An Indian company will make history early Saturday morning (July 18), and you can watch the action live.

Skyroot Aerospace plans to launch its Vikram-1 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the Indian barrier island of Sriharikota, on Saturday at 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT; 11:30 a.m. India Standard Time). Vikram-1 is the first-ever privately built Indian orbital rocket, so its liftoff could blaze a new trail for the nation and for commercial spaceflight.

You can watch the launch live here at Space.com courtesy of Skyroot, or directly via the company. Coverage will start at around 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT).

Skyroot Aerospace is based in the central Indian city of Hyderabad and was founded in 2018. The company made history four years later with its Vikram-S suborbital rocket, becoming the first private Indian outfit ever to reach space.

Vikram-1 is the next step for Skyroot: an orbital vehicle. The four-stage, seven-story-tall rocket is a small-satellite launcher; it can haul about 770 pounds (350 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit, according to the company.

"The small satellite launch market is deeply constrained on the supply side," Skyroot Co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 16).

"At the same time, the demand for services enabled by satellites in space will only continue to grow, and that is where Skyroot's opportunity lies," he added.

The company will begin exploiting that opportunity on Saturday morning, with a test flight called Aagaman (Sanskrit for "Arrival"). The main goal is to see how Vikram-1 and its various systems perform during flight. But the rocket is also carrying some customer payloads, which will be deployed at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers), if all goes according to plan.

Those payloads include a technology demonstration from the German company DCUBED; the Solaras S3 nanosatellite pathfinder from Indian startup Grahaa Space; and Embrace, a robotic arm built by the Indian company Cosmoserve Space that's designed to capture space debris.

Vikram-1 is also carrying Skyroot's SCOPE satellite, which will collect a variety of data to help the company assess the rocket's performance during flight. There are two symbolic payloads on board as well — a small, 18-karat gold rocket from the artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada and "Cosmic Bloom," which was designed by Cosmos Diamonds, a company that makes jewelry using lab-grown gems.

"What we are aiming to do on 18 July is bigger than a single launch. It represents the hopes and hard work of around 1,000 people, the contributions of over 400 suppliers, and nearly 3,000 days of resolve to build a global offering from India," Skyroot Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Naga Bharath Daka said in the same statement.

"With the in-flight data gathered from this mission, we will return to the shop floor to learn, improve, and build further," added Daka, who, like Chandana, used to work for the Indian Space Research Organisation. "This test flight is the first step towards creating a reliable, on-demand launch company for the world from India."

Skyroot has some leeway if Vikram-1 isn't able to fly as planned on Saturday: The current launch window runs through Aug. 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update for 1:15 p.m. ET on July 17: SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 20) for the launch of Starship Flight 13, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few new objectives, however.

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

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

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

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

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

After several days of testing, SpaceX has stacked and readied its massive Starship rocket for its 13th test flight. The company tried to launch on Thursday, but that attempt was aborted at the last second. SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 20), during a 90-minute launch window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT), from pad 2 at SpaceX's facility in Starbase, Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starship isn't the only SpaceX rocket flying today.

A Falcon 9 rocket launched from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today (July 16), carrying 21 satellites for the U.S. military's advanced new "Tranche 1 Transport Layer" (T1TL) constellation to orbit.

Liftoff took place at 4:32 p.m. EDT (2032 GMT; 1:32 p.m. local California time).

SpaceX's Starship megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — is slated to make its 13th test flight a few hours later. It will lift off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time).

SpaceX will stream that mission live, and Space.com will carry the feed. Coverage will begin about half an hour before launch.

Today's Falcon 9 flight helps assemble the T1TL, a network in low Earth orbit (LEO) that will be operated by the U.S. Space Force's Space Development Agency (SDA).

The T1TL "will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe," SDA officials wrote in a explainer.

The T1TL will eventually consist of 126 satellites, which will be built by York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Sixty-three of the spacecraft have now launched to date, on three Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg — one last September, another last October and today.

These 126 spacecraft will be part of a larger LEO network that the SDA calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

The PWSA is "a proliferated constellation of hundreds of optically linked small satellites, in low-Earth orbit (LEO), delivering capability at speed to the warfighter," SDA officials wrote in a Tranche 1 fact sheet.

"SDA leverages spiral development to deploy and proliferate new capability into a new generation of the PWSA every two years, called a 'tranche,' to continually increase capability used by the warfighter," they added.

Everything went according to plan today, at least during the mission's early stages. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff for a landing in the Pacific Ocean, on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." According to a SpaceX mission description, it was the fourth flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1103.

The Falcon 9's upper stage continued hauling the 21 satellites to LEO. We don't know when or exactly where they'll be deployed; the SpaceX mission description doesn't provide that information, and the company cut off its launch webcast shortly after booster landing at the request of the SDA.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:44 p.m. ET on July 16 with news of successful launch and booster landing.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will take to the skies again on Monday (July 20), and you can watch the thundering action live.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Monday — the 57th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 moon landing, by the way — during a 90-minute widow that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). It will be Starship's 13th flight overall and its second mission of 2026. (SpaceX originally tried to launch Flight 13 on Thursday, July 16, but that attempt was aborted at the last second.)

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

A potentially revolutionary rocket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan for Starship Flight 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:25 p.m. ET on July 17 with the new target launch date of July 20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rocket Lab has completed a major qualification test for its formidable Archimedes engine, which will power the company's next-gen Neutron launch vehicle.

As Rocket Lab continues with regular launches of its workhorse small-lift Electron rocket, development of Neutron has carried on in the background, progressing toward a possible debut later this year. The company recently completed a full-duration burn of a second-stage Archimedes, paving the way for integration with Neutron in the coming months.

The burn took place at Rocket Lab's Archimedes Test Complex, housed at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The full-duration test aimed to simulate flight-like requirements and lasted just under 5.5 minutes. "What a thing of beauty," the company said in a July 13 social media post announcing the success, calling it a "critical preparation for Neutron's first flight."

Neutron is equipped with eight Archimedes engines on its first stage, which together provide nearly 1.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The output of each is comparable to that of each Merlin 1D engine, which powers the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Like the Falcon 9, Neutron is also designed for partial reusability: Its first stage will be capable of returning for landing back at its launch site or on droneship vehicles stationed at sea.

The vehicle's second stage, however, is unique compared to other rockets. Conventional launch vehicles secure their payloads inside protective fairings that fall away from the rocket completely once damaging aerodynamic forces disappear in the vacuum of space. But Neutron's fairing halves separate like a clam shell. Rocket Lab has dubbed the system the "Hungry Hippo," after the popular children's game.

Neutron's fairings are also unique in the way they house the rocket's second stage, which emerges from the open fairing jaws to provide its payload a final push into orbit. A single vacuum-optimized Archimedes (AVac) powers Neutron's second stage. It features an engine bell that stretches about eight feet (2.5 meters) taller than the rocket's first-stage engines and produces 1.2 times the thrust of its first-stage counterparts in a vacuum.

For the recent engine test, Rocket Lab installed a shorter sea-level variant skirt on the AVac to compensate for its grounded altitude, which can expose the full-length nozzle to "flow separation and instability," the company's post said. "Stub skirts are used to anchor our engineers' analysis for how the engine will perform with the full nozzle in vacuum conditions."

Rocket Lab had targeted late 2025 for Neutron's debut but pushed that date to the first half of 2026 as last calendar year was approaching its end with the rocket far from being ready for launch. Neutron's timeline suffered another blow in January, when the main stage tank ruptured during a pressure test taking place at the company's Wallops, Virginia, launch facility.

Setbacks aside, Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck has repeatedly voiced his stance that the Neutron team is focused on reaching orbit when the vehicle is ready, not meeting an arbitrary target date.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites made over 355,000 collision avoidance maneuvers throughout the past year, with each satellite now dodging debris and other spacecraft on an almost weekly basis.

The numbers are based on disclosures made by SpaceX in its latest semiannual report to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). According to the latest report, Starlink satellites performed an overall 207,152 avoidance maneuvers between December 2025 and May 2026, up nearly 60,000 from the 148,696 reported in the previous half year. That brings the yearly total to over 355,000, more than three times as many as the constellation performed in 2024. On average, each Starlink satellite performed more than 40 space dodging maneuvers per year between June 1, 2025 and May 31, 2026.

Experts fear the situation might soon get out of hand. "I think we're heading towards a situation where there will be a collision involving an operational satellite in the constellation," Hugh Lewis, a space sustainability expert and professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., told Space.com. "And it will not be for the lack of trying to avoid those things. It will be in spite of all those maneuvers."

The increase coincides with the growth of the internet-beaming constellation and the overall number of satellites in space in the past five years. Starlink grew from about 6,000 satellites in 2024 to more than 10,000 as of June 2026. Over the same time period, the overall number of operational spacecraft in orbit rose from around 10,000 to about 16,000.

The SpaceX constellation orbits at altitudes between 298 miles (480 km) and 342 miles (550 kilometers) and uses an autonomous collision avoidance system that initiates a maneuver when the probability of a collision appears higher than 3 in 10 million. Lewis says that although SpaceX is "doing an excellent job" managing orbital traffic, the steep growth cannot continue without risks.

"The avoidance maneuvers reduce the probability of a collision to about one in a million, which is so small that it's negligible," Lewis said. "The problem is that if you make a million maneuvers and you have a residual probability of one in a million, you end up with an aggregate risk across your entire constellation that you can't get rid of."

Lewis points out that with the expected continued rise in avoidance maneuvers (SpaceX has applied to the FCC to increase the size of its constellation to 100,000 satellites), SpaceX will have made a million avoidance maneuvers over the lifetime of the Starlink constellation as early as June 2027. By 2030, the constellation may be making more than a million maneuvers every year. At that point, the one in a million risk of a collision may no longer be negligible at all.

Tommaso Sgobba, the Director of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, told Space.com that the increase in collision avoidance maneuvers is a predictable certainty.

"The more satellites you pack into [an orbital] shell, the more pairs of satellites exist that could potentially cross paths," Sgobba wrote in an email. "Adding satellites does not just add risk one unit at a time, it multiplies the number of possible pairings. Double the satellites in a shell and you roughly quadruple the number of pairs that need to be watched."

Sgobba also said that the collision probabilities predicted are highly inaccurate as the effects of air drag, which change frequently with space weather, are currently impossible to predict.

He said that due to the vast uncertainties in satellite trajectory predictions "operators lack tools to tell a real threat from statistical confusion," adding that "satellites are frequently dodging ghosts, burning fuel and shortening their operational lives in the process."

SpaceX, being the largest constellation currently in orbit, takes the bulk of responsibilities for orbital maneuvering. Instead of communicating with the other operator to decide who will make the dodge, Starlink satellites automatically avoid other objects — both space debris fragments or operational satellites — whenever there is a conjunction alert.

Other ambitious constellations, such as Amazon LEO or China's Thousand Sails, or Qianfan, are currently being deployed, actively adding to the high number of satellites operating in low Earth orbit.

Lewis said that the only way to safely manage multiple constellations is to make sure their orbits do not intersect. That, however, is not the case based on available information. The Thousand Sails constellation, in particular, is expected to occupy similar regions as Starlink. Many of the recently announced orbital data center projects want to launch into particular orbital regions that are convenient for their operations and are therefore likely to overlap.

