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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No need for a quick spray of Windex to get a clear view of this situation.

There's a growing need for windows for rubbernecking space travelers, whether they're making suborbital hops, staying in Earth orbit or conducting far-flung sojourns to the moon and beyond.

Retrofire back decades ago when the first Mercury space capsule offered a tiny porthole for its single seat occupant, Alan Shepard. Similarly, the first human in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, had but a small window to take in the view.

Oddly, in those early years of pioneering space treks, nobody knew what microgravity would do to the human eye and a person's vision. Talk about floaters!

That aside, sightseeing in space has meant an evolution of safe and sound windows and tackling the engineering challenges to produce them. But what's the outlook ahead for space voyagers?

Earthgazing

"Based on my experience of interviewing professional and commercial astronauts, I would say that the windows are key to the 'Overview Effect' experience," said Frank White, who coined the phrase and is author of "The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987).

White called attention to the deep shift in cognitive awareness that most space travelers undergo in viewing our planet from Earth orbit and beyond.

It's clear that, for NASA astronauts, transitioning from space shuttle missions to the International Space Station (ISS) was critical to a more meaningful opportunity to view Earth from a distance, White said.

"This shift intensified with the advent of the ISS Cupola, where astronauts spend a great deal of time ‘Earthgazing,'" he told Space.com.

Customer experience

White said that, because Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have focused on having their suborbital space tourism customers experience the Overview Effect, "both companies have ensured great views from the windows of their spacecraft. As a result, commercial astronauts have had profound experiences, even though they are weightless and looking at the Earth only briefly."

It is no accident that SpaceX installed a special "cupola" on its Crew Dragon capsule for the Inspiration4 astronaut mission in September 2021, and it paid off, White observed. Anyone who doubts this fact, he said, should watch the video of the unveiling of that window by the Inspiration4 crew.

"The story goes that the engineers for the Mercury flights did not want the spacecraft to have windows," White said. "The astronauts insisted and eventually prevailed. Fortunately, their precedent continues to this day, to the benefit of the astronauts and the people of Earth. The Overview Effect is one of the most important 'spinoffs' of space exploration."

Human comfort

Similar in view is Samuel Coniglio IV, author of "Creature Comforts in Space: Designing Enjoyment and Sustainability for Off-World Living" (BookBaby, 2024).

Coniglio also points to that scene from the 1983 film "The Right Stuff," in which the original Mercury astronauts were arguing with the engineers for a need to see outside their capsule. After all, they were an elite set of pilots and may have needed to take manual control of their craft at some point.

"Just as plants and taking a shower play a critical role in human comfort, so do windows," said Coniglio. "Being able to see the vast heavens allows you to become one with the universe, and to see all the cool stuff going on outside. We can't just live in a box — we need to be part of the outside world as well."

Structural reliability

Lynda Estes is the spacecraft transparencies discipline lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. She's an engineering expert who has been integrating windows into crew-carrying spacecraft for decades.

Estes has worked with many vehicles during her NASA career — the space shuttles, the International Space Station, the Artemis program's Orion capsule and every private human-rated spacecraft developed by companies partnering with the agency's Commercial Crew Program.

Estes is an internationally sought-after resource for design, development, engineering, testing and operations for high-risk, human-rated pressure cabins in both aviation and spaceflight. She's the author of the governing NASA requirements document that ensures high structural reliability in spacecraft glass window designs.

Starting as a stress analyst for mechanisms, "windows are a whole new PhD," Estes told Space.com. "Glass is a brittle material. It breaks. That's what it likes to do. But it's also beautifully transparent as well."

Room with a view

In earlier NASA programs, windows were made of multiple panes of different types of glass. For example, the European-built Cupola on the ISS — offering the "best room with a view" — consists of six trapezoidal side windows and a circular top window. Each window consists of four panes for protection from astronaut-induced scratches, as well as outside dings from space debris.

The entire window, or the individual scratched or debris-pocked panes, can be replaced. Reinstating an entire window requires a "big, fancy ballet," said Estes — one that is well-choreographed, with an astronaut first fitting an external pressure cover over the window during a spacewalk.

Overall, the ISS Cupola serves as an observation and work area when the crew operates the station's robotic arms or observes visiting vehicles. But it's a lure during leisure time as well, as it affords astronauts extraordinary views of Earth and celestial objects.

Static fatigue

But there are troubling features of glass, too. For one, tiny flaws affect its strength. And glass actually loses structural capability over time, according to Estes.

"We call that static fatigue," she said, referring to cracks that grow microscopically under a load.

"We're working hard to remove glass because of those two features," Estes said, explaining that NASA wants to move to an all acrylic window design for the Orion spacecraft. "Acrylic, when seeing reentry temperatures, acts like a heat shield."

As a structural engineer, Estes advises that windows are worrisome.

"We come at it from, How do we keep everybody alive? Cutting a hole in the side of your pressure vessel and installing something like glass to replace that hole is a really poor choice," said Estes. "That's why we are trying to move contractors and our partners to acrylic. That is a much more structurally stable material."

Buying risk

One of the challenges with glass is that it produces shards when it breaks. "And the first place those shards want to go is to that human body that just went over to the window to see what happened," Estes pointed out.

With glass you are buying risk, said Estes. On the other hand, NASA has a written requirement, she said: "If you are going to put humans inside and send it to space, it must have a window."

Estes and her team are now providing guidance for spacecraft windows to be utilized for future moon operations, including the human landing systems for the Artemis program.

Back down here on Earth, does she clean windows at home?

"I do not," Estes responded.

Rocket Lab still holds out hope that it can build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency picked Blue Origin for that job earlier this month, awarding Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company $700 million to develop, launch and operate the Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN).

Today (Sept. 11), however, Rocket Lab announced that it has challenged that decision, filing a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

"NASA's award decision appears to be inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by Congress. In addition, the agency’s punitive review of Rocket Lab's technical volume was inconsistent, making incorrect assertions and conclusions," Rocket Lab said today in an X post that laid out its argument.

"Procurement standards exist to ensure fair competition and protect public investment," the California-based company added. "We are pursuing this review to ensure those standards are upheld for critical infrastructure that will underpin American exploration at Mars for decades to come."

As its name suggests, the MTN orbiter will serve as a communications link between mission controllers here on Earth and other NASA spacecraft studying the Red Planet. Just two agency orbiters fulfill that relay role these days, and both are quite old: Mars Odyssey launched in 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off in 2005.

NASA had been eyeing a new Mars telecom orbiter for years and finally got Congressional funding for it in July 2025 — $700 million, to be precise. The agency issued a request for proposals this past May, drawing considerable interest from the private sector.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were widely considered the front-runners, and NASA ended up going with Blue. The award calls for the company to deliver MTN (which, despite the "network" in its name, is a single spacecraft) to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028. It's expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

Blue Origin has been in Rocket Lab's shoes before, and has behaved similarly. Bezos' company filed a protest with the GAO in 2021 after NASA picked SpaceX to provide the first crewed moon lander for the agency's Artemis program.

The GAO denied the protest in July of that year. Blue Origin then sued NASA but lost in court in November 2021. The story has a happy ending for the company, however: NASA decided to select a second Artemis lander as well, and Blue Origin won that contract in 2023. We'll see how this story plays out for Rocket Lab...

Blue Origin will build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 1) that it has selected Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company to develop the $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN), which is expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

"The award marks a milestone in NASA's strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades," NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

As its name suggests, the MTN — previously known as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter — will primarily serve to aid NASA science missions rather than gather data of its own.

The MTN is "a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions," NASA officials said in the statement.

The need for such a data-relay craft is expected to become acute in the coming years as NASA's fleet of current Mars orbiters ages and the agency works to prepare the Red Planet ground for crewed missions in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

At the moment, just two NASA orbiters relay data and commands between the agency's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers and their handlers on Earth — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The European Space Agency's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft help out as well.

All four of these orbiters are gathering science data of their own, however. The MTN will not have a split focus; it will be a dedicated communications craft.

NASA got $700 million for a Mars telecom orbiter in July 2025, when Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill. The agency laid out requirements for the spacecraft in February of this year, then issued a request for proposals in May.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were viewed as the front-runners for the contract, and both pushed hard for it, touting their bona fides and expertise.

Blue Origin won out in the end, however. The company will base MTN on its Blue Ring spacecraft platform, which it describes as "an all-in-one, high-powered hybrid solar electric and chemical propelled spacecraft that provides unmatched mission maneuverability, versatility, and capacity at dramatically lower profile costs."

Blue Ring has not flown a mission yet, but a prototype version of it went to space on the first-ever launch of Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket in January 2025. Though Blue Ring can fly on other rockets as well, MTN will presumably launch on a New Glenn; the newly announced NASA contract calls for Blue Origin to "design, develop, integrate, launch and operate" the Mars telecom mission.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to deliver the spacecraft to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028.

Blue Origin plans to return its Florida launch site to a dual-pad facility to support its bigger, more powerful New Glenn "9x4" rocket, which is still under development.

As facility repairs continue following the explosion of one of Blue Origin's New Glenn "7x2" rockets during tests at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Launch Complex-36 in May, the company has announced its intent to expand the site with an additional pad. The company also plans to build operations infrastructure for the complex on land nearby, which will include a Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) for the New Glenn 9x4 vehicle, and a Payload Processing Facility (PPF).

Blue Origin has expressed confidence in its ability to complete repairs at its existing LC-36 pad (LC-36A) in time for New Glenn 7x2 to return to launch by the end of the year, but the company did not state a timeline for the readiness of LC-36B or an expected debut of New Glenn 9x4.

The 7x2 and 9x4 designations are a denotation of the rockets' engine configurations. It's similar to SpaceX's name for the Falcon 9 rocket, which is powered by nine Merlin 1D engines on its first stage, arranged in a circle of eight around a single engine in the center. New Glenn's first stage is powered by Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, and the rocket's second stage uses BE-3Us.

Both New Glenn first-stage configurations are designed for landing and reusability. The 7x2 flies with seven BE-4 engines on its first stage and two BE-3Us on its second stage. Subsequently, the taller, yet-to-debut New Glenn 9x4 will be powered by nine BE-4 engines on its first stage and four BE-3Us on its second stage. It will therefore be capable of launching larger, heavier payloads into space.

For roughly four decades beginning in the 1960s, LC-36 was home to two pads that supported the Atlas-Centaur family and, later, the Atlas I, II and III rockets. In that time, the pads hosted launches of NASA's Surveyor, Mariner and Pioneer probes, as well as commercial and national-security payloads. But that era ended in the mid-aughts as those Atlas rockets reached retirement. LC-36A hosted its final launch in 2004, LC-36B launched its last rocket in 2005, and the complex was decommissioned and demolished.

Blue Origin took over the lease for LC-36 in 2015, began construction of its own launch facility in 2016, and launched the first New Glenn 7x2 rocket from the facility in 2025. Since that debut, New Glenn has flown two more missions, with the most recent lifting off in April. The company had planned for as many as eight to 12 launches in 2026, but May's static test fire explosion has reduced that number to a hopeful one (1).

The fourth New Glenn rocket (NG-4) was slated to deliver a stack of Amazon Leo wireless internet satellites to orbit before its destruction during testing on May 8, which also resulted in extensive damage to LC-36 facilities. Less than a month later, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp provided a repair update with the assurance that New Glenn would fly again before the end of 2026. He also outlined some early upgrades that would be integrated into LC-36 as a result of the unexpected repairs, including the replacement of New Glenn's transporter erector with "an alternative vertical conop (operational concept)," for transporting the rocket to the pad.

"LC-36 has served as a cornerstone of American spaceflight for decades, supporting a broad range of missions for NASA and commercial partners," Blue Origin said in a statement. "Now, this historic site is entering a new era, furthering New Glenn operations."

According to Limp, the additional pad will require as much as 2,500 tons of steel, much of which will go toward building a700-foot-tall (213 meters) launch tower.

"Proud to honor the legacy of Launch Complex 36. Rebuilding LC-36A and flying again this year remains our priority. Alongside that work, a separate team is beginning work on LC-36B, the operational home for New Glenn's 9x4," Limp said in an Aug. 12 social media post.

Virgin Galactic's next customers will have to wait a bit longer to get off the ground.

The suborbital space tourism company hasn't been to the final frontier since June 2024. It had been targeting late 2026 for the resumption of commercial service, but that's not going to happen, we learned on Wednesday (Aug. 12).

"We've moved our first commercial spaceflight to this coming February to allow additional time to complete avionics and systems installations," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said on Wednesday, during a call the company held to discuss its financial results for the second quarter of 2026.

"No single issue is driving the schedule push," he added. "Rather, we have experienced modest time-duration extension across hundreds of relatively small but important installation tasks involved in the first build of our new spaceship."

The coming mission won't be Virgin Galactic's first commercial spaceflight overall. That occurred in June 2023 and was performed by the company's VSS Unity space plane, which was retired a year later following its seventh operational, customer-carrying flight.

Rather, Colglazier was referring to the debut of the company's first "Delta class" vehicle, an advanced iteration that's designed to fly much more frequently than Unity ever did — twice per week, if all goes to plan.

Virgin Galactic is currently building two Delta planes, which will be broadly similar to Unity in most ways. They will be piloted vehicles that seat six passengers, for example, and will take off beneath the wings of a carrier plane. That mothercraft will drop the Delta vehicles at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), after which they'll ignite their rocket motors and head to suborbital space.

Their suborbital jaunts will likely last 60 to 90 minutes, and they'll end with a landing at the same runway where they started.

The second Delta spaceship is expected to join the first one at Spaceport America in New Mexico — Virgin Galactic's commercial hub — in March 2027, Colglazier said.

Colglazier also announced that Virgin Galactic's latest "tranche" of passenger bookings was oversubscribed, demonstrating a continuing strong demand from customers despite the flight hiatus. The per-seat price for that tranche was $750,000 — a number that's no longer available.

"We have retired the $750,000 price point, and we plan to open a new tranche of spaceflight expeditions this fall at higher price points," Colglazier said.

He didn't say what the new price would be. But the jump could be considerable, based on recent history: The ticket price before $750,000 was $600,000, and the one before that was $450,000.

Virgin Galactic lost nearly $56 million in Q2 2026, the company announced in Wednesday's earnings call. That was an improvement over Q2 2025, when the company was about $67 million in the red.

But things should change considerably next year, according to the company.

"With our second [Delta] spaceship entering service, we continue to forecast that we will achieve a flight rate of 10 or more spaceflights per month by the end of the second quarter of 2027," Virgin Galactic Chief Financial Officer Doug Ahrens said during Wednesday's call.

"This flight rate is an unprecedented achievement in human spaceflight, and this is made possible with our highly reusable spaceship design," he added. "Given these flight rate expectations, we continue to forecast quarterly positive cash flow within 2027."

The outlook is even rosier over the long haul, Ahrens stressed.

"We expect each new spaceship to cost approximately $60 million to produce," he said. "Given a conservative lifetime estimate of 500 flights per spaceship, with six astronauts per spaceflight, average pricing of $600,000 per spaceflight expedition, and a contribution margin over 80% per spaceflight, each new spaceship has the potential to generate over $1.4 billion of lifetime contribution margin."

Virgin Galactic will be the only game in town once it gets back up and running. Its chief competitor in the suborbital space tourism business, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, recently put its flights on hold to focus on helping NASA return astronauts to the moon.

Blue Origin has never revealed its ticket prices, but Ahrens said they were believed to be in the $1 million to $2 million range.

"I don't think we need to be driving our prices up that quickly," he said. "But there is strong and solid demand, and we do expect each time we release a tranche of tickets, it will be priced higher than the tranche before. And that's appropriate, so I think you'll see us do that for a little bit longer."

Rainer Zitelmann has doctorates in history and sociology. He has authored and edited 32 books that have been translated into 35 languages. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Without property rights in space, one of the most important economic incentives for the commercial development — and ultimately the settlement — of celestial bodies is missing. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits states from claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies or land on them. The underlying idea reflected the dominant thinking of the time: space belongs to all mankind.

The question of whether private individuals or companies may acquire property rights remains unresolved. The treaty says nothing explicitly about private ownership, largely because in the 1960s hardly anyone imagined that, just a few decades later, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos would possess the financial resources and technological expertise to accomplish what was then thought possible only for governments.

The absence of property rights is one important reason why humanity has made less progress in the exploration and development of space than many expected. Once the United States had won the race to the moon, the incentive for the next stage of space exploration largely disappeared.

