Japanese space agency leading five-year mission to Phobos, one of ‘most important unclimbed mountains in the solar system’
Japan is to launch a spacecraft on the world’s first mission to bring back samples from Phobos, one of the two small, potato-shaped moons orbiting Mars.
Scientists hope the mission, which is expected to take five years, will provide clues to how Phobos and its smaller sibling Deimos formed, and hopefully even shed light on the origins of life in the solar system.
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© Photograph: NASA/AP
© Photograph: NASA/AP
© Photograph: NASA/AP
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School looking to sell piece of open land beloved by people in Devon town to fund refurbishments
On Saturdays throughout autumn, residents of Totnes have met at a field on the banks of the River Dart to play ballgames, fly kites or simply sit on the grass and chat.
But it hasn’t just been about having fun – this has been a “play protest” aimed at trying to save a beloved piece of open land in the historic Devon market town.
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© Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian
© Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian
© Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian
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Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.
© Stoke Space
Blue Origin announced a major expansion of its already considerable Florida launch facilities on Friday morning with the intent of eventually flying more than 100 rockets a year from there.
The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.
The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.
© Blue Origin
Rocket Lab announced Wednesday that its Neutron launch vehicle won't fly until 2027, citing an issue discovered during manufacturing of the rocket's carbon composite structures.
The announcement was public confirmation of what nearly everyone inside Rocket Lab and the wider space industry already knew. The most recent official update from Rocket Lab in August suggested the company still held hope of delivering the first Neutron rocket to its launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, before the end of this year, a schedule that would have almost certainly pushed the first flight into 2027.
But Rocket Lab's statement Wednesday about Neutron's schedule suggests the company is still struggling with manufacturing the rocket's large booster stage. Neutron's reusable first stage is made of carbon composite structures, which offer low weight, high strength, and corrosion resistance. But carbon composites in aerospace are generally harder to manufacture than metallic structures.
© Rocket Lab
Most planetary scientists will tell you the heyday of Venus exploration was more than a generation ago. That is about to change.
Two NASA missions are on track to launch to Venus in the early 2030s. The first, known as the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI), is now scheduled for launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned. DAVINCI will send a parachute-assisted descent probe through the atmosphere of Venus, returning the first direct images of the planet's surface since 1982. A second mission, Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy (VERITAS), will follow with a launch in November 2032 to map the Venusian surface by radar from orbit.
The European Space Agency is building another orbiter, Envision, for launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as next year, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet's clouds.
© NASA/Mike Guinto
Expanding plume of fuel exhaust crystalized in the sky and reflected sunlight off frozen particles after Florida launch
A SpaceX rocket provided a stunning pre-dawn display over Florida as a egiant, luminescent “jellyfish cloud” spread for miles, caused by an expanding plume of fuel exhaust crystalizing in the sky and reflecting sunlight off the frozen particles.
The phenomenon occurred shortly after Tuesday’s 6.33am ET launch of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station.
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© Photograph: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
Welcome to the second space race. You can be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu. Last time, it was the Soviet Union and the United States vying to be the first to plant some flags. Now it’s a sprint to the lunar surface between America and China—alongside a host of varyingly friendly and rival nations—plus a cornucopia of private spaceflight companies. And this time it looks like they’re getting ready to set up camp. There will be, the contenders say, bases on the moon, permanently inhabited castles under the stars.
The notion of a moon base, fanciful as it might sound, isn’t new. But this year, under the leadership of Administrator Jared Isaacman, NASA has been flooding the zone with bold announcements. If all goes according to plan—a plan that will likely cost tens of billions of dollars to start—there will be drones, robotic landers, communication satellites, and a nuclear power plant; there will be plant terrariums and moonquake sensors; there will be mechanized scouts exploring craters for water.
Initial astronaut missions to the lunar surface, which the US is currently planning to start in 2028, will be focused on exploration and technological experimentation. But the idea is that we will—some time in the 2030s—get to a point where there will be habitation quarters for long-term stays, surrounded by a network of scientific research stations, resource mining and processing plants, and landing pads for spaceships. “It’s going to be an expanse,” says Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s moon base program manager—one that will add up to “hundreds of square miles.”
The effort is undoubtedly being fueled by nationalistic competition. China has near-identical plans to build its own base on the moon. And being first matters, because the “victor” gets to define the terms. What is the moon, exactly? Is it a militarized outpost? Is it a manufacturing hub? Is it a wilderness to be studied and preserved?
But there are also other reasons to go. Earth’s companion contains primeval rocks that hold clues to the formation of the entire solar system. The lunar surface, with virtually no atmosphere in the way, is an ideal place to put telescopes that could examine the most ancient epochs of the cosmos. The far side of the moon would be “a fantastic place to explore the further universe,” says Josef Aschbacher, the European Space Agency’s director general. And it’s way more energy efficient to launch rockets from the low-gravity lunar surface than it is from Earth, meaning sending astronauts—or robotic spacecraft—farther into the solar system will become much less difficult. “The moon is critical. It will be a stepping stone for going further—that means to Mars and beyond,” says Aschbacher.
But if these bold visions are to become reality, there’s a daunting amount of work to be done. A sprawling moon base must be safe for its astronaut inhabitants—protected from falling asteroids, endless cosmic radiation, razor-sharp lunar dust, and torturous temperature swings. It also must be somewhat self-sustaining, so that it can weather changing political fortunes and not cost ruinous amounts of money to maintain. For that, we’ll need to find a way to use the moon’s resources to keep the base operating—and ideally generating revenue. And we’ll need autonomous robots that can build, maintain, and expand the base even when their human masters aren’t present. “It’s almost like starting civilization from scratch,” says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales.
Assuming we can overcome these starting challenges, decades from now—let’s say, by the year 2100—our initial moon bases could grow from barely visible structures into luminous cities, perhaps not too dissimilar from those dreamed up by authors and screenwriters the world over. “It’s like science fiction today that we really want to turn into a reality,” says García-Galán. Will anyone succeed?
The moon is a tremendously hostile place to set up camp. In general, daytime temperatures can reach more than 250 °F; at night, they can plummet to less than –200 °F. Exposed to the vacuum of space, the surface is constantly showered in carcinogenic radiation and frequently hit by meteoroids. And its volcanic dust is sticky and corrosive, a destroyer of equipment and choker of lungs.
Sadly, the lunar south pole—the area NASA is targeting—is even harsher. NASA wants to build a base there because its permanently shadowed craters are thought to harbor caches of water ice, which would be more precious than gold. Purify it, and you can water crops and hydrate astronauts; split it into oxygen and hydrogen, and you have breathable air and rocket propellant. But the temperature in those craters can be lower than –410 °F, making them some of the coldest places in the known universe. On the surface outside those pits, astronauts would be bathed in the scorching sun for 14 days before experiencing an equally long frigid night.
But there is only so much money we can spend on safety. “What it comes down to is acceptable risk of death,” Philip Metzger, a spaceflight engineering researcher at the Florida Space Institute, said while pondering some of the dangers. “What can we reasonably survive without breaking the bank?”
Temperature is one of the easiest problems to handle. Materials science has come a long way, and there are myriad metals, ceramics, plastics, compounds, and alloys that can resist wild temperature swings. Radiators keep things cool; heaters keep batteries from dying prematurely. Astronauts survive just fine too, with their fancy spacesuits—but that technology has proved itself only during brief excursions. It’s not yet clear how long this equipment could operate under such tempestuous conditions.
The temperature in the moon’s south pole craters can be lower than –410 °F, making them some of the coldest places in the known universe.
Outside those pits, astronauts would be bathed in the scorching sun for 14 days before experiencing an equally long frigid night.
Space radiation, which can wreak havoc on electronics and trigger a cancerous division of cells, is far more pernicious. And as Stuart George, a physicist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, explains, it comes in two unpleasant forms.
The first is galactic cosmic rays, which rain down on the moon almost constantly. “They’re made by supernovas and neutron star mergers—all these kinds of things,” says George. And because the atomic nuclei, protons, and electrons that make them up are moving at significant fractions of the speed of light, these cosmic rays have oodles of kinetic energy, meaning they can punch through thin shielding (say, a metal wall) with ease. “They also have this habit where the heavier ions are fragmenting in that shielding and making secondary particles,” says George. That means if your shield is too thin, the astronauts behind it will be blasted with a surprisingly large dose of radiation.
