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NASA’s moon rocket makes the slow trip to its launch pad

Space Launch System rocket on its way to launch pad with "Drive Safely" sign in foreground
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and its mobile launcher head for the launch pad at a top speed of 1 mph. (NASA Photo / Keegan Barber)

NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket crept toward its Florida launch pad today at a top speed of about 1 mph, marking the first step in a journey that will eventually send astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The 4-mile trek to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center began at 7 a.m. ET (4 a.m. PT) and lasted until evening. Because the rocket with its mobile launcher stands more than 300 feet tall and weighs millions of pounds, the trip required the use of a crawler-transporter — the same vehicle used for the Apollo and space shuttle programs, now upgraded for NASA’s Artemis moon program.

Liftoff for the Artemis 2 mission could come as early as Feb. 6, but there’s lots to be done in the weeks ahead. After today’s rollout, the mission team will conduct a thorough checkout of the Space Launch System and its Orion crew spacecraft. Then there’ll be a “wet dress rehearsal,” during which the launch team will fuel the rocket and count down to T-minus 29 seconds.

“We have, I think, zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until we get through wet dress,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters.

Artemis 2 is slated to send three NASA astronauts and one Canadian astronaut on a 10-day journey tracing a figure-8 route around the moon. The trip will take them as far as 4,800 miles beyond the lunar far side — farther out than any human has gone before.

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Year in Space: Get ready for magnificent moon missions

Orion making a lunar flyby
An artist’s conception shows the Orion spacecraft’s main engine firing during a lunar flyby. (NASA Illustration)

Lunar missions once felt like the domain of history books rather than current events, but an upcoming trip around the moon is poised to generate headlines at a level not seen since the Apollo era.

NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, which is due to launch four astronauts on a round-the-moon journey as a warmup for a future lunar landing, is shaping up as the spaceflight highlight of 2026. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who took the agency’s helm this month after a tumultuous year, says it’s the top item on his must-see list.

“What’s not to be excited about?” he said last week on CNBC. “We’re sending American astronauts around the moon. It’s the first time we’ve done that in a half-century. … We’re weeks away, potentially a month or two away at most from sending American astronauts around the moon again.”

The Pacific Northwest plays a significant role in the back-to-moon campaign. For example, L3Harris Technologies’ team in Redmond, Wash., built thrusters for Artemis 2’s Orion crew vehicle. And Artemis 2 isn’t the only upcoming moon mission with Seattle-area connections: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, headquartered in Kent, plans to send an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the lunar surface in 2026 to help NASA get set for future moon trips.

“We are taking our first steps to help open up the lunar frontier for all of humanity,” Paul Brower, Blue Origin’s director of lunar operations, said in a recent LinkedIn post.

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How AI can help scientists head off water woes

Screenshot showing interactive map generated in response to AI query: "Show me the drought condition in North America for August 2012"
A screenshot shows how Hydrology Copilot can turn a simple query into an interactive, color-coded map. (Microsoft Infographic)

Microsoft and NASA say they’re applying artificial intelligence to a challenge that has become increasingly urgent: how to cope with flooding and other disasters driven by extreme weather.

The result of their efforts is Hydrology Copilot, a set of AI agents aimed at making hydrological data easier to access and analyze. The platform is built on the foundation that was established for NASA Earth Copilot, a cloud-based AI tool that can sift through petabytes of Earth science data.

Hydrology is the scientific study of Earth’s water cycle, which encompasses precipitation, runoff, evaporation and the movement of water through rivers, lakes and soil. It’s not just an academic exercise: Hydrologic insights are put to use in fields ranging from agriculture to forestry to urban development.

“NASA has long produced advanced hydrology and land-surface datasets, powering breakthroughs in drought early-warning systems, environmental planning and environmental research,” Juan Carlos López, a senior solution specialist at Microsoft who focuses on space and AI, wrote in a blog post. “Yet despite their value, these datasets and the specialized tools required to navigate and interpret them remain difficult to access for many who could benefit most.”

That’s where Hydrology Copilot comes in: Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Foundry, the platform lets researchers query NASA’s data using straightforward questions — for example, “Which regions may be facing elevated flood risk?”

