The hardware that will fly the astronauts moonward includes two 177-foot-tall (54 meters) twin boosters that are the backbone of the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket's launch power. Recently, the two boosters that will fly on the Artemis 2 mission had an "America 250" emblem painted on their sides, in honor of the upcoming. 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

What is it?

Artemis 2, scheduled to launch in early 2026, will be the first crewed mission of the program. Over a 10-day journey, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will travel around the moon and return to Earth. Their mission will test Artemis systems, procedures and spacecraft in preparation for future lunar landings.

Artemis 2 relies on two key vehicles: SLS, which is NASA's most powerful rocket to date, and the Orion spacecraft, designed to carry astronauts safely beyond low Earth orbit. Inside NASA's iconic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, these elements come together through a massive, carefully choreographed preparation effort.

Where is it?

The image was taken from inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC.

Why is it amazing?

For Artemis 2, the "America 250" represents NASA's celebration of the anniversary under the theme "Spirit of Innovation." Just as the U.S. was founded on bold ideas and transformative thinking, Artemis 2 embodies a new era of exploration that looks outward, to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Seeing the emblem on the boosters connects technological progress with national heritage, according to NASA. It serves as a reminder that spaceflight, for all its complexity, is also a cultural project, one that captures imagination, inspires generations and reflects shared aspirations.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the Artemis program and upcoming Artemis 2 launch.

Nearly five years into its mission on the Red Planet, the car-sized rover still has enough remaining capability to drive more than twice the distance it has already logged, mission scientists said Wednesday (Dec. 17) at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Louisiana. If all goes according to plan and nothing breaks, Perseverance could drive as much as 62 miles (100 kilometers) by the time its mission is over.

That estimate puts the six-wheeled robot on track to surpass the current distance record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers), set by NASA's Opportunity rover after more than 14 years of exploration on Mars before a monster dust storm ended its mission in 2018. Perseverance is "in excellent shape," Steve Lee, the rover's deputy project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told reporters at the conference.

Lee said engineering tests completed over the summer certified that the rotary actuators used to steer Perseverance's wheels can operate optimally for at least another 37 miles (60 kilometers). Since touching down inside Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, the rover has already traveled about 25 miles (40 kilometers), according to NASA. "It just turned out to add up to a nice even 100 kilometers," Lee said.

Perseverance was originally tested and certified to drive a total of just 12 miles (20 kilometers). Its extended durability reflects lessons learned from Curiosity, its predecessor, whose wheels accumulated an increasing number of dings and punctures after encountering terrain sharper and more rugged than anticipated. That led engineers to design Perseverance's wheels for even tougher conditions, making them larger in diameter and giving them twice as many treads as Curiosity's, Lee said.

"That is proving to play out very well," Lee added. The rover's wheels, he said, "are in fantastic shape" with no known punctures or tears.

Since its wheels-down landing in Jezero Crater — the remnant of a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago that was later home to a large lake and river delta — Perseverance has drilled and cached rock samples in its search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover has since climbed more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) up the crater's inner wall and onto the rim, exploring new terrain.

Along the way, Perseverance found one of its most intriguing targets yet — an arrowhead-shaped rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls that contains chemical signatures and structures scientists say could have formed through processes associated with microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter than it is today.

In a paper published Dec. 17 in the journal Science, scientists report results from the crater's "Margin Unit," where Perseverance collected samples rich in the mineral olivine. This olivine likely formed at high temperatures deep within the Red Planet until being later exposed at the surface, where it interacted with water from Jezero's long-gone lake and with carbon dioxide in Mars' early atmosphere.

Those interactions produced carbonate minerals, which can preserve chemical signatures of past environments and potentially of biological activity, scientists say.

"This combination of olivine and carbonate was a major factor in the choice to land at Jezero Crater," study lead author Ken Williford of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Washington said in NASA's statement. "These minerals are powerful recorders of planetary evolution and the potential for life."

As Perseverance moves beyond the crater's rim, scientists hope to collect additional olivine-rich samples and compare them with those gathered from the Margin Unit.

The rover currently carries six unused sample tubes, and at least two tubes contain samples that have been collected but not yet sealed, meaning they could be replaced if more compelling targets emerge, Lee said.

That flexibility may prove important as the rover pushes into new terrain. This week, the rover is expected to reach a site nicknamed Lac de Charmes, just beyond the rim of Jezero Crater, where ancient rocks appear to be more intact — and potentially more revealing of early Martian geological processes — than those closer to the crater, Briony Horgan of Purdue University in Indiana who co-authored the new Science paper, told reporters on Wednesday.

Perseverance captured this panoramic view that includes Lac de Charmes, where it will look to collect additional samples next year. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Scientists are eager to bring Perseverance's haul — the 10 sample tubes dropped onto the crater floor in 2023 — back to laboratories on Earth, but their return remains uncertain as NASA's troubled Mars Sample Return program languishes in limbo.

That uncertainty has not altered Perseverance's near-term science plans, Lee said. The mission team is working with NASA headquarters to finalize the rover's next 2.5 years of exploration, extending through most of 2028, he said, with no current plans to deposit additional sample tubes beyond those already awaiting potential pickup.

The team is also beginning to explore how artificial intelligence might assist mission operations and data analysis. Lee described AI as "an exciting emerging capability," particularly for identifying long-term trends in the rover's growing data archive, and potentially helping develop short-term activity plans.

"We still are at that stage where we want to make sure to do that very carefully," Lee said.

Any AI-assisted plans would still undergo the same rigorous simulations and human oversight as traditional command sequences, he said, "to make sure any plans that are developed are going to make sense and are safe."

When asked how long Perseverance may last on Mars, Lee said the rover carries no consumables, such as propellant, that would impose a hard end to the mission. A NASA assessment of the rover's subsystems predicts that Perseverance could continue operating through at least 2031.

The primary life-limiting factor for the rover is its radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which generates electricity from the heat released by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 and gradually produces less power over time. That will require more conservative operations, Lee said, likening it to a phone charging more slowly on a weaker power source.

"We'll start seeing that and have to adjust our appetites in operations," Lee said. In the meantime, "there is a lot to keep us busy."

Though the liftoff was successful, there was a downside: During the launch, Baikonur's Pad 31/6 — the only pad that hosts Russian crew and cargo launches to the ISS — sustained serious damage, and it's unclear when it will be repaired.

What is it?

The Soyuz (Russian for "unison") program began during the height of the space race in the 1960s as the Soviet Union's third human spaceflight program, following Vostok and Voskhod. Soyuz was originally conceived as part of a lunar landing project. Soyuz never made it to the moon, but it's still going strong decades later.

Aboard Soyuz MS-28 were three long-duration crew members: NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Mikaev and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The three men will participate in an eight-month mission as part of the ISS' Expedition 73.

Where is it?

This image was taken in low Earth orbit, around 263 miles (432 kilometers) above the Mediterranean Sea near Barcelona.

Why is it amazing?

While the Soyuz program itself is historic, the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft helped made some history of its own. With Soyuz MS-28 docked at the International Space Station, all eight of the ISS' visiting vehicle docking ports were occupied at the same time, a first in the orbital outpost's 25-year history.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the International Space Station and the Soyuz program.

Orbital observation

It is a "wonderful world" indeed.

"Thinking, 'I'm sure everyone would want to see a photo of Earth,' I took a few shots right before going to bed. I think the amazing thing about the ISS is that you can see views like this without even trying,'" JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui, an Expedition 74 flight engineer, wrote on social media on Thursday (Dec. 11).

Yui's photo nicely captures the "skies of blue and clouds of white" as sung by the iconic Louis Armstrong.

Science status

Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 74 crew aboard the space station this week was:

StemCellEx-IP1 — In an effort that may someday lead to ways to repair damaged organs and tissue, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman studied stem cells under a microscope, observing their production in microgravity as compared to on Earth.

Virtual — In a Roscosmos experiment that looks at how the vestibular system adapts to microgravity, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev traded off wearing a different set of VR (virtual reality) goggles to track their vision. The study could lead to developing additional countermeasures when readjusting to gravity.

Station keeping

The Expedition 74 crew also devoted time to maintaining the space station's systems, including:

JEM DRCS — In a demo that has applications to future Artemis missions to the moon and ultimately to Mars, JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui installed and soundproofed the JEM Demonstration of CO2 Removal System in the station's Kibo module. The experimental device traps carbon dioxide from the air and vents it overboard.

JAXA’s HTV-X1 — NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Mike Fincke, together with some help from Zena Cardman and JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui, continued preparing the cargo ship for its departure in January. Williams worked on loading refuse and no-longer-needed equipment, while Fincke focused on preparing a science rack for its transfer from the space station to inside the HTV-X.

Waste and Hygiene Compartment — Fincke also spent some of his time this week servicing one of the space station's restrooms, replacing orbital plumbing components in the Tranquility node.

Astronaut activity

NASA astronaut Chris Williams is living out his boyhood dream as an Expedition 74 flight engineer.

"For as far back as I can remember, so when I was a little kid, I was always fascinated by exploration and in particular, space," said Williams. "I think it is one of those things that a lot of kids have a fascination with, and I just never grew out of it. It is something that has always been a point of curiosity for me, and being an astronaut felt like the best way to explore space."

Williams discussed his path to flying in space and serving aboard the International Space Station during an in-flight interview on Thursday (Dec. 11), with The Washington Post. You can watch the full discussion in the video above.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Dec. 12), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 74 commander Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman and Chris Williams of NASA; JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui; Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev of Roscosmos, all flight engineers.

There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the space-facing port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-28 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Rassvet module.

There are four cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module, Progress MS-32 (93P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool, berthed to the Earth-facing common berthing mechanism (CBM) on the Unity node and Japan's HTV-X1 attached to the Earth-facing CBM on the Harmony node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 25 years, 1 month and 10 days.

Now, however, Stanford researchers have used artificial intelligence to steer a free-flying robot aboard the International Space Station (ISS), potentially paving the way for more autonomous space missions in the future.

Working with NASA's cube-shaped Astrobee robot, the Stanford research team demonstrated how a machine-learning system can plan safe routes through the ISS' crowded modules significantly faster than existing methods. The advances address a long-standing hurdle for space robotics — namely, how to move quickly and safely with limited computing power and minimal human input in one of the most extreme engineering environments possible.

Lead researcher Somrita Banerjee, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, said that the station's maze of equipment and experiments makes motion planning especially challenging, as algorithms that work well for robots on Earth often bog down when run on the older, radiation-hardened computers certified for spaceflight.

To get around those constraints, Banerjee and her colleagues started with a standard optimization approach, described in a new paper presented earlier this month at the International Conference on Space Robotics, which breaks a complex motion-planning problem into many smaller steps. They then trained an AI model on thousands of previously computed paths, so the system could begin each new plan with an informed "warm start" instead of calculating from scratch.

"Using a warm start is like planning a road trip by starting with a route that real people have driven before, rather than drawing a straight line across the map," Banerjee said in a Stanford University statement. "You start with something informed by experience and then optimize from there."

This approach allows for strict safety checks before runs, while cutting actual computation time. In tests on the station, routes generated with the AI warm start were roughly 50% to 60% faster to compute than conventional plans, according to the researchers.

"This is the first time AI has been used to help control a robot on the ISS," Banerjee said. "It shows that robots can move faster and more efficiently without sacrificing safety, which is essential for future missions where humans won't always be able to guide them."

Setting the stage for AI robots on the ISS and beyond

Before the in-orbit trial, the system was first validated at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley using a granite table testbed with a compressed air cushion that allows a robot to glide over it like an air hockey puck, mimicking the microgravity found on the ISS. In orbit, astronauts performed a brief setup and then left Astrobee to be commanded from the ground in what NASA calls a "crew-minimal" experiment.

Over a four-hour session, mission controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston directed Astrobee to fly 18 trajectories, each run twice with and without the AI-generated warm start. Additional safeguards, including virtual obstacles and the ability to halt a run, were used to avoid collisions.

The team says that similar AI-guided planning could eventually allow robots to handle inspections, logistics and science tasks on future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond, freeing astronauts to focus on higher-priority work.

"As robots travel farther from Earth and as missions become more frequent and lower-cost, we won't always be able to teleoperate them from the ground," Banerjee said. "Autonomy with built-in guarantees isn't just helpful; it's essential for the future of space robotics."

What is it?

Airglow is a faint light emitted by Earth's upper atmosphere, produced when molecules emit energy after being excited by cosmic rays or ultraviolet solar radiation. Although far dimmer than auroras, airglow forms a continuous global layer and is always present, both day and night, though it's best visible from space.

Where is it?

This image was taken from low Earth orbit as the ISS flew 260 miles (418 kilometers) above Texas.

Why is it amazing?

Airglow is more than just visually stunning; it can also be used as a diagnostic tool for understanding the structure and dynamics of Earth's upper atmosphere. Airglow can help shed light on atmospheric disturbances, as well as the impacts of space weather coming from solar radiation.

The different colors of airglow are caused by various chemicals found in the atmosphere, so understanding what chemicals are present can help researchers refine atmospheric models used in climate science to get a more accurate picture of how our planet's atmosphere changes over time.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the International Space Station and airglow.

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut are safely back on Earth after spending eight months aboard the International Space Station.

Soyuz MS-27 crewmates Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos, along with Jonny Kim of NASA, landed on the cold, snow-flurry-covered steppe of Kazakhstan on Tuesday (Dec. 9). The spacecraft, descending under a parachute and cushioned by braking thrusters, met the ground at 12:03 a.m. EST (0503 GMT or 10:03 a.m. local time).

A Roscosmos recovery team, together with representatives from NASA, were quickly on site to assist the three Soyuz MS-27 crew members out of the capsule and into chairs for brief medical checks.

Ryzhikov and Kim looked to be in fine condition and in good spirits. Zubritsky was taken directly from the Soyuz to an inflatable medical tent.

"Congratulations on one more end of a Soyuz vehicle trip. Expedition 73, all tasks complete," said Ryzhikov after the landing. "The crew are feeling great."

The cosmonauts and astronaut will next be flown by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where the recovery teams are based. Kim will then board a NASA aircraft and be transported to Houston, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky will depart for the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim's journey back to Earth began on Monday (Dec. 8), as they boarded and undocked their Soyuz from the station's Prichal module. Their departure at 8:41 p.m. EST (0141 GMT Tuesday) marked the formal end of Expedition 73 and the beginning of Expedition 74.

"What I think I'm going to remember most is the bond that we shared together, and after having spent eight months in space, I firmly believe that the greatest quality of an astronaut and a human is not technical competence or loyalty or any of the myriad of the things that we like to ascribe to astronauts, it's love," said Kim during a brief change-of-command ceremony on Sunday (Dec. 7). "I firmly believe that love is the greatest thing an astronaut can have for each other and for the people that they work with and for our lovely planet."

"I think that's what we accomplished here — we always gave each other grace and had so much love for each other and for the ground, for everyone that supports us, and I think that is what makes space exploration possible and human," said Kim.

Still aboard the space station as the newly formed Expedition 74 crew are commander Mike Fincke and fellow NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Chris Williams, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev.

Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev and Williams arrived in late November, on a Soyuz launch that left Russia's only launch pad capable of supporting flights to the station significantly damaged.

Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim, during their 245 days in low Earth orbit, conducted hundreds of science investigations and technology demonstrations, as well as contributed to the upkeep of the station and oversaw the arrival and departure of uncrewed cargo ships, including the first upgraded spacecraft from Northrop Grumman (Cygnus XL) and JAXA (HTV-X).

Ryzhikov and Zubritsky also conducted two spacewalks to install scientific experiments and relocate a controller for the European Robotic Arm on the exterior of the Russian segment of the station.

Ryzhikov, 51, was the only veteran on the Soyuz MS-27 crew and has now reached a total time in space that only 12 other people in history have exceeded.

"Now [that] I'm commander, my first thing to do is to celebrate something," said Fincke on Sunday (Dec. 7). "Today is the 60th anniversary of Gemini 7, and that was a big deal for the American space program. They were going to go on a really long-duration mission of 14 days. And amongst us here, we have a man who's flown for 600 days in space."

Ryzhikov, who is a colonel in the Russian Air Force, previously served on the Expedition 50 and Expedition 64 crews in 2017 and 2021, respectively.

Zubritsky, 33, was the 630th person to fly into Earth orbit, according to the Registry of Space Travelers maintained by the Association of Space Explorers. Kim, 41, who inspired memes given his prior careers as a U.S. Navy SEAL and medical doctor, was the 631st person to orbit Earth. (Ryzhikov became number 548 when he launched on his first flight in 2016.)

Soyuz MS-27 was Russia's 73rd spacecraft in its class to launch for the station since 2000 and the 156th Soyuz to fly since 1967.

Three astronauts will come back to Earth early Tuesday morning (Dec. 9), and you can watch their homecoming live.

NASA's Jonny Kim and Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky of the Russian space agency Roscosmos left the International Space Station (ISS) in a Soyuz spacecraft on Monday (Dec. 8) at 8:41 p.m. EST (0141 GMT on Dec. 9). They're scheduled to touch down about 3.5 hours later, at 12:03 a.m. EST (0503 GMT).

You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency.

The reentry and landing livestream will begin today at 10:30 p.m. EST (0330 GMT).

If all goes to plan, the Soyuz carrying Kim and his cosmonaut colleagues will land Tuesday (Dec. 9) at 12:03 a.m. EST (0503 GMT) on the steppe of Kazakhstan, near the city of Dzhezkazgan.

Kim, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky arrived at the ISS on April 8. Their 245-day mission is the first spaceflight for Kim and Zubritsky and the third for Ryzhikov, the commander of the station's Expedition 73 mission.

By the time they touch down on Tuesday morning, the trio will have orbited Earth 3,920 times together and traveled nearly 104 million miles (167 million kilometers), according to a NASA statement.

After Kim, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky departed the ISS, there were seven people left on board the orbiting lab — Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev of Roscosmos; NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke and Chris Williams; and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui.

Williams, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev are new arrivals, reaching the station on Thanksgiving Day. Their launch was more eventful than Roscosmos officials had planned; shortly after their Soyuz rocket lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the pad's service platform crashed into the flame trench.

It's unclear how long it will take to repair that pad, which is currently the only one capable of launching Russian astronaut and cargo missions to the ISS.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 with news of the Soyuz's successful departure from the ISS.

Orbital observation

JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui is fond of photographing his home nation of Japan from his vantage point aboard the International Space Station. Thursday (Dec. 4) was no different.

"Last night, I went to bed early and woke up once in the middle of the night to film a video of the Japanese archipelago," Yui posted to social media. "Even from space, it looked very cold."

"There were many areas where it seemed to be snowing or places where it had snowed afterward, and while it looked beautiful from space, I became a little worried when I thought about all of you," he wrote.

In the foreground are Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo ship, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool (at right) and the newly docked Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft.

Science status

Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 73 crew aboard the space station this week was:

CIPHER — Zena Cardman and Jonny Kim of NASA collected samples of Cardman's blood, tested her cognition and measured her exercise, all as activities under the CIPHER human research study tracking astronauts' health before, during and after a spaceflight. Afterward, Cardman used a centrifuge to prepare them for being placed inside a science freezer for future analysis.

Astrobee — Scientists on Earth, working with astronauts on the space station like Kim, assessed robotic free-flying assistants called "Astrobee" to enable astronauts to conduct more research.

Station keeping

The Expedition 73 crew also devoted time to maintaining the space station's systems, including:

New Crew Member Orientation — Having just arrived at the space station the week before, NASA astronaut Chris Williams attended an orientation session, of sorts, as fellow NASA astronaut Mike Fincke and Kimiya Yui of JAXA took turns bringing Williams up to speed about life on orbit. Fincke and Yui familiarized Williams with space station hardware, operations and systems.

'Closet' inventory — Oleg Platonov, a flight engineer with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, spent the first part of his shift documenting the location and amount of clothing and towels remaining in the Russian segment of the space station.

Zero Boil-Off Tank Noncondensables — Flight Engineer Mike Fincke changed out the cameras inside a microgravity science glovebox to photograph how cryogenic fluids behave in microgravity to improve the design of spacecraft fuel tanks.

Astronaut activity

As part of their work maintaining the systems aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Jonny Kim and Chris Williams spent this week cleaning and inspecting the European Exploration Exercise Device (E4D) after its installation in the European Space Agency's (ESA) Columbus laboratory.

According to NASA, the E4D is being tested for its ability to provide bicycling, rowing and resistance exercises to protect crew members' muscles, bones and heart health in microgravity.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Dec. 5), there are 10 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergey Mikaev and Alexey Zubritsky of Roscosmos; NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Jonny Kim and Chris Williams and JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, all flight engineers.

There are three docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the space-facing port of the Harmony module, Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node and Soyuz MS-28 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Rassvet module.

There are four cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module, Progress MS-32 (93P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool, berthed to the Earth-facing common berthing mechanism (CBM) on the Unity node and Japan's HTV-X1 attached to the Earth-facing CBM on the Harmony node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 25 years, 1 month and 3 days.

Griffin testified alongside other witnesses at a hearing held in Washington D.C. on Thursday (Dec. 4) by the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The hearing, titled "Strategic Trajectories Assessing China’s Space Rise and the Risks to U.S. Leadership," was held to discuss the rapid development of China's space program and what that means for America's long-held dominance when it comes to space exploration.

And according to Griffin and the witnesses at the hearing, that dominance might soon cede to China due to policy decisions that continue to plague the Artemis program, NASA's current planned campaign of moon missions. "Sticking to a plan is important when the plan makes sense. China is sticking to a plan that makes sense. It looks a lot, in fact, like what the United States did for Apollo," Griffin said. "We have stuck to a plan that does not make sense."

Griffin said NASA and two consecutive presidential administrations have stuck to an Artemis moon landing architecture that "cannot work" and "poses a level of crew risk that should be considered unacceptable." The former NASA administrator reiterated a previous recommendation he made to Congress, arguing that NASA's Artemis 3 mission, currently planned for 2027, should be canceled  — along with every other Artemis mission  — so NASA and the U.S. government can rethink the whole plan for America's return to the moon.

"We should start over, proceeding with all deliberate speed," Griffin said. "We have lost a lot of time, and we may not be able to return to the moon before the Chinese execute their own first landing. Or we may; space is hard and despite the progress that China is making, mission success is guaranteed to no one. But though we may not win at this first step, we cannot cede the pursuit and leave the playing field to others."

NASA and SpaceX's current plan for Artemis 3 and other moon missions in the program relies on a complicated in-orbit refueling system. The current moon landing architecture requires a high number of SpaceX Starship launches in order to refuel the lander that would take NASA astronauts to the moon. The exact number still isn't even known, though SpaceX estimates it could require 12 Starship launches to fully refuel the lander. The concept also remains unproven; SpaceX intends to test Starship's in-flight refueling system on an upcoming launch.

Furthermore, Griffin added, the length of time the lander would need to remain in orbit while the refueling flights launch and rendezvous with it would "almost guarantee" the propellant loaded into the lunar lander would boil off before the mission proceeds. "I do not see a way with the current technology we have to overcome those problems, and therefore we should not pursue that line of approach," Griffin said.

Even SpaceX appears to doubt the current Artemis moon landing architecture. In internal company documents obtained by Politico, SpaceX estimates that September 2028 is the earliest timeline for a first crewed lunar landing attempt; however, according to publicly available information, NASA is still aiming for 2027 for that mission.

If Artemis 3 is delayed to late 2028, there will have been an average of two years between the first three Artemis program missions. The Apollo program, by comparison, launched each of its 11 missions an average of once every 4.5 months between 1968 and 1972.

NASA's current acting administrator has even criticized SpaceX for being "behind" on its lunar lander and Starship development. In remarks made in October 2025, acting NASA chief Sean Duffy suggested the Trump administration might be looking for other companies to compete to build and launch NASA's next moon lander. "The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term, so I'm gonna open up the contract," Duffy told CNBC. "I'm gonna let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin."

But it could be that such programmatic instability is what is holding the United States back from committing to a moon landing program in the long-term, according to Dean Cheng, a China expert at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. Cheng told House representatives during the hearing that the bureaucratic structures of the Chinese government allow the nation to stick to plans over longer timelines than the U.S. government system allows. "China sticks to a plan. It creates a plan that sticks to it for decades," Cheng said. "And the benefit there is programmatic stability, budgetary stability, staff stability."

NASA, meanwhile, has been in a period of turmoil that has seen key science facilities lose capabilities, many flagship science missions put at risk of cancellation due to budget cuts, and thousands of personnel lost due to federal workforce reductions.

But whether or not the United States returns to the moon before China, former NASA chief Griffin said that the real risk is "failing to commit to what winning really means in the long run." Many U.S. government officials have stressed that whichever nation is able to establish a sustained presence on the moon first will have the privilege of establishing norms for how other nations can access and use lunar resources. If China manages to get a foothold on the moon ahead of the United States, it may be able to dictate who uses certain areas of the moon going forward, and how.

"I am confident that China fully understands this," Griffin said.

All eight docking ports for spacecraft on the current configuration of the International Space Station (ISS) are fully occupied for the first time in the complex's history, NASA officials said in a statement on Monday (Dec. 1). (Construction of the ISS began in 1998, but the complex didn't have that many ports in the beginning.)

The ISS is so full up that controllers had to temporarily move aside a robotic spacecraft to make room for an astronaut taxi last week. NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos arrived aboard Russia's Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft, which docked at the Russian Rassvet module on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 28), for an expected eight-month mission.

Before the Soyuz crew got there, Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston used the ISS' robotic Canadarm2 to move Northrop Grumman's Cygnus-23 cargo spacecraft, "to provide appropriate clearance" for the incoming crewed spacecraft, NASA officials stated. Cygnus-23 was then reinstalled at the Earth-facing port of the station's Unity module. (That's spacecraft No. 2 of eight, for those of you keeping track.)

There's another Soyuz vehicle at the ISS as well — Soyuz MS-27, which is installed at the Russian Prichal module. But its orbital stay is coming to and end: Soyuz MS-27 is scheduled to depart the ISS with NASA's Jonny Kim and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky on Dec. 8, for a landing soon thereafter in Kazakhstan.

The remaining five spacecraft at the ISS are the Russian Progress-92 and Progress-93 robotic cargo spacecraft, which reside at the Russian Poisk and Zvezda modules, respectively; the Japanese HTV-X1 cargo craft, berthed at the nadir port of the station's Harmony Node 2; and two SpaceX Dragon capsules.

These Dragons are at the two other ports on Harmony used for visiting spacecraft. One is the Commercial Resupply Services-33 (CRS-33) robotic cargo capsule, at the Harmony Node 2 forward port. The other is the Crew-11 Dragon, on Harmony's space-facing port. (Harmony in fact has six ports, but three serve as attachments to the Destiny, Columbus and Kibo ISS modules.)

As its name makes clear, Crew-11 is an astronaut mission. Its crewmembers make up the remainder of the Expedition 73 long-duration astronauts on the ISS: NASA's Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Kimiya Yui from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and Oleg Platonov from Roscosmos. The quartet will return to Earth sometime in 2026.

From the fiery launch pads to the silent, dusty plains of the lunar surface, Apollo missions redefined what was possible and ignited imaginations across the globe.

This quiz invites you to journey back through the triumphs and trials of the Apollo era.

Whether you're a seasoned space enthusiast or a curious newcomer, you'll encounter questions that span the program's technical marvels, iconic astronauts and unforgettable moments.

Try it out below and see how well you score!

What is it?

Cygnus XL is Northrop Grumman's largest cargo spacecraft to date. The spacecraft was reconfigured to have increased payload capacity, with a greater pressurized cargo volume and structural upgrades for heavier payloads, making it a vital asset for supporting long-duration missions aboard the ISS.

Since 2013, Cygnus missions have played a critical role in delivering experiments, spare parts, and daily necessities to astronauts aboard the ISS. These cargo missions are part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, which partners with private companies to maintain the logistics pipeline needed for humans to continuously live on the space station.

Where is it?

This image was taken from the International Space Station in low Earth orbit.

Why is it amazing?

As the ISS enters its later years of operation and plans accelerate for commercial space stations in the 2030s, the demand for larger and more efficient cargo vehicles continues to grow. With the successful docking and unloading of the 11,000 pounds (4,990 kilograms) of cargo from this recent mission, the Cygnus XL spacecraft has illustrated how space operations can continue forward.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about Northrop Grumman and the International Space Station.

On Thursday (Nov. 27), Russia's Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft docked to the Rassvet module with three new crew members for the space station.

"In this photo, too, the two spacecraft [Soyuz MS-28 and MS-27] are parked side by side so amicably, aren't they? With 10 crew members on the ISS during the handover period, it's quite lively," wrote flight engineer Kimiya Yui on social media from the International Space Station (ISS).

Soyuz MS-28 crewmates NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev will spend the next eight months on board.

Science status

Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 73 crew aboard the space station this week was:

Ultrasound 2 — Doctors on Earth watched live as Zena Cardman used a portable ultrasound to scan Jonny Kim's chest in an effort to better understand how his heart is adapting to living in space.

Droplet — In an effort to create better optical materials and develop better ways to remove pollution, Mike Fincke used a fluorescence microscope to sample hardware so scientists could see how particles behave inside fluids.

Station keeping

The Expedition 73 crew also devoted time to maintaining the space station's systems, including:

Soyuz MS-27 — Working inside his soon-to-be ride home, Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov checked the electronics and communications systems aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft and then continued loading cargo inside for his, Alexey Zubritsky and Jonny Kim's return to Earth.

Astronaut activity

To prepare for the arrival of Soyuz MS-28 with three new crewmates, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo ship, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool, needed to be unberthed and held at a distance by the International Space Station's Canadarm2 robotic arm so as to give ample room for the docking.

Here, Expedition 73 flight engineer Zena Cardman of NASA takes a break from closing the hatch to the Cygnus capsule to pose for a photo while holding up a couple of equipment covers as if they were a pair of goggles.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Nov. 28), there are 10 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos; NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Jonny Kim and Chris Williams of NASA and JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, all flight engineers.

