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During a lengthy news conference on Friday, NASA provided a detailed overview of how it plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2028 as part of its Artemis Program.
Although much of the information behind these plans has been previously reported at Ars Technica and elsewhere, this marked the first time NASA has laid them out in detail and acknowledged some substantial changes in the architecture.
Most notably, for SpaceX's Starship vehicle, the revised plan calls for the Orion spacecraft to dock with the Starship lunar lander in high-Earth orbit before transiting to the Moon. And for Blue Origin, the mission architecture includes four launches of the New Glenn rocket, but no spacecraft-to-spacecraft refuelings. Additionally, the Blue Origin plans allows for the possibility of its Blue Moon lander rendezvousing with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.
Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX's Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.
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.
Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.
Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth, a daring international project that could yield new insights into the formation of the Solar System.
The robotic Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, lifted off at 3:41 pm EDT Monday (4:41 am Japan Standard Time Tuesday) from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.
The MMX spacecraft rode into orbit atop a 207-foot-tall (63-meter) H3 rocket, Japan's flagship launch vehicle. The rocket assigned to MMX debuted a new souped-up configuration with four strap-on solid rocket boosters, full-throttle main engines, and an extended payload shroud to accommodate the demands of Japan's heaviest and most ambitious interplanetary mission to date.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For two decades, largely in service to the International Space Station, NASA has sought to foster an "economy" in low-Earth orbit.
Twenty years ago, with a program to develop private spacecraft for cargo delivery to the space station, NASA sought to "stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and operate safe, reliable, and cost-effective commercial space transportation systems." In recent years this has expanded to creating an entire commercial ecosystem in orbit, with transportation, space stations, manufacturing, tourism, and more, such that NASA is one of many customers in the market.
In April 2024, the space agency explicitly laid out its philosophy: "NASA supports a robust commercial space economy that advances American industry and promotes technological discovery through in-space work and research. NASA remains committed to fostering innovation and collaboration within the American space industry."
NASA announced on Monday that it will exercise options to purchase two additional flights on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, as well as financially support the company in its efforts to return the crewed vehicle to flight and find a new rocket after the Atlas V vehicle retires.
The space agency's announcement confirms reporting by Ars Technica earlier this month on NASA's plans to maintain access to low-Earth orbit after the impending retirement of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle.
"I do not think it's a secret that SpaceX intends to sunset older platforms like Falcon and Dragon as they concentrate on their next-generation capability, Starship," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference on Monday afternoon.
Recently, the astronauts on board the International Space Station performed a routine "walk-off" maneuver with the large, 58-foot-long robotic arm attached to the orbiting laboratory.
The robotic arm, known as Canadarm2 because it was supplied by the Canadian Space Agency, is something of a modern engineering miracle—it can effectively move around the exterior of the large space station like an inchworm because both ends are essentially identical.
However, after this particular walk-off maneuver, the robotic arm, along with the mobile transporter that guides it along the main truss of the space station, engineers noted some issues with operations.
The first in a new class of space telescopes is on track to reach the launch pad in the early 2030s, NASA announced this week.
The PRIMA mission will be the first of NASA's Probe Explorers, a new line of observatories intended to do more science for less money. The agency's space telescopes typically fall into lower-cost "Explorer-class" missions, with cost caps in the range of a few hundred million dollars, or flagship observatories like the recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which came with a price tag of some $4.3 billion.
With the Probe Explorers, NASA officials seek to find a better balance between the smaller Explorer missions and multibillion-dollar flagships. NASA has studied potential Probe Explorer mission concepts for several years after an independent panel of scientists recommended the new mission category. But it wasn't clear until recently whether NASA's science budget, which is under pressure from the Trump administration, would be sufficient to actually start developing one.
Did you know that the first character that Walt Disney created to specifically appear on television was inspired, in part, by early Space Age rocket scientists?