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Universe Today

Super-quiet X-59 supersonic jet makes first test flight

X-59 aircraft flying over Mojave Desert with mountains in background
The X-59 low-boom supersonic aircraft flies over California's Mojave Desert. (Credit: Lockheed Martin)

In partnership with NASA, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft. This week’s first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.

“We are thrilled to achieve the first flight of the X-59,” OJ Sanchez, Skunk Works’ vice president and general manager, said in a news release. “This aircraft is a testament to the innovation and expertise of our joint team, and we are proud to be at the forefront of quiet supersonic technology development.”

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy called the X-59 “a symbol of American ingenuity.”

“The American spirit knows no bounds. It’s part of our DNA – the desire to go farther, faster and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before,” he said. “This work sustains America’s place as the leader in aviation and has the potential to change the way the public flies.”

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Fiction Science Club

How billionaires boost America in space race with China

Blended image of Elon Musk celebrating after launch of NASA astronauts, and Jeff Bezos celebrating after first crewed New Shepard launch
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have both celebrated space victories. (Left: GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota, 2020. Right: Blue Origin Photo, 2021)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has only just begun to launch a heavy-lift rocket that was a decade in the making — its orbital-class New Glenn launch vehicle, which had its first flight in January. But it’s already planning something even bigger to rival Starship, the super-rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Bezos simply isn’t ready to share those plans yet.

Actually, a super-heavy-lift rocket concept known as New Armstrong (named in honor of first moonwalker Neil Armstrong) has been talked about for almost as long as New Glenn (whose name pays tribute to John Glenn, the first American in orbit). Bezos mentioned the idea way back in 2016, but said at the time that it was “a story for the future.”

Details about New Armstrong are still a story for the future, according to an account in “Rocket Dreams,” a book about the billionaire space race written by Washington Post staff writer Christian Davenport.

“They’ve been very quiet about it,” Davenport says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I asked Jeff specifically about that at the New Glenn launch, and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

In the book, he quotes Bezos as saying only that “we are working on a vehicle that will come after New Glenn and lift more mass.”

New Armstrong is one of the few mysteries that Davenport wasn’t able to crack in his account of the space rivalry between Bezos and Musk. Davenport first addressed that rivalry seven years ago in a book titled “Space Barons,” but this updated saga is set in the context of an even bigger rivalry between America and China. Both nations are aiming to send astronauts to the moon by 2030, if not before.

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NASA hits new milestones with latest class of astronauts

Lineup of newly named NASA astronaut candidates
NASA’s Class of 2025 astronauts include Ben Bailey, Cameron Jones, Katherine Spies, Erin Overcash, Adam Fuhrmann, Lauren Edgar, Yuri Kubo and Imelda Muller (from left, top row), plus Anna Menon and Rebecca Lawler nestling in the A’s of the NASA logo. (NASA Photo)

NASA has named the next 10 members of its astronaut corps, and one of those 10 is a geologist with plenty of space research experience who hails from the Pacific Northwest.

Lauren Edgar — who regards Sammamish, Wash., as her hometown — is part of the first class of astronaut candidates in which the women outnumber the men. It’s also the first class to include someone who has already gone into orbit on a commercial spacecraft, and who set a spaceflight record to boot.

NASA’s Class of 2025 was introduced today at a ceremony conducted at Johnson Space Center in Houston, with members of Congress and other VIPs in attendance.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy noted that more than 8,000 people applied for this year’s spots. “We picked the best and the brightest, the most skilled, the best-looking, the best personalities to take these 10 spots,” he said. “One of these 10 could actually be one of the first Americans to put their boots on the Mars surface, which is very, very cool.”

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Blue Origin will work on getting VIPER rover to the moon

Illustration: VIPER rover and Blue Moon lander on the moon
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s VIPER rover and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander on the lunar surface. (Blue Origin Illustration)

NASA has selected Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to help it resurrect a mission to send a robotic prospector to the moon’s south polar region.

Blue Origin will be tasked with drawing up a plan to deliver the VIPER rover to the moon in late 2027, using its uncrewed Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander. This would be Blue Origin’s second lunar lander. The first lander is due for launch as early as this year, with the objective of delivering NASA’s SCALPSS camera system and a retroreflective array to the lunar surface.

