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Former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticizes China's space ambitions in his memoir 'Space Odyssey,' set for a January 2027 release by Harper Horizon. He recounts NASA's involvement in the 2023 Chinese spy balloon incident, framing it as a signal of an intensifying space race with China, which he says has higher stakes than the Cold War.
NASA launched Artemis 2, sending astronauts on a lunar flyby mission using the Orion spacecraft for its first crewed flight. The mission was designed to test Orion's life-support, navigation, and other systems with humans aboard after previous uncrewed testing.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency will be selective about which countries it partners with in lunar exploration, prioritizing only what he called 'good deals.' Speaking at a defense conference near Washington, he framed the race to the Moon's south pole as a contest for limited prime real estate rich in water ice and near-constant sunlight, rather than a purely symbolic contest.
NASA's Curiosity rover team identified organic compounds in ancient clay deposits on Mars that resemble molecules thought to have contributed to life's origins on Earth. The discovery earned the mission's chemistry lab team recognition at the Gizmodo Science Fair for providing strong chemical evidence of Mars's past potential habitability.
An investigation by Futurism found that Space Daily, a decades-old space news site now owned by Brown Brothers Media, published articles under invented bylines like 'Dr. Katherine Chen' and 'Dr. James Whitfield,' who were falsely credited with careers at NASA's JPL and the European Space Agency. Neither agency has any record of these people existing, and after being contacted by reporters, Brown Brothers Media began deleting large numbers of articles and the fake author profiles themselves.
NASA and IBM Research have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system pretrained on SomBench, a dataset of nearly two million co-registered lunar data bundles across 11 modalities. The model fuses imagery, topography, mineralogy, radar, gravity and other planetary datasets to help scientists analyze the Moon's surface, with USRA scientist Rachel Slank contributing planetary science expertise during development.
NASA has expanded its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract with SpaceX, adding three additional crewed Dragon missions to the International Space Station through 2030. The new award is worth up to $946 million and brings SpaceX's total operational flights under the contract to 17, pushing its cumulative earnings from NASA to $5.92 billion. SpaceX shares ISS crew transport duties with Boeing, whose Starliner is set to begin crewed flights in 2027 after an unpiloted test flight.
NASA scientist Robert Wagner discovered a massive new lunar crater while performing a routine data check on imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The impact, likely caused by an object roughly the size of a six-story building sometime between April and May 2024, created a crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, the largest fresh impact site the orbiter has ever recorded.
NASA-affiliated scientists have documented the largest newly formed crater on the Moon, resulting from an impact recorded in 2024. The impact site is unusual because it produced a cold spot stretching more than four miles across, a thermal signature researchers describe as extremely rare.
NASA plans to announce as soon as next week that it will order two additional crewed missions from Boeing's Starliner, help fund fixes to its thruster problems, and support certifying the capsule for launch on a new rocket. The move comes after SpaceX told NASA officials it intends to retire Crew Dragon by 2030 or sooner as it shifts focus toward Starship and Starlink-related business.
In a first-person account, former NASA astronaut Charlie Precourt describes commanding Space Shuttle Atlantis through its final descent after a 10-day mission delivering supplies and a new crew to the Russian Mir station. He details disengaging the autopilot near Mach 1 at 45,000 feet and relying on mission pilot Eileen Collins' scripted calls to guide the unpowered glider to a precise touchdown at Kennedy Space Center.
NASA says a precise SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch and flawless early course correction have left the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with enough propellant for at least 22 years of operations, more than double the mission's original five-year baseline plan. The $4.3 billion observatory launched August 30 from Kennedy Space Center and is now heading to its observation post to survey wide swaths of the sky with Hubble-level resolution.