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• Jeff Foust
Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover will move to emeritus status after their planned April 2026 lunar mission, ending their eligibility for future NASA flights. Separately, Greece’s first astronaut, physician Adrianos Golemis, is set to fly to the ISS on a private ESA-Vast mission in 2027.
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NASA awarded Inversion Space a contract to study aerocapture, a concept that uses a planetary atmosphere to slow an incoming spacecraft. The work could examine a new approach to interplanetary travel by reducing the need for conventional propulsion during spacecraft arrival.
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Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover will move to emeritus status after their planned April 2026 lunar mission, ending their eligibility for future NASA flights. Separately, Greece’s first astronaut, physician Adrianos Golemis, is set to fly to the ISS on a private ESA-Vast mission in 2027.
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is expected to directly image exoplanets, while a next-generation observatory in early development could analyze reflected light from their surfaces. Detecting signatures such as ocean glint and rainbows would provide potentially important evidence in the search for habitable worlds and life beyond Earth.
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Arianespace announced orders for 10 additional Ariane 6 launches, including six linked to Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite deployment plans, while ICEYE agreed to evaluate the rocket for sovereign SAR missions. Separately, NASA added Relativity Space’s Terran R to its NLS II launch-services contract.
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Following the landmark Artemis II lunar mission, NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman are leaving the agency’s active astronaut corps and transitioning to emeritus status in September. The crew recently received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
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NASA teams at Kennedy Space Center have stacked another pair of Artemis III Space Launch System solid-rocket-booster segments, while continuing Core Stage-3 engine work and early Artemis IV processing. Orion test results also confirmed a trajectory correction, providing additional progress across the Artemis hardware pipeline.
NASA has added a new antenna to its Deep Space Network in the California desert, increasing communications capacity as a growing number of deep-space missions place greater demands on the agency’s ground infrastructure. The expansion is intended to support more reliable links with spacecraft operating far beyond Earth.
Katalyst Space is wrapping up operations on a spacecraft intended to reboost NASA’s Swift observatory. Although the mission did not achieve its original objective, the vehicle became a technology demonstration for satellite servicing, offering an operational data point for emerging commercial in-space support capabilities.
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