunar module, an error overloaded the onboard computer's processing unit. Mission Control faced the prospect of aborting the landing, but Margaret's ingenious programming allowed the system to prioritize essential tasks while canceling the inessential ones. The lunar module touched down without a hitch, and Armstrong and Aldrin became famous.

Sadly, Margaret Hamilton did not. She continued to work behind the scenes, contributing to the five additional lunar landings as well as Skylab and the space shuttle. In 1976, she struck off on her own to start a software company. She might have lived the rest of her life in obscurity if not for a fateful black-and-white photograph from 1969.

This image began to attract attention on the internet in the 2010s. It showed Margaret wedged between a coatrack and a blackboard at MIT, standing beside a towering stack of her printed code from the Apollo missions. Bespectacled and smiling, she radiates the confidence of a scientist who had stormed the boys' club and conquered the universe.

I was one of those fascinated by the photograph, and I contacted Margaret about the possibility of profiling her in a children's book. She initially resisted, uncomfortable with being the center of attention. But she came to see the appeal of a book about herself that she could read to her great-grandchildren, so that they might be inspired to break barriers themselves one day. She warmed to the task of telling her life story and even sent me examples of her Apollo code, which Lucy Knisley incorporated in the illustrations for "Margaret and the Moon: How Margaret Hamilton Saved the First Lunar Landing."

With the 2016 book and movie "Hidden Figures" calling attention to women's overlooked contributions to the space program, Hamilton soon had to get used to being the center of attention. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom and achieved LEGO immortality in the "Women of NASA" set. In 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, Google used reflected moonlight to create a massive portrait of Margaret in the Mojave Desert. Rarely has so humble a soul received so grand a tribute.

The world will miss Margaret Hamilton, but, just like her great-grandchildren, we will always have her example to inspire us. She showed that, no matter how daunting the obstacles, there are few problems we can't solve.

I know perfectly well that the moon comes out during the day. I have known this for decades. Yet whenever I spot it in a blue afternoon sky, some primitive part of my brain still thinks it has turned up early.

I'm certainly not the only one. Many people don't understand how it could be visible in daylight. In their eyes, the moon is a nighttime object. Why? Because that's when they notice it — it appears brighter.

We tend to think of the sun as belonging to the day and the moon to the night because that's how they're usually presented to us as children. Astronomically, it makes little sense. The moon spends plenty of time above our horizon while the sun is also up — it spends half its time in the daytime sky, in fact.

If the moon, pale but unmistakable, looks slightly out of place against a blue sky, it's not — you are. This week is a great time to get used to seeing it there. Just past first quarter, the moon will spend each afternoon hanging in the daytime sky, becoming easier to spot as the sun sinks towards the horizon.

What's happening and when to look

The moon reached first quarter on Sunday, Oct. 18, and is now waxing toward full moon, which occurs early on Monday, Oct. 26 (Oct. 25 in some time zones). That puts it in the right part of its orbit to be conspicuous during the late afternoon this weekend.

Here's the useful bit to remember. Around first quarter, the moon rises roughly around midday. As it waxes towards full, it rises progressively later in the afternoon. By full moon, it rises around sunset.

That makes the days immediately after first quarter an excellent time to get into the habit of finding the moon before sunset. On Monday, Oct. 19, look southeast in the afternoon for a moon just over half-lit. Each afternoon this week, it will become a little more illuminated, move farther east against the background stars, and appear progressively later in the day.

You don't need to wait until dusk. In fact, that's the point. Start looking during the afternoon, when the sun is still well above the horizon. Once you find the moon, it can be surprisingly conspicuous against the blue sky.

How and when I'm watching it

I'll start looking in the mid-to-late afternoon this week, when the waxing moon should already be high enough to find easily. You can check the exact moonrise time where you are, but there's no need to catch it as it rises. Look towards the east or southeast and scan the blue sky.

Once you've found the moon in daylight, keep checking on it as sunset approaches. The moon doesn't suddenly become brighter, of course. Instead, the surrounding sky darkens, increasing the contrast until the pale daytime moon seems to switch on at dusk and grow increasingly brilliant.

Binoculars will give you a superb view at dusk, particularly along the terminator — the boundary between lunar day and night. That's where low-angle sunlight throws mountains and crater rims into sharp relief. As the moon waxes this week, the terminator will move steadily across its surface, revealing a different landscape each afternoon.

That's another reason not to wait for the full moon. The full moon gets most of the attention, but the week beforehand is arguably a much better time to get to know our nearest celestial neighbor — and you don't even have to wait until dark.

Stargazer's corner: October 23-29, 2026

This is a bright-moon week. Full moon arrives early on Monday, Oct. 26, so moonlight will wash out faint stars and make galaxies and nebulas much harder to see. So go for Saturn instead. It reached opposition earlier this month and remains very well placed in the evening sky. Better still, the nearly full moon passes near Saturn around Oct. 23-24, giving beginners a convenient landmark for locating the planet. The moon's glare will hide faint nearby stars, but Saturn itself is easily bright enough to cope. A good example will be Oct. 27, when the Pleiades is passed closely by a bright moon. The Seven Sisters therefore won't be at their best, so you'll need to use binoculars — if you do, you'll see them easily enough.

Constellation of the week: Auriga

Auriga, "the Charioteer," is climbing in the northeastern and eastern sky during late October evenings. It's easiest to find if you start at Capella, one of the brightest stars in the entire night sky. It's just 43 light-years from the sun. From there, I look for the other stars that form Auriga's rough pentagon, including Menkalinan, Mahasim and Almaaz. The fifth corner is Elnath, although it officially belongs to neighboring Taurus.

Auriga gets even better with binoculars. The Milky Way runs straight through it, bringing with it three bright open star clusters — M36, M37 and M38. All three show up in binoculars under a reasonably dark sky, while a small telescope starts to resolve them into individual stars. There's always another layer to find in the night sky.

My latest stargazing obsession

There's something special about stargazing during the blue hour — that brief transition when daylight drains from the sky and night's window begins to open. It's particularly beautiful a few days before full moon, when the near-full orb is already rising in the east as the sun sets in the west. Look below it, and you may also see the Belt of Venus, a pinkish band above the eastern horizon caused by reddened sunlight shining through Earth's atmosphere, with our planet's dark blue-gray shadow beneath. As the sky fades through ever-deeper shades of blue, the moon brightens, and the first stars emerge around it.

Your invitation to revisit the Space Age has arrived.

Whether you miss the days when people got dressed up to fly or you wish your "other" ride was a rocket, Mission: 60s has a *space* reserved for you.

"This is a three-day celebration of Apollo, aviation, space exploration and 1960s culture," reads a promo for the Oct. 23 to 25 event in New York. "You will be fully immersed in the sights, sounds and spirit of the 1960s Space Age."

"The weekend features astronauts, Apollo flight directors, Mission Control engineers, Star Trek legends, space artists, a Saturday Spacefarer Soiree with live music (1960s attire encouraged!), and a Sunday NASA Artemis keynote."

Organized by Luna Replicas, a company specializing in vintage space gear, and Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that underwrites spaceflight experiences, Mission: 60s is aimed at being the bridge between the last time humanity reached for the moon and today's "second space race" to do it again — this time to stay.

Launch pad

Your journey back to the 60s begins when you check into the TWA Hotel at the John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York.

Once a functioning terminal for Trans World Airlines (as featured in the 2002 movie "Catch Me If You Can"), the TWA Flight Center has been reimagined as a hotel like no other.

"At the center of the hotel is Eero Saarinen's iconic TWA Flight Center, where restaurants, bars and retail outlets have taken flight. Two hotel wings, designed to reflect and defer to the landmark TWA Flight Center, sit behind the historic building and contain 512 guest rooms with views of JFK's runways and the TWA Flight Center," reads the hotel's website.

The TWA Hotel is only the first sight straight out of the past that guests will encounter. On Friday (Oct. 23), Mission: 60s begins with a guided tour of the 1964 World's Fair site in Flushing Meadows. Today the home to the New York Hall of Science, the outdoor exhibits includes the Rocket Park, where Gemini-Titan II and Mercury-Atlas D rockets and a Saturn V F-1 engine still stand.

"The space age was less than 10 years old when rockets like these powered incredible missions to outer space," reads the description on the museum's website. "Visitors will learn about the history of these vehicles as well as the United States' mission to reach the moon."

Also on view at the World's Fair site is the Unisphere, a spherical stainless steel representation of Earth, and the Astro-View Observation Towers (later reimagined as actual flying saucers in the 1997 movie "Men in Black").

The first day concludes with Space For Humanity's (separately-ticketed) "Celestial Soiree" and a Mission: 60's pool party on the hotel's rooftop.

MCC, ILC and ILM

Saturday and Sunday at Mission: 60s will bring together members of Mission Control (MCC), spaceflight experts (including ILC Dover, makers of the Apollo spacesuit) and representatives from the Hollywood community who brought about the 60s-era visions of space exploration (including Industrial Light & Magic [ILM]) for a series of engaging panel discussions.

Among the various topics scheduled for the two days of talks are:

• Apollo Mission Control & Flight Operations
• Apollo to Artemis & Beyond
• Women in Aerospace
• Apollo Communications: The Sights & Sounds From the Moon
• SciFi Inspires
• The Overview Effect
• Making Space Real: Art & Visual Effects That Sold Humanity on Space
• Space Advocacy

Featured speakers and moderators include Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin, TIME Magazine science editor Jeffrey Kluger, former NASA astronauts Nicole Stott and Ron Garan, "Star Trek" actor Bob Picardo and researcher Frank White.

On Saturday evening, there will be a second gala, "The Spacefarer Soiree," featuring a limited meet and greet aboard a Lockheed Constellation airliner and music by Bonnie Gordon. Set in 1969, attendees are encouraged to come wearing their finest period clothing.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, Uplift Aerospace will host a shared "Overview" VR experience for up to 50 people participating together.

Both days will include a vendor and artists' hall, with guests signing autographs and their books, as well as companies such as NASA's official patch provider A-B Emblem, selling Apollo-themed souvenirs and memorabilia.

A weekend pass is $150 per person, with add-ons for VIP access, the galas and Friday's World Fair excursion. Single-day admission is $85.

SpaceX wants to start flying its Starship megarocket a lot more often.

The company has requested permission to launch Starship from its Starbase site in South Texas up to 456 times per year. That's a big jump from the currently allowed cadence of 25.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the early stages of reviewing the request. Today (Oct. 14), the agency announced "its intent to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, open a public scoping period and hold public scoping meetings for SpaceX’s proposal."

Starship, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It's also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX believes will revolutionize spaceflight.

The megarocket has flown 14 times to date, all of them test flights from Starbase, which is near the Texas border city of Brownsville. On the most recent jaunt, which lifted off on Sept. 28, Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first members of a new broadband constellation that could eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Assembling that network will require a lot of Starship launches. And even more will be needed to build SpaceX's planned Starmind AI megaconstellation, which Elon Musk has said will harbor a million satellites. Indeed, the world's richest man has said that SpaceX is targeting more than 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030.

Not all of those flights will originate from Starbase, which hosts two orbital pads. SpaceX is working to get three Starship pads up and running on Florida's Space Coast, and the company aims to break ground on a $100 billion, 12-pad complex in Louisiana next year.

Each operational Starship launch will also feature two landings. Both of the vehicle's elements — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage — are designed to return to the pad after liftoff, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. So SpaceX's proposal for 456 launches from Starbase per year includes a request for approval for 912 landings.

SpaceX plans to work up to this cadence in two phases, according to the FAA. Phase 1 "would include up to 100 annual launches and up to 200 annual landings (100 of Starship and 100 of Super Heavy)," the agency wrote. "Launches and landings could occur any day or time of the week."

Phase 2 covers 456 launches and 912 landings, which would occur only Monday through Friday, though at any time on those days.

The FAA will hold five "public scoping meetings" about the proposal next month, four of them in person in the Starbase area and one of them virtual.

There will be two in-person meetings on Nov. 17 at Texas Southmost College, one from 1-3 p.m. local (Central) time and the other from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Two in-person meetings will follow on Nov. 19, at the same two times but at a different location: the Port Isabel Event & Cultural Center.

The virtual meeting will be held Nov. 18, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Central time. Registration is required for all of these meetings, even the virtual one. You can register here.

Starship just reached orbit for the first time, carrying satellites for SpaceX's Starlink program. Analysts disagree on whether that's a detour or the destination — and what of the company's plans for the Red Planet?

Ten years ago, Elon Musk stood on stage at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, and unveiled plans for a giant spaceship to carry people to Mars. This past Sept. 28 — a decade and a day later — the descendant of that vehicle reached orbit for the first time, on Starship's 14th-ever test flight.

