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Moon Missions News 16 June 2025 - 27 October 2025

SpaceX’s Starship Triumph Sparks Moon Race 2.0 with China – Stocks Take Off

NASA’s Epic Week: Moon Rocket Ready, Mars Life Clue, and an Interstellar Visitor

Artemis on the Fast Track – and a New Moon Race NASA’s Moon program reached a major milestone this week: engineers at Kennedy Space Center finished stacking the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for Artemis 2, placing the Orion crew capsule (nicknamed “Integrity”) atop the booster space.com. “The towering rocket…has come together,” NASA announced, after hoisting Orion onto SLS inside the Vehicle Assembly Building space.com. This completed rocket – set to launch four astronauts around the Moon – was even exempted from the ongoing federal shutdown, underscoring Artemis 2’s high priority space.com. The mission is targeting February 2026 for liftoff, which would mark
27 October 2025
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NASA’s “Astronaut Avatars” – Tiny Organ Chips Poised to Protect Artemis II Crew’s Health

SpaceX’s Moon Mission in Jeopardy as NASA Opens Artemis Contract to Rivals

NASA Reopens Moon Lander Contract Amid SpaceX Delays NASA’s surprise move to reopen the Artemis III lunar lander contract marks a dramatic shift in the U.S. return-to-the-Moon effort. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy – who also serves as U.S. Transportation Secretary – revealed on Monday that NASA will no longer rely exclusively on SpaceX for the planned Moon landing mission. “I’m in the process of opening that contract up,” Duffy said, explaining that SpaceX’s development schedule has slipped too much reuters.com. SpaceX’s Starship rocket was originally slated to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface in late 2025 or 2026,
20 October 2025
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SpaceX’s Mega Starship Aces Final V2 Test – ‘One Step Closer to Moon!’

SpaceX’s Mega Starship Aces Final V2 Test – ‘One Step Closer to Moon!’

The Final Starship V2 Test Flight At 6:23 p.m. local time on Oct. 13, SpaceX lit the engines on Starship Flight 11. The vehicle — fully stacked and standing ~121 m (400 ft) tall space.com ts2.tech — roared off the Starbase launch tower under 33 ground-level Raptor engines, generating about 16 million pounds of thrust (over twice that of the Saturn V moon rocket) ts2.tech. The Super Heavy booster carried its upper-stage “Ship 38” clear of the pad in a plume of flame. The only anomaly during ascent was one Raptor failing to reignite during a planned boost-back burn; that engine later relit during the landing
14 October 2025
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NASA’s “Astronaut Avatars” – Tiny Organ Chips Poised to Protect Artemis II Crew’s Health

Artemis II: NASA’s Daring 2026 Moon Mission – First Crewed Lunar Orbit in 50 Years

Mission Overview: Artemis II and Its Significance Artemis II is poised to be a historic mission, rekindling human exploration beyond Earth orbit after half a century. It is the second mission in NASA’s Artemis program and the first that will carry astronauts. In essence, Artemis II is a lunar flyby: the crew will venture around the Moon and return to Earth without landing spacepolicyonline.com. The mission builds directly on the uncrewed Artemis I flight (Nov–Dec 2022), which tested the enormous SLS rocket and Orion capsule around the Moon and back. Artemis I was deemed a success, but engineers learned vital lessons – notably about Orion’s heat shield, which ablated more than expected spacepolicyonline.com. Armed
25 September 2025
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Space Race in 48 Hours: Starship Roars, Moon Mission Nears & Space Tourism Soars

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
24 September 2025
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NASA’s New Astronaut Class of 2025 Makes History with “All-American” Recruits Poised for Moon and Mars

NASA’s New Astronaut Class of 2025 Makes History with “All-American” Recruits Poised for Moon and Mars

Overview of the 2025 Astronaut Class Announcement NASA’s 2025 Astronaut Candidate Class – the ten selectees pose at Johnson Space Center in Houston after their introduction on September 22, 2025. NASA unveiled this “All-American” 2025 astronaut class during a live ceremony, marking the agency’s first new astronaut cohort since 2021. The announcement followed a highly competitive process: more than 8,000 Americans applied, hoping to earn a coveted spot in NASA’s astronaut corps. Ultimately, 10 candidates (6 women and 4 men) were chosen, all U.S. citizens hailing from “every corner of this nation,” as NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy noted in
23 September 2025
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Space Weekend Shockers: Starlink Blitz, Moon Rover Revival & Mars Life Clues (Sept 20–21, 2025)