"The safe thing to do is to separate the constellations," Lewis said. "But then you are talking about orbital carrying capacity and the first mover benefit, because if I go into a particular altitude with my constellation, then nobody else can use it."

Sgobba calls for predicted numbers of collision avoidance maneuvers based on satellite numbers to be mandatorily disclosed to regulators before applications are granted.

"Right now, there is no clear requirement for a company to say, before launch, how many collision avoidance maneuvers a constellation of this size and density will need every year and whether the satellites carry enough fuel and automation to actually perform them all," Sgobba wrote.

"In short, the crowding of orbit is not an accident waiting to happen. It is a manageable, predictable engineering workload and the argument worth making publicly is that regulators should be treating it that way, by asking for these numbers up front rather than reacting to headlines about near misses after the fact."

SpaceX is just a few days away from its first Starship test flight of the summer, and if you're hoping to watch the world's largest rocket lift off, you'll need to know where and when to tune in. But don't worry — we've got you covered.

The next Starship test flight, called Flight 13 (SpaceX doesn't appear to be superstitious), is scheduled to launch from the company's test site in Starbase, Texas near Boca Chica Beach on Monday, July 20. Liftoff is set for 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

As its name suggests, the upcoming flight will be the 13th test launch overall of SpaceX's Starship megarocket. It will be the second such flight this year, after the May 22 launch of Starship Flight 12. SpaceX is designing Starship, which stands more than 400 feet (121 meters) tall, to be a fully reusable rocket capable of launching missions to the moon, Mars or beyond.

NASA picked Starship to land its Artemis IV astronauts on the moon by 2028, and SpaceX has sold at least one Starship passenger flight to Mars as well. But before SpaceX can carry astronauts to other worlds with Starship, it has to complete a series of suborbital flights and, eventually, reach Earth orbit for in-flight fueling tests, docking demonstrations and more.

SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 is a suborbital test that will be the second flight of SpaceX's new V3 Starship. Below you'll find details on what time Flight 13 will launch, what the mission will do and a full timeline for the mission.

What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 launch?

SpaceX is currently targeting the launch of Starship Flight 13 for no earlier than 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT) on Monday, July 20. (The company originally tried to lift off on Thursday, July 16, but that attempt was aborted at the last second.) However, the exact timing of the launch could change.

That's because SpaceX has a 90-minute window in which to launch Flight 13 from Starbase Pad 2. Liftoff could occur anytime between 6:45 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. EDT (2245 to 0015 GMT). SpaceX's launch webcast will begin 30 minutes before liftoff.

And remember, SpaceX likely has backup days, so the launch could slip a bit if needed. In that case, it would likely lift off at the same time — 6:45 p.m. EDT — and have a 90-minute window, as on the coming attempt.

Related: Read our SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy guide for a detailed look

Can I watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 launch?

Yes, you'll be able to watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 launch online, but you'll have your pick on where to watch.

SpaceX will provide its own livestream of the launch via its X account and the official Flight 13 mission page. If everything is on time, that livestream will begin at 6:15 p.m. EDT (2215 GMT) — 30 minutes before the planned Flight 13 liftoff.

Space.com will simulcast the SpaceX Flight 13 launch webcast on this page, as well as an our homepage and YouTube channel.

A prelaunch show

Now, if you need to get your Starship Flight 13 fix earlier than SpaceX's stream, a good place to look is the NASASpaceflight show: Its livestream will start several hours before liftoff.

The NASASpaceflight launch webcast will begin on July 20 at 3:45 p.m. EDT (1945 GMT). NASASpaceflight has a wealth of cameras installed around SpaceX's Starbase test facility, and the company will share up-close views and live commentary for many preflight activities.

In-person launch options

While SpaceX does not have an official Starship launch viewing site, there are several places where you can see the launch in person around the Starbase area.

For first-time spectators, I recommend watching Starship launch from near the Cameron County Amphitheater at Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island, which is just across the bay from Starbase. The rocky beaches around the amphitheater offer a clear line of sight of the Starship launch pad, and there are often spectators on boats out of nearby Port Isabel offering a picturesque view. It's about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the launch site, and the park has bathrooms.

The traffic getting to South Padre Island (if you're not staying at a hotel on the island) can be heavy on launch days, so another option is watching from the shore in Port Isabel, which is home to Hopper Haus, a SpaceX-themed bar and grill that I can confirm makes awesome burgers.

There is also a shoreline stretch of Highway 48 between Brownsville and Port Isabel, from 6 to 8 miles (10 to 13 km) from the launch site, where you can pull up for the day to watch the launch. It's just the side of the highway, so you won't find amenities like bathrooms there. You can learn more about that at the site SpaceLaunchSchedule.com.

If you're looking for a more rustic experience (and have cash for a $200 ticket, though kids under 17 are $40), you can camp at the Rocket Ranch, which is 3.8 miles (6.1 km) from the Starbase launch site, and camp there for one day and night. It has two viewing locations available, one at an "Outpost" and the other on the campground itself. The Outpost location is the closest and has "unmatched media service," so you can stay connected. Larger four-day camping packages are also available. The ticket includes bus transportation from the ranch campground to a viewing site and back for one launch attempt. I've actually never visited this ranch, but I wanted to include it so you know it's an option. Be sure to read the full Rocket Ranch FAQ so you know what to expect.

How long is SpaceX's Starship Flight 13?

SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 test flight will last just over 1 hour and 5 minutes and should follow the same mission profile as the company's last test, Flight 12, in May. This will be the second flight of SpaceX's new Starship Version 3, or V3.

During Flight 12, the giant Super Heavy booster stage failed to return to Earth properly for a controlled landing and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (which the Trump Administration has renamed the Gulf of America). Instead, the booster crashed into the ocean.

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

Starship Flight 13 will launch from SpaceX's new Pad 2 at Starbase, which the company upgraded with shorter, faster "chopsticks" — capture arms that can catch returning Starship Super Heavy boosters and Ship upper stages during landing, as well as lift vehicles into place on the pad for launch. Check out our full overview on how SpaceX changed Starship for V3 here.

SpaceX will not try to reach orbit with Starship Flight 13 or return its Ship back to Earth for a capture at the launch pad. Instead, both vehicles aim to make controlled descent and water landings, before falling over and sliding into the sea.

While the Super Heavy booster will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Boca Chica, the Ship upper stage will follow a suborbital trajectory for a target splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

During the flight, the Ship vehicle will attempt to deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the company's newer and larger satellite-internet units, but they won't reach orbit. They will follow Starship's suborbital trajectory back down to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.

Six of the Starlink V3 satellites are equipped with cameras to record live views of Starship and its heat shield and beam them back to Earth for analysis.

"For the first time, Starship will carry V3 Starlink satellites to space, which aim to greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds. As part of this initial test, Starship is planned to deploy 20 satellites which will extend solar arrays and antennas and will attempt to connect with the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers," SpaceX wrote in the mission overview. "The Starlink satellites will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to demise upon reentry approximately 20 minutes after deployment."

What if Starship Flight 13 can't launch?

If SpaceX can't launch Starship Flight 13 on July 20, the company likely has multiple backup opportunities. So, if bad weather or another technical issue delays launch, SpaceX could try again in the coming days.

Whichever date SpaceX launches Starship Flight 13, you will be able to follow the mission on Space.com. Be sure to return to Space.com on launch day for complete Starship Flight 13 coverage.

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

SpaceX reached a milestone with its latest Starlink launch, sending the satellites into orbit on its 600th flight of a flight-proven booster.

The sexacentennial launch came on the second of two Falcon 9 missions that lifted off less than eight hours apart overnight from Monday to Tuesday (July 13 to July 14). The first flight, with Starlink batch 15-14, launched at 9:28 p.m. EDT (0128 GMT or 6:28 p.m. PDT local time) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The second flight, with Starlink group 10-45, followed at 5:10 a.m. EDT (0910 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Both launches successfully deployed their payloads — 27 and 29 Starlink satellites, respectively — into their intended orbits, as confirmed by SpaceX.

Both flights also successfully recovered their Falcon 9 first stage boosters. B1093, launched from Florida, completed its 15th flight. B1080, launched from California, achieved its 28th mission. The record for a single Falcon 9 first stage's re-flight stands at 36 launches.

The addition of 56 more Starlink satellites to SpaceX's megaconstellation brought the total active number of broadband internet relay units to 10,839, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell.

In addition to Tuesday's launch being the 600th launch of a flight-proven Falcon 9 stage, SpaceX now stands at 83 Falcon 9 missions this year to date.

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

Liftoff for the spacecraft’s upcoming 13th test flight was originally scheduled for Wednesday (July 16) from the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. That attempt was aborted at the last second, however; SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 20), during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SpaceX's massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, was scheduled to launch its critical test flight on Thursday, July 16, at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT) from Starbase, Texas. The mission was scrubbed at the very end of the countdown. SpaceX is now targeting July 20 for Starship Flight 13.

You can see our latest updates on the Starship V3 (short for Version 3) rocket, including its test flight goals, system upgrades and more. Flight 13 is the 13th test launch of the Starship vehicle since 2023.

Launch livestream | Starship V3 upgrades explained | SpaceX

SpaceX targeting July 16 for Starship Flight 13

The next Starship launch has arrived!

SpaceX is targeting no earlier than July 16 for the next launch of its massive Starship rocket, the company announced on in a post on X. Flight 13 will be the second launch of the vehicle's Version 3 configuration and will be similar in profile to Flight 12. It will be the second launch for Starship "Version 3" (V3), a bigger, more powerful upgrade from previous Starship designs, and will come a little less than two months after V3's debut.

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

Full story: SpaceX targets July 16 for Starship Flight 13, reveals what went wrong on previous launch

Super Heavy booster moved back to hangar

Following a static fire engine test last Friday (July 10), SpaceX has lowered the Flight 13 Super Heavy, Booster 20, from the launch stand and transported the stage back to its hangar at the company's Starbase, Texas, facility.

The booster will roll back to the pad in the next day or so, along with Ship 40, the Flight 13 Starship upper stage. The pair will be stacked a Starbase's pad 2, where it's expected the rocket will undergo at least one additional engine test prior to launch.

SpaceX is still targeting July 16 for liftoff of Starship's 13th test flight, scheduled to get off the ground during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

Read how this launch will deploy SpaceX's first batch up upgraded Starlink Version 3 satellites into space.

How to watch SpaceX launch Starship Flight 13 on July 16

SpaceX readying Starship to launch in just over 24 hours

Starship's next big test launch is just a day away.

SpaceX has transported Booster 20, the Super Heavy first stage for the massive launch vehicle, back to pad 2 at the company's Starbase facility in Texas. If all goes according to plan, that will be its last relocation before launch, currently scheduled for tomorrow (July 15) during a 90-minute launch window beginning at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

Ship 40, Starship's upper stage for Flight 13, will be trasnported to the pad today, and stacked on Super Heavy for a full wet dress rehearsal to confirm the vehicle's readiness ahead of tomorrow's launch attempt.

What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 launch on July 16? (Full mission timeline)

Starship stacked, awaiting launch countdown

SpaceX's massive Starship rocket is stacked and ready for this evening's Flight 13 launch. Booster 20, the Super Heavy vehicle supporting the mission, was rolled back to Starbase's pad 2 yesterday, with the upper stage Ship 40 joining the booster overnight, when the two were stacked for (hopefully) the final time before liftoff.

