Blue Origin launched its 15th space tourism flight today (Oct. 8), sending six people on a brief trip to the final frontier, including a mystery passenger who only revealed his identity after the flight.

The company's New Shepard vehicle lifted off from Blue Origin's West Texas launch site today at 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT; 8:40 a.m. local Texas time), kicking off a suborbital flight known as NS-36.

Everything went according to plan for Blue Origin. New Shepard's first stage came back to Earth for a vertical, powered landing about 8 minutes after launch, and the autonomous vehicle's capsule followed suit several minutes later, touching down under parachutes in the Texas desert.

Flying on that capsule were franchise-industry executive Jeff Elgin, media entrepreneur Danna Karagussova, electrical engineer Clint Kelly III, software entrepreneur and author Aaron Newman, and Ukrainian businessman and investor Vitalii Ostrovsky.

"Oh my God, oh my God!" Karagussova could be heard exclaiming as they reached space. She and her crewmates had dubbed themselves the "Space Nomads" for the flight, as each Blue Origin crew picks its own nickname, the company said.

There was also a sixth mystery passenger, who wanted to remain anonymous until after the flight.

That mystery space tourist was Will Lewis, CEO and chair of the medical biotech company Insmed. "He is an experienced adventurer and considers NS-36 to be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream," Blue Origin spokesperson Tabitha Lipkin said during live commentary.

NS-36 was the second spaceflight for Kelly, who performed pioneering robotics and computer-science research in the 1980s at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He also went to space on Blue Origin's NS-22 mission in August 2022.

You can read more about each NS-36 passenger in our crew reveal story.

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has been flying New Shepard for a decade now.

As its name suggests, today's flight was the 36th overall for the reusable vehicle. It was just the 15th to carry people, however; most New Shepard jaunts have been uncrewed research flights.

New Shepard gets more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — higher than the Kármán line, the widely recognized boundary of outer space. Passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see Earth against the blackness of space.

Blue Origin said the NS-36 space tourists reached a maximum altitude of about 66 miles (107 kilometers), just above the Kármán line during their flight. From liftoff to landing, the entire mission lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds.

Blue Origin has not revealed its New Shepard ticket prices. But, for some perspective: The company's biggest competitor in the suborbital tourism business, Virgin Galactic, charged $600,000 per seat for its most recent flights.

UPDATE: Blue Origin is now targeting 9:40 am ET (1340 GMT) for the launch of six passengers on its NS-36 space tourist flight.

Blue Origin plans to launch its 15th space tourism mission on today (Oct. 8), and you can watch the action live.

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is targeting a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on Wednesday morning for the latest flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

You can watch the liftoff — which will take place from Blue Origin's West Texas launch site — live here at Space.com, courtesy of the company. Coverage will begin 30 minutes before liftoff.

Blue Origin calls today's mission NS-36, because it will be the 36th overall flight of New Shepard, an autonomous, reusable rocket-capsule combo. Twenty-one of New Shepard's missions to date have been uncrewed research flights; this will be the 15th to carry people.

Six people will go up on NS-36. They are franchise-industry executive Jeff Elgin, media entrepreneur Danna Karagussova, electrical engineer and robotics researcher Clint Kelly III, software entrepreneur Aaron Newman, Ukrainian businessman Vitalii Ostrovsky, and a sixth passenger who wishes to remain anonymous until after the flight.

Kelly is a spaceflight veteran; he also flew on Blue Origin's NS-22 mission in August 2022.

You can read more about each of these passengers in our NS-36 crew reveal story.

New Shepard flights last 10 to 12 minutes from launch until capsule touchdown. Passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness during this time, and they get above the Kármán line — the widely recognized boundary of outer space, which lies 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth.

It's unclear how much a seat aboard New Shepard costs; Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices.

New Shepard has carried some famous people to and from the final frontier over the past few years. Passengers on previous flights include "Star Trek" icon William Shatner, NFL Hall of Famer Michael Strahan and pop superstar Katy Perry.

On Wednesday (Oct. 1), Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, announced the passenger list for NS-36, the next flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. (We don't yet know when NS-36 will launch; that info is coming soon, according to Blue Origin.)

The company gave us five names for NS-36. There will also be a sixth, but that person "asked to remain anonymous until after the flight," Blue Origin wrote in an update on Wednesday. Here's a brief rundown of the announced five, using information provided in the update.

• Jeff Elgin, founder of FranChoice, a network that helps match people with franchise-owning opportunities.
• Danna Karagussova, founder of Portals, "a multimodal ecosystem that features digital self-regulation tools that fuse art and science," according to Blue Origin. She's also a lifelong mountaineer.
• Dr. Clint Kelly III, an electrical engineer with a long history in computer and robotics research. His work at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1980s helped lay the foundation for driverless cars, Blue Origin wrote. He's also a wildlife photographer who wrote a book about penguins. Kelly has already flown with Blue Origin, reaching space on the NS-22 mission in August 2022.
• Aaron Newman, an entrepreneur who founded five software startups. Newman is also a veteran of the U.S. Army and an explorer, having descended into the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the world's oceans.
• Vitalii Ostrovsky, a Ukrainian businessman, investor and globetrotter who has lived in more than 100 countries around the world.

As its name suggests, NS-36 will be the 36th spaceflight for New Shepard, which consists of a reusable booster and a reusable capsule. It will be just the 15th New Shepard tourist flight, however; most of the vehicle's missions have been uncrewed research flights.

New Shepard flights — crewed or uncrewed — last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to the parachute-aided touchdown of the capsule. Passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space. It's unclear how much this costs; Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices.

Twenty-eight alumni of Indiana-based Purdue have flown to space or been selected for spaceflight. That impressive roster includes Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom, as well as Adam Fuhrmann and Yuri Kubo, members of NASA's just-announced 2025 astronaut class.

And the list just got longer, for Purdue announced today (Sept. 23) that it's sending a team of researchers, students and alumni to suborbital space with Virgin Galactic in 2027, on a mission called Purdue 1.

"This mission with Purdue University is a powerful demonstration of what becomes possible when research institutions and educators gain direct access to the microgravity environment," Virgin Galactic President of Spaceline Mike Moses, a former NASA space shuttle launch integration manager who also went to Purdue, said in a statement.

"By enabling researchers to accompany and interact with their experiments in real time, we are not just advancing science — we are empowering the next generation of innovators and expanding the frontiers of educational opportunity," added Moses, whose wife Beth Moses is Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor, a veteran of multiple suborbital spaceflights and a former Boilermaker herself.

