Space Race in 48 Hours: Starship Roars, Moon Mission Nears & Space Tourism Soars
Key Facts (Sept. 23–24, 2025) Satellite Launches & Space Missions Solar Probes Take Flight: On Sept. 24, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 thundered off pad 39A in Florida carrying three solar science spacecraft: NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), a small Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s SWFO-L1 space-weather monitor science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov. Liftoff was targeted for 7:30 a.m. EDT, with the booster aiming to hurl the payloads toward the Sun-Earth L1 point, about a million miles out nasa.gov nasa.gov. This mission inaugurates a new era in heliophysics – IMAP will map the boundaries of the heliosphere (the “bubble” of solar wind around our solar system) to