The designs and hardware evolved greatly over those 10 years. For example, the 2016 design, called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), employed carbon fiber, but this gave way to the stainless-steel Starship, which SpaceX began testing in 2019 with short hops from its Texas site. Prototypes flew to high altitude and landed, and some exploded, until SN15 stuck a landing in May 2021. That same year, NASA selected Starship as the first astronaut lander for its Artemis lunar missions.

The full Starship stack — a Super Heavy booster with a Ship upper stage on top — first flew in April 2023 and failed within minutes. Three flights followed in less than a year, each reaching space, and each ending with Ship lost on reentry. During a 2024 test flight, SpaceX moved liquid oxygen between two tanks inside one Ship, the closest it has come to the propellant transfer that any mission to the moon or Mars will require. In June of that year, the company brought both stages down in controlled splashdowns, and that October the launch tower's mechanical arms caught a returning Super Heavy booster for the first time.

Progress wasn't linear, however. After a booster catch in January 2025, a string of Ship failures followed, and one upper stage exploded during ground testing that June. A clean flight in August 2025 helped break the streak, and by that October, SpaceX flew the last of the older design. The first Starship V3 launched in May 2026. Another went up in July, and Flight 14 followed on Sept. 28.

'A different beast'

"ITS was definitely a different beast," said Matija Renčelj of the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). "Yet, we have to acknowledge two trends that both attest to SpaceX's agility and increasingly market-first rather than vision-first outlook."

"The gap between ITS and Starship is real, but I would not consider that a failure," he said.

In his view, the rocket is mainly a business tool. "The rocket is the means, not the end," Renčelj said, adding that its main role now is cutting Starlink deployment costs. SpaceX currently operates a constellation of more than 11,000 Starlink broadband satellites, almost all of which were launched by its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. But Starship Flight 14 lofted the first members of the next-gen Starlink V3 constellation, which will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan. Starlink V3 satellites are bigger and heavier than their predecessors and can only be launched efficiently by Starship.

Renčelj said the moon focus reflects Washington's priorities and SpaceX's interest in staying central to NASA's Artemis program, and in reassuring investors after the company's acquisition of xAI this past February and its IPO, which occurred in June.

Joseph Gonzalez, a University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering aerospace professor who spent about a decade working on Artemis, sees it differently.

"I think SpaceX is still very much targeting Mars," he said. "SpaceX continues to stress making humanity multiplanetary and establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars as long-term objectives." Gonzalez sees the moon as a proving ground rather than a replacement. Just days away from Earth, the moon lets engineers find problems "before committing humans to a Mars mission."

"Space exploration takes time, especially when you are developing a human spaceflight system with this level of complexity," Gonzalez said. "They build, fly, learn, make changes and fly again. That creates very visible successes and failures, but it also allows engineers to accumulate flight experience and data quickly."

Challenges remain

Reaching Earth orbit isn't the hard part for Starship. Gonzalez said that the most underrated gap is the large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer between vehicles once in orbit. SpaceX has moved propellant between tanks in one Ship before, but its architecture requires numerous transfers involving tanker ships to refill a fuel depot, which a Ship must visit in order to make journeys to the moon or Mars. Gonzalez described this depot as a gas station in space, but there are challenges typical gas stations don't face. The fuel is extremely cold, for example, and it needs to be moved in microgravity conditions.

That milestone is yet to happen, and the timeline for an attempt is not clear. It could potentially come with Flight 15 and 16. These were aspirationally scheduled for no earlier than mid and late October, respectively, but have now apparently slipped to mid-to-late November (though there has been no public confirmation of any firm target date).

In 2025, Musk said there was a "50/50" chance of Starship making a run for Mars in 2026. However, with the once-every-26-months Mars launch window — which lasts a few weeks, opening in late October — and no propellant transfer demonstration yet in the books, that is off the table. The next such low-energy orbital transfer opportunity for the Red Planet opens in late 2028, running into early 2029. At the same time, NASA is currently targeting late 2028 for its Artemis IV mission — which involves Starship — to return humans to the lunar surface after an absence of more than 50 years, giving SpaceX a challenging deadline toward which to work. The company will need to dedicate key resources to meet that timeline, including developing life support systems for crew.

For now, Starship's most immediate role is hauling Starlink satellites in orbit. Renčelj noted that startups raising billions are betting on Starship delivering low super-launch prices along with Falcon 9-like reliability. "Their business models are underpinned by what might be a single point of failure," he said.

"Starship still has major capabilities to demonstrate before it can perform the complete missions envisioned for the moon and Mars," said Gonzalez.

"So I would say the timelines are comparable considering the ambition of the vehicles," he added. "The bigger difference isn't necessarily how many years they have taken, but it's where and how each program chooses to learn during those years."

Musk has repeatedly talked of getting thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people on Mars "to make life multiplanetary." Most immediately, SpaceX has a number of business goals and lunar commitments to adhere to ahead of a first uncrewed visit to Mars. Late 2028 appears to be the next real opportunity.

Don't expect any of the Artemis II moon astronauts to fly again soon.

On Tuesday (Oct. 13), NASA announced that Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch will become the agency’s acting deputy chief engineer, effective Nov. 1.

"With this appointment, Koch will transition to management astronaut status and will no longer be eligible for future spaceflight assignments," NASA officials wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

Her three Artemis II crewmates had already shared their next moves, none of which put another spaceflight in play in the near future.

Mission commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both of NASA, became "emeritus" astronauts last month, a role that seems to include planning, advising and mentoring duties but no flights into the final frontier. Glover will also work full-time at his alma mater, the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo.

"I'm grateful they will continue sharing what they learned with our astronauts, flight controllers and engineers as we prepare for Artemis III in 2027 and the missions that follow," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said of Wiseman and Glover in a Sept. 9 statement.

The fourth Artemis II astronaut, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, announced a change of his own in July: He planned to become a reservist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he's also a colonel. That move became official last month as well.

Artemis II sent the four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon in an Orion capsule. It was the first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program and the first human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) since Apollo 17 in 1972.

As Isaacman mentioned, the next mission in the program is Artemis III, a docking test in LEO scheduled to launch next year. The Artemis III crew, which was announced in June, consists of NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik (commander), Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio (mission specialists) and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (pilot).

If all goes according to plan, Artemis IV will land astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2028. We don't yet know who will fly on that historic mission.

Koch will succeed current NASA Deputy Chief Engineer Katherine Van Hooser, who will retire on Oct. 21 after more than 35 years of work for the space agency.

"In her new role, Koch will help lead NASA's engineering community, supporting technical oversight, mission readiness, and engineering excellence across the agency's programs and projects," agency officials said in Tuesday's statement.

Koch is a natural choice for the job, given her education and experience. She holds bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and physics and a master's in electrical engineering, and she began her NASA career as an electrical engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

NASA selected Koch as an astronaut candidate in 2013. She has two spaceflights under her belt: Artemis II and a 328-day-flight to the International Space Station that launched in March 2019. That's the longest space mission ever conducted by a woman, and it featured the first three all-female spacewalks, which Koch conducted with fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir.

"Christina has seen NASA engineering from both sides of the equation: developing complex systems on the ground and trusting them with her life in space," Isaacman said in the Tuesday statement.

"After spending nearly a year living and working aboard the International Space Station and helping lead America back around the moon on Artemis II this year, she brings an extraordinary combination of technical expertise, operational experience, and judgment to this role," he added. "I am excited to see the impact she will have across NASA as we return Americans to the lunar surface, build the Moon Base, get underway on nuclear power in space, and develop the capabilities that will ultimately take us on to Mars."

NASA is asking for ideas to stop static electricity from zapping astronauts or critical hardware during moon missions.

The agency opened a "Lunar Grounding Challenge" to avoid situations where an astronaut on the moon could become "a walking, high voltage capacitor." Submissions for the $150,000 competition are due Jan. 15 and you can see the requirements here.

NASA is hoping to put astronaut boots at the lunar south pole in 2028 during the Artemis 4 or 5 missions, on the first landing mission since NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972. But simulations suggest that both "tribocharging" (electric-charge transfer between two objects) and plasma charging (from ambient gas in the region) could build up electric charge on spacesuits. "This problem is severely compounded when entering lunar shadows and permanently shadowed regions," the agency wrote, referring to deeply cratered areas where the sun does not touch the lunar surface.

The concern is that astronauts' spacesuits could become electrically charged, as there would be an excess of electrons (negatively charged particles) compared with ions (positively charged) in these areas.

"The risk occurs when an astronaut returns to the spacecraft," the agency added. The lander would have a slight positive charge, producing an issue once the "highly negatively-charged astronaut approaches the vehicle."

NASA has asked industry partners for ideas that can help an astronaut avoid "becoming a walking, high voltage capacitor", including issues such as an electrical arc that could damage spacesuits, spark fires in the oxygen atmosphere of a spacecraft, or create electrical shocks. (A Mars simulation in 2018 was reportedly derailed due to a crew experiencing electrical issues, so this problem is not unprecedented.)

The challenge aims to create designs that would safely discharge the astronaut and their spacesuit before an astronaut touches the lander. Among the technical requirements, NASA is looking for something small (in terms of mass, volume and power) that would be able to operate even in the extreme temperature swings of the lunar surface. The technology must also be able to help as many as four extra-vehicular activities (moonwalks) that take place over as long as 10 days.

"In addition, the suspended lunar dust and heavy dust buildup on a suit in these environments significantly increases arcing lengths, allowing sparks to jump across larger gaps than they would in a clean vacuum. Therefore, the solution must aim to avoid a sudden arc that may come into contact with the outer pressure garment — suit — or the lander," NASA wrote in the challenge description.

The challenge will include multiple phases, including a concept design, concept refinement after chatting with reviewers, and then a final selection. NASA did not release a target date in its press release for when the tech would be available for astronauts, but the agency is planning on a long-term moon base for astronaut missions that would be largely ready to go in the 2030s if schedules hold.

Are there secret underground caves on the moon? NASA has a new program that aims to find out.

Though we see it in the sky most nights, the moon still holds an incredible amount of mystery. One such mystery is a large underground cave, or a cavernous tube carved out by ancient lava, that scientists think extends past a particular pit on the moon's surface. And to get to the bottom of it, NASA has selected a project known as GIMLI (the Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation, not the character from Lord of the Rings). GIMLI was selected along with two other programs that are all intended to expand our understanding of the moon to better support a future moon base, which NASA aims to build near the south pole.

"NASA Science is building the ultimate interplanetary survival guide to ensure that science goes first to the lunar surface to provide our future astronaut crews with the vital information, resources, and safety precautions needed ahead of time to survive the night on the moon," Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.

Lunar mysteries

The site of this investigation will be the Marius Hill Pit, which was discovered in 2009 by Japan's Kaguya moon orbiter. You can see the pit clearly in the probe's images. But researchers think that there's more there than just a large hole in the lunar surface.

They think it's possible that the pit is connected to a vast, underground cave likely created by lava flowing in the ancient past. If true, this could shed light on the history of volcanic activity on the moon.

"Confirming a substantial lava tube would give us an insight into how volcanism operated on the moon," GIMLI deputy principal investigator Gareth Morgan said in a different statement. "Lava tubes are a common feature of basaltic volcanism on Earth, so identifying them on the moon means we could use knowledge of such terrestrial caves to better understand lunar history."

Even more, if researchers confirm the presence of this lava tube, astronauts could potentially use it as a natural shelter on the lunar surface. These lava-made caves would provide general shelter as well as protection from the extreme temperatures and radiation exposure experienced on the moon's surface. Lava tubes could also be a safe "bunker" of sorts where future astronauts could be shielded from micrometeorites. While a future moon base will probably have human-made shelters included, natural caves could be an incredible, existing resource that astronauts could tap into.

How to find a moon cave

GIMLI will work directly on the lunar surface, scanning beneath to look for signs of the lava tube. This investigation comes from a proposal led by the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and will be funded through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program.

The investigation is partnering with Honeybee Robotics to help build the equipment and instrumentation that will be necessary for the study. This gear will get to the moon aboard a lander and rover via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, and the data collected will be studied by a team led by PSI associate director and senior scientist Than Putzig. The work done by PSI will be in partnership with the Norwegian Space Agency.

From the lunar surface, GIMLI will gather data using ground-penetrating radar, seismic sensors and a gravimeter to better understand what's really happening underneath the surface. These measurements will allow GIMLI to determine if there is a subsurface lava tube and, if so, how big it is. Could it fit an entire astronaut crew? We will have to wait and see.

