NASA detailed updated plans for returning astronauts to the Moon, confirming changes to how Orion will interact with SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon landers. Orion will now dock with Starship in high-Earth orbit rather than near the Moon, while Blue Origin's plan uses four New Glenn launches without orbital refueling and allows Blue Moon to meet Orion in low-lunar orbit. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency still targets a demonstration mission by summer 2027 and a crewed lunar landing by 2028.
At a quarterly meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, member Charlie Precourt cited a new estimate that roughly 22 Starship launches would be required to fuel SpaceX's lunar lander for a single Artemis Moon mission. NASA has historically avoided confirming an exact figure, with earlier officials giving ranges from 'high single digits to low double digits' up to 'high teens.'
Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to launch its Spaceborne Computer-4, a fanless compute module roughly the size of a graphics card, to the Moon's south pole aboard an Astrolab FLIP rover in late 2026. The mission, tied to NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and a Voyager Technologies Griffin-1 lander, will run HPCG and other supercomputing benchmarks alongside AI tasks like LLM retrieval-augmented generation, vision inference, and LiDAR processing, in partnership with NASA and Deloitte.
NASA is pursuing a new $2 billion nuclear electric propulsion initiative, following the 2025 termination of DRACO, a joint NASA-Department of Defense nuclear thermal propulsion project that was canceled over high costs and testing safety concerns. The new approach, detailed in a presentation on NASA's SR-1 program by director Steve Sinacore, uses a uranium reactor generating at least 20 kilowatts to produce electricity that ionizes gas for thrust, offering low thrust but high efficiency over long durations.
A new analysis of NASA lunar imagery has identified more than 10,000 relatively young geological faults scattered across the Moon's surface. Unlike Earth, whose crust is broken into multiple tectonic plates, the Moon's surface is described as a single continuous shell, meaning these faults can still trigger moonquakes.
A NASA scientist involved with the Artemis program described how astronauts on Artemis III and later missions will be trained to make scientific observations on the Moon, not just take photographs. The approach includes giving crew members science prompts during training exercises, asking them to interpret scenes, infer causes, and decide what actions to take next, mirroring how they'll operate on the lunar surface.
Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions at MIT, has died aged 90. She is widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering' and later founded companies building programming systems used in aerospace, defence and other industries.
NASA has accelerated its DAVINCI atmospheric probe mission to Venus, now set for a December 2030 launch, a year earlier than previously scheduled. Its sister mission, the VERITAS orbiter, is slated to launch in November 2032, while ESA's EnVision orbiter is also planned for 2032, and Rocket Lab hopes to send a privately funded cloud-sampling probe as early as next year.
NASA has published details of its SPEARS project, which is developing batteries using solid ceramic or polymer materials instead of liquid electrolytes found in standard lithium-ion cells. The goal is to create batteries that can endure the Moon's extreme temperature swings, from 212°F daytime highs to minus 328°F lows at the lunar south pole, for use in future Artemis missions and Mars exploration.
A new study using NASA satellite measurements concludes that human activity is significantly depleting groundwater reserves worldwide. Researchers say the data reveal declining water levels across multiple regions, pointing to unsustainable extraction rates tied to agriculture, drinking water demand, and other uses.
NASA says its Perseverance rover has now traveled 28.10 miles (45.22 km) on Mars, surpassing Opportunity's previous record of 28.06 miles (45.16 km). Perseverance reached the mark in about five and a half years, far faster than Opportunity's nearly 15-year run, and is now heading toward a site called Idubi to study ancient terrain.
NASA has chosen the GIMLI mission to send a rover to the Marius Hills Pit, a lunar hole roughly 150 feet deep and 300 feet wide, to determine whether it opens into a larger underground lava tube. The rover, built with instruments from Honeybee Robotics including ground-penetrating radar, seismic probes and a gravimeter, will study the pit from the surface rather than orbit for the first time. The project is funded through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon program.
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