Project
NASA's expendable heavy-lift rocket built to launch Orion spacecraft and cargo for the Artemis Moon program.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman named Stephen Cash director of Marshall Space Flight Center, effective Oct. 19. He cited advanced propulsion and nuclear power as the work Cash is meant to lead the center into.
Reality
NASA released a preliminary Artemis II lunar science report built from the four-person crew's photos, spoken notes and drawings. Researchers can now test whether those observations hold science that instruments alone would have missed.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
SpaceX put Starship into orbit on its first orbital flight even after one of the upper stage's six Raptor engines shut down early. It sets up the orbital refuelling tests NASA's 2028 moon landing depends on, though those tests and an upper-stage catch are still ahead.
Reality
LandSpace has brought a Zhuque-3 booster back to Earth, a first for China, but no Chinese booster has flown twice, and SpaceX has done it hundreds of times. Launch savings come from reflying hardware, and China's 2030 'space power' plan depends on exactly that.
Reality
The August 20 National Space Transportation Policy sets a 2030 floor of more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year against 181 launches in 2025, and the people who track range capacity put the shortage in payload buildings and site plumbing.
Reality
A Sandia-led team pulled the energy of New Glenn's May 29 hotfire explosion out of infrasound recorded as far away as northeast Texas, putting the blast at an estimated 0.131 kilotons of TNT equivalent using infrasound data alone.
Reality
The Artemis II crew flew 252,756 miles from Earth, farther than anyone before them. The medals presented in Houston close the mission out institutionally, while its successor is scheduled to stay in low Earth orbit.
Reality