Starship success, a private moon landing and more: The top 10 spaceflight stories of 2025

2025 was a very busy year in spaceflight.

Over the past 12 months, we saw multiple spaceflight records broken, the debut of a powerful new reusable rocket and the first-ever fully successful private moon landing.

Here's a rundown of the top 10 spaceflight stories of the year.

10. Astronauts fly over Earth's poles for the first time ever

On March 31, SpaceX launched the private Fram2 mission, which sent four private astronauts on a 3.5-day mission to Earth orbit aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. It was SpaceX's 17th crewed mission to date, but it still broke new ground: Fram2 circled our planet over the poles, which no astronaut flight had ever done before.

There are a number of reasons why human spaceflight planners have avoided this trajectory. Chief among them is that the most common astronaut destinations — these days, the International Space Station (ISS) and China's Tiangong outpost — don't take polar paths. Flying over the poles also exposes astronauts to higher levels of radiation and imposes communications challenges.

The Fram2 crew — led by billionaire commander and mission funder Chun Wang — performed a few dozen scientific experiments during their flight. They also got unprecedented views of our planet's icy extremes, some of which they shared with those of us stuck down here on terra firma.

9. India completes its first in-space docking

India notched a big milestone shortly after the calendar turned this year: On Jan. 15, the two spacecraft of the nation's Space Docking Experiment, or SpaDex for short, linked up in Earth orbit. The success made India just the fourth nation ever to pull off an in-space docking, after the USSR/Russia, the United States and China.

Those other countries are all space powers, a status that India seeks to attain as well. And SpaDex is a step along this path: Mastery of docking tech is necessary to achieve big things in the final frontier, like building a space station and returning samples from the moon.

8. European mission creates its first artificial solar eclipse

An "eclipse machine" came online in 2025. The European Space Agency's two-satellite Proba-3 mission launched to Earth orbit in December 2024, tasked with generating artificial solar eclipses via precise formation flying: One Proba-3 spacecraft blocks out the sun from the perspective of the other, which observes the phenomenon using an onboard telescope.

Proba-3 was designed to help scientists study the sun's wispy, superhot corona, or outer atmosphere, which is swamped by our star's overwhelming brightness — except during total solar eclipses. And Proba-3 delivered the goods for the first time on May 23, capturing an eclipse of its own creation.

7. Suni Williams breaks spacewalk record

Suni Williams' latest space stay lasted far longer than she or anyone else had expected — and the unplanned extension allowed her to break a spacewalk record.

Williams and fellow NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore launched toward the ISS on June 5, 2024, on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. Their mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so. But Starliner suffered thruster problems and helium leaks on the way up, so NASA delayed the vehicle's return to study the issues. The agency eventually decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened without incident on Sept. 7, 2024, and kept Williams and Wilmore on the ISS until March of this year, when they returned to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

NASA integrated Williams and Wilmore into the ISS' full-time crew, and the duo used their extra time well. Williams, for example, performed two spacewalks: one on Jan. 16 and the other on Jan. 30. That second excursion brought her career spacewalking time (accrued over nine extravehicular activities) to 62 hours, 6 minutes. That set a new record for female spaceflyers, besting NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson's total time by 1 hour, 45 minutes. The overall record is 82 hours, 22 minutes, held by cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev.

Whitson still holds the American and female-astronaut records for the most total time spent in space, at 675 days. Williams has been off Earth for a total of 608 days.

6. China launches a mission to sample a "quasi-moon" of Earth

China continued its bold advance into the final frontier this year, launching its first-ever asteroid sample-return mission. That project, called Tianwen 2, isn't targeting any old asteroid — it's on the way to Kamo'oalewa (also known as 2016 HO3), which may be a piece of the moon blasted into space by a giant impact. Kamo'oalewa is weird in another way as well: It's one of Earth's seven known "quasi-moons," objects that don't circle our planet but orbit the sun in lockstep with it.

Tianwen 2 launched on May 28. If all goes according to plan, it will return samples of Kamo'oalewa to Earth in 2027, giving scientists their first up-close look at an intriguing and mysterious object.

5. SpaceX breaks its launch record — again

No surprises here: SpaceX broke its single-year launch record in 2025. Elon Musk's company has launched 170 times so far this year — 165 flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and five suborbital test missions of Starship, the giant, fully reusable vehicle designed to help humanity settle Mars and the moon. More than 70% of the Falcon 9 launches have been devoted to building out SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation, which consists of more than 9,000 operational satellites (and counting).

It was the sixth year in a row that SpaceX has set a new launch record. That mark has increased from 25 in 2020 to 31 (2021) to 61 (2022) to 98 (2023) to 138 (2024) and, now, to 170. And SpaceX is planning to launch two more Falcon 9 missions before the calendar turns, so that number should reach 172.

4. China launches its first reusable rocket

The Chinese company Landspace has developed its own version of the Falcon 9. The rocket, called Zhuque-3, features a reusable first stage powered by nine engines. Zhuque-3 took flight for the first time on Dec. 3, successfully reaching orbit and nearly pulling off a booster landing as well. Zhuque-3's first stage crashed and burned near its touchdown zone, however, apparently after suffering an engine loss during the descent.

Zhuque-3 may well pull off China's first-ever orbital rocket landing on its next flight. Or another vehicle may claim that mantle — Space Pioneer's Tianlong-3, perhaps, or the Long March 12A, which was developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Both of those rockets feature reusable first stages and are scheduled to make their debut flights soon.

3. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket comes online

An even more powerful, partially reusable rocket earned its wings this year: New Glenn, the heavy lifter developed by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' aerospace company.

New Glenn debuted Jan. 16, successfully reaching orbit with a dummy version of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft platform on board. The company tried to land the rocket's reusable first stage on a ship at sea during the flight, but that didn't work out. The second try was the charm, however: New Glenn's booster aced its ocean landing during flight number two, which occurred Nov. 13. The rocket succeeded in its primary mission that day as well, sending the twin ESCAPADE Mars probes into the final frontier for NASA.

Each New Glenn first stage is designed to fly at least 25 times, according to Blue Origin. If the company can attain such SpaceX-levels of reuse, it could achieve some very big things down the road.

2. SpaceX's Starship aces two straight test flights

Speaking of reuse: SpaceX's fully reusable vehicle, the Starship megarocket, flew five test flights in 2025. The first three were checkered affairs, featuring the loss of at least one of Starship's two stages. But the final two, which lifted off in August and October, were unqualified successes.

On both missions, Starship's Super Heavy booster came back to Earth for a pinpoint touchdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The vehicle's upper stage reached space, deployed dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, and splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, still has to check off some pretty big boxes before it's up and running. It needs to reach orbit, for example, and demonstrate in-space refueling of the upper stage, which will be needed on all missions to the moon and Mars. But Starship enters 2026 with some serious momentum.

1. A private company lands on the moon

On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's robotic Blue Ghost lander touched down successfully on the moon. It remained operational for about two weeks thereafter, allowing the science instruments it carried to do their planned work.

This was an unprecedented achievement for private industry and spaceflight in general. Another company, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, put its Odysseus lunar lander down in February 2024, but that vehicle soon toppled over, shortening its mission and those of some of its payloads. Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander, Athena, suffered a similar fate shortly after its touchdown on March 6 of this year.

Blue Ghost's success was also a victory for NASA, which booked the mission (and those of Odysseus and Athena) via its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. More CLPS missions — by Firefly, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic and other companies — are scheduled to launch soon, potentially opening up the moon to more research and human exploration activities — and perhaps even settlement down the road.