On this day 65 years ago (September 24, 1961), Disney introduced the "renowned scientist, lecturer, psychologist [and] world traveler," Ludwig Von Drake. A member of the Duck family (he is the "brilliant and eccentric" uncle of Donald Duck), Von Drake was "the outstanding genius of the century" (per Disney himself) who helped to explain scientific principles and technological concepts to the millions of people who tuned in every Sunday to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on NBC.
A few years later, after expertly (but often absent-mindedly) addressing topics such as how color television works, the health benefits of exercising, and the history of aviation, Von Drake dove into the topic for which he said he wrote the book on, in the February 10, 1963, episode "Inside Outer Space."
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In a forthcoming memoir, former US politician and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson offers a blistering assessment of China, saying the United States must do all it can to retain its leadership in space exploration.
"Beijing's intended strategy is to dominate the high ground of the twenty-first century," writes Nelson in Space Odyssey, a book to be published by Harper Horizon in January 2027.
A former Congressman and Senator from Florida, Nelson served as a mission specialist on a space shuttle flight in 1986 and later as NASA administrator from May 2021 to January 2025 under President Biden. The book largely focuses on his space policy work in Congress and his tenure as NASA's leader.
NASA must be more selective in the way it forges international partnerships as the race to the Moon transforms from a battle for national prestige between the United States and China into a high-stakes competition for extraterrestrial real estate and resources, the agency's administrator said.
Jared Isaacman, now in his 10th month at the helm of the world's largest civilian space agency, told a gathering of military leaders and defense contractors last week near Washington, DC, that the 21st-century race to the Moon is more than a battle of ideologies. The sweet spot for a Moon base, Isaacman said, is a relatively small region near the lunar south pole, and there are tangible implications for who gets there first.
The Moon's south pole harbors substantial quantities of water ice concentrated on the floors of craters away from the reach of sublimating rays of sunlight. The ice inside these eternally dark craters could be used to supply water, air, and rocket fuel for a Moon base, supporting a permanent settlement and providing a springboard for future expeditions to Mars.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gliding toward its distant observation post on a pinpoint trajectory so precise that engineers estimate the spacecraft's fuel load will last twice as long as their initial expectations, the space agency confirmed Monday.
The $4.3 billion observatory's designers originally planned to load enough propellant into Roman's four fuel tanks for a minimum lifetime of five years, plus a potential five-year mission extension. That was a conservative estimate. NASA officials knew an on-target launch and perfect execution of the observatory's first post-launch course correction maneuver would leave Roman with a hearty fuel reserve.
"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.
NASA has released a document that provides some initial details about the proposed United States Space Academy, and it's clear that the space agency wants to move quickly in establishing the institution.
According to the document's timeline, NASA seeks a groundbreaking for a permanent campus no later than next year, the first class to be enrolled and begin studies in temporary facilities in 2028, and a transition to a permanent campus in 2031.
What will that campus look like?
The European Space Agency is moving "full steam ahead" with development of a robotic mission to Venus after NASA officials determined they were unlikely to fulfill a commitment to provide a US-built radar instrument for the spacecraft, the mission's project scientist said.
The European orbiter, named Envision, will map the Venusian surface at 10 times higher resolution than the last radar mission sent to Venus by NASA in the 1990s. The planet is enshrouded in a blanket of thick clouds of sulfuric acid, rendering its mysterious surface unseen by optical cameras in orbit. Radar is the most effective way to penetrate the clouds of Venus to reveal the terrain below, and scientists will use Envision to look for signs of active volcanism.
NASA and ESA signed a memorandum of understanding in 2024 outlining their partnership on Envision. NASA agreed to supply a US-made synthetic aperture radar instrument, Envision's primary means of mapping the surface of Venus, along with providing tracking and communications support through NASA's Deep Space Network. In exchange, ESA would include US researchers on Envision's science team. Europe would build the Envision spacecraft and the rest of its science instruments and provide the launch on an Ariane 6 rocket.
The commander and pilot of NASA's Artemis II mission have gained a new distinction five months after splashing down from the Moon: They're not fully retiring from the space agency.
Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover are the first astronauts to join NASA's emeritus program, enabling them to continue to support the work being done at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They will remain available to train and mentor the current workforce while still being able to pursue employment and opportunities outside of NASA.
"I have asked NASA ... to not use the term 'retire' as much, but technically emeritus is a retirement program," Glover told collectSPACE.com on Wednesday. "It's something we have typically done for scientists when they have groundbreaking research, and they want to go back to academia to teach or to research and publish."
NASA has decided to use a simpler spacesuit for its initial missions to the lunar surface, Ars has learned.
The agency announced the decision during an internal meeting this week as it seeks to accelerate its program to land humans at the south pole of the Moon as early as 2028. At the direction of Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons, NASA will work with Axiom Space to develop a "Sortie Suit" variant of the planned spacesuit for the lunar surface.
Sources said the Sortie Suit will be used for the initial landing missions flown on landers developed both by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Among the goals of the initiative are to lower the mass of the spacesuit, reduce its complexity, and simplify interfaces between the spacesuits and lunar landers.
Perhaps the biggest question going into the Artemis II mission this spring was how the heat shield at the base of the spacecraft would perform during reentry through Earth's atmosphere.
The ablative heat shield, designed to char upon reentry while keeping the crew safe, had experienced unexpected losses of large chunks during a test flight in late 2022. After much deliberation, and not without controversy, NASA decided to fly the Artemis II heat shield as is but modify the spacecraft's reentry trajectory.
Obviously, the heat shield worked. The crew of Artemis II, led by commander Reid Wiseman, safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a triumphant trip around the Moon. Afterward, they and other NASA officials offered general comments, saying the heat shield looked good.
For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA has no firm plans to send any new landers or rovers to Mars. Instead, the agency's near-term focus at the red planet is on aerial drones, a pioneering mode of exploration that didn't seem realistic until a few years ago.
The first real use of drones for science at Mars will come with the SkyFall mission, a fleet of three helicopters set for launch as soon as late 2028. SkyFall's helicopters will ride to the red planet with NASA's Space Reactor-1 "Freedom" mission, which has the primary objective of demonstrating nuclear electric propulsion in deep space.
The launch schedule is aggressive for SR-1 Freedom and SkyFall, projects that didn't even exist in NASA's portfolio six months ago. NASA's plan for the SR-1 Freedom mission, estimated to cost $2.1 billion, calls for repurposing the core module of the canceled Gateway lunar space station into a testbed for nuclear electric propulsion. SkyFall will build on NASA's success with the Ingenuity helicopter, an experimental vehicle that became the first rotorcraft to fly on another world in 2021.
As is standard procedure for major NASA missions, the US space agency held a post-launch news conference on Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide information about how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was faring during its initial maneuvers.
What was not standard, however, is what happened in the middle of the news conference. A little less than half an hour in, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at his mobile phone, and then stood up and walked away from the dais where he had been seated behind a table along with other NASA officials. He briefly left the room.
Isaacman returned about a minute later, phone in hand, apologizing for interrupting NASA's chief of science, Nicky Fox, as she was speaking about the mission. "The President of the United States of America would like to address and congratulate everyone on this mission," Isaacman said, returning to his seat.
During a visit to Johnson Space Center, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy.
"It's clear that we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators, and everything else to do what we have to do," Trump said. "I will sign an executive order to begin the process of creating a new national academy. It's called the US Space Academy. That's a big deal."
The proposed United States Space Academy would fall under the jurisdiction of NASA, and according to US space officials, is not intended be a traditional service academy in the sense that it educates and trains officers for the armed services, such as the Air Force Academy.
For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look.
The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon. The Artemis design retains nods to what made the "white rocket" immediately recognizable, but adds a new colorway and painted graphics to make clear where NASA is headed.