The newly announced task order, known as CS-7, was awarded through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and has a total potential value of $190 million.

“NASA is leading the world in exploring more of the moon than ever before, and this delivery is just one of many ways we’re leveraging U.S. industry to support a long-term American presence on the lunar surface,” acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said today in a news release.

VIPER is designed to explore permanently shadowed regions near the moon’s south pole for signs of volatile materials, including water ice. Such ice could be extracted to produce drinkable water and breathable oxygen as well as hydrogen for rocket fuel. VIPER is an acronym that stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover.

Duffy said the VIPER mission will “help inform future landing sites for our astronauts and better understand the moon’s environment – important insights for sustaining humans over longer missions, as America leads our future in space.”

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NASA thanks suppliers for work on the next big moonshot

NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg in lab at L3Harris / Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond, Wash.
NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg faces the TV cameras at L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Redmond, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

REDMOND, Wash. — The first crewed flight around the moon in more than 50 years is still months away, but NASA is already saying thank you to L3Harris Technologies’ Aerojet Rocketdyne segment and other suppliers who are making the trip possible.

Today, NASA’s road trip brought agency officials — plus astronaut Woody Hoburg — to the L3Harris facility in Redmond, which has contributed propulsion systems to NASA missions ranging from space shuttle flights to the Voyager probes’ journeys to the edge of the solar system.

Now NASA is getting ready to launch four astronauts on a round-the-moon mission known as Artemis 2, powered in part by hardware built in Redmond. Hoburg, who spent six months on the International Space Station in 2023 and is awaiting his next crew assignment, told an audience of about 200 L3Harris employees and VIPs that the Artemis 2 crew is well aware of the company’s contribution.

“They’re depending on you, and they know they can count on you,” he said. “Thank you for all the hard work you’re doing to make this amazing adventure possible.”

The Artemis 2 mission is currently targeted for launch next April, or perhaps even earlier, said Howard Hu, NASA’s program manager for the Orion crew vehicle. The mission after that, Artemis 3, is due to lift off no earlier than mid-2027 with the goal of landing astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

L3Harris’ Aerojet Redmond team delivered the hardware for those two Artemis missions — including auxiliary engines for Orion’s European-built service module — years ago. Now the team is working on thrusters for missions as far out as Artemis 8, which is scheduled to go the moon no earlier than 2033.

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NASA funds studies focusing on orbital transfer vehicles

Illustration: Blue Ring vehicle in orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Blue Ring space platform in orbit. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is among six companies that will be producing studies for NASA looking at low-cost ways to use orbital transfer vehicles to deliver spacecraft to hard-to-reach orbits for the space agency.

The awards will support nine studies in all, with a maximum total value of about $1.4 million, NASA said today.

“With the increasing maturity of commercial space delivery capabilities, we’re asking companies to demonstrate how they can meet NASA’s need for multi-spacecraft and multi-orbit delivery to difficult-to-reach orbits beyond current launch service offerings,” Joe Dant, orbital transfer vehicle strategic initiative owner for the Launch Services Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, said in a news release. “This will increase unique science capability and lower the agency’s overall mission costs.”

Blue Origin will conduct two studies — one that focuses on potential NASA applications for its Blue Ring multi-mission space mobility platform, and another that focuses on how the upper stage of its New Glenn rocket could be used.

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Universe Today

Lucy probe snaps closeup of weirdly shaped asteroid

Closeup of asteroid Donaldjohanson
NASA's Lucy probe captured this view of the asteroid Donaldjohanson from about 660 miles away. (NASA / Goddard / SwRI / JHUAPL / NOIRLab)

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft made a successful flyby of the second asteroid on its must-see list over the weekend, and sent back imagery documenting the elongated object’s bizarre double-lobed shape.

It turns out that asteroid Donaldjohanson — which was named after the anthropologist who discovered the fossils of a human ancestor called Lucy — is what’s known as a contact binary, with a couple of ridges in its narrow neck. In today’s image advisory, NASA compares the ridged structure to a pair of nested ice cream cones.

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