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Astronauts haven't been to the moon since 1972 but if all goes well a manned mission to the moon will lift off as soon as next month. It's called Artemis II and the plan is to take four astronauts and send them into space on a trajectory that will wrap around, but not orbit, the moon. Just this weekend, the rocket that will launch the astronauts made its way to the launch pad. After many months inside the VAB being stacked and prepared for launch, the NASA SLS rocket has come outside fully as it rolls out to LC-39B ahead...

A Chinese space institute has filed to launch some satellites into orbit. And by "some," I mean nearly 200,000 total, which would be over ten times more than are in orbit today. Specifically, the Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilisation and Technological Innovation is hoping to launch two constellations of exactly 96,714 satellites each. That application has gone to the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is responsible for ensuring that one country's satellites don't broadcast on the same frequencies as another's. There's, uh, going to be a lot of work to do approving an application of that size. What exactly...

Donald Trump’s desire for Greenland is not just about access to oil, minerals and control of the new strategic and commercial corridors opening in the region. It’s also about data. Specifically, the most important data in the world. For decades, Pituffik Space Base – formerly Thule – in Greenland has been central to US space defense and Arctic strategy. It’s the US military’s only base above the Arctic Circle and their most northerly deep-water port and airstrip. It’s home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron. Its massive AN/FPS-132 radar has 240 degrees of coverage surveying the Arctic Ocean and Russia’s...

In July, researchers using the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey telescope in Chile made an exceedingly rare discovery: a mysterious object passing through the solar system at far too high a speed to be bound by the Sun’s gravity. As the visitor made its closest approach to Earth, coming within just 167 million miles on December 19, an international team of researchers from the alien-hunting astronomy project Breakthrough Listen pointed the Green Bank Telescope — the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world — at 3I/ATLAS. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they revealed sobering — albeit probably expected —...

Teen Discovers 1.5M Space Objects With AI | Image by Matteo Paz @matteopaz06/X A recently graduated high school student made an artificial intelligence breakthrough using retired NASA data, which led to a public recruitment pitch from the agency’s new administrator on social media, including a fighter jet ride. The teenager from Pasadena, California, used AI to identify approximately 1.5 million previously unrecognized cosmic objects in archival NASA data. His work went viral on X, capturing the attention of senior space officials. This led to an informal public recruitment pitch from Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur recently appointed as NASA administrator....

It’s a race to the moon – again. Yesterday (18) was a historic day for American space exploration, as the new NASA administrator, the businessman, pilot and astronaut Jared Isaacman, was confirmed by the US Senate, and Donald J. Trump signed an important Executive Order ENSURING AMERICAN SPACE SUPERIORITY. Isaacman has had an unusual trajectory, having been appointed, discarded in the context of the fight between Donald J. Trump and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, and successfully re-appointed. CBS News reported: “The Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman to be NASA administrator on Wednesday in a 67 to 30 vote after he was...

NEWS: Today, Trump signed an executive order committing the United States to return to the Moon by 2028, build a lunar outpost by 2030 and prepare for the journey to Mars. Everything in the Executive Order: • Return Americans to the Moon by 2028 • Begin building a permanent lunar outpost by 2030 • Make U.S. space superiority a core national priority • Expand commercial launch, lower costs, increase cadence • Develop next-gen space-based missile defense by 2028 • Detect and counter threats in LEO and cislunar space • Rapidly modernize national security space architecture • Deepen allied cooperation in...

Sometimes, what goes up doesn’t come back down — instead, it becomes a problem. Junk is accumulating in space at a fantastic pace, millions of pieces orbit the Earth, from broken satellites to lost screws and tiny hunks of splintered paint. The International Space Station has to dodge it. Sometimes, space junk crashes into other space junk, creating more space junk. And while there have been many proposals for technologies to capture and destroy it, there’s not been a system-level plan for dealing with it in a comprehensive way. This week, researchers at England’s University of Surrey published a paper...

NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe will continue its almost half-century of service by delivering yet another milestone: by this time next year, it should have reached a distance of 1 light-day from Earth. Based on the most recent estimates, the revolutionary Voyager 1 space probe is expected to achieve the feat on November 15, 2026, continuing its reign as the farthest-travelled human-made object. After flying by Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, the spacecraft continued its journey into interstellar space. The Speed of Light Based on present-day physics, scientists know the speed of light is the greatest speed at which anything in...

Damage to a Russian launch site has stopped Moscow from sending people into space for the first time in over six decades, it has been reported. Moscow’s space agency Roscosmos said that Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan had sustained damage during a launch on Thursday carrying Russian and American astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). But Russian space bloggers said the damage to Russia’s only launch site for crewed missions was more serious than authorities were claiming. One expert, Vitaly Egorov, said if the damage is as suspected, Moscow will have lost the ability to launch people into space for...