SpaceX is progressing toward a 90-minute launch window that opens today (July 16) at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT). The mission can be streamed live here on Space.com, or directly via SpaceX on the Flight 13 website and the company's X account. Read our full mission breakdown for a complete mission profile:

SpaceX will launch Starship, the world's largest rocket, on critical Flight 13 test today. Here's what to expect.

SpaceX stacks Starship overnight (video)

SpaceX has released photos and video of last night's Starship stacking. Super Heavy 20 was rolled back to pad 2 yesterday (July 15), with Ship 40 following its trail after sunset. Both recently completed static test fires of the Raptor 3 engines, followed by final prelaunch checkouts back at their respective hangars.

Now that both have been transported to the launch pad and stacked, SpaceX is preparing the rocket and ground infrastructure for liftoff.

The Flight 13 launch window opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT), and will last for up to 90 minutes.

Starship Flight 13 on track for launch

SpaceX is moving ahead today with Starship Flight 13, according to a post on the company's social media page. Beach and road closures around Starbase close to the public this afternoon around 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT), clearing all but essential personnel from the surrounding facility.

A 90-minute launch window will open at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT), with several opportunities for teams to reset if liftoff doesn't occur at the top of the window. SpaceX's livestream is expected to begin about 30 minutes before launch, and will be simulcast here on Space.com.

SpaceX stacks massive Starship rocket ahead of today's Flight 13 test launch (video)

SpaceX Straship Flight 13 launch stream is live

Live coverage has begun for SpaceX's Starship Flight 13! You can watch the action and follow along with live updates here, and on the Space.com homepage. SpaceX's direct stream is available on the company's website.

Liftoff is currently set for 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT), with a launch window that extends to 8:15 p.m. EDT (0015 GMT, July 17).

Super Heavy booster propellant load had begun

SpaceX has begun loading cryogenic fuel into the Super Heavy booster at Starbase's pad 2. Starship uses a mixture of liquid methane and liquix oxygen, together known as "methalox," to power both Super Heavy and Ship stages of Starship.

SpaceX not tracking any issues

SpaceX is fueling Starship for Flight 13 right now, and is not tracking any issues as the opening of the launch window approaches. The day began with a 90% probability of favorable launch conditions, according the SpaceX livestream host Dan Huot, who is voicing confidence in the success of today's mission.

According to SpaceX commentators, success on today's mission will open the door for "near future orbital flights" and the first-ever attempt to catch Starship's Ship upper stage using the launch tower at Starbase's pad 2.

Barring any delays in fueling or weather constraints, Starship is scheduled to lift off at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT). The launch window extends for 90 minutes.

T-1 minute to launch!

SpaceX has entered the terminal count for Starship! Just one minute to go until Starship Flight 13 liftoff! Let's go!

SCRUB

SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 is scrubbed for the day.

At T-0, the rocket's automated flight computer initiated a hold and abort call. It isn't immediately clear what caused the abort, but its execution so far into the countdown means a scrub for the day. "We did trigger a hold on the booster that aborted our liftoff as we were starting to light those Raptor engines," SpaceX livestream host Dan Huot said.

"At this point," Huot said as the coverage ended, "they're going to get into [propellant] offload. We're gonna get all the methane, all the oxygen off the vehicle, and then we'll figure out next steps."

A new launch date for Starship Flight 13 has not been determined.

SpaceX assessing new launch date

Following the last-second scrub of last night's Starship Flight 13 launch, SpaceX stood down from Thursday's launch attempt.

It was not immediately clear what caused the automated abort, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted to social media shortly after the launch was called off, saying a failure of a few of Straship's Raptor 3 engines failed to light at ignition. "Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days," Musk said in a post.

He clarified later yesterday evening, saying, "To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week."

SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 test launch aborts at last second (video)

SpaceX targeting July 20 for Starship Flight 13 test launch

We have a new (tentative) launch date: After a last-second abort scuttled SpaceX's first attempt to launch Starship Flight 13 yesterday (July 17), the company is now targeting no earlier than Monday (July 20) for the liftoff. The 90-minute launch window opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local time).

You can watch the launch here at Space.com when the time comes and learn about the mission in our Flight 13 preview.

Yesterday's abort was triggered when several of the 33 Raptor engines on Starship's first-stage booster failed to ignite as planned, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. "To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced," Musk said via X, the social media platform he owns, shortly after yesterday's abort.

July 20 is a very meaningful date in spaceflight history, by the way. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and NASA's robotic Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars exactly seven years later.

The International Space Station has three new residents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update for 1:15 p.m. ET on July 17: The July 16 launch attempt was aborted. SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 20) for the launch of Starship Flight 13, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HYDERABAD, India — When Space.com visited Skyroot Aerospace's Max-Q campus here in February, the company's first orbital rocket, Vikram-1, was still coming together.

Inside the company's 55,000-square-foot (5,110 square meters) rocket factory, engineers sat before computer screens, running critical simulations and systems checks on Vikram-1's Orbit Adjustment Module, the liquid-fueled upper stage that stands at the center of the room and will guide the rocket's final maneuvers in space. Unlike the rocket's three solid-fueled lower stages, the upper stage can restart its engine, allowing Vikram-1 to deploy multiple customer satellites into different orbits during a single mission.

At the time, it was one of the last major components awaiting an overnight transport to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, where the rocket's lower stages had already arrived for final integration.

Five months later, the fully assembled, seven-story rocket stands on the coastal launch pad, monitored by a launch team of about 200 people — roughly one-fifth of Skyroot's workforce — preparing for a launch window that opened on July 12 and runs through Aug. 4.

On Thursday (July 16), the company announced a target date and time during this window — 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT and 11:30 a.m. India Standard Time) on Saturday (July 18).

If all goes as planned, Vikram-1's mission, named Aagaman — Sanskrit for "arrival" — will place multiple customer payloads into low Earth orbit, at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). Success would be historic: No private Indian company has ever launched a satellite to orbit.

The manifest includes Skyroot's SCOPE satellite; a technology demonstration from the German company DCUBED; Indian startup Grahaa Space's SOLARAS S3 satellite; and Embrace, a robotic arm designed to capture debris in orbit, from fellow Indian company Cosmoserve Space.

Vikram-1 will also carry two symbolic payloads — a floral-shaped artwork called Cosmic Bloom from the lab-grown-jewelry company Cosmos Diamonds, and a miniature 18-karat gold rocket by artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada that honors Indian scientific pioneers Vikram Sarabhai (after whom the Vikram rocket series is named), C.V. Raman and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

A successful mission would also move Skyroot closer to its goal of offering dedicated launches for small satellites that require precise orbital destinations. Rather than flying as secondary payloads aboard larger rockets, customers would be able to purchase missions tailored to their own orbital requirements — a model most successfully employed these days by the California-based company Rocket Lab.

Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana likens the strategy to booking a cab rather than taking a train.

"The 'cab' market is what we want to put our mark on with the Vikram series," Chandana told Space.com. "There are very few opportunities for customers to reach customized orbits today."

Aagaman is the first of three planned development flights intended to validate Vikram-1 before Skyroot begins commercial operations. If the vehicle performs as expected, the company hopes to scale production to one orbital rocket a month from its two Hyderabad campuses, according to Chandana.

"The whole idea is to go there as prepared as possible and to attain as much data as possible from the launch, so that we can get to fast-paced, high-frequency launches as soon as possible," he said.

Skyroot first drew headlines in 2022, when its Vikram-S vehicle became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach space.

The vehicle was a suborbital technology demonstrator, climbing to an altitude of roughly 54 miles (88 km) before falling back to Earth. (That's above the boundary of space according to some, but not all, metrics.) According to Chandana, about 80% of the technologies now flying on Vikram-1 — including its carbon-composite structures, solid propulsion system, avionics and thermal protection materials — were first validated during that mission.

Even so, developing a rocket capable of reaching orbit took another four years. Roughly four times larger than Vikram-S, Vikram-1 must not only reach an altitude of 280 miles (450 km) but also accelerate its payloads to about 8 km (5 miles) per second — fast enough to remain in orbit around Earth. Along the way, it must execute a precisely timed sequence of stage separations before relying on its restartable liquid-fueled upper stage to place satellites into their intended orbits — capabilities that Skyroot has extensively tested on the ground but has yet to demonstrate in flight.

"We were very optimistic that we will get to an orbital launch in maybe two, three years from there," said Chandana. "However, rocket science is rocket science."

"We learned a lot of things on the go," he added. "Because of that optimism, we were able to process progress very fast."

When Chandana and co-founder Bharath Daka left the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to establish Skyroot in 2018, India's private launch industry was almost nonexistent. The country had yet to adopt a national space policy or create a formal framework for private investment, and startups had no established pathway to use government launch facilities. Instead, Skyroot relied on India's existing aerospace supplier base, the expertise of former ISRO engineers and the founders' belief that India's proximity to the equator would eventually help make the country an attractive base for commercial launches. (Earth spins faster near the equator, giving rockets launched from low latitudes an extra push toward orbit.)

"We just took the leap of faith," Chandana said.

That bet paid off. In 2020, the Indian government opened the space sector to private companies by establishing the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center (IN-SPACe). The move, followed by a new space policy in 2023, allowed startups to independently design, test and launch their own space technologies while also giving them access to ISRO's launch pads, propulsion test stands, and other facilities.

"That accelerates our development cycles, because we need not invest and put energy into building facilities," Chandana said.

Since the reforms, India's space sector has grown from a state-dominated enterprise to an ecosystem of more than 400 startups. Jitendra Singh, India's minister of state for science and technology, recently estimated that the country's space economy, valued at roughly $8.4 billion in 2022, could expand to about $40 billion over the next decade as private investment and launch activity accelerate.

Skyroot is already looking beyond small satellites to capture a share of that growing market. Chandana said the company, now valued at $1.1 billion after raising $60 million in May, plans to develop larger launch vehicles capable of carrying heavier payloads while investing in reusable rocket technology to decrease launch costs.

"There's a very attractive market for the bigger payloads and bigger vehicles as well," Chandana said. Reusable rockets, he added, will become increasingly important particularly for launching big satellite constellations.

For now, however, the company's attention is fixed on the rocket standing on the launch pad in Sriharikota.

The final days before launch are among the most operationally demanding for the team. Chandana said there is also a palpable sense of excitement in the debut of India's first privately developed orbital rocket, particularly for the company's young workforce, many of whom are experiencing their first orbital launch campaign.

"We have been preparing ourselves for quite some time towards this launch," said Chandana. "For us, the mood is very energetic right now."

Tiny pieces of space junk only 2 inches (5 centimeters) in size are cluttering a valuable orbital region where some of the costliest satellites reside, a new study has found.

Researchers from the University of Warwick in the U.K. found that the geostationary orbit — a region of space at the altitude of 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) — is full of dangerous, previously unseen bits of space junk that could destroy satellites.

The geostationary orbit is quite unique. Satellites at this altitude circle Earth in sync with the planet's rotation, appearing permanently suspended above a fixed spot on the equator. A single satellite in the geostationary ring has a constant view of a vast portion of the globe. This feature has been taken advantage of for decades for things like TV broadcasting, internet delivery, Earth observation and weather monitoring. But, as it appears, those satellites might not be safe up there at all.