"This new 'Artemis' livery has a black and white paint scheme with blue and red stripes that separate those two paint schemes," said Sean Brady, who proposed and designed the new livery while serving as the T-38 project pilot in NASA's Aircraft Operations Division (AOD), part of the Flight Operations Directorate at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The Artemis program logo in the back and a picture of the Moon is on the left and right side of the rear fuselage."
A new national space transportation policy signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday calls for the development of more spaceports to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries per year by 2030.
The presidential memorandum replaces a 2013 policy signed by former President Barack Obama. Both policies share an emphasis on supporting the commercial space industry and underscore the importance of assured access to space. But the launch sector has changed immensely since then. There were 176 orbital launch attempts from US soil last year, nearly 10 times the number in 2013. SpaceX led the pack last year with 165 orbital launches of its Falcon 9 rocket, plus five suborbital test flights of the much larger Starship.
"By 2030, our space transportation ranges must grow to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year," the policy says. "The policies set forth in this memorandum will secure America's continued superiority in space."
NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.
The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.
Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that "ongoing attitude control issues" will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link's remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite's close-in navigation system.
For 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has looked out into the Universe. Now, Lego is inviting builders to look inward with its latest model of the orbiting observatory.
The new Lego Icons Hubble Space Telescope (set no. 11382) was released on August 1 for $140 at the toy company's stores and its online shop. The 1,252-piece kit builds a 15-inch-long (38-cm) desktop model that is about twice as large as the previously released Lego Hubble models.
The Icons Hubble is the first to be sized in comparison to a Lego minifigure, such that the included astronaut provides a sense of scale for the telescope.
One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA's $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control.
It didn't look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft's cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.
The Link satellite is built, owned, and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, a satellite servicing startup that won a $30 million contract from NASA to fly up to the Swift observatory, grab onto it, and boost its orbit before succumbing to aerodynamic drag and burning up in the atmosphere.
When we last checked in on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in February, NASA was announcing that it had formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure.
At the time, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency was working with Boeing to "fully understand the risks associated" with the Starliner spacecraft, and to remediate them. Starliner would not fly its next mission, a cargo flight to the International Space Station, until those problems were identified and remediated. He declined to put a date on the test flight.
However, it now appears this work is proceeding apace.
Nearly a month since its launch, a first-of-its-kind commercial satellite built to save NASA's Swift gamma-ray telescope from a fiery reentry is having problems of its own, the agency announced Tuesday.
The Link satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies "experienced issues with attitude control" over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.
"Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link's three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system," NASA said.
SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean.
Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote stretch of ocean west of Australia. Previous splashdowns ended with conflagrations, an outcome SpaceX officials have come to expect with each water landing of Starship.
The buoyant Starship looked to be in fine shape after reaching the Indian Ocean. SpaceX engineers flew drones over the vehicle to inspect its heat shield, getting their best look yet at how more than 18,000 ceramic tiles insulating the ship's stainless steel airframe weathered the trip to space and back. The tiles withstood temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as Starship streaked back into the atmosphere at the end of its hourlong flight from Starbase, Texas.
A fast-moving wildfire, one of many raging across Spain, bore down on the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday, forcing an evacuation and temporarily suspending operations at one of NASA's most important tracking stations.
The tracking station is part of NASA's Deep Space Network, operating in concert with similar facilities in California and Australia to provide global coverage as Earth's rotation brings the planets, stars, and deep space probes in and out of view. The network supports more than 40 missions from the Moon to the edge of the Solar System, including Artemis, the James Webb Space Telescope, and NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft.
A NASA spokesperson confirmed the tracking station in Spain, located in the hills nearly 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of central Madrid, was evaluated Friday "due to ongoing wildfires in the region. Photos and video from the area showed flames and smoke plumes rising over the ground station's antenna array, anchored by a 230-foot-diameter (70-meter) radio dish and a collection of smaller 112-foot (34-meter) antennas.