Purdue 1 will carry five passengers to and from suborbital space, along with two pilots. Those passengers are Steven Collicott, a Purdue professor of aerospace engineering; Purdue graduate student Abigail Mizzi; alumnus Jason Williamson and two other alumni who will be named at a later date.

Virgin Galactic's space plane can carry six crewmembers, but one seat will be removed from the cabin on this flight to accommodate the mission's research payloads, according to the university.

Those experiments will be carried out by Collicott and Mizzi. Collicott's work will look at how liquids spread over a surface, while Mizzi will investigate how liquids oscillate in zero gravity.

"If you spill water on your kitchen counter, you’ll see it spreads more in some ways than others," Collicott said, in a description of his experiment. "Is this drinking water in a space station or a liquid packed with nutrients for a plant growth system? We need to get this important data to learn more about these flows to aid in spaceflight hardware design for future long-duration missions and perhaps so that future payloads can be automated, which would make missions even less expensive."

Virgin Galactic's space plane lifts off under the wings of a carrier aircraft, which drops it at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). The spacecraft ignites its onboard rocket motor, powering its own way to suborbital space, then glides back down for a runway landing here on Earth.

The company reached space for the first time in December 2018 and conducted its first fully crewed flight in July 2021. (Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was one of the passengers on that debut jaunt).

Virgin Galactic has flown seven commercial flights to date, the most recent one occurring in June 2024. The company has paused its launches to get a new, more advanced version of its space plane, known as the Delta class, up and running.

These new vehicles are expected to start flying in 2026, so Purdue 1 will be a Delta flight.

Virgin Galactic's most recent ticket price was $600,000. That was for a seat on the old VSS Unity space plane, however; prices for the Delta spacecraft have not yet been set, but they're expected to be a bit higher.

Collicott's seat will be paid for by NASA; the professor won a research proposal competition through the agency's Flight Opportunities program. Donations accepted by Purdue will fund Mizzi's trip, while the three alumni on the flight will pay for their own seats, according to the university.

The SpaceX founder and CEO thinks humanity can get a sustainable, self-sufficient Mars settlement up and running by 2055, as long as we make some key advances with our heavy-lift launch technology.

"I think it can be done in in 30 years, provided there's an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer window, which is every two years," Elon Musk said via video on Sept. 9 during the All-In Summit, an event organized by the All-In podcast. (Earth and the Red Planet align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)

Ramping up the tonnage is important, he stressed, because a Mars settlement will need lots of stuff, from habitat modules to helper robots. And, to be truly self-sufficient, it will also need "to have all of the ingredients of civilization," Musk said — the materials that will enable settlers to grow food, generate fuel from the Martian atmosphere and build microchips, computers and rockets, among many other things.

Musk has one particular rocket in mind to make this Red Planet dream come true — SpaceX's Starship, the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built.

Starship consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft called Starship, or Ship for short. Both are made of stainless steel and powered by SpaceX's next-gen Raptor engine, which burns liquid oxygen and liquid methane (both of which can be produced on Mars, Musk has stressed).

The vehicle is still under development. It has flown in a fully stacked configuration 10 times to date, most recently on Aug. 26. Flight 10 went well; Starship notched all of its main mission milestones, including its first-ever payload deployment in space (eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites).

This was an important bounce-back mission for Ship, which was lost prematurely on the previous three Starship test flights.

The next Starship test flight will be the final launch of the vehicle's current Version 2 design, Musk said at the All-In Summit.

"Thereafter, it's Version 3, which is a gigantic upgrade, because that's got Raptor 3, and pretty much everything changes on the rocket," he said, referring to the next engine iteration. "So, Version 3 might have some initial teething pains because it's such a radical redesign, but it's capable of over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable."

That's about 2.5 times the lift capacity of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket in reusable mode, he noted. But the Heavy, like its cousin the Falcon 9, is only partially reusable; the vehicle's upper stage is expendable. Each Super Heavy and Ship, by contrast, will fly many times, if all goes according to plan.

SpaceX has already demonstrated reusability with Super Heavy, flying the same booster on both Flight 7 and Flight 9. But it has yet to do so with Ship, which is understandable given the challenges involved.

"For full reusability of the Ship, there's still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield," Musk said.

"No one's ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield. The [space] shuttle heat shield had to go through nine months of repair after every flight," he added. "We really are looking at the fundamental physics here — again, physics first principles, and trying to figure out, 'How do we make something that can withstand the heat, is very light [and] doesn't transmit the heat to the primary structure?' And then, all the tiles stay on and they don't crack."

Still, Musk voiced optimism about SpaceX's ability to clear such hurdles in a timely fashion.

"I think, unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the Ship, and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit," he said.

(Starship's eventual flight plan involves both Super Heavy and Ship coming back to the launch pad, where they'll be snagged by the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower.)

Starship Version 3 will stand about 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, compared to Version 2's 397 feet (121 m), Musk has said. Version 3 will be the first iteration of the vehicle that can fly to Mars — and SpaceX hopes to launch the first uncrewed test flights to the Red Planet with it next year.

But most of the Mars-settlement heavy lifting could be done by an even bigger Starship: Musk has said the vehicle will eventually stand a whopping 466 feet (142 m) tall when fully stacked.

Musk will likely stay committed to the Mars-settlement goal over the long haul, as it has long been a driving force for him and SpaceX. Indeed, Musk has stressed that he founded the company in 2002 primarily to help humanity expand its footprint beyond Earth.

"What really matters is that Mars is self-sustaining, that we are truly a multi-planet species, such that we've achieved planetary redundancy," he said at the All-In Summit. "There's always some risk of an annihilation event on Earth — like I said, self annihilation, or some natural disaster — and so the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as we are a multi-planet species, with the key test being: Can [the settlement on] Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming?"

But beyond the Falcon 9, SpaceX has been developing its Starship megarocket, which is designed to carry massive payloads and large crews on deep-space missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

What is it?

In a recent post on X, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk shared a photo taken from beneath the Starship spacecraft that was being prepped to launch on the vehicle's 10th test flight. (That flight occurred on Aug. 26, and it went well.)

The photo shows the 33 Raptor engines of Super Heavy, Starship's first stage, arranged in a dense circular pattern. Musk added in a separate post: "33 engines, each more than twice the power of all 4 engines on a 747."

Where is it?

This photograph was taken at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, near Boca Chica, where the Starship system is built and tested.

Why is it amazing?

Packing 33 engines into a single stage presents some intense engineering challenges. Each Raptor engine must fire in perfect synchronization, maintaining stability during launch while withstanding extreme forces and vibrations.