"The debris in geosynchronous orbit is a potential minefield," Stuart Eves, the study’s co-author and space consultant at SJE Space, said in a statement. "No one in their right mind would enter a terrestrial minefield without a mine detector. Similarly, no one in their right mind should launch a satellite to GEO without an adequate debris survey."

The researchers uncovered the previously invisible debris by re-examining a dataset from an earlier space debris survey conducted by astronomers using the 8.3-foot (2.54-meter) Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, Canary Islands. They ran the data through new image processing algorithms to distinguish smaller and much fainter fragments than was previously possible in the distant geostationary orbit.

"The blind stacking technique is a very powerful method for improving the sensitivity limit of astronomical datasets," Ben Cooke, a research fellow at the University of Warwick's Center for Space Domain Awareness and co-author of the paper, said in the statement. "It involves testing many potential paths in an image sequence along which hidden targets might be moving and stacking the images to help bring those targets above the noise floor. This project shows a successful, real-world application of the method."

The researchers found 25 previously missed debris tracks in the images, 80% of which were caused by previously unknown objects.

The finding is concerning as space debris at such high altitudes behaves differently from that circling closer to Earth. The residual atmosphere at 22,000 miles is almost non-existent, meaning there is no air drag to force the orbital clutter spiral into the atmosphere and burn up.

"Debris in the neighborhood of the geostationary belt is particularly concerning," James Blake, also a Warwick research fellow and the study’s co-author, said in the statement. "It's very far away, well above the Earth's atmosphere, so small objects tend to be incredibly faint and difficult to detect, and any debris that's generated will stick around indefinitely."

While orbits near Earth naturally clear up as the residual air at these altitudes slows the junk fragments down, at the higher altitude, the concentrations of such fragments will forever keep rising, making the region ever more tricky to operate in.

Moreover, the satellites that reside in this unique orbital region tend to be very large and expensive, designed for much longer missions than those making up megaconstellations in low Earth orbit. These satellites, frequently fitted with solar panels spanning 100 feet (30 meters) or more, can suffer substantial damage from a collision with the tiniest piece of junk.

"Pieces of space junk can be moving very quickly relative to one another, as much as several kilometers every second," Blake said. "The energies involved are really high, and even small debris can cause a lot of damage to very expensive satellites, so small things really matter."

The researchers are now looking to analyze additional images obtained by other telescopes around the world to get a fuller understanding of the scale of the debris contamination in the region.

The study was published in the Journal of Astronautical Sciences in June.

The first of perhaps tens of thousands of sunlight-directing space mirrors just got cleared for liftoff.

California-based startup Reflect Orbital just got a license from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch and operate its first demonstration satellite, a spacecraft that will unfurl a reflective surface that measures about 60 feet (18 meters) on a side.

That satellite, called Eärendil-1 is targeted to fly later this year. And it could be the first of many: Reflect Orbital aims to operate 50,000 or more such mirror-craft in low Earth orbit by 2035, beaming reflected sunlight down to a variety of customers on the surface.

"We're grateful to the FCC for recognizing the importance of testing novel technologies in space," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's co-founder and CEO, said in an emailed statement on Friday (July 10).

"This license is the first step toward rigorously testing our technology's efficacy and the safeguards we have developed," he added. "We're excited to demonstrate how our technology works and to introduce transformative, clean technology the world urgently needs."

That technology could aid a variety of industries and endeavors, according to Reflect Orbital.

"Imagine the endless possibilities when sunlight is not limited by geography or time of day," the company's website reads. "A search-and-rescue team locates a missing person in minutes. A city has safer, evenly lit streets without the carbon emissions. Construction projects complete in half the time with teams able to work through the night safely."

The planned mirror constellation will also boost the productivity of solar arrays on Earth, allowing them to take more of the electricity-generating load from polluting options such as fossil fuels, according to the company.

Not everybody is thrilled about Reflect Orbital's plans, however. Satellite megaconstellations in general are controversial. Some folks object to how they're changing the night sky, for example, and others worry that deorbiting huge numbers of satellites will pollute Earth's atmosphere with heavy metals.

There are some specific concerns about Reflect Orbital's plans as well — namely, that it will introduce a new type of light pollution for people and ecosystems to deal with.

"The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation," John Barentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory in Tucson, Arizona and a consultant at Dark Sky Consulting, previously told Space.com.

"That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well," he added.

Reflect Orbital stresses that it will do its best to minimize such potential impacts.

"We design for safety in three ways: 1) the light is contained within the spot, 2) the light can be turned off quickly and at any time so that none of it reaches the Earth, and 3) we can intentionally avoid sensitive areas like research observatories or protected habitats," the company's website states.

"The light is not bright enough to start fires or harm eyes, even when viewed through a telescope, and cannot be concentrated past maximum natural sunlight irradiance," it adds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launch (April 1)

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

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

Lunar flyby (April 6)

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

Splashdown (April 10)

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

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

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

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

Websites

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

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

Social media

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

Imagine you're on a hike in a remote mountain range. Your hyperactive dog catches the scent of a deer and, powered by his hunter's instinct, disappears in the forest. He has a GPS tracker in his collar that can send his coordinates via the cellular network. But where you are, there is no mobile coverage. You keep whistling and calling but to no avail: your dog is nowhere to be seen.

That exact scenario prompted technologist Jonathan Bensamoun to develop what he describes as the world's first satellite-connected wearable device for dogs. Bensamoun is the founder and CEO of Fi, which has been manufacturing dog trackers since 2017. He first conceived the idea to make GPS devices for dogs when he adopted a young German shepherd named Thor and wanted to make sure that his hired dog walker wasn't cutting corners when taking him out for walks.

But even though the company had quickly grown into a market leader, Bensamoun kept hearing customers complain about the device's usefulness. That's where SpaceX's Starlink satellites came in.

"The number one complaint from customers is either 'I live in an area where the cellular network is not really good' or 'I get really worried about my dog when it's away from the typical suburban area. I am worried when it escapes the yard and runs into the woods," Bensamoun told Space.com.

When Starlink began delivering connectivity directly to smartphones in 2024, Bensamoun knew a solution to the problem was on its way. And on July 8, the world's first satellite dog tracking service came online.

The device combines a GPS receiver, which determines the dog's position in real time, and a simple battery-powered modem that connects to T-Mobile's cellular network, which partners with Space's Starlink system. When the dog's position registers outside a pre-defined zone, the owner receives a message via a smartphone app.

When no cell tower is within reach, the device links with an overflying Starlink satellite to complete the task. The dog owner can also set a geo fence around the dog, an area within which the dog is allowed to move without triggering an alert. When the dog crosses that virtual boundary, for example, escapes from the backyard, the tracker sends a message to the owner.

The device's battery lasts "multiple days", according to Fi, giving the desperate pet owner plenty of time to locate the refugee. To speed up the search, Fi enables the owner to send the dog signals — short bursts of vibrations or sounds — to entice it to come home voluntarily.

"You can train your dog with those vibrations and reward it with food every time they receive the vibration," said Bensamoun. "That way, they will start associating the vibration with their food being ready at home."

GPS tracking has been around for decades. In the animal realm, wild, endangered animals became the first to wear them in the 1990s. But those early devices were clunky and expensive, good for large mammals such as moose and caribou, but not fit for commercial use on pets. The technology finally shrunk to small enough dimensions in the early 2010s when first GPS dog trackers entered the market.

Today, some 11 million dogs worldwide are tracked or monitored by GPS in some form. Fi's new tracker — the Fi Ultra Direct-to-Cell tracker — takes the technology another step further by providing "nearly omnipresent connectivity," said Bensamoun.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been appointed as the head of a new White House group to study unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP, a new catch-all term for UFOs that might appear not just in the air but also in space or underwater. Loeb says the group is focused on evidence, instrumentation, data analysis and collection standards.

The move follows recent Trump administration initiatives to bring more transparency to the topic of UFOs, or UAP. The UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb explains, was established by the White House, the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other members of the Intelligence Community.

Loeb co-founded and leads the Galileo Project, designed to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations "from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research."

As chair of the just-formed UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb has built a team of researchers that he describes as "an amazing A-team of exceptional scientists and experts."

Members of the group come from a wide range of disciplines from data science and instrumentation to biology, oceanography, anthropology and psychology.

The council's stated purpose is to help government agencies study the nature of UAP through rigorous scientific methods, with an emphasis on collecting and analyzing higher-quality data rather than relitigating older material that cannot be independently verified.

Meet the team

But first things first.

What is the current membership makeup of Loeb's Council? It's quite a mix of talent to undertake a new look at UAP:

• Liberty Capito is a professor of practice in data science at the Olin Business School at the Washington University in St. Louis.
• Carol Cleland is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
• Richard Cloete is a computer scientist at Harvard University and a member of Loeb's Galileo Project.
• Omer Eldadi is in the department of psychology at Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel.
• Tim Gallaudet is a retired Navy admiral and oceanographer.
• Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University statistics and economics.
• Ross Howard is producer of John Michael Godier's Event Horizon podcast that explores the technosignatures of alien technology. He is also with the Sol Foundation aimed at addressing the UAP issue and preparing society for its social implications.
• Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany.
• Ravi Kopparapu is a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center expert having research interests in extrasolar planet habitability, atmosphere modeling and characterization.
• Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO Of Colossal Biosciences, the world's first de-extinction company.
• Jacob Haqq Misra, of Blue Marble Space, is a meteorology and astrobiology specialist.
• Devesh Nandal is a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian.
• Garry Nolan is professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine and is executive director of the board of the Sol Foundation.
• Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and an educator on critical thinking.
• Peter Skafish is a sociocultural anthropologist and secretary of the Sol Foundation.
• Matthew Szydagis is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Albany.
• Jennice Vilhauer is a clinical psychologist with expertise in quantitative psychology and the psychological dimensions of potential disclosure.

Data-driven, physics-based

Space.com reached out to several of the UAP Council members to get their personal views on this new study approach.

"I expect the council and myself to follow methods and techniques deeply rooted in the scientific principles," said Devesh Nandal.

"The UAP Science council in particular is focused on a data-driven and physics-based approach on the topic of UAP," said Nandal. "We approach this topic with the same rigor we apply in our respective scientific fields and we hope to provide an unbiased analysis on this topic."

Nandal said his role is to help with quantitative data analysis and apply his expertise in astrophysics to help the council decipher the origin of UAPs.

"My first and foremost passion is in stellar astrophysics where I study the life and death of massive and supermassive stars," Nandal said. "I also find the anomalous nature of UAP sightings to be quite intriguing, and whether these events are of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin, I am excited to apply my understanding of physics to decipher their true nature," he said.

If such events can be explained using known principles, "that's excellent," Nandal advised, as this gives him a chance to test the laws of physics to explain a phenomenon that is captivating fellow humans.

"If such events are beyond our current understanding, I see this as a brilliant opportunity to learn all that I can about the Universe and share my findings with everyone," Nandal concluded.

Public trust in science

Council member Liberty Capito said she's honored to be a part of the study group.

"Avi is one of the most brilliant scientists of our time and what he has put together, is what I believe to be a blueprint for re-establishing the public's trust in science by having people with vastly different views, beliefs and science on it," Capito said.