There are three docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the space-facing port of the Harmony module, Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node and Soyuz MS-28 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Rassvet module.

There are four cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module, Progress MS-32 (93P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool, temporarily at the end to the Canadarm2 but soon to be berthed again to the Earth-facing common berthing mechanism (CBM) on the Unity node and Japan's HTV-X1 attached to the Earth-facing CBM on the Harmony node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 25 years and 26 days.

The maintenance cabin (also referred to as a service platform) located in the flame trench at the Baikonur Cosmodrome's Site 31/6 in Kazakhstan reportedly collapsed in the wake of the Soyuz MS-28 crew launching to the space station atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket. The platform is needed in the preparation of boosters launching from the pad.

"The launch site was inspected, as is done every time after a rocket launch. Damage to a number of launch pad elements was detected," read a statement released by Roscosmos late on Thursday. "Such damage may appear after launch, so an inspection like this is mandatory in international practice."

"The condition of the launch complex is currently being assessed," the statement said. "All the necessary spare parts are available for restoration, and the damage will be repaired in the near future."

Site 31/6 has been used exclusively for Russian human and cargo flights to the International Space Station since 2020, after Site 1 was retired due a lack of funds for upgrades. Also known as "Gagarin's Start," Site 1 hosted the world's first human spaceflight by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961.

Site 31/6 was first used in January 1961 and has supported more than 400 launches since.

"There is some possibility that duplicate hardware could be borrowed from the mothballed Site 1 in Baikonur or from similar facilities at other launch sites," wrote journalist Anatoly Zak on his Russian Space Web site. "According to preliminary estimates, repairs of the service platform, known as 8U0216, could take up to two years."

It is unclear if another Russian launch pad could support flights to the space station. Roscosmos had scheduled an uncrewed Progress resupply mission in December.

The Soyuz MS-28 crew of Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergey Mikaev and NASA astronaut Chris Williams are safe aboard the space station, where they are expected to stay for the next eight months.

What is it?

As a Korean-American astronaut — and one of NASA's most accomplished, with careers as a Navy SEAL, Harvard-trained physician and now spaceflyer — Jonny Kim often speaks about honoring his heritage.

Sharing Korean cuisine in orbit isn't just a treat; it's a symbol of representation aboard an international laboratory where culture and science blend daily. These moments also highlight the importance of food in astronaut well-being. Familiar flavors help reduce stress, combat homesickness and create a sense of normalcy during months-long missions.

Where is it?

This image was taken aboard the ISS in low Earth orbit.

Why is it amazing?

While NASA's research into space nutrition focuses on health, caloric needs and long-duration mission planning, meals like Kim's remind us that food is also about humanity. Each dish carries memories, identity and comfort, qualities that matter just as much 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth as they do at home.

In showcasing Korean and American foods side by side, Kim shows the core spirit of the ISS: many cultures, working — and sharing meals — together in orbit.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about space food and the International Space Station.

NASA astronauts on the International Space Station are planning to have Thanksgiving dinner with some newly arrived guests, just like many people in the United States.

In a new video, members of the Expedition 73 crew shared their plans for Thanksgiving, which likely includes a special arrival at the International Space Station (ISS). NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos will launch on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 26) on the Soyuz MS-28 mission and arrive in time for dinner, if all goes to plan.

The launch is scheduled for 4:27 a.m. EST (0927 GMT or 2:27 p.m. local time in Baikonur, Kazakhstan), and you'll be able to watch it live at Space.com. The crew are scheduled to orbit Earth twice before docking with the ISS Russian Rassvet module at 7:38 a.m. EST (1238 GMT), only about three hours after liftoff.

Four-time NASA spaceflyer Mike Fincke, celebrating his second U.S. Thanksgiving in space after ISS Expedition 18 (which ran from October 2008 to April 2009), said in the video that the ISS crew is already getting food ready for the new arrivals. He showed off turkey and cranberry sauce in front of the camera facing the crew in the crowded Destiny module, where U.S. research primarily takes place.

"This cranberry sauce is actually Russian cranberry, so it's kind of neat to have that up here because that's one of my favorite parts," Fincke said, carefully extracting packets from a plastic bag while the astronauts floated between experiments and laptops attached to the module's walls. "I'm going to miss my family, of course, but I'm up here with my space family … We're looking forward to the food up here, and the company."

"Food is a really important part of everyday life up here, and staying happy and healthy," added NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, who is on her first spaceflight. "We share a lot of meals, and so this one is just going to be extra special. Our ground teams, and the food lab at NASA, have taken such great care of us that we have a very special food holiday bag here. We’ve got everything from turkey and the traditional things that Mike mentioned [to] some mashed potatoes, to crab meat, salmon. We've even got some lobster, which is amazing."

Aside from the food, Korean-American NASA astronaut Jonny Kim (also on his first mission) said he is looking forward to Thanksgiving as a moment "to kind of pause, and slow down, and reflect on our lives — the people we cherish in our lives, and all the support we've had on this journey."

Two-time spaceflyer Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said that there is no Thanksgiving in his home country. But Yui said he will happily celebrate the holiday on Thursday, as is tradition — ISS spaceflyers mark the customs of their international crewmates. And he enjoys how Thanksgiving conveys "respect, and also appreciation to others," which he called "a very good tradition."

Also on the ISS are Alexey Zubritsky, Oleg Platonov and Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos. Over the decades of ISS operations, the U.S. and Russian sides of the space station have traditionally had separate scheduling and public relations events. That said, the crews often come together for big tasks in space and share meals, so it is possible the Russians will celebrate Thanksgiving alongside the Americans.

Expedition 73 began in April and is anticipated to complete wrap up later this year; NASA has not yet shared when the U.S.-Japanese crew will return, but it will be sometime after the new arrivals on Soyuz settle into their duties on the orbiting complex.

Perseverance spotted an unusual "sculpted, high-standing" rock nestled among "low-lying, flat and fragmented surrounding rocks", which got the attention of scientists right away, according to a blog post posted Nov. 13 on NASA's website written by Candice Bedford, a research scientist at Purdue University. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory rover spotted Phippsaksla on Sept. 2, initially using the left Mastcam-Z camera high on the rover's mast. Sept. 2 was Sol 1612 of the mission; a sol is a Martian day, which is slightly longer than Earth's.

Perseverance next used its laser instrument, known as SuperCam, to show that the nearly three-foot-long (31 inches, or 81 centimeters) rock is made of iron and nickel, which matches what we know about the composition of cores of large asteroids in the solar system. If its origin is confirmed, this would be Perseverance's first meteorite find since arriving at the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021.

Asteroids are large space rocks that are typically made of leftover material from when the solar system was formed, 4.5 billion years ago, before larger bodies like planets and moons came together. Meteoroids — smaller space rocks — often are fragments of asteroids, and if one of meteoroids makes it to the surface of a planet or moon, these are called meteorites.

The Perseverance rover team nicknames its science targets and sites for easy public identification. The suspected meteorite has been named "Phippsaksla", a name taken from an area in Svalbard, Norway. The site where the rock was found, "Vernodden," is also based on a location in Svalbard.

While this is Perseverance's first suspected meteorite find, it's far from the first space rock ever found on the Red Planet.

Perseverance's predecessor rover Curiosity, which has been active on the surface since 2012, has found several iron-nickel meteorites in the Gale crater region and a mountain it is climbing, called Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp. Notable examples include the huge, 39-inch (1-meter) "Lebanon" meteorite found in 2014, and another space rock nicknamed "Cacao", found in 2023.

The previous generation of NASA rovers were known as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which included Opportunity (operational on Mars from 2004 through 2018) and Spirit (2004-11). Since those robotic explorers also found several iron-nickel meteorites themselves, NASA officials had been surprised at Perseverance's lack of space rock finds.

For the past year or so, Perseverance has been carefully examining the rim of its landing site, Jezero crater. Bedford noted that Jezero crater should have more meteorites, "particularly given its similar age to Gale crater and number of smaller impact craters, suggesting that meteorites did fall on the crater floor, delta, and crater rim throughout time."

But hunting meteorites is just a side job for Perseverance. The rover landed on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater with the primary mission of hunting for possible signs of past life on Mars and to gather samples for a possible future return to Earth.

Just last month, NASA announced the rover found tantalizing chemical fingerprints that might show evidence of chemical reactions between sediment and organic matter, but the rover's limited selection of instruments mean the samples would have to be hauled back to Earth before a conclusive determination could be made.

Roman is a survey telescope, with an 8-foot (2.4-meter) mirror like the Hubble Space Telescope, but a field of view 100 times larger. Besides studying dark matter and dark energy, one of Roman's core surveys will be the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, in which millions of stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way galaxy will be studied, principally to look for exoplanets. The idea is to use gravitational microlensing as a planet-finding device. Gravitational lensing is a technique often used in astrophysics to study distant objects; due to the way spacetime warps as per general relativity, some huge objects in space (like galaxy clusters, for instance) warp light traveling nearby, therefore magnifying, distorting and duplicating the source of that light as seen through our telescopes. Gravitational microlensing refers to gravitational lensing on smaller scales, like that of a planet.

Staring at the hundreds of millions of stars in the bulge, Roman will occasionally see some flicker, brightening temporarily as the gravity of an unseen foreground planet magnifies their light before moving out of alignment. However, microlensing is not the only phenomenon that can cause a star's light to flicker. Stars are constant, writhing masses of vast convective bubbles rising to their seething surfaces. Oscillations also reverberate through their interiors, shaking them up. The frequency of these oscillations depends upon the temperature, structure and composition of a star, and when the oscillations break through to the surface they can cause a star to temporarily, subtly brighten.

The science of studying these stellar oscillations is called asteroseismology, and the frequency of the oscillations can reveal the masses, sizes and ages of the stars for which they are observed. In turn, understanding stars better can inform astronomers as to some of the properties of the planets that orbit them.

"With asteroseismic data we'll be able to get a lot of information about exoplanets' host stars and that will give us a lot of insight on exoplanets themselves," study leader Trevor Weiss of California State University, Long Beach, said in a statement.

The Kepler Space Telescope, which hunted for exoplanets by watching for transits, was able to make asteroseismological measurements of 150,000 stars. In assessing whether Roman will be able to do the same, Weiss' team applied the Kepler dataset to models of Roman's observational capabilities. In particular, they discovered that Roman will be adept at detecting stellar oscillations on red giant stars, which are both luminous (making them easier to detect) and have a high frequency of oscillation with a period ranging from hours to days. This is a good match for Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, which will keep a steady eye on hundreds of millions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy's bulge every 12 minutes over half-a-dozen 70.5-day stretches, meaning that it will be attuned to the red giants' vibrations.

"Asteroseismology with Roman is possible because we don't need to ask the telescope to do anything it wasn't already planning to do," said Marc Pinsonneault of Ohio State University. "The strength of the Roman mission is remarkable: it's designed in part to advance exoplanet science, but we'll also get really rich data for other scientific areas that extend beyond its main focus."

The bulge, which harbors the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, is the oldest part of the Milky Way galaxy. Many of its stars are now aging out, evolving off the main sequence (which is what we call the stage of their life when they are generating energy through the fusion of hydrogen into helium in the core).

Upon leaving the main sequence, the next stage in the evolution of a sun-like star with less than eight solar masses is to expand and become a red giant. Initial estimates of the number of red giants that Roman could observe seismic waves on was 290,000, but deeper analysis found that the actual number could be much more.

"Now that we know the survey will entail a 12-minute cadence, we find it strengthens our numbers to over 300,000 asteroseismic detections in total," said Weiss. Depending upon certain assumptions, the total number could be as high as 648,000 red giants in its field of view, with 358,000 in the bulge.

"It would be the largest asteroseismic sample ever collected," said Weiss.

Understanding the properties of the host stars will inform astronomers about the planets they find — for example, whether they are in the habitable zones. The observations will also provide clues as to the future of planetary systems when their star begins to gradually die by evolving into a red giant star, before casting off their outer layers and leaving behind a dead white dwarf. How soon this happens depends upon the star's mass. More massive stars live shorter lifetimes than less massive stars. During the expansion and casting off phase, any planets orbiting close to the star are destroyed.

In our solar system's case, Mercury, Venus and probably Earth will all be doomed. However, microlensing has an advantage by being able to detect planets that are farther out from their star, far enough out to perhaps survive the red giant stage. By detecting planets around red giants, and the orbits of those planets, it will help astronomers better understand what fate will befall the planets of our solar system, and how far out a world has to be in order to survive. Astronomers have already noticed a deficit of planets orbiting red giants, and Roman’s findings will cement our picture of evolved planetary systems.

"Our work will lay out the statistical properties of the whole population — what their typical abundances and ages are — so that the exoplanet scientists can put the Roman measurements in context," said Pinsonneault.

Roman's asteroseismic discoveries won't just teach us about planetary systems, but the ages of the stars based on the asteroseismic readings will act as a guide to the history of the Milky Way, and its bulge in particular.

"We actually don’t know a lot about our galaxy's bulge since you can only see it in infrared light due to all the intervening dust," said Pinsonneault. "There could be surprising populations or chemical patterns there. What if there are young stars buried there? Roman will open a completely different window into the stellar populations in the Milky Way's center. I'm prepared to be surprised."

For example, a young population of stars could come to light if Roman measures oscillations on more massive red giants. This is because more massive stars live shorter lifetimes and therefore would have formed more recently.

The Roman Space Telescope is currently scheduled for launch between autumn 2026 and May 2027. In the meantime, the new assessment of its asteroseismic capabilities has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Researchers exposed moss spores to the harsh environment of space for nine months recently, and the results were surprising, a new study reports.

"Most living organisms, including humans, cannot survive even briefly in the vacuum of space," study lead author Tomomichi Fujita, of Hokkaido University in Japan, said in a statement. "However, the moss spores retained their vitality after nine months of direct exposure. This provides striking evidence that the life that has evolved on Earth possesses, at the cellular level, intrinsic mechanisms to endure the conditions of space."

Mosses are some of the oldest plants on Earth. They evolved more than 400 million years ago and lack some of the signature traits of more "advanced" flora — for instance, they don't have a vascular system that transports water and nutrients throughout their bodies. But many mosses are quite hardy, thriving in extreme environments around the world from the Arctic tundra to the sands of the Sahara.

Fujita and his team wanted to see if that resilience extends beyond Earth. So, they packed some spores of a widespread species known as "spreading earthmoss" aboard Northrop Grumman's 17th Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2022.

The scientists selected spores — or, more specifically, sporophytes, the reproductive structures that produce spores — after conducting a few experiments here on Earth. Those experiments involved exposing the sporophytes, as well as juvenile moss and moss stem cells, to space-like conditions in the lab — a vacuum environment, microgravity, high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation and large temperature swings.

The researchers determined that UV radiation was the single biggest stressor for the moss, and that the sporophytes handled it — and the other hardships — much better than the juvenile moss and moss stem cells did.

So, they sent some sporophytes to the ISS. Astronauts affixed the samples to the station's exterior, where they remained for 283 days before coming back to Earth on a Dragon cargo capsule in January 2023. (Cygnus wasn't designed to survive the trip back to Earth, but Dragon crew and cargo craft are reusable.)

