NASA

NASA faces significant challenges to bring about the Artemis III mission next year and to complete a series of test objectives involving the interaction between Orion and the two lunar lander prototypes. So what happens if the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft are ready next summer, but one or both of the landers is not? Isaacman said they would not launch Artemis III until they are ready to fly a meaningful mission. “I would say, at a very high level, we’re not going to launch this mission until we feel like the objectives that are outlined are sufficient to bring down the risk

Something caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during Friday’s launch sequence. Raptor failures are nothing new for SpaceX, but this flight marked the first use of the company’s upgraded Raptor 3, a redesign with higher thrust, lighter weight, and improved efficiency. Collectively, the 33 Raptor engines on the booster produced up to 18 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket used on last month’s Artemis II mission. Starship and Super Heavy have engine-out capability, mean

A future with numerous robotic probes spread throughout the Solar System sounds thrilling to space scientists and space enthusiasts, but you can’t get there with flat budgets and billion-dollar missions that take a decade to get off the ground. Many of NASA’s robotic science missions use purpose-built satellites and instruments, usually manufactured by large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, university labs, or NASA itself. Unlike SpaceX’s hangars full of reusable rockets, there’s no building with cameras, spectrometers, telescopes, and spacecraft buses—the core chassis of a

The purpose of Artemis II was to prove that NASA can once again circle the moon with a crew. The long-awaited lunar landing will have to wait for Artemis IV. In the meantime, the program's third mission will focus on perfecting the technologies that made Artemis II possible and resolving any setbacks, while NASA's partners finish key systems such as SpaceX's lunar descent module. In any case, the agency maintains its goal: to achieve a “return to the moon” by 2030. This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.