From Council member, Robin Hanson: "It's an honor to be invited, and it's a great cause. I worried at first if we could find much useful to do, but it seems that we do have some promising ideas."

Another member of the UAP Council is Carol Cleland, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute Affiliate and a member of CU Boulder's Center for Astrobiology.

"I anticipate having a council of outside experts will pressure the government to be more open about releasing information and allowing members of the council to interview UAP witnesses," Cleland told Space.com.

Potential positive

Identifying the unidentified deserves a high priority within the U.S. government and the scientific community, explains Loeb.

Nevertheless, for organizations that also continue to diligently sort out what's behind unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the past and the current UAP tag line, they are taking a cautiously optimistic attitude.

"The involvement of serious, independent scientists is a potential positive development, and the government requires that for any thorough and credible investigation of UAP," said Mark Rodeghier, president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies since 1986.

The key issue is not the credentials of the people involved, Rodeghier said, but the structure they are working within.

"If the Council lacks a clear mandate, access to relevant data, a collaborative relationship with those actually grappling with the UAP problem in the government, and then a path for public reporting, its practical value may be quite limited," Rodeghier told Space.com.

Wait and see

Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, said he's adopting a "wait and see" attitude regarding the UAP Council at this point in time.

"Since the UAP Council seems to have the ear of some in Congress," Powell told Space.com, "I hope that they will spend some of their time advocating that Congress appropriate funding specific to the study of UAP through the National Science Foundation."

In SCU board meetings, Powell added, they are a strong proponent of making funding available to the scientific community and academia.

"We never know from where a breakthrough may occur in the study of UAP," Powell said, "and the more scientists involved from all areas of research, the better."

A SpaceX rocket just inched closer to the record books.

A Falcon 9 vehicle lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California tonight (July 10) at 11:01 p.m. EDT (8:01 p.m. local time; 0301 GMT on July 11), carrying 29 of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 35th flight for this rocket's first stage, a booster designated B1071. The SpaceX record is 36, set just a few days ago by B1067 on another Starlink mission.

And, there will likely be more flights for B1071 down the road. The booster came back to Earth for a touchdown tonight as planned, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" about 8.5 minutes after launch.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 29 Starlink satellites aloft. They're scheduled to be deployed in LEO about 62 minutes after launch.

The Starlink megaconstellation currently consists of more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. The network is growing all the time, however, and it could eventually get very large indeed; SpaceX recently applied for approval to operate 100,000 of the spacecraft in LEO.

Tonight's launch was the 81st Falcon 9 mission of 2026. About 80% of them have been Starlink flights.

German company Isar Aerospace is expanding its operations overseas after signing an agreement with Canada's Maritime Launch Services for use of its Spaceport Nova Scotia.

The deal allows Isar to design and operate the pad infrastructure based on the company's needs, in order to launch its Spectrum rocket. In return, Maritime Launch Services (MLS) will provide the pad and surrounding facilities for vehicle stage and payload integration, testing and a mission control hub for launch operations.

The agreement grants Isar a $150 million, 10-year lease for the MLS launch site, with the option to extend up to an additional 10 years. Development of the facility is scheduled to begin later this year, with Isar targeting 2028 for its first orbital launches from the new site.

"Canada is the next step in our roadmap to bring full end-to-end launch capability to sovereign nations," Alexandre Dalloneau, Isar's mission and launch operations vice president, said in a company statement on Tuesday (July 7). "And we are proud to be doing it here in, and together with, Canada.”

By 2029, Isar hopes to be able to support up to 40 launches from the new Canadian site. “By combining Isar Aerospace’s launch vehicle, Spectrum, with Spaceport Nova Scotia’s licensed infrastructure, we are creating the conditions for reliable orbital launch services from Canada," MLS President and CEO Stephen Matier said in the same statement.

MLS has positioned Spaceport Nova Scotia as a multi-user launch center, designed for expansion based on future customer needs. It's one of Canada's first-ever facilities designed to support orbital launches — Canadian company NordSpace is constructing a launch pad of its own with a similarly flexible framework, but neither it nor Isar has yet carried out a successful orbital launch.

Isar has tried, however. Spectrum launched for the first time in March 2025, from Europe's Andøya Spaceport in Norway, but the rocket began to tumble shortly after clearing the tower and fell back to Earth in a fiery explosion. Since then, the company has rolled Spectrum out several times for a second launch opportunity but has run up against either weather or technical delays that have scrubbed each attempt.

Still, that hasn't slowed the company's efforts. Dalloneau sees Isar's success as one of international importance.

“While every nation needs data from space, almost no nation has the end-to-end capability to access it independently. This makes launch capacity one of the most consequential bottlenecks in defense and intelligence today, and we are here to close it," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it a space jellyfish? Is it an alien? No, it's the aftermath of a SpaceX rocket launch!

What is it?

Have you ever looked up and thought, "Why is there a giant glowing jellyfish cloud in the sky?" If so, chances are that you've seen the remnants of a rocket launch, and not a surprise alien visitor.

In the early hours of July 9, SpaceX launched 29 of its Starlink broadband satellites from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to low Earth orbit. It was the rocket's 36th flight, a record.

The rocket lifted off at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 GMT), and the scene it painted in the dark early-morning sky looks truly out of this world. But there is a practical, Earthly explanation.

When a Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its engines expel water vapor and carbon dioxide. As it climbs higher into the sky, the temperature drops and the water vapor quickly freezes, forming ice crystals that trail behind the rocket in the spectacular plume we're seeing here. And this view is made more colorful and striking by the sunlight of early morning.

Why is it incredible?

While this photograph's beauty speaks for itself, it is also a colorful example of how real scientific moments can spark the imagination.

Do you think it looks like a jellyfish? I think it looks like a comb jelly, which isn't actually a jellyfish but rather a different type of transparent, squishy invertebrate that drifts through the ocean. It could also look like a glowing football or even a mythological monster.

Whatever you think it looks like, while we have a real scientific explanation for why this rocket launch was followed by a giant, glowing, uniquely shaped cloud, it's still fun to use our imagination.

A new ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court protecting voter rights could extend to astronauts living and working in space and training internationally, their families, and the multitude of NASA workers who travel to support their missions.

On Monday (June 29), the Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots can be counted toward a total vote even if they arrive after election day, as long as they are postmarked by election day. The ruling followed efforts by the Trump Administration to place restrictions on mail-in voting. In a new statement, the nonpartisan activist organization Astronauts for America spoke out in support of the Supreme Court's decision, which supports absentee voting.

"We don't want to see barriers put in place [that] make it more challenging for somebody to exercise their constitutional right of voting," retired NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence told Space.com. Lawrence is a member of Astronauts for America, as well as a veteran of the U.S. Navy, where she served as a captain, engineer and helicopter pilot.

What happened?

An executive order issued by President Trump in March 2026 attempted to place a number of restrictions on voting in the country, including limitations on mail-in or absentee voting. The order directed the United States Postal Service to only transmit ballots for states that compile and submit lists of eligible mail-in voters 60 days before elections, added requirements and complications to mail-in ballots and attempted to limit who receives a ballot in the mail.

This order not only added layers to limit voting access, but it conflicted with existing procedures set by states for absentee voting. Additionally, the U.S. Constitution places the authority to change election rules and processes with Congress, not the president, though this was not the first executive order put out by Trump to attempt to change election rules, CNN has reported.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court blocked the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out this executive order, declaring that mail-in ballots may be counted if they arrive up to five days after election day, as long as they are postmarked by election day.

"This is key to making sure we have free and fair elections, that people have the ability to cast their vote, and it's not an overwhelming burden for them to do that again," said Lawrence.

Astronauts vote (and so do the people around them)

In a statement shared on social media, Astronauts for America commented on the recent ruling.

"We at Astronauts for America are pleased to see the justices take this critical step toward safeguarding free and fair elections, and ensuring that every eligible voter has their ballot counted," the statement reads. "As astronauts, some of us cast our votes from space. As military veterans, many of us relied on voting by mail. Upholding this grace period ensures that astronauts and other Americans are able to exercise their civil rights."

"Voting is the cornerstone of our American democracy, and this is an important step forward in our battle to ensure everyone has the right to vote," the statement continued. "While the Supreme Court ruling should be celebrated, we must continue standing up for our democracy and constitutional principles."

Astronauts have used absentee voting systems for decades, and they do so regularly: Astronauts have been living in orbit on board the International Space Station continuously since November 2000. When astronauts are going to be in space during an election, NASA has a digital system that allows them to submit absentee votes. But as the statement above suggests, astronauts don't just need absentee voting during their space missions.

Astronaut training can take place all around the world, especially if there is a mission with international collaboration. Lawrence shared that, during her tenure with NASA's space shuttle program, there was a 16-month period when she had to live and train full-time in Russia. And, astronauts don't prepare for space in a vacuum. Family members like spouses might travel with them for long-term training, and there are a wide variety of mission managers and support staff for crewed missions (and their families) who might have to be on long-term travel as well.

Additionally, many astronauts like Lawrence are also military veterans who, during their service, are only able to vote through absentee voting, sometimes for years on end. While this ruling extends far past astronauts, even within the space sector, absentee voting has protected the constitutional rights of many.

China just notched a huge spaceflight milestone.

The nation has recovered a rocket during an orbital launch for the first time ever, pulling off the feat during the Long March 10B's maiden liftoff on Friday (July 10). And that recovery was unique: The rocket's first stage nestled softly into a net-like structure carried by a ship at sea.

"This mission marks my country's first successful controlled recovery of a launch vehicle and the world's first network-based recovery of a launch vehicle," the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced via social media shortly after the launch. (Translation by Google.) "It signifies a historic breakthrough for my country in the field of reusable rocket technology and will lay a solid foundation for accelerating the improvement of my country's space access capabilities."

The Long March 10B is a two-stage rocket that stands about 207 feet (63 meters) tall, according to the state-owned CASC, the main contractor for China's space program.

The vehicle's first stage burns kerosene and liquid oxygen (LOX) propellants, whereas the second stage uses LOX and liquid methane. In reusable mode, the Long March 10B can loft about 16 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.

And the rocket flew with a payload on its debut liftoff — a satellite that successfully reached "its predetermined orbit," according to the CASC update. That post did not provide any details about the spacecraft or its orbit. It did give a brief rundown of the first-stage recovery, however.

"Approximately 6 minutes after the first and second stages separated, the first stage returned vertically and was successfully recovered at a sea-based recovery platform using a net system," CASC officials wrote, noting that launch occurred from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site on Friday at 12:15 a.m. EDT (0415 GMT; 12:15 p.m. Beijing time.) "The launch and first-stage recovery missions were a complete success."

China plans to refly the first stage by the end of the year, they added.

Until now, vertical landings of orbital-class rockets had been performed only by SpaceX, which does them on a regular basis. Indeed, Elon Musk's company has landed orbital rockets more than 600 times to date.

Such extensive reuse has allowed SpaceX to fly more cheaply and efficiently than its competitors and dominate the launch market — something that China is working hard to emulate.

The Long March 10B's "reusable configuration significantly reduces launch costs, offering advantages of large payload capacity and high cost-effectiveness," CASC officials wrote in the post-launch update.

