Tag: lunar
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South Korean Orbiter Photographs Fresh Lunar Crater After Falcon 9 Upper Stage Impact
The upper stage was a leftover piece of the rocket that launched Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s HAKUTO-R M2 Resilience, two lunar landers that lifted off in January 2025. The stage measured 13.8 meters long and weighed 4,000 kg. While the incident poses no harm to any missions currently in orbit or on…
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NASA Redirects Gateway Hardware Toward Lunar Surface Demonstration Missions
Gateway was a cornerstone of the Artemis architecture and represented years of international partnership commitments. Redirecting its hardware to surface demonstrations signals that NASA is moving toward establishing a permanent lunar presence on the ground rather than in orbit. The repurposing effort is being carried out in partnership with Northrop Grumman. The hardware in question…
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Spent Falcon 9 Stage Set to Strike the Moon on August 5, Offering a Live Test for Impact Science
The stage is a leftover from the launch that carried Firefly’s Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on January 15, 2025. That same flight also carried the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, called Resilience, developed by the Japanese company ispace. An international team led by William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas,…
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Interlune Demonstrates 99% Pure Helium-3 Production With New Cold Capture Technology
The Seattle-based startup announced that its proprietary Cold Capture™ technology successfully extracted and purified helium-3 from Grade A helium. Rather than waiting until the 2030s for material from the Moon, the company says the system can immediately expand Earth’s supply of one of the world’s rarest industrial gases while validating the same core technology it…
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Carrier rocket for China’s Chang’e-7 lunar probe arrives at launch site
The carrier rocket for the Chang’e-7 lunar exploration mission has arrived at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China’s Hainan Province, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said on Monday. The Long March-5 Y14 carrier rocket will undergo assembly and testing at the launch site together with the Chang’e-7 lunar probe, which was transported…
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Voyager Wins $298M NASA Contract After Astrobotic Deal
Does Voyager’s $298M NASA Contract Validate the Astrobotic Acquisition? $298 million. That single NASA task order — awarded June 30, 2026, and announced publicly alongside the close of Voyager Technologies’ acquisition of Astrobotic Technology — may be the clearest signal yet that the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) pipeline is maturing into a real, recurring…
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China’s Long March 10B Nails First Net Catch at Sea
Is China’s Net-Catch Booster Recovery a Viable Third Architecture? China’s state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) recovered an orbital-class booster for the first time on July 11, 2026, catching the Long March 10B first stage in a tensioned cable net mounted to an offshore vessel — a recovery method distinct from both SpaceX’s…
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Artemis II Crew Briefs Congress on 10-Day Lunar Mission Success
How did NASA’s Artemis II crew perform during their 10-day lunar flyby mission? NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen briefed congressional staff Tuesday on their successful Artemis II mission, which completed a nearly 10-day cislunar space journey. The crew brought “Rise,” their zero gravity indicator from…
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NASA 2028 Moon Landing Threatened by Spacesuit Development Delays
Will NASA’s spacesuit delays derail the 2028 Moon landing? NASA’s ambitious 2028 timeline for returning astronauts to the lunar surface faces a critical bottleneck: spacesuit development is running significantly behind schedule, according to a damning Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released Monday. The report identifies the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) program as…
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Artemis 2 Crew Returns to Earth After Historic Lunar Flyby
What does Artemis 2’s successful return mean for NASA’s lunar program? The Artemis 2 crew capsule successfully completed its atmospheric reentry and Pacific Ocean splashdown off the California coast on April 10, marking the first crewed lunar mission in over five decades. The four-person crew—Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialists Christina Hammock Koch,…