Official announcements on space missions, aerospace research, and exploration

NASA has awarded Axiom Space its fifth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, with a launch window opening no earlier than January 2027 from Kennedy Space Center. The 14‑day flight will carry up to four crew members who will train alongside NASA and international partners. Axiom will purchase crew consumables and other in‑orbit services from NASA, while NASA will buy cold‑chain sample‑return capability from Axiom. The contract reinforces NASA’s commercial space strategy and feeds into the Artemis Moon‑to‑Mars roadmap.

NASA’s Libera instrument, designed to sustain the global Earth radiation budget record, has successfully completed comprehensive environmental testing, including thermal vacuum simulations. The instrument, built by the University of Colorado Boulder’s LASP, will fly aboard the JPSS‑4 satellite—later named NOAA‑22—targeted...

NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Station 15 (DSS-15) is a 112‑foot antenna that forms part of the Deep Space Network’s global array of communication facilities. The DSN supports interplanetary spacecraft, radar, and radio‑astronomy observations, and is a critical link for the...

NASA’s Artemis Landing and Recovery team, together with the Department of Defense, performed a final just‑in‑time training exercise off California’s coast on Jan. 27, 2026. The drill used a full‑scale Crew Module Test Article to mimic the Orion spacecraft’s splashdown environment for...

NASA‑backed researchers have resurrected a 3.2‑billion‑year‑old nitrogenase enzyme, demonstrating that its nitrogen‑isotope signature remains unchanged despite billions of years of molecular evolution. By reverse‑engineering modern nitrogenase, the team recreated ancestral versions and expressed them in microbes, confirming that the isotopic...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a vivid infrared image of the young star cluster Pismis 24 in the Lobster Nebula, while the Chandra X‑ray Observatory overlaid red, green and blue bursts indicating high‑energy activity from massive stars. The composite picture,...