Fujita and his colleagues were in for a surprise when they took a look at the space-flown spores.

"We expected almost zero survival, but the result was the opposite: Most of the spores survived," he said. "We were genuinely astonished by the extraordinary durability of these tiny plant cells."

More than 80% of the sporophytes were still alive, in fact, and 89% of those survivors were able to germinate back in the lab. Spaceflight caused a 20% reduction in chlorophyll a, the main pigment involved in photosynthesis, but the spores seemed to be healthy despite that drop, the team found.

Indeed, the sporophytes likely could have survived much longer in the final frontier — 5,600 days or so, according to a mathematical model the researchers developed.

"This study demonstrates the astonishing resilience of life that originated on Earth," Fujita said. (We've gotten previous peeks at this resilience, which is displayed by a variety of organisms, such as bacteria and tardigrades.)

The new research could also have implications for journeys beyond our home planet, Fujita added.

"Ultimately, we hope this work opens a new frontier toward constructing ecosystems in extraterrestrial environments such as the moon and Mars," he said. "I hope that our moss research will serve as a starting point."

The new study was published Thursday (Nov. 20) in the journal iScience.

Orbital observation

It's a morning ritual for millions, but isn't so straightforward without the benefit of the pull of gravity.

"In space, we’re weightless, but not massless. So how do we measure our mass?" NASA astronaut Johnny Kim, a flight engineer on the space station's Expedition 73 crew, wrote in a social media post on Thursday (Nov. 20).

In short, it takes specialized equipment like Russia's Body Mass Measurement Device. They all, however, rely on Newton’s Second Law: F = ma.

"Apply a known force, measure the resulting acceleration, and you can calculate mass from the relationship between the two," Kim wrote.

Science status

Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 73 crew aboard the space station this week was:

DROPLET — Flight engineer Mike Fincke of NASA continued an experiment observing how particles attach to liquid droplets and rearrange in the weightlessness of space by installing samples inside a fluorescence microscope to be observed by scientists on Earth.

Ultrasound 3 — Zena Cardman, Fincke's fellow NASA flight engineer, checked out the operations of the new scanning device, which can be used for crew heart and vein scans, as well as internal imaging of bones, organs and tissues.

Station keeping

The Expedition 73 crew also devoted time to maintaining the space station's systems, including:

Progress MS-32 (93P) — On Wednesday (Nov. 19), the Russian cargo capsule fired its engine for 14 minutes and 7 seconds while still docked to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, raising the altitude of the space station by 1 mile at apogee and 2.3 miles at perigee (1.6 and 3.7 kilometers), leaving the complex in a higher orbit for the upcoming arrival of a new crew on a Soyuz spacecraft.

Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation — Flight engineer Jonny Kim set up a temporary sleep station for one of the three arriving Soyuz MS-28 crew members in the Columbus laboratory module. The Soyuz crew will briefly increase the station's residency to 10 members.

Spacesuit stowage — Flight engineer Zena Cardman photo-documented and prepared for packing components from the station's extravehicular mobility units (EMUs, or spacesuits) that are slated to return to Earth on Russia's Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft.

Astronaut activity

"Gloves on, science flowing. Starting a new campaign for Stellar Stem Cells-2 inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox — where tiny cells teach us big things," wrote NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, an Expedition 73 flight engineer, in a Nov. 19, 2025 social media post from the ISS.

The Stellar Stem Cells Mission-2 study explores how microgravity affects stem cells becoming cardiac and brain cells. Growing such cells on Earth is not as efficient on the ground, but doing so in space helps scientists learn more about how to produce them for regenerative medicine both on Earth and for future spaceflights.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Nov. 21), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Oleg Platonov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos; NASA astronauts Zena Cardman,Mike Fincke and Jonny Kim of NASA and JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, all flight engineers.

There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the space-facing port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node.

There are four docked cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module, Progress MS-32 (93P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool, attached to the Earth-facing common berthing mechanism (CBM) on the Unity node and Japan's HTV-X1 attached to the Earth-facing CBM on the Harmony node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 25 years and 19 days.

What is it?

Artemis 2 represents the first time humans will travel to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. While it will not involve a lunar landing, Artemis 2 is critical for validating the performance of the SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, life-support systems, and deep-space operational procedures with astronauts onboard. The spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on what will be the first crewed mission of the Artemis program.

The mission will follow a hybrid free-return trajectory, allowing Orion to loop around the moon and head back toward Earth using gravitational forces, an important safety feature for early crewed missions. Throughout the roughly 10-day journey, the crew will conduct evaluations of life-support performance, spacecraft maneuvering, communication systems and other mission-critical functions needed for future lunar landings.

Where is it?

This image was taken at High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Why is it amazing?

During Artemis 2, Orion will serve as both transport and habitat for the four-person crew. The spacecraft includes advanced guidance and navigation systems, radiation protection features, state-of-the-art avionics and life-support technologies capable of sustaining astronauts through deep-space conditions. Its heat shield—the largest ever built for a human spacecraft — will protect the crew during reentry at nearly 25,000 mph (40,000 kph).

Artemis 2 is a foundational step toward establishing a sustained human presence on and around the moon. Its success will support future construction of the Gateway lunar orbiting platform, development of lunar surface infrastructure and preparation for eventual crewed missions to Mars, according to NASA.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about NASA's Artemis program and the Orion spacecraft.

Add to this two comets that have been seen in the night sky, comet Swan and comet Lemmon. While the astronauts on the ISS had to take shelter during the recent solar storms to avoid potentially dangerous radiation, they did manage to capture this image of comet Lemmon appearing near the auroras on Earth.

What is it?

Comet Lemmon, officially designated C/2012 F6 (Lemmon), is a long-period comet discovered in 2012 by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona. It originates from the distant Oort Cloud, the icy reservoir of cometary bodies that surrounds our solar system.

As it approaches the sun during its 1,350-year orbit, comet Lemmon warms, releasing gas and dust that form its signature glowing tail.

Where is it?

This image was taken in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station, which circles our planet at an average altitude of about 250 miles (400 kilometers).

Why is it amazing?

Because of their long orbits, comets are a relatively rare sight in the night sky. And catching one juxtaposed against powerful auroras is rarer still.

This photo is a good reminder of how dynamic, multi-layered and interconnected our corner of the universe really is, and how once in a while, things line up just right to capture something truly extraordinary.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about comet Lemmon and space weather.

In September, NASA announced that it has chosen Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the altitude of its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a space telescope whose orbit has gotten dangerously low since its November 2004 launch.

Today (Nov. 19), we learned how Katalyst's spacecraft will get off the ground — aboard Pegasus, an air-launched rocket built by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

The $500 million Swift observatory was built by Orbital Sciences, a company that in 2014 became Orbital ATK, which was then acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018. The space telescope has been studying gamma-ray bursts — the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang — from low Earth orbit (LEO) for two decades.

But that orbit has decayed considerably over the years, from an initial 373 miles (600 kilometers) to about 249 miles (400 km) today. As Swift gets lower and lower, it encounters more frictional drag from Earth's atmosphere, so its descent is accelerating — and the observatory has no thrusters to counteract the process.

If nothing changes, Swift will likely crash back to Earth by the end of 2026, and there's no replacement mission in the works. So NASA decided to fund a rescue effort, leveraging the capabilities of private industry to meet a tight timeline.

Katalyst won that contract. And the company has decided that Pegasus — which fires up its solid rocket motors after being dropped by Northrop Grumman's L-1011 Stargazer aircraft at an elevation of about 39,000 feet (12,000 meters) — is the right launcher for the job.

"It's the only launch vehicle that can meet the orbit, the schedule and the cost to achieve something unprecedented with emerging technology," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in a statement today.

Pegasus is capable of hauling about 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms) of payload to LEO. The rocket debuted in 1990 and has 45 missions under its belt to date, 40 of them fully successful. Pegasus flew most recently in June 2021, when it lofted a "space domain awareness" satellite for the U.S. Space Force.

Northrop Grumman already had the rocket hardware for this coming mission pretty much ready to go, according to Kurt Eberly, director of space launch for the company.

"We have to do some final integration and test, and we have to develop the trajectory and the guidance for the RAAN [right ascension of the ascending node] steering and software, but that's really it," Eberly told Space.com.

Katalyst's mission will fly on a Pegasus XL, a slightly longer and more massive version of the air-launched rocket. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the total budget of the Swift rescue mission is $30 million, including launch.

The Pegasus XL will launch in June 2026, if all goes according to plan. And there's not much wiggle room in that target, considering how quickly Swift is coming down.

"We are treating this launch date as a firm commitment," Kieran Wilson, vice president of technology at Katalyst, told Space.com. "We'll kind of continuously evaluate where Swift stands in its orbital decay and figure out what sort of adaptations we might need to pursue, whether it's launching to a different altitude, whether it's targeting slightly different insertions."

The Katalyst spacecraft will head to an orbit similar to that of Swift, then spend two to three weeks closing in on the observatory. The boost vehicle will inspect its target "from reasonable standoff distances, to allow us to get high-resolution imagery and understand the current state," Wilson said.

Once that state is understood, the rescuer — which is about 4.9 feet (1.5 m) tall and weighs 770 pounds (350 kg) — will close in and capture Swift using its three robotic arms.

This will be challenging, as the NASA observatory was not designed to be serviced. And Swift has super-sensitive optics, which cannot be pointed toward the sun, Earth or moon without potentially incurring damage.

So Katalyst has been poring over old prelaunch photos of Swift and consulting with teams from NASA and Northrop Grumman to figure out the best and safest way to grab the observatory.

"There's a lot of really fun detective work going on behind the scenes, in order to determine what points on the spacecraft we can actually capture and what the states are going to be," Wilson said.

That work has revealed a primary capture point as well as a few promising backups, he added.

After a successful capture, the Katalyst spacecraft will haul Swift back up to its initial altitude of 373 miles (600 km) or so, if all goes to plan.

"That lasted it 22 years the first time," Wilson said. "We expect [the boost] to provide a similar amount of on-orbit longevity this time around."

A successful boost would be historic, marking the first-ever capture of an uncrewed U.S. government satellite by a private spacecraft. (It would not be the first-ever servicing mission to a NASA space telescope, however; astronauts repaired and upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope five times between 1993 and 2009. But Hubble was designed to be serviced.)

Katalyst already has spaceflight experience; in 2024, the company launched two spacecraft to LEO on SpaceX's Transporter 10 rideshare mission. Those satellites demonstrated many of the core systems that the Swift-boosting craft will employ, Wilson said.

But the Swift mission marks a step up in difficulty, especially given how quickly everything must come together: A June 2026 launch will come just eight or nine months after Katalyst scored the NASA contract.

Saving Swift could therefore serve as a blueprint of sorts, paving the way for similar, and perhaps even more ambitious, feats down the road, according to Wilson.

"If we're able to do this for NASA in just eight months, I do think that opens up a new set of responsive missions in the future," he said, noting that servicing missions have historically taken multiple years to develop and launch.

Katalyst plans to operate some of those future missions itself. For example, in 2027, the company aims to launch its first mission to geostationary orbit, which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth. That flight will mark the debut of Katalyst's larger Nexus spacecraft, "a multi-mission robotic platform to serve both government and commercial customers for life extension and space domain awareness services," Wilson said.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were forced to rearrange some of their sleeping arrangements due to the potential threat posed by recent solar storms, a recent communications exchange between ISS mission control and crew members aboard the space station shows.

"We entered into an energetic solar particle event this morning, and we're going to go in and out of holes of higher than the baseline [radiation] risk," one operator told NASA astronaut Mike Fincke over the comms channel. Out of an "abundance of caution," the station's three Russian cosmonauts were instructed to spend a night in the ISS laboratory module

On the nights of Nov. 11 and 12, coronal mass ejections from one of the most energetic sunspot groups of the current solar cycle, AR4274, caused widespread auroras across the Northern Hemisphere. The same energized particles that interact with Earth's magnetosphere to create auroras also arrive carrying heavy, radioactive ions, which can be harmful to astronauts in orbit not shielded by the planet's natural defenses.

The ISS does have some defenses of its own, though. Only Russian crew members Oleg Platonov, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky were asked to bunk elsewhere for the night. "The USOS crew slept in their crew quarters and the Roscosmos cosmonauts camped out in the lab as a preventative measure due to the solar storm," Sandra Jones, a NASA public affairs official, told Space.com in an email. The ISS crew was also given a list of other places aboard the ISS to avoid during the solar storm event.

In addition to cosmonauts Platonov, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky, ISS Expedition 73 consists of NASA astronauts Mike Fincke, Jonny Kim and Zena Cardman, as well as JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui. The latter four launched to the ISS Aug. 1 aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, and are scheduled to remain aboard the station for another three months.

With the U.S. government shutdown over, American astronauts both on Earth and in space are able to resume their online presences. Just in time, Kim took to social media to share a video of aurora from space taken on Sept. 3 as his first post since the shutdown ended.

The module, which is supposed to be shipped to NASA this week, was nearly not needed after the Trump administration revealed plans to discontinue Orion and its rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), after the Artemis 3 mission in 2027. Trump's $18.8 billion NASA budget proposal for 2026, introduced in May, proposed sweeping cuts and changes to the agency's current programs. NASA's lunar exploration program was one of around 40 projects selected for funding reduction. The Trump administration signaled that it sought to replace the NASA-made SLS rocket and the Orion spaceship with commercial alternatives after the completion of Artemis 3. It also wanted to eliminate the Lunar Gateway, a station designed to orbit the moon and serve as a base for sorties to the moon’s surface.

But the mission was salvaged by a last minute addition to the Big, Beautiful Bill, spearheaded by Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July, secured funding for both the Lunar Gateway and further Orion and SLS flights beyond Artemis 3. Although the original version of the bill didn’t address NASA, later versions eventually provided $2.6 billion to build the Lunar Gateway, $41.1 billion for SLS to launch Artemis 4, and 5 and $20 million for a new Orion capsule to be used on Artemis 4 and subsequent launches.

ESA said in a statement that the Artemis 4 Orion service module would begin its journey across the Atlantic Ocean "in a few days" to head to NASA's Kennedy Space Center for further integration. In 2021, ESA paid a consortium of European companies 650 million euros ($791 million) to produce Orion service modules for Artemis missions 4, 5 and 6.

The service module is an expendable part of the Orion space ship that provides propulsion, electricity and atmosphere regeneration during the trip to the moon and back. ESA is building the technology as part of a barter agreement with NASA in exchange for the American agency providing seats on launch vehicles to take European astronauts to the International Space Station.

ESA has previously delivered three Orion service modules to NASA. Only the first of the three has so far made it to space — the one that powered the Artemis 1 uncrewed test mission in December 2022. Artemis 2 is scheduled to deliver the first human crew since the Apollo era to the moon's orbit in April next year. Artemis 3, planned for 2027, is expected to carry the Starship HLS lander to enable a human return to the moon's surface.