As if this weren't ambitious enough, Musk added the following in a thread on his original post: "Starship V4 will have 42 engines when 3 more Raptors are added to a significantly longer ship. That will fly in 2027." With more engines providing additional thrust, systems like Starship can carry heavier payloads, making deep-space travel more achievable.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about SpaceX's mission and its Starship system.

The novel booster, called Neutron, is Rocket Lab's newest and the company's first purpose-built reusable rocket to tap into the medium-size satellite launch market. The first flight is expected by the end of 2025 from the company's new pad, Launch Complex 3, which Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck officially opened for business on Thursday (Aug. 28).

"Today marks an extraordinary milestone, not just for Rocket Lab, but for the future of space access in America," Beck told a crowd of investors, reporters and company officials during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday. "With the opening of Launch Complex 3, we take a major step forward in ensuring resilient and assured space access for the nation, a capability that has never been more critical."

Beck then hit a button that unleashed a torrent of water from the pad's deluge system.

Neutron's new launch site stands atop Pad 0D here at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. It is a sleek pad, consisting of concrete and steel painted in the company's red, black and gray colors with room to grow to support a high flight rate. Initial Neutron flights will use a crane to lift the rocket into place, with more infrastructure to be added as needed.

"The pad is designed to be not just like a block of concrete; it's a really, really smart pad," Beck told Space.com in an interview on Thursday. "So we're able to shed a lot of systems out of the vehicle and push them in, down into the pad. Most people look at it and go, It's a piece of steel and concrete. But actually it is like a living, breathing, functioning machine."

Rocket Lab's first U.S. pad, Launch Complex 2, sits just next door and is used to launch Electron, the company's smaller workhorse rocket for small satellite missions. The company's primary launch site is Launch Complex 1, which consists of two pads for Electron flights on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand.

The Neutron rocket is a medium-lift launch vehicle that will stand 141 feet (43 meters) tall and be able to lift payloads of up to 28,660 pounds (13,000 kilograms) on trips to low Earth orbit (LEO). The rocket's first stage will be fully reusable, powered by nine of the company's new Archimedes engines, which are fueled by liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

"Neutron is an entirely new kind of rocket, and it's been developed on a really, really rapid timeline to meet the demand for our constellation customers, and of course, high assurance missions for the nation," Beck said.

In a novel design, Rocket Lab has placed its Neutron second stage inside the first stage, instead of on top like more traditional rockets. That second stage will be deployed when the first stage's "Hungry Hippo" fairing (it's actually called that) opens its metal maw wide, ejecting a payload-bearing Neutron second stage powered by a single Archimedes engine into space. The first stage will then return to Earth for a land or ship-based landing.

Rocket Lab first unveiled its Neutron rocket concept in March 2021. Before then, Beck had said he'd eat his hat if the company built a booster larger than Electron. In a company video announcing Neutron, Beck did just that: He put a Rocket Lab baseball cap in a blender and ate pieces of the hat while sitting at a table between Neutron fairing halves.

The Neutron design has changed slightly during its development. When it was first announced, Neutron's first stage relied on seven Archimedes engines. Now it has nine. The rocket was also announced to make land-based landings. In March of this year, Rocket Lab unveiled a new landing platform to land Neutron at sea on some missions, much like SpaceX does with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters and Blue Origin plans to do with its New Glenn rocket.

"Our new landing platform will open space access even further by enabling even more mission opportunities that require maximum Neutron performance," Beck said at the time. The landing barge is called "Return On Investment," perhaps a nod to Beck's initial comments in 2021 that developing a landing ship was a costly endeavor. "It's really important also to be able to return the vehicle to the launch site, not costly barges way out in the middle of the ocean," Beck said during a video presentation in December 2021.

Neutron also appears to have grown in size and performance over the course of its development. In 2021, the rocket was originally announced as a 130-foot-tall (40 m) booster that could haul up to 18,000 pounds (8,000 kg) to LEO, and up to 4,400 pounds (2,000 kg) to the moon. It also had a 15-foot-wide (4.5 m) fairing, a traditional size, and was expected to make its first flight in 2024, a deadline that Rocket Lab missed.

Now, the rocket is 11 feet taller (with a height of 141 feet) and has a 17-foot (5 m) fairing that can accommodate larger payloads. And its lift capacity is greater now — up to 28,660 pounds to LEO. Neutron is made of a "lightweight specially formulated Rocket Lab carbon composite" material, the company has said.

For comparison, Rocket Lab's Electron stands 59 feet (18 m) tall and can carry payloads of just over 660 pounds (300 kg) to LEO. While Electron was not designed for reflight, Rocket Lab did recover first stage boosters from the sea and via a parachute and helicopter catch system to test the concept. The company has also reused Electron Rutherford engines on subsequent flights.

Beck said that the original specifications of Neutron were more of a placeholder design as the company worked to develop the medium-lift rocket. Shaun D'Mello, Rocket Lab's vice president for the Neutron rocket, added that, as Neutron was under development, two things helped refine its design. First, Russia's invasion of Ukraine led some satellite companies to forgo launching on Russian rockets, opening up a market for Neutron to help fill, D'Mello said.

"The other data point is that, for constellations, space vehicle designers and satellite makers also had real satellites they're starting to build; satellites got heavier," he added. "So the new magic number — we call it that sweet spot — became closer to the 12- to 15-ton range."

Rocket Lab already has customers lined up for Neutron launches. Last November, the company announced that it had signed its first customer for the rocket, but did not publicly disclose the client or mission payload. Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force announced it had booked a Neutron flight to test point-to-point launch cargo delivery. That mission is expected to fly in 2026.

In a November 2024 earnings call, Beck said the company aimed to launch one Neutron test flight in 2025, three missions in 2026 and five Neutron flights in 2027. The company would then target a flight rate of seven Neutron missions a year thereafter.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who cut the ribbon to open the Neutron pad on Thursday, said he welcomed the new rocket's addition to the commercial fleet operating out of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, since it will attract more tourists and business to the area.

"Before the end of this year, we will all gather and we will watch the first Neutron rocket lift off from Pad 0D right here together," Youngkin said. "If it's on Christmas Day, I'll bring the gifts."

SpaceX's Starship megarocket took to the skies for the 10th time ever today (Aug. 26), on a bold test flight that marked a big bounceback from recent failures.

Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas today at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT; 6:30 p.m. local Texas time). That was two days later than originally planned; an issue with ground systems at Starbase forced a scrub on Sunday (Aug. 24), and bad weather caused another one on Monday (Aug. 25).