Then you have the sun. It may sustain life on Earth, but without our planet’s thick atmosphere and magnetic bubble to get in its way, moonwalkers will occasionally be blasted by one of its paroxysms: a solar flare (a burst of diverse types of radiation) or a coronal mass ejection (volleys of magnetized plasma). “During Apollo, they knew that if a large solar flare occurred while the crew was on the moon, there would be no way to keep them alive,” says Metzger. The crew could have developed acute radiation sickness and perished in a matter of days.
The way to survive a powerful solar flare or coronal mass ejection is straightforward: “Get back inside a habitat where there’s more shielding,” says George—preferably a dedicated, highly shielded “storm shelter,” essentially a thick-walled bunker. The issue is that astronauts might be outside the base, driving a rover many miles away. Coronal mass ejections take hours to days to reach the vicinity of the Earth-moon system, but solar flares can do so in under an hour. And scientists can’t yet model the sun well enough to give much advance notice. “All of the capability to forecast solar storms is kind of like where weather forecasting [was] … in the ’50s and ’60s,” says George.
As for those punchy galactic cosmic rays, the only way to avoid them would be to put a lot of stuff—lunar rocks, possibly—between the astronauts and the sky. “Build habitat modules underground,” says Chris Dreyer, director of engineering at the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. One option: Burrow living quarters into lava tubes, the naturally hollowed-out volcanic tunnels created by molten rock eons ago. At this point, NASA hasn’t mentioned any plans to make its moon base subterranean, but it may need to if it wants to end up with a small lunar city.
Radiation limits the time astronauts can spend on the lunar surface over their entire life—it can total around two years max, experts estimate, before the health risk becomes too high. Unfortunately, that’s not all space will throw at them. When the Artemis II astronauts swung around the far side of the moon earlier this year, they saw curious flashes light up the silvery land below. These were the explosive deaths of small meteoroids punching into the lunar surface.
Earth is naturally protected from smaller space rocks, up to around 50 feet in diameter: They burn up inconsequentially in the atmosphere. “You don’t have that option on the moon,” says Philip Lubin, a physicist and planetary defense researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since smaller rocks plunge toward planets and moons far more frequently than larger ones do, this means the moon is often peppered by what are effectively tiny space bullets. They could easily puncture a spacesuit or the engine of a moon rover.
How do you protect astronauts from the onslaught? “The simplest answer is burial,” says Nicholas Schmerr, a planetary seismologist at the University of Maryland—conveniently, the same way you’d deal with radiation exposure. Pile up moon rocks onto your base walls or put habitable structures in lava tubes.
Inconveniently, there’s always a chance that a bigger asteroid will come along. Even buried habitation modules would have trouble surviving an assault from a 50-footer—about the length of a semi-trailer.
That doesn’t mean a moon base would be helpless against bigger asteroids. Planetary defense has come a long way in just a few decades. NASA’s DART mission demonstrated that it could deflect an asteroid by ramming into the rock with an uncrewed spacecraft, and cutting-edge experiments at clandestine labs around the US suggest that a nuclear bomb could swat away or entirely vaporize errant space rocks. An array of both ground-based and space-based telescopes specifically designed to spy killers—such as the ATLAS quartet of largely automated telescopes, and the soon-to-be-launched NEO Surveyor infrared telescope—are also aiming to find 90% of the near-Earth asteroids potentially capable of wiping out entire cities (those 460 feet across) in the coming years.
All these protections apply to the moon. But asteroids 50 feet across are so stealthy that even NASA’s best telescopes would struggle to see them years or even months in advance. Odds are that they would first be seen not long before they were due to hit the lunar surface. Then what?
It’s not unreasonable to imagine several turret-like launch sites on the moon that, owing to the lower gravity and airless environment, could rapidly fire projectiles toward an incoming asteroid. Hit it hard enough and it would break into fragments. Just make sure you shoot when it is as far away as possible: “If you were to break something up into a thousand pieces, then you have a thousand impacts on the moon,” says Lubin. “That might be worse than letting it hit one place.”
Having your base destroyed by an asteroid would be awful. But a moon base is far more likely to be imperiled by dust—which, unlike asteroids, is everywhere, all the time.
Volcanic lunar rocks, when broken down, turn into sharp, electrostatically charged, adhesive, acrid, abrasive particles. While on the moon, Apollo astronauts who inhaled some of this dust occasionally suffered from a strange “lunar hay fever,” which irritated their eyes and agitated their lungs. That same dust ate through all kinds of gear with disturbing ease. “It rips up seals, gears, motors, spacesuits, habitats—everything else it comes into contact with,” says Justin Cyrus, the CEO of Lunar Outpost, a spaceflight technology company that is providing NASA with one of the Artemis program’s moon rovers.
NASA has already developed a defense against these dark shards: the electrodynamic dust shield, or EDS. The lightweight electrodes that make up this shield—which can be layered on machinery, walls, and perhaps even spacesuits—use opposing currents to blast away the electrically charged dust. The EDS worked wonders when tested in labs on Earth, and it also demonstrated its anti-dust magic when sent to the lunar surface in 2025 as part of a NASA-sponsored robotic mission.
Amy Fritz, a dust-mitigation researcher at Johnson Space Center, says that the EDS will likely be widely featured all over a lunar habitat. But other dust-fighting instruments are being developed too—including a lint-roller-type object inspired by gecko skin and a sci-fi-esque blaster that uses ionized nitrogen gas. Its first spray will neutralize the charge of the dust to remove its stickiness; then a second burst will clear it off the surface.
Irritatingly, the busier a base gets, the dustier things will become. As it expands to the size of a small city, rocket ships will need to deliver cargo and crew to the lunar surface on a frequent cadence. Each takeoff and landing will launch a salvo of dust in every direction, inundating the base’s infrastructure. “You have to worry about essentially being sandblasted every time,” says Fritz.
Metzger calculates that even with landing pads more than 3,000 feet away from a base, just 10 to 20 liftoffs or landings would be sufficient to severely damage things like protective coatings on exterior walls and communications equipment. After a while, he says, “everything breaks.”
Even if the moon base of the future is buried partly below ground, barricaded against micrometeorites and space radiation, and well equipped with dust-repelling technologies, it’s still a risky gig for any astronaut. Skipping around in a preternaturally agile way at one-sixth of Earth’s gravity will be entertaining. But “microgravity is not good for the human body,” says Dreyer. Muscle wastage, cardiovascular troubles, respiratory problems, and immune deficiencies can arise.
Radiation, too, may always afflict lunar residents. And there’s also evidence that disease-causing microbes could stealthily sneak aboard spacecraft, even after stringent sterilization procedures. Those microbes may behave differently than they do on Earth; microgravity experiments (both real and simulated) have suggested that some become more aggressive and more likely to cause disease. “We call them the invisible crew,” says Lisa Carnell, the director of NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division.
Hoping to find a better way to protect astronauts, Carnell spearheaded an experiment called AVATAR (A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response), which launched aboard the Artemis II mission. It used thumb-drive-size chips, containing cells taken from the heart, lungs, or other parts of the body, that could be switched on to act like miniature organs. Scientists have previously used this organ-on-a-chip technology for purposes like testing out new pharmaceuticals in a highly controlled setting. For Artemis II, Carnell’s crew sent up chips containing bone marrow samples taken from the mission’s four astronauts. Bone marrow makes red and white blood cells, as well as platelets—the sort of stuff that affects almost the entire human body. So seeing how space radiation and microgravity affect it would give Carnell and her team vital insight into how astronauts’ biology might change on the moon.
The advantage of organ chips is that you can make them for any astronaut and then send them into space ahead of time to see how that person’s organs will react to spaceflight. Researchers envision that data from such chips will be able to clue medics in to the specific preventive treatments or pharmaceuticals that will help moonbound astronauts on their journey.
