NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Commercial
New Glenn flew. Now Blue Origin has to prove it can do it again.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket reached orbit on its first attempt — a significant achievement for a company that spent years being compared unfavorably to SpaceX. But a single successful launch is a beginning, not a business. What comes next will define whether New Glenn becomes a serious player.
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Stargazing
Jupiter is at its biggest and brightest of the year. How to make the most of it.
Every thirteen months, Earth laps Jupiter in their orbits around the Sun, bringing the giant planet to opposition — closest approach, fully illuminated, visible all night. Jupiter's 2026 opposition puts it in a favorable position for northern observers, and a modest telescope will show you cloud bands, the Great Red Spot, and four moons that.
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Commercial
A startup is building a space station. Haven-1 is closer than most people realize.
Vast Space is developing Haven-1, a small commercial space station aimed at hosting private astronauts and eventually science payloads. SpaceX is launching it. The timeline is aggressive and the company is a newcomer, but the hardware is real and the contracts are signed.
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Missions
Artemis II keeps slipping. Here's what's actually holding it back.
NASA's crewed lunar flyby mission has been delayed again. The reasons are technical, financial, and organizational — and understanding them reveals how difficult it is to run a government human spaceflight program in 2026.
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Science & Discovery
How black holes actually grow: new X-ray observations are filling in the picture
Black holes grow by consuming nearby gas and dust — but the details of how that accretion works, and how it produces the relativistic jets that extend for millions of light-years, are still being worked out. A new generation of X-ray telescopes is catching the process in action.
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Missions
Dragonfly is going to Titan. Here's why that's one of the boldest planetary missions ever designed.
NASA's Dragonfly mission will send a nuclear-powered rotorcraft to fly across the surface of Saturn's moon Titan — a world with lakes of liquid methane, organic chemistry everywhere, and possibly the ingredients for life. The mission is years away, but it's being built now.
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Stargazing
Saturn's rings are nearly edge-on. Here's why that's worth watching.
Saturn's rings appear to open and close as the planet orbits the Sun, presenting a full face every fifteen years or so — and then nearly vanishing as they tilt edge-on. We are approaching one of those disappearing acts. Understanding the geometry, and how to watch it unfold, makes an ordinary telescope into a front-row seat for orbital mechanics.
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Missions
NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. It worked better than the models said it would.
The DART spacecraft impacted asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, reducing its orbital period by 33 minutes — far more than the minimum 73-second threshold for mission success. The result has permanently changed how planetary defense is planned.
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Missions
China just brought back rocks from the side of the Moon we've never sampled. Here's why that matters.
Chang'e-6 landed in the South Pole–Aitken Basin on the Moon's far side in June 2024 — the first mission to return samples from this ancient region. The rocks it brought back may finally explain why the near and far sides of the Moon are so different.
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Missions
Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars. Here's what those flights changed.
Designed for five flights, Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars over nearly three years before a rotor blade broke on landing. It proved that powered flight on another planet is possible — and gave Perseverance a scout that changed how it drove.
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Missions
NASA's new space telescope has one job: find every asteroid that could hit Earth
NEO Surveyor is a purpose-built infrared space telescope designed to find near-Earth objects that ground-based surveys miss. Its goal is to complete the congressional mandate to catalog 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters — a mandate that has gone unmet since 2005.
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Missions
A microwave-oven-sized spacecraft spent a year testing the orbit where NASA's Moon station will live
CAPSTONE, a 25-kilogram cubesat, was the first spacecraft to enter the near-rectilinear halo orbit that will host the Gateway lunar station. Its year of operations validated the orbital mechanics and navigation techniques Gateway will depend on.