The great views of Starship's first orbital flight keep on coming.

The megarocket circled our planet for the first time ever on Sept. 28, its 14th liftoff to date. And Starship deployed some payloads when it got up there — 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink satellites, the first members of a broadband constellation that will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

SpaceX already released still imagery of that historic deployment, which was captured by cameras on a few of the Starlink satellites. But on Tuesday, the company gave us something even better, releasing gorgeous video of Starlink craft popping out of the Starship upper stage's "Pez dispenser" slot.

"Constant communication is what makes autonomy like this safe," representatives of Starlink, which is a SpaceX subsidiary, said in a Tuesday X post that featured the deployment video.

"Early contact lets us take maneuvering responsibility, publish ephemeris faster than ground radar can catalog the object, and deorbit and keep commanding through demise if needed," they added. "We treat early communications as a requirement, not a nice-to-have."

A few days earlier, on Oct. 2, SpaceX posted three short videos of another important Flight 14 milestone — stage separation, when the megarocket's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship spacecraft began flying independently of its Super Heavy booster.

The footage captured the farewell from both perspectives. One video showed Super Heavy falling back toward Earth, while the other two revealed Ship powering its way toward orbit, its six Raptor engines glowing yellow-orange with the effort.

Super Heavy came down relatively quickly, steering itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. Ship stayed up for another three hours, circling Earth multiple times (and deploying those Starlink satellites) before meeting its own watery end in the northern Pacific Ocean.

Despite Flight 14's successes, Starship remains in the development phase and needs to tick a few other important boxes before it's fully operational.

For example, SpaceX still needs to demonstrate in-space refueling of Ship, which will be necessary on all Starship missions that venture beyond Earth orbit. And crewed versions of the vehicle will need a life-support system, which has yet to fly on any of the test missions to date.

The first Starship launch from Florida may be just a few months away.

All 14 of the SpaceX megarocket's test flights to date have lifted off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas — including the most recent, on Sept. 28, which saw Starship reach orbit for the first time.

But SpaceX is working hard to get three pads on Florida's Space Coast ready for Starship. And one of them, historic Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), is nearly there, according to the company.

"Things are going super well at 39A," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a briefing on Oct. 1 that primarily discussed that day's launch of the Crew-13 astronaut mission to the International Space Station.

The pad's new Starship launch tower is nearly complete, as is most other essential construction at the site, according to Scheiman.

"We've essentially done a lot of the initial build of the structures and the systems needed for launching Starship, and we're beginning to step into the sort of acceptance testing and operational testing prior to activation," she said. "So, we're kind of through the main construction and going into the proofing, testing — activation testing."

The work at Pad 39A began in late 2021. The fact that it's taken so long shouldn't be surprising, for Starship requires some very specialized infrastructure. After all, it's the biggest rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall. For comparison, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles — the only rockets that have flown out of Pad 39A since SpaceX started leasing it from NASA in 2014 — are both about 230 feet (70 m) tall.

Starship is also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and its recovery operations are very different than those of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The first stages of those two rockets touch down either on a ship at sea or on a designated landing pad close to the launch site. But Starship's two stages — its Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to come back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the giant tower's "chopstick" arms. So finishing construction of Pad 39A's new Starship tower will be a very big deal.

Starship also employs different engines than the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy — Raptors rather than Merlins. Raptors burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than rocket-grade kerosene and LOX like Merlins, so the new Starship-friendly 39A needs a new tank farm to feed in this different mix of propellant.

SpaceX plans to launch at least one more Starship test flight from Starbase before flying the megarocket out of KSC, Scheiman said on Oct. 1 — meaning the first Florida Starship launch come come as soon as Flight 16.

The company has not yet announced target dates for upcoming Starship launches, but provisional planning documents identify Oct. 19 and Oct. 30 as possible "no earlier than" dates for Flight 15 and Flight 16, respectively. Those dates may be a bit aspirational, but they suggest that SpaceX aims to fly Starship again soon, and to launch two missions in relatively quick succession. (For perspective: Starship has flown three times so far this year — on May 22, July 24 and Sept. 28.)

Whenever Starship breaks in the new Pad 39A, it will be something of a blast from the past. The launch complex was originally built in the 1960s to host launches of a different megarocket — NASA's Saturn V, which sent the Apollo moon missions skyward. Pad 39A was the jumping-off point for some of the most iconic Apollo flights, including Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 11 in July 1969.

This tradition will continue, if all goes according to plan: NASA picked Starship's Ship upper stage to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.

Ship is scheduled to fly for the Artemis program for the first time on Artemis III, a planned 2027 docking test in Earth orbit between the vehicle and NASA's Orion capsule. And that Ship liftoff will take place from Pad 39A, Scheiman said.

There's more pad work going on in Florida as well. Late last year, the U.S. Air Force gave SpaceX permission to fly Starship from two pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next-door to KSC. Those two pads — SLC (Space Launch Complex)-37A and SLC-37B — could eventually host 76 Starship liftoffs per year between them.

SpaceX has already made considerable progress on SLC-37A and SLC-37B, according to Scheiman. "If you look towards Launch Complex 37, you can see the beginnings of that Starship tower," she said on Oct. 1.

And SpaceX plans to break ground next year on an even bigger Starship launch site — the $100 billion, 12-pad Starbase Louisiana complex. Twelve new pads seems like overkill, unless you know that SpaceX aims to launch more than 10,000 Starship missions per year by 2030.

The vast majority of those liftoffs will serve to assemble two SpaceX megaprojects in Earth orbit: the next-gen Starlink broadband network, which will consist of about 100,000 satellites, and Starmind, an AI data center constellation that will feature a million spacecraft, according to Elon Musk.

Millions of stargazers saw Jupiter vanish from the night sky on Tuesday (Oct. 6) as the moon's slender crescent passed directly in front of the gas giant in a spectacular display of orbital mechanics.

The full occultation was visible across a swath of North America, Western Africa and the Atlantic Ocean, where the moon passed directly between Jupiter and the observer.

Countless others outside of the path of occultation saw the 20%-lit moon shine just a few degrees away from Jupiter thanks to the parallax effect, which causes nearby celestial objects to appear in a subtly different location based on the viewer's location on Earth. (Reminder: Your clenched fist held at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of sky.)

Read on to see our favorite photos of the Oct. 6 lunar occultation.

Jupiter and the Crescent Moon dazzle in photos of Oct. 6 occultation

Peter Zay captured this beautiful image of Jupiter shining in the skies over North Carolina shortly before the gas giant slipped out of sight behind the lunar crescent.

"Astrophotography is unforgiving," Zay told Space.com in an email. "As a photojournalist, I don’t use techniques like composite[s] of various exposures. I stay true to authentic captures. I regularly photograph the Moon, its phases, solar and lunar eclipses, etc. Planning is key: gear, weather, location, and timing. But still, it’s hard, the very nature asks optical capabilities to be pushed to their limits."

Zay also snapped Jupiter as it emerged from behind the night side of the moon, while fine-tuning his camera to reveal a different aspect of the stunning occultation.

"I knew that success meant balancing the luminance of the Moon's sunlit surface and of Jupiter's four moons. The exposure that is proper for the Moon's sunlit 20% would not reveal Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto," continued Zay. "My photograph captures lunar craters, earthshine, and stars sprinkled in the background. My geographical position put Jupiter and its moons perfectly in the middle as it egressed the shadowed side of the Moon. Who could ask for more?"

Astrophotographer Steven Bellavia witnessed the occultation from a dark sky site in Potters County, Pennsylvania, where he captured the scene with an Explore Scientific 152mm Maksutov-Cassegrain paired with a ZWO ASI 662MC astronomy camera.

"I was racing the clock just to put Jupiter onto the tiny sensor," Bellavia told Space.com. "I got it just in time to focus and start recording SER videos. I then took the best of thousands of images and sorted through those to get to my favorite. Aligning and stacking doesn't work well with two objects moving at different rates, so the image is a single 50 millisecond capture."

Josh McCollum, meanwhile, aimed his Skywatcher 400P Flextube dobsonian telescope and Celestron C11 Schmidt Cassegrain at Jupiter to take stunning views of the solar system rendezvous from the borough of Emmaus in Pennsylvania.

"The atmospheric conditions weren’t ideal, but Ganymede (the largest moon in the solar system) can be seen above Jupiter as it was nearing total occultation," McCollum told Space.com in an email. "Its return was easy to find, as Europa and Io were the first to poke out of the moon before Jupiter. The coolest part was seeing the silhouette of the moon as Jupiter stepped back into our night sky. I was so happy to get this shot, and it was extremely surreal to see an event like this."

X user EricTheCat also posted gorgeous views of the occultation as it unfolded in the skies over Minnesota. "Since the event started at 6 degrees and finished at 15 degrees above my horizon I opted to expose to show the moons and earthshine rather than try for finer details," Eric noted in a post on the social media site.

Want to try your hand at astrophotography? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, along with our picks of the top telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your planetary or lunar astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) and comments, along with your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The moon is a historical landmark — a celestial body continually peppered with robotic landers shot from our home planet, as well as human footprints planted there by a dozen visiting moonwalkers from 1969 to 1972.

A recent gathering in Italy of the International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage (ISCAH) looked at protecting lunar heritage with an eye toward developing guidelines for spacecraft deorbiting onto the moon's surface.

Particular attention was paid to the risks posed by the impacts of deorbited satellites and rocket stages, recently highlighted by the crash of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage into the moon last August.

As pointed out in the meeting, as lunar traffic increases, controlled crash landings of moon orbiters and rocket stages are becoming an attractive end-of-mission disposal strategy.

And that's a problem.

Limited knowledge

There is limited knowledge regarding ejecta modeling and the effects produced by these impacts, said Luca Forassiepi. He spoke at the Sept. 14 meeting in Piza, which was called "Protecting Lunar Heritage: Developing Guidelines and Recommendations for Controlled Lunar Deorbiting."

"These effects have only been observed, and only partially, in a handful of historical cases. As a result, much of our current understanding relies on simulations, which necessarily involve a number of simplifications compared with reality," Forassiepi told Space.com.

Strong incentive

"Because the moon is an airless world, any movement on the surface is going to stir up sticky, abrasive dust that erodes human materials," pointed out associate professor Alice Gorman, an Australian archaeologist and heritage consultant at Flinders University.

"This is a problem for cultural heritage sites," Gorman said. "Imagine the iconic Apollo 11 landing module, the Eagle, being worn away until it crumbles into dust itself."

"It's also going to be a problem for habitation and mining installations," she added. "So there is a strong incentive for [the] space industry to minimize the impacts of rocket and satellite crashes, protecting both heritage places and new surface missions."

End-of-life planning

Gorman pointed to 51 hard spacecraft impacts on the moon to date, a number that includes nine rocket bodies and 19 lunar orbiters.

"We've reached an inflection point where spacecraft craters aren't just new archaeological sites, they're an environmental hazard that may cause irreversible damage," Gorman told Space.com.

Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, Gorman observed, nations are liable for any damage their space hardware causes to the property of other nations. "We could be looking at a situation where a state could demand compensation for a rocket body crash harming its cultural heritage. End-of-life planning is going to become critical."

Cultural landscape

Also taking part in the meeting was Beth O'Leary, a cultural anthropology and archaeology specialist and college professor emerita at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

"The moon is part of the cultural landscape of Earth," she said. As such, its environment and heritage deserve international attention.

It's now been more than 60 years since the first successful soft landing on the moon, that of the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft in February 1966. And lunar traffic is poised to increase greatly in the coming years, as both the United States and China aim to build bases near the moon's south pole.

Given this landscape, "we seek to address the challenges of lunar traffic from crashes, deorbiting spacecraft, and intentional landings and to understand those risks to our aerospace heritage. Our committee attempts to estimate the real consequences of the impacts," O'Leary said.

With global experts in planetary geoarchaeology, site formation processes and heritage management, ISCAH is analyzing and increasing the knowledge base that could prevent the irreversible destruction of the significant historic cultural resources on the lunar surface.

Far-reaching consequences

"Our recommendations should inform consensus-based decisions and support international best practices and policies," said O'Leary.

The ongoing work of the group provides the best opportunities for lunar preservation and protection by and for humanity, she added.

"In our short three years," O'Leary said, "we will have had three conferences, created a mission statement, received World Monuments Fund listing, and will continue as a delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space."

O'Leary told Space.com that all these issues are complex scientifically and legally, "but it is so important to rely on excellent research and proven heritage management principles in order to make good decisions about preservation which have far-reaching consequences."