Space Weekend Shockers: Starlink Blitz, Moon Rover Revival & Mars Life Clues (Sept 20–21, 2025)

Key Facts Satellite Launches & Mission Updates SpaceX’s Starlink Surge: SpaceX capped a busy week with back-to-back Starlink launches. On Sept. 19, a Falcon 9 from foggy Vandenberg SFB deployed 24 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit space.com, using a veteran booster on its 10th flight space.com. This boosted the Starlink constellation to around 8,400 active satellites, the largest ever space.com. Just hours later, SpaceX rolled out another Falcon 9 in Florida for a near-sunrise launch on Sept. 21 carrying 28 more Starlink V2 Mini satellites spaceflightnow.com. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral at 6:53 a.m. EDT Sunday went off smoothly, with the booster landing at sea
21 September 2025
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Space Race Heats Up: Major Launches, Moon Missions & Policy Showdowns (Sept. 19–20, 2025)

Space Race Heats Up: Major Launches, Moon Missions & Policy Showdowns (Sept. 19–20, 2025)

Key Facts Starlink Launch Extends SpaceX’s Record Year SpaceX continued its rapid launch cadence with yet another Starlink deployment on Sept. 19. After two days of bad weather delays, a Falcon 9 rocket roared off the pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 9:31 a.m. local time, carrying 24 Starlink V2 Mini satellites into polar orbit spaceflightnow.com. This mission – dubbed Starlink 17-12 – was SpaceX’s 84th Starlink launch of the year, underscoring the company’s breakneck pace in 2025 spaceflightnow.com. It also brings the total Starlink satellites launched in 2025 to over 2,000 as SpaceX builds out its massive internet constellation spaceflightnow.com. Notably, the
20 September 2025
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SpaceX Starship’s Epic Test Flight Stuns the World – What It Means for Moon, Mars, and Beyond

SpaceX Starship’s Epic Test Flight Stuns the World – What It Means for Moon, Mars, and Beyond

Starship’s Latest Test: Breaking New Ground in South Texas SpaceX’s Starship program notched a dramatic success on August 26, 2025, when the giant Starship rocket aced its 10th flight test from the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas space.com. At 7:30 p.m. ET that day, the 40-story vehicle thundered off the pad on 33 Raptor engines, delivering a ground-shaking 16 million pounds of thrust – more than twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V or SLS moon rockets spaceflightnow.com. SpaceX employees cheered as the booster propelled the Starship upper stage toward space, marking the first time in over a
19 September 2025
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Historic Splashdowns, Lunar Leaps & Billion-Dollar Space Deals (Aug 8–9, 2025)

Historic Splashdowns, Lunar Leaps & Billion-Dollar Space Deals (Aug 8–9, 2025)

NASA’s Crew-10 astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov completed a 146-day mission with a splashdown off the California coast at 11:33 a.m. ET on Aug. 9, 2025, the first crewed West Coast splashdown under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. China completed the first full-scale test of the Lanyue (“Embrace the Moon”) crewed lunar lander in Hebei on Aug. 6, 2025, validating its ascent and descent engines ahead of a 2030 lunar mission. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is slated for its first national-security launch with mission USSF-106 as early as Aug. 12, 2025, marking Vulcan’s inaugural national-security and Post-Certification
9 August 2025
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ISRO’s Lunar Success (Chandrayaan-3) and Momentum for Mars Exploration

ISRO’s Lunar Success (Chandrayaan-3) and Momentum for Mars Exploration

Chandrayaan-3, launched July 2023, achieved a soft landing near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023, with lander Vikram and six-wheeled rover Pragyan. The mission conducted 14 days of surface operations and returned at least 1100 images and data, including ChaSTE soil temperature measurements to 10 cm depth. Chandrayaan-3 marked India’s first soft landing in the lunar south polar region and made India the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon. The mission cost was about $75 million. India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM / Mangalyaan-1) launched on November 5, 2013 atop a PSLV-XL, with a dry mass of about
16 June 2025
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