All articles on space, missions, technology and cosmic discovery.
Artemis II ended a 53-year crewed drought beyond Earth orbit in April 2026. Since then NASA has scrapped the Lunar Gateway, repurposed Artemis III as an orbital dress rehearsal, and set two commercial landers racing toward a 2028 Moon landing.
After a booster lost, a satellite stranded, and a test-stand explosion, Blue Origin is rebuilding its New Glenn rocket and targeting December 2026 for a return to flight — with NASA's Moon plans and Amazon's satellite constellation riding on it.
In May 2026 China unified its crewed lunar effort, robotic Chang'e missions, and Tiangong station work into a single integrated moon exploration project — 'mobilizing all resources' for a crewed landing by 2030. Here's the hardware, the robotic scouts, and the plan.
NASA released its final 360-page request for proposals for commercial space stations on October 9, 2026, officially starting the race to replace the International Space Station before its planned fiery plunge into the Pacific in 2030–2031.
Congress cancelled NASA's $11-billion Mars Sample Return in the FY2026 spending package — stranding Perseverance's sealed sample tubes, including a potential biosignature, in Jezero Crater with no ride home. Now China is racing to get there first.
Launched August 30, 2026, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope survived a near-cancellation to begin its journey to a million miles from Earth — where it will survey the dark universe, census thousands of exoplanets, and generate one of the largest astronomical datasets ever.
Launched October 13, 2026, the CRS-35 mission carries more than 6,300 pounds of cargo to the ISS: the last pair of roll-out solar arrays, artificial-retina hardware, lab-grown heart tissue, and brain organoids hunting for Alzheimer's treatments.
On September 28, 2026, SpaceX's Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time on its 14th test flight — deploying 26 Starlink satellites along the way and taking a crucial step toward the Artemis Moon landings.
Astronomers analyzing 300 well-studied multiplanet systems found they fall into two distinct families shaped by the mass and chemistry of their host stars — a Nature Astronomy study that rewrites how planetary systems are born and evolve.
On a Chilean mountaintop, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 3.2-gigapixel camera is scanning the entire southern sky every few nights — firing off hundreds of thousands of alerts per night, bagging thousands of asteroids, and photographing ghost galaxies from the Milky Way's childhood.
From a nursery of six infant galaxies merging 12 billion light-years away to the clearest-ever look at a rocky exoplanet's surface, the James Webb Space Telescope spent 2026 turning astronomy from a science of discovery into a science of dissection.