After successfully entering orbit, the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft completed its status setup and successfully docked with the forward port of the Tianhe core module of the space station at 15:50 Beijing time on November 25, 2025. Following the docking, the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft will enter the combined docking section and will subsequently serve as the return spacecraft for the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew.Currently, the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew is in good condition in orbit and is completing all planned tasks. The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft will continue to remain in orbit to conduct relevant experiments.After the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft's return was delayed on November 5 due to...

Success! #Shenzhou22LaunchSuccess# ] At 12:11 PM Beijing time on November 25, 2025, the Long March-2F Y22 carrier rocket carrying the #Shenzhou22# spacecraft was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Approximately 10 minutes later, the spacecraft successfully separated from the rocket and entered its predetermined orbit, marking a complete success for the launch mission. After entering orbit, the spacecraft will autonomously and rapidly rendezvous and dock with the space station assembly according to the predetermined procedures.The Shenzhou-22 spacecraft is unmanned and carries space food, space medicine, fresh fruits and vegetables, a device for dealing with cracks in the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft's...

AMERICAN GENERALS once spoke in euphemisms about the possibility of fighting a war in space, preferring to talk about space “dominance” rather than the grim prospect of shattering satellites in orbit. Now they speak openly about the need to launch weapons from, within and towards space in any future conflict with Russia or China. In 2026 there are five areas to watch that could shape the direction of this intensifying competition. One is President Donald Trump’s plan to build a “Golden Dome” missile-defence shield to protect America. Much of that project is a rebranding of older, more prosaic efforts to...

For the first time, astronomers have picked up a radio signal from the mysterious interstellar visitor as it speeds through our Solar System. South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope detected absorption lines from OH molecules...Harvard professor Avi Loeb, who has been studying 3I/ATLAS since the summer, said: 'These molecules leave a distinct radio signature that telescopes like MeerKAT can pick up.'... Optical images captured on November 9 reveal that 3I/ATLAS is ejecting enormous jets of material both toward and away from the sun. The jets stretch nearly 600,000 miles sunward and almost 1.8 million miles in the opposite direction, roughly the...

A 62-page document written by President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again pick to run NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman, outlines a sweeping, ambitious, and at times controversial plan for the space agency.... The leak — according to a recent Ars Technica report and a source who confirmed the account to CNN — looked to have been part of an effort by Duffy, who is temporarily running NASA, to spur controversy and potentially thwart Isaacman’s renomination... A Mars shot and nuclear propulsion One eye-popping proposal in Project Athena is to set up a new Mars program, dubbed “Olympus.”...The document also includes numerous mentions of...

Two-time space traveler and billionaire Jared Isaacman had been on the cusp of becoming NASA’s next administrator last May when President Donald Trump yanked his nomination. Trump has since changed his mind. “Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era,” Trump wrote Tuesday on a post on Truth Social announcing he was putting Isaacman back in a position to lead the agency. Isaacman had sat through the Senate confirmation hearings...

And it's not even Boeing's fault! Bad joke, I know. I kid, I kid. 3 Chinese astronauts stranded in space station after debris strikes return capsule https://t.co/Z246fzZTKH pic.twitter.com/CS1anBno7D— New York Post (@nypost) November 6, 2025Three Chinese astronauts, who were slated to return home after six months on the Chinese space station, are currently stranded after it was discovered that some space debris struck their capsule at some point during their stay. A Chinese space crew is stranded at the country’s Tiangong space station after tiny pieces of space debris were believed to have struck their return capsule, China’s spaceflight agency...

A global plea is growing for Elon Musk to rescue three Chinese astronauts stranded in space after their return capsule was reportedly struck by an 'unknown object.'The Shenzhou-20 team, mission commander Senior Colonel Chen Dong and crew members Colonel Chen Zhongrui and Colonel Wang Jie, launched to China's Tiangong space station in April and were set to return home on November 5. But officials revealed this week that their spacecraft may have sustained damage while docked in orbit for the past six months.Chinese officials are unsure what struck the spacecraft, but the damage is believed to have been caused by...

An Atlas V 551 rocket, configured with five side-mounted solid rocket boosters and a standard-length payload fairing, will utilize several launch optimization features to place the ViaSat-3 Flight 2 spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. The craft is one of the heaviest single-satellite payloads. Liftoff will occur from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Launch Readiness Review completed The Launch Readiness Review (LRR) is GO for Wednesday’s liftoff of the United Launch Alliance commercial Atlas V rocket with one of the most sophisticated and powerful commercial communications satellites — the ViaSat-3 Flight 2 ultra-high-capacity broadband spacecraft....

The space environment would provide natural radiative cooling, as well as unlimited solar energy. With the generative AI boom in full force, scientists have warned of the immense power requirements of data centers used to train and utilize these systems. Now, a team of researchers from NTU Singapore has joined the call to place data centers in space. Doing so would pave the way for sustainable computing, the claim. According to the team, space data centers would be powered by round-the-clock solar energy and would harness free cooling. Crucially, all of this is possible using existing technologies. Sending AI infrastructure...