Artemis 4 is expected to launch in 2028 with another crew tasked with a lunar landing. The mission will also deliver the Lunar I-Hab, a habitation module for the planned Gateway station, into the moon's orbit.

"[The European Service Module 4] will play a key role as the Artemis 4 mission is due to deliver the International Habitation Module (Lunar I-Hab) of the Lunar Gateway space station," Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA's Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, said in the statement. "This state-of-the-art hardware, developed by Airbus Defence and Space and its subcontractors across Europe, demonstrates our ability to contribute to major international partnerships."

The Trump 2026 NASA budget, widely criticized and described as the smallest NASA budget since 1961, introduces wide-ranging cuts and cancellations of space and Earth science missions. Additional ESA projects carried out in collaboration with NASA are on the line including the Venus explorer Envision and the gravitational wave space detector LISA.

The Trump budget, however, is facing opposition in Congress, which is rumored to be working on a competing proposal that might restore most of the funding. On the other hand, insider reports have indicated that NASA leadership is aggressively pushing for reforms, job cuts and project cancellations to implement Trump's vision even ahead of a formal budget approval.

Scheduled for liftoff no earlier than Sunday (Nov. 9) aboard Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the $80 million ESCAPADE mission — short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — will send two twin probes, nicknamed Blue and Gold, to orbit Mars in tandem. The mission marks NASA's first dual-satellite mission to another planet, and aims to create a 3D view of how the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the sun, energizes and strips away Martian air.

"To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars," Robert Lillis, principal investigator for ESCAPADE and associate director for planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said in a statement released Wednesday (Nov. 5). "ESCAPADE gives us what you might call a stereo perspective — two different vantage points simultaneously."

Geologic evidence from ancient river valleys and water-formed minerals shows that Mars once had liquid water, which means it also had a much thicker atmosphere. But around 4 billion years ago, the planet's magnetic field, which is the invisible shield that protects a world from the sun's radiation, began to fade. Without that protection, the solar wind slowly stripped away the Martian atmosphere, leaving behind a tenuous wisp less than 1% as dense as Earth's.

Previous missions, including NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, MAVEN, and the Emirates Mars Mission Hope, have shown that Mars lacks a global magnetic field but retains patchy magnetic "bubbles" locked into its crust. However, with only one spacecraft in orbit at a time, researchers have been limited to viewing one region at a time, often hours apart.

With the ESCAPADE satellites, "we can monitor how those regions vary on timescales as short as two minutes and up to 30 minutes," Lillis said in the statement. "This will allow us to really make measurements we've never made before, and to characterize a very dynamic system in a way we couldn't characterize it before."

After reaching Mars in September 2027, the robotic duo will spend about seven months fine-tuning their orbits before flying in formation, like a "pair of pearls on a string," coming within 100 miles (160 kilometers) above the surface. If all goes to plan, after six months of joint observations, they will separate into different orbits for another five months to build a 3D map of how energy and matter flow between Mars and the solar wind, the process that controls atmospheric loss.

Over roughly 11 months of science operations, ESCAPADE will explore three key questions, including how Mars’ magnetic bubble is shaped, how energy from the sun interacts with it, and how this affects the flow of particles in and out of the planet’s atmosphere.

To achieve this, each probe, about the size of a copy machine, carries an identical suite of instruments working in concert. Electrostatic analyzers, built at UC Berkeley, will detect charged particles escaping from Mars; by measuring their direction and energy, scientists can determine whether those particles are falling back toward the planet or being swept away by the solar wind, the statement says.

A magnetometer from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will track the strength and orientation of magnetic fields, while plasma sensors from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University will probe plasma properties. Meanwhile, student-built cameras from Northern Arizona University will capture images of Mars, and may even catch glimpses of its mysterious green auroras.

ESCAPADE is also testing a clever new route to Mars. Instead of heading directly to Mars, the spacecraft will first gear toward a Lagrange point, a gravitational “sweet spot” between Earth and the sun, for about a year before slingshotting toward Mars in 2026. This longer but more flexible route could make future missions less dependent on the narrow, once-every-two-years Mars launch windows, scientists say.

Understanding how solar radiation interacts with Mars' upper atmosphere, known as the ionosphere, could also aid future explorers. On Mars, radio waves can reflect off the ionosphere to travel beyond the horizon, so mapping how this layer behaves will be vital for communication and navigation. The mission's results may even hint at whether liquid water still lingers underground, a possibility supported by recent analyses of seismic data from NASA's InSight lander — and a key question for future human exploration.

"It is definitely going to be a challenge to establish a human settlement on Mars," Lillis said in the same statement. "But, you know, humans are tenacious, right?"

Latvia will become the latest country to join the Artemis Accords, the country announced at the end of October. The European nation was the fourth commit during that month, doubling the number of countries that had previously signed the accords in 2025.

Also adding their name to the accords in October were the Philippines, Malaysia and Hungary. They were preceded by Senegal, Norway, Bangladesh and Finland, who signed earlier this year.

"Latvia’s accession to the Artemis Accords is a significant step towards our more active participation in the global space community," Latvian officials said in an Oct. 31 statement on a government-affiliated website. "We are proud to become part of a group of nations committed to exploring and using space responsibly and sustainably."

October also marks five years of the Artemis Accords, which NASA, the U.S. State Department and seven other founding nations established in 2020 as a set of international principles to designed to guide how countries explore the moon and deep space. They parallel concepts from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which aimed to promote peaceful cooperation in space.

Despite their name, the accords aren't directly associated with NASA's current push to return astronauts to the moon with the Artemis program. The agency is gearing up for the launch of Artemis 2 as early as February 2026, which will be the first mission to fly astronauts to the moon since 1972.

Artemis 3, currently targeted for 2027 or 2028, will be the program's first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface, and will be followed, NASA hopes, by a series of missions to establish a permanent human presence on the moon.

NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy announced the addition of Hungary to the accords via social media on Oct. 22 and did the same with the Philippines and Malaysia today (Nov. 3).

Latvia's announcement indicates that the country "plans" to join the accords, according to the English translation of the release, but its official inclusion may have been delayed with the U.S. government shutdown still underway. NASA officials have indicated that a formal signing ceremony will likely take place once the government reopens.

By the time that the International Space Station (ISS) is safely and deliberately de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean, the station will have been permanently crewed for 30 years — it has had visitors ever since the first Expedition 1 mission (consisting of one astronaut and two cosmonauts) first docked with the fledgling, half-built station on November 2, 2000. Yet as we begin to near the end of the ISS's time in low Earth orbit, we are beginning to think ever more about the station's true legacy, whether it achieved what it set out to achieve, and what we will lose when it is finally gone.

The loss of the ISS will be keenly felt by many; it will be like when one of our beloved Mars rovers falters and is forced to end its mission. Sure, there will be other Mars rovers after, but they will be different. There will be other space stations, but they will be different.

For some, though, says sociologist Paola Castaño-Rodriguez of the University of Exeter, the end of the ISS will be no loss at all, as they always saw it as a white elephant.

"When it comes to spaceflight, everybody uses the word 'we,' but when you're a sociologist, the first thing you ask is, who is 'we?'" she told Space.com. "Just as equally as you have enthusiasts, there's a lot of people for whom this is an obscene waste of money."

Castaño-Rodriguez studies the processes by which science is conducted on the ISS, the unique way in which people from across the world come together to perform this science, and the different criteria by which this science is valued. She's also currently working on her book, "Beyond the Lab: the Social Lives of Experiments on the International Space Station," which explores these topics through the stories of three science experiments: the first time lettuce was grown on the ISS, the twin experiment involving Mark and Scott Kelly, and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle physics experiment affixed to the exterior hull of the ISS.

The critics are correct that the ISS is expensive, having cost $150 billion to build and operate so far, with NASA alone spending $3 billion per year to maintain it. For that amount of money, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect some major outputs. Indeed, the science case for building the space station back in the 1990s was that the experiments that could be performed on the ISS could help cure cancer or discover dark matter.

"In a way, part of the problem is in how the space station was pitched, with these big promises that scientists had to make to get funded, and the issue is that those things have become the things that the space station is accountable for," said Castaño-Rodriguez.

The point is, the way we judge what we will lose when the ISS is de-orbited will differ depending on who is doing the judging — and how that judgement is cast. Looking at things purely from the eureka moments of scientific discovery that make headlines, people might consider the ISS a disappointment. Still, earlier this year, NASA has revealed that over 4,000 science experiments have been conducted on the ISS over the past 25 years, resulting in 4,400 scientific papers — but those findings have been, for the most part, relatively modest or incremental rather than revelatory.

However, looking at science in only this way would completely ignore what Castaño-Rodriguez considers to be the true success of science on the station, and what will be most keenly felt when it is lost.

"It takes for granted all the infrastructural work, all the operations, all the processes that, to me, are actually the key outcome of the space station, which is learning how to do science in such an adverse environment," she said. "In a way, it requires re-educating audiences about what is valuable about science. It's not just the shiny headline discovery, it is all the knowledge that is produced to enable a field to move forward. It's an epic and incredibly complex process to do these experiments on the space station.

"I think, when it comes to further space exploration, this infrastructural knowledge is going to be needed. There will be gaps and it is uncertain at the moment how they are going to be filled with other platforms."

Those other platforms that Castaño-Rodriguez refers to are commercial space stations NASA expects to replace the ISS. Companies such as Axiom Space, Blue Origin and a partnership of Starlab Space and Northrop Grumman have signed Space Act agreements with NASA to design and build new space stations. However, with this commercialization comes uncertainty about how much of what the ISS did will be transferred over to the new, privately developed orbiting habitats.

On the one hand, much of the expertise in these commercial ventures is from ex-NASA spaceflight people, and so rather than lose their expertise when the ISS is de-orbited, the processes and values that they embodied at NASA will be merged into the identity of the new commercial stations.

But on the other hand, commercialization could bring with it a loss of transparency.

In the United States, the direction of centrally funded science is governed by the peer review process of the National Academy of Sciences' decadal surveys. It is this process that guides what research NASA funds on the space station, which ensures that science on the ISS is judged only on its scientific merits.

"Are private companies going to be accountable to things like the decadal surveys?" asked Castaño-Rodriguez. "In terms of the process by which experiments will be selected, that's a big question, because the implication is that scientists just become the paying customers and the only experiments that go to the station are the ones that can be afforded."

Science today on the ISS is a truly public affair, with a mandate to make all the data collected by science experiments performed on the space station available in a public repository.

"This is a huge deal because you don't have to be involved in spaceflight to analyze the data," said Castaño-Rodriguez. "This open science is very much part of the space station's history that is not really talked about much, but it's a really important infrastructural aspect that is very international with researchers all over the world participating and engaging and re-analyzing the data produced on the space station."

The risk is that the transition from the publicly funded ISS to commercial stations could see the loss of this accessible open data, though Castaño-Rodriguez sees some reasons for optimism, for example through ex-NASA staff who, in the past, have championed open data and who now work for the private companies.

Castaño-Rodriguez also thinks commercial stations could be just as international as the ISS.

“They're going to be pathways to a lot of middle- to high-income nations to start paying for their astronaut missions," said Castaño-Rodriguez. For example, Axiom Space has already flown two Saudi astronauts on one of their missions (previously NASA had flown a Saudi prince on shuttle Discovery in 1985) as well as the first Turkish astronaut.

However, there's a difference between being a paying guest and a true partner, which is how the mix of international astronauts on the ISS has mostly been seen.

“I don't think [the commercial stations] will be anything like the particular international configuration of the ISS,” said Castaño-Rodriguez. "It's very much a product of its time."

That time being the 1990s and 2000s, off the back of the nearly five-decade Cold War and the dawn — arguably a false one — of renewed international cooperation both on Earth and in space. Militarily trained astronauts on both sides began shaking hands with people they'd been ideologically trained to treat as enemies. At the level of crew-member interactions, mission-control interactions, and scientific interactions, cooperation in space on the ISS helped break down barriers.

When we lose the ISS, we won't just lose its hardware, or how it made science in low-Earth orbit accessible. We'll also lose a pillar of space history that brought together people from different countries that were still learning to trust each other. Even today, despite Russia's invasion of Ukraine and tension that globally arose from the conflict, cosmonauts still fly to the station and work closely with their crewmates from other nations. It's hard to see that being replicated on a commercial station in today's geopolitical climate, at least to the same level and for such a prolonged time as it was exhibited on the ISS.

The space station really has been a unique experiment, an orbiting petri dish where humans have learned to work and live together in space. Wherever our spacefaring takes us in the future, it will owe a great deal to the legacy of the ISS. While we will lose the physical space station, Castaño-Rodriguez describes an infrastructural knowledge that will live on, at least in part, in where we take crewed space exploration next.

As part of her research, Castaño-Rodriguez has interviewed nearly a hundred astronauts, engineers and scientists involved in the ISS who have a unique insight into the importance of this orbiting science post. Perhaps the legacy of the ISS is best summed up by Sergei Krikalev, cosmonaut on the Expedition 1 mission 25 years ago.

"I asked him, when he was there on Expedition 1, did he remember any of the science experiments?" said Castaño-Rodriguez. "He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'the space station is the experiment.'"

As the shutdown continues into its second month, many federal employees are furloughed. Some, however, keep working (mostly without pay at the moment), because they're considered critical to the continued operation of the nation's functions, like the delivery of the mail.

Thankfully for the NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), their wellbeing falls into the category of "protection of life and safety," which NASA is tasked with maintaining while the government's doors are closed.

Like all federal agencies, NASA has had to severely cut back on its day-to-day activities, as more than 15,000 NASA civil servants have been furloughed since Oct. 1. Only essential personnel deemed "necessary to protect life and property" are granted "excepted" status, according to NASA's shutdown guidance. This includes astronauts in space and the technicians in mission control on the ground who support them.

For the most part, life aboard the ISS has continued as usual. The Expedition 73 crew currently occupying the space station have spent the past month conducting microgravity research and other experiments on their rotation and performing scheduled maintenance.

Of the seven astronauts currently living on the ISS, three are from the Russian space agency Roscosmos — Sergey Ryzhikov, Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov — and another is Japan's Kimiya Yui, from Japan.

The remaining three are NASA's Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke. Like their international counterparts, they've continued pulling their fair share of the chores in space. They just aren't getting paid for it. Like every other federal employees forced to work during the shutdown, they will later receive backpay compensation for the time they're currently putting in.

This past week, for example, Japan's new HTV-X1 cargo spacecraft launched and rendezvoused with the ISS. All three NASA astronauts were on hand for that capture and were scheduled to help unload its cargo on Friday (Oct. 31).

One thing NASA's astronauts aren't doing is updating their social media feeds or other lines of public communication. Yui, though, has been filling that gap. Over the last month, he has posted stunning views of Earth that have included the HTV-X arrival, comet Lemmon above the thin line of Earth's atmosphere, and auroras from space.

NASA has also classified work on the agency's Artemis moon program as critical and therefore continues work to launch the four-astronaut Artemis 2 mission around the moon as early as February 2026.

While work on Artemis has progressed, the continued shutdown may put a strain on agency resources as more and more employees are forced to work without pay. Delays could push the mission's hopeful February target date further into the launch window, which extends through April.