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine that whoever reaches an asteroid with a spacecraft and begins mining it acquires the right to claim ownership of that asteroid and list it on the stock market as a real estate investment trust (REIT). Or imagine that whoever reaches Mars and begins constructing a settlement — whether with robots or eventually with human settlers — gains the right to declare the surrounding land as private property. Such rights would create extraordinarily powerful economic incentives. Today, by contrast, the legal position of private actors is, at best, uncertain. A genuine race to reach these celestial bodies would begin, and investors would emerge to finance these ambitious ventures.

There are good reasons to believe, however, that this process will begin even without a clear legal framework. History suggests that this is not the exception but the rule. Consider the settlement of the American West. In his classic book "The Mystery of Capital," the renowned economist Hernando de Soto described the process as follows:

"America was filling up with immigrants, who settled boundaries, ploughed fields, built homes, transferred land and established credit long before governments conferred on them any right to engage in these acts. Those were the days of the pioneers and the 'Wild West.' One of the reasons it was so wild was that those pioneers, most of them nothing but squatters, insisted that their labor, not formal paper titles or arbitrary boundary lines, gave land value and established ownership. They believed that if they occupied the land and improved it with houses and farms, it was theirs."

Contrary to a common misconception, property rights did not initially emerge through formal acts of government imposed from above. They evolved spontaneously from below. As de Soto explains: "To be legitimate, a right does not necessarily have to be defined by formal law. That a group of people strongly supports a particular convention is enough for it to be upheld as a right and defended against formal law." Only later, during America's early history, did governments formally legalize what settlers had already established in practice.

Capitalism, unlike socialism, develops as a spontaneous order from below. We have seen this pattern repeated in more recent history, particularly in former communist countries such as China and Vietnam.

Long before the official ban on private farming was lifted in 1982, peasants across China spontaneously reintroduced private ownership in defiance of socialist doctrine. The results were remarkable. Agricultural production rose rapidly, and recurring food shortages came to an end. By 1983, almost all agriculture in China had been decollectivized.

The story was similar in Vietnam. Following the market-oriented reforms launched in 1986, poverty declined from nearly 80% to just 3%. Yet many of these reforms merely legalized developments that had already taken place at the grassroots level. Agricultural collectives and even state-owned enterprises increasingly ignored official regulations. They abandoned collective production and entered into unauthorized contracts ("Khoán chui") between collectives and families or between state farms and private traders. This became known as "Phá rào," or "fence breaking."

Some scholars argue that these spontaneous grassroots developments — not decisions by the Communist Party — were the true driving force behind Vietnam's reforms. As Vietnamese researcher Vu Le Thao Chi explains, "It is closer to the truth of the matter that the state served more as an agent of adjustments and, in this, sanctioned the manner of the ordinary farmers' efforts to survive the unpredictably winding path." Economist Tran Thi Anh-Dao and other scholars likewise argue that Vietnam's reform process began "with evidence-based practices at the microeconomic (local) level that were then applied at the macroeconomic (national) level."

In my recently published book "New Space Capitalism," where I discuss the legal issues in detail, I answer the question "Who should have the right to acquire property in space?" as follows: Those who have the financial resources and are willing to take the risks necessary to get there, develop the land, and put it to productive use.

If SpaceX succeeds in reaching Mars and begins building permanent settlements on the Red Planet, then ownership of land should initially belong to SpaceX. Not the entire planet, of course, but a practical area — for example, roughly the size of Singapore. Since the surface area of Mars is approximately 200,000 times larger than Singapore, SpaceX would initially own only about 0.0005% of the planet. That would be sufficient to establish multiple settlements while leaving more than enough room for future competitors.

SpaceX could finance its transportation and development costs by placing this Martian land into a real estate investment trust (REIT) and listing it on the stock exchange. The market would determine its value.

The same principle could apply to asteroids. At least in the case of smaller celestial bodies, ownership could be granted to those capable of mining valuable resources such as water or platinum. The most practical solution would likely be to place the entire asteroid into a publicly traded REIT. Investors would finance the mining operations, while shareholders would ultimately receive dividends generated by resource extraction. Even before the first dollar of revenue was earned or the first dividend paid, a functioning market for these shares could emerge.

This is, of course, only a thought experiment. But it shows one way in which property in space could come into existence, creating the foundation for humanity to unlock the vast economic potential of space.

Blue Origin is close to figuring out why its New Glenn rocket went boom a few months ago.

The explosion — which destroyed the rocket and some key pieces of pad infrastructure — occurred on May 28 during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working hard ever since to determine the cause of the anomaly, and it has made considerable progress, according to a new update.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Wednesday afternoon (Aug. 5). "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn features a reusable first stage, which is powered by seven BE-4s and designed to launch at least 25 times. The heavy lifter is a big part of Blue Origin's ambitious plans, which include helping humanity establish a foothold in the final frontier.

"The rocket is engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly humans, and will enable our vision of building a road to space for the benefit of Earth," Blue Origin's website states.

The company, and NASA, are counting on the rocket to get important hardware to the moon. New Glenn will be the ride for Blue Origin's Blue Moon, one of two crewed landers that NASA picked to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

And there's an important Blue Moon mission coming up: the first test flight of the prototype Mark 1 lander, which is scheduled to make an uncrewed lunar touchdown by the end of this year, if possible. That mission will help prove out the vehicle's capabilities ahead of crewed flights.

New Glenn debuted in January 2025 and has flown two more times since, in November 2025 and April 19 of this year. There was an issue on that most recent launch, which carried up AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite: New Glenn failed to deploy the payload into the proper orbit, and it was lost.

Despite that issue, and the May 28 explosion, Limp expressed confidence that Blue Origin will soon get New Glenn up and running again.

"The path forward is clear," he added in Wednesday's X post. "We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis."

The great technological leaps in American history have often featured influential industrialists who step forward as vanguards, leading the way to a better tomorrow while emerging as major players in extreme endeavors.

Spaceflight is no exception.

A new CNN documentary titled "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" shines a light on how a pair of visionary billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have been shaping and steering our country's space program and the bright future of private space enterprise.

Premiering on Sunday (Aug. 9) at 8 p.m. EDT/PDT on CNN, the documentary examines the contributions of the two men and how their considerable wealth have affected America's spaceflight efforts. It also features exclusive interviews with Chief Ambassador of The Planetary Society Bill Nye, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, journalist and CNN contributor Kara Swisher, Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson and many others.

"'Eclipsing Power' traces how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have transformed the future of space exploration, shifting what was once an endeavor primarily led by government into a race driven by private ambition," states the show's official synopsis.

"It follows the rise of SpaceX and Blue Origin, detailing how two of the world's most influential entrepreneurs have come to play an outsized role in America's space program. The hour looks at both the opportunities and the risks of NASA's growing reliance on private industry, the race to return humans to the moon, and what this new era of commercial spaceflight could mean for the future of humanity."

"What am I most excited about in space exploration?," Nye shares in our exclusive clip. "Well, for me, discovering evidence of life elsewhere. Maybe the rocks on Mars. Maybe under the ice on Europa, the moon of Jupiter with twice as much ocean water as Earth. Maybe Enceladus or Titan. It would change the course of human history. We’ll see you up there!"

CNN’s FlashDocs division offers provocative storytelling on topical issues shaping society and culture. Former FlashDocs programs have included "Bad Bunny and the Halftime Show: Rhythms of Resistance" and "Behind the Bob: Vogue's Anna Wintour."

Executive produced by Eric Johnson alongside CNN Studios' Amy Entelis and Katie Hinman, "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" will first stream exclusively at CNN.com/Watch and on the CNN app beginning on Friday (Aug. 7) and has its broadcast debut on Sunday at 8 p.m. EDT on CNN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After its rocket explosion, Blue Origin wants to complete repairs and put another New Glenn on the launchpad before the end of 2026, according to CEO Dave Limp. That's very ambitious.

The company's New Glenn rocket stood at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station last Thursday (May 28) for a static hot fire test ahead of the vehicle's fourth launch. Blue Origin has yet to complete an investigation into the incident, but whatever the cause, New Glenn exploded on the launchpad in an enormous fireball visible for more than a hundred miles, destroying the launch vehicle and spreading damage across LC-36 and the surrounding vegetation.

Now that the smoke has settled, Limp has shed some light on the extent of that damage, and thinks the company can have New Glenn ready for launch before the end of the year. "before the end of this year," he said in a post on X, which ended with the phrase, "Gradatim Ferociter," the company's motto that means "step by step, ferociously."

Limp said that amongst the ruins of LC-36, which can be seen from space, there was still some promising news to share. In addition to the facility's water tower, "the propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG (liquid nitrogen) tanks are all in good shape," he said. But the pad didn't survive unscathed.

The large tower that helps coordinate systems and ground infrastructure at the pad sustained significant charring in the blast, but is in fine-enough shape that Limp said it can be repaired rather than needing to be torn down and rebuilt. The transporter-erector — the strongback that delivers and erects New Glenn at the pad — was destroyed beyond repair, but instead of rebuilding the structure, it will be replaced by "an alternative vertical conop (operational concept)," Limp said, which Blue Origin "had already been working for some time."

Setting the goal to return New Glenn to flight before the end of 2026 is an ambitious one, and with a timeline nearly half as long as comparable undertakings at other launch facilities.

For example, SpaceX launched its first Starship rocket test flight in April 2023, before building a flame trench under the launchpad at its Starbase facility in South Texas. As a result, the 33 Raptor engines of the vehicle's Super Heavy booster blasted a crater in the pad's concrete, spewing heavy debris throughout the pad and surrounding area as the rocket lifted off.

The second Starship test flight occurred about seven months later, in November 2023, aligning with Blue Origin's hopeful timeline for LC-36, but damage from the power of a rocket's engines, and damage from that entire rocket exploding on the launchpad are different levels of destruction.

In 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Launch Complex-40 exploded during the same type of static hot fire test that New Glenn was undergoing, and facilities there didn't support another launch for a year. And it was almost two years between launches at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility after the Orb-3 mission in 2014, when an Antares rocket failed seconds after liftoff and crashed back down to its pad just below.

LC-36 is Blue Origin's only launchpad, meaning each day that it remains out of operation is another delay to the company's efforts to prove New Glenn's reliability not only to its customers, like Amazon, which has contracted Blue Origin to launch several Leo wireless internet satellite missions, but also NASA, which is relying on New Glenn for critical parts of the Artemis program and the agency's efforts to return astronauts to the moon.

NASA has contracted SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft as the first two lunar landers for Artemis, and a delay in Blue Origin's ability to launch Blue Moon to orbit could mean the company takes a backseat to humanity's return to the moon.

It could also lead to a delay in that return all together. Starship and Blue Moon both have a ways to go before NASA will certify the vehicles to fly astronauts, so any time lost on that front by Blue Origin could further narrow NASA's options and increase the risk of setbacks to the agency's lunar landing timeline.

NASA is currently targeting 2027 for Artemis 3, a mission to low Earth orbit for astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one or both lunar landers, based on their availability. The first Artemis lunar landing mission is scheduled for 2028, and whatever role Blue Origin plays between now and then will likely be heavily influenced by its ability to get LC-36 up and running again.

The dust has settled in the aftermath of last week's giant New Glenn rocket explosion, which shook Florida's Space Coast and the space industry itself.

Blue Origin was conducting a fueling test on May 28, ahead of New Glenn's fourth mission, when a yet unknown event led to the total destruction of the vehicle and significant damage to the ground infrastructure at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36). No one was hurt in the incident, but the loss dealt a serious blow to Blue Origin's ability to meet NASA's timeline to support the Artemis missions to return astronauts to the moon, and further stalls the growth of the Amazon Leo wireless internet constellation meant to compete against SpaceX's Starlink satellite network.

The explosion caused extensive damage to LC-36, Blue Origin's only launchpad capable of supporting a rocket as large as New Glenn. So extensive, in fact, that the damage can be measured from space, as seen in images captured by Planet Lab's SkySat-C9 satellite, and processed by Spacefromspace.

Satellite imagery shows charred vegetation stretched out in nearly every direction around the half-mile-wide (1 kilometer) New Glenn pad. Blue Origin leases LC-36, which is located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). Visible damage across the scorched facility, now in ruin, can be seen on the launch tower, flame trench and other support systems.

Blue Origin is currently working out how to repair the damage. "We will start clearing the pad soon and have a good rebuild plan in place," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a post to X on May 31. Limp and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos toured LC-36 with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman on May 30, according to Isaacman, who promised the agency's full support in the investigation ahead.

New Glenn is one of the rockets NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon during future Artemis missions. Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander is one of two spacecraft contracted by NASA to carry out those landings — the other is SpaceX's Starship — and until Blue Origin can complete repairs to LC-36, Blue Moon doesn't have a ride to space.

Blue Origin had planned to launch the first Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), a smaller cargo variant of the eventual MK2 model designed to support a crew, on a mission to the lunar surface this fall, and stood to deliver a suite of NASA payloads as part of the agency's Moon Base 1 phase to establish a future permanent outpost. But the restoration of LC-36 will very likely delay that launch for several months. That will have ripple effects for Blue Origin's readiness to supply a Blue Moon vehicle for the upcoming Artemis 3 mission to launch the lunar landers to Earth orbit to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with the Orion spacecraft. That, in turn, could either delay Artemis 3 or create an untenable timeline for Blue Moon to gain its certification to carry astronauts in time for the first Artemis mission lunar landing on Artemis 4.

When an Antares rocket exploded and damaged its launchpad in 2014, it was nearly two years until the affected facilities at NASA's Wallops Space Flight Center supported another launch. SpaceX suffered a similar static test fire accident to New Glenn's in September 2016, when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded at CCSFS's Launch Complex-40 leading up to the launch of the Amos-6 communications satellite. SpaceX spent just over a year repairing its facilities there, launching a mission from LC-40 in December 2017.

Blue Origin hasn't come out with an estimated repair time for LC-16, and has yet to release an overall assessment of the damage. Following his tour with Isaacman, Bezos voiced his determination for the company to press onward, and his appreciation to the administrator for NASA's support. "Thank you for being here today," Bezos said in a post on X. "We will get back to flight, and we will get to the moon. Gradatim Ferociter."

The recent explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket during a routine test is a big setback for the private spaceflight company, and will likely have implications for NASA's Artemis program timeline and the nation's efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.

The May 28 incident, in which no one was injured, occurred while Blue Origin prepared its fourth New Glenn rocket for launch. A static test fire of the vehicle's engines at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36), located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Florida, was the rocket's last major milestone before a liftoff targeted for June 4. During that test, however, an explosion destroyed the rocket and severely damaged launch infrastructure on the ground. (The payload for that flight, a group of 48 Amazon Leo internet satellites, was not aboard the rocket when it exploded.)

The mishap is a major blow to Blue Origin's progress with New Glenn, which was only cleared to proceed with the upcoming flight a week ago. New Glenn had been grounded pending a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigation after the NG-3 mission in April, when a failure of the rocket's second stage stranded AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite payload in an unstable orbit. Now, with another investigation opening, and extensive repairs needed at LC-36, New Glenn may be grounded for a while, potentially forcing NASA to change its expectations for how Blue Origin will support upcoming Artemis missions.

"This is a pretty significant incident to happen to Blue Origin," Kathleen Curlee, a commercial space industry research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Space.com in an interview.

New Glenn is Blue Origin's partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle, designed to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Starship rockets. Before New Glenn, New Shepard was the only rocket Blue Origin ever launched to space, and each of those flights was suborbital. Though long delayed in its initial debut, New Glenn made it to orbit on its first launch in January 2025 and performed a successful landing of the rocket's first stage during its second mission (NG-2). And, despite the second stage shortfalls of NG-3, that mission managed to reuse NG-2's landed booster core (with new engines), which performed a second successful landing on Blue Origin's recovery droneship "Jacklyn," in the Atlantic Ocean.

All that progress now comes to a screeching halt while Blue Origin investigates the cause of New Glenn's explosion and faces the task of rebuilding LC-36. In the meantime, the 2027 target to launch the next mission in NASA's Artemis program, Artemis 3, inches ever closer, and the time for Blue Origin to RSVP to the party draws nearer.

The Artemis program aims to create a sustained human presence with a base on the moon, and eventually develop technologies that can support crewed missions to Mars. The agency selected Blue Origin and SpaceX to support that effort, contracting each company to design and build lunar landers capable of delivering astronauts to the moon's surface and launching them back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with NASA's Orion spacecraft.

The first of those lunar landing missions is Artemis 4, which NASA hopes to launch in late 2028. Artemis 3 is a stepping stone to that achievement, but one which relies on at least one lunar lander making it to space. And right now, Blue Origin's contribution, the Blue Moon lander, has no way of getting there.