What is NASA likely to send up sooner rather than later? “Brain organoids,” says Carnell. Yes, she adds—that sounds super weird. But it would be good to know how a real brain might respond to being on the moon for several months before people start living there.
Okay. Your vast moon base and its inhabitants are protected—as much as is possible—from the treacherous lunar environment. But astronauts’ time is extremely valuable, and humans are fragile creatures. You can’t make them do all the heavy lifting, which means that whether you’re trying to make a tiny lunar outpost or a small city, you’re going to need a lot of robots. “The buildup of the moon base, in the first years, will pretty much 99% be robotic,” says NASA’s García-Galán.
Autonomy will be there right from the start. NASA’s new version of the moon buggy, its Lunar Terrain Vehicle, can be driven by the astronauts riding in it but can also be piloted remotely from Earth (or from elsewhere on the moon). There are visions, too, of adding modular robotic arms, towing vehicles, and cargo movers—all still in the preliminary stages of planning.
Over the next few decades, though, we’ll likely want an army of robots to do our bidding: excavators to dig up lunar rocks that could be turned into concrete and bricks, plus other robots to flatten surfaces, dig trenches, create building foundations, pave landing pads, and build up dust-deflecting berms to keep the base from being sandblasted by launches and landings. Even solar panels and wiring can potentially be made from moon rocks—something that the spaceflight company Blue Origin demonstrated in labs on Earth in 2023 using a geologic simulant designed to match the composition of lunar regolith.
Powering this robot army will require considerable energy. Two-week-long nights make solar power an impractical solution. Aside from a cornucopia of high-capacity, extreme-temperature-resistant batteries, nuclear power is probably the only viable option. A small, car-size nuclear reactor, filled with an almost literal handful of uranium, could power a small village for a decade without needing to be refueled. And although nobody’s yet tested a nuclear reactor on the moon, few doubt that NASA and the US Department of Energy can conjure up a working design—one that perhaps wouldn’t be too different from those aboard nuclear submarines. A moon base in 2100 would probably feature multiple small, autonomously or remotely operated nuclear reactors, which—conveniently—the base-expanding robots could simply plug themselves into to recharge.
But the biggest lunar question mark might be water, which planners want to support the astronauts—and to make fuel to launch things from the lunar surface. A process known as electrolysis, which uses electricity to snap apart molecular bonds, can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, both of which could be used to make rocket fuel. Getting them this way could be far less expensive than sending either all the way from Earth. And as an added bonus, it would provide a source of breathable oxygen.
Orbital data has revealed that there is some amount of water preserved in patches on the lunar south pole, but little is known about how much there actually is, what form it takes, or how easy it will be to extract. Will there be solid sheets of ice here and there, ready for us to excavate? Or will there be scattered ice crystals intermingled among the rocky grains, requiring some more inventive form of extraction?
A lot of the moon’s water is thought to be hiding in deep, dark craters on the south pole, where the environment is so extreme that robots may freeze up, tumble over, or lose contact with the base. “To me, that is the biggest hurdle,” says Paul van Susante, principal investigator of the Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab at Michigan Technological University.
Van Susante’s lab has been putting various construction robots through their paces in moon-like vacuum chambers filled with moon-like rocks. His team was part of NASA’s recent Break the Ice challenge, which invited engineers to build robots to test different ways to excavate such rocks. Some teams used an electric jackhammer and a scoop, while others used scrapers to peel off layers of the ground. The teams simulated the moon’s weak gravity using a crane to lift and offset the weight of the robots. Progress in this regard is speeding along. “I won’t say that’s solved, but we’ve got a lot of the puzzle pieces,” says van Susante.
Mining the water will be just one part of an extensive operation. “When you extract it, it’s not going to be clean. It needs to be purified,” says Jessica Atkin, a space botanist at Texas A&M. The technology to do this already exists and works fine on terra firma. But things in space never go the way you expect. “There’s a water purification system on the International Space Station (ISS), and it is known for getting contaminated with microbes,” she says.
But if you purify the water sufficiently—something that can handily be achieved on Earth but may falter in microgravity, where fluids flow in stranger ways—then your moon base can hit its stride. With an effective water recycling system, an increasingly populous base will never go thirsty—and, just maybe, you’ll have a lunar greenhouse. Several edible plants have been successfully grown aboard the ISS, including lettuce, mustard greens, tomatoes, and peppers. Lunar dust unfortunately makes for a terrible garden: It’s filled with far too much aluminum—and it forms a resistant layer when watered. But Atkin has shown that with the help of fertilizing fungi, chickpeas can grow in soil much like the volcanic stuff found on the moon.
Moon base inhabitants of 2100 would be supported largely by prepacked meals sent from Earth. But in time, they would start growing some of their own produce—probably with a good deal of automation for lighting, watering, and maintenance of humidity and other environmental conditions. Aside from chickpeas, there might also be plenty of lunar tomatoes. They’d be desirable not least because they’ve been bioengineered to produce higher levels of compounds called anthocyanins that, according to some studies, might help humans mitigate the cellular damage caused by space radiation.
A garden on the moon would do more than just provide food, as recent experiences on the ISS suggest. Carnell says that NASA recently caught the astronauts aboard the space station doing something sneaky. All plants up there are supposed to be confined to their growth chambers. But “we learned that the crew were pirating our leftover soil and bringing their seeds and planting their own little gardens, if you will, and hiding them in their own cabins,” she says.
Conversations were had in the summer of 2026, after which NASA decided to let astronauts grow their own mini-gardens anywhere they wanted. “Some of the astronauts said they thrived better,” says Carnell. Nature, and gardening, has a hugely beneficial psychological effect on those kept in confined quarters hanging above Earth. That will be even truer for those living in lava tunnels under the lunar surface. “That human element is so important,” she says.
Nobody is deluded into thinking there isn’t a mountain of technological challenges in the way. Mars may be a hellhole, as the writer Shannon Stirone put it in 2021 in The Atlantic, but the moon isn’t too far behind. It’s an almost comically menacing place to be. Much about it stands in the way of building a safe, self-sustaining, robotically managed base.
NASA wants to put the first nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. China, partnering with Russia, wants to place its own nuclear power plant up there around 2035.
Beyond the first basic habitation module, it will take decades of experimentation and iteration on the lunar surface to get to a working moon base spanning hundreds of square miles. But few doubt that with enough time and tinkering, humanity can prevail. “It’s not an unsolvable problem,” says the University of Maryland’s Schmerr.
The chief obstacle, especially in the initial stages of building, may be one of political will. NASA is currently bringing every resource to bear on the project—something that the agency hopes could culminate in a small lunar city by the century’s end. But will that commitment continue over multiple US administrations? Will the international community also throw its weight behind the NASA-led effort? NASA has “a very ambitious plan,” says Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong. “We need to keep an eye on it.” In fact, he says, “the current plan looks over-ambitious.” The agency, for example, wants to put the first nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. (China, partnering with Russia, wants to place its own nuclear power plant up there around 2035.)
“These sorts of projects—although very exciting, and potentially transformative for humankind—are the first ones to be delayed or scrapped,” says Middleburgh of the Nuclear Futures Institute. NASA’s direction tends to change when a new administration comes into power—sometimes dramatically so.
But several experts outside of NASA agree that, at least for now, there is definite momentum and political will behind the moon base. “NASA has very clearly expressed where they want to go, what their priorities [are], what their ambition is, and how they want to do it,” says ESA’s Aschbacher. “It was quite impressive to see.”
Even if the political will behind the US-led endeavor is maintained over the coming decades, expanding anywhere beyond an initial, compact moon base will require more than government funding. “There has to be a lunar economy for this to be self-sustaining,” says Dreyer, the space resources expert. Perhaps that will come from the production of rocket fuel, or from the mining of valuable materials on the moon that can replace similar, polluting activities on Earth. But it’s not at all clear how valuable, or not, a lunar economy will be.
Even Isaacman, NASA’s chief, doesn’t think the moon will be a major moneymaker. “I don’t know of anything on the moon right now that’s going to be easier and more affordable to mine, manufacture, and then bring back to Earth than what we could make here on Earth,” he remarked back in February. (Instead, he suspects, mining metals from asteroids will be the path to prosperity.)