Other partially reusable Chinese rockets are in the works as well, including CASC's Long March 12A and the Zhuque-3, a vehicle built and operated by the Beijing-based company Landspace. Both of those rockets debuted this past December, with similar results: They reached orbit as planned, but their first stages didn't stick the landing.

The Chinese companies CAS Space, Galactic Energy and Deep Blue Aerospace are developing reusable vehicles of their own — Kinetica-2, Pallas-1 and Nebula 1, respectively. So, before too long, Chinese rockets could be returning to Earth with a frequency that rivals SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9.

Wally Funk, who flew to space at 82 after a lifetime of flying and fighting for women in aviation and aerospace, has passed away at age 87.

Born in Texas in 1939, Funk was determined to take to the skies, flying as a teenager and becoming a professional aviator at the tender age of 20. Her dreams extended even beyond Earth, and in 1961 she joined the "Mercury 13" group of women who completed the testing given to NASA's male astronauts. But Funk was the only Mercury 13 alum to ever reach space. After a lifetime of flying, in July 2021, the then 82-year-old Funk launched to suborbital space aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard vehicle, a trip that she described as "incredible."

"We are deeply saddened by the passing of Wally Funk," Blue Origin shared in a statement on X on Thursday (July 9). "Wally was a pioneer in every sense of the word … On NS-16, sixty years later, Wally made history as the oldest astronaut at the time and remains the oldest woman to ever fly to space. It was a moment six decades in the making. We were humbled to be part of her journey. Her story will continue to inspire generations of future explorers. Fly Wally, Fly."

Making space history

Funk's spaceflight was historic in every sense of the word. "I've been waiting a long time to finally get up there," she said during a livestreamed postflight briefing at the time. "I've done a lot of astronaut training through the world — Russia, America … I could always beat the guys on what they were doing, because I was always stronger. I've always done everything on my own."

At the time of her spaceflight, Funk was the oldest person to ever go to space. But she was also the only member of the Mercury 13 to ever make it there. Funk joined the group, officially called the "Women in Space" program, as its youngest member at only 21 years old. Led by physician William Lovelace, the program put a group of young women through the same rigorous physical and mental testing as NASA's male astronauts to see how they would fare. And, across the board, the group either kept pace with or even excelled by comparison.

While the program didn't have official government sponsorship, there was hope that success could pave the way for women to be allowed into the human spaceflight program. (NASA astronauts were all male at the time; the agency didn't select a female astronaut candidate until 1978.) And in a way, it did, though it took far longer than the group likely expected.

Despite the group not leading to spaceflight access for women at the time, the participants proved their capability beyond doubt. In one particular test, participants were submerged in a sensory deprivation tank, a test meant to measure a participant's mental fortitude. While famed NASA astronaut John Glenn — who became the first American to orbit Earth — lasted three hours in the tank, Funk stayed in for a whopping 10 hours and 35 minutes.

'Married to airplanes'

Though Funk was quite young when she joined the Mercury 13, she'd already racked up years of aviation experience and an impressive array of accomplishments. In fact, Funk, who never married, famously said that she was "married to airplanes."

From her teenage experience with the "Flying Susies," Funk found her way to the skies as early as possible. And following her participation in the Mercury 13 program, Funk became the first female civilian flight instructor at a U.S. military base. Her aviation career was storied; she served as the National Transportation Safety Board's first female Air Safety Investigator, competed in air races and was even chief pilot for multiple aviation schools across the country, sharing her knowledge and expertise with countless aviation hopefuls.

But while she continued to make history and pursue her passions in aviation, her love for space never dwindled. When NASA finally began accepting women into the astronaut corps in the late 1970s, Funk was quick to apply. She applied three separate times but was denied on each occasion. Despite these setbacks, she remained close to the space world, even attending a launch with fellow former Mercury 13 members in 1995 to see NASA astronaut Eileen Collins lift off as the first woman to pilot a space shuttle.

A dream, realized

With her spaceflight dream still aflame, Funk was once again quick to act when Blue Origin got New Shepard fully up on running. And on July 20, 2021, Funk finally realized this lifelong goal, on the first-ever crewed flight of the suborbital spacecraft. (Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos was on that flight as well, along with his brother Mark, Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.)

In thinking of her many aviation students, she said at the time, "I don't know if they're going to get to see this or not … but I felt so charged. I was just a normal person going up into space."

Funk will be remembered for her passion, her dedication and her many accomplishments across aviation and aerospace, which will continue to inspire aviators for generations to come.

SpaceX is nothing if not ambitious.

Elon Musk's company just filed an application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate a 100,000-member constellation of "Gen3" satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

This will presumably be an updated version of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who reported the news via X today (July 9).

The new plan would dramatically expand Starlink's already extensive orbital footprint. SpaceX currently operates nearly 10,800 of the internet spacecraft in LEO and has FCC approval for about 4,000 more.

And each individual Gen3 satellite will be considerably larger than its predecessors. According to McDowell, SpaceX's FCC application states that each one will weigh 4,400 to 5,500 pounds (2,000 to 2,500 kilograms) and cover an area of 3,230 to 4,300 square feet (300 to 400 square meters) with its solar arrays extended.

For perspective: The Starlink satellite version that SpaceX is launching these days, known as the V2 Mini, weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kg) and covers about 1,250 square feet (116 square meters), according to SpaceflightNow.

SpaceX launches V2 Minis aboard its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, generally in fleets of 29 satellites apiece. The Gen3 is so big, however, that it will probably need to fly on Starship, the giant, super-heavy-lift rocket that SpaceX is developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Starlink Gen3 isn't even the biggest satellite assemblage that SpaceX is cooking up: The company also aims to build a million-strong AI megaconstellation called Starmind.

"Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future," Musk wrote in a February 2026 update about the planned AI constellation.

A number of other companies, including Amazon and Blue Origin, are also building out large constellations in LEO, or plan to do so in the near future.

A variety of people and organizations have objected to how crowded Earth orbit is becoming, voicing concerns about the effects on astronomical observations, wildlife, Earth's atmosphere and humanity's enjoyment of the night sky, among other issues.

Is there life on Mars … in clay? Scientists think that the minerals in clay could be the key to finding signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

The European Space Agency is still working toward launching its ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars to search for signs of life. And, according to a statement from the space agency, the rover is now aiming to land at Oxia Planum, a depression on the Martian surface where it's thought that water was once plentiful. There, scientists think that they might find major clues in the hunt for life in the basin's clay, according to a new paper.

"We will use the instruments on board to ground truth the discoveries made from orbit, learn about the ancient environment in which they formed, and if they preserve any evidence of Martian life. Warmth and nutrients on an early martian seabed could have provided habitats for early life," ExoMars deputy project scientist Elliot Sefton-Nash added in the statement.

Scientists have spent years searching for signs that life once existed on Mars. It's thought that water on Mars evaporated around three billion years ago, but before then the planet likely had a more substantial atmosphere and water flowing in rivers and into lakes all across its surface. Because of the planet's history, many scientists think that it's most likely that at some point in the ancient past, the planet must have supported life. While this has yet to be confirmed, last year scientists found what is currently thought of as the strongest possible biosignature, or physical evidence of life, on Mars.

In a new study, researchers have found extensive clay deposits at Rosalind Franklin's proposed landing site. They found this clay to reach roughly 186 miles (300 kilometers) outward from Oxia Planum, stretching as far as a Martian valley called Mawrth Vallis. To spot the clay, they first studied the planet from orbit.

Researchers used the OMEGA instrument on ESA's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to explore the minerals and rock layers on Mars between Oxia Planum and Mawrth Vallid, finding mineral layers at both sites as well as markers showing changes in water chemistry over time. These observations add to other studies pointing to water on ancient Mars.

With ESA's upcoming rover, some scientists think that the clues to life on Mars could be hiding in this clay in the Oxia Planum region.

"By landing at Oxia Planum, we’ll uncover a large-scale process that shaped ancient clays across Mars," lead author Inés Torres Auré of the University of Lyon in France said in the statement.

Scientists think that it's possible that the area of Oxia Planum could have once been home to a body of water as big as an ocean or the region could possibly have experienced incredible flooding some four billion years ago, according to the statement.

"Because the area is so large, we are not talking about a localised occurrence, but rather a regional or global process that would have required immense amounts of water. We are targeting the oldest deposits in the sequence, which makes the potential implications for the geology and early climate of Mars very relevant for the Rosalind Franklin mission in its search for life," ExoMars project scientist Jorge Vago explained in the statement.

While we have never confirmed life off-Earth and it could be different from the life we know, as far as life on Earth is concerned, water is a necessary ingredient.

ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover is projected to launch to the Red Planet in 2028. The rover will be part of ESA's ExoMars program alongside the agency's Trace Gas Orbiter which is already traveling around Mars. Rosalind Franklin will have a drill, allowing it to explore below the planet's surface as the pair work together from orbit and on the Martian surface to hunt for signs of ancient life.

This work was described in a study published in the journal Science Direct.

The United States government is looking into launching commercial rockets from sea-based launch sites, but some ocean advocacy experts say the move is part of a larger trend of allowing the spaceflight industry to use the ocean as a dumping ground.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Tuesday (July 7) announced a Request for Information (RFI) to look into launching rockets and recovering spacecraft from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), a region of the United States that extends 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) out from America's coastlines. "Offshore launch, reentry, and recovery infrastructure could expand operational flexibility, increase capacity, reduce constraints on growing launch demand, and strengthen the nation's commercial and national security space capabilities," acting BOEM Director Matt Giacona said in a bureau statement announcing the RFI.

But while BOEM lauds the development of facilities on the continental shelf as a way to bolster America's space economy and support its ambitious space exploration goals, at least one ocean conservancy group says the plan could have disastrous effects on the ocean.

According to the RFI, BOEM is looking for ideas from private industry on how to use existing offshore infrastructure such as oil and gas drilling platforms, as well as how to establish "new, purpose-built offshore facilities dedicated to commercial space launches, space re-entry, and related activities" on the Outer Continental Shelf. BOEM has jurisdiction over some 3.2 billion acres (1.3 billion hectares) of the shelf.

The announcement builds on a White House Executive Order signed in December 2025 titled "Ensuring American Space Superiority" that aims to boost investment in the American space industry and "unleash commercial development and lay the foundation for a new space age."

The order does not list offshore launches specifically, but it does aim to increase the frequency of launches and reentries through "new and upgraded facilities" and policy reforms.

But some critics are already speaking out against the idea. "Space junk and rocket explosions have already been trashing our coastal wildlife refuges, and now Trump wants to expand that destruction farther into our oceans," said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona.

Sakashita added that the initiative is "likely another Trump excuse for allowing the oil industry to leave its rusty old junk in the ocean" and avoid imposing regulations on the energy sector.

"The whales, sea turtles and other marine wildlife off our coasts deserve better than to suffer for Big Oil and the pet projects of trillionaires and billionaires," she said. "It's the administration's job to protect our public waters, not turn them into playgrounds for pipe dreams and profit."

BOEM's RFI will be open for 30 days, closing on Aug. 7, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched for a record-breaking 36th time early Thursday morning (July 9).

The Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 GMT), carrying 29 of the company's Starlink broadband satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO).

This particular booster, known as 1067, had already completed 35 orbital missions, more than any other SpaceX rocket in history. The overall record is held by NASA's space shuttle Discovery, which flew to orbit and back 39 times.