Planetary geoarchaeology

One goal the group is addressing is a "post-mission gap," particularly regarding lunar projects.

That is, what happens to lunar heritage following the completion of a successful mission and in the decades that follow?

Also, what are the appropriate end-of-mission practices, and how can we ensure the long-term protection of spacecraft, robotics and other material remains associated with these missions?

Those questions are being deliberated by Justin Holcomb, an assistant research professor with the Kansas Geological Survey, a research unit of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Planetary geoarchaeology provides one way to address this issue, by identifying the natural (geological) and anthropogenic (human) processes operating within these environments "that may threaten lunar heritage, while also identifying environmental settings that are more conducive to its long-term preservation," Holcomb told Space.com.

Lunar practices

Forassiepi said that future points of action are on the agenda.

"There is certainly ongoing and continuous work by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage on this aspect," said Forassiepi.

ICOMOS is the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental organization working to conserve and protect cultural heritage sites on our planet — and off it as well.

"In active collaboration with the World Monuments Fund, we will further refine our research into the potential risks associated with deorbiting and crash landings," Forassiepi noted.

Over the coming months, Forassiepi said, the group will move into a second phase focused on listening and dialogue with all relevant stakeholders in the sector, from space agencies and the scientific community to private actors, heritage experts and communities with social and religious values associated with the moon that could be affected or disrupted by certain lunar practices.

Ultimate goal

"The aim is to initiate an open dialogue and exchange among all these different actors, with a view to collectively developing guidelines based on broad consensus," Forassiepi said.

These will then be presented in the context of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2027, with the hope that, over time, they may evolve into "internationally recognized standards of behavior" and be adopted and followed by all space actors, Forassiepi added.

"The ultimate goal is to build a lunar future that is sustainable not only from an operational perspective, but also in terms of scientific research and the protection of the earliest traces of human presence in the history of space," he stressed. "These are two irreplaceable forms of heritage, and their damage would represent an enormous loss for future generations."

Heads up stargazers! Jupiter will appear to "vanish" from the predawn sky on Oct.6. Here's how you can see it for yourself.

Early birds will be treated to quite the show on Oct. 6, as the slender crescent moon, just 20% illuminated, passes in front of Jupiter, appearing to swallow the gas giant whole and spitting it out about an hour later.

The vanishing act will be visible across parts of North America, and for those outside the occultation zone, don't fret; you'll still see a stunning sight as the gas giant appears remarkably close to the lunar disk after local moonrise (weather permitting).

What is happening?

Known as a lunar occultation, the event happens when the moon passes in front of a more distant object from our perspective on Earth. While occultations of Jupiter occur fairly regularly somewhere around the world, seeing one from any particular location under a dark sky is much rarer — occurring on average about once every 13 years, according to Space.com skywatching columnist Joe Rao.

Where and when to see it

The best views of the occultation will come from the eastern and central eastern U.S. and parts of southern Canada, where Jupiter will disappear behind the moon's bright crescent before emerging from behind its dark, Earth-lit limb roughly an hour later.

Exact timings depend on your location. Here are the disappearance and reappearance times for several major cities, based on predictions from the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA). All times are local time.

Farther west, the moon and Jupiter will still be below the horizon when the occultation begins. From Denver, for example, Jupiter's disappearance won't be visible, but skywatchers can catch the planet reappearing from behind the moon at around 3:11 a.m. MDT.

Across much of the western U.S., including Washington, Oregon, California and most of Arizona, the occultation will already be over by the time the moon and Jupiter rise. But you'll still be treated to a striking close pairing, so it's still worth a look.

Want to make sure you don't miss Jupiter's disappearing act? Check out our complete guide to the Oct. 6 Jupiter occultation for detailed maps, viewing times and everything you need to know to watch it.

Blue Origin just unveiled its "Power Tower," which is designed to provide solar electricity for an upcoming base on the moon.

The space company, which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, posted an animation of the tower on X on Sept. 25, showing the hardware landing on the moon and then deploying above the lunar surface.

"Our Power Tower is a 20-meter-tall, vertically deployed solar array system designed to provide more than 10 kilowatts of power for Moon Base operations at the lunar south pole," Blue Origin wrote in the post.

The X post also links to a YouTube video, which shows a real deployment test that occurred here on Earth on July 22, 2026. From the low vantage point of the camera, you can see a pole extending up from the base, before arms branch out from the center to deploy solar arrays that fold down.

"Its modular architecture will support future surface networks, extending power beyond the lander to the assets that need it most," reads the Blue Origin post.

The power tower appears to be an evolution of an earlier technology called Lunar Array Mast and Power System (LAMPS), which was developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, and tested at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2024.

Honeybee Robotics is one of the companies that have been working under NASA's Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT) project, which has been developing solar arrays to create the necessary power for a sustained presence on the moon in the future.

The X post mentions that the power tower will be used for operations at the lunar south pole. Blue Origin likely envisions the solar tower as part of NASA's planned moon base, which the agency aims to build in the area via its Artemis program. NASA's Moon Base project is currently in its first phase, which lasts until 2029. The current timeline has the moon base up and running by 2032.

On Oct. 3, 1942, Germany performed the first-ever successful test launch of a ballistic missile.

This missile was officially named Aggregat 4 (A4) but is more commonly known as the V-2. The V-2 was designed by the famous German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and it proved to be a deadly weapon during World War II.

During the landmark test, the rocket launched from an island off the Baltic coast of Germany called Peenemünde. It reached an altitude of 52.5 miles (84.5 kilometers) — just short of the Kármán Line, the widely recognized boundary of outer space at 62 miles (100 km) up — before landing on target 118 miles (190 km) away.

Why it mattered

The V-2 matters first of all as an instrument of death and terror, and it dealt plenty of both during World War II. The 46-foot-tall (14 meters) rocket introduced a new element to the battlefield: ultrafast weapon delivery.

The V-2 traveled at up to 3,400 mph (5,470 kph) and could carry a 2,200-pound (1,000 kilograms) warhead to a target up to 200 miles (320 km) away. Nazi Germany launched its first V-2 in combat on Sept. 6, 1944 and continued using the rockets through March 1945, just a month before the regime surrendered.

The Nazis employed the V-2 heavily during this time, but the rocket was not terribly accurate. So V-2s did not tend to lay waste to entire cities like plane-based bombing raids did during the war.

"The Army and Waffen-SS launched over 3,000 rockets, primarily against London and Antwerp, but the ones that actually reached a populated target only killed about 5,000 people," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote about the V-2.

"Against that total must be put the 10-20,000 concentration-camp prisoners who died in the SS camps connected to V-2 manufacturing," the museum added. "That makes it a rare and peculiar weapon — more than twice as many people died as the result of making it than did being hit by it."

The V-2 also helped usher the world into the space age, by showing what rockets are capable of.

"The V-2 was a revolutionary technological device," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote. "The space launch vehicles and the intercontinental ballistic missiles of the world virtually all trace their origin, one way or another, to this rocket."

That's particularly true of American launch vehicles, for von Braun — who was a member of the Nazi Party and a junior SS officer — and more than 100 members of his V-2 team came to the United States after the war as part of Project Paperclip. These scientists and engineers were first put to work at Fort Bliss in West Texas but moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama in 1950.

Once there, the German group "became the heart of the Army’s nuclear-armed ballistic missile development," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote in a description of Project Paperclip.

"Soon after the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, [von Braun] and his German-led group, now numbering in the thousands (almost all native-born Americans), helped launch the first United States satellite, Explorer I," the museum added. "In 1960, von Braun’s division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was transferred to a new civilian space agency, NASA. The Huntsville Germans, most naturalized in 1954-1955, went on to lead the development of the Saturn rockets that put Americans on the moon in 1969."

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

Set your alarm early on Oct. 6 and you can one watch one of the brightest objects in the night sky disappear from view, albeit temporarily.

In the predawn hours on Tuesday morning, a slender waning crescent moon, just 20% illuminated and a little over four days from new phase will rise in the east-northeast at around 2:30 a.m. local daylight time, with brilliant Jupiter shining near its sunlit side.

As this "dynamic duo" ascends, the moon will gradually draw closer to the big planet. Observers in the eastern and central U.S. and adjacent southern Canada can then watch as Jupiter slips behind the moon's bright limb. It will then emerge from behind the moon's dark limb — dimly illuminated by earthshine — roughly an hour or so later.

What is happening?

Unlike a star whose pinpoint of light appears to suddenly "blink out" or "pop on" instantaneously, Jupiter's disappearance and reappearance will each take roughly a minute as the moon's edge advances across the giant planet's disk, whose apparent diameter is ¹⁄₅₈ that of the moon. You're going to need binoculars or better yet a telescope to watch Jupiter disappear behind the moon's bright crescent, but its reappearance will be readily visible to the naked eye. Of course, binoculars or a telescope will provide a far more stunning view.

Clearly, that will be the most memorable part of this sky show.

In October 1968, an occultation of Jupiter occurred over the western and central United States and descriptions of Jupiter's reappearance published in the January 1969 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine were described as "quite dramatic" as seen from Chicago, while an observer at La Pryor, Texas, noted that the most spectacular feature for him was the naked-eye impression of Jupiter ". . . (looking) like a brightening jewel on the dark limb of the moon."

How to watch

Using our specially designed maps you can closely approximate the circumstances for the disappearance and reappearance at your hometown. Do this first by

1. Interpolate along the thin horizontal curves for the times listed as Universal Time (UT) of the event. (To convert to Eastern Daylight Time, subtract 4 hours from UT; to get Central Daylight Time, subtract 5 hours; to get Mountain, subtract 6.)
2. Then interpolate between the thicker vertical lines to find the altitude of Jupiter and the moon above your east-northeast horizon. Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees. For eastern New York State and New England, Jupiter and the moon will be between 20 and 30 degrees above the horizon. Farther west, their altitude will be lower, especially for the disappearance, so you might want to scout out an observing site in advance that will afford you a low enough view toward the east-northeast.

As an example, what will be the times and altitude for the disappearance of Jupiter as viewed from Memphis, Tennessee? From the disappearance map, Memphis is inside the "8:15" contour. Subtracting 5 hours for Central Daylight Time gives us 3:15 a.m. for when Jupiter goes behind the moon's bright limb. Memphis is roughly midway between the "Jupiter disappears at moonrise" and "Jupiter and moon 10° up" lines, so for Memphis the altitude will be very low; only above 5° above the east-northeast horizon.

For more detailed information, including a map of the occultation zone, as well as Universal Times for 767 locations, including 285 cities in the contiguous U.S. and 71 in Canada, check out these resources courtesy of the International Occultation Timers Association (IOTA).

Watch Jupiter's moons disappear too

A telescope will also show occultations of Jupiter's Galilean moons. Europa roughly 5 minutes before Jupiter itself (depending on your location), Callisto and Io about 3 minutes before, and Ganymede roughly 2 minutes after. Coming out, Europa will be first, about 5 minutes before Jupiter, followed by Callisto and Io about two minutes later. Finally, two minutes after Jupiter fully returns to view, Ganymede will emerge. Except in large telescopes, the satellites might be lost in the glare of the bright lunar crescent just prior to disappearing behind the moon, but their emergence from behind the Moon's dark side should be especially dramatic.

What if you're outside the occultation zone?

While many locations will enjoy the sight of the waning crescent moon occulting Jupiter, a swath of the western U.S. and Canada lies outside of the occultation zone. For those living in the states of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, most of Arizona and parts of western Montana and western Utah, the main event will have already taken place before the moon and Jupiter rise.

But, as a consolation prize, these regions will be treated to the stunning and rare sight of the planet appearing very closely above the upper edge of the lunar disk shortly after local moonrise; not an occultation but still a head-turning celestial tableau!

For places like Boise and Tucson Jupiter will appear only about one-sixth of the moon's diameter above the moon's dim earth lit rim. The gap widens as you head farther west.

How rare is this?

One question that not a few will probably ask is: "How often does the Moon eclipse Jupiter?" If we consult Jean Meeus' Astronomical Tables of the Sun, Moon and Planets, we find that on a worldwide basis, there are 123 occultations of Jupiter between 1980 and 2040. But if we confine our search to a specific location and only include those instances when the sun is below the horizon, such an event occurs on average once about every 13 years.

Still, there are oddities that occasionally show up. In the year 2037, as seen from Portland, Oregon, the moon will occult Jupiter on the morning after Thanksgiving, Nov. 27 ("Black Friday"). Portland's next dark-sky occultation of Jupiter will come less than a month later, near the break of dawn on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24.