What if, instead, a moon base earns the right to exist because it’s a place for novel scientific research? Aschbacher imagines it will be like humanity’s outposts in Antarctica. Down there, in what truly feels like another world, scientist-explorers work in a land of gleaming and endless ice to learn more about our planet’s climate, its deep past, and its resilient life-forms. “We understand planet Earth by looking into those remote places,” he says. The moon offers a similar opportunity. What discoveries await astronauts in those primordial lava tubes? What will lunar astronomers see in the night sky—with effectively no atmosphere or light pollution in the way—that those on Earth can’t?
As in all spaceflight programs, technologies developed up there will no doubt be tweaked to be used back on Earth. And a base on the moon will make exploring the rest of the solar system easier. Technologically, physiologically, and psychologically, the moon “is a proving ground for the technologies we need for Mars,” says NASA’s García-Galán.
If we play the US-China race forward, perhaps the lunar south pole of 2100 will feature several sprawling bases operated by multiple geopolitical rivals. Perhaps it’ll be an off-world powder keg of militarized territorial ambitions and jingoism. But maybe it could instead become an international cathedral to science—and the ultimate adventure destination. “Even if countries on planet Earth have difficulty talking to each other,” says Aschbacher, they might behave differently when it comes to the moon. “I’m pretty sure they will get together and see what we can do together, and see what problems we can solve.” After all, he says, up there, far from home, “you’re so dependent on each other.”
Robin George Andrews is an award-winning science journalist and doctor of volcanoes based in London. He regularly writes about the Earth, space, and planetary sciences and is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Super Volcanoes (2021) and How to Kill an Asteroid (2024).
Though mostly visible near the Arctic Circle, the natural phenomenon dazzled sky-gazers as far south Devon, Hampshire and Kent
The northern lights illuminated the skies across the UK on Friday and Saturday evening.
Sky-gazers as far south as Devon, Hampshire and Kent were treated to the dazzling natural phenomenon, also known as the aurora borealis.
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© Photograph: James Bell/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.
© Photograph: James Bell/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.
© Photograph: James Bell/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.
NASA on Friday released a much-anticipated "request" to the US commercial space industry to develop private space stations that, as early as 2030, will succeed the International Space Station as a place for astronauts to live in low-Earth orbit.
In a cover letter accompanying the 360-page "request for proposals," NASA stated its plan: "This will ensure NASA has a sustained human presence in LEO for crew members to perform science and exploration." Several private companies that have worked for years on designing and developing such stations have been keen to learn exactly what capabilities NASA is seeking. These new documents finally provide some answers.
NASA's solicitation can be found here. Industry responses are due back to NASA on December 8. NASA said it plans to select "two or more" contractors in this phase of the competition and intends to make a final decision in April.
© NASA
Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo mission, is also planned for this year. Assuming the solid rocket boosters work, Vulcan could be poised for a major breakthrough next year in cadence.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Nuri rocket notches another success. South Korea successfully deployed five satellites for its first domestically launched microsatellite constellation during the fifth flight of its homegrown Nuri rocket Wednesday, Yonhap News Agency reports. In addition to the primary payload of five New-space Earth Observation Satellite Constellation for National Safety microsatellites, nine of the rocket's 10 CubeSat secondary payloads were released as planned, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration. PERSAT-02, developed by South Korean startup Quaternion, failed to separate from the rocket.
© United Launch Alliance
Space has plenty of room for more megaconstellations, but only if all operators are willing to share information about where their satellites are and where they're going, a top executive at SpaceX and its AI subsidiary said this week.
Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, used a presentation Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey as a clarion call for improved data-sharing among satellite operators.
SpaceX's Starlink constellation now has more than 11,000 satellites, about two-thirds of all active spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Radars and telescopes routinely track thousands more pieces of space junk.
© SpaceX
Intense flash of radio waves is more than 10bn years old and has travelled through ‘approximately 80% of cosmic history’
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a mysterious flash of energy was released into the universe.
Astronomers have now detected that flash – a burst of radio waves which travelled for more than 10bn years before reaching Earth – what they believe to be the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) ever recorded.
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© Photograph: Brendon Wainwright/Wikipedia
© Photograph: Brendon Wainwright/Wikipedia
© Photograph: Brendon Wainwright/Wikipedia
Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term "software engineering" and led the development of onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program in the 1960s, died last week at the age of 90. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, Hamilton was also immortalized as a LEGO minifig the following year—part of the "Women of NASA" set that also included astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride.
“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer—to say she was ahead of her time—would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved,” said Olivier de Weck, interim head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program’s success.”
Born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana, Hamilton graduated from Earlham College in 1958 with a degree in mathematics and a minor in philosophy—the latter a nod to her father (a poet) and grandfather (a headmaster). She married her first husband, James Cox Hamilton, that same year. The plan was for her to work until he finished his law degree, after which he would support her through graduate school to earn a PhD in mathematics.
© NASA/Public domain
The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space.
Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's debut into satellite Internet is being closely watched, not just by some consumers, but by businesses ranging from airlines to shipping companies to governments. Broadband Internet from orbit has proven broadly useful for a lot of purposes, from video games to commerce to warfighting.
But until now, most people had to buy it from Elon Musk and SpaceX. OneWeb has only offered limited services, leaving Amazon as the only real competitor to deliver high-speed Internet globally. Moreover, at the head of the company's broadband efforts is Rajeev Badyal, who led Starlink during its early years, but whom Musk fired eight years ago for moving too cautiously on Starlink.
© Amazon Leo
MIT computer scientist led development of software for moon mission and earned Presidential Medal of Freedom
Margaret Hamilton, the computer pioneer whose software powered the first moon landing, has died, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced on Wednesday. She was 90.
In an era before titles such as software engineer and computer scientist became mainstream, Hamilton, who died on 30 September, learned to program under the tutelage of a renowned MIT meteorologist.
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© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
As well as books, the new facility in Colorado offers hundreds of kits to connect people with the natural world. We asked five of the first visitors what they thought of it
Mark Fink knows exactly why he opened the first public nature library in the US. “There are a lot of barriers for people to access nature here. We want people to learn about the birds and the plants in their own back yard and to appreciate that you don’t need a three-day camping trip in the mountains to experience nature.”
The library offers people in Colorado’s Adams county the opportunity to borrow books and equipment to help them to engage with the natural world – for free.
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© Composite: Kevin Mohatt
© Composite: Kevin Mohatt
© Composite: Kevin Mohatt
It's no surprise that NASA's new tack toward foreign partnerships—good deals only, please—is challenging preconceived notions of international cooperation in space.
Without a massive budget hike, the US space agency's emphasis on building a Moon Base and winning a competition for lunar real estate and resources with China will inevitably leave lesser priorities behind.
Gone is the Lunar Gateway, a space station that was to be assembled in orbit around the Moon. For the United States, Gateway was an unnecessary distraction and expense as NASA goes all-in on placing a surface station near the Moon's south pole.
© AEI/MM/Exozet
As a flight director during NASA's Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust your colleagues in the trenches.
"When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry," Griffin said in an interview. "With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference."
© NASA
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Milt Windler, one of the four leaders of Mission Control who in 1970 directed the round-the-clock efforts to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth safely, has died at the age of 94.
Windler died on Thursday, surrounded by his loving family, according to a brief notice posted online.
Named a NASA flight director in 1968 after working on recovery operations during the Mercury and Gemini programs, Windler also led a shift of flight controllers for the Apollo 8 first circumlunar flight and Apollo 10 lunar landing dress rehearsal, as well as the second, third and fourth moon landings — Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15. He then served as a flight director for all three crewed missions to the United States' first space station, Skylab.
© NASA
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In late 1970, a Titan IIIC rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at what was then called Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried a top-secret payload for the US military.
Much has changed in spaceflight since then. The Titan IIIC would bow out in 1982 after dozens of launches. Various Titans continued launching from Space Launch Complex 40 until 2005, at which point the US Air Force—in a competitive process hotly opposed by United Launch Alliance—turned the pad over to a small, largely unknown startup called SpaceX. And Cape Canaveral is now a "Space Force" station.