Welcome to Edition 9.04 of the Rocket Report! We've had to wait an extra week for SpaceX to get its 13th Starship test flight off the ground. A last-second abort on July 16 led engineers to roll the booster back to its hangar in South Texas to swap out engines. Starship is now back on the launch pad. Liftoff is set for Friday evening. A flawless launch and reentry will put SpaceX on the cusp of an orbital flight later this year. Ars will have a comprehensive recap story after the completion of the test flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.
India's first private rocket reaches orbit. Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket, India’s first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a “grand success” Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal, Ars reports. The Vikram-1 lifted off from India’s primary spaceport on Sriharikota Island around midday local time. The launch was delayed more than a half-hour to resolve a last-minute technical problem. The countdown resumed, culminating in the command to ignite Vikram-1’s solid-fueled first stage booster to propel the rocket off the launch pad.
Anil Menon, a NASA flight surgeon, felt crushed nine years ago as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him.
For the fourth time, he had diligently applied to become an astronaut at the US space agency, seeking to fulfill a lifelong dream. Although he made it to the final round, NASA had once again rejected his application at the end of the grueling process.
"I was so sad, and I admitted defeat," Menon said. "I just did not see a pathway forward. So I pretty much, at that point in time, gave up on being an astronaut. I thought there was a zero percent chance."
NASA this week released a much-anticipated document, known as a "draft Request for Proposals," that provides some clarity about what it expects from US companies attempting to build privately operated space stations in low-Earth orbit.
The stakes are high with this document, known as a draft RFP. The space agency, publicly, has set an end date for the International Space Station of 2030. Although there is likely to be a two-year extension, time is still running short to build, test, and fly a vehicle as complex as a space station. NASA officials and the US Congress have both said they want to avoid a gap in having a human presence in orbit, and this has created considerable urgency about what comes next.
Nearly five years ago the space agency took a concrete step toward filling this gap, awarding funding to three companies to develop space station concepts. Previously, NASA had also provided $140 million to another space station company, Axiom Space. These Space Act Agreements were intended as a prelude to a second phase of the program, which would award substantially more funding to one or two more companies to proceed into the construction and launch of their space stations. But phase two of the program kept getting delayed, in part because Congress dithered on funding.
High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.
The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.
Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.
High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.
The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.
Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.
A long-standing ban on commercial supersonic flights over the United States would be overturned in a new rule proposed by the US Federal Aviation Administration. That could pave the way for the possible return of commercial supersonic airliners—as long as such aircraft can reduce the ground-level impacts of their sonic booms.
The FAA originally banned overland supersonic flights by civil aircraft in 1973, following US military tests involving supersonic flights over US cities such as Oklahoma City, Chicago, and St. Louis in the 1960s. But the Trump administration has championed the repeal of the ban to pave the way for supersonic airliners that could operate without disruptive sonic booms. So the FAA’s new rulemaking action on June 30, 2026, follows the direction of an executive order issued by President Trump on June 6, 2025.
The newly proposed rule would replace the 53-year prohibition with an interim “noise-based” certification standard requiring any sonic boom overpressure at the surface to be kept below 0.11 pounds per square foot. That proposed standard is based on the Colorado-based startup Boom Supersonic having demonstrated quiet Mach cutoff flights with its XB-1 aircraft—harnessing specific atmospheric conditions while flying just beyond supersonic speeds at higher altitudes so that the aircraft’s shockwaves are refracted upward into the atmosphere rather than traveling to the ground.
NASA's inspector general released an audit Tuesday of the agency's Commercial Crew Program, and it looks increasingly likely that Boeing's Starliner crew capsule won't be certified for operational flights to the International Space Station until next year.
That's just three years before NASA's official retirement date for the ISS in 2030, though lawmakers in Congress are seeking an extension until 2032. What's more, declaring Starliner ready for regular crew rotation flights next year would put the Boeing crew capsule a decade behind its original target of 2017.
The inspector general issued six recommendations. NASA officials agreed to all of them. The recommendations include developing a schedule for the next Starliner flight and future crew missions and making sure the schedule is updated to include sufficient time to ensure all of the problems from Starliner's first test flight with astronauts in 2024 are "resolved and documented."