Conversely, for New York City prior to this year, the last dark-sky occultation of Jupiter occurred nearly 22 years ago on Dec. 7, 2004. Incredibly, before that date we must go back over 115 years, to the late 19th century — Sept. 3, 1889 — for New York's previous case of a dark-sky occultation of Jupiter. The New York Times wrote of that late 19th-century spectacle:

"The moon looked like half of a big custard pie, and Jupiter like a firefly getting ready to take a bite out of it. Imperceptibly, Jupiter crowded along, nearer and nearer to the big light of the night. Dimmer and dimmer it grew as it neared the moon, its light paling into insignificance as the light of the tallow candle pales into insignificance before a calcium light."

This month's event is the best Jupiter occultation for North America since 2004. There is no scientific value to this occultation, since there are no abrupt events to be timed, but it certainly will be an unusual observing project for skywatchers as well as a memorable eye-catching spectacle wherever it can be seen.

So clear skies, good luck and make the most of this upcoming opportunity!

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.

As September draws to a close on Sept. 30, an 80% illuminated waning gibbous moon pays a visit to the iconic Pleiades (M45) open cluster. While this stellar nursery is normally a dazzling, easy sight through binoculars, tonight's viewing dynamic presents a unique and dramatic observation challenge. The intense lunar spotlight casts significant glare across the cluster, heavily washing out its faint blue reflection nebulosity.

The close encounter also makes the Pleiades particularly easy to locate. Simply find the bright moon and look nearby for the compact gathering of stars. The cluster is bright enough to see with the naked eye from a reasonably dark location, though binoculars will reveal many more of its stars.

Use this intense phase contrast as a fun visual challenge. Take a moment to look closely at the cluster and try to memorize or name its most prominent members: Alcyone, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Merope, Asterope, and Celaeno, alongside their mythological parents Atlas and Pleione. See how many of these seven sisters you can consciously pick out before the lunar glare overwhelms your night vision.

You can also try using averted vision to tease out some of the fainter stars. Instead of looking directly at your target, look slightly to one side of it. This places the light on a more sensitive part of your retina and can make faint objects easier to see.

If the gibbous moon becomes too overwhelmingly bright, use a simple field trick: position yourself so the edge of a house, a chimney, or a thick tree branch completely blocks the lunar disk from view, allowing you to observe the sparkling cluster in relative darkness.

If you are setting up a camera, try capturing a wide-field time-lapse sequence over several hours. Watching the moon's rapid orbital motion physically carry it across the sky relative to the fixed, glittering background stars of the Pleiades makes for a mesmerizing astronomical animation.

Starship just notched a huge milestone, but it needs to check a few more boxes to get fully up and running.

The SpaceX megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit for the first time ever on Monday (Sept. 28), during its 14th test flight to date. Starship also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink V3 broadband satellites on Flight 14, kicking off construction of a constellation that will eventually harbor 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

These were big successes, but they didn't vault Starship into full technological maturity; the rocket will have to clear a few more hurdles to get there. Here's a brief rundown of the most important ones.

Catching the Ship upper stage

Both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both of these vehicles back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX thinks this recovery strategy will enable fast and efficient reuse, allowing the company to achieve seemingly outrageous launch cadences. Indeed, the company is targeting 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030, Elon Musk has said.

SpaceX has already pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy, doing so on three Starship test flights to date. But the company has yet to attempt one with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship, which has always targeted an ocean splashdown to wrap up its missions.

That could change very soon. During an appearance at the All-In Summit on Sept. 14, Musk said that SpaceX may try to catch Ship on Flight 15, provided that Flight 14 went well.

The company has not laid out a mission profile for Flight 15, but Monday's success would seem to keep a Ship catch in play. We don't have an official launch date for the upcoming mission, either, but provisional planning documents peg Oct. 19 as the earliest possible target.

And another note about that launch cadence: SpaceX aims to achieve it by expanding launch operations of Starship, which has previously flown from just two pads at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. SpaceX is currently building three Starship pads on Florida's Space Coast, and it plans to break ground on the $100 billion, 12-pad Starship Louisiana complex in 2027. So that work will be going in the background of each upcoming Starship flight.

Off-Earth propellant transfer

Most Starship missions will stay in Earth orbit, deploying satellites for the Starlink V3 constellation and the company's even bigger "Starmind" data center network, which will consist of about a million satellites, if all goes to plan.

But some of the megarocket launches will send Ship farther afield — to the moon and Mars, for example. Indeed, NASA picked Starship's upper stage to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next decade or so.

Deep-space Starship missions will be more complicated than orbital ones, because they require more propellant. Ship cannot launch with much fuel onboard — doing so would make it too heavy — so each Ship bound for the moon or Mars will need to visit an off-Earth fuel depot, which itself will be a Ship variant.

This depot will need to be fueled up by special Ship "tanker" vehicles. It's unclear how many tanker flights will be required for each deep-space Ship mission, but the number is not negligible. For example, estimates for a Ship lunar-landing campaign range from eight tanker missions on the low end to 15 or 20 on the high end.

So in-space fueling is a key capability that Starship must demonstrate. SpaceX has taken some baby steps to this end already, successfully transferring propellant from one internal tank to another on Ship during Flight 3 back in March 2024.

But the company has not yet moved propellant from one vehicle to another in space. SpaceX may decide to try this as soon as Flight 15, but that's just speculation; we need to wait for an official mission description.

Getting Starship ready for astronauts

Starship was always envisioned to be a crew-carrying spacecraft. When Musk introduced it to the world back in September 2016, he framed the megarocket — then known as the Interplanetary Transport System — as the key breakthrough that would make Mars settlement feasible.

So SpaceX will need to incorporate a suite of life-support technologies into Starship and test them extensively before putting any people on board. And the clock is ticking on this task, thanks to the timeline that NASA has laid out for Artemis.

The agency plans to launch the crewed Artemis III mission in mid-2027, sending its Orion crew capsule to dock with Ship in Earth orbit. It's unclear if Ship will need to be crew-capable by then — the Artemis III astronauts may not enter Ship — but it will definitely have to be people-friendly by the time Artemis IV rolls around in 2028. That mission will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, in the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.

And the timeline isn't the only driver for SpaceX. There's also competition for these flights; NASA has said it may fly Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander on Artemis III and/or Artemis IV if Ship isn't ready.

SpaceX won't be starting from scratch with its life-support tech; it can (and probably already has begun to) scale up the systems it has used on its Crew Dragon capsule, which has flown 20 astronaut missions to low Earth orbit to date.

As this partial list shows, the next few Starship missions should be just as exciting as Flight 14, if not more so. There will likely be a lot riding on each one.

Construction of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink satellite megaconstellation is officially underway.

The milestone occurred today (Sept. 28), during the 14th test flight of the company's Starship megarocket. The 407-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship reached orbit for the first time ever on Flight 14 — and it did something productive while it was up there.

Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, successfully delivered 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 (V3) Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) today. And we got great views of the deployment, from cameras aboard Ship and on the satellites.

SpaceX currently operates more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO — by far the largest spacecraft network ever assembled. But the Starlink V3 megaconstellation will be a completely different animal.

For starters, Starlink V3 satellites are about twice as heavy as their predecessors, tipping the scales here on Earth at roughly 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms). They can fly efficiently only on the ultrapowerful Starship; they're too big to launch aboard SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which built the original Starlink constellation.

The new Starlinks are also far more capable.

"The Starlink V3 satellite is designed to support 1 Tbps [terabytes per second] of downlink and 160 Gbps [gigabytes per second] of uplink capacity. That's an ~10x improvement in downlink capacity and an ~22x increase in uplink capacity from the Starlink V2 satellite," SpaceX representatives wrote in a description of the technology.

"The V3 satellite's antennas support both 2,048 downlink and uplink beams," they added. "For comparison, Starlink V2 satellite's phased arrays supported 192 downlink and 144 uplink beams."

Thanks to these and other enhancements, "we'll be able to deploy ~20x the capacity per Starship launch into the constellation as compared to a Falcon 9 launch of V2 satellites," SpaceX wrote.

And there will be a lot of Starship Starlink launches in the coming months and years, if all goes according to plan.

The Starlink V3 constellation will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. Starship can carry up about 60 Starlink V3s on each mission, so just getting to 100,000 will require nearly 1,700 liftoffs. More will be needed to maintain the constellation, of course; Starlink satellites have an operational lifetime of about five years, so they'll have to be replaced regularly.

But Starship could fly even more frequently in service of another megaconstellation — one that's bigger by an order of magnitude. SpaceX intends to operate a million of its "Starmind" AI data centers in Earth orbit, and all of them will ride on Starship's back.

Indeed, SpaceX aims to launch Starship 10,000 times per year by 2030, Musk has said — an outrageous cadence that the company thinks is possible because the vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. For perspective: the Falcon 9 flew 165 times in 2025, which was a company record and represented half of all orbital missions worldwide for that year.

SpaceX took a big step toward meeting those ambitious goals with today's success, but Starship still has some boxes to check. For example, missions to the moon and Mars — which are definitely in the cards, according to SpaceX — will require Ship to be fueled up in Earth orbit, something that the company has not yet demonstrated.

And Ship will start carrying humans into the final frontier in the near future, if all goes to plan. So SpaceX will need to install a life-support system in Ship, and launch some test flights to demonstrate that it works.

SpaceX has considerable experience in this regard, having flown 20 astronaut missions aboard its Crew Dragon capsule to date. But Starship and Dragon, which generally carries just four people per flight, are very different vehicles, so some scale-up will be required.

Starship just went where it had never gone before.

SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit today (Sept. 28), notching a huge milestone on the road to operational flight. But the launch, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, was not without high drama.

During liftoff, one of the six engines on Starship's Ship upper stage went out, raising doubt about whether SpaceX would attempt to reach orbit after all. SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot even announced it was called off, only to reverse course as flight controllers decided to press ahead.

"We are not giving up yet," Huot said. "We will continue to hang out."

And the call came just a few minutes later: Starship was "go" for orbit. About 25 minutes after liftoff, Ship fired a single Raptor engine briefly to enter orbit. It was the primary goal of SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 launch test: Reach orbit for the first time and deploy 26 Starlink satellites into an operational orbit.

"Starship is orbital," mission control confirmed, eliciting cheers from the SpaceX employees watching the launch live at Starbase.

"First orbital flight of Starship successful!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on SpaceX's X platform.

• SpaceX Starship Flight 14 live updates: Starship is in orbit!

The rocket of the future

Starship stands 407 feet (124 meters) tall and can haul more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to Earth orbit, according to its SpaceX specs page. The rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage are both designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

SpaceX thinks this combination of power and reflight will be transformative, allowing humanity to expand its footprint into the final frontier like never before. For example, Elon Musk has repeatedly cited Starship's potential to make Mars settlement economically feasible.

NASA is invested in this vision as well. The space agency picked Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.

If all goes according to plan, Starship's Ship upper stage will fly on the crewed Artemis III mission to low Earth orbit in mid-2027 and put astronauts down near the moon's south pole a year later with Artemis IV. (According to SpaceX's plan, anyway; NASA also selected Blue Origin to supply Artemis crewed landers, and it's unclear at the moment which vehicle will fly Artemis IV.)

A busy and ambitious test flight

Starship lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas today at 8:48 a.m. EDT (1248 GMT; 7:48 a.m. local Texas time), kicking off its 14th test flight to date.

Flight 14 is the third Starship launch to feature Version 3 of the vehicle, a relatively mature iteration that's capable of deploying satellites and reaching the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Everything went according to plan initially. Super Heavy did what it was supposed to do, coming back down to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. It appeared to experience several engine shutdowns during flight, but nothing serious enough to affect the landing. Meanwhile, Ship continued on its upward ascent, inserting into low Earth orbit (LEO) about a half-hour into the flight.

But SpaceX wasn't content with just getting to LEO. Ship carried 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink V3 broadband satellites, which it successfully deployed over a 30-minute stretch starting at about T+34 minutes. These are the first members of a megaconstellation that will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, according to Musk. (Ship deployed V3 Starlinks on Flight 13 in July, but they were on a suborbital trajectory and soon fell back to Earth.)

Three of the 26 Starlinks were outfitted with cameras, which they used to scan Ship. SpaceX engineers will study this imagery to see if they can improve Ship's heat shield, which allows the vehicle to survive the fiery trip down through Earth's atmosphere at the end of its missions.

Ship kept circling Earth for a while after deploying the Starlink satellites — though not nearly as long as originally planned. SpaceX wanted Ship to complete about six orbits and splash down off the coast of Chile 9 hours and 50 minutes after launch, but mission controllers decided to shave nearly seven hours off that flight time.