And any delay to Artemis 2 could be bad news for the timeline of Artemis 3, which will be NASA's first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s. China, too, has aspirations of landing astronauts (or, as China calls them, "taikonauts") on the moon, and NASA and U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly stressed the importance of winning this new "moon race."

The International Space Station is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern age. It is the largest, most complex, most expensive and most durable spacecraft ever built.

Its first modules were launched in 1998. The first crew to live on the International Space Station – an American and two Russians – entered it in 2000. Nov. 2, 2025, marks 25 years of continuous habitation by at least two people, and as many as 13 at one time. It is a singular example of international cooperation that has stood the test of time.

Two hundred and ninety people from 26 countries have now visited the space station, several of them staying for a year or more. More than 40% of all the humans who have ever been to space have been International Space Station visitors.

The station has been the locus of thousands of scientific and engineering studies using almost 200 distinct scientific facilities, investigating everything from astronomical phenomena and basic physics to crew health and plant growth. The phenomenon of space tourism was born on the space station. Altogether, astronauts have accumulated almost 127 person-years of experience on the station, and a deep understanding of what it takes to live in low Earth orbit.

If you've ever seen photos of the inside of the International Space Station, you've probably noticed the clutter. There are cables everywhere. Equipment sticks out into corridors. It doesn’t look like Star Trek's Enterprise or other science fiction spacecraft. There’s no shower for the crew, or a kitchen for cooking a meal from scratch. It doesn’t have an area designed for the crew to gather in their downtime. But even without those niceties, it clearly represents a vision of the future from the past, one where humanity would live permanently in space for the first time.

Space archaeology

November 2025, by coincidence, also marks the 10th anniversary of my team's research on the space station, the International Space Station Archaeological Project. The long history of habitation on the space station makes it perfect for the kind of studies that archaeologists like my colleagues and me carry out.

We recognized that there had been hardly any research on the social and cultural aspects of life in space. We wanted to show space agencies that were already planning three-year missions to Mars what they were overlooking.

We wanted to go beyond just talking to the crew about their experiences, though we have also done that. But as previous studies of contemporary societies have shown, people often don't want to discuss all their lives with researchers, or they’re unable to articulate all their experiences.

Astronauts on Earth are usually trying to get their next ride back to space, and they understandably don't want to rock the boat. Our research provides an additional window onto life on a space station by using archaeological evidence: the traces of human interactions with the objects and built spaces of the site.

The problem, of course, is that we can't go to the station and observe it directly. So we had to come up with other ways to capture data. In November 2015, I realized that we could use the thousands of photos taken by the crew and published by NASA as a starting point. These would allow us to track the movement of people and things around the site over time, and to map the behaviors and associations between them.

In 2022, the International Space Station Archaeological Project also carried out the first archaeological fieldwork off the Earth, an experiment designed by my collaborator, Alice Gorman. We asked the crew to document six sample locations in different modules by taking photos of each one every day for two months.

Lessons from photos

We learned that the crew of the International Space Station is a lot like those of us on Earth – perhaps unsurprising, since they live 95% or more of their lives here with the rest of us. They decorate the walls of the station with pictures, memorabilia and, on the Russian side, religious items, the way you might put photos and souvenirs on your refrigerator door to say something about yourself and your family. They make birthday cakes for their colleagues. They love to snack on candy or other special foods that they selected to be sent.

Unlike the rest of us, however, they live without much freedom to make choices about their lives. Their days are governed by lengthy procedures overseen by Mission Control, and by lists of items and their locations.

Crew members do show some signs of autonomy, though. They sometimes create new uses for different areas. They used a maintenance work station for the storage of all kinds of unrelated things, just because it has a lot of Velcro for holding items in place. They have to come up with solutions for storing their toiletry kits because that kind of affordance wasn’t considered necessary by the station’s designers 30 or 40 years ago.

We discovered that despite the international nature of the station, most areas of it are highly nationalized, with each space agency controlling its own modules and, often, the activities going on in each one. This makes sense, since each agency is responsible to their own taxpayers and needs to show how their money is being spent. But it probably isn't the most efficient way to run what is the most expensive building project in the history of humanity.

In our latest research, we tracked changes in scientific activity, which we found has become increasingly diverse, by documenting the use of specialized experimental equipment. This work was the result of questions from one of the companies competing to build a commercial successor to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit.

The company wanted to know if we could tell them what facilities their customers were likely going to need. Of course, understanding how people have used different parts of a site over time is a typical archaeological problem. They are using our results to improve the experiences of their crews.

The archaeology of the contemporary world

Similar archaeological studies of contemporary issues here on Earth can also make future lives better, whether by studying phenomena such as migration, ethnonationalism or ecological issues.

In this way, we and other contemporary archaeologists are charting a new future for studying the past, a path for our discipline that lies alongside our traditional work of investigating ancient societies and managing heritage resources. Our International Space Station work also demonstrates the relevance of social science research for solving all kinds of problems – even ones that seem to be purely technical, like living in space.

You can read the original article here.

Sunday (Nov. 2) marked the 25th anniversary of continuous human occupation of the International Space Station (ISS), which has carved out a spot in the history books as one of our species' grandest (and most expensive) technological achievements.

Don't save any confetti for a semicentennial celebration, however — the ISS is in its home stretch. NASA and its partners plan to deorbit the aging outpost toward the end of 2030, using a modified, extra-burly version of SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule to bring it down over an uninhabited stretch of ocean.

And not just any stretch — the "spacecraft cemetery," a patch of the Pacific centered on Point Nemo, which is named after the famous submarine captain in Jules Verne's 1871 novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."

"This remote oceanic location is located at coordinates 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W, about 2,688 kilometers [1,670 miles] from the nearest land — Ducie Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands, to the north; Motu Nui, one of the Easter Islands, to the northeast; and Maher Island, part of Antarctica, to the south," officials with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in a brief Point Nemo explainer.

That remoteness explains Point Nemo's appeal to mission planners, who have ditched several hundred big spacecraft there over the decades: If there's no land nearby, there's virtually no chance that chunks of falling, flaming hardware could harm people, buildings or other infrastructure. (You'd have to be a pretty unlucky sailor to get hit in the spacecraft cemetery).

And some pieces of the ISS are likely to survive its blazing reentry.

"NASA engineers expect breakup to occur as a sequence of three events: solar array and radiator separation first, followed by breakup and separation of intact modules and the truss segment and finally individual module fragmentation and loss of structural integrity of the truss," agency officials wrote in an FAQ about the ISS transition plan.

"As the debris continues to re-enter the atmosphere, the external skin of the modules is expected to melt away and expose internal hardware to rapid heating and melting," they added. "Most station hardware is expected to burn up or vaporize during the intense heating associated with atmospheric re-entry, whereas some denser or heat-resistant components like truss sections are expected to survive reentry and splash down within an uninhabited region of the ocean."

This analysis is informed by the reentry behavior of other large spacecraft, such as the Soviet-Russian space station Mir and NASA's Skylab, agency officials explained. The final days of these two orbiting outposts hold some lessons for mission planners, especially as Earth orbit gets more and more crowded.

Russia steered Mir down to a controlled reentry near Point Nemo in March 2001. NASA tried to ditch Skylab over the Indian Ocean in July 1979 but didn't quite manage it; charred pieces of the station dropped onto a swath of Western Australia, and the town of Esperance famously fined NASA $400 for littering.

The 107-foot-long (33-meter-long), 130-ton Mir remains the largest vehicle ever to fall to Earth over the spacecraft cemetery (or anywhere else, for that matter), but the ISS will break that mark: It's about as long as a football field and weighs 460 tons.

The company holds a contract to put NASA astronauts down near the lunar south pole on the Artemis 3 mission, which is expected to launch in 2028, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX will use a modified upper stage of its Starship megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launcher ever built — for this very high-profile job.

Or will it? Last week, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said the agency will reopen the Artemis 3 landing contract to competition, citing concerns with the pace of Starship's development. The rocket has flown 11 uncrewed test flights to date, the last two of them completely successful, but has yet to reach Earth orbit or demonstrate key moon-critical milestones such as in-space propellant transfer. (Each Starship vehicle will need to be refueled multiple times in Earth orbit before it can reach the moon.)

"I love SpaceX; it's an amazing company. The problem is, they're behind. They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China," Duffy said on Oct. 20 during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." (China plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and has been making steady progress toward this goal.)

This announcement did not sit well with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. He attacked Duffy via social media repeatedly over the following few days, calling the acting NASA chief "Sean Dummy" and claiming that he "is trying to kill NASA."

Now, more than a week later, SpaceX has formulated a more substantive response. On Thursday (Oct. 30), the company posted an update called "To the Moon and Beyond," which summarizes the progress that SpaceX has made with Starship to date and lays out the vehicle's potential to make NASA's lunar ambitions a reality.

"Starship provides unmatched capability to explore the moon, thanks to its large size and ability to refill propellant in space," the blog post reads. "One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, which is roughly two-thirds the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station, and is complete with a cabin that can be scaled for large numbers of explorers and dual airlocks for surface exploration."

SpaceX stressed in the update that it's working in parallel along two Starship paths, developing the "core" megarocket (which will help humanity colonize Mars, among other tasks) as well as the Artemis-specific moon-lander upper stage. SpaceX is self-funding the core path, and its contract for the Artemis lander is of the fixed-price variety, "ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs," the company wrote.

According to Thursday's update, SpaceX has already completed 49 such milestones for the Artemis lander, including testing of micrometeoroid and space debris shielding and demonstrations of "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control" systems. And the company plans to make even more progress soon, sending a Starship upper stage to Earth orbit and completing an in-space fueling test with the vehicle in 2026, if all goes to plan.

SpaceX affirmed in the blog post that it shares NASA's goal to return astronauts to the moon "as expeditiously as possible" and wants to be "a core enabler" of the Artemis program's overriding ambition — to establish a permanent and sustained human presence on the moon, rather than mount a flags-and-footprints retread of Apollo. And the company said it's willing to be flexible to help make all of this happen.

"Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis 3 have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities," reads the update, which also features a new render of the interior of a crewed Starship moon lander. "In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the moon while simultaneously improving crew safety."

The current Artemis 3 plan calls for its four astronauts to lift off atop a NASA Space Launch System rocket, then ride an Orion capsule to lunar orbit, where they'll meet up with the Starship upper stage. The astronauts will move into Starship, which will take them to and from the lunar surface.

SpaceX's new blog post doesn't provide any details about the possible "simplified" Artemis 3 architecture. But Musk may have given us a clue on Oct. 20, in one of his many Duffy reaction posts. "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry," the billionaire wrote. "Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole moon mission. Mark my words."

Japan's new HTV-X cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station for the first time ever today (Oct. 28), delivering thousands of pounds of payloads and supplies to astronauts aboard.

The robotic HTV-X was captured by the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm — operated by NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — today at 11:58 p.m. EDT (1558 GMT), as the station flew 260 miles ( kilometers) over the south Atlantic Ocean.

The HTV-X is the successor to Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), which flew nine missions — all of them successful — to the International Space Station (ISS) between September 2009 and May 2020.

Like its predecessor, the HTV-X can carry about 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit. It's hauling about 9,000 pounds (4,080 kg) of food and supplies on this mission, which began with a launch atop an H3 rocket on Saturday (Oct. 25).

Upon its rendezvous with the ISS, HTV-X carried out a series of test maneuvers, including a retreat-from-station procedure and systems checks ahead of spacecraft capture.

The new freighter is expendable, just like the HTV (which was also known as Kounotori, Japanese for "White Stork"). But the HTV-X can stay up for considerably longer stretches.

"HTV-X enhances transportation capabilities and adds the capability to provide various users with on-orbit demonstration opportunities for up to 1.5 years after leaving ISS until reentry," Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which builds the HTV-X for JAXA, wrote in a description of the vehicle.

HTV-X joins three other vehicles in the stable of robotic ISS cargo craft. The other freighters that currently service the station are Russia's Progress vehicle as well as Cygnus and Dragon, which are built by the American companies Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, respectively.

All are expendable except Dragon, which splashes down in the ocean for recovery and reuse. Dragon can therefore also haul scientific experiments and other materials down to Earth from the station.

Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Alexey Zubritsky, both of the federal space corporation Roscosmos, were back in the vacuum of space on Tuesday (Oct. 28) to continue and expand on the work they began during an extravehicular activity (EVA) on Oct. 16. During this most recent outing, they spent 6 hours and 54 minutes mounting, relocating and cleaning hardware on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module (MLM).

This EVA, like the one two weeks ago, began with Ryzhikov and Zubritsky opening the hatch on the Poisk Mini-Research Module-2, this time at 10:18 a.m. EDT (1418 GMT). After gathering their tools, the cosmonauts used a telescoping crane, called the Strela boom, to trasverse to their first worksite on the Nauka MLM.

There they tackled their first major task of the day, attaching a two-part apparatus to support a pulse plasma (Impuls) experiment and research into the effect that spacecraft have on Earth's ionosphere (IPI-500, by the NPO IT company in Moscow). The Impuls study will test the potential for jet engines to work in space.

Between running connectors and moving on to the next installation, Ryzhikov also cleaned a window on the Nauka module. Shutters that protect the pane when it's not in use were opened to allow the cleaning. When done, the shutters were closed again.

Ryzhikov and Zubritsky then returned to an experiment they installed during the earlier spacewalk two weeks ago. Ekran-M, or the Molecular Beam Epitaxy experiment, is designed to produce very thin materials for use in semiconductors. After discovering a loose gasket in the device's chamber, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky were instructed by mission control to carefully extract it using tweezers.

The spacewalkers then inserted a replacement cassette into the Ekran-M and, despite having to use wire ties to hold it in place, mission control reported getting good data. The older cassette will be returned to Earth for analysis.

Ryzhikov and Zubritsky wrapped up their time outside by relocating an exterior control panel for the European Robotic Arm (ERA), a manipulator that is used to access and service different areas of the Russian segment of the space station.

Russian EVAs often save for their final task the jettison of no-longer-needed equipment that has been gathered during the cosmonauts' work. With the pending arrival, however, of Japan's new robotic cargo vehicle, the HTV-X, on Wednesday morning (Oct. 29), it was decided to avoid any risk from the debris.

The spacewalk ended at 5:12 p.m. EDT (2112 GMT) with Ryzhikov and Zubritsky safely back inside the Poisk airlock.

Tuesday's EVA was the third for Expedition 73 and the 277th in support of the International Space Station's assembly and maintenance since 1998. It was Zubritsky's second spacewalk, bringing his total time outside to 13 hours and 3 minutes, and the third for Ryzhikov, who now has logged a total of 19 hours and 51 minutes in the vacuum of space.

A pair of cosmonauts will work outside the International Space Station today (Oct. 28), and you can watch the off-Earth action live.

Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritskiy, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will conduct a roughly six-hour spacewalk today, starting at around 10:20 a.m. EDT (1420 GMT).

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT).

The duo "will install experiment hardware on the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module, and relocate a control panel for the European robotic arm attached to Nauka," NASA News Chief Cheryl Warner wrote in an emailed statement on Monday (Oct. 27).