But those unspecified payloads? Until last month, some of them were still flying operationally.
© ULA/Carleton Bailie
Welcome to Edition 9.13 of the Rocket Report!
This week, SpaceX celebrated the first orbital launch of its new Starship rocket. I'm not sure many people, at least those outside of SpaceX, expected it to take 14 flights of Starship before it technically reached low-Earth orbit, but Monday morning's launch finally added that to SpaceX's list of accomplishments with its new super-heavy rocket. Starship had gone 99 percent of the way to orbit before, only held back by safety concerns around the possibility of stranding the huge rocket in space.
What was most notable for SpaceX with this Starship flight was that it unlocked a massive growth potential for Starlink, with the first 26 of the network's new-generation Starlink V3 satellites successfully deployed Monday.
© SpaceX
A four-person crew rocketed into orbit Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, heading for a six-month expedition on the International Space Station.
Riding a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, the four crew members departed from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral at 11:10 am EDT (15:10 UTC) Thursday. Nine minutes later, they were in orbit to begin closing in on the space station for docking Thursday evening.
The launch was delayed from mid-September to replace a balky valve in the Dragon spacecraft's propulsion system, a task that involved cutting into a propellant line inside the ship to swap out a faulty component.
© SpaceX
A year or two ago, a few Canadian launch companies were trying to develop small rockets, but if we're being frank, the industry was not particularly notable. Sure, something interesting might eventually happen, but no one outside of a few Canadian space geeks was paying much attention.
But then the Trump Administration started threatening and instituting tariffs. There was talk of making Canada the 51st state. And pretty much every Canadian I know began telling me how enraged they were at their neighbors to the south. It's hard to blame them.
This has led the Canadian government to reassess all manner of areas where it had previously been happy to rely largely on the US government and American companies for goods and services. This included sovereign access to space. So this spring, the government announced the first awards to three companies—NordSpace, Reaction Dynamics, and Canada Rocket Company—to support work on rockets with "light lift" capability.
© Canada Rocket Company
An attempt to save NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from dropping out of orbit fell short, but the behind-the-scenes machinations required just to make a rescue possible deserve recognition, government and commercial space officials said in a recounting of the mission.
The rescue mission was developed by Katalyst Space Technologies, working under a $30 million contract awarded by NASA last September. NASA gave Katalyst nine months to build and launch a satellite to capture Swift flying some 200 miles above the Earth and boost it into a higher orbit.
Katalyst's rescue spacecraft, known as Link, successfully launched July 3 and completed some of its initial checkouts before a malfunction caused it to spin out of control a few weeks later. NASA announced in August that Link would not be able to reach Swift as intended, and the rescue mission was aborted.
© NASA/Sophia Roberts
In what seems like an alternate universe in hindsight, Russia and the European Space Agency began discussing collaboration on next-generation crewed spacecraft two decades ago. Under the agreement, Europe would have provided a service module to power a crew capsule carrying up to six passengers.
Europe ultimately decided not to pursue a crewed spacecraft project at the time, and Russia's state-backed space corporation, Roscosmos, chose to move ahead with a crewed spacecraft on its own. This project—always seemingly more of a Potemkin village than an effort encompassing real hardware—has gone under various guises over the years:
Beyond the name changes and a flood of renderings, after nearly 20 years of work, then, is anything actually happening with the Eagle spacecraft?
© Contributor/Getty Images
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A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029.
It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. And the spacecraft will follow a novel trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics research lab. PSI is launching today with $58 million in funding led by Breakthrough Energy, a climate-focused investment group founded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
It’s not the first time this has been tried. In 2016, the billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner announced an interstellar mission called Breakthrough Starshot to launch humanity’s first spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. The plan was to use powerful lasers that would propel tiny probes to a fifth of the speed of light—fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri within 20 years. Milner pledged $100 million toward a proof of concept. But a decade later, nothing has launched.
“We didn’t want to do another Breakthrough Starshot,” says Philip Johnston, the cofounder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission. “We’re dead set on something actually launching.”
To do that, “we are not constraining ourselves to doing it in a human lifetime,” says Johnston. “Let’s just figure out the way to get to another star.”
The new mission, currently funded by individual private donors, is expected to cost just $15 million. The spacecraft will carry cargo weighing at least one kilogram. That will include artistic and scientific payloads, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record, a gold-plated disc of Earth’s sounds and images that NASA attached to its two Voyager probes in 1977 as a message to any civilization that might find them.
Engineering an interstellar journey is extremely difficult. Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles away from Earth. One of the fastest objects that humans have ever launched, the Voyager 1 probe, has been flying since 1977 and has covered less than 1% percent of that distance. At its speed, the trip would take more than 70,000 years.
Johnston and his team spent a year trying, and failing, to find a way for a small, solar-powered spacecraft costing only $15 million to reach Alpha Centauri. They kept running into the knotty problem of how to give the spacecraft enough power without making it too heavy (and thus more fuel-guzzling).
After the Fermi team struggled to find a workable route, Johnston mentioned the problem in a podcast hosted by Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist who cofounded PSI. Wissner-Gross offered to run it through an AI system the lab developed, called Get Physics Done. It’s open-source software that takes a physics research question, breaks it into smaller tasks, and decides which simulations to run, using AI models including Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s GPT.
A week later, the AI system turned up a novel trajectory, to Johnston’s surprise. It combined well-known orbital maneuvers in a way the Fermi team had not considered, according to a paper that has not been peer-reviewed. It suggested that the spacecraft could first slow down so its orbit swings in close to the sun—closer than Mercury. On each close pass, it would fire its engine so that the solar panels get four times the light, and a burst of thrust delivered at high speed would buy more energy than the same burst anywhere else. Because the engine would run only near the sun, the solar panels could stay small and the spacecraft light.
The system conducted the research mostly on its own for three days, running on a billion tokens, says Matt Pines, the cofounder and CEO of PSI. An astrophysicist on PSI’s staff steered it to follow the mission’s requirements, asked for a cost analysis and clearer charts, and checked the output for errors.
“The fact that it came up with an entirely different mission profile, one that was creative and not one [the Fermi team] had considered—that was the more surprising aspect,” says Pines. Still, the model lacks a human researcher’s judgment and taste, he says. It has no reliable sense of which problems are interesting or which approaches are worth pursuing, so it often gets stuck chasing dead ends or failing to explore different approaches. “I don’t think we’ve yet figured out how these models can internally represent something like that,” he says of research judgment.
Even if the Fermi probe launches, “we’re pretty confident that we will not be the first to arrive” at Alpha Centauri, says Johnston, since he expects spacecraft technology to improve. If an engine a thousand years from now is even 20% faster than today’s, a spacecraft launched then would still beat Fermi’s probe to Alpha Centauri by more than 10,000 years.
But the Fermi project isn’t just an interstellar mission driven by engineering ambition. It’s also a quest to answer one of the oldest open questions in physics. In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi posed a puzzle: The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, most of them far older than our sun. Even a civilization traveling slowly between stars could spread across the whole galaxy in a few million years, which pales in comparison to how old the galaxy is. If there is intelligent life somewhere, we should have seen signs of its existence by now.
That means either reaching for another star is too difficult or other intelligent species simply haven’t bothered. But once the Fermi probe launches, we will become a civilization that can and wants to reach another star, meaning that neither explanation might be what’s keeping the galaxy unexplored. That could point us toward more unsettling possibilities, says Johnston. Maybe life like ours is almost unimaginably rare. Or maybe intelligent life is common but tends to die out before it can spread.
If the latter is true, “one of those reasons could be that once you hit superintelligence, that for some reason is self-destructive,” says Johnston. “Maybe in the next 50 years, there’s some great filter that we do not pass through. That all intelligent civilizations, for some reason, do not pass through.”
A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study.
Later this year, the US company Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite called Eärendil-1 that will extend an 18-by-18-meter mirror in orbit. The goal is to test the feasibility of the company’s plans to launch up to 50,000 larger satellites, measuring 54 by 54 meters, and reflect sunlight to Earth on demand.