Ship started reentering our planet's atmosphere about two hours and 40 minutes after launch and went subsonic — breaking the sound barrier, in the fast-to-slow direction — 26 minutes later. The vehicle splashed down intact in the northern Pacific Ocean three hours and eight minutes after liftoff, causing another eruption of cheers from the folks gathered at Starbase.

Ship then toppled over and exploded when it hit the waves, providing a dramatic capper to a very exciting day for SpaceX.

Despite all of today's successes, SpaceX still has some work to do to get Starship fully up and running.

For example, the company plans to bring Super Heavy and Ship down on the launch pad at the end of each mission, catching both vehicles with the launch tower's "chopstick" arms — a recovery strategy meant to make reuse quicker and more efficient. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Super Heavy on three test flights to date but has yet to try one with Ship.

And Starship missions that go to the moon or Mars will require multiple launches of "tanker" spacecraft to fuel up Ship in Earth orbit. SpaceX has not yet demonstrated off-Earth refueling, so that will be another big box to check.

SpaceX will also need to install life-support systems ahead of crewed missions like Artemis IV — and it will doubtless fly Starship successfully many times before putting an astronaut on it. So stay tuned: There will probably be a lot more Starship action in the coming weeks and months.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:15 p.m. EDT with news of successful satellite deployment and Ship splashdown.

Update for Sept. 28, 12 p.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched a Starship into orbit for the first time today, deploying 26 Starlink satellites before making a splashdown in the Northern Pacific Ocean. See our full Starship Flight 14 launch story with amazing videos and photos. Plus, don't miss these stunning views of Starship in orbit as seen by Starlink.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will attempt to go orbital for the first time ever on Monday morning (Sept. 28), and you can watch the historic action live.

Starship is scheduled to launch from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time).

You can watch it in the window above, courtesy of SpaceX. Coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing a towering 407 feet (124 meters) tall when fully stacked. Both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX has called the "holy grail of rocketry."

The company believes that Starship will open the heavens like never before, allowing humanity to settle the moon and Mars, and perhaps venture even farther afield. But the rocket is not yet ready for such world-changing work; it's still in the flight-test phase.

Starship debuted in April 2023 and now has 13 missions under its belt, all of them suborbital. That figures to change on Monday, however, when the giant vehicle launches for the 14th time.

Flight 14 will send the 171-foot-tall (52 m) Ship to Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink Version 3 internet satellites. These will be the first members of a new megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft. (SpaceX currently operates about 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO).

Ship will circle our planet six times, then head home for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Chile nearly 10 hours after launch. This will be quite a departure from Starship's suborbital flights, which lasted a maximum of 65 minutes and targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

Super Heavy won't stay up for nearly so long; it's scheduled to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, as it has on previous flights.

During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the launch pad, where they'll be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet attempted it with Ship.

That box will be checked on another flight. And Starship will have other hurdles to clear as well, even if today's flight goes perfectly. For example, each Starship mission beyond Earth orbit will require multiple rendezvous with "tanker" Ships to fuel up the voyaging spacecraft. SpaceX has yet to demonstrate off-Earth propellant transfer, so we will doubtless see that milestone on an upcoming test flight.

Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.

Look east tonight to see September's full "Harvest Moon" rise into the autumn sky. Here's what to expect on Sept. 26.

The Harvest Moon is the name given to the full moon that falls closest to the autumn equinox, which this year marked the beginning of astronomical autumn in the Northern Hemisphere on Sept. 22.

September's full moon will reach its point of maximum illumination at 12:49 p.m. EDT (1649 GMT), when the moon shines opposite the sun in Earth's sky, appearing fully illuminated from our perspective.

What to expect from the Harvest Moon

The full Harvest Moon rises over the eastern horizon around sunset on Sept. 26, as the diamond formation of stars belonging to the Great Square of Pegasus sparkling higher in the Autumn sky.

You may notice the moon adopt a yellow-orange color around moonrise, as sunlight reflected off its surface is scattered by Earth's atmosphere while close to the horizon. The lunar disk will return to its usual silvery luster upon rising higher into the autumn sky, as its light passes through less of Earth's atmosphere.

Look for Saturn shining as a bright star-like object a little over 5 degrees below the moon for viewers in the U.S. about an hour after moonrise. A 6-inch telescope will help reveal its iconic ring system, along with bright points of light representing the large moons Titan, Rhea, Dione, Iapetus, Tethys and Enceladus.

Turn your scope on the moon and you'll see evidence of its violent past etched across the lunar surface. Bright rays mark material blasted outward by relatively recent impacts, while vast, dark lunar seas lie where basaltic lava flooded ancient craters.

September's Harvest Moon will track a steady arc over the southern horizon as the night unfolds, before finally setting in the west as dawn breaks on Sept. 27.

Read more: September full moon 2026: When, where and how to see the Harvest Moon.

You can capture gorgeous photos of the moon for yourself using our easy guide to photographing the lunar disk. While you're at it, be sure to check out our picks of the best cameras and lenses available for astrophotography if you're thinking about upgrading your gear.

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

There’s a lot riding on SpaceX’s next Starship launch, both physically and conceptually, as the company prepares the giant rocket for its most consequential test flight to date.

SpaceX is targeting Sept. 28 for Starship’s Flight 14, the next liftoff of its industry-shaking launch vehicle, and is planning to fly the towering spacecraft farther and longer than it has ever flown, with a very specific destination in mind: orbit. Of the baker’s-dozen launches so far under its belt, Starship has only ever flown suborbitally. Succeeding in its first orbital endeavor will serve as a huge milestone for the rocket, which is still in development.

Liftoff on Sept. 28 is scheduled during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT). With orbit as the goal, the mission is expected to last much longer than previous Starship launches — about 10 hours from liftoff to splashdown of the rocket’s Ship upper stage, compared to past suborbital flights that have each only lasted about an hour. Rather than its previous arching trajectories above the reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, Starship will soar to an altitude of approximately 170 miles (275 kilometers), where it will circle the planet around six times before executing a deorbit burn to initiate its return.

SpaceX is taking the opportunity to load Starship with a stack of 26 operational Starlink Version 3 (V3) satellites for deployment in low Earth orbit (LEO). This batch will be the first of more than 100,000 upgraded Starlink spacecraft designed to expand the company’s wireless satellite internet services. SpaceX has deployed sets of Starlink V3 test payloads on previous Starship launches, but due to their suborbital trajectory, all of them quickly came back down to Earth. Three of the V3 Starlinks going up on Flight 14 are equipped with cameras for peering back at Starship after their deployment to inspect the spacecraft’s heat-shield tiles — an essential component to the success of Starship’s ultimate purpose.

SpaceX is designing Starship as the world’s first fully reusable launch vehicle — what the company calls “The Holy Grail of Rocketry” (which is also the title of SpaceX’s latest documentary-style episode chronicling the rocket’s development). Starship’s Super Heavy first-stage booster and Ship upper stage are being designed with the capability to perform deceleration and landing burns for a return to their launch site, where they will be caught mid-air using massive chopstick-like arms on a pair of adjacent “Mechazilla” launch towers for refurbishment and reflight.

As the company has worked toward that goal, it has crossed several milestones off Starship’s list of technical feats needed to realize the rocket’s eventual rapid reusability. For example, SpaceX has made three successful catches of Super Heavy back at SpaceX’s Starbase, Texas, launch facility, and has executed a handful of Raptor 3 single-engine relights on Ship while in space.

SpaceX hasn’t attempted a Super Heavy return to launch site and catch since introducing the most recent Starship design upgrade, Version 3, which lifted off for the first time on Flight 12 in May. None of Starship’s launches have yet attempted a return and catch of the rocket’s Ship upper stage. Instead, the two Starship V3 vehicles that have launched this year targeted soft splashdowns at sea for Ship and Super Heavy, in order to fine-tune landing burn procedures without risking damage to the major launch infrastructure at Starbase. That will be the case for Flight 14 as well.

SpaceX has made “several modifications” to Super Heavy’s hardware to address issues discovered during previous flights, according to the company's Flight 14 mission page, and will send at least one more of the Starship boosters to a watery grave to ensure those modifications are all working as expected. Flight 14's Super Heavy (Booster 21, for those keeping track) will follow a similar trajectory to its previous flights, with its primary objectives after stage separation being a successful boostback burn, followed by a landing burn and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ship (Ship 41, if you’re counting), on the other hand, will fly a very new mission compared to its previous jaunts in space. Its initial trajectory after stage separation will put the spacecraft on the same course as previous flights, arching toward a reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. But it will then head for orbit, if all systems are “go.” SpaceX clarified its criteria for entering orbit on the Flight 14 page, stating, “Starship will only execute a burn to enter orbit after the flight control team has ensured there is sufficient redundancy on hardware critical to doing the subsequent deorbit burn at the end of the mission.”

Approximately 25 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft will fire one or more of its three vacuum-optimized Raptor 3 engines for an orbital insertion maneuver, which is expected to last only about 20 seconds. SpaceX has included splashdown contingency locations in case the need for an early deorbit arises, and plans to be “intentionally conservative” in its abort criteria to ensure flight safety. Should that phase of flight execute nominally, however, SpaceX has slated the half-hour-long Starlink deployment procedure to begin about 10 minutes later. Then the coast phase of the mission will begin.

SpaceX is planning for Starship to complete six orbits of Earth over the course of about eight hours, during which the company hopes to stream live views of the planet from Ship’s onboard cameras. At the end of its coast phase, the spacecraft will fire a single-engine deorbit burn using one of its sea-level Raptor 3s for a targeted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, wrapping up the Flight 14 mission approximately 10 hours after launch.

Orbit is a big step for Starship, provided SpaceX can pull it off. If the Flight 14 launch date remains on Sept. 28, it will mark exactly 10 years and one day from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s initial unveiling of the company’s Starship design (then dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System, or ITS) at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016.

Since then, the ambitious launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful in history, has undergone a decade of modifications, ground tests and increasingly complex launch profiles, with progress marked by a mixture of achievements and setbacks along the way. But the pressure to get Starship operational is mounting.

NASA is counting on a lunar lander version of the vehicle for its Artemis program architecture, which includes an uncrewed article for docking tests in Earth orbit with NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Artemis III crew in mid-2027, and a crewed lunar landing mission in 2028 on Artemis IV. SpaceX is also eager for Starship’s massive payload capacity to begin deploying its much larger Starlink V3s at scale and, eventually, help assemble an even larger constellation of orbital AI data centers that Musk envisions. That constellation will consist of a million spacecraft, if SpaceX gets regulatory approval.

Still, Starship has more feats to master before it can pull off all SpaceX has billed it for. At 407 feet tall (124 meters), Starship V3's Super Heavy is powered by 33 Raptor 3s, which provide about 18.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — enough to deliver up to 100 tons to orbit. SpaceX says that later Starship generations are being designed to double that payload capacity to around 200 tons. But realizing those design goals is contingent on SpaceX’s ability to mature Starship much further.

For Starship to follow through on SpaceX’s promises, the company still needs to tackle technological hurdles like on-orbit fuel transfers and long-term cryogenic propellant storage in space, both of which Starship needs in order to fly beyond LEO. On Artemis IV, for example, NASA estimates the Starship lunar lander will need up to a dozen refueling launches to top off its tanks enough to carry out its mission of delivering astronauts to the surface of the moon, where it's expected to remain for up to a week before then launching its crew back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with Orion.

Those capabilities, though, lie farther (but presumably not too far) down Starship’s developmental timeline. Orbit is Flight 14’s primary focus, and only by achieving that milestone can SpaceX move on to clear the rocket’s remaining hurdles.

The Harvest Moon has marketing problems. Since it's a full moon, naturally everyone expects it to look its best on full moon night. Not this one. Moreover, since it's now fashionable to dismiss all full moons for their sometimes silly-sounding names (we're looking at you, Beaver Moon), the clue in its name is often overlooked.

The Harvest Moon is the full moon that happens closest to the autumnal equinox in September or October. This year, the September equinox occurred on Sept. 23 at 00:05 UTC (Sept. 22 in the Americas), and the Harvest Moon will turn 100% full on Sept. 26.

It gets its name because farmers used to rely on its bright light to finish gathering crops in the fields after sunset — but for a few successive evenings, not just one. Crucially — and unlike the way too North American-centric Sturgeon, Beaver and Worm Moons — the Harvest Moon is recognized far beyond North America. There are a few variations, such as Corn Moon, Barley Moon and Wine Moon, but all reflect the seasonal gathering of crops and fruits.