Blue Moon is designed to launch on New Glenn. The first prototype for that lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), was scheduled to launch in fall 2026 to deliver the first building blocks for NASA's Moon Base 1 mission phase. With a delay of that mission now likely, the development and qualification timeline for the crew-capable Blue Moon MK2 may now slip as well.

"It's a good lander, it's a good system, but they cannot get it to the moon without their New Glenn, and their New Glenn is grounded," Curlee said.

The goal of Artemis 3 is to launch Orion with a crew of astronauts into Earth orbit to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the program's lunar landers. Before a program architecture redesign earlier this year, NASA chose Starship to fly the first Artemis lunar landing mission. But development of SpaceX's megarocket spacecraft faced its own delays, and NASA has since indicated a willingness to fly with whichever lunar lander can be ready when the time comes to launch the missions ahead. The loss of New Glenn and the damage to the rocket's only launch pad now give SpaceX a potential leg up in that competition.

Starship has faced its own delays over the past several years — even explosions in flight and on the test stand. The spacecraft's 12th overall test flight launched on May 22, for instance, and experienced issues with the vehicle's new Raptor 3 engines that led to a failure in the first stage's boostback burn, and its subsequent fiery plunge into the Gulf of Mexico. But that incident, during an otherwise successful flight, doesn't quite stack up against New Glenn's explosive mishap, Curlee said.

"In the launch industry, it is a success if you get your rocket off of the launch pad," she said. "Yes, [SpaceX] had anomalies … but they did not blow up their launch pad, and they were able to achieve flight. For Blue Origin, this exploding on the launch pad is a pretty significant failure."

SpaceX is no stranger to destroying launch pads, however. In September 2016, the company experienced an accident similar to New Glenn's explosion: A Falcon 9 rocket exploded at CCSFS's Launch Complex-40 (LC-40) during the static fire test for the Amos-6 communications satellite launch. (The satellite was aboard the rocket at the time and was destroyed.) According to Curlee, though, that loss wasn't as hard a blow to SpaceX as this fresh one will be to Blue Origin.

Following an incident investigation at the time, SpaceX was able to return Falcon 9 to flight about four months later, but only because of the company's additional launch pads at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which is next door to CCSFS, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Launches didn't return to LC-40 until December 2017.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman toured LC-36 Friday, alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Dave Limp. "NASA is committed to helping the Blue team recover, continue to advance their lunar lander and get New Glenn back to launching as soon as safely possible," Isaacman said in a post on X.

Blue Origin has no other launch pads for New Glenn, so regardless of the length of the company's investigation into the cause of the explosion, New Glenn is grounded until LC-36 can get back up and running.

"Launch pads are a pretty high-value real estate item," Curlee said. "There's only a few launch pads that can handle the size of the New Glenn, and the one that [Blue Origin] had was LC-36, which has now been destroyed. So this is a pretty significant setback."

Still, she doesn't think it heralds the end of NASA's lunar ambitions. "I think overall this doesn't mean that we've lost the moon … but NASA is going to have significantly readjust its Artemis and Moon Base programs to account for the fact that this happened."

An explosion on Florida's Space Coast last night lit up the sky more than 100 miles away.

During a test of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket in the evening hours on May 28, ahead of an upcoming mission to deliver a batch of Amazon Leo internet satellites to low Earth orbit, the launch vehicle experienced an anomaly that led to its complete loss and what is likely significant damage to the Launch Complex-36 (LC-36), at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos confirmed in a post on X that no one was hurt in the accident, and said, "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." Dozens of other posts to social media quickly spread views of the explosion seen from nearby Cocoa Beach all the way to Tampa, on Florida's west coast.

A flyover image taken this morning (May 29) of LC-36 gives an idea to the extent of damage sustained by the launchpad infrastructure.

One X user, @leesteapleton, posted a video sent to him by a patron of Cocoa Beach restaurant Coconuts on the Beach, located about 11.5 miles (18.5 kilometers) from the launchpad.

Farther north near Jetty Park, a popular launch viewing location in Port Canaveral about 5.5 miles (8.9 kilometers) from LC-36, X user @JConcilus called the explosion "absolutely enormous."

The incident was also captured in nearby waters off the shore. Instagram user @gofly2 saw the explosion while aboard a yacht on the way back into Port Canaveral.

This Ring doorbell footage from @huntermanely, on X, caught the explosion lighting up the night sky as a delivery driver dropped off some food.

X user @ItsAlexQuinn, who happened to be in the sky at the time of the incident, posted a video from his airplane window seat while flying above Orlando, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the launchpad.

The glow from the New Glenn explosion was so bright, in fact, that it could be seen all the way on the opposite end of the state. X user @radiolassi shared a video from Tampa, FL, showing the sky illuminating in a bright flash from more than 100 miles away.

"120 miles away. That's the distance between Tampa and the New Glenn explosion in this video. Yet the blast was still visible across Florida's night sky. Moments like this remind you just how powerful modern rockets are," they said in their post.

Both Blue Origin and Space Force officials are instructing the public to report any debris that may wash up on nearby shores. "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety," Blue Origin said in a post on X.

People are urged to call Blue Origin's Wreckage Management Hotline if they should happen upon such debris, but also to call 911 if items pose "an immediate public safety hazard," Space Force's Space Launch Delta 45, who oversee Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, said in their post, directing the public "not touch or attempt to recover suspected debris."

Blue Origin just hit a hurdle on its way to the moon.

The company's powerful New Glenn rocket exploded during a routine prelaunch engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday night (May 28), creating a huge fireball that lit up the dark Space Coast skies.

"We experienced an anomaly during today's hotfire test," Blue Origin wrote in an statement. " All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more."

Nobody was injured, Blue Origin said in an update on X on Thursday night. But damage to the pad — Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) — could be extensive, judging by the extent of the explosion, which multiple rocket-watchers captured on video.

"All personnel are accounted for and safe. It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it," Jeff Bezos, the billionaire and founder of Blue Origin, wrote in a statement on social media. "Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.

The accident could have big implications for Blue Origin, NASA and the United States' moon plans.

Blue Origin, which Amazon's Bezos founded back in 2000, sees the 320-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn as its launch workhorse, a powerhouse rocket that will help humanity establish a foothold away from Earth.

Indeed, New Glenn is the rocket ride for Blue Origin's Blue Moon, one of the two private vehicles (along with SpaceX's Starship) that NASA selected to land astronauts on the moon for its Artemis program.

And the agency announced earlier this week that Blue Moon will land two private lunar rovers on the lunar surface — missions that are key to the buildout of NASA's planned moon base near the south pole. The agency wants at least one of those rovers to be on the moon before the first crewed Artemis mission (Artemis 4) touches down, a milestone targeted for late 2028.

But Blue Moon is supposed to head to the moon considerably sooner than that. Blue Origin is gearing up to send a robotic prototype of the vehicle, called Blue Moon Mark 1, to the lunar surface later this year, to demonstrate the vehicle’s capabilities.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman addressed the New Glenn explosion on Thursday night, showing how important the rocket is to the agency's plans going forward.

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult," Isaacman said in an X post. "We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets. 
We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

New Glenn has flown just three times to date, and things haven't always gone swimmingly. For example, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded the rocket briefly after its third flight, which occurred on April 19. During that mission, New Glenn failed to deploy its payload, the BlueBird 7 communications satellite, into the proper orbit.

Thursday's explosion occurred during a "hotfire" engine test meant to clear the path for New Glenn's fourth flight, which was supposed to deploy 49 satellites for Amazon's nascent broadband constellation. That mission was scheduled to fly on June 4.

LC-36 is currently the only pad that hosts New Glenn launches, so extensive damage to the pad would likely keep the rocket grounded for a while.

Editor's note: This story was updatedon May 29 to include additional statements from Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos.

SpaceX's next-gen Starship megarocket finally got off the ground last week.

On May 22, SpaceX's first Starship V3 ("Version 3") vehicle lifted off from a brand-new pad at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. It was the first Starship launch in more than seven months, a lag caused by the time it took to develop and incorporate V3's many upgrades over its predecessors. (The destruction of a V3 Super Heavy booster during testing in November didn't help, either.)

Though Starship V3 suffered a few engine glitches on May 22, and its Super Heavy booster didn't steer itself down for a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX heralded the suborbital test flight as a success. That's a big deal, because V3 is expected to carry a heavy load for the company, and for NASA, in the coming years.

Great expectations

The 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship V3 is the biggest and most powerful iteration of Starship yet. It's the first variant of the vehicle outfitted with SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engine, the sleekest, lightest and brawniest Raptor that the company has built.

V3 sports many other upgrades as well. For example, its Super Heavy first stage has an improved fuel-transfer system that allows the booster's 33 engines to fire more quickly, according to a May 12 SpaceX update.

The Ship upper stage, meanwhile, features a more efficient propulsion system, larger propellant tanks and docking ports that will enable meetups with refueling "tanker" vehicles in Earth orbit, among other modifications.

Those in-space meetups will be a big part of Starship missions in the future. Any Starship flight to the moon, Mars or another deep-space destination will require the launch of a dozen or more Ships to haul its required propellant to space, experts say. (The exact number of necessary tanker missions is hard to pin down.)

And the moon is indeed a target. In 2021, NASA selected Ship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of lunar exploration. SpaceX is currently working to get Ship ready for the next two Artemis missions — Artemis 3, a docking test with NASA's Orion crew capsule in low Earth orbit, and Artemis 4, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole. If all goes to plan, Artemis 3 will launch in mid-2027, and Artemis 4 will lift off in late 2028.

Ship isn't guaranteed to fly on either of these missions, however. NASA also picked Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft to be an Artemis lander, and both are still in the running for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. (Both private landers could fly on Artemis 3, NASA officials have said, but only one will make the trip to the moon a year later.)

Next steps

SpaceX is working to get Starship V3 up and running in time for Artemis 3. And it needs to move quickly, for there's a lot still needs to be done.

The immediate priority is determining why Super Heavy failed to stick its landing during the May 22 test flight. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration declared that failure a mishap and has grounded Starship until SpaceX wraps up an investigation into the matter.

After Starship V3 has been cleared to fly again, it will need to notch some big milestones in the final frontier — notably, reaching Earth orbit and topping off its tanks there. And SpaceX has laid out how it plans to tick those boxes.

"It will start with a Starship launched from Starbase to spend an extended time on orbit, gathering data on vehicle propulsion and thermal behavior on an extended duration mission, including long duration propellant storage and boil-off characterization," the company wrote in an update on Oct. 30, about two weeks after Starship's 11th test flight. "A second Starship will then launch to rendezvous with the first to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer in Earth orbit."

SpaceX aims to launch both of those Starship flights this year, the company added. But we don't know if the next Starship launch will kick off the first leg of that refueling test; SpaceX hasn't announced details about Flight 13 (including its flight date).

We should expect Starship to launch again relatively soon, however, for SpaceX prioritizes flight-testing as the best way to develop and mature its hardware. And there's no shortage of hardware to fly at the moment: The company has built up a stockpile of Starship V3 vehicles, according to founder and CEO Elon Musk.

"The Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year," Musk wrote on May 18 via X, the social media platform he owns.

SpaceX also needs to integrate a life-support system into Starship ahead of Artemis 4. That vital tech may not be necessary for Artemis 3, however; NASA is still defining the parameters of that docking test and has left open the possibility that the astronauts will not enter whichever private lander flies on Artemis 3.

SpaceX has been operating life-support systems in space since 2020, when it launched its first Crew Dragon astronaut mission to the International Space Station. And the company has been working on a Starship version of the tech as well.

In the October 2025 update, SpaceX wrote that it has completed "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control system demonstrations, using a full-scale cabin module inhabited by multiple people to test the capability to inject oxygen and nitrogen into the cabin environment and accurately manage air distribution and sanitation, along with humidity and thermal control."

There's other vital gear to integrate as well — the elevator, for instance. Ship stands a whopping 171 feet (52 meters) tall, so the astronauts who fly on it to the moon will need a way to get from the vehicle's nose (where the cabin will be) down to the gray dirt.

SpaceX has already conducted a demonstration of Ship elevator and airlock tech, according to the October 2025 update. That test — performed with Axiom Space, which is building the Artemis program's spacesuits — occurred at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California in mid-2024.

Over the longer term, we can expect an accelerating cadence of increasingly ambitious test flights as SpaceX gets even more proficient at building and flying Starship hardware.

Perhaps the most important of these trials is an uncrewed test flight to the lunar surface, which both Ship and Blue Moon will need to ace before the private vehicles are certified to carry NASA astronauts.

There's no stated timeline for either of those landmark flights, though at least one of them will have to occur before late 2028 to keep Artemis 4 on schedule. (A robotic prototype of Blue Moon will launch on a lunar-landing mission this fall, if all goes to plan. But the mature, crew-capable variant of Blue Moon will still have to duplicate the feat before astronauts can climb aboard.)

What can we expect once Starship gets fully up and running? It's hard to say, but Musk has certainly set expectations high.

"Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour," the world's richest man wrote via X on May 23. "Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then."

The next big Artemis announcement is just hours away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NASA is definitely thinking big on the moon.

The U.S. space agency plans to build a crewed lunar base over the next decade or so via its Artemis program — and we just got a sense of that project's impressive scope.

"We envision the moon base to be hundreds of square miles, with different assets all building up to the objective of permanent lunar presence on the moon," Carlos García-Galán, the manager of NASA's Moon Base program at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said during a press conference Tuesday (May 26).

The base will be constructed over the next decade or so near the lunar south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice. This precious resource has been accumulating for billions of years on the permanently shadowed floors of craters in the region, scientists say.

NASA didn't go into the moon base-planning process with a big footprint as a priority. Rather, it emerged naturally, as all of the envisioned elements started coming together in planners' heads.

"There's no one spot that covers all the science, all the technology, all the habitation needs of the surface, and even within the local area, you have to consider the terrain," NASA's Nujoud Merancy, chief architect of the Moon Base program, said during today's briefing.

"So, you'll have the habitats on the tops of the hills where they get sunlight," she added. "Power systems — nuclear systems — need to be a kilometer or more away for the radiation protection, so all of these things, when you start putting them together, end up sprawling a little bit more like a city as you start building it out."

And scientists and mission planners still don't know a lot about the lunar south pole, which is another reason for a settlement there to cover a lot of ground, according to García-Galán.

"We're going to want to explore different sites to really maximize the mix of scientific objectives and viability of a permanent presence," he said.

NASA plans to reduce the uncertainty via the use of MoonFall drones — small, hopping robots that will scout out the south polar region ahead of moon base construction. The first MoonFall batch, a set of three or four spacecraft, will launch to the moon in 2028 aboard a lander built by Firefly Aerospace, NASA announced today. (Firefly nabbed a $75 million contract for the mission, the company said.)

Those drones, or others like it, could also help mark the moon base's borders, said García-Galán.

"We're going to be able to basically put them at the corners of the areas where we think we have either key scientific objectives or we want to build up the moon base," he said.

China plans to build a base on the moon in the coming years as well (its first astronaut landing is aimed for 2030), and U.S. officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of getting the American one up and running first. The U.S. wants to be the one establishing norms of responsible behavior on Earth's nearest neighbor, the argument goes.

So, during today's press conference, Ars Technica's Eric Berger asked García-Galán and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who also participated in the event, if the MoonFall drones could help delineate a keep-out zone of sorts.

"I think it's important for us to get there first," Isaacman said. "I think the idea that there are areas of great interest on the lunar surface — we do want to get there and explore them, and we also obviously want to be very mindful of the Outer Space Treaty, so that we are respectful of other nations that are putting assets on the on the lunar surface. We would expect that to be reciprocal."

The moon base's envisioned size was just a sidelight of today's event. The main purpose was to announce contracts that the agency just awarded to get the ball rolling on the outpost's construction.

Firefly wasn't the only compay to win a NASA Moon Base program contract. NASA is giving California-based Astrolab $219 million and Colorado's Lunar Outpost $220 million for production of their lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs).

LTVs are large rovers that Artemis astronauts will use to explore the lunar surface. These vehicles will also be capable of autonomous operation, meaning they can land before crewed missions, be remotely controlled from Earth, and meet up with astronauts at their touchdown sites. And that is indeed the goal: NASA wants to have at least one LTV on the lunar surface before Artemis 4 touches down near the lunar south pole in late 2028.

Both LTVs will be delivered to the lunar surface by Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, NASA announced today. Those two contracts are worth $234 million apiece, agency officials said during the briefing.

Blue Origin is also building a crewed variant of Blue Moon, which is in the running to fly the Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 astronaut missions, as well as future flights.

Artemis 3 is a docking test in Earth orbit between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the program's privately developed crewed lunar landers — Blue Moon and SpaceX's Starship. NASA aims to launch Artemis 3 in mid-2027, Isaacman said today.