NASA officials said Tuesday that they are seriously considering sending the full-scale engineering model of the Perseverance rover, which is currently housed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, to the Moon to expedite their efforts to explore the south pole region.
The car-sized rover nicknamed "Promise," which serves as a testbed for Perseverance and was not otherwise planned for a launch, would land equipped with a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) to power it across difficult terrain and through the lunar night. NASA's other rovers primarily operate on solar power.
"We are thinking very hard right now about sending Promise to the Moon," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday during a monthly update on the agency's plans to build a Moon base.
More than two decades since the Concorde supersonic airliner last took to the skies, NASA has been flying an experimental aircraft designed to replace loud sonic booms with a quieter thump equivalent to a car door slamming shut 20 feet away. A successful NASA flight test program could influence the design of future supersonic airliners capable of flying overland routes without rattling buildings—and people’s nerves.
The Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst—an acronym for Quiet SuperSonic Technology—first took flight late last year and recently began supersonic test flights. But unlike with many experimental “X-plane” aircraft that may never leave restricted airspace near Edwards Air Force Base in California, NASA plans to eventually take the X-59 on a tour around the United States so residents of various cities and towns can provide feedback on the quieter sonic “thumps” it produces.
“Usually an X plane is kind of bare-bones—‘cobble it together from a bunch of parts from other airplanes and just demonstrate one thing,’” said Jim “Clue” Less, a NASA test pilot and aerospace engineer, in an interview with Ars. “We need to demonstrate that one thing, but then we need a plane that's robust enough that we can fly it all over the place and gather that data.”
Three months ago, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the space agency was making a major pivot from building a space station in lunar orbit to a base on the surface. This "Ignition" event followed an earlier announcement in which NASA also said it was ending development of a new upper stage for its Space Launch System rocket.
In the aftermath of these decisions, there was some grumbling—mostly from contractors involved with the programs—that NASA was foolishly walking away from nearly complete hardware that the space agency needed for its Artemis Program.
Isaacman said these programs were not essential for landing humans on the Moon and added that they had cost far more than originally budgeted and had been subjected to years of delays. Moreover, they were still not ready.
NASA's infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center, the crown jewel of US spaceports, is aging and approaching its limit due to increased demand from private companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, a new report finds.
"NASA’s launch infrastructure is vital to providing the agency, other government agencies, and commercial partners access to space for their most complex and expensive missions," states the report, published by the NASA Office of Inspector General. "Nevertheless, NASA’s launch infrastructure is dated and often does not provide the capacity to meet the growing demands of the agency and its partners."
The report covers NASA's launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. However, the most noteworthy information in the report concerns the Florida spaceport, where demand from SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicles is expected to stress NASA.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.
At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.
Space Exploration Technologies, better known simply as SpaceX, became a publicly traded company on Friday nearly a quarter of a century after it was founded.
The company began trading on the NASDAQ exchange in New York City at $135 a share, valuing SpaceX at nearly $1.8 trillion. By the end of the trading day the company's shares were selling at $160.95, a respectable increase of more than 19 percent.
On paper, SpaceX founder Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, with his personal stake in the company valued at more than $700 billion. Because of the company's stock options plan, thousands of current and former employees became overnight millionaires. Employees at SpaceX have worked remarkably hard over the last 24 years, and now they will be richly compensated for having done so.
On Tuesday, NASA announced the crew for the Artemis III mission, which is scheduled to be flown no earlier than summer 2027. As part of the announcement, space agency officials also discussed plans for the crew to dock with both a Blue Origin lander and a SpaceX Starship lander during the spaceflight in low-Earth orbit.
The presentation, although informative, still left open key questions about the landers' readiness and what exactly they'll look like. After the crew announcement, Ars sat down with Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, to answer some of these questions.
This interview, conducted at NASA's Johnson Space Center, has been lightly edited for clarity.
The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.
The four crew members are:
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