The Harvest Moon — seen from the Northern Hemisphere, at least — provides moonlight relatively soon after sunset on several consecutive evenings. How is that possible? It's a story about how moonrises can help us decipher Earth's journey around the sun.

The moon travels 360 degrees around Earth — in the same direction Earth spins — every 27.3 days (the sidereal month). The calculation reveals that the moon moves 13.2 degrees across the sky every day. So our rotating planet has to turn a little farther each day before the moon comes back above the horizon.

However, around the Northern Hemisphere's autumn equinox, something unusual happens to that familiar delay. The ecliptic — the path followed approximately by the sun, moon and planets — meets the eastern evening horizon at a particularly shallow angle. As the moon moves eastwards along that low-sloping path, much of its nightly movement is sideways along the horizon rather than steeply down below it.

As a result, Earth does not need to rotate as far before the moon rises again. At temperate northern latitudes, consecutive

moonrises around Harvest Moon can therefore be separated by much less than the usual 50 minutes, and at some northern locations by only a few minutes.

That is the Harvest Moon's real trick. For several evenings around the full moon, a big, bright, nearly full moon keeps appearing shortly after sunset. Historically, that sequence of early-evening moonlight was useful during the harvest, before artificial lighting made working after sunset straightforward.

What's happening and when to look

Exactly how close together moonrise times are depends strongly on latitude and the moon's precise orbital geometry, so there is no single Harvest Moon delay that applies everywhere. However, the effect generally becomes more pronounced at higher northern latitudes. For example, in Edinburgh, Scotland, at almost 56 degrees north, between Sept. 24-28 moonrise occurs at 6:23, 6:29, 6:36, 6:43 and 6:52 p.m. (a span of just 29 minutes across five days). Meanwhile, in New York City at 40 degrees north, between Sept. 24-28 moonrise occurs at 5:50, 6:12, 6:34, 6:58 and 7:27 p.m. (a span of 97 minutes). Watch each one, and you'll notice that moonrise moves noticeably northwards along the horizon.

However, if you're just after the most photogenic view, the usual rule applies — choose the night when the striking orange-yellow full moon climbs into a twilight sky, while buildings and landscape still retain plenty of ambient light. That's when the full moon rises as close to sunset as possible: low on the horizon, with the landscape and sky still holding twilight color.

In Edinburgh, that means Monday, Sept. 28, when the moon rises at 6:52 p.m. BST, a few minutes after sunset. In New York City, the geometry favors the actual night of the full moon, Saturday, Sept. 26, when the Harvest Moon rises at 6:34 p.m. EDT, only 12 minutes before sunset. The following night, it rises at 6:58 p.m. EDT, only 14 minutes after sunset.

Stargazer's corner: Sept. 25-Oct. 2, 2026

As well as the Harvest Moon, Saturn is coming into sharp focus. The sixth planet from the sun will actually be visible rising beneath the full moon on Saturday, Sept. 26. It's now approaching its very best of the year, reaching its annual opposition on Oct. 4, so it's already particularly well placed for observing. Even a small telescope will give you a view of its fabulous rings.

Constellation of the week: Aries

A few days after the full moon, our natural satellite will cross into the boundaries of a relatively small yet well-known constellation. Aries is not a spectacular constellation. Its most recognizable feature is a small crooked line of stars led by Hamal, its brightest member. It sits between the richer star fields around Taurus and Perseus, and the sprawling, faint constellations of the autumn sky such as Pisces and Cetus.

Starship just cleared a major hurdle ahead of its first orbital flight.

SpaceX announced this afternoon (Sept. 24) that it has completed a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the next flight of Starship, the huge, fully reusable rocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars.

During a WDR, mission teams fuel up a vehicle and go through all of the major steps they will take on launch day, without actually igniting the engines. With this key test in the books, Starship remains on track to launch Monday morning (Sept. 28) on its 14th-ever test flight, which will take the 407-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle farther than it has ever gone before.

Starship debuted in April 2023. That launch, and the next 12 that followed, all sent Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, known as Ship, on a suborbital trajectory.

On Flight 14, however, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will go fast enough to enter orbit. Once up there, it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first members of a constellation that Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Ship will stay up for a while, if all goes to plan; it will circle Earth six times before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. (That splashdown zone is new as well; previous Starship flights targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.)

Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, will make a splashdown of its own in the Gulf of Mexico. This will occur about seven minutes after launch.

That will not be the end game on operational Starship flights, however. SpaceX wants to catch both Ship and Super Heavy back at the pad, using the launch tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this with Super Heavy on three previous flights but has not yet tried to do so with Ship.

Starship Flight 14 is scheduled to launch from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time).

You can watch all the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX. And there should be a lot to watch: The company has said it aims to keep the stream going for all six of Ship's orbits around Earth and its splashdown.

In case you are feeling the empty hole of moon missions, void since the return of the Artemis II astronauts from their trip around the lunar far side six months ago, NASA has you covered.

The agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launched Artemis II on April 1, carrying a crew of four on the first mission around the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972. SLS lifted off from Launch Complex-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, and, to the awe of hundreds of thousands, climbed a bright blue early evening sky on a trail of smoke left by the vehicle's solid rocket boosters up into space.

More than 300,000 people traveled to the Space Coast to watch the launch from dozens of locations around KSC and surrounding cities. But the best views wouldn't be seen until well after the rocket cleared the pad, when NASA technicians recovered the slew of engineering footage captured by dozens of specialized cameras distributed everywhere from the base of the launch pad to drones positioned in the air to track every detail of the launch. Now, NASA has released that footage to the public.

The newly-released videos include a wide spectrum (literally) of views and angles that follow SLS from just before engine ignition through solid rocket booster separation as the rocket leaves Earth's atmosphere. NASA teams used scientifically calibrated in-flight imaging (SCIFLI) to compile footage ranging from the visible light spectrum, to short-wave infrared (SWIR), near-infrared (NIR), mid-wave infrared (MWIR) and infrared — to give you a few helpful acronyms for context as you pursue these videos on NASA's Artemis II album. These different wavelengths of light captured views imperceivable to the eye and typical camera sensors, and allowed NASA technicians to filter out things like the extreme brightness of the flames from the rocket’s engines.

Artemis II was the first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent base on the surface of the moon in the 2030s. It was also the first flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft with astronauts aboard. Essentially a shakedown cruise for Orion's life support systems, the mission flew NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth.

The next mission in NASA's lunar line up, Artemis III, will last longer, but won't fly as far. Artemis III is scheduled to launch in mid-2027 with NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and Andrew Douglas, as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano of Italy. They will launch aboard Orion to Earth orbit, where their spacecraft will rendezvous with the two commercial lunar landers NASA has contracted for the Artemis program, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

Artemis III is expected to last about two weeks as Orion will rendezvous and dock with each lander separately to test the spacecrafts' interoperability. That mission will serve as a precursor to the program's first actual lunar landing with astronauts on Artemis IV, which NASA is targeting to lift off in 2028.

SpaceX has completed assembly of the Starship rocket slated to launch the test vehicle’s most ambitious mission to date.

Flight 14, the 14th full-stack launch of Starship’s test campaign, is slated to lift off during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT) on Sept. 28. The Super Heavy first stage for Flight 14, Booster 21, was transported to Starbase’s Pad 2 earlier this week, and its upper-stage Ship (Ship 41) joined its counterpart at the pad overnight on Wednesday (Sept. 23).

The two were stacked before the sun rose on the South Texas launch facility and are undergoing final checkouts before SpaceX performs a key fueling test known as a wet dress rehearsal, which is expected sometime Thursday (Sept. 24).

Flight 14 will be Starship’s first attempt at reaching orbit, and a major milestone for the launch vehicle that has now been in development for 10 years. If all goes according to plan, Flight 14 will also see the first deployment of SpaceX’s upgraded Starlink Version 3 (V3) high-speed internet satellites. Starship has carried small batches of V3 Starlinks on previous launches, but those missions’ suborbital trajectories meant the satellites burned up in Earth’s atmosphere rather than remaining in orbit.

Ship 41 has been loaded with 26 Starlink V3s, which, if successfully deployed, will be the very first in a constellation that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to grow to more than 100,000. The larger, more powerful Starlink V3s will eventually completely replace the existing Starlink network and, according to Musk, will occupy low Earth orbit (LEO) alongside an even larger network of more than 1 million AI data center satellites, if SpaceX gets regulatory approval.

Deploying these first V3 Starlinks will depend on Starship reaching orbit, a feat the rocket has yet to attempt. Starship’s first 13 flights all flew suborbital trajectories by design, as SpaceX fine-tuned the launch vehicle’s design. Like the Starlink satellites it’s carrying, Starship is also in its V3 design iteration. SpaceX is confident that the V3 Starship can carry out the elementary components of its immediate missions ahead: chiefly, reaching orbit, deploying its payload and returning safely to Earth.

Much beyond that requires clearing a few technological hurdles SpaceX has yet to tackle, such as orbital refueling and storing cryogenic propellants in space. For Starship to deliver payloads beyond LEO will require supplemental Starship “tanker” launches to replenish a primary Ship’s propellant. And SpaceX will need to overcome those obstacles to Starship’s full operational status soon.

In addition to SpaceX’s own eagerness to begin launching the Starlink V3 megaconstellation, NASA has also contracted the vehicle as a lunar lander for the Artemis program. NASA is expecting an orbital spacecraft capable of docking with the agency’s Orion spacecraft in time for Artemis III in mid-2027, and a crew-certified vehicle to land astronauts on the moon on Artemis IV, in 2028.

If everything goes smoothly during Thursday’s wet dress rehearsal, SpaceX will be free to proceed toward Flight 14’s Sept. 28 launch target, pending regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration . Unlike previous suborbital flights that have lasted only about an hour, Flight 14’s orbital jaunt is expected to last about 10 hours from liftoff to splashdown of Ship 41 in the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX is gearing up for the first orbital flight of its Starship megarocket, which is now just a week away.

Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, was rolled out to the pad at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, the company revealed in an X post today (Sept. 21).

The booster will be paired with its Ship upper stage on the launch mount soon. If all goes according to plan, the duo will lift off on Sept. 28, on Starship's most ambitious flight to date.

The upcoming test mission will be Starship's 14th to date but the first to go orbital.

The flight plan calls for Super Heavy to make a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. Ship, meanwhile, will power its way to low Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 satellites.

Flight 14 will therefore begin assembly of the Starlink V3 broadband megaconstellation, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites. (Ship deployed 20 V3 Starlinks two months ago on Flight 13, but they were on a suborbital trajectory and quickly came back down to Earth.)

Ship will stay in orbit for a while, circling our planet about six times before returning for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile roughly 10 hours after launch.

This will be a new landing locale for Ship; its suborbital missions came down in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Its current iteration stands 408 feet (124 meters) tall, and future versions will be even larger, Musk has said.

In addition, both of its stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — the "holy grail of rocketry," according to SpaceX. The company thinks Starship will revolutionize spaceflight, making settlement of the moon and Mars economically feasible at long last.

NASA's moon-orbiting spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has captured a fresh new crater on our moon — and this cavity is so huge scientists call it a "once-in-a-century" discovery.

What is it?

What you see in this image is an aerial view of McGetchin crater on the moon. Named after Tom McGetchin, a lunar scientist whose tenure fell during the Apollo era, the crater measures out at 728 feet (221.9 meters) wide and 141 feet (43 meters) deep.

The image was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera on Dec. 5, 2025 and covers about 0.75 miles (1.2 kilometers) of width on the moon. The crater itself, however, was originally discovered on Oct. 24, 2025 by LRO scientist Robert Wagner. Serendipitously, Wagner happened to identify the feature during a routine data-quality check of his data. "I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," he said in a statement.

Scientists believe this huge crater formed in 2024, at some point between April 11 and May 22. They also think the asteroid (or perhaps comet) that smashed into the moon and formed the crater should have been about the size of a three- to six-story building.

Why is it incredible?

The reason McGetchin is dubbed a "once-in-a-century" crater has to do with its massive size. This dent in the moon is actually the largest newly formed crater ever found on our lunar companion — and, in fact, in the entire solar system.

According to NASA, the enormous lunar impact that could have formed a crater with such heft should only happen about once every hundred or so years. Some scientists have even authored a paper that delves into studying the buckets of lunar material that would've been thrown outward as the impact happened; another team looked at how the region around the crater was altered due to the crash.