NASA plans to build the moon base in three phases. Phase One, which runs from now through 2029, will gather detailed information and "secure reliable access" to the lunar surface, according to the agency.

Phase Two runs from 2029 to 2032 and will set up the base's "initial operating capability." Phase Three, which runs from 2032 far into the future, will "achieve semi-permanent crew presence" on the moon.

“The Moon Base will be America's and humanity's first outpost on another celestial world," Isaacman said in a NASA statement today. "Every mission, crewed and uncrewed, will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable."

NASA has launched two Artemis missions to date. Artemis 1 sent an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back in late 2022, and Artemis 2 took four astronauts around the moon in Orion last month. Both missions were successful.

A new NASA satellite will test critical technologies for storing and transferring super-chilled, cryogenic fuels in space in order to help astronauts reach the moon and potentially Mars someday.

The Liquid Oxygen Flight demonstration (LOXSAT) will launch to orbit around the Earth later this year to test the fluid management capabilities that will be needed to maintain cryogenic fuels in microgravity, which come with additional challenges compared to other propellants. In a statement, NASA said these in-space propellant depots could some day be "essentially gas stations in space that could support long-term exploration."

LOXSAT will head to low Earth orbit (LEO) this summer aboard a Rocket Lab Photon satellite bus, hitching a ride on an Electron launch vehicle, from the company's facilities in New Zealand no earlier than July 17, according to NASA's statement. The mission is set to last for nine months, and will conduct tests on 11 different components of cryogenic fluid management to collect data to mature the technologies for scaling.

Cryogenic fuels must be managed with tight temperature controls to prevent them from boiling off, whether on Earth or in space. The same temperature conditions that make those liquids hard to store also make them hard to transfer, and the ability to do so between vehicles in space is a crucial step to unlocking missions to deep space, like those of NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon and other exploration efforts such as crewed missions to Mars.

The mission is a collaboration with Eta Space of Rockledge, Florida, and NASA hopes the technology can evolve to support on-orbit fueling depots for spacecraft designed for long-term deep space objectives. It's central to the success of the agency's upcoming lunar goals, and part of a larger Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Project involving scientists and engineers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Glenn Research Center, and Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

Eta Space was selected under NASA's Tipping Point initiative, which chose 14 companies to develop a variety of technologies to support the Artemis program's goal of sustained operations on the surface of the moon by 2030. Managing cryogenic fuels in space is a critical part of that architecture.

Both Artemis lunar landers commissioned under NASA's Human Landing System contracts rely on cryogenic propellants, and require on-orbit refueling in order to complete their missions of landing astronauts on the lunar surface and delivering them back to lunar orbit.

Both landers also use liquid oxygen as the oxidizer for their respective propellants. SpaceX's Starship is powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid methane (methalox). The other, Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen (hydrolox) — both of which require constant cryogenic refrigeration to maintain their liquid state. Neither landers (or any other spacecraft, to date) have yet demonstrated how they will handle long-term storage of those super-chilled fuels, or the ability to transfer them between vehicles. That means LOXSAT may be the first.

SpaceX and Blue Origin continue advancing their lunar lander tests. SpaceX's Starship is poised to launch its twelfth test flight later this week (currently no earlier than May 20), and Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) is undergoing late-stage testing at the company's facilities near KSC, in Florida.

The outcome of Starship's Flight 12 will have deep implications for how the vehicle's development progresses through the rest of the year. It's the first launch of Starship Version 3, and the first iteration of the spacecraft designed to eventually demonstrate capabilities like on-orbit refueling. A successful test on its first launch could mean a higher cadence of test launches moving forward — seven months have passed between Starship's upcoming launch and its last. But a failure could delay Starship's development further, and, in turn, potentially set back the timeline for NASA's Artemis missions.

Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 is progressing towards launch readiness, but the company's New Glenn rocket is currently grounded due to a mishap with its second stage during its most recent mission, which failed to deliver its payload to orbit. MK1 is a cargo variant of the crewed lander Blue Origin plans to use for NASA's Artemis missions, and is scheduled to perform a lunar landing demonstration later this year, pending the completion of the FAA's investigation into New Glenn's previous failure.

NASA is targeting late 2027 for the Artemis 3 mission, which will launch four astronauts to LEO to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers between their Orion spacecraft and one or both of the program's lunar landers. NASA has indicated the agency will fly with whichever is ready when it comes time to launch the mission, even if that means leaving one behind on Earth.

By then, LOXSAT will have completed its own on-orbit demonstrations, and, if all goes according to plan, provided scientists and engineers useful data that could potentially inform SpaceX's and Blue Origin's efforts to achieve cryogenic fuel management in microgravity, and eventually lead to orbital refueling stations that can support Artemis and other missions to the moon, Mars and other deep space destinations.

We just learned a little more about NASA's next Artemis mission.

The agency dropped a few details on Wednesday (May 13) about Artemis 3, a crewed mission that will test rendezvous and docking operations with one or more lunar landers close to home.

"While this is a mission to Earth orbit, it is an important stepping stone to successfully landing on the moon with Artemis 4," Jeremy Parsons, Moon to Mars acting assistant deputy administrator at NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement on Wednesday. "Artemis 3 is one of the most highly complex missions NASA has undertaken."

We already knew the broad outlines of Artemis 3: It will use NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to send four astronauts to orbit aboard the Orion spacecraft. Orion will then rendezvous and dock with one or both of the Artemis program's privately developed lunar landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

This architecture was announced in late February. It's a big departure from the original Artemis 3 plan, which would have used one of the landers to put astronauts down near the moon's south pole.

NASA is still working to define the details of Artemis 3, but the agency has made some progress, as Wednesday's announcement shows. For example, NASA revealed that the astronauts will spend more time aboard Orion on Artemis 3 than they did on Artemis 2, "further advancing the evaluation of life support systems."

Artemis 2, which sent four astronauts on an epic journey around the moon, lasted about 10 days, launching this past April 1 and splashing down on April 10. Wednesday's statement does not give an estimate for how long Artemis 3 will last.

NASA also revealed on Wednesday that the Artemis 3 SLS will employ a dummy "spacer" rather than a functional upper stage.

"The spacer will maintain the same overall dimensions and interface connection points as the upper stage between the Orion stage adapter and launch vehicle stage adapter," NASA officials wrote in the statement, noting that spacer "design and fabrication activities" are underway at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

This development makes a certain amount of cost-saving sense. The SLS upper stage (known as the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, or ICPS), propels Orion out of Earth orbit and toward the moon. And Artemis 3 isn't going to the moon.

"After the rocket delivers Orion to orbit, the spacecraft's European-built service module will provide propulsion to circularize Orion's orbit around the planet in low Earth orbit," NASA officials wrote. "This orbit increases overall mission success by allowing more launch opportunities for each element as compared to a lunar mission — SLS carrying Orion and its crew, SpaceX's Starship human landing system pathfinder, and Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 human landing system pathfinder."

There's also a bit of news here: Most of us had assumed that Artemis 3 will head to low Earth orbit (as opposed to more distant paths around our planet), but NASA had not explicitly confirmed that until now.

Wednesday's statement also noted that Artemis 3 will use a new, upgraded Orion heat shield (which we already knew) and said that mission astronauts "could potentially enter at least one lander test article."

We still don't know which lander will fly on the mission, Starship or Blue Moon (or perhaps both). There are plenty of other specifics that still need to be worked out as well, including Artemis 3's duration, which astronauts will fly on it, what science experiments they might conduct and how the mission will test the new Artemis spacesuits, which are being built by the Houston-based company Axiom Space.

"NASA has asked for industry input on potential solutions to improve the communications with the ground during the mission since the Deep Space Network will not be used," agency officials added in Wednesday's statement.

"The agency also is seeking both international and domestic interest in potentially flying cubesats to deploy in Earth orbit, and may share other opportunities as the concept of operations for the mission is further defined," they added.

NASA's Orion space capsule training simulator is located inside Building 9 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It's a full-scale, high-fidelity model of the real thing, and where the Artemis 2 astronauts spent more than a year preparing for their recent mission around the moon.

For a long time, the Orion simulator sat alone in its own corner, away from the group of International Space Station training modules lined up inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF). But now, Orion has a neighbor.

A mockup of Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lunar lander has been assembled at the SVMF, and is ready for astronauts to come aboard to begin training, according to a NASA release. Standing adjacent to the Orion capsule, the Blue Moon crew cabin and exterior resemble the design of the lander's Mark 2 variant, which will eventually land Artemis astronauts on the moon, if all goes according to plan.

With Blue Origin's mockup now assembled at JSC, astronauts can now seamlessly transition from training inside Orion to training in Blue Moon as they prepare for the Artemis missions ahead. The next mission, Artemis 3, is dependent on at least one lunar lander being ready to fly before the mission can launch.

Blue Moon is one of two lunar landers NASA has chosen through the agency's Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, the other being SpaceX's Starship, and is a critical component of NASA's Artemis program that aims to establish a permanent presence on the moon's surface.

Both landers have faced delays in development, but Blue Moon is the first of the pair to integrate a cabin model for training at a NASA facility. Astronauts wearing Artemis spacesuit prototypes from Axiom Space have had the opportunity to test some of Starship's early cabin designs, as well as the spacecraft's elevator that will be used to lower crews down the roughly 170 feet (52 meters) from Starship's cabin section to its base, but those tests have so far been limited to SpaceX's own facilities.

For comparison, the Blue Moon MK 2 will be about 52 feet (16 meters) tall, with the crew cabin located near the base.

Artemis 3 is scheduled for late 2027, according to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who based the timetable on Blue Origin's and SpaceX's estimations of the earliest completion for their respective landers. NASA has indicated a willingness to fly with either or both vehicles, depending on their readiness.

The mission will fly four astronauts aboard Orion into low Earth orbit, where the spacecraft will rendezvous with the lunar lander vehicles to practice docking procedures and verify their life support and communications systems. Artemis 3 astronauts may also have the chance to don Axiom's new spacesuits, but those have also faced significant delays.

If Artemis 3 goes according to plan, and the landers and spacesuits are ready in time, NASA is targeting 2028 for a moon landing on Artemis 4, and possibly again on Artemis 5 that same year. But the landers have a long way to go before NASA will qualify either to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface.

The Artemis moon landers will need to touch down safely on the moon, as well as deliver crews back to lunar orbit for transfer back aboard Orion. That's different from how Apollo astronauts performed lunar landings, flying aboard a two-stage vehicle that left half a spacecraft behind on the surface in order to shed the necessary weight to make it back to orbit. NASA's long-term, sustainable habitation approach for the Artemis program makes abandoning half a lunar lander on the surface for every mission untenable.

To pull off the single-stage landing and launch back to orbit, both Starship and Blue Moon will need several on-orbit refueling flights, requiring transfer and long-term storage of cryogenic propellants — neither of which capabilities have ever been demonstrated in space. Once those milestones have been accomplished, NASA is also requiring successful uncrewed missions to the lunar surface for each lander, before they can qualify to carry astronauts.

The Blue Moon lander mockup now operational in the SVMF is not the final design of the vehicle, inside or out, but NASA plans to use the test article to provide feedback on its design as Blue Origin continues the real MK2's development, according to a NASA release.

Blue Moon MK1, a smaller cargo variant of the lunar lander, recently completed vacuum chamber testing at JSC and shipped to Blue Origin's facilities near NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. It's slated to launch aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket on an uncrewed mission to land on the moon later this year, though that may face its own delay as the company completes an investigation with the FAA into the failure of New Glenn's upper stage on its most recent launch.

Blue Origin continues putting its first lunar lander through its paces, testing the spacecraft at NASA centers across the nation to prepare it for its upcoming mission to the moon.

That vehicle, named "Endurance," is Blue Origin's uncrewed Blue Moon MK1 test lander, which is designed to pave the way for the more advanced MK2 version that will be capable of flying astronauts to the moon's surface. Blue Moon is one of two private lunar landers, from Blue Origin and SpaceX, that NASA has contracted to support its Artemis program, and both of those vehicles have a lengthy list of tests and qualifications to check off in order to meet the agency's timeline.

NASA is targeting late 2027 for the launch of Artemis 3, which will fly four astronauts to Earth orbit aboard an Orion space capsule. The mission will practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with either Blue Moon or SpaceX's Starship, or both. NASA has indicated a willingness to fly with whichever lander is ready when it comes time to launch.

Endurance recently completed vacuum chamber testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and was shipped to Blue Origin's facilities near Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida last month. Now, the lander is being prepared for radio frequency compatibility testing inside the company's Lunar Plant 1, to ensure the lander's communication systems won't experience any interference before flight.

NASA is targeting 2028 for the first Artemis program moon landing on Artemis 4. However, before NASA certifies either Starship or Blue Moon to deliver astronauts to the surface, both must complete a series of qualifications, including an uncrewed lunar touchdown, which Blue Origin hopes to accomplish later this year with Endurance. In order to pull off a successful landing, the spacecraft will also need to demonstrate autonomous navigation, cryogenic fuel transfer and prolonged storage, and then prove its ability to launch back into lunar orbit.

Part of Endurance's landing mission will include two science demonstration payloads for NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, a side-by-side initiative with Artemis that partners with private industry to deliver payloads to the moon to further evolve the technologies needed to support future long-term lunar habitation missions with astronauts.

Whether Endurance can make it to space before the end of 2026 is dependent on how it fares in the tests ahead, and whether Blue Origin encounters any anomalies along the way. And, in addition to the prelaunch tests still ahead for the MK1, the lander's intended launch vehicle, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, is currently grounded pending an FAA investigation into a second-stage failure during its most recent mission.

Starship may have a leg up in its development timeline, with 11 test launches to space under its belt (and a 12th expected in a week or so) already. But the SpaceX vehicle hasn't actually flown a full orbit around Earth yet, and it faces the same list of to-dos as Blue Moon.

It's unclear to what extent NASA will require either lander's development to have progressed in order to qualify to fly on Artemis 3. For example, the agency hasn't announced whether or not the astronauts will enter the landers while in Earth orbit, or whether Orion will dock with the spacecraft at all, or simply perform proximity operations maneuvers around them.

Blue Origin's moon lander has passed its tests in the vacuum chamber.

This marks one big step forward for the company and its possible participation in humanity's return to the moon.

What is it?

Blue Origin's uncrewed cargo lunar lander, called Moon Mark 1 (MK1) and nicknamed Endurance, has completed its testing in the vacuum chamber, NASA shared on May 4.

The lander, which is being developed in support of NASA's Artemis program, was tested in Thermal Vacuum Chamber A at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. These tests evaluated how the spacecraft can hold up against extreme temperatures, and modeled how it will eventually fare in the extreme environments of spaceflight and in the vacuum of outer space.

Why is it incredible?

Blue Origin's lander is being developed as part of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface in 2028.

With the recent success of Artemis 2, which saw astronauts fly around the moon and back, the program established the first human presence at the moon since the agency's Apollo program launched its last lunar mission in 1972.

MK1 is scheduled to carry NASA science experiments and technology to the moon's south pole as early as late 2026. The success of this test represents a step forward in solidifying the public-private partnership that will support this return to the moon.

With the Artemis 2 crew back home after their historic circumlunar voyage, attention now turns to getting astronauts back on the surface of the moon. But how are the landers that will make such an ambitious endeavor possible progressing?

NASA recently outlined a revised plan for Artemis 3, which has the mission performing a crewed test in Earth orbit in late 2027 rather than the previously planned 2028 lunar landing. The mission will instead be an Earth-orbit rendezvous of NASA's Orion spacecraft with one or both of the program's moon landers, analogous to the Apollo 9 mission, setting up a lunar landing attempt with Artemis 4 in late 2028. But this plan relies on swift action by NASA's partners.

The agency earlier selected two private companies to provide crewed Artemis moon landers: SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System (HLS) and Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, both of which are in development and facing tight deadlines for future missions.

With a number of major milestones on the horizon, the coming months will indicate if these landers can be readied for their planned 2027 orbital tests.

SpaceX and Starship HLS

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has long talked about getting humans to Mars, but recently he's shifted his attention to the moon, despite earlier calling our natural satellite "a distraction." Now, he's talking about a lunar settlement. First, however, SpaceX needs to get its Starship HLS lander ready.

That vehicle, which NASA selected in 2021, is a specific configuration of Starship, which comprises the 33-engine Super Heavy booster and Starship, or "Ship," upper stage. SpaceX says that, as of late October last year, it has hit 49 milestones related to developing the subsystems, infrastructure and operations needed to land astronauts on the moon. These include lunar life support, Raptor cold start demonstrations, Raptor lunar landing throttle tests, software, debris protection and elevator and airlock tests. The key to the major progress needed in the next 18 months, however, is flying Starship regularly and demonstrating on-orbit docking and propellant transfer.