The case for doing this remains somewhat uncertain, but Reflect Orbital has said the goal is to prolong the hours of sunlight for various uses, including solar panel charging, emergency response, and military activities.
The launch, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in July, has been met with disbelief by astronomers and environmental groups. “This is incompatible with astronomy,” says Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada. “There is no way you can do this and preserve dark skies.”
Miroslav Kocifaj, an astronomer at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues have now calculated the broader effect on the night sky. In a new paper published online and accepted for publication in the space journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, they studied the extent to which the light the satellites beamed to the ground would scatter.
They found that within the beam’s target area, intended to be a circular patch five kilometers across, a single Reflect Orbital satellite would appear about 40 times brighter than the full moon in the sky. As far as 14 kilometers away from the center of the beam, the satellite would still be as bright as the full moon.
Combining the beams of 400 satellites, which Reflect Orbital eventually plans to do, would yield a light as bright as 10,000 full moons within the five-kilometer area, or 2.4% as bright as the sun. Even up to 80 kilometers away, Kocifaj and his colleagues calculated, this combined beam would be visible as “a glow above the horizon,” he says. That means the night sky would be altered for many more people than those within the area Reflect Orbital intends to illuminate.
“Deploying these mirrors would be seriously damaging for astronomy and for the nighttime environment,” says Kocifaj.“ The damage extends far beyond the target area.”
Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, says the results of the paper are not surprising but are still useful. “These guys are really good at that kind of modeling,” he says. “They know what they’re doing.”
Hainaut had previously modeled the broader effect of Reflect Orbital’s beams, finding they would brighten the sky up to 300% worldwide. This latest work gives an even more complete picture of what the impact would be. “These two papers really cover most of it,” he says.
Reflect Orbital CEO Ben Nowack disagrees with the findings of Kocifaj’s paper. “Some assumptions are simply inaccurate,” he says. “The critical point is that our safeguards, including maintaining exclusion zones, take account of scattering.”
He says that the company has “engaged substantively with legitimate concerns raised by astronomers, environmental researchers, and scientists,” and that their feedback has “informed our technology and operational plans.”
Kocifaj says that Reflect Orbital has not provided data to back up its claims. The company “states that safeguards exist, that scattering is taken into account, and that the models are being updated, but it gives no numbers, no description of the model, no assumptions, and no data,” he says. “There is therefore nothing that can be engaged with technically. Our calculations produce concrete figures.”
Reflect Orbital’s intention is to place its satellites into highly inclined orbits above Earth, almost from pole to pole. This will enable them to reflect sunlight in the hours before sunrise and after sunset, extending daylight hours in certain locations. Eventually, the company has said, it wants to place satellites high enough to provide light 24-7 to locations on Earth.
In August, a group of organisations including DarkSky International and the American Bird Conservancy urged the FCC to review its approval of the Eärendil-1 satellite. As well as the impact on astronomy raised by this and future satellites, the group also highlighted potential negative consequences for aviation and wildlife.
“Our primary request is straightforward: Reverse the Space Bureau’s order, and require a lawful public-interest and NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] review,” the group said in a statement.
The satellites could also pose risks to humans, according to Reflect Orbital itself. In a filing with the FCC in March, the company said that observing Eärendil-1 with a telescope larger than 12 inches —which many astronomers have access to—may be unsafe for human eyes. It added, though, that such observations are “unlikely to … result in significant injury” because the satellites are not constantly bright.
Currently there is no global entity that could regulate satellites such as these, so approval falls to national regulators such as the FCC in the US. Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer at the University of Mississippi’s School of Law, says there are “real benefits” to the plans proposed by Reflect Orbital. “It could extend the productive hours of solar facilities and provide light in remote areas or after a disaster,” she says.
However, the “legal basis is less clear than the technology,” she says. The FCC “does not have authority to license or regulate the operation of the solar reflector itself.” It can only authorize the use of radio frequencies to communicate with the spacecraft.
That means Reflect Orbital will need permission on a national and local level to reflect sunlight onto the ground, but if the beams spread as much as Kocifaj and his team predict, “the company could need approvals in more than one jurisdiction,” says Hanlon. “There may also be aviation-safety and cross-border questions.”
The fierce debate over the satellites shows no signs of abating. “It makes me sad that astronomers are having to spend their time doing these sorts of calculations rather than actually doing astronomy,” says Lawler. “This is not what we want to spend our time on.”
© LandSpace/Xinhua, via Associated Press
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles.
While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of Apollo 11—a spectacle that 20% of the world population watched live—Artemis II still attracted massive public interest. It drew tens of millions of viewers and inspired outpourings of “moon joy,” a term coined spontaneously during the mission that became a viral sensation.
The expedition is only the first in a planned series of ambitious missions. The Artemis program aims to establish a human base on the south pole of the moon, operated by the US and its international and commercial partners, during the 2030s. China and Russia have teamed up to build their own crewed lunar base in the same region and on a similar timeline. Meanwhile, companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX hope to lock down the burgeoning extraterrestrial tourism market by flying civilian astronauts on private missions, with the long-term dream of taking them to the moon—or even Mars.
But some overarching questions about this new era of space exploration linger, including perhaps the most existential one of all: What’s the point? Launching humans into space is dangerous and expensive, and it’s unclear whether it can deliver a better return on investment than we’d get if we were to send robots in our stead to make scientific discoveries or to conduct commercial activities, such as mining.
Since the dawn of human spaceflight, this line of questioning has been met with countless answers. We go to space for geopolitical prestige, manifest destiny, spiritual fulfillment, scientific curiosity, and, increasingly, business opportunities.
In the wake of Artemis II, a slew of new books suggest that these justifications are subsumed by one unifying fact: Humans have itchy feet, and we are simply wired to roam. No matter the merits of any single rationale for sending people to space, they are all downstream of the basic evolutionary instinct to expand and adapt, which may not require much rational explanation at all.
Indeed, in her new book, The Ultraview Effect, the space anthropologist Deana L. Weibel frames human space exploration as an extension of our ancient compulsion to embark on pilgrimages, often facing perilous obstacles, in order to experience revelations about our universe. Eiman Jahangir, who recounts his journey to space with Blue Origin in A Heart for Space, is one of a growing number of these new-age civilian space pilgrims. And in his memoir Dinner with an Astronaut, coauthored with writer Victoria Bruce, former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao concludes that people simply “need to know what’s on the other side.”
“We go into space because we want to explore,” Weibel told me. “We want to see what it’s like to walk on another world.”
This simple motivation for human spaceflight is usually framed as aspirational: Explore new places, break new ground, adapt environments to suit our needs. But as our presence in space expands, we are bound to bring along the same human foibles that have stymied us on Earth. Frontiers like the moon and Mars will no longer be some hazy dreamlands onto which we can project our hopes, values, and favorite visions from science fiction. They will be workspaces for astronauts, places of commerce, military domains, tourist destinations, and heritage sites.
How we deal with all that is, literally, up in the air. At the moment, a relatively small group of players in human spaceflight have an outsize role in determining the path forward, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk standing as the most conspicuous example. But shrugging off the drive to leave Earth as an itch for exploration and domination that only nation-states and the ultrarich can scratch won’t cut it any more. Now is the time for everyone who cares about space exploration, no matter their backgrounds, to advocate for their own visions of our off-Earth future—before it is decided for them.
During the Apollo era, the justification for blasting astronauts into space was clear-cut: brinkmanship. As Cold War tensions peaked in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had every reason to demonstrate their technological prowess through human spaceflight.
To be sure, the feat of sending humans to the moon inspired millions of people, many of whom went on to work in science and engineering. Chiao credits his own career as an astronaut to the Apollo 11 landing, which he watched, riveted, as an eight-year-old child in Wichita, Kansas. Decades later, he flew three space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station.
But while early milestones were met with giddy excitement, the space race was fundamentally animated by an implicit threat. Whichever nation proved superior in space could easily trade nuclear warheads for the astronauts it was launching on rockets that were essentially modified missiles.