But it was worth the wait: Starship did everything SpaceX asked it to today, getting the giant vehicle back on track after a string of issues.

"That was absolutely incredible," SpaceX Build Reliability Engineer Amanda Lee said during live launch commentary. "A huge congrats to all the teams here."

"Great work by the SpaceX team!!!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the flight.

A rocky road recently

Today's flight was the 10th overall for Starship, which is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and its fourth of 2025 so far. The year's three previous liftoffs didn't go entirely to plan.

The company lost the Ship vehicle, Starship's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage, less than 10 minutes after liftoff on both Flight 7 and Flight 8, which launched in January and March, respectively. The Ship on Flight 9 in May made it considerably farther, but still fell short of its planned Indian Ocean splashdown: The spacecraft broke apart as it reentered Earth's atmosphere about 45 minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX suffered another Ship setback in June, when the vehicle it was prepping for Flight 10 exploded on a Starbase test stand. The upper stage was completely destroyed, forcing SpaceX to switch to another Ship.

Starship's giant first-stage booster, named Super Heavy, has performed better as of late. For example, the booster successfully returned to Starbase for a dramatic catch by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms on both Flight 7 and Flight 8.

SpaceX notched a major Super Heavy milestone on Flight 9 as well, reflying the booster for the first time. (The same vehicle launched on Flight 7). But there was also a hiccup on the May mission.

SpaceX conducted a number of experiments with Super Heavy on Flight 9, including bringing it back to Earth at a different angle, and so aimed for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico rather than a somewhat risky return to Starbase. But Super Heavy didn't hit the water intact, exploding above the waves during the final stages of its descent.

Making adjustments

SpaceX studied the above issues in detail, then diagnosed them and cameup with fixes. For example, the company traced Ship's Flight 9 problems to a failure of the vehicle's main fuel tank pressurization system diffuser. Engineers redesigned the diffuser "to better direct pressurized gas into the main fuel tank and substantially decrease the strain on the diffuser structure," SpaceX wrote in a report about the Flight 9 anomaly.

Super Heavy's breakup on Flight 9 was likely caused by unexpectedly high forces on the booster's fuel transfer tube, which itself was the result of the higher "angle of attack" during descent, the company added. Future flights will reduce that angle to minimize the chance that the same problem will recur.

And the culprit of the June test-stand explosion was undetected damage to a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) in Ship's payload bay section, according to SpaceX. (COPVs in that area contain nitrogen gas that's used by Ship's environmental control system.)

"To address the issue, COPVs on upcoming flights will operate at a reduced pressure with additional inspections and proof tests added prior to loading reactive propellants onto a vehicle," the company wrote in the Flight 9 report, which also addressed the June explosion. "SpaceX has also updated its COPV acceptance criteria and developed a new non-destructive evaluation method to detect internal COPV damage."

An ambitious Flight 10

The goals of Flight 10 were similar to those of Flight 9. Once again, SpaceX aimed to perform several experiments with Super Heavy, including a fuel-conserving controlled flip during descent and a landing burn that featured "unique engine configurations," according to company mission preview.

That all seemed to go according to plan today, as did Super Heavy's final move: It made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after launch, just as SpaceX drew it up.

Ship came through today as well — and it had considerably more work to do. The upper stage separated from Super Heavy on time and achieved its desired suborbital trajectory. The, during a five-minute stretch that began about 20 minutes after launch, Ship deployed eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites, a critical capability it tried but failed to demonstrate on all three of this year's previous Starship flights.

"Just a reminder, we're on a suborbital trajectory," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during live commentary. "These satellites on that exact same suborbital trajectory, they're going to burn up entirely."

And there will be many satellite deployments from Ship in the future, if all goes to plan: SpaceX is counting on Starship to finish building out its Starlink megaconstellation, which is already the biggest satellite network ever assembled. The giant rocket should carry at least 60 Starlinks at a time, Huot said.

Then, about 38 minutes into the flight, Ship briefly ignited one of its engines. This was another big milestone for SpaceX; such in-space re-lights will be needed on operational Starship flights, to help power the vehicles to their distant destinations and to guide them down to Earth for safe touchdowns and reuse.

"Looks like we confirmed the relight of one of those center raptor engines second time we've done that," Lee said during live commentary. "Super exciting. Huge congrats to the team on this milestone."

"That was a cool light show," Huot added.

About 45 minutes after liftoff, Ship began its reentry to Earth's atmosphere, a violent ordeal that SpaceX made even more harrowing to push the vehicle to its limits.

"A significant number of tiles have been removed from Starship to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle during reentry," the company wrote in the Flight 10 mission preview. "Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry."

Reentry took a toll on Ship. About two minutes in, a chunk of Ship's skirt — the basal part near its engine bay — broke apart, sending debris floating into the final frontier.

"That's not what we want to see," Huot said."We've got some visible damage on the aft skirt. We're continue to re enter, though.

The Ship vehicle persevered, surviving in good enough shape to perform its planned landing burn and splashing down in the Indian Ocean as planned. 66.5 minutes after launch. And it was a bullseye landing: Ship came down within view of a buoy-mounted camera that SpaceX set up in the planned splashdown zone.

All in all, it was a successful day for SpaceX and the Starship team — one that the company celebrated and will doubtless plan to build on going forward.

"We probably gave it a little bit of extra time in the oven, but made it all the way through reentry ... we promised maximum excitement. Starship delivered," Huot said as he ticked off each of the Flight 10 milestones Starship nailed during the flight. "Time to go through the data. Really crazy cool to hit all those objectives today."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:28 p.m. EDT to include more comments from SpaceX's team on the Starship Flight 10 test flight.

Starship Flight 9 launched on May 27 from SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas. The mission ended with the loss of both the Super Heavy booster and the Ship upper stage. SpaceX led the probe into the mishap with oversight from the FAA and support from the U.S. Space Force, NASA and the National Transportation and Safety Board. Investigators traced the failures to separate structural issues in each of the vehicle's stages, according to a recent SpaceX statement.

In the same update, SpaceX also shared findings about the explosion that occurred on June 18, at one of Starbase's ground test sites. The incident destroyed Ship 36, the upper stage previously tapped for Starship's upcoming launch, as well as the surrounding infrastructure.

Flight 9 was the third Starship launch of 2025. On all three occasion, the upper stage failed to achieve its main mission goals. Flight 7 and Flight 8, which launched in January and March, respectively, each ended in explosions over the Atlantic Ocean that could be seen from Florida, the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos.