Most of NASA's activities are on hold due to the ongoing government shutdown, but the agency will stream today's spacewalk "and provide minimal technical commentary as this activity relates to excepted mission operations," Warner wrote.

This will be the second spacewalk in less than two weeks for Ryzhikov, who commands the International Space Station's current Expedition 73, and flight engineer Zubritsky. The duo also performed an extravehicular activity on Oct. 16, installing a semiconductor experiment on the orbiting lab and jettisoning an old HDTV camera.

Today's spacewalk will be the third for Ryzhikov, who will wear a spacesuit with red stripes, and the second for for Zubritsky, whose suit will have blue stripes, according to Warner.

It will be the 277th overall spacewalk in the history of the ISS, which has hosted rotating astronaut crews continuously since Nov. 2, 2000.

The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket being stacked for the Artemis 2 mission has its final piece. Integrity, the Orion spacecraft that will fly NASA's Artemis 2 crew around the moon as early as February 2026, was recently transported across NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and hoisted atop SLS, completing the rocket's assembly ahead of launch.

It's a major milestone for the mission, which has been marked a priority and exempt from NASA's widespread shuttering during the ongoing government shutdown. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced the milestone in a social media post on Monday (Oct. 20), saying, "We are one step closer to mission complete!"

Artemis 2 is NASA's second mission in the Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, and eventually lay the foundation for astronaut trips to Mars. It will be the first crewed mission of the program, and will fly four NASA astronauts on a loop around the moon and back — the first crewed lunar mission since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will fly Integrity on a free-return trajectory, circling once around the lunar far side before heading back to Earth.

Their 10-day mission is currently targeted for as early as Feb. 5, 2026, with launch windows available through the end of April. Its predecessor, Artemis 1, launched in November 2022, and carried several sensors but no life support systems or astronauts. Artemis 2 will be the first crewed test of Orion and will pave the way for Artemis 3, which will land a crew on the moon's surface in 2027 or 2028.

Delays have been a familiar occurrence for the Artemis program, however. Issues with Orion's heat shield during reentry through Earth's atmosphere at the end of Artemis 1 created a more than three year gap between Artemis's first and second launches. Now, as the program is beginning to pick up some momentum, concerns about the readiness of SpaceX's Starship, which is contracted as the Artemis 3 lunar lander, are pushing a lunar landing even further.

NASA was targeting mid-2027 for Artemis 3, though that date appears to be slipping, despite Artemis 2 remaining on track for a launch in early 2026. In an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday, Duffy suggested that Artemis 3 will likely launch sometime in 2028, and the space agency is considering other landing options.

What is it?

Cubesats, compact spacecraft usually no bigger than a shoebox, have helped transform the landscape of space research in the past 20 years. Originally invented in 1999 by professors from Stanford University and California Polytechnic State University, the cubesat format was designed to lower the barriers to space for universities, small organizations and companies.

By following a shared design standard and using off-the-shelf components, teams can build and launch fully functional satellites in months rather than years, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional spacecraft.

Where is it?

This image was taken at the ISS's Kibo module in low-Earth orbit around 248 miles (400 kilometers) above our planet.

Why is it amazing?

While cubesats are used in a variety of space research, the three recently deployed by JAXA are focused specifically on auroral activity and the understanding of space weather. The YOTSUBA-KULOVER cubesat was developed by the Kyushu Institute of Technology, while the e-kagaku-1 was built by students in the e-kagaku Association and BOTAN was constructed by the Chiba Institute of Technology.

All three will look at specific factors around space weather and auroras, including volcanic pumice and solar activity.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about cubesats and the International Space Station.

In April 2021, NASA awarded Elon Musk's company a $2.9 billion contract to provide the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program. That vehicle, a modified upper stage of SpaceX's Starship megarocket, is supposed to land astronauts on the moon for the first time on the upcoming Artemis 3 mission.

But NASA isn't satisfied with the pace of Starship's development and is therefore shaking things up, acting agency chief Sean Duffy announced on Monday (Oct. 20).

"I love SpaceX; it's an amazing company. The problem is, they're behind. They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China," Duffy said on Monday morning, during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term, so I'm gonna open up the contract," he added. "I'm gonna let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin."

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, won an Artemis Human Landing System contract of its own in 2023, an award worth $3.4 billion. The company plans to fulfill that deal with its Blue Moon lander, which was originally expected to make its crewed lunar debut on the Artemis 5 mission.

Musk voiced skepticism that Blue Origin could speed up its timeline enough to be ready for a crewed moon mission before SpaceX.

"Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the moon," the world's richest person said via X on Monday, qualifying that to "useful payload" in a follow-up post. (Blue Origin's huge New Glenn rocket carried a prototype of the company's Blue Ring spacecraft to Earth orbit on its first — and so far, only — launch this past January.)

Artemis 3's timeline has shifted to the right several times over the past few years, and not just because Starship is still in the testing phase; issues with spacesuits, NASA's Orion capsule and other tech have also played a role. (Orion will carry Artemis astronauts to lunar orbit, where they'll meet up with the lander that will deliver them to the surface.)

The launch date was originally targeted for late 2024 but was pushed back to 2025, September 2026 and then mid-2027.

And NASA is now apparently eyeing an even later timeline: In Monday's "Squawk Box" interview, Duffy suggests that 2028 is the target for Artemis 3.

The Artemis program has one launch under its belt — that of Artemis 1, which successfully sent an uncrewed Orion to and from lunar orbit in late 2022.

NASA is now gearing up for Artemis 2, which will launch four people on a 10-day journey around the moon next year. That mission remains on track to launch as early as February, Duffy said on Monday.

SpaceX's Starship, meanwhile, has launched on 11 suborbital test flights to date. The most recent two liftoffs, which took place on Aug. 26 and Oct. 13, respectively, were fully successful.

As Duffy noted, China has moon plans of its own: The nation plans to land astronauts on Earth's nearest neighbor by 2030 and is making serious progress toward achieving that goal. No humans have touched the lunar surface since NASA's Apollo 17 astronauts did so in December 1972.

Orbital observation

"Isn't this one of the top five stunning views among all the photos taken from the 'Kibo' window? Self-praise here..." wrote Kimiya Yui, an Expedition 73 flight engineer, with a laugh from on board the International Space Station.

"The ISS took on a different posture than usual, so the view from the window changed as well," explained Yui.

That post actually features two shots. In both, a band of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is seen above Earth's horizon, with the space station's solar arrays and the Kibo exposed facility in the foreground. One image also shows dancing green and red auroras, while the other captures a darker night sky.

"[It was a] special view that I wanted everyone to see, so I pushed through my work early to make time and took this photo," said Yui.

Astronaut activity

JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui has spent this week preparing for the arrival and capture of his country's first next-generation HTV-X cargo vehicle. Liftoff is targeted for Monday (Oct. 20).

"I'm waiting for you! I'll catch you gently, so don't worry!" wrote Yui to the resupply ship still on Earth on Friday (Oct. 17).

Yui will use the space station's Canadarm2 robotic arm to grab hold of the HTV-X1 spacecraft once it is in proximity of the manipulator's reach.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Oct. 17), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos; fellow cosmonauts Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov; Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA; and Kimiya Yui of JAXA, all flight engineers.

There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the zenith port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node.

There are four docked cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module and Progress M-32 (93P) docked to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, SpaceX's CRS-33 Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of Harmony Node 2 and Northrop Grumman's NG-23 Cygnus XL, the "SS William C. 'Willie' McCool," berthed to the Unity node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 24 years, 11 months and 15 days.

Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Alexey Zubritsky, both with Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos, marked the end of their first extravehicular activity (EVA) together at 7:19 p.m. EDT (2319 GMT) on Thursday (Oct. 16). The two cosmonauts reentered the Poisk module's airlock and closed the hatch behind them, 6 hours and 9 minutes after they began the spacewalk at 1:10 p.m. EDT (1710 GMT).

After configuring their tools, the two crewmates made their way to their first worksite, outside of the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module. Ryzhikov held onto the Ekran-M, or Molecular Beam Epitaxy experiment, while riding at the end of the European Robotic Arm (ERA), which was driven by cosmonaut Oleg Platonov from a workstation inside the space station.

Ryzhikov and Zubritsky installed the drum-shaped unit, ran power cables and mounted a swappable cassette. The experiment is intended to demonstrate the ability to produce very thin materials — too thin to be made reliably on Earth — that can go from the microgravity environment of outer space to being used in semiconductors.

Their primary task completed, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky then made their way to the Zvezda service module to remove and dispose of a high-definition television system that was originally a part of a Canadian commercial payload. Zubritsky then stood a the end of the European Robotic Arm and tossed the camera overboard, toward the rear of the space station, ensuring it would not come back in contact with the outpost.

"It is going so well," radioed Zubritsky as the camera disappeared into the shadow of Earth. "Jettison is complete."

Given its relatively small mass (180 pounds, or 82 kilograms) and volume (2 by 4.6 by 2.3 feet, or 0.6 by 1.4 by 0.7 meters), the jettisoned equipment will fall back to Earth and be destroyed during its reentry into the atmosphere.

Ryzhikov and Zubritsky also cleaned a window on the service module before heading back to the Poisk module, picking up an exposed material samples experiment to bring back with them into the space station.

Thursday's spacewalk was the second for Expedition 73 and the 276th in support of the International Space Station's assembly and maintenance since 1998. It was Zubritsky's first EVA and the second for Ryzhikov, who now has logged a total of 12 hours and 57 minutes on his two spacewalks.

Two cosmonauts will conduct a spacewalk today (Oct. 16), and you can watch the action live.

Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos will venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) today at about 12:50 p.m. EDT (1650 GMT), kicking off a spacewalk that's expected to last 5.5 hours.

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 12:15 p.m. EDT (1615 GMT).

Ryzhikov, the commander of the ISS's current Expedition 73, and Zubritsky "will install a molecular beam experiment on the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module, remove a mounting platform housing a commercial camera that will be jettisoned and clean windows on the Zvezda Service Module," NASA News Chief Cheryl Warner wrote in an emailed statement on Tuesday (Oct. 14).

"Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov will operate the European Robotic Arm on the Russian segment of the station during the spacewalk from inside the station," she added.

Most NASA activities are on hold due to the ongoing government shutdown, which furloughed 80% of the agency's workforce. However, NASA will stream today's spacewalk and "provide minimal technical commentary, as this activity relates to excepted mission operations," Warner wrote.

Other "excepted" agency activities include the operation of weather satellites deemed critical to public safety and work on the Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon in 2027.

Today's EVA will be the second for Ryzhikov, who will wear a spacesuit with red stripes, and the first for Zubritsky, whose suit will sport blue stripes, according to Warner.

It will be the 276th spacewalk in the history of the ISS, which has supported rotating astronaut crews on a continuous basis since November 2000.

For 24 hours a day, seven days a week since November 2000, NASA and its international partners have sustained a continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit, including at least one American – a streak that will soon reach 25 years.

When viewed in the history of spaceflight, the International Space Station is perhaps one of humanity's most amazing accomplishments, a shining example of cooperation in space among the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia. But all good things must come to an end.

In 2030, the International Space Station will be deorbited: driven into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.

I'm an aerospace engineer who has helped build a range of hardware and experiments for the ISS. As a member of the spaceflight community for over 30 years and a 17-year member of the NASA community, it will be hard for me to see the ISS come to an end.

Since the first pieces of the International Space Station were launched in 1998, the station has been home to significant research accomplishments across domains that include materials science, biotechnology, astronomy and astrophysics, Earth science, combustion and more.

Astronauts performing research inside the space station and payload experiments attached to the station's exterior have generated many publications in peer-reviewed science journals. Some of them have advanced our understanding of thunderstorms, led to improvements in the crystallization processes of key cancer-fighting drugs, detailed how to grow artificial retinas in space, explored the processing of ultrapure optical fibers and explained how to sequence DNA in orbit.

In total, more than 4,000 experiments have been conducted aboard the ISS, resulting in more than 4,400 research publications dedicated to advancing and improving life on Earth and helping forge a path for future space exploration activities.

The ISS has proven the value of conducting research in the unique environment of spaceflight – which has very low gravity, a vacuum, extreme temperature cycles and radiation – to advance scientists’ understanding of a wide range of important physical, chemical and biological processes.

Keeping a presence in orbit

But in the wake of the station's retirement, NASA and its international partners are not abandoning their outpost in low-Earth orbit. Instead, they are looking for alternatives to continue to take advantage of low Earth orbit's promise as a unique research laboratory and to extend the continuous, 25-year human presence some 250 miles (402 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.

In December 2021, NASA announced three awards to help develop privately owned, commercially operated space stations in low-Earth orbit.

For years, NASA has successfully sent supplies to the International Space Station using commercial partners, and the agency recently began similar business arrangements with SpaceX and Boeing for transporting crew aboard the Dragon and Starliner spacecraft, respectively.

Based on the success of these programs, NASA invested more than US$400 million to stimulate the development of commercial space stations and hopefully launch and activate them before the ISS is decommissioned.

Dawn of commercial space stations

In September 2025, NASA issued a draft announcement for Phase 2 partnership proposals for commercial space stations. Companies that are selected will receive funding to support critical design reviews and demonstrate stations with four people in orbit for at least 30 days.

NASA will then move forward with formal design acceptance and certification to ensure that these stations meet NASA's stringent safety requirements. The outcome will allow NASA to purchase missions and other services aboard these stations on a commercial basis – similar to how NASA gets cargo and crew to the ISS today.

Which of these teams will be successful, and on what timescale, remains to be seen.

While these stations are being built, Chinese astronauts will continue to live and work aboard their Tiangong space station, a three-person, permanently crewed facility orbiting approximately 250 miles (402 km) above the Earth's surface. Consequently, if the ISS's occupied streak comes to an end, China and Tiangong will take over as the longest continually inhabited space station in operation: It's been occupied for approximately four years and counting.

In the meantime, enjoy the view

It will be several years before any of these new commercial space stations circle the Earth at around 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) and several years before the ISS is deorbited in 2030.

So while you have a chance, take a look up and enjoy the view. On most nights when the ISS flies over, it is simply magnificent: a brilliant blue-white point of light, usually the brightest object in the sky, silently executing a graceful arc across the sky.

Our ancestors could hardly have imagined that one day, one of the brightest objects in the night sky would have been conceived by the human mind and built by human hands.

Orbital observation

Expedition 73 flight engineer Kimiya Yui of JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) saw not one but two typhoons this week from aboard the International Space Station. (Typhoons are the same weather phenomenon as hurricanes: both are tropical cyclones. This type of powerful storm is called a hurricane in the Atlantic and central and eastern North Pacific regions, and a typhoon in the Northwest Pacific.)

"The eye of Typhoon 22 has become somewhat unclear, but it still appears to be maintaining its strong intensity as before," wrote Yui on social media on Thursday (Oct. 9). "Typhoon 23 is a bit distant, but it is swirling with thick rain clouds on its southern side."

"Stay safe while keeping up with the latest typhoon information!" he said.

Astronaut activity

Yui worked with his Expedition 73 crewmates and ground controllers to check out PROX, a device that will be used when Japan's next-generation cargo vehicle, the HTV-X, approaches the International Space Station for berthing.