Starship has flown 11 suborbital missions over the past three years. The 12th flight, expected later this month, will be the debut of the larger and more powerful Version 3, equipped with its new V3 Raptor engines, which will be used for orbital flights and operational payloads.

In its multiple flight tests, SpaceX has hit some big development milestones, including relighting engines in space, payload deployment demonstrations and spectacular "chopstick" booster recoveries. But many more lie ahead, with time running out. These include not just reaching Earth orbit by also demonstrating orbital refueling, which involves a propellant transfer demo between two Starship upper stages. This is required, as the HLS Starship needs to be fueled up in Earth orbit with tanker missions to allow it to head for the moon.

This requirement alone demands a high launch cadence, with multiple tanker flights needed to fuel a single lunar mission, while there is also a need to verify long-duration life support for astronauts. There's lots on the menu for SpaceX for HLS advancement, and a positive first flight of Starship V3 will be crucial.

Blue Origin's Blue Moon

Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mk2 crewed variant lunar lander is a simpler system compared to Starship HLS, selected in 2023 and intended for the Artemis 5 mission and beyond, rather than what is now Artemis 4. But the shakeup of NASA's Artemis plans has opened the door to an earlier landing, if Blue Moon can be made ready.

Unlike SpaceX, Blue Origin is pursuing a stepwise approach, beginning with an uncrewed cargo lander before attempting a crewed system. The biggest test on the horizon is the launch of the smaller Blue Moon Mark-1 (Mk1) cargo lander, which is expected to launch to the moon later this year after recently undergoing vacuum chamber testing. One major issue, however, is the grounding of its rocket ride — Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn — after a recent launch anomaly.

Getting the New Glenn launcher and uncrewed Mk1 lander ready and then acing a lunar landing will be crucial to Blue's lunar ambitions with Artemis. As with Starship HLS, there is also the need to develop and test the life support systems for Blue Moon Mk2.

The company is typically reserved in terms of public updates on the program, but recent Congressional meetings have provided some insight into developments.

In a NASA budget hearing held by the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies on April 27, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that the companies assured him of their efforts to be ready.

"I've received responses from both vendors, both SpaceX and Blue Origin, to meet our needs for a late 2027 rendezvous docking and test the interoperability out of both landers in advance of a landing attempt in 2028," Isaacman said.

NASA has indicated it is willing to fly with whichever lander is ready in late 2027 for Artemis 3, meaning the race is on, and could determine whether SpaceX or Blue Origin gets to ferry astronauts down to the moon on Artemis 4.

Blue Origin's huge New Glenn rocket has been temporarily grounded.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is requiring an investigation into New Glenn's third-ever mission, which launched on Sunday morning (April 19) and resulted in the loss of its payload — the BlueBird 7 internet-beaming satellite.

"The FAA will oversee the Blue Origin-led investigation, be involved in every step of the process, and approve Blue Origin's final report, including any corrective actions," the FAA wrote in an update on Monday (April 20).

Sunday's mission, which Blue Origin called NG-3, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The 322-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn performed well at first; its reusable first stage even aced its return to Earth, landing as planned in the Atlantic Ocean atop the Blue Origin droneship "Jacklyn."

But the rocket's upper stage ran into problems while hauling BlueBird 7 to low Earth orbit (LEO). One of the stage's two BE-3U engines didn't produce enough thrust during a key burn, according to Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, and the satellite was deployed into the wrong spot as a result.

"While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will [be] de-orbited," BlueBird 7's operator, the Texas company AST SpaceMobile, wrote in an update on Sunday. "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company's insurance policy."

AST SpaceMobile is building out a constellation of direct-to-cellphone satellites in LEO. BlueBird 7 was the second of the company's "Block 2" spacecraft to lift off, after BlueBird 6. These satellites are huge, featuring antennas that cover 2,400 square feet (223 square m) when deployed.

A lot of eyes will be on this mishap investigation, because a lot is riding on New Glenn's success — and not just for Blue Origin.

For example, later this year, the rocket is supposed to launch the first-ever test flight of the company's Blue Moon spacecraft, one of the two contracted crewed lunar landers for NASA's Artemis program.

"Dave, I have no doubt the team at Blue Origin will get back to the pad and fly again soon — overcoming setbacks only gets us closer to achieving the near-impossible. I’m confident Blue's sustained achievements — like the successful reuse and recovery of the New Glenn first stage we saw this week — will keep us on track for success with the Artemis program," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on Tuesday (April 21), in an X post addressed to Limp.

"Thank you, Jared. Learnings from this setback will make us better. We'll be back on the pad soon for AST SpaceMobile, NASA, and all our customers," Limp replied.

Blue Origin, the space launch company founded by Jeff Bezos, just achieved a successful recovery of its first reused orbital-class rocket, but the payload it placed into space has ended up in the wrong location.

The New Glenn rocket lifted off on its third-ever mission on Sunday (April 19), and the 7:25 a.m. EDT (1125 GMT) liftoff from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida initially went as planned. So did the propulsive recovery of the rocket's first stage — called "Never Tell Me The Odds" and being reused for the first time — when it touched down on Blue Origin's "Jacklyn" droneship in the Atlantic Ocean about six minutes later.

Indeed, the company's updates were celebratory until 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT), when Blue Origin acknowledged a problem on social media.

"We have confirmed payload separation. AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information," the company wrote.

Later on Sunday, AST SpaceMobile issued its own update, which delivered some bad news.

"While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will [be] de-orbited," AST SpaceMobile wrote. "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy."

AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite was intended to join the largest communications array ever deployed in low Earth orbit to expand the network's ability to provide space based cellular broadband to consumer smartphones. BlueBird 7 is one of the largest satellites in space, with an antenna that spans 2,400 square feet (223 square meters).

It's unclear at the moment what effect the BlueBird 7 issue will have on future New Glenn launches, including Blue Origin's planned uncrewed moon landing later this year.

The company is using its prototype MK1 "Endurance" lander as a test vehicle and precursor to its much larger MK2, which will support NASA's Artemis astronaut missions to the lunar south pole.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:50 p.m. ET on April 19 with the news that BlueBird 7 will be deorbited.

Jeff Bezos' space company just notched a big reusability milestone — but also suffered a sizable setback.

Blue Origin's huge New Glenn rocket launched into space for the third time ever Sunday morning (April 19) — but, in a first for the company, it soared into orbit powered by previously flown hardware. The mission, called NG-3, carried the massive payload BlueBird 7, a direct-to-cellphone internet satellite, to low Earth orbit (LEO), and flew atop the same first-stage booster core that launched NG-2, but with new engines.

Things went well at first, but BlueBird 7 did not make it to its planned destination.

Liftoff for NG-3 occurred at 7:25 a.m. EDT (1125 GMT) from Blue Origin's Launch Complex 36 pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Blue Origin had hoped to launch the flight at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 GMT), at the start of a two-hour window, but paused the countdown at T-3 minutes, 57 seconds for a bit due to an undisclosed reason. The clock resumed with a new launch time a just after 7 a.m. EDT.

New Glenn's first stage shut off its engines and separated from the upper part of the rocket about 3.5 minutes into flight, landing back on Blue Origin's droneship "Jacklyn" in the Atlantic Ocean around six minutes later.

Blue Origin workers across the country cheered loudly as the booster returned to Earth, chanting GS-1 (the technical name of the booster, which Blue Origin calls "Never Tell Me The Odds") during landing.

Jordan Charles, vice president of New Glenn for Blue Origin, said during launch commentary that engineers refurbished the thermal protection system along the base of the rocket so it could better handle the heat of reentry.

"That gets pretty hot as you're coming in during our reentry process," Charles said. "So we want to definitely see and correlate a bit better our thermal environments as we're flying this particular mission."

Blue Origin also made guidance system upgrades to the booster for today's flight.

"We made a few tweaks with respect to how the rocket actually reenters, and then on the inside of the rocket, just making sure all of our systems continue to work as we as we expect that they will," Charles said.

The first reuse of a New Glenn first stage, even if its engines are new, is a significant step toward the company's ultimate vision for the rocket, whose first stages are designed to fly at least 25 times apiece.

Of the two New Glenn missions to date, only NG-2 successfully landed its first stage aboard the Jacklyn droneship. That mission launched NASA's ESCAPADE probes on a mission to Mars in November 2025. New Glenn debuted in January 2025, on a mission that reached orbit successfully but did not pull off a first-stage landing.

A hefty payload

The main goal of Sunday's New Glenn rocket launch was not to demonstrate reusability, but to launch a massive satellite into orbit.

BlueBird 7 was supposed to be the second "Block 2" satellite in the internet constellation of Texas-based company AST SpaceMobile. Its predecessor, BlueBird 6, launched on an Indian LVM3 rocket last December. BlueBird 6 is one of the largest satellites in space, with an antenna that spans 2,400 square feet (223 square meters). BlueBird 7 has the same dimensions.

BlueBirds 1-5, the "Block 1" version, while sizable in their own right, pale in comparison; their antennas cover a more modest 693 square feet (64.4 m) apiece.

Bluebird 7 was scheduled to be deployed into orbit from New Glenn's upper stage about 1 hour and 15 minutes after liftoff. But about 2 hours after liftoff, Blue Origin reported that something appeared to go wrong.

"We have confirmed payload separation. AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on," Blue Origin wrote in a social media update. "The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information."

A little later on Sunday, AST SpaceMobile provided its own update, and the news was not good.

"While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will [be] de-orbited," the company said in a statement. "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy."

This third launch of New Glenn was a major milestone for Blue Origin, which has designed the rocket's first stage to be fully reusable. Such a capability would allow the company to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets, the only orbital-capable boosters to date with proven reusability.

New Glenn stands 322 feet (98 meters) tall — about the same size as the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that launched the Artemis 2 mission around the moon, and nearly 100 feet (30 m) taller than the 230-foot (70-m) Falcon 9.

New Glenn's first stage is powered by seven BE-4 engines, which burn a fuel mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, known as methalox — the same fuel used by the 33 SpaceX-built Raptor engines that power Starship's Super Heavy booster. And right now, both launch vehicles need to prove themselves.

Blue Origin is relying on New Glenn to launch the company's Blue Moon lander, one of two commercial vehicles NASA selected to land astronauts on the moon as part of the agency's Artemis program.

SpaceX had been NASA's first choice for a crewed lunar lander, with Starship slated to put astronauts on the moon on the Artemis 3 mission. But delays in the development of both companies' spacecraft and a recent shakeup of Artemis architecture has put Blue Moon back in the spotlight.

During Sunday's launch, Blue Origin officials said its Mark 1 Blue Moon lander, an uncrewed version of the lander, will launch to the moon by the end of this summer. The lander recently completed environmental testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. It is now back at Blue Origin's Rocket Park facility in Cape Canaveral for final work.

The problem New Glenn experienced on today's launch could complicate that timeline, however.

Artemis 3 will no longer go to the moon. NASA now wants astronauts aboard its Orion spacecraft to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers in Earth orbit with either or both of the lunar landers, and has indicated a willingness to fly with whichever is ready once it's time to launch — hopefully, in mid-2027.

Both landers have a list of qualifications and technology demonstrations to complete before NASA certifies either to support astronauts aboard, such as on-orbit cryogenic fuel transfer and uncrewed lunar landings, but each is making progress.

SpaceX is currently performing prelaunch tests on the Version 3 of its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, which are expected to lift off on the vehicle's 12th test flight in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the Mark 1 (Mk1) Blue Moon vehicle recently completed a stint inside the massive vacuum chamber at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and was later shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, for further testing.

Editor's note: This story was updated on April 19 to include details of the successful launch and landing of Blue Origin's NG-3, as well as the off-nominal orbit of its BlueBird 7 payload. It was updated again at 4:10 p.m. ET on April 19 with the news that BlueBird 7 will be deorbited.

The astronauts who flew NASA's Artemis 2 mission around the moon splashed down less than a week ago — and they're back at work helping the agency prepare for the program's next giant leap.

NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen captivated the world earlier this month, as they flew on a 10-day mission around the far side of the moon and back to Earth aboard the Orion spacecraft "Integrity."

During their journey, the crew shared inspiring images of our celestial neighbor and reflections that spoke to the hearts of millions of people who followed their flight from its April 1 launch to its April 10 splashdown.

"We wanted to go out and try to do something that would bring the world together, to unite the world," Wiseman, the Artemis 2 commander, said during a press conference on Thursday (April 16).

He thanked not only those at NASA who helped ensure the astronauts' safe return but also members of the media and the world at large for "just tuning in for a second and getting hooked on this mission."

Artemis 2 was the first crewed mission of the Artemis program, as well as the first crewed flight of the Orion space capsule. Principally, Artemis 2 was a test flight of Orion's life support systems and a shakedown cruise to verify that the craft can sustain a crew during a mission to lunar space. And from the perspective of the astronauts aboard: Mission accomplished.

Wiseman and his crewmates said they gained a deeper understanding about life aboard Orion during their time in space. And what they learned bodes well for future Artemis missions.

"The thing that really surprised me on this mission was how well the spacecraft handled and how well the machine supported the four humans on board," Wiseman said.

"There's always things we need to improve," he said, listing a few small items that needed to be troubleshot on orbit, like cabin temperature.

"We were a little cold the first two days. They warmed it up. They fixed everything that we asked," he said. "They could put the Artemis 3 Orion on the Space Launch System [rocket] tomorrow and launch it, and the crew would be in great shape."

"It's important for us to run these processes out," Glover said, "because we are still making changes and learning ways that we're going to support the 30- and 45-day missions of Artemis 3, 4, 5. And so it's really important for us to keep practicing, keeping our heads in the game."

Artemis 3 is the next launch planned for the program, and will see another crew aboard Orion practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers in Earth orbit with one or both of the contracted Artemis lunar landers. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have been tapped to provide landers for the program, and NASA indicated a willingness to fly with either or both once Artemis 3 is ready to launch.

That mission is scheduled to lift off in mid-2027, but had, until recently, been slated as the first Artemis moon landing, targeting 2028. Now, with Artemis 2 in the books, Wiseman says that a crewed moon landing seems more obtainable than ever.

"It's not the leap I thought it was," he said on Thursday, reflecting on his time approaching and flying around the moon. "If we had a first-flight lander on board that thing, I know at least three of my crewmates would have been in it, trying to land on the moon."

"It's going to be extremely technically challenging, but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it's doable soon."

If NASA's schedule holds, and Artemis 3 goes well, Artemis 4 will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole in late 2028.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket just took a big step toward its first-ever reflight.

Blue Origin conducted a 19-second static fire test with New Glenn at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station this morning (April 16), firing up its seven first-stage engines while the rocket remained anchored to the pad.

The milestone kept New Glenn on track for the planned Sunday (April 19) launch of NG-3, a mission that will reuse a booster from a previous flight — a first for the vehicle.

The two-stage, 322-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn has launched twice to date. It debuted on a test flight in January 2025, then successfully sent NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes toward Mars this past November.

Blue Origin landed New Glenn's first stage during the ESCAPADE launch, bringing it down softly on the drone ship "Jacklyn" in the Atlantic Ocean. And that booster will fly again on NG-3.

Well, the shell of it will, anyway; some key hardware will be new.

"With our first refurbished booster, we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles. We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Monday (April 13).

Sunday's mission, which is scheduled to launch at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 GMT), could be the first of many reflights for this particular booster. Each New Glenn first stage is designed to fly at least 25 times, Blue Origin has said.

NG-3 will send a Block 2 BlueBird direct-to-cellphone internet satellite to low Earth orbit (LEO) for the Texas company AST SpaceMobile.

One Block 2 BlueBird has reached space to date, getting there in December aboard an Indian rocket. It's one of the largest satellites in space, with an antenna that covers a whopping 2,400 square feet (223 square meters).

Block 2 BlueBirds are considerably larger than their predecessors, five of which reached LEO. Each of those satellites' antennas cover 693 square feet (64.4 m).

Artemis 2 has come home.

The four Artemis 2 astronauts splashed down off the coast of San Diego this evening (April 10), wrapping up an epic mission that broke spaceflight records, caught the attention of the world and set the stage for even more ambitious moonshots to come.

"From the pages of Jules Verne to a modern-day mission to the moon, a new chapter of the exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete. Integrity's astronauts are back on Earth," NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said just after splashdown, referring to the name of Artemis 2's Orion capsule.

A mission of firsts

Artemis 2 launched on April 1, sending four explorers — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — toward the moon inside Integrity.