Starship's ninth flight began with a successful liftoff, and featured the first reuse of a Super Heavy, a vehicle known as Booster 14. The booster pulled off a clean hot-stage separation from Ship, at which point the booster navigated back toward Earth on a steeper-than-normal angle of attack.

SpaceX has successfully caught three Super Heavy boosters at Starbase using giant chopstick arms on the "Mechazilla" launch tower, but Booster 14 targeted a controlled splashdown offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to push Super Heavy to its aerodynamic limits. About six minutes into flight, Super Heavy relit 12 of the 13 engines intended for its landing burn, but exploded a little more than half a mile (1 kilometer) above the gulf. SpaceX believes the increased descent forces ruptured an internal propellant line, igniting Super Heavy's liquid oxygen and methane fuels.

SpaceX says it plans to decrease the angle of attack on future flights, to reduce stress during booster descents. However, another modification the company will make to Super Heavy — though not one included for Flight 10 — will help gain some of those attack angles back. Future Super Heavy boosters will be made with redesigned grid fins, with a transition from four to three aerodynamic control surfaces that are 50% larger than those currently in use, to aid boosters' trajectories during descent and allow for some higher angles of attack.

After separating from the booster, Flight 9's upper stage, known as Ship 35, initiated its first planned engine burn. About halfway through that maneuver, however, onboard sensors detected a methane leak developing inside Starship's nosecone, SpaceX said in the recent update. Though Starship's systems were able to compensate for the change in pressure through the completion of the roughly five-minute ascent burn, the leak gradually destabilized the vehicle's attitude control and prevented the mission's planned in-space maneuvering test and deployment of dummy Starlink satellites.

Ship 35 eventually regained control, but liquid methane pooling in the forward section of the nosecone then triggered the full venting of the spacecraft's remaining fuel into space, leaving the vehicle to coast toward reentry. SpaceX said that Ship 35 "reentered Earth's atmosphere in an off-nominal attitude," after which the company lost communications with the vehicle about 46 minutes into flight.

Final telemetry was received as the spacecraft was descending over the Indian Ocean, where SpaceX had been hoping the vehicle would make a controlled splashdown. Investigators say the cause of Ship 35's issues could be traced to a failure in a gas diffuser used to pressurize the main fuel tank, which engineers were able to replicate at SpaceX's test site in McGregor, Texas. They say updated versions have since passed qualification campaigns simulating 10 times its expected service life.

Just weeks after Flight 9, another Starship upper stage — Ship 36 — was destroyed during ground testing on the stand at Starbase's Massey's site. The spacecraft exploded as it was undergoing cryogenic fuel loading in preparation for a static fire test. The "rapid unscheduled disassembly," or RUD, as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has previously referred to such mishaps, resulted in the total loss of Ship 36 and extensive damage to the surrounding infrastructure.

SpaceX traced the root cause to a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV), used to store nitrogen in Starship's payload bay. The failure was caused by "undetectable or under-screened damage" to the COPV, which compromised the vehicle's structure and caused the propellant leak and subsequent explosion on the stand.

In response, SpaceX said that it has lowered the operating pressure for COPVs and added protective covers to guard the tanks during Starship assembly. SpaceX has also introduced new COPV inspection and testing procedures, including a "non-destructive evaluation method" for detecting any internal damage.

"Every lesson learned, through both flight and ground testing, continues to feed directly into designs for the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy," the SpaceX statement said.

Starship Flight 10 and Flight 11 will be the final two of the giant rocket's current design generation, "each with test objectives designed to expand the envelope on vehicle capabilities as we iterate towards fully and rapidly reusable, reliable rockets," SpaceX's update said.

The next iteration of Super Heavy and Starship will need to pick up the pace to qualify in time to fly as part of NASA's Artemis 3 moon mission. NASA selected Starship as the lunar lander for the mission, which will put astronauts on the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. NASA is currently targeting 2027 for the launch of Artemis 3, and Starship's recent test-flight issues are unlikely to quell ongoing concerns at the space agency that Starship's development may delay the mission further.

In a statement released on Aug. 15, the FAA says it has "accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation," and confirmed no reports of injury or damage caused by the loss of both vehicles on Starship's Flight 9. "SpaceX can now proceed with Starship Flight 10 launch operations under its current license."

Liftoff of Starship Flight 10 is expected during a launch window that begins Sunday (Aug. 24) at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT). SpaceX will stream the mission live on its website, as well as its account on X. Space.com will also carry the broadcast on our homepage, starting about 30 minutes before liftoff.

What is it?

Grid fins are lattice-style control surfaces that help steer rockets back down through the atmosphere toward their landing zones, helping to reduce the possible risk of damage or a crash.

For SpaceX, which relies on reusable spacecraft like Falcon 9 and Starship, having more controllable areas can help keep the spacecraft in better condition, allowing for more future launches.

Where is it?

This photo was taken at SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Why is it amazing?

SpaceX has been working on the next-generation of its Super Heavy booster, which includes a new style of grid fins. In their post on X, the company mentioned that "The redesigned grid fins are 50% larger and higher strength, moving from four fins to three for vehicle control while enabling the booster to descend at higher angles of attack."

This change allows for the team to have more control during descent while allowing the booster to return to Earth from more extreme angles, improving its landing capabilities.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about SpaceX's work and its ongoing launches.

Virgin Galactic is also collaborating on a feasibility study with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to look at using its mothership aircraft to launch other spacecraft at high altitude as a carrier platform.

"Progress on our SpaceShips continues across all systems and structures," reports Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic. He underscores a strong financial balance sheet, "to execute our business model as we bring our SpaceShips into commercial service." Colglazier says commercial service remains planned for 2026, with both research and private astronaut flights expected in the fall next year.

Conference call

The construction of Virgin Galactic's new Delta Class space plane was reviewed during the company's second quarter 2025 business conference call on Aug. 6.

The company highlighted ongoing work on Delta Class systems and structures, such as wing assembly to be completed during the fourth quarter of this year, as well as the craft's novel "feather" assembly. The feathering system is utilized when the suborbital vehicle heads back to Earth, making it more stable during the reentry process. Construction of the Delta Class SpaceShip fuselage is expected to be completed late this year or early 2026.

Also noted in the business update was progress in a feasibility study to potentially develop a second spaceport in Italy.

Flight frequency

Final assembly of the vehicles will take place at Virgin Galactic's Delta facility near Phoenix, Arizona. The Delta Class spaceships are being built to be capable of flying eight space missions per month, with twelve times the monthly payload or customer capacity of their original spaceship, VSS Unity.