"Preparations to welcome HTV-X to the ISS are steadily progressing," wrote Yui in a social media post on Oct. 8, 2025. "Here's the news: just like with Kounotori-kun, I've been assigned to operate the arm and grasp it this time as well. The responsibility is significant, but I'll cooperate with everyone to reliably carry out the mission!"

By the numbers

As of Friday (Oct. 10), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos; fellow cosmonauts Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov; Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA; and Kimiya Yui of JAXA, all flight engineers.

There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the zenith port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node.

There are four docked cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module and Progress M-32 (93P) docked to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, SpaceX's CRS-33 Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of Harmony Node 2 and Northrop Grumman's NG-23 Cygnus XL, the "SS William C. 'Willie' McCool," berthed to the Unity node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 24 years, 11 months and 8 days.

An amazing new video shows flashes of sunlight sparkling off a batch of SpaceX satellites, with a green aurora glowing just below.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit, an accomplished amateur photographer, captured the stunning "train" of SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites during his recent mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The aurora was produced by solar particles slamming into Earth’s atmosphere.

Despite the natural light show, the Starlink group was "very visible. Many were as bright as Jupiter — they would flash from one to 10 seconds," added Pettit in a comment on X, where he posted the undated video on Tuesday (Oct. 7).

That is indeed quite bright. The peak brightness of Jupiter is roughly -2 magnitude in the night sky. For comparison, the brightest stars range between about magnitude 2 and -2, Venus can get as bright as -4, and the sun is at magnitude -26. (Lower numbers indicate brighter objects on astronomers' magnitude scale.)

Pettit’s latest space mission, a 220-day jaunt, concluded on his 70th birthday on April 20, when the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that carried him and his two crewmates touched down in the steppe of Kazakhstan. Since life gets busy on the ISS, however, Pettit has been steadily uploading a backlog of images and videos ever since coming home.

Starlink current consists of nearly 8,600 operational satellites, according to a tracker maintained by space debris expert Jonathan McDowell. While that’s a boon for remote areas looking for the reliable internet service SpaceX strives to provide, astronomers have concerns.

The brightness Pettit observed is one of the worries, as these Starlink trains — usually most apparent shortly after launch aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket — can interfere with astronomical observations. Starlinks also have brought up space debris concerns, both in that more satellites raise the risk of collisions and because their reentry could leave traces of metals in Earth’s atmosphere, potentially causing pollution and affecting climate.

In response to these concerns, SpaceX has changed the reflectivity of some of its satellites, and the company continues to emphasize that the Starlinks can be maneuvered in case of trouble. And many more Starlinks will reach orbit over time: SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 of the satellites aloft.

The Juno probe launched in 2011 and entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, beginning what was originally planned as a 20-month mission. Nearly a decade later, the spacecraft has delivered unprecedented research of the Jovian system, observing the gas giant, its many moons and faint ring system long past its intended lifespan.

NASA has extended Juno's mission multiple times, most recently in 2021, guaranteeing operations through Sept. 30, 2025. That date has now passed, and with the U.S. government shut down, there is no word yet on whether Juno will come out alive on the other side.

Juno's latest extension broadened its mission from studying Jupiter's interior and magnetosphere to include the planet's rings and observations of its large moons.

"By extending the science goals of this important orbiting observatory, the Juno team will start tackling a breadth of science historically required of flagships," Lori Glaze, NASA's planetary science division director at the time, said in a statement. And Juno has done just that.

Over the past several years, the spacecraft has conducted close flybys of the moons Ganymede, Europa and Io, delivering data on their geology, environments and composition. Juno has also investigated Jupiter's faint ring system, while continuing to map the planet's powerful magnetic and gravitational fields.

These results have contributed to preparations for upcoming missions like Europa Clipper, NASA's next major Jupiter spacecraft. Europa Clipper launched in Oct. 2024, and is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030 to study the moon after which the spacecraft is named. Ending Juno's mission before Europa Clipper's arrival would create a years-long gap in dedicated observations of that part of our solar system, leaving scientists without new data until the end of the decade.

In an email shared with Space.com, NASA Planetary Science Division Media Lead Molly Wasser referenced Juno's 2021 extension saying the "mission was extended to September of 2025. This is the most recent update. Regarding the future of the mission, NASA will abide by the law."

Due to the government shutdown, NASA is currently unable to say whether Juno is still operating or already powered down. At the time of publication, responses from agency officials state that "NASA is currently closed due to a lapse in government funding … Please reach back out after an appropriation or continuing resolution is approved."

Under shutdown rules, only missions that fall under "excepted activities" — those required to protect life, property, or national security — can continue operations or communications. NASA's continuity plans also specify that carryover funding may only be applied to "presidential priorities," which limits what science programs can proceed during a lapse.

Juno does not fall into those protected categories, and was also zeroed-out on the President's fiscal year 2026 budget request — making the mission, presumably, not a priority. So, until normal government operations resume, the spacecraft's future is uncertain.

Floating above Earth, the ISS is a symbol of global cooperation, scientific discovery and the relentless curiosity that drives us to explore the cosmos.

It's not just a home in space — it's a laboratory, a classroom and a proving ground for technologies that may one day take us to Mars and beyond. From growing lettuce in microgravity to studying the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body, the ISS is a hub of innovation that's reshaping our understanding of life off Earth.

Whether you're a seasoned space nerd or just dipping your toes into the vacuum of space trivia, this quiz will challenge your knowledge and ignite your imagination about the ISS.

So buckle up, adjust your mental thrusters, and prepare for liftoff, you're about to take a spin through the fascinating world of the International Space Station.

Try it out below and see how well you score!

Orbital observation

Hello from space!

"Today was a busy day as well, but I was able to take some photos in between workouts," wrote Kimiya Yui on social media on Thursday (Oct. 2). "About 25 minutes after taking photos near the Mediterranean, we passed over Japan's Honshu. Those who saw the ISS yesterday evening and waved to it, ended up waving to me while I was doing strength training looking out the window."

Science status

Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 73 crew aboard the space station this week was:

SHRIMP — NASA astronaut Jonny Kim activated the State-of-the-art Humidity Removal in Microgravity Payload, a device designed to extract moisture from a spacecraft's atmosphere for reuse.

Heat Transfer Host 2 — Mike Fincke, also with NASA, installed the new experiment to study condensation when gas turns to liquid, potentially adding to the development of thermal systems for crewed spacecraft sent on deep-space missions.

ADvanced Space Experiment Processor-4 — NASA flight engineer Zena Cardman installed new sample cassettes for a study supporting the manufacturing of medicines (drugs or pharmaceuticals) in microgravity.

Station keeping

The Expedition 73 crewmates also took part in activities to maintain the space station's systems and prepare for future research.

Fluid Science Laboratory — Mike Fincke and Jonny Kim spent time configuring this European Space Agency (ESA) apparatus for researching the physics of fluid in microgravity. They changed out electrical cables, brought together components and mounted foam coarsening samples.

Capture Bag Demo — Fincke also installed the TransAstra Fly Trap Capture Bag Demo into the NanoRacks Bishop airlock, ahead of tests to show its capability to remain open, close and stay airtight in the weightless environment of space. The bag may be a method of capturing and disposing of space debris.

Electrostatic Levitation Furnace — JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui changed out specimen handling hardware and configured cables for this device, which uses lasers to heat materials to ultra-high temperatures while data is collected about the thermo-physical properties of the samples.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Oct. 3), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos; fellow cosmonauts Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov; Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA; and Kimiya Yui of JAXA, all flight engineers.

There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the zenith port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node.

There are four docked cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module and Progress M-32 (93P) docked to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, SpaceX's CRS-33 Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of Harmony Node 2 and Northrop Grumman's NG-23 Cygnus XL, the "SS William C. 'Willie' McCool," berthed to the Unity node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 24 years, 11 months and 1 day.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for enhanced cooperation here at the 76th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here in Sydney on Wednesday (Oct. 1).

The agreement will allow the agencies to use each others' ground stations for telemetry, tracking and command functions. The MoU also covers future areas of cooperation including space science, exploration, human spaceflight, in-space infrastructure and beyond. There is also an intention to work together on space weather.

"This is an important moment for Europe and Korea, opening up great opportunities for our space interests, and strengthening existing systems through cooperation," ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in a statement. "In ESA, we are excited to learn from our colleagues in KASA, and to share our experience to reach complementary goals."

"KASA's objectives include enhancing global space cooperation;" said Youngbin Yoon, KASA's administrator. "Today, we have taken an important step, and we look forward to our shared journey in cooperation in space activities for peaceful purposes."

Support from ESA's Estrack global ground station network could help facilitate South Korea's lunar ambitions, with ESA having played a similar role during the development of China's Chang'e lunar program.

South Korea's moon program already includes the Danuri spacecraft, which is in lunar orbit, capturing stunning images of the moon. But the country is now building toward a robotic lunar lander to be launched by a homegrown rocket, with a grander vision of establishing a moon base by 2045 as part of a long-term exploration road map released by KASA in August. Earlier this year, the agency began converting an abandoned mine to a testing ground for lunar exploration.

The developments come as ESA earlier this year began considering diversifying and deepening global partnerships in the wake of uncertainty over the NASA budget and the future of cooperative programs. ESA also held discussions with India on deepening their cooperation at IAC in Sydney.

Asteroid rideshare with Japan

A day earlier, ESA's Aschbacher celebrated recent milestones in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with agency head Hiroshi Yamakawa. Both men addressed IAC at a Heads of Agencies event on Sept. 29.

Aschbacher celebrated a recent rideshare agreement that will see ESA's Ramses spacecraft and Japan's Destiny+ mission launch together on a Japanese H3 rocket to study the former doomsday asteroid Apophis ahead of its 2029 close encounter with Earth.

"Ramses is not only a scientifically exciting mission and a symbol of two partnerships between Japan and ESA, but it also is a good example of quick project development and implementation," Aschbacher said.

The main objective for Destiny+ is to study the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the parent body of the Geminid meteor shower. Launch delays have, however, provided the opportunity for the spacecraft to first visit Apophis, and for a serendipitous rideshare for Ramses.

ESA still needs to get a final positive decision on funding for the mission at a key ministerial meeting of member states in November, but the Ramses spacecraft is already advancing along its development path. Aschbacher also highlighted recent cooperation with JAXA on the EarthCare mission, which launched last year.

NASA's search for evidence of past life on Mars just produced an exciting update. On Sept. 10, 2025, a team of scientists published a paper detailing the Perseverance rover's investigation of a distinctive rock outcrop called Bright Angel on the edge of Mars' Jezero Crater. This outcrop is notable for its light-toned rocks with striking mineral nodules and multicolored, leopard print-like splotches.

By combining data from five scientific instruments, the team determined that these nodules formed through processes that could have involved microorganisms. While this finding is not direct evidence of life, it's a compelling discovery that planetary scientists hope to look into more closely.

To appreciate how discoveries like this one come about, it's helpful to understand how scientists engage with rover data — that is, how planetary scientists like me use robots like Perseverance on Mars as extensions of our own senses.

Experiencing Mars through data

When you strap on a virtual reality headset, you suddenly lose your orientation to the immediate surroundings, and your awareness is transported by light and sound to a fabricated environment. For Mars scientists working on rover mission teams, something very similar occurs when rovers send back their daily downlinks of data.

Several developers, including MarsVR, Planetary Visor and Access Mars, have actually worked to build virtual Mars environments for viewing with a virtual reality headset. However, much of Mars scientists' daily work instead involves analyzing numerical data visualized in graphs and plots. These datasets, produced by state-of-the-art sensors on Mars rovers, extend far beyond human vision and hearing.

Developing an intuition for interpreting these complex datasets takes years, if not entire careers. It is through this "mind-data connection" that scientists build mental models of Martian landscapes – models they then communicate to the world through scientific publications.

The robots' tool kit: Sensors and instruments

Five primary instruments on Perseverance, aided by machine learning algorithms, helped describe the unusual rock formations at a site called Beaver Falls and the past they record.

Robotic hands: Mounted on the rover's robotic arm are tools for blowing dust aside and abrading rock surfaces. These ensure the rover analyzes clean samples.

Cameras: Perseverance hosts 19 cameras for navigation, self-inspection and science. Five science-focused cameras played a key role in this study. These cameras captured details unseeable by human eyes, including magnified mineral textures and light in infrared wavelengths. Their images revealed that Bright Angel is a mudstone, a type of sedimentary rock formed from fine sediments deposited in water.

Spectrometers: Instruments such as SuperCam and SHERLOC – scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals – analyze how rocks reflect or emit light across a range of wavelengths. Think of this as taking hundreds of flash photographs of the same tiny spot, all in different "colors." These datasets, called spectra, revealed signs of water integrated into mineral structures in the rock and traces of organic molecules: the basic building blocks of life.

Subsurface radar: RIMFAX, the radar imager for Mars subsurface experiment, uses radio waves to peer beneath Mars' surface and map rock layers. At Beaver Falls, this showed the rocks were layered over other ancient terrains, likely due to the activity of a flowing river. Areas with persistently present water are better habitats for microbes than dry or intermittently wet locations.

X-ray chemistry: PIXL, the planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry, bombards rock surfaces with X-rays and observes how the rock glows or reflects them. This technique can tell researchers which elements and minerals the rock contains at a fine scale. PIXL revealed that the leopard-like spots found at Beaver Falls differed chemically from the surrounding rock. The spots resembled patterns on Earth formed by chemical reactions that are mediated by microbes underwater.

Together, these instruments produce a multifaceted picture of the Martian environment. Some datasets require significant processing, and refined machine learning algorithms help the mission teams turn that information into a more intuitive description of the Jezero Crater’s setting, past and present.

The challenge of uncertainty

Despite Perseverance's remarkable tools and processing software, uncertainty remains in the results. Science, especially when conducted remotely on another planet, is rarely black and white. In this case, the chemical signatures and mineral formations at Beaver Falls are suggestive – but not conclusive – of past life on Mars.

There actually are tools, such as mass spectrometers, that can show definitively whether a rock sample contains evidence of biological activity. However, these instruments are currently too fragile, heavy and power-intensive for Mars missions.

Fortunately, Perseverance has collected and sealed rock core samples from Beaver Falls and other promising sites in Jezero Crater with the goal of sending them back to Earth. If the current Mars sample return plan can retrieve these samples, laboratories on Earth can scrutinize them far more thoroughly than the rover was able to.

Investing in our robotic senses

This discovery is a testament to decades of NASA's sustained investment in Mars exploration and the work of engineering teams that developed these instruments. Yet these investments face an uncertain future.

The White House's budget office recently proposed cutting 47% of NASA’s science funding. Such reductions could curtail ongoing missions, including Perseverance's continued operations, which are targeted for a 23% cut, and jeopardize future plans such as the Mars sample return campaign, among many other missions.

Perseverance represents more than a machine. It is a proxy extending humanity’s senses across millions of miles to an alien world. These robotic explorers and the NASA science programs behind them are a key part of the United States' collective quest to answer profound questions about the universe and life beyond Earth.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.