It was the second-ever liftoff for NASA's huge Space Launch System rocket and the first crewed flight for both SLS and Orion.

Artemis 2 was a mission of firsts in many other ways as well. For starters, it launched humanity back to the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Glover was the first person of color ever to leave Earth orbit, and Koch and Hansen were the first woman and first non-American, respectively, to do so. (The Apollo astronauts had been the only people to achieve this feat, and they were all white American men.)

"We sent four amazing people to the moon and safely returned them to Earth for the first time in more than 50 years," Lori Glaze, NASA's Artemis program manager, said after the splashdown. "To the generation that now knows what we're capable of, 'Welcome to our moonshot.'"

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who watched the Artemis 2 astronauts return to Earth from the deck of their recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha, seemed in awe of the entire mission.

"Honestly, I'm still at a loss for words," Isaacman said after splashdown during NASA's televised commentary. "The childhood Jared, right now, can't believe what I just saw. I mean, I've almost been waiting my whole lifetime to see to see this, and then it's as NASA administrator. I just couldn't be more proud of the entire workforce, the years, the effort, the late nights, all the hard work from across the country that contributed to this incredible moment right now."

Artemis 2 also took a unique path to Earth's nearest neighbor — a "free-return" trajectory that featured a single loop around the far side. The Apollo moon missions, by contrast, targeted lunar orbit, after which some of them touched down on the gray dirt.

Apollo 13 ended up flying a free-return trajectory in April 1970, but that wasn't by design; that mission was supposed to orbit and then land on the moon, but it suffered an explosion en route that scuttled that plan and forced its astronauts into survival mode.

Apollo 13's unplanned lunar loop sent it 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth, farther than any humans had ever gone before. Artemis 2 broke that record during its own flyby on Monday (April 6), which took the crewmates 252,756 miles (406,771 km) from their home planet. (From liftoff to landing, the Artemis 2 crew flew a total of 700,237 miles, or 1.1 million km.)

They don't want to hold this record for half a century, though, for that would signal a disappointing stagnation in human spaceflight.

"We, most importantly, choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived," Hansen said shortly after Artemis 2 surpassed Apollo 13.

The Apollo capsules held a maximum of three astronauts. So Artemis 2 was the first mission to fly four people to deep space, as well as the first to send a bona fide toilet beyond Earth orbit. Artemis 2's space toilet had some issues, but it was still a giant leap for deep-space hygiene; the Apollo astronauts did their business into handheld bags.

The moon up close — and a solar eclipse, too!

But Artemis 2 wasn't about setting records. It was primarily a shakeout cruise, designed to show that SLS and Orion can fly crewed missions beyond Earth orbit.

There were some science objectives, too. After all, the Artemis 2 astronauts were getting humanity's first up-close looks at the moon in more than 50 years.

And their free-return trajectory, which featured a lunar close-approach distance of 4,067 miles (6,545 km), gave them different, more zoomed-out views than those of the Apollo astronauts, who mostly observed the moon from a tight orbit. Indeed, during their flyby, the Artemis 2 astronauts saw parts of the far side never before seen with human eyes, which are incredibly capable instruments.

"Human eyes and brains are highly sensitive to subtle changes in color, texture and other surface characteristics," NASA officials wrote in an Artemis 2 explainer.

"Having astronaut eyes observe the lunar surface directly, in combination with the context of all the advances that scientists have made about the moon over the last several decades, may uncover new discoveries and a more nuanced appreciation for the features on the surface of the moon," they added.

So NASA scientists prepped the Artemis 2 crewmates extensively, giving them a long list of viewing targets and instructions on how to observe them.

One of the highest-priority landforms was Orientale Basin. This 600-mile-wide (965 km) crater, known as the "Grand Canyon of the moon," had never been seen in sunlight before, so the science team was keen to get Artemis 2's eyes on it.

The astronauts obliged, returning detailed observations of Orientale. They reported back effusively about many other features as well. Glover, for example, was particularly taken with the terminator, the boundary between day and night on the moon.

"There's just so much magic in the terminator — the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes; you'd fall straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those," he radioed to Mission Control during the flyby. "It's just so visually captivating." The crew reported seeing colors on the moon as well, describing some regions as green and brown.

The Artemis 2 astronauts also got to see a total solar eclipse during Monday's flyby, a happy accident of orbital dynamics locked in by the fact that they launched on April 1. (The eclipse wasn't visible to us here on Earth.)

Because the moon loomed so large in Artemis 2's view, it blocked the sun for a whopping 54 minutes — far longer than totality lasts during solar eclipses seen from Earth.

The astronauts dutifully recorded details of the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, during the epic event. But they took some time to appreciate it on an emotional level as well.

"When that actually happened, it just blew us all away," Glover said in a call with reporters on Wednesday (April 8). He called it "unreal" when he watched it in real-time.

There were many such human moments on this mission, and we got to see them thanks to NASA's 24/7 livestream. For instance, just after Artemis 2 broke Apollo 13's distance record, Hansen radioed Mission Control asking for permission to name two heretofore anonymous craters on the moon — one after Integrity and one after Wiseman's late wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

As Hansen made the case for Carroll Crater, his crewmates fought off tears, without much success.

"For me personally, that was kind of the pinnacle moment of the mission," Wiseman said in Wednesday's call. "That was, I think, where the four of us were the most forged, the most bonded, and we came out of that really focused on that day ahead."

Mission Control agreed to both name proposals, by the way, though they won't get onto official moon maps until the International Astronomical Union gives the thumbs-up as well.

Coming home

Monday's lunar flyby did more than break a spaceflight record and enable unprecedented science observations; it also charted Integrity's course back to Earth. Indeed, that was the main reason NASA picked the free-return trajectory for Artemis 2: Relying on lunar gravity to send Orion home eliminated the need for a major engine burn, reducing risks for this test mission.

So there wasn't a lot of drama over the past few days as Integrity made its way back toward Earth. But that was just as well, for today's homecoming had plenty of drama — and a fair bit of danger.

Spacecraft returning from the moon hit Earth's atmosphere at tremendous speeds — 24,000 mph (38,600 kph) or thereabouts. This generates huge amounts of frictional heating; temperatures around the vehicle can hit 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 degrees Celsius).

Orion has a heat shield to deal with such temperatures — the biggest one ever built for crewed flight, in fact, at 16.5 feet (5 meters) wide. But that heat shield showed some cracks on the lone previous Artemis mission — Artemis 1, which successfully sent an uncrewed Orion to lunar orbit and back in late 2022.

Because of that unexpected damage, NASA tweaked Artemis 2's reentry profile, bringing Integrity in on a steeper angle to limit the amount of time its heat shield was exposed to extreme conditions in the atmosphere. But the agency didn't modify the heat shield itself, stressing that the hardware was up to the challenge.

Still, when Orion hit the Earth's atmosphere and went radio silent for six minutes due to the interference from plasma during descent, there was some nervousness in Mission Control.

"Certainly, there's anxiety," Artemis 2 entry flight director Rick Henfling said after splashdown in a press conference. "If you didn't have anxiety bringing the spacecraft home, you probably didn't have a pulse."

But he and his team had extreme confidence in Orion's heat shield and performance, as did the rest of Mission Control and the astronauts themselves.

That confidence was well placed, for Integrity survived its trial by fire today. The capsule hit the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean southeast of Hawaii at 7:53 p.m. (2353 GMT). Ten minutes later, the capsule's drogue parachutes deployed as planned, followed in short succession by its three big main chutes.

The mains helped slow Integrity's descent to 19 mph (31 kph) — the speed it was traveling when it hit the water at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 GMT on April 11) off the coast of San Diego, about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the spot where it first slammed into the atmosphere.

"A perfect bulls-eye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts," Navias said. "It was, for all intents and purposes, a textbook mission."

The USS John P. Murtha, from Naval Base San Diego — was waiting in the area to welcome the astronauts home, and to get them to shore for medical checks. All four were reported to be in good health and good spirits.

Bigger things coming

Artemis 2 was a big deal, but it will lead to even more ambitious missions in the next few years, if all goes according to plan.

It's a step toward the chief goal of the Artemis program: establishing a crewed outpost near the moon's south pole by the early 2030s. This region is thought to be rich in water ice, which can be used for life support and also processed into rocket fuel. NASA believes that building such a base will help it map out an even grander project — landing astronauts on Mars, which the agency aims to do in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

With Artemis 2 in the books, NASA can now turn its attention to Artemis 3, which is scheduled to send astronauts to Earth orbit in mid-2027. They'll test docking procedures up there using Orion and one or both of the Artemis program's contracted lunar landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

After that will come Artemis 4, which will use one of those privately developed vehicles to put astronauts down near the lunar south pole in late 2028. The timeline is aggressive by design: China aims to pull off its own crewed lunar landing by 2030, and the U.S. wants to win this new space race.

"The path to the lunar surface is open, but the work ahead is greater than the work behind us. It always will be," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in the briefing. "Fifty-three years ago, humanity left the moon. This time, we return to stay."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:30 a.m. ET on April 11 to include additional details and comments from NASA's post Artemis 2 splashdown briefing. Space.com Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik contributed to this report.

Artemis 2 is an ambitious mission, sending four astronauts on a 10-day loop around the moon and back to Earth. But it's not too ambitious: The quartet won't touch down on the lunar surface.

Artemis 2, which could launch as soon as April 1, consists of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot) and Christina Koch (mission specialist), and Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

Glover will be the first Black astronaut ever to fly a moon mission, while Koch will be the first woman and Hansen the first non-American to do so. They will become the humans to visit the moon's neighborhood since Apollo 17 did so in 1972.

Why no moon landing on Artemis 2?

The first moon landing of the Artemis program is expected to take place on Artemis 4, no earlier than 2028. That's because, simply put, the Artemis program isn't built to put Artemis 2 on the moon. The Orion spacecraft the astronauts will use has no landing capability, and NASA is taking a staged testing approach before committing to a moon landing.

Artemis 1 successfully sent an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit and back in late 2022, on the first-ever launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. It was the second mission for Orion, which had launched on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV on an uncrewed Earth-circling trip in December 2014.

Artemis 2 is also a test mission to the moon, but this time with crew. Orion will carry life-support systems for the first time, and the crew will test their ability to maneuver the capsule in Earth orbit before committing to an engine burn to reach the moon.

Artemis 2 "will confirm all the spacecraft’s systems operate as designed with crew aboard in the actual environment of deep space," NASA wrote in a mission description. "The mission will pave the way for lunar surface missions, establishing long-term lunar science and exploration capabilities and inspire the next generation of explorers."

NASA originally planned for Artemis 3 to make the program's first crewed lunar landing in 2027. In late February of this year, however, the agency restructured the Artemis program, changing Artemis 3 to a mission that will practice docking and rendezvous operations in Earth orbit between Orion and one or both of the program's private crewed landers (SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon). If all goes well with Artemis 3, Artemis 4 will put boots on the moon in 2028.

The eventual goal of the greater Artemis program is twofold: to establish a sustainable presence on the moon's surface and to demonstrate U.S. norms in cislunar space through the Artemis Accords (which is also framed as a race against China to the surface).

From 2024 to 2028

Long-time followers of Artemis may remember that the initial moon-landing deadline was 2024. That was set in March 2019, when then-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of the Artemis program. To be sure, the announcement built on previous work: many elements of Artemis (including Orion and SLS) predate the formation of the program by many years, and President Donald Trump made a crewed lunar return the official policy of the United States in December 2017 with the signing of Space Policy Directive 1.

In December 2019, a new senior NASA manager of the time showed off a "d-minus pin," which he made himself, showing that 1,855 days were left until Dec. 31, 2024. His intent was to update it daily and to wear it prominently during visits with the NASA workforce. That manager, Douglas Loverro, associate administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, added that he did not want to "go ahead and tell people to rush" but instead wished to remind people to "make every day count."

By March 2021, however, NASA's Office of the Inspector General said it was "not feasible" to land humans on the moon by 2024 due to delays with developing the next generation of moon spacesuits, called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU). (NASA later pivoted to a commercial solution from Axiom Space, which is still under development.)

Later in 2021, official aims of meeting the ambitious 2024 date quickly faded as space policy experts reflected on the beginning of the Biden administration. "Candidly, I don't think anyone thought that 2024 timeline was realistic. It was ambitious and aspirational, but I don't think realistic," Eric Stallmer, who had recently left his long-standing post as president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told Space.com at the time.

Today, under the second Trump administration, the landing of Artemis 4 is set for 2028. Why is it still two years away? The spacesuit delays aren't the only factor; the human landing system and Orion's heat shield have also played a role.

Human landing system

In April 2021, SpaceX was awarded a sole-source contract by NASA, valued at $2.9 billion, to use Starship for the Artemis 3 landing. Three companies had competed for the opportunity, and it was widely expected that NASA would choose multiple vendors.

Competitors Blue Origin and Dynetics filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, with billionaire Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin promising to cover up to $2 billion in payments that the company might receive from NASA for the contract, among other things. Both protests were ultimately denied. Blue Origin then filed a lawsuit, which it lost in federal court.

NASA was later directed by the Senate Appropriations Committee to find a second HLS vendor, which ended up being Blue Origin in May 2023. The company got an award worth $3.4 billion and was expected to start landing NASA astronauts on the moon on the Artemis 5 mission.

Meanwhile, Starship's first fully stacked flight test took place in April 2023, which planned to fly the upper stage almost all of the way around Earth and end with a splashdown off Hawaii. But after the two stages of the vehicle didn't separate as expected, SpaceX made a controlled destruction of Starship over the Gulf of Mexico before the flight had reached four minutes of air time.

Also in 2023, NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) said that Starship development issues would likely push back the moon landing two years to 2026, and NASA also made a series of declarations saying it was worried about Starship's progress: "If you figure they need a number of launches to do their depot for our crewed flight, they need a number of launches to do the demo, they need a number of launches just to get flying — they have a significant number of launches to go, and that of course gives me concern," said Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems development, in one example from June 2023.

Starship has made considerable progress since then. In 2025 alone, SpaceX achieved five test flights. The first three didn't meet all goals, but SpaceX declared the August and October missions full successes. On both occasions, the Ship upper stage survived its trip to suborbital space and back to Earth for a splashdown off the coast of Western Australia, while the Super Heavy booster made a pinpoint landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

But that wasn't enough for Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. In October 2025, he threatened to open the Starship first-landing contract (which at that time was still for Artemis 3) to other companies. "I love SpaceX; it's an amazing company. The problem is, they're behind. They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China," Duffy said on CNBC's "Squawk Box." =

Days later, SpaceX released a "simplified" Artemis 3 architecture proposal to speed up the work. And by early 2026, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk leaned harder into moon work, with a proposal to put a city on the lunar surface — a milestone that, of course, depends on the successful operation of Starship. Meanwhile, competitor Blue Origin put its New Shepard suborbital launch and space tourism program on hold for at least two years to pour more resources into lunar missions, presumably to help make its case to be called upon by NASA.

The Orion heat shield

The Artemis 1 mission of late 2022 achieved its major goals, but it also uncovered a major concern: By early 2023, NASA was noting that Orion's heat shield lost more material than expected during the high-speed reentry from the moon. The agency pledged to investigate the cause and to resolve it.

In May 2024, the OIG released a report about the issue, showing that Artemis 1 "revealed anomalies with the Orion heat shield, separation bolts and power distribution that pose significant risks to the safety of the crew." One key finding was that NASA uncovered more than 100 areas on Orion's heat shield that had ablated "differently than expected."

In December 2024, NASA officials elected to push back the Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 target launch dates to 2026 and 2027, respectively, to give themselves the room they needed to investigate the issue. The agency has also decided to fly a different reentry profile with Artemis 2 rather than replace the heat shield. NASA has said that it "can keep the crew safe during the planned mission, with changes to Orion's trajectory."

Readying for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4

The agency will evaluate the results of the Artemis 2 mission, after it flies, to inform the development of Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. But as things stand now, NASA plans to launch Artemis 3 in 2027 and Artemis 4 in 2028.

Both of those missions will require at least one of the two private lunar landers to be ready. Notably, an internal SpaceX document obtained by Politico in November 2025 showed that the company expects a September 2028 astronaut landing after achieving two major Starship testing milestones for the flight: June 2026 for the first orbital refueling demonstration between Starship vehicles, and an uncrewed lunar landing in June 2027.

A space-focused executive order from the Trump administration in December 2025 also acknowledged the updated timeline, in part directing "returning Americans to the moon by 2028 through the Artemis program."