Thursday's flight extended Booster 1067's company record. The rocket returned to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff, landing on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, hauled the 29 Starlink satellites to LEO and deployed them there 63.5 minutes after launch as planned.

Thursday's launch was the 80th Falcon 9 mission of the year already. About 80% of the rocket's 2026 flights have been devoted to building out Starlink, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

The megaconstellation currently consists of more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. And, as Thursday's launch shows, that number is growing all the time.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:40 a.m. ET with news of successful rocket launch and landing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A constellation of cubesats fitted with special detectors could sniff out nuclear weapons hidden on satellites launched by adversary nations, according to a new study.

In 2024, rumors began to swirl in military circles that Russia might be developing a space-borne nuclear weapon. At that time, two years into the war in Ukraine, Russia was well aware of how big a lifeline SpaceX's Starlink broadband constellation had been for the Ukrainians. Starlink has not only provided connectivity to ravaged cities and frontline troops but also helped Ukrainians counter-attack the Russian invaders more effectively.

Drones fitted with Starlink terminals could reach much more distant targets than those controlled via conventional radio links. As the Starlink signal is almost impossible to disrupt by jamming, the idea that Russia might consider wiping the megaconstellation out by brute force didn't seem impossible.

Researchers know that a nuclear detonation in orbit would flood the space around Earth with fast, energetic electrons. These particles would destroy most unhardened satellites within range, which would extend to orbits even hundreds of miles away from the explosion.

"It would make the low Earth orbit and very low Earth orbit — where the Starlink satellites are, where many reconnaissance and communications satellites are, and where the International Space Station is — uninhabitable for a long period of time," Areg Danagoulian, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the new paper describing the proposed detection method, told Space.com.

"We would essentially not only lose the satellites in those orbits, we would lose those orbits for a few years," he added.

Humankind has already seen the effects of a nuclear explosion in space. In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4-megaton hydrogen bomb at an altitude of 240 miles (400 kilometers) above the Pacific Ocean. Radiation from the explosion, known as the Starfish Prime test, destroyed one-third of all satellites in orbit at that time. Admittedly, there weren't that many up there — fewer than 100 — but the impact was far-reaching.

Today, a nuclear detonation in space would be a catastrophe. It would knock out internet-beaming constellations such as Starlink and Amazon Leo, as well as hundreds of Earth-observing satellites that keep an eye on the activity of adversary nations, the changing climate and areas struck by natural disasters.

No reliable way currently exists to detect and defuse a nuclear bomb in space. Danagoulian proposes a constellation of small "9U" cubesats, each one about the size of a large shoebox and each carrying a special detector capable of sensing radiation emitted by unexploded nulear bombs.

He explores a scenario in which Russia launches a suspected space nuke into an orbit with an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 km). That number is not random. In 2022, Russia's Kosmos 2553 satellite, orbiting at that exact altitude, triggered suspicions it might be testing components for a future orbital nuclear weapon.

Russia claims the satellite just observes Earth. At that altitude, the satellite passes through the Van Allen belt, a region of intense cosmic radiation trapped by Earth's magnetic field. Most of the belt stretches between altitudes of around 600 miles (1,000 km) to tens of thousands of miles, but in some areas the radiation can reach much closer to Earth's surface.

The interaction between the fissile material inside the nuke and the energetic particles from the radiation belt would create distinct signatures, Danagoulian said, which could help confirm whether a suspicious satellite carries a nuke or not.

"The thermonuclear weapon would contain a significant amount of uranium," Danagoulian said. "The high-energy protons [in the uranium] would break up when another proton is coming in and shred the nuclei. That would knock out a large number of neutrons. This interaction turns that device into a very intense neutron source that otherwise would not be there."

The process is known as proton-induced neutron spallation, which essentially means the ejection of fragments from material triggered by impacts of protons.

The detector satellite Danagoulian proposes would have to be able to get quite close to the suspect spacecraft — a few kilometers. The inspector spacecraft would carry a sensor combining two types of detectors. At the heart of the device is a neutron scintillator, which detects all incoming neutrons and protons. Around it is a "cage of diamond" detector that detects only neutrons — not protons. Such a set-up helps filter out the particles present in the environment naturally, said Danagoulian. In addition, by using two "planes of neutron detectors," the sensor can determine the direction from which the neutrons arrived.

"If the external diamond detector triggers and gives a signal, you can ignore the particle, because it's most likely a proton and not a neutron," said Danagoulian. "Once you identify those neutrons, by having those two detections, you can back project and find out where the neutron came from."

Danagoulian says such a nuke sniffer would have to be launched into an orbit aligned with that of the suspicious satellite and creep up as close as 2.5 miles (4 km) from it. It would then take about a week to gather enough measurements to confirm whether the object is hiding a nuke or not. A constellation of 10 such satellites could reduce the process to mere hours, Danagoulian said.

If a nuke were detected, the military could then try to jam the satellite's communications link from the ground, making it impossible for the adversary to remotely detonate the bomb. There is currently no technology available to safely defuse a nuclear weapon in space.

The United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which provides the legal foundation for humankind's use of outer space, bans the use of nuclear weapons in orbit. However, the treaty has no means to ensure compliance.

Other approaches to nuke detection in space have been explored, including maneuverable X-ray satellites, but those would be quite a bit more complex and expensive.

Danagoulian also suggests that high-grade radiation hardening could improve satellites' chances of surviving a nuclear winter in space.

The paper was published online in the journal Nature today (July 8).

The American Earth-observation company Vantor maps Earth from space in 3D. The images are available in near-real time, revealing immediate effects of natural disasters and armed conflict. What is more, the images are also absolutely stunning.

Vantor, which operates a fleet of 10 satellites that image the surface of the planet with a resolution of 12 inches (30 centimetres), released the first set of its 3D shots from space on July 1. The images capture a variety of targets, all in amazing detail.

For example, there are shots of iconic landmarks in Paris; the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the modernist quarter La Défense emerge in the images as if seen from a landing plane. Other image sets track the progress of ship-building activity at China's Yulin Naval Base and decreasing water levels at Arizona's Hoover Dam.

the standard resolution of 20 inches (50 cm) with an accuracy of 13 feet (4 meters) in all directions, and the HD version with a 6-inch (15 cm) resolution and a 10-foot (3 m) accuracy in all dimensions.

The 3D views are created by combining multiple satellite images taken from different angles and are updated every 24 hours or less to track even the most rapidly occurring changes in the landscape. The images form a basis for 3D maps that could, for example, help autonomous drones navigate in areas hit by GPS jamming.

The satellite fleet's ability to rapidly update the imagery is a unique feature that was impossible to achieve by other 3D mapping technologies. Most commonly, mapmakers and organizations would have to conduct costly imaging campaigns from aboard aircraft or using remotely controlled drones. Neither of these approaches, however, allows such regular and frequent revisits, according to Vantor. On top of that, drones and planes may not be able to safely access and map areas controlled by unfriendly nations.

"From command and control to autonomous systems operating in GPS-denied environments, many of today's most complex missions require current, accurate 3D terrain," Peter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Vantor, said in a statement.

"With WorldView 3D, customers can update the specific areas they care about, including remote and contested areas where traditional aircraft collection is limited, with unmatched speed and scale," Wilczynski added. "This is the future of spatial intelligence."

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is hanging out in the clean room at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, preparing for its epic journey to space.

What is it?

Roman is NASA's next big flagship mission, designed to explore the universe like we've never seen it before. And with just over a month and a half until its expected launch on Aug. 30, it is in the home stretch to liftoff.

After recently leaving NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the telescope was assembled and tested, Roman made its way to KSC, from where it will launch. In this new photo, snapped on June 26, we can see Roman seemingly floating in mid-air, hanging inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, a secure clean room at KSC where spacecraft are fueled, tested and otherwise prepared for flight. In this moment, technicians and engineers were using a crane to lift Roman into the air into a specialized stand, where the telescope can rest while it is worked on.

Why is it incredible?

Roman — named for the pioneering astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who served as NASA's first chief of astronomy and expanded our understanding of the universe — is a mission that scientists have been waiting for for a long time.

With a field of view at least 100 times larger than the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will be able to capture immense views across the universe. The mission will explore dark matter and dark energy, and with its tech demonstration the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, it will snap images of exoplanets, offering direct looks at worlds far from our solar system.

The U.S. Space Force has acquired one of its first publicly acknowledged offensive weapons, one that can blast adversary satellites with beams of electromagnetic radiation to disrupt their signals without physically damaging them.

The system, known as Meadowlands, was developed by L3 Harris. It is an electromagnetic warfare system, meaning it is designed to disrupt, deny or degrade an adversary's use of the electromagnetic spectrum  — such as radio waves, for example  — rendering their satellites effectively silent, unable to communicate or share data with forces on the ground. These are "reversible effects," meaning they don't permanently destroy satellites but instead jam or interfere with signals being transmitted to or from them.

Or, as the Space Force puts it, Meadowlands provides the U.S. military with a "robust toolkit for spectrum dominance," according to a statement. Based on the few publicly available photos shared by the U.S. Space Force, Meadowlands appears to consist of an antenna dish mounted to a wheeled trailer, which presumably could allow it to be transported either by ground or a large cargo aircraft. This would allow it to be deployed in areas where adversary satellites might be stationed overhead.

According to available budget documentation, Space Force requested nearly $460 million in Fiscal Year 2027 to develop Meadowlands and the support and training needed to field it.

Space Force leadership has repeatedly stated that these types of systems are key to the U.S. military's current emphasis on space-based warfare. "Continued U.S. Space Force investment in electromagnetic warfare systems, software, and advanced training is essential to modern warfare," said U.S. Space Force Col. Angelo Fernandez, commander of Mission Delta 3 – Space Electromagnetic Warfare, a unit tasked specifically with operating systems such as Meadowlands.

In the same statement, the Space Force said that these types of capabilities were central to the success of Operation Midnight Hammer, a June 2025 offensive in which the U.S. military attacked nuclear sites in Iran.

During that conflict, "electromagnetic warfare professionals successfully created a silence zone to ensure secure bomber ingress and egress, effectively halting adversary communications to provide vital indications and warnings," Space Force said in the statement.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the service's current Chief of Space Operations, cited how Space Force personnel employed the same types of capabilities during the ongoing conflict with Iran in a keynote speech at the Space Foundation's annual Space Symposium in April 2026.

"On day one of Operation Epic Fury, one of these specialists led the planning and execution of high-tempo space electronic warfare fires for U.S. Central Command," Saltzman said. "That's what it means to be a Guardian in today's Space Force."

The service has been procuring these types of systems and training its personnel in what it calls orbital warfare since the Space Force was created back in 2019. Because satellite surveillance and communication systems are so vital to the battlefields of today, the ability to disrupt an adversary's use of space is a highly sought-after one by militaries worldwide.

NASA's New Horizons probe has woken up in good health nearly 6 billion miles away beyond Pluto after spending nearly a year in hibernation.

Traveling such vast distances between our solar system's most remote objects means New Horizons often cruises for months at a time with little to do other than passively collect data. During these periods, the probe goes into a hibernation mode in which its instruments still collect data, but most other systems power down.