The firm explains that their next-generation vehicles will bring humans to space at an unprecedented frequency with an industry-leading cost structure.

Virgin Galactic's Mike Moses, president of Spaceline, oversees the commercial spaceflight program. A newly issued "Galactic 10" video spotlighted development milestones in moving the Delta Class SpaceShip program forward.

From billionaires to actors to singers, the final frontier is becoming the newest playground for the rich and famous. Thanks to companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, visiting space is possible for those who can afford a seat.

But how well do you know who's gone up?

Our new quiz tests your smarts on which celebrities have taken "shooting for the stars" a little too literally.

Try it out below and see how well you score!

The mission also shows the growing popularity in public-private partnerships in spaceflight, with SpaceX's Falcon 9 reusable rocket and Crew Dragon capsule now regular fixtures on NASA's manifest.

What is it?

Bathed in a golden sunrise, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket assigned to the Crew-11 mission was poised for flight on July 31, 2025.

The Falcon 9, named after the famous "Star Wars" spacecraft the Millenium Falcon, is SpaceX's workhorse rocket, and its reusable first stage makes spaceflight more efficient and less costly. The two-stage rocket is often used to ferry Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit.

Where is it?

The rocket sits on a launch pad at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Why is it amazing?

The Crew-11 mission, with its four astronauts, is headed to the International Space Station, where the team will participate in biomedical research, Earth observation, and other studies as part of the outpost's Expedition 73 mission.

Despite the picture-perfect morning skies and a rocket stacked and ready, the first launch attempt on July 31, 2025 was scrubbed due to weather. A second attempt occurred in the late morning on Aug. 1, with a successful launch as the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off the launch pad and sent the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour toward the ISS.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about the Crew-11 mission and the ongoing research at the ISS.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched a crypto billionaire and five other people to the final frontier on Sunday (Aug. 3).

The mission — known as NS-34, because it was the 34th overall flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle — lifted off from the company's West Texas spaceport at 8:43 a.m. EDT (1243 GMT; 7:43 a.m. local time in West Texas).

The highest-profile NS-34 passenger was Justin Sun, a 34-year-old billionaire who founded the blockchain platform Tron. In June 2021, Sun won an auction for a seat aboard the first-ever crewed flight of New Shepard, plunking down $28 million. (He did so anonymously; we didn't learn that Sun posted the winning bid until December 2021.)

A scheduling conflict kept Sun from joining that landmark flight, which took place on July 20, 2021 — the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The passengers that day were Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.

The people flying with Sun on Sunday were Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, an Indian-born American real estate investor and adventurer; Turkish businessman and photographer Gökhan Erdem; Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico; Englishman Lionel Pitchford, who has run an orphanage in Nepal for three decades; and American entrepreneur James (J.D.) Russell.

"It was an honor to see so many nations represented on our flight today,” Blue Origin's Phil Joyce, senior vice president, New Shepard, said in a postflight statement. "The view of our fragile planet from space has a unifying effect on all who witness it, and I am always eager to see how our astronauts use this experience for the benefit of Earth."

All six passengers were spaceflight rookies except Russell, who flew on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission in November 2024. You can learn more about each of them in our NS-34 "meet the crew" story.

NS-34 was the 14th human spaceflight to date for New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a crew capsule. Both of these elements are reusable; the rocket comes back to Earth for a vertical, powered touchdown like those performed by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, and the capsule lands softly under parachutes.

Each New Shepard flight lasts 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown. During this brief time, passengers get above the Kármán line — the 62-mile-high (100 kilometers) demarcation widely regarded as the point where space begins — and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices, so we don't how much folks usually pay for a ride. But it's safe to say that it's considerably less than Sun ponied up back in 2021.

That sum was a philanthropic contribution. according to Blue Origin.

"The proceeds from the $28 million bid benefitted 19 space-focused charities to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEAM [science, technology, engineering, art and math] and help shape the future of life in space," the company wrote in an NS-34 mission description.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:20 a.m. ET to include a postflight quote from Phil Joyce.

Peggy Whitson, the commander of Axiom Space's fourth crewed flight to the International Space Station (ISS), says she found new perspectives on visiting her off-Earth "home" by helping the three rookies who accompanied her on the Ax-4 mission last month.

Assisting the new astronauts for 2.5 weeks "reminds you of all the experiences you had when you were first up there," Whitson told Space.com in a livestreamed post-flight press conference on Friday (Aug. 1). "It's always great to relive a little bit of that first time."

Ax-4 launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 26. The mission concluded 19 days later with a Pacific Ocean splashdown off the coast of California on July 15.

Ax-4's SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, named "Grace," was commanded by Whitson, a former NASA astronaut and currently Axiom's director of human spaceflight. "I've been there a few days," she joked to Space.com when asked to reflect on her nearly two years of cumulative off-Earth time, which is an American record.

Among the Ax-4 rookies was pilot Shubhanshu "Shux" Shukla from India. Shukla is one of four astronauts selected for the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) first human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan, which is scheduled to fly sometime in 2027.

"The knowledge that I've gained, it spans a history of human spaceflight missions," Shukla, the first Indian astronaut to visit the ISS, said during Friday's briefing. "The success has already started showing, wherein the [Indian] kids have already started asking questions, like, 'How do we become astronauts?' and 'How do we get to be a part of this?' I think that is also a big success for this mission."

Ax-4's other first-time flyers were mission specialists. Poland's Sławosz "Suave" Uznański-Wiśniewski is a member of the European Space Agency astronaut reserve program. Tibor Kapu is a member of the Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) program. Both were also the first from their countries to visit the ISS.

Uznański-Wiśniewski said the ISS Expedition 73 astronauts, who have been living on the station for several months, staged a special experience for him shortly after Ax-4's arrival.

"We were getting a first tour of the station, and then I was asked to close my eyes. I was lowered into the cupola, where the NASA crew asked me to then reopen my eyes. And there it was: The first look from cupola was my first time looking back to see Earth, to see Poland … I'll never forget that moment. Earth is big, and so very blue."

Kapu said he was grateful both for his time in orbit and for the support team he has at home. "I miss my family and friends the most in the past year," he said, noting that mission debriefs mean he will not return to Hungary until mid-August.

"Obviously, there have been some rough patches; the preparation for a mission like this doesn't always only have good days. There are some harder ones as well," he continued, saying his personal connections helped him keep going. "Those are the people, exactly when you talk to them, they are the ones who give you energy."

The Ax-4 quartet accomplished 60 science experiments and technology demonstrations during their time in orbit, setting an experiment record while also performing public outreach events.