As to why it's so exciting to investigate a freshly formed crater? Well, it's basically because enough time hasn't yet passed to degrade the scene of the crime. Over time, geologic features slowly change due to exposure to the elements — even on the moon, where time seems to stand still. So, scientists are getting a rather pristine crash site to analyze. And though tons of other bits and bobs hit the moon every year, they either don't form a crater visible to LRO or lead to a very small one.

Last year, for example, LRO found a crater large enough to make the news — but it was so little scientists adorably called it a "freckle." It has surely been overshadowed by this brand new lunar beauty mark.

On Sept. 20, 1970, the Soviet Union's Luna 16 moon probe landed on the moon to retrieve a soil sample and return it to Earth.

Luna 16 was the first robotic spacecraft to succeed in landing on the moon, scooping up a soil sample and returning it to Earth four days after its landing. Before Luna 16, the Soviet space program had tried and failed five times to return a sample from the moon. Overall, this was the third lunar sample brought to Earth.

NASA's Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions had also brought back some rocks and soil from the moon. Luna 16 made a soft landing on the lunar surface in a mare known as "the Sea of Fertility," where it retrieved 101 grams of lunar soil.

Why it mattered

By the time the Soviet Union launched its Luna 16 spacecraftin 1970, it had already lost the Space Race to the moon to NASA's Apollo 11, which landed astronauts on the surface on July 20, 1969, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collecting 47.6 pounds (21.6 kilograms) of lunar samples, including 50 moon rocks. But the Soviet Union still wanted a way to collect samples of its own.

That's where Luna 16 came in — and succeeded.

The Soviet Union launched Luna 16 atop a Proton K rocket on Sept. 12, 1970, with the probe taking eight days to reach the moon and make its historic landing. After collecting its admittedly small sample of lunar material (101 grams is only 3.5 ounces), the spacecraft loaded it into a sample return capsule and launched it back toward Earth on Sept. 21. The return capsule landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan, similar to Russia's Soyuz cosmonaut capsules today, on Sept. 24 of that year.

Luna 16 proved to the Soviet Union that it could collect moon samples robotically, without the need for costly crewed systems and their associated risk. (The Soviet Union's planned N-1 moon rocket suffered major setbacks during the race to the moon, some of them explosive.)

The mission also proved that a spacecraft could drill into the moon to collect samples, instead of just scoop up dirt or rocks on the surface. Luna 16 drilled about 35 centimeters into the moon to collect its core sample. The process took about 7 minutes and was performed entirely in the dark as the sun had set over the landing location, according to the European Space Agency. In fact, because it was night on the Sea of Fertility, Luna 16 became the first moon probe ever to land in darkness, ESA said.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

A newly discovered crater on the moon is giving scientists a rare glimpse into the immediate aftermath of a lunar impact.

Named McGetchin crater, the feature formed sometime between April 11 and May 22 in the year 2024 when an asteroid or comet fragment struck the moon. Measuring about 728 feet (222 meters) across and roughly 141 feet (43 meters) deep, McGetchin is the largest newly formed impact crater identified by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). In fact, it's the largest newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, according to the agency. An impact capable of producing a crater this size is expected to occur on the moon only about once every century, making McGetchin an exceptionally rare real-time discovery.

The findings are detailed in two new studies published Sept 16. in the journal Science Advances. One study, led by Mark Robinson of Intuitive Machines, describes the crater itself and the enormous amount of material thrown across the lunar surface due to the impact that provoked the feature. The second study, led by researchers studying data from LRO's Diviner instrument, examines a much larger region around the crater that was physically altered by the impact. Together, the studies offer scientists something they rarely get: a pristine impact site with observations from before and after the event. And importantly, this site is seen before other processes begin to degrade it.

"McGetchin crater is exceptional because it is the largest newly formed impact crater that has been identified to date," Tyler Powell, lead author of one of the studies, told Space.com. "A crater of this size is expected to form on the moon only once per century, so we're extremely lucky it formed during the lifetime of the LRO mission and that we are able to observe the region both before and after impact."

NASA's LRO mission has been observing the moon for more than 17 years, giving researchers images and measurements of the area before and after the impact. That long-running record allowed scientists to identify subtle changes that would otherwise be difficult to detect.

The crater was first discovered in 2025 by researchers comparing LRO images of the lunar surface. But then, follow-up observations from LRO's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) revealed the fresh crater and the material blasted outward during the impact.

The two studies reveal that McGetchin's effects extend well beyond the sizable crater. LROC observations show an extensive ejecta blanket surrounding the crater, while data from LRO's Diviner Lunar Radiometer revealed an even broader thermal anomaly.

Diviner detected a roughly 4.3-mile-wide (7-kilometer-wide) "cold spot" around the crater that is about 14 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit (8 to 9 kelvins) colder than the surrounding surface during the lunar night. Scientists believe the temperature difference is caused by changes to the upper layers of lunar soil as the impact disturbed and decompacted the regolith, creating a "fluffier" layer that is less able to retain heat, Powell explained.

"Impact cratering is one of the most common and important processes in the solar system. Understanding how impacts modify the surface and their surroundings is important for interpreting lunar geology and history," Powell said. "In addition, understanding how impacts influence surface properties is relevant for lunar exploration and future landed missions."

The moon is covered with impact craters, but most are ancient and have been altered by subsequent impacts and the effects of space weathering. Therefore, McGetchin being a large, pristine crater provides a valuable reference point for understanding how craters form and evolve.

The crater's pristine condition could also make it an intriguing target for future lunar exploration. Its location along a boundary between the moon's darker, basalt-covered mare and brighter highlands terrain offers scientists a chance to study how an impact affects two distinct geological environments.

A rover or crewed mission could take that research a step further by examining features that cannot be fully resolved from orbit.

"Observations from the surface would be really valuable because they would allow us to correlate what we see and map from orbit with small-scale changes to surface texture, the distribution of ejected material, and other properties that can only be studied in detail from the surface," Powell said. "This would improve our understanding of many aspects of the impact cratering process."

Those observations could also have practical implications for future lunar exploration. As NASA and other space agencies plan increasingly ambitious missions to the moon, understanding how impacts alter the physical properties of the regolith could help scientists better anticipate how future rovers, landers and other equipment will interact with the lunar surface. In that sense, McGetchin is more than a newly formed crater — it is a natural laboratory that could help scientists understand both the moon's past and the challenges awaiting future explorers.

The U.S. military must be ready to engage the enemy farther from home than ever before, according to its highest-ranking officer.

"Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday (Sept. 16) during a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

Cislunar space extends from Earth all the way out to the orbit of the moon and includes the lunar surface. For several years now, military officials have been stressing the strategic importance of this huge region, which could get quite a bit busier in the next decade or so.

For example, both the United States and China plan to build bases near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice. Winning this new moon race is critical, U.S. officials have stressed, because whoever does so will be able to establish norms of behavior on and around Earth's nearest neighbor.

China has already demonstrated impressive capabilities in the lunar sphere. In 2019, the nation's robotic Chang'e 4 mission pulled off the first-ever soft landing on the moon's mysterious far side. In 2024, Chang'e 6 returned far-side samples to Earth — another first.

Caine didn't cite such missions or even mention China by name. And he provided no details about what conflict on the cislunar battlefield might look like (though presumably it would be entirely robotic, with satellites seeking to take out adversary craft via jamming or blinding).

But he invoked the cislunar battlefield twice and noted that U.S. military branches cannot assume continued dominance of their various domains.

"Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rare areas or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment," Caine said. "Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space."

The United States' long-held advantage in the final frontier will be key to securing such victories, he added.

"We must continue to ensure that the United States of America can strike anywhere on the globe at the time and place of our choosing, and sustain that force," Caine said. "Our United States Space Force must provide unrivaled space superiority and sustain the associated networks, domain awareness [and] data advantage that the joint force needs to win in space, both now and in the future."

We now know that part of the Space Force's strategy for maintaining that crucial superiority is the operation of weapons in Earth orbit. The branch's chief, Gen. Douglas Schiess, admitted as much during an address at the same conference on Tuesday (Sept. 15).

"Let me be crystal clear: Today, guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said during his speech. ("Guardian" is the official name for a member of the Space Force, just as members of the U.S. Navy are called sailors and members of the Army are soldiers.)

Schiess provided few details about these weapons but, later in the speech, implied that they are electromagnetic rather than kinetic in nature. That is, they're probably designed to knock out key systems of adversary satellites rather than destroy the entire spacecraft (which would create a cloud of potentially troublesome debris).

It's no surprise the U.S. possesses and employs such technology; the newsworthy bit is that a top official said it so openly. The nation's chief rivals in the space domain, China and Russia, possess advanced counterspace technologies as well. For example, both have destroyed defunct satellites with missiles and conducted close approaches of spacecraft with "inspector" vehicles.

SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back by nearly a week.

SpaceX had originally targeted Sept. 22 for the first orbital flight of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket that the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and more.

Today (Sept. 17), however, SpaceX announced a new launch date — Sept. 28. It gave no explanation for the delay.

Liftoff, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, will occur during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.

The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Starship, which debuted in April 2023 and has flown twice so far in 2026. But the 408-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle's first 13 jaunts were all suborbital, so Flight 14 will be a landmark.

"By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 14 mission description.

"This will also mark the first time we plan to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into the constellation, delivering a payload that will dramatically expand connectivity speeds and reliability around the world," the company added.

Starlink, SpaceX's network of broadband satellites in low Earth orbit, currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft. None of those are the larger, more capable V3 version, which are designed to launch on Starship.

Flight 14 will carry up 26 of these next-gen craft — the first of many, if all goes to plan. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company wants the Starlink megaconstellation to eventually consist of 100,000 V3 satellites.

Three of the Starlink craft launching on Flight 14 have been outfitted with cameras and will photograph the heat shield on Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, after deployment. SpaceX will use this imagery to study and potentially improve the heat shield, which protects Ship during its return trip through Earth's atmosphere.

If all goes according to plan on Sept. 28, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will complete six orbits of Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles (275 kilometers). The vehicle will then maneuver its way to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about 10 hours after launch, SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

That's a very different plan than previous Starship flights. On those suborbital missions, Ship stayed aloft for just 65 minutes or so, did not complete an orbit of Earth and came down in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

But Flight 14 will be more of the same for Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy. If all goes to plan, the giant rocket will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, as it has done on a number of previous flights.

So there will be no catch — of either Ship or Super Heavy — by the "chopstick" arms of Starbase's launch tower on Flight 14. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Super Heavy on three occasions to date but has never done so with Ship. This recovery method will eventually be the norm on Starship flights, leading to faster and more efficient reuse of the vehicle, Musk has said.

So, while Flight 14 aims to check a very big box — reaching orbit — other milestones will be reserved for future flights. A Ship tower catch will be among the most anticipated, along with refueling the vehicle in orbit, something that will be required for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on Sept. 17. It first ran on Sept. 15 with the original target launch date of Sept. 22.

Moon lovers rejoice! International Observe the Moon Night returns tonight (Sept. 19). Here's everything you need to know about how to participate in the annual celebration of Earth's natural satellite both in-person and from the comfort of your home.

International Observe the Moon Night takes place around the first quarter moon in September or October, when the moon is conveniently visible in the late afternoon and evening. It's also an excellent phase for exploring features along the terminator — the boundary between lunar day and night — where long shadows help craters, mountains and other features stand out according to NASA.

The global celebration aims to raise awareness of lunar observation, science and exploration, which has intensified in recent years as NASA and its partners work to return humans to the surface of the moon as part of its Artemis program.

How can I participate?

You can join in with the International Observe the Moon Night celebrations either as part of a group or solo from the comfort of your own home!

Looking for an event near you? Search NASA's interactive global map of hundreds moongazing events from star parties organized by local astronomy groups to virtual events hosted by observatories and passionate amateurs.

Or host your own celebration. NASA has advice on how to host your own private or public event to celebrate the occasion, and you can register on the agency's map so other moon enthusiasts can join you.

You can also participate from the comfort of your home simply by stepping out to observe the moon with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. Or you can peruse hundreds of images of the moon captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the astronauts of Artemis II as they journeyed to the far side of Earth's moon.

Anyone with a 3D printer can also create models of the lunar surface made from LRO data, including the landing site of the historic Apollo 11 mission, which touched down in the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969.

Space.com also has a range of fantastic lunar resources to help you get to know Earth's moon! Be sure to check out our explainer article detailing everything you need to know about the moon, along with the latest news on NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface and our September full moon guide.

Read more: Apollo landing sites: An observer's guide on how to spot them on the moon.

New to stargazing? No problem! Simply check out our guide to observing the lunar disk, along with our picks of the best binoculars and telescopes that'll have you exploring the wealth of craters and lunar seas scarring the near side of the moon's surface in no time.

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