Fortunately, we are no longer on the brink of nuclear war <knock on wood>. NASA is, however, making an overt case that America is embroiled in a new space race, this time with China. Whereas the US and the USSR used spaceflight as a symbolic proxy for global technological dominance, Chiao told me in an interview that the new first-place prize could be uncontested access to valuable resources such as water, which could be sourced from ice patches on the south pole of the moon.
Space law prohibits any nation from owning part of the moon, but these aging rules are about to endure road testing. Both the US and China plan to establish bases on the lunar south pole designed to support human crews for long periods. These outposts will inevitably be powered by nuclear reactors, so safety will require exclusion zones around them.
The desire to spread our species beyond the planet is about more than technocratic bragging rights. It’s also ancient, primal, and perhaps unstoppable.
As a result, there could be a first-mover advantage to setting up shop on the most resource-rich patches of the moon, even if a nation never officially owns them. This is all speculative at the moment, and many skeptics in the legal, political, financial, and public spheres have cast doubt on the idea that a thriving market for space resources will materialize—at least in the near term.
Still, the rough contours of a human spaceflight economy—reaching to the surface of the moon and perhaps beyond—are beginning to take shape, and governments aren’t the only ones with plans to capitalize. Musk ultimately wants SpaceX to launch millions of civilians into orbit and eventually establish a permanent settlement on Mars. Whether or not those grand visions pan out, the company continues to make moves toward space tourism. Meanwhile, Blue Origin, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, has ferried more than 80 civilians on brief flights into suborbital space, including Star Trek icon William Shatner; pop star Katy Perry; and Jahangir, a cardiologist whose book describes the realization of a lifelong dream.
Jahangir, who was born in Iran and grew up in Tennessee, worked tirelessly for years to qualify as an astronaut with NASA but never made the cut. He finally got his chance to leave Earth after winning a raffle for a seat on Blue Origin’s New Shepard–26 mission, which achieved a 10-minute flight to an altitude of 65 miles in August 2024.
For Jahangir, the flight was the ultimate pilgrimage. “To get to those ten minutes took forty years of dreaming and twenty years of hustling,” he writes in his memoir. “It was not the future I expected, growing up with plans to be a NASA astronaut, but it was the future I was given, and one I am grateful for.”
While these forays are personally fulfilling, from a business standpoint the core purpose of space tourism is, as ever, to turn a profit. And there are signs of some public discomfort with the increasing commodification of human spaceflight. Take, for example, the intense backlash to the all-female Blue Origin mission that flew celebrity passengers like Perry, journalist Gayle King, Bezos’s now-wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, and several others in April 2025. The attempt to brand the mission as a feminist milestone was mercilessly mocked online, hinting that questions about who gets to go to space, how they get there, and what they take away from the experience may inspire more acrimony and debate as these flights become increasingly common.
Space visionaries are currently testing next-generation rockets, drawing up blueprints for moon bases, and racing to claim a stake in the future of human spaceflight. But the desire to spread our species beyond the planet is about more than technocratic bragging rights. It’s also ancient, primal, and perhaps unstoppable. And that isn’t a bad thing—harnessed properly, it could have benefits for our lives not just in space but on Earth.
Weibel, who studies pilgrimages through an anthropological lens, points to the deep roots of our human yearning to voyage to a hallowed spot and be transformed. For decades, she has chronicled the stories of pilgrims who seek out the Black Madonna statue in the village of Rocamadour in southwestern France. The sculpture sits in a chapel built into a cliff, so visitors experience a sense of vertigo intermixed with spiritual wonder.
Weibel’s “ultraview effect” is the cosmic version of this sensation—a spin on the overview effect, a term coined by the space philosopher Frank White to describe the revelatory experience of viewing Earth from orbit. The ultraview effect turns the astronautic gaze in the other direction, out into the incomprehensible immensity of the universe. Spacefarers report a feeling that is awesome and sublime in the old senses of those words: Their wonder is tempered by alienation, incomprehension, and what the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke termed “delightful horror.”
“These moments of wonder or strangeness, such as the ultraview effect,” are “when we realize the extent of the vast mysteries we are not equipped to understand,” Weibel writes.
As if to make her point, at a NASA briefing in April, Reid Wiseman, the commander of Artemis II, recalled seeing the moon eclipse the sun from lunar space and telling a crewmate that he didn’t think “humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now.”
The story that initially inspired The Ultraview Effect came from the same distant location, the far side of the moon—though it occurred decades ago. Weibel recounts her conversations with “Zack,” an Apollo command module pilot whose name was changed for anonymity. Turning away from the moon, Zack gazed out into the dizzying endlessness of space, with all the lights on his spacecraft switched off so he was “dark-adjusted.” But the takeaway was the same. “It changed my view of infinity,” Zack told Weibel. “Infinity is just something beyond what we can contemplate. So that changes your outlook on everything.”
Even without full immersion into darkness, suborbital passengers on commercial flights have reported a touch of what might be described as the ultraview effect. For instance, Shatner was clearly rattled after his Blue Origin flight in 2021. He described Earth’s skies as a “comforter of blue” and our planet as “mother” and “life,” but looking away from our world, he saw only a “black ugliness.”
“Was that death?” he asked. “Is that the way death is?”
Likewise, Jahangir was struck by the contrast between the classic overview effect and its ultraview corollary. Earth “was brighter than anything I had imagined,” he writes in A Heart for Space. “Then I shifted my gaze up just slightly and saw the vastness and darkness of space. It was the blackest black I have ever seen, like staring into an inkwell. I just gazed, unable to comprehend what was before me and knowing that our atmosphere, our Earth, is home—a home we should protect at all costs.”
These anecdotes transcend any practical argument for human spaceflight: The constant jockeying for “top dog” status, the allure of unfathomable revenue, or the spinoff technologies that could lead to scientific breakthroughs. Pull off those layers and you have the hero’s journey. Across eras and cultures, some people simply feel the need to chase the horizon. Often, pilgrims in history and legend never return home. But when they do, they tend to bring back wisdom and guidance for a better world.
For Elon Musk, the hero’s journey means expanding human life to Mars and beyond, to find a permanent presence among the stars. As Weibel explains, this idea is not new. For centuries, space visionaries have cast human space exploration as the final phase of our maturation as a species, a sentiment the Russian rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky summed up by declaring, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”
The dream of an interstellar Earthling diaspora, one that could guarantee our continuation as a species, is hugely appealing, both as grist for science fiction and as a road map for our human future. But for Chiao, who is stoic on these matters, deliverance in space is a mirage.
“It’s important to develop a way to deflect asteroids and develop a way to have humans sustainably live on a place like Mars, but to me, at some point we end,” he told me. “I know it sounds a bit odd, but there’s some comfort in that knowledge. We’re not in this race to save ourselves. There seems to be order in the universe, and probably every group of intelligent life has its own cycle. It’s okay to be extinct.”
In that scenario, our robotic spacecraft may outlive us. Even now, they are our most daring emissaries: They can surf the sun, explore hostile planets, and even break into the interstellar frontier. But while these spacecraft are our scouts, many people will always prefer to see themselves in space. “People identify when there’s a human out there doing it,” Chiao told me. “We’re just thrilled and amazed to see what comes back from these robotic probes, but I think you need both.”
Weibel points out that during the Apollo era, robotic spacecraft took pictures of Earth from lunar orbit. But it wasn’t until Bill Anders, an astronaut on board Apollo 8, snapped the famous “Earthrise” shot that the otherworldly view really hit home for the public. Similar shots from the Artemis II astronauts went viral, including a picture of Christina Koch gazing through the spacecraft window at Earth.
There are lots of reasons for humans to stay grounded, from the dangerous nature of spaceflight to the medical complications of long-term radiation exposure to the gargantuan expense. But it is unlikely we will stay put on Earth, even if we never make it far—for the same reason our ancestors crossed deserts, oceans, and mountains.
“Knowing somebody’s been there and can tell us about it when they come back—that’s a whole other level of it that makes it more compelling,” Weibel told me. “I’m not 100% sure why,” she adds, “but we trust witness testimony.”
Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in upstate New York and the author of First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens.
Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild travel dreams into reality. Over two decades as co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has orchestrated everything from the construction of a client’s superyacht to vacations in the Bahamas at a location so private that guests must sign an NDA.