New Horizons entered just such a hibernation period last August, and has now woken up in "good health", according to a NASA statement. The spacecraft is 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, so far away that it takes around 9 hours for its radio signals to reach us. Now that it's awake, New Horizons will begin transmitting the data it has collected over the last 321 days and letting its controllers on the ground know how its systems are faring in the cold, dark reaches of deep space.

So far, the probe appears to be in perfect health. "Every status report through this hibernation period was 'green,' meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week," said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the NASA statement.

New Horizons is the first and only flyby spacecraft to conduct a flyby of the Pluto system, which it did in 2015. Four years later, the plucky probe studied the most distant object ever explored in our solar system, the snowman-shaped planetesimal Arrokoth, while it was one billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto.

Since then, the long-distance voyager has been probing the edge of our sun's influence and studying objects in the Kuiper Belt, the cold, donut-shaped ring of icy objects that circles the outer solar system beyond Neptune.

New Horizons is currently speeding away from Earth at a rate of 300 million miles (483 million km) per year, according to NASA.

Three weeks from now, New Horizons will begin conducting a study of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere, the region of space influenced by the stream of charged particles blowing outward from the sun, known as the solar wind.

The data the probe is collecting at the farthest reaches of our solar system is the first of its kind. It could help scientists understand what happens at the boundary between the sun's region of influence and interstellar space, known as the "termination shock."

Only two spacecraft have crossed this boundary before, NASA's twin Voyager probes. However, those far-flung explorers weren't equipped with the same scientific instruments as New Horizons, which enable it to conduct more sensitive measurements of this distant region of the solar system.

"The data from the termination shock encounter will be a treasure trove for space physicists worldwide who are eager to understand how this vast boundary works," Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at APL, previously told Space.com. "All these discoveries from pioneering missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies beyond."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long road to space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moon work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Futurists and science fiction writers have predicted privately funded missions to Mars for decades, but until recently, the prospect appeared to be decades away. While fully private human missions to Mars are probably not yet practical (given the complexity and cost of such missions), the commercial sector, in partnership with space agencies such as NASA, has a critical role to play in enabling a human presence on Mars. Whether that possibility becomes reality will depend on the choices we make today about public leadership, commercial engagement, and international collaboration.

The role of national space agencies is not limited to funding missions. They maintain the research ecosystems, testing facilities, safety standards, planetary-science programs, and international partnerships that commercial industry builds upon.

However, no single agency — not even NASA — can develop all the technologies, supply chains, transportation systems, life-support tools, digital platforms, and surface infrastructure needed to move from exploration to sustained settlement. Commercial participation is therefore not "nice to have"; it is the engine that will turn Mars from an aspirational destination into an achievable, economically grounded frontier. While NASA has an extraordinary repository of knowledge and expertise from which to draw, commercial industry can deploy more "outside the box" thinking and a somewhat higher risk tolerance that can yield more nimbleness. Working together should deliver the best of both worlds.

Public-private partnerships between NASA and industry demonstrate today's commitment to building a platform for a vibrant and multisided commercial space economy. Over the last two decades, NASA introduced programs such as the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), and the Human Landing System (HLS) program.

While these programs have faced challenges (such as the continuing delays in developing a system capable of safely landing humans on the moon), they have succeeded in producing new cargo vehicles to supply the International Space Station (ISS), the only new operational crew vehicle yet to reach the ISS (SpaceX's Dragon capsule), and the first commercial robotic landers on the lunar surface. NASA also just awarded over $1 billion in contracts to start developing infrastructure needed to build the planned Moon Base.

Public-private Mars missions

Not all of NASA's commercial partnerships have been focused on low Earth orbit (LEO) or the moon. NASA's ESCAPADE mission, a partnership between NASA, UC Berkeley, Rocket Lab, and Advanced Space, launched on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket in November 2025, using commercially developed spacecraft platforms and streamlined development processes. ESCAPADE is expected to deliver critical knowledge for human exploration about radiation risks, atmospheric escape, and space weather dynamics at a fraction of the traditional cost.

On June 17, NASA also announced a partnership with Relativity Space to deliver the Aeolus atmospheric‑science instrument payload suite to Mars in 2028. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, "By pairing NASA’s world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars."

In 2025, NASA also announced a new, highly ambitious, public-private partnership program: Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS). By challenging the commercial aerospace industry to deliver payloads and communications relays to both Mars orbit and the surface, CMPS may create efficiencies that could enable the development of lunar and Mars architectures in parallel, which is essential if we hope to land humans on the Red Planet anytime soon. However, with the realignment of NASA's Artemis Program, as well as budget disagreements between the Administration and Congress, the future of CMPS remains unclear.

Even with a large amount of funds entering the commercial space industry (such as the recent SpaceX IPO), a critical part of this equation is NASA's role as an anchor tenant, which was key to transforming commercial space in LEO and is now poised to do the same for Mars. When NASA commits to purchasing services rather than owning the entire stack (imagery, transportation, surface mobility, communications, in-situ resource utilization), it sends a powerful signal to the market: there will be customers, there will be demand, and there will be revenue beyond any single mission.

That stable early demand empowers companies to raise capital, build technologies, and develop capabilities that would be far too risky or expensive to pursue on speculation. Firms collaborating with NASA could then sell similar capabilities to other U.S. and international agencies, research institutions, and eventually commercial customers. By serving as a guaranteed first buyer, the agency catalyzes an ecosystem that becomes self-sustaining over time.

Mars innovation improving life on Earth

Creating a human presence on Mars isn't only about rockets and crew vehicles—and not all projects need cost billions of dollars. A sustainable Mars program will require hundreds, if not thousands, of innovations that protect human health, maintain psychological resilience, and support efficient work in one of the harshest environments imaginable. Mars inhabitants will need to eat, drink, breathe, heal, sleep, relax, and collaborate productively for months or years at a time.

Delivering those capabilities will demand breakthroughs in medical science, mental-health support, agriculture and nutrition, artificial intelligence, autonomy and robotics, biotechnology, circular environmental systems, materials science, design, and more. Importantly, many critical solutions will come from companies that currently do not think of themselves as "space companies."

This is where Mars becomes a driving engine for improving life on Earth. By inviting innovators across sectors — health, food, energy, manufacturing, construction, A.I. and more — to solve Mars-class problems, we accelerate progress on the very challenges that people face on Earth today. Technologies that keep crews alive and thriving on Mars can make our hospitals more resilient, our homes more efficient, our food systems more sustainable, and our workplaces healthier.

Ultimately, the path to Mars runs through a steady cadence of public–private projects in LEO and here on Earth, as well as missions launched directly to the Red Planet. Every new launch vehicle, propulsion system, habitat technology, food-production method, and autonomous system built for deep-space missions drives jobs, strengthens manufacturing capacity, opens new markets, and builds the technological base here on Earth that keeps the U.S. and its partners competitive. Such benefits to our home planet do not and will not have to wait until we actually land humans on Mars. They are already being felt, and enjoyed, here on Earth today.

This commercial pathway depends on NASA leadership. As NASA prepares to build the Moon Base over the next several years, it should not lose sight of Mars. It must continue to empower public-private partnerships to help enable human missions to Mars as soon as the 2030s.

Now is the moment for action. If we act deliberately in this decade by strengthening public leadership, empowering commercial innovation, and working together across borders, we will not only make a human presence on Mars achievable, but also unlock enduring benefits for life on Earth.

Dr. Tiffany Vora is President of Explore Mars, Inc and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

Chris Carberry is CEO of Explore Mars, Inc. and the author of The Music of Space, Alcohol in Space, and co-editor of A Future Spacefaring Society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mid-spacewalk, one NASA astronaut had to take a moment to show off his muscles.

What is it?

NASA astronaut Chris Williams recently left the confines of the International Space Station for a 7-hour-and-20-minute spacewalk with fellow astronaut Jessica Meir. This was Williams' second spacewalk and Meir's fifth.

In a moment of fun, Williams flexed his muscles for a photo snapped by Meir during the strenuous spacewalk. With a big grin on his face, visible even through his spacesuit helmet, Williams raised his arms in a classic Muscle Beach pose as planet Earth glowed hundreds of miles beneath him.

But the pair of astronauts weren't playing around in space; this spacewalk had a serious purpose. On June 30, Williams and Meir ventured into the void to replace a wrist joint on the space station's Canadarm2 robotic arm that had been malfunctioning.

Canadarm2 has been operating for over 25 years, so it makes sense that every once in a while it needs a repair or upgrade. After making this swap, the old wrist joint will be sent back to Earth to be fixed in case it needs to be used as backup in the future.

Why is it incredible?

Williams' demeanor in this photo makes it seem like spacewalks are fun, or even easy. But his smile and playful pose for the camera are a major contrast to the incredible strength, stamina and careful work that it takes to complete a spacewalk.

From preparation to suiting up, and doing incredibly precise work with a spacesuit on while floating in the vacuum of space while tethered to the space station, spacewalks are incredibly hard work. Williams may have been having a fun moment with Meir showing off in this photo, but the pair of astronauts were certainly using their muscles to get a tough job done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world's first commercially built nuclear-powered satellite has reached orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The BOHR (Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability) satellite, built by Florida-based company City Labs, launched to space early this morning (July 7) on SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare mission.

Transporter-17's Falcon 9 rocket, which was carrying a total of 81 payloads, lifted off early this morning from the SpaceX pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and began delivering its payloads to their various orbits about 50 minutes later.

BOHR is a novel cubesat demonstration mission from City Labs, which is testing out its proprietary "NanoTritium" betavoltaic micropower source in space for the first time. Similar to how spacecraft like NASA's Voyager probes' radioisotope thermoelectric generators produce power from the heat emitted from their plutonium cores, City Lab's NanoTritium device harnesses the beta particles emitted from the radioactive decay of tritium, which can be converted directly to electricity using a semiconductor.

“This is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space,” said City Labs CEO Peter Cabauy in a statement.

BOHR is designed as a pathfinder mission to test the feasibility of City Labs' new technology, which is meant to provide continuous power to spacecraft without a reliance on solar energy. Though its tritium core isn't actually BOHR's power source — the cubesat is still dependent on solar power for general operations — City Labs' technology could help introduce new vehicles capable of exploring places that current spacecraft can't operate for long periods of time, like permanently shadowed regions at the moon's poles.

The moon's south pole, specifically, has come into focus as the target region for NASA's Artemis lunar landing missions. An abundance of water ice there, and its potential for extraction as a resource, makes the lunar south pole particularly suited to support long-term habitation of the moon, and NASA is actively funding the development of nuclear reactor technology to support that goal.

"City Labs’ BOHR arrives as the first commercial answer to that challenge," the company said in a statement. Though the cubesat's NanoTritium power source cannot produce nearly enough energy to power something like a moon base, City Labs sees its application scaling to eventually be able to do so.

One benefit of using tritium as the basis for a power system is the low radiation levels it emits. "City Labs’ tritium-based power systems… are engineered for safe handling, transportation, and integration within standard commercial launch environments," the company stated.

BOHR, and City Labs' tritium development, was funded under a Department of Defense contract. It's also the first nuclear-powered mission to be greenlit under the Federal Aviation Administration's nuclear launch approval under Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum-20, which was issued in 2019.

City Labs hopes the success of this mission will pave the way for more nuclear-powered spacecraft to support national defense as well as private space missions in the future.

"BOHR demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment," Cabauy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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