New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, in comments published Feb. 10 in Aerospace America, said that he wants a crewed Artemis moon landing to happen as soon as possible. But he noted the importance of on-orbit propellant transfer operations being achieved as one key milestone ahead of that landing. Isaacman also has committed to "absolute needle-moving objectives" intended to spur the workforce, with a new workforce directive aiming to consider creating more civil service positions if needed to meet NASA's goals.

NASA is officially sidelining the long-planned lunar Gateway space station to focus its efforts on establishing a base on the surface of the moon.

The change comes as the agency continues to lay out its accelerated plan for returning astronauts to the moon and building a sustained human presence there as a part of the Artemis program. During an event announcing updates to its planned campaign of moon exploration on Tuesday (March 24), NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the pivot as part of a broader push to hone the agency's workforce, simplify program architecture, increase launch cadence and compete with China's lunar ambitions.

"We find ourselves with a real geopolitical rival, challenging American leadership in the high ground of space," Isaacman said. NASA has committed to landing astronauts back on the moon, "before the end of President Trump's term," Isaacman stated, and said the next step toward building a moon base is a pivot away from a space station in lunar orbit. "It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface."

Instead, NASA will concentrate on expanding its Artemis program surface architecture through crewed and uncrewed landers, rovers and habitats. In that light, existing Gateway hardware and international partner contributions will be repurposed wherever possible for surface systems or other program needs.

The announcement was made one week before NASA's targeted launch of Artemis 2, scheduled for April 1. It's the first crewed mission of the program, and will fly three NASA and one Canadian Space Agency astronaut on a 10-day flight around the moon. The mission is designed as a stepping stone toward a lunar landing and eventual permanent base.

NASA is targeting 2027 for Artemis 3 to test integrated operations of Orion and one or both of the program's current lunar landers in Earth orbit, and 2028 for the program's first lunar landing attempt on Artemis 4 — no longer including a Gateway rendezvous.

One of the reasons NASA is officially excluding Gateway from its plans is to the ease of its integration with lunar landers' ability to travel from the space station, down to the surface and back. Gateway was meant to be launched into what NASA calls a near rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, with an apogee far above the lunar surface that demanded tight fuel constraints for landers needed to traverse the distance.

"Despite some of the very real hardware and scheduled challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives," Isaacman said. "It's worth pointing out that shifting NASA workforce priority to the surface, which has lots of advantages for safety, tech demonstration and science … does not preclude revisiting the orbital outpost in the future.

The new approach calls for an increased cadence of not only Artemis launches, but also support missions that will be needed to build out the infrastructure for astronauts on the moon's surface step-by-step through programs like the Human Landing System (HLS), Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) and the Lunar Transit Vehicle (LTV). Isaacman says the lunar base will be developed in three phases through the end of the decade, and cost roughly $20 billion. These plans extend far beyond NASA's 2028 lunar landing schedule, and rule out — for now — the inclusion of an outpost in lunar orbit.

Phase one expands robotic and early surface lunar landings through CLPS, HLS and LTV to deliver rovers and landers for technology demonstrations. These missions will test things like power, communications and navigation systems needed for short-term crewed excursions.

The second phase introduces semi-habitable modules and routine logistics to enable longer-term missions, leaning on "significant contributions from our great partners, like JAXA's (Japan's space agency) pressurized rover," Isaacman said.

Phase three introduces permanent infrastructure, enabled by higher cargo capacity from commercial landing systems, with the goal of long-duration habitation modules and systems to support a sustained human presence on the moon.

As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than half a century, the agency is revising its long-term plans for Earth's natural satellite.

Speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on Monday (March 16), NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said that Artemis 2 remains on track for an April 1 launch. If successful, the mission will send astronauts farther from Earth than humans have ever traveled before, surpassing the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.

"The most exciting point is, we're getting back to it," Kshatriya said. "We're getting back to contemplating what human exploration of the moon could look like."

The roughly 10-day mission will carry commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen on a trajectory around the far side of the moon. At closest approach, the moon will appear to them about the size of a basketball held at arm's length. From that vantage point, the astronauts will document various surface features, including regions scientists believe have never been seen by humans.

"We tell the crew that their verbal descriptions are actually going to be the monumental scientific data set from this mission," said Ariel Deutsch, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California and a member of the science team helping plan Artemis 2 observations. "As humans, the crew provides critical perceptual context that just can't be replicated with robotic sensors."

The Artemis 2 crew may spend up to six hours conducting observations, using handheld Nikon cameras, recording verbal descriptions, and making sketches and annotations on tablets. While many lunar targets are large or otherwise easy to identify, scientists are particularly interested in subtle variations in color, lighting and terrain — features human perception can capture in ways that instruments alone may miss, Deutsch said.

To guide the effort, NASA has developed an interactive lunar atlas to help the crew track priority targets based on lighting and viewing conditions during the flyby. The final observation plan will be uploaded after launch, once the spacecraft's precise trajectory is confirmed, said Deutsch.

Preparation for Artemis 2 has included three years of training rooted in Apollo-era techniques, particularly field geology, along with an intensive "lunar fundamentals" course designed to build the vocabulary and observational skills needed to describe the moon from orbit, said Cindy Evans of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, who led the geology training program for the crew.

"We practiced a lot their visual observations and their descriptions," Evans said, "so that they would feel confident in being able to talk about the moon and knowing that they were talking about critical features that are important to lunar scientists back on the Earth."

A more flexible path back to the moon

Artemis 2 was, until recently, billed as the precursor to a crewed lunar landing in 2028. But in late February, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that milestone will shift from Artemis 3, as originally planned, to Artemis 4, which is now positioned to become the first crewed moon landing since the Apollo era.

The ultimate destination remains the lunar south pole, a region believed to harbor water ice — a crucial resource for future human exploration — in permanently shadowed craters. But the terrain there is far more challenging than the relatively smooth equatorial sites visited during Apollo, with steep slopes, rugged mountains and extreme lighting conditions.

"The whole point is to get down to the south pole," Kshatriya said. "I think we agree, still, hopefully, that that's the right place to go. We are going to keep our sights there."

To make that goal "more achievable," NASA is opening up the performance specifications for early Artemis landing missions "in as many ways as we can," Kshatriya said. The changes allow greater flexibility in spacecraft orbits and mission design, accounting for capabilities and limitations of current systems while giving industry partners more freedom to propose faster paths forward, he said.

"But we're not yet giving up on the south pole, and I don't think we will, because I think that's a place we need to go," Kshatriya said. "We need to challenge ourselves, and we need to go to some place that we've never been."

The revised strategy places increased emphasis on robotic precursor missions to lay the groundwork for a sustained human presence. NASA envisions a steady cadence of robotic landings near the south pole — potentially as often as monthly — beginning as early as 2027, to gather data on temperature extremes, soil properties and communications challenges.

The data will help reduce risk for future crews and "actually give ourselves a credible shot at aggregating a lunar base in the right spot," Kshatriya said.

"We're not just going to plop down a magical bubble dome that everybody lives in and has plants and amazing things," he said. "We know that that's not credible."

The strategy shift comes amid delays to SpaceX's massive Starship rocket, whose upper stage NASA tapped to be the Artemis program's first crewed moon lander. Under the original architecture, Artemis 3 depended on the completion of several complex milestones that Starship has yet to demonstrate. These include large-scale transfer and storage of super-cooled propellant in space, as well as a dozen or so refueling flights in Earth orbit before the vehicle can head to the moon.

NASA has also selected the Blue Moon lander from Blue Origin, which has paused its suborbital space tourism efforts for at least two years to accelerate development of its lunar lander. NASA plans to test the rendezvous and docking capabilities of Orion alongside Starship and/or Blue Moon in Earth orbit during Artemis 3, which is now targeted to launch in 2027

NASA hopes the revised plan will keep it on track for a lunar landing in 2028, while also positioning the agency to return astronauts to the moon before China — and before the end of the current U.S. presidential term in January 2029.

Kshatriya said meeting that timeline will require what he described as "a sea change" in how NASA works with industry.

"It's going to take NASA folks rolling up their sleeves and getting side by side with industry to finish some of these things," he said, "which I think a lot of us want to do anyway, but that's what it's going to take."

"It's ambitious, but I think we can do it."

Blue Origin is teaming up with NASA to thwart asteroids that may be on collision courses with Earth.

Jeff Bezos' company has partnered with researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology to study how to integrate Earth defense capabilities into its existing Blue Ring spacecraft platform. The concept is called the Near Earth Objects (NEO) Hunter mission, and it relies on multiple technologies to scan, deflect and divert incoming asteroids away from possible impacts with Earth.

It's the latest application for Blue Ring, Blue Origin's modular satellite bus built to support up to 8,800 pounds (4,000 kilograms) of mission payloads distributed between as many as 13 different connection ports. Blue Ring is designed to operate anywhere from low Earth and geostationary orbits to cislunar space, Mars and other deep-space destinations.

NEO Hunter will utilize multiple techniques to intercept, assess and, if needed, redirect the trajectories of potentially hazardous asteroids, according to a March 11 Blue Origin post on X.

Across two separate mission phases, NEO Hunter will release a group of cubesats to rendezvous with and characterize a potential space object threat. Understanding as much as possible about an object's composition, mass and density can inform which strategies can most successfully be deployed to ensure an altered trajectory.

One of those strategies can be carried out using NEO Hunter's powerful ion beam emitter. The spacecraft will be capable of shooting a ray of charged particles onto an asteroid to change its orbit. Ion drive engines expel charged particles to propel a spacecraft, like the one used on NASA's DART probe. Similarly, an ion beam can direct a concentrated stream of charged atoms with enough force to theoretically alter the heading of an object in space.

If an asteroid is too big, or moving too fast, to be effectively influenced by NEO Hunter's ion beam, the spacecraft can enter a second mission phase called "Robust Kinetic Disruption."

That technique was first demonstrated by DART, a space probe that NASA slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. DART effectively changed Dimorphos' orbit around its binary partner asteroid Didymos, and also altered the binary pair's orbit around the sun.

In the same way, NEO Hunter can set a course for a high-velocity intercept with its target asteroid to crash into the space rock as fast as 22,600 mph (36,370 kph). Before doing so, however, NEO Hunter will release another smaller satellite called the "Slamcam" to document the impact and confirm mission success.

"This is another example of how commercial platforms like Blue Ring can conduct low-cost, high-priority science, exploration and planetary defense missions," Blue Origin said in the post.

The company has designed Blue Ring for many applications, including its use as a Mars telecommunications orbiter. The satellite's bus landed its first customer last year, when Blue Origin partnered with Scout Space to fly an orbital domain awareness sensor as Blue Ring's first payload.

Planetary defense against near Earth objects is gaining increasing attention these days, as shown by interest in events like the recent crash of a meteorite through someone's roof in Germany and the occasional near-miss of an asteroid flying between the Earth and the moon. Astronomers have been on the case for decades, however, building a catalogue of asteroids that are big enough to be dangerous and also have a chance of hitting Earth at some point in the future. So far, they haven't found any serious imminent threats.

The International Space Station could keep flying a bit longer than we thought.

The orbiting lab, which has hosted rotating astronaut crews continuously since November 2000, is currently slated to be deorbited in late 2030. However, a newly advanced NASA Authorization bill pushes that retirement back by two years, to Sept. 30, 2032.

The goal of the extension is "to avoid a gap in continuous human presence and capabilities in LEO [low Earth orbit], thus avoiding ceding leadership to China before commercial stations are ready," the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation wrote in a summary of the bill, which it approved on Wednesday (March 4).

Staying ahead of China in human spaceflight is a key priority of the committee and its chairman, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Last September, for example, the committee held a hearing titled "There's a Bad Moon on the Rise," which stressed the importance of returning astronauts to the lunar surface with NASA's Artemis program before China can pull off the feat (which the nation plans to do by 2030). But it wasn't all moon talk.

"This is a pivotal moment for our nation's space program," Cruz said during the September hearing. "America must maintain leadership in low Earth orbit while also embarking on a new era of exploration with Artemis."

And U.S. leadership in LEO is under threat.

China got a crewed foothold in LEO in 2021, when it launched the core module of its Tiangong space station. The nation finished building the T-shaped, three-module Tiangong in late 2022 and apparently plans to operate it into the mid-2030s.

The United States, meanwhile, plans to replace the aging ISS with one or more commercial outposts. NASA has been encouraging the development of such stations via its Commercial LEO Destinations program, which has awarded more than $500 million since its establishment in 2021, most of it to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Voyager Technologies, two companies leading the planned Orbital Reef and Starlab space stations, respectively.

Other outposts are in the works, too. The California startup Vast, for example, just raised $500 million for its planned Haven-2 station. And the Houston company Axiom Space aims to operate its own LEO outpost, which will consist of modules that originally launched to, and docked with, the ISS.

The companies behind all of these commercial outposts plan to get them up and running before 2030. But the newly advanced NASA Authorization bill suggests the Senate committee is skeptical of its ability to meet that timeline.

Indeed, it instructs NASA not to begin phasing out the ISS until a successor is operational.

"When one or more commercial space stations is capable of providing services to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Administrator shall begin the process of an orderly, managed transition of operations from the International Space Station to commercial providers in such a way as to maintain a continuous human presence," the bill states.

There's quite a bit else to chew on in the NASA Authorization bill, which was introduced in March 2025. (The version that the Senate committee just passed is a revision of that original bill.)

For instance, it rejects President Trump's planned 24% cut to NASA funding, allocating $24.7 billion to NASA for fiscal year 2026 and $25.3 billion for fiscal year 2027. (Trump's budget request allocated just $18.8 billion to NASA for the current year.) The bill also directs NASA to start building a crewed base on the moon, which is already a key objective of the Artemis program.

"The lunar base will be capable of long-duration habitation, as well as robotic and human-tended industrial operations to advance science, technology and strategic interests," reads a press release issued by the Senate science committee on Wednesday.

"A sustained human and robotic presence at the lunar base will support priority scientific investigations that lay the foundation for a successful mission to Mars," the release adds.

Advancing out of committee is just one step for the NASA Authorization bill. To become law, it will also have to be approved by the full Senate and the House of Representatives, then be signed by President Trump.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently announced a significant restructuring of the Artemis program, and how the agency intends to return astronauts to the moon.

The new plan shortens the time between missions and redraws the map of which launches will achieve various program milestones. Nothing will change for Artemis 2, which may lift off in a matter of weeks, carrying four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth. Every mission after Artemis 2, however, has been adjusted.

The programmatic shuffle is rendering parts of the old Artemis plan obsolete, leaving major ground hardware half-built and an uncertain future for the Gateway moon-orbiting space station under development.

Isaacman announced the changes during a press conference on Feb. 27, citing unacceptable wait times between missions for Artemis' Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and an increased risk of relying on unproven technologies to carry out mission-critical objectives like landing astronauts safely on the lunar surface.

The Artemis 2 SLS is currently undergoing repairs in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a potential rollback to its launch pad in time for a launch window that opens April 1. Artemis 2 will bethe first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft and the first return of astronauts to lunar space in more than half a century. Under the previous framework, it was meant to be followed by Artemis 3 in 2028, which would carry out the program's first moon landing with astronauts aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle.

For Artemis 4, NASA planned to upgrade to the SLS Block 1B, which features a design powerful enough to launch elements of the Gateway space station intended for lunar orbit. Beginning with Artemis 4, NASA aimed to use the Gateway outpost around the moon for deep-space science and as an orbital layover stop where Orion and the program's lunar lander could dock to transfer crews headed down to the surface. Gateway, however, is nowhere to be found in any of NASA's recent Artemis updates.

Under NASA's new plan, there will be no SLS Block 1B. In the hope of shortening launch cadences from the current 3.5-year interval to the desired 10 months, SLS is being standardized into a single configuration. Instead of relying on SLS' current Interim Cryogenic Propulsion upper stage, NASA is reportedly considering converting United Launch Alliance's Centaur V upper stage for use on SLS for all Artemis launches after Artemis 3.

The revised Artemis program is now targeting 2027 for the launch of Artemis 3, but instead of landing on the moon, the mission will fly to low Earth orbit for rendezvous and docking maneuvers with either or both of the Artemis program's contracted moon landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft — depending on their relative readiness for orbital missions.

NASA partnered with SpaceX for Starship to serve as the lander for Artemis 3 and 4 and contracted Blue Moon for Artemis 5. But the agency is now signaling that it's ready to fly Artemis 3 with whichever lander can be made safely available when launch time rolls around.

With Artemis 3 turned into a lunar landing stepping stone around Earth, Artemis 4 has been tapped as the program's first crewed landing on the moon, which NASA still hopes to accomplish in 2028, with a possible second moon landing that same year on Artemis 5.