The experiences earned him “the ear,” he says, “of the ultra-high-net-worth audience.” It also led to a life-changing phone call: In 2018, Axiom Space wanted to find citizen explorers willing to pay $50 million each to join the first fully private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), slated for April 2022.
This showed Chiporukha that the sky was no longer the limit; it was the market. He successfully signed up a private astronaut and then launched SpaceVIP in 2021 to offer celestial experiences that mix culture, science, and purpose.
Here’s what it takes to become the Expedia of the cosmos.
Chiporukha isn’t an astronaut or aerospace engineer, so he had to fast-track his own education on the nuances of commercial spaceflight. To help private citizens skip the rocket-science headache, he has wrangled the highly fragmented space sector into a single, seamless digital portal, so adventurers can investigate suborbital flights and far-out itineraries as effortlessly as they would a weekend getaway. But he insists they still need an expert fixer who can secure “the perks, the custom requests, and the upgrades.”
SpaceVIP receives dozens of inquires a month, but Chiporukha helps just a small, exclusive roster design custom adventures based on their budgets and physical comfort zones. Acting as a bridge between starry-eyed dreamers and strict aerospace parameters, he works with operators like Axiom for multiday stays on the ISS, and with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic for other excursions. Spacefarers can choose, for example, a zero-gravity parabolic flight or a smooth six-hour voyage aboard a stratospheric balloon 15 miles above Earth—an option he says is “relatively affordable,” if you’re a person for whom a few hundred thousand dollars isn’t that much.
Making space travel widespread is an uphill climb in terms of cost and technology. But, Chiporukha adds, more people simply need to be interested. He cofounded the Space Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that runs science competitions for young women and groups underrepresented in STEM. Winners get zero-gravity flights and entry into immersive astronaut-training programs. “Making space more mainstream isn’t just about bringing down the cost of a ticket,” he says. “It’s about creating pathways into the industry and helping people understand that this future shouldn’t belong to a tiny group.”
Correction (August 17): An earlier version of this article said that Chiporukha signed up three private astronauts for the ISS, instead of one, before founding SpaceVIP.
Linda Childers is a California-based freelance journalist who writes about science, education, and health.
At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its goal is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos. But Roman could also serve another purpose: defending Earth from killer asteroids. In September, a multi-institutional team of planetary scientists and astronomers will outline how the space telescope is uniquely placed to scan asteroids and provide information about their trajectories, sizes, and compositions.
Roman, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, is equipped with a super-wide-angle, 300-megapixel infrared camera, allowing it to see a large patch of space at any one time—roughly 100 times larger than is possible with the Hubble Space Telescope. That will allow it to discover thousands of new planets and tens of thousands of exploding stars, and survey over a billion galaxies in remarkable detail.
While doing so, it’ll be looking “through” our solar system, and this is what makes it uniquely well placed to spot asteroids.
Roman was not built for this purpose, but last summer, it was (once again) threatened with significant funding cuts by the Trump administration. “My colleague Rick Cosentino [a planetary scientist at NASA] said to me in July 2025 that we need to show what Roman can do for planetary defense as a way to further increase the visibility of the mission with lawmakers and taxpayers,” says Bryan Holler, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Holler and his colleagues’ proposal, which will be presented at the Europlanet Science Congress at The Hague, reveals that Roman’s epic field of view and infrared vision allow it to spot small asteroids up to 60 feet long. This is comparable to the asteroid that exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, unleashing the force of 500,000 tons of TNT and sending 1,500 people to the hospital.
Roman’s software will need some tweaking to spy space rocks. The telescope, as designed, will see through—and beyond—the solar system in order to gather the clearest possible pictures of the rest of the universe. “Streaks, whether caused by cosmic rays or glitches or asteroids, are caught by the software and discarded,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist and planetary defense researcher at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. But astronomers could go in, study those streaks, and pick out those they identify as asteroids.
Even with those potential adjustments, Roman won’t be an asteroid-finding wunderkind on its own. Its strength lies in its ability to complement the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), another observatory that’s built to peer at galaxies and stars in the far reaches of the universe. It can also intensely focus on a single asteroid when needed—as it did last year, playing a key role in tracking 2024 YR4, which was briefly the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered. “But Roman’s field of view is much bigger,” says Rivkin.
That means it could look at multiple questionable asteroids very quickly. “Roman can provide infrared observations of more asteroids than JWST could hope to observe in a reasonable amount of observing time,” says Holler.
If those asteroids are found to be benign travelers, we can relax. But if they might collide with Earth, other telescopes—including JWST—can follow up from Roman’s observations. Those observations could give experts the information they need to assess the likely damage of an upcoming asteroid strike—or to launch a mission to attempt to swat an asteroid away.
“Roman will sample such a large volume of the cosmos that we’ve long known it will offer vast opportunities for a range of additional science,” says Alise Fisher, the astrophysics communications lead at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, and its partners across the world, are chiefly worried about asteroids 460 feet long and larger. Around 25,000 of those are estimated to have near-Earth orbits, and just over half have yet to be found. Should one hit a city, much of it would be destroyed or irreversibly damaged in a heartbeat. Astronomers estimate that there are also 230,000 or so 165-foot-long asteroids orbiting close to Earth, and fewer than 10% have been located. A strike on a city from one of those might not annihilate it, but it would unleash a force comparable to that of a large atomic bomb, albeit without the radiation.
Such an asteroid could theoretically be deflected (by ramming a spacecraft into it) or vaporized (perhaps using a nuclear weapon). But planetary defenders need to know where they are first, which is why NASA funds a network of ground-based telescopes designed to seek them out. They work well, but there’s only so much of the night sky they can see, and Earth’s atmosphere peskily gets in their way.
That’s why NASA is launching the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor space telescope in 2027. By positioning itself between Earth and the sun, it’ll find many elusive asteroids that ground-based telescopes cannot see. And unlike many of its asteroid-seeking cousins, it’ll see in infrared, not visible light. Not only do asteroids show up more clearly in infrared, but seeing them through this lens gives scientists a considerably better measure of their size. In a matter of years, it could find 90% of the city-killer-size asteroids in near-Earth orbits.
NEO Surveyor is explicitly a planetary defense observatory. But it’ll work with other telescopes with more science-minded missions, including Roman and JWST (both of which conveniently have infrared scopes too) as well as the Vera Rubin Observatory, which just began its 10-year survey of the entire night sky from atop a mountain in Chile. As part of its inventory of the cosmos, it’s expected to discover 89,000 near-Earth asteroids.
Here’s how they might all work together. Say NEO Surveyor spies an asteroid that, to judge from a few observations, has a chance of impacting Earth. Then it finds five more just like it. Those initial observations leave a lot of uncertainty about their orbits. Roman, with its huge field of view, could be commanded to look at the corner of the night sky that includes all those asteroids, and in a matter of days it could improve the precision by several orders of magnitude.
Roman also occupies a different part of space from both NEO Surveyor and the Rubin observatory. “Those slightly different viewing angles will also help narrow orbits down more quickly than if all objects were looking from the same place,” says Holler.
Perhaps five of those potentially hazardous asteroids are found to stand no chance of colliding with Earth for the foreseeable future. One, however, might not be able to be ruled out—and that’s when other telescopes, including JWST, could be asked to track it down and study it further.
“Telescope resources, whether in space or on the ground, are typically oversubscribed and will not be available to follow up on all [near-Earth asteroids] with a non-zero impact probability when they are first discovered,” says Holler. Roman, then, will help scientists “make sure we follow up on the correct targets.”
Roman’s infrared scope also allows it to offer a decent estimate of an asteroid’s size and can even tell whether it’s a stony rock, a puffy and watery carbon-rich rock, or a metallic one. “This in turn provides strong clues to the composition and thereby the density and mass of the asteroid, which are important when estimating the impact damage or, less ghoulishly, the effort required to nudge it out of its current orbit,” says Holler.
Roman won’t play the lead role in protecting Earth in the way NEO Surveyor will. But while it’s seeking out supernovas and planets scooting around other stars, it will also be doing its part to protect all 8 billion of us from a cosmic catastrophe.
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