It's a major reshaping of Artemis' original mission progression, but the plan has been purposed to maximize both crew safety and NASA's chances of success, according to Isaacman. The shakeup doesn't come without some sacrifice, though.

Gateway's fate remains undetermined under NASA's new plan. Many components of Gateway are already in various states of assembly, but there is now no rocket to launch some of them once they're ready and no missions yet assigned to rendezvous with the proposed outpost. Congress advanced a revised NASA authorization bill on Wednesday (March 4) that supports many of Isaacman's proposed changes to the Artemis program, but only requires he brief lawmakers on Gateway's status within a few months' of the bill's passing.

If Gateway is on the chopping block, as seems likely, there is potential for its existing hardware to be repurposed for use in a possible base on the lunar surface, which has been a longstanding component of the Artemis program's goals and NASA's vision for a sustained human presence on the moon. One of the revisions in the authorization bill even grants the NASA administrator the freedom to "repurpose, reprogram, reconfigure, or reassign existing programs, platforms, modules, or hardware originally developed for other programs" in order to ensure that the space agency's Artemis goals are successful.

Canceling future SLS upgrades also has implications for some of Artemis' ground infrastructure, which is being built to support the larger rocket variant. To transfer the 322-foot-tall (98 meters) SLS Block 1 from the VAB to its launch pad, NASA uses the huge Crawler-Transporter 2 vehicle to traverse the distance with the rocket standing on its mobile launch platform (MLP). The MLP contains the SLS launch tower, which helps secure the rocket in place and provides the umbilicals that help fuel SLS before liftoff.

Previous block upgrades to SLS were substantial enough to require a separate MLP (Mobile Launcher 2) be built, rather than upgrading the existing platform. But in an update on March 3, NASA confirmed that "the agency is no longer planning to use the Exploration Upper Stage or Mobile Launcher 2."

The contract for Mobile Launcher 2 was awarded in 2019, and has cost about $1.6 billion to date, about 98% of which has already been paid. Seven years later, the Mobile Launcher 2 is currently nearing completion outside the VAB, but it now may never realize its originally intended purpose. And relying on a single MLP to support Artemis launches less than a year apart could cause a schedule jam. The SLS MLP required refurbishment from damage caused after the Artemis 1 launch in November 2022.

Preparing the existing mobile launcher for an Artemis 4 flight with a new Centaur V-based upper stage could take a year or more, because the work would go beyond normal post-launch refurbishment. Engineers would have to reconfigure upper-stage umbilicals, fluid and electrical interfaces, and control systems, then complete testing to certify the update for launching SLS.

Potentially losing Gateway, or having to halt construction and/or repurpose the hardware from Mobile Launcher 2, isn't necessarily a total loss for NASA or the Artemis program, though. The agency has a long history of repurposing or evolving massive hardware for use on new or revised missions. Elements from both could be utilized to support Artemis or other future missions as NASA's plans continue to evolve.

NASA has revealed a huge shakeup to its Artemis program of crewed moon exploration.

The announcement came last week, just after the agency's Artemis 2 rocket was rolled back to the hangar for repairs. What was expected as an update to the timeline for Artemis 2's mission ended up being an explanation of the restructuring of the Artemis program itself.

The plan for Artemis 2 remains the same: Launch a crew of four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and back to Earth aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft. With maintenance already underway, NASA is hoping the repairs to the Artemis 2 rocket can be made in time to meet a launch window that opens April 1. Until now, the mission had been billed as the precursor to an actual landing on the lunar surface on Artemis 3 in 2028, but that is no longer the case. NASA hasn't changed its goal of returning astronauts to the moon in 2028, but Artemis 3 won't be the mission to carry it out.

Instead, that task will fall to Artemis 4, with Artemis 3 launching sooner with a different mission framework, and with a potential second crewed lunar landing on Artemis 5 in late 2028. The approach mirrors that of NASA's early Apollo program, which launched incremental, quick-succession missions to test and prove the technologies necessary to safely land astronauts on the moon.

"We didn't go right to Apollo 11," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during a Feb. 27 press conference. "We had a whole Mercury program, Gemini [and] lots of Apollo missions before we ultimately landed."

In contrast, Artemis' architecture previously outlined a jump from Orion's first uncrewed mission to the moon in 2022, a crewed lunar flyby on the upcoming Artemis 2 mission and a moon landing on Artemis 3 in 2028. But three or more years between missions, and a leap from lunar space to the lunar surface without at least one test-run with Orion and its landing vehicle left too many "firsts" for Artemis 3 to take on and posed a significant safety risk, according to a recent report from the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP).

"The numerous and unprecedented mission objectives — many being attempted for the first time within a single flight — result in a compounded level of technical and safety risk," the ASAP report said.

Indeed, under its original design, the success of Artemis 3 depended on a lot of things going right. The mission's moon lander, SpaceX's Starship spacecraft, is expected to need more than a dozen refueling flights in Earth orbit in order to complete its objectives of rendezvousing and docking with Orion in orbit around the moon, landing astronauts on the lunar surface and launching them back to orbit to rendezvous and dock again with Orion, which will safely ferry the astronauts home.

Artemis 3's success was not only dependent on all of those things going exactly right for the first time, but also on a number of operational milestones SpaceX has yet to demonstrate during Starship's ongoing development. One such milestone is the ability to transfer and store large amounts of cryogenic propellant in space, which has never been done before.

Now, NASA is breaking up those objectives between multiple missions. Artemis 3 will now launch in 2027, and will rendezvous with one or both of NASA's contracted moon landers in Earth orbit. In addition to Starship, NASA has also tapped the Blue Moon lander from Blue Origin to support the Artemis program, and the space agency is eager to test out Orion with Starship, Blue Moon or both on next year's Artemis 3 flight.

"It's challenging, it's ambitious, but with this course correction, we are on a more stable foundation, and a more realistic path to the mountains we have ahead," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said on Friday (Feb. 27).

In the same way that Artemis 2 parallels the objectives of Apollo 8 to test out the crew capsule's flight systems around the moon, Artemis 3's mission to demonstrate rendezvous and docking with the lunar landers in Earth orbit, as well as testing out new spacesuits, is now closely aligned with Apollo 9.

NASA also wants to shorten the cadence between Artemis launches. Apollo 8 launched on Dec. 21, 1968, and was followed less than three months later by Apollo 9 — a much quicker turnaround than Artemis' current wait time of three-plus years.

To do this, NASA is backing away from some of the more complex design upgrades intended for Aretmis' rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). SLS Block 1 was designed with the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) to launch the first three Artemis missions. Artemis 4 and the missions to follow were supposed to employ more powerful SLS variants — Block 1B, Block 2 and so forth — which feature an enhanced Exploration Upper Stage to launch heavier elements of the program, such as components for the Gateway space station planned for lunar orbit.

Now, NASA is planning a more standardized SLS, with an upper stage solidified for its design rather than customized for each Artemis mission, and a new NASA graphic paints a picture of what that and other plans for Artemis' future might look like.

An image released in concert with last week's Artemis announcement illustrates NASA's new vision for the program and humanity's return to the moon, and has some details that may bring clarity to how that vision will unfold.

The newly unveiled image is divided into three frames: Artemis 2, Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 and beyond. The Artemis 2 panel contains no surprises; it shows Orion's launch on SLS, lunar flyby and return to Earth. Artemis 3 shows the mission's new plan, with Orion still flying with ICPS, docking with both Starship and Blue Moon above Earth.

The image's bottom panel — Artemis 4 and beyond — is the most interesting. It shows the standardized SLS Block 1 configuration launching alongside SpaceX's Starship rocket and Blue Origin's New Glenn. Orion is then seen flying next to both landers in space, still attached to its SLS upper stage, which is notably not the ICPS.

Instead, the spacecraft appears to be powered by a dual-engine Centaur vehicle, which is the upper stage for United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan rocket. While NASA has not yet confirmed that it plans to outfit Centaur for SLS and Orion, doing so could make a lot of sense. The stage is nearly equal in diameter to Orion and its service module, has been proven reliable on all of ULA's Vulcan missions to date, and doesn't need to be designed from scratch to support the needs of future Artemis launches.

Other significant inclusions in NASA's illustration are seen on the lunar surface. Next to a handful of Starship and Blue Moon landers stands a robotic Intuitive Machines lander — notably, the first commercial lander to touch down on the moon, which it did as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in early 2024.

Moon rovers bearing a striking resemblance to Astrolab's FLEX lunar excursion vehicle are also seen scattered around the modules of a lunar base. Astrolab's rover design is one of three in the running for Artemis, along with rovers from Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost, neither of which appears to be included in NASA's graphic.

NASA is hoping its Artemis restructuring will accelerate its readiness for a 2028 crewed lunar landing, while also breaking its missions down into more manageable milestones. It's an ambitious undertaking for an increased launch cadence by the space agency, which has run into repeated delays over the course of the last 10 or so years leading up the program's first crewed flight.

Some experts aren't sure the space agency can pull off the new plan in such a short amount of time, but still see the reorganization as a step in the right direction. As Lori Garver, NASA's deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013, said in an online post, "We didn't 'wait' 3.5 yrs between launches because we wanted to, that is what it took. The new plan increases the probability that the next US moon landing attempt will be successful — even though it is still likely more years away than we hope."

Her post received a response directly from Isaacman, who agreed that "after decades, America’s return to the moon has to be more than just talk."

"I would describe launching SLS every 10 months as extremely difficult," Isaacman wrote, "which is supposed to be our specialty at NASA."

NASA's Artemis 3 mission will no longer land astronauts on the moon — and it might not involve SpaceX's Starship megarocket, either.

On Friday (Feb. 27), the space agency announced that it's revamping the architecture of its Artemis program of lunar exploration. One of the biggest changes involves Artemis 3, which was originally supposed to land astronauts on the moon using Starship's upper stage.

NASA's new plan launches Artemis 3 in 2027 but keeps it in low Earth orbit. The mission will aim to demonstrate a range of technologies and capabilities there, including a rendezvous and docking procedure between the Orion crew capsule and "one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin," agency officials said in a statement on Friday.

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is developing a crewed lander called Blue Moon. That vehicle was supposed to carry NASA astronauts for the first time on Artemis 5, a lunar landing mission previously targeted for 2030.

But NASA has mused about pressing Blue Moon into service sooner than that. Last October, for example, then-Acting Administrator Sean Duffy announced that he planned to open the Artemis 3 landing contract to competition, explaining that he wasn't satisfied with the pace of Starship's development. (Starship has flown 11 test flights to date, and the most recent two were fully successful. However, the vehicle has yet to reach Earth orbit.)

Blue Origin was the only realistic competitor for that moon-landing gig. And it would appear the company remains in the running for the mission in its revised form, given the wording of Friday's announcement.

"Otherwise, they could have simply said in this statement today that they're going to dock the Orion with the Starship lunar lander and do their testing," Don Platt, head of the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, told Space.com on Friday. "But they didn't. They didn't say that."

Pace of development isn't the only factor going into this decision, according to Platt, who also leads the university's Spaceport Education Center.

"NASA does not want to have to rely on only one one contractor, either," he said. "I think that's why they're really kind of pushing this competition between Blue Origin and SpaceX."

Blue Origin appears to be leaning into the competition. In late January, the company announced that it's pausing its suborbital space tourism flights for at least two years "to further accelerate development of the company's human lunar capabilities."

"The decision reflects Blue Origin's commitment to the nation's goal of returning to the moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence," the company said in a statement at the time.

The revised Artemis architecture now envisions the first crewed lunar landing since the Apollo era to take place on Artemis 4 in 2028, with a possible second touchdown occurring that same year, on Artemis 5.

The new plans are part of a broader shift, which prioritizes a step-by-step approach and an increased launch cadence. (It's been more than three years since the first — and so far only — Artemis mission lifted off; NASA is gearing up to launch the Artemis 2 crewed mission around the moon in a month or so.)

For example, NASA officials said on Friday that they want to keep flying Artemis' Space Launch System rocket in a configuration as close to the current "Block I" as possible. Previously, Artemis 4 had been slated to use the "Block IB" variant, which would have featured a new, more capable upper stage.

The ultimate goal of Artemis is to establish a permanent, sustainable human presence on and around the moon in the next five to 10 years. NASA also wants to land the first Artemis astronauts before China puts boots on the moon, which the nation aims to do by 2030.

"With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays and achieve our objectives," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in Friday's statement.

"Standardizing vehicle configuration, increasing flight rate and progressing through objectives in a logical, phased approach, is how we achieved the near-impossible in 1969, and it is how we will do it again," he added.

NASA's plan to return humans to the moon has changed.

As engineers work to fix issues with the Artemis 2 mission's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, NASA officials are reexamining what flights will follow and are shaking up plans for which of those will actually land astronauts on the moon.

In short, Artemis 3 is changing from a crewed mission to the lunar surface to an Earth-orbit rendezvous of NASA's Orion spacecraft with one or more of the program's moon landers in 2027, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced on Friday (Feb. 27). The program's first moon landing will now take place on Artemis 4, in 2028, with a potential second landing that same year with Artemis 5.

In addition, SLS' design will be standardized to streamline production, and the rocket's launch cadence will be shortened from once every three years to once every10 months, if all goes to plan. To accomplish this, NASA plans to bolster its workforce in order to "rebuild core competencies," Isaacman said, "that will directly contribute to NASA's launch cadence."

It's a major shift in the architecture of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustained human presence on the moon and in lunar orbit. A recent report from NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), however, cast serious doubts on the previous architecture, calling into question the agency's timeline, projected mission safety and the readiness of the Human Landing System (HLS) vehicles that NASA has contracted from private companies to perform lunar landings.

As originally designed, Artemis 3 encompassed a long list of technological firsts, with a heavy dependency on HLS, which the ASAP determined posed "significant risks at the mission level."

"This is just not the right pathway forward," Isaacman said. "Going right to the moon … is not a pathway to success."

"We want to reduce complexity to the greatest extent possible," he added. "We want to accelerate manufacturing, pull in the hardware and increase launch rate, which obviously has a direct safety consideration to it as well."

With the new framework, Artemis 3 is drastically simplified, and less dependent on the readiness of a moon lander's ability to actually land on the moon. The development of both private HLS landers chosen by NASA has fallen short of the space agency's hopeful timeline, resulting in impending delays.

NASA contracted SpaceX's Starship to land astronauts on the Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 moon missions. Starship has flown 11 suborbital test flights over the past three years but has yet to notch several critical milestones needed to qualify the spacecraft for lunar landings with astronauts onboard.

NASA picked Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft, meanwhile, to land astronauts on the Artemis 5 moon mission. A Blue Moon pathfinder known as Mark 1 is currently undergoing testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Before NASA will let either Starship or Blue Moon carry astronauts to the lunar surface, the vehicles will have to demonstrate their ability to transfer and store cryogenic fuels in space, rendezvous and dock with Orion, as well as execute an uncrewed moon landing and successful ascent back to lunar orbit.

Now, NASA plans to use Artemis 3 as a safe proving ground for those procedures in low Earth orbit before entrusting the landers to be 100% successful on their first flights to the moon.

Previous architecture for Artemis 4 used an upgraded version of SLS, called Block 1B, which featured the enhanced Exploration Upper Stage in place of SLS' current Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS). If NASA's launch cadence with SLS remained unchanged, Artemis 4 would have launched sometime around 2030.

Space agency officials are counting on a standardized SLS configuration to shorten the wait time between launches, and are now targeting an Artemis 4 liftoff in 2028 as the program's first crewed lunar landing, with the potential for Artemis 5 to repeat the feat later that same year.

"I think what we're doing is directly in line with what ASAP asked us to do," Isaacman told Space.com during Friday's briefing. "I think it should be incredibly obvious you don't go from one uncrewed launch of Orion and SLS, wait three years, go around the moon, wait three years and land on it."

Isaacman compared the need for an increased SLS launch cadence to the United States' first lunar program, saying, "There has to be a better way, in line with our history."

"We did not just jump right to Apollo 11. We did it through Mercury, Gemini and lots of Apollo missions with the launch cadence every three months," Isaacman said. "We shouldn't be comfortable with the current cadence. We should be getting back to basics and doing what we know works."

In the meantime, teams at NASA's Kennedy Space Center continue to work toward an April launch date for Artemis 2, despite its recent relocation from the pad at Launch Complex-39B to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for repairs.

Engineers conducting routine post-fueling procedures after a Feb. 19 countdown rehearsal for the Artemis 2 rocket encountered a helium flow pressurization issue on ICPS that they could address only back inside the VAB. That countdown practice run was the second "wet dress rehearsal" for the Artemis 2 SLS, which experienced liquid hydrogen leaks and an early countdown termination during testing on Feb. 2.