Media reports suggest that Axiom Space's next effort, called Ax-5, will launch around May or June 2026, depending on ISS scheduling. That crew has not been named; NASA does require all private ISS spaceflight missions be commanded by a retired agency astronaut, however.

One possibility could be an all-U.K. mission. In 2023, the U.K. Space Agency and Axiom signed an agreement for a potential commercially sponsored mission expected to send four U.K. astronauts aloft. Retired U.K. astronaut Tim Peake joined Axiom in 2024 as a strategic advisor, aiming to make that mission a reality.

Axiom also plans to assemble and operate its own free-flying space station as early as 2028, following up on a contract signed with NASA in 2020 as part of the agency's efforts to eventually replace the decades-old ISS complex. Axiom accelerated its station timeline by two years this past December, by altering the order of when it will launch modules to orbit.

Jeff Bezos' aerospace company announced on Wednesday (July 30) that it's targeting Sunday (Aug. 3) for the flight, which is called NS-34 because it's the 34th overall mission for Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

NS-34 will lift off from the company's West Texas spaceport, near the town of Van Horn, on Sunday during a window that opens at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT; 7:30 a.m. local Texas time). Blue Origin will stream the action live, starting 30 minutes before launch.

NS-34's passengers are headlined by 34-year-old crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who in June 2021 put down the winning bid — $28 million — in an auction for a seat aboard Blue Origin's first-ever human spaceflight.

Sun couldn't fly on that mission due to scheduling issues. It launched on July 20, 2021 — the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing — with Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen onboard.

Sun's five crewmates on NS-34 are real estate investor and adventurer Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, who was born in India but is now an American citizen; Turkish businessman and photographer Gökhan Erdem; Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico; Englishman Lionel Pitchford, who has run an orphanage in Kathmandu for 30 years; and American entrepreneur James (J.D.) Russell, who also flew on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission in November 2024.

Also on Wednesday, Blue Origin revealed the NS-34 mission patch, which features an element of each passenger's life story. Here's the company's explanation, which you can find on its website:

• The globe symbolizes Arvi Bahal’s passion for travel, including visiting every country in the world, and the North and South Poles. 
• The Bosphorus Strait symbolizes Gökhan Erdem’s Turkish heritage.    
• The shape of Puerto Rico symbolizes Deborah Martorell’s home. 
• Mt. Everest symbolizes Lionel Pitchford’s decades of work in Nepal. 
• The book symbolizes J.D. Russell’s foundation, founded in honor of his deceased daughter, and dedicated to supporting children’s education and assisting first responder families. 
• The banana symbolizes H.E. Justin Sun's passion for conceptual art. 
• The sun in the center symbolizes H.E. Justin Sun, Deborah Martorell’s meteorology background, and new adventures for the whole crew.

Each New Shepard mission lasts 10 to 12 minutes, from liftoff to the parachute-aided touchdown of the vehicle's capsule. (New Shepard's booster also comes back to Earth safely for refurbishment and reuse.)

Passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see Earth against the blackness of space. We don't know what this experience costs (except in rare cases like Sun's); Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices.

NS-34 will be Blue Origin's 14th crewed mission to date and its fifth such flight of 2025.

Since its founding, the company has achieve feats once thought impossible. Its partnership with NASA has shown the capabilities of private spaceflight, with implications in space tourism.

You've seen the rocket launches, watched the booster landings, and maybe even stayed up for a livestream or two. But are you truly a SpaceX expert, or just along for the ride? Our quiz will test your grasp of the company's accomplishments and technologies.

Florida-based Space Perspective has been developing a luxury balloon-borne capsule called Spaceship Neptune, which is designed to carry passengers on leisurely trips through the stratosphere for $125,000 per seat.

Space Perspective made serious progress over the years, even launching a full (though uncrewed) test flight of the first Spaceship Neptune, named Excelsior, to a maximum altitude of about 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) in September of 2024. However, the company fell upon tough times recently.

Short on cash, Space Perspective furloughed nearly its entire workforce in January and was evicted a few months later from the Florida airport that hosted several of its facilities, according to media reports.

The acquisition by Eos X Space therefore appears to be a lifeline. Space Perspective "will operate with full autonomy, under U.S. leadership and corporate structure," Eos X Space representatives said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 24).

Space Perspective's efforts will dovetail with those of Madrid-based Eos X Space, an aerospace outfit founded in 2020 that has been working on a balloon-tourism system of its own.

"This is a historic opportunity for two former rivals to join forces and make manned space tourism a reality," Eos X Space Founder and CEO Kemel Kharbachi said in the same statement.

Eos X Space views the acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed, as a chance to join the top echelon of space tourism providers, which currently consists of SpaceX (for orbital flights) as well as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, both of which offer rocket-powered trips to and from suborbital space. (Balloon-borne capsules don't reach space, of course, but they do allow passengers to see the curve of our planet against the inky void.)

The move also allows Eos X Space to extend its operations and influence to the United States. The company said it will soon have two key sites in the U.S. — a spaceport at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for balloon flights and a research and development facility in California's Silicon Valley. Eventually, Eos X Space plans to move its global operational headquarters to the U.S.

"This is not just a strategic acquisition; it is a declaration of our long-term vision," Kharbachi said. "We are building a scalable, ethical and efficient space platform driven by innovation, purpose and excellence."

In June 2021, Sun — the billionaire founder of the blockchain platform Tron — won an auction for a seat aboard Blue Origin's first-ever crewed spaceflight.

That mission launched on July 20 of that year, carrying Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three other people to and from suborbital space on the company's reusable New Shepard vehicle. Sun was not on board, however; he had to back out due to scheduling conflicts, the company said at the time.

Sun had not identified himself as the winning bidder when that flight lifted off. The big reveal came in December 2021, when the crypto billionaire went public and said he now planned to fly in 2022 with five other "space warriors."

That didn't happen, either. But Sun's long-deferred spaceflight is now just around the corner: He is officially on the manifest for NS-34, New Shepard's next human spaceflight, Blue Origin announced on Monday (July 21). The company has not yet disclosed a target launch date for the flight but is expected to do so soon.

Here's a brief profile of the 34-year-old Sun and his five NS-34 crewmates, using information provided by Blue Origin.

• Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, a real estate investor and adventurer who was born in India but is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He has visited every country in the world, as well as both the north and south poles.
• Gökhan Erdem, a Turkish businessman, photographer and space enthusiast who "dreams of one day traveling to the International Space Station and possibly even beyond," Blue Origin wrote.
• Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico who has taken a microgravity-inducing airplane flight and reported on a number of space missions, including NASA's Artemis 1 moon flight. She's also a Solar System Ambassador for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
• Lionel Pitchford, an Englishman who has long lived in Spain and traveled the world. After losing his sister and her family in a 1992 plane crash in Nepal, he founded a nonprofit in the nation devoted to helping disadvantaged children. Pitchford has also run an orphanage in Kathmandu for the last 30 years.
• James (J.D.) Russell, an entrepreneur who founded the venture capital firm Alpha Funds. He also established the Victoria Russell Foundation, a nonprofit that honors the memory of his deceased daughter by "supporting children's education and assisting the families of first responders," Blue Origin wrote. Unlike the other NS-34 passengers, Russell is not a spaceflight rookie; he flew on the NS-28 mission in November 2024.
• Justin Sun, who is worth about $8.5 billion, according to Forbes. In addition to his Tron work, Sun is the ambassador and former Permanent Representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organization and serves as an advisor to the HTX crypto exchange. "A protege of Alibaba's Jack Ma, Sun was featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine in April 2025, where he was recognized as one of the most dynamic and outspoken figures in crypto and earning the moniker 'Crypto's Billionaire Barker' for his bold approach to innovation, advocacy and industry leadership," Blue Origin wrote. Sun's winning $28 million bid for the New Shepard seat in 2021 was donated to Club for the Future, Blue Origin's education nonprofit.

NS-34 will be the 14th crewed New Shepard flight to date, and the fifth such mission of 2025. The most recent, NS-33, lifted off on June 29.

New Shepard missions fly from Blue Origin's launch site in West Texas, near the town of Van Horn. Each one lasts 10 to 12 minutes from launch to the parachute-aided touchdown of the New Shepard crew capsule. (New Shepard's rocket also comes back down to Earth for a safe landing and eventual reuse.)

New Shepard is an autonomous vehicle, so the passengers can sit back and simply enjoy the flight. That experience includes a few minutes of weightlessness and great views of Earth against the blackness of space, from an altitude of more than 62 miles (100 kilometers).

Welcome home! Four astronauts have returned to Earth following more than two weeks living aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Axiom Space's fourth crewed mission to the ISS, known as Ax-4, concluded early this morning, with the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule "Grace" splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California at 5:32 a.m. EDT (0932 GMT; locally, 2:32 a.m. PDT). Grace undocked from the ISS yesterday (July 14) at 7:15 a.m. EDT (1115 GMT), beginning the 22-hour final leg of the crew's journey in space.

On the mission, Ax-4 commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut and currently Axiom's director of human spaceflight, extended her record for cumulative days spent by an American in space to 695. Whitson was joined by a trio of first-time astronauts from three different countries, none of which had ever sent a citizen to the ISS before.

Shubhanshu "Shux" Shukla, who served as Ax-4's pilot, hails from India. He is a pilot in the Indian Air Force and one of four astronauts selected for the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) first human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan, expected sometime in 2027.

Ax-4 mission specialist Sławosz "Suave" Uznański-Wiśniewski, from Poland, is a member of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) astronaut reserve program, and Tibor Kapu, a mission specialist from Hungary, is a member of HUNOR, Hungary's orbital astronaut program.

Ax-4 launched on June 26 from storied Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew aboard Grace lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the space station a day later. Their mission was expected to last about two weeks but was extended by four days to achieve favorable orbital phasing during their return.

While aboard the ISS, the Ax-4 crew carried out a record number of science investigations and public outreach events. With contributions from a total of 31 different countries, Ax-4 astronauts completed more than 60 experiments and technology demonstrations  — more than any previous Axiom mission.

Ax-4's splashdown this morning followed about 22.5 hours on orbit after their departure from the ISS. After nearly a full day flying their return trajectory, the crew's final minutes before splashdown passed relatively quickly.

Grace began its atmospheric descent at approximately 5:18 a.m. EDT (0918 GMT; locally, 2:18 am PT). Having survived the char of the most unforgiving layers of Earth's upper atmosphere, the spacecraft's drogue parachutes deployed to stabilize its plummet. Shortly thereafter, the Dragon's four main chutes unfolded to slow the capsule's descent even further.

The Ax-4 spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, where it was met by the SpaceX Dragon recovery vessel "Shannon." Once safely hoisted aboard "Shannon," the Ax-4 crew will disembark Grace to begin acclimating to Earth's gravity once again.

This is only SpaceX's second West Coast crew recovery, after the Crew-9 mission to the ISS came down this past March. SpaceX has shifted permanently Pacific Ocean spacecraft recoveries to avoid possible instances of pieces of Dragon's trunk surviving atmospheric reentry and crashing back to Earth, which were reported during some Atlantic Ocean and Gulf returns.

The empty space station docking port left behind after Ax-4's undocking won't remain so for long. The next astronauts launching to the ISS are slated for liftoff no earlier than July 31. That mission, SpaceX's Crew-11, will launch a crew rotation for NASA that's expected to last between six and eight months.

The four astronauts of Axiom Space's latest private mission have concluded their stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Ax-4's SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, named Grace, undocked from the ISS this morning (July 14), carrying the quartet on the last leg of the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) mission.

Undocking occurred at 7:15 a.m. EDT (1115 GMT) today. Grace safely maneuvered away from the orbital laboratory, which was the Ax-4's crew's home for the past 2.5 weeks — about half a week longer than originally expected. Grace performed a series of deorbit burns, and is on a trajectory to return to Earth around 5:30 a.m. EDT (0930 GMT), Tuesday (July 15).

Ax-4's commander is former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now Axiom's director of human spaceflight. "Space Station, Grace," Whitson said over the communication system as the Crew Dragon crossed out of the ISS's safety "keep-out sphere," "The Ax-4 crew wants to thank you very much for your support. You guys are amazing."

Her crewmates are pilot Shubhanshu "Shux" Shukla and mission specialists Sławosz "Suave" Uznański-Wiśniewski and Tibor Kapu. This was the first spaceflight for each of those three. But Ax-4 is Whitson's fifth mission to orbit and raises her current record for most cumulative days in space by an American to 695.

Grace docked to the ISS with the Ax-4 crew aboard on June 26. Their mission, Axiom's fourth to the space station, is an extension of the Houston-based company's previous crewed flights, with research and science investigations aimed at furthering understandings of the microgravity environment.

The Ax-4 crew took on more than 60 experiments and technology demonstrations with contributions from 31 different nations, as well as a number of public outreach events, breaking a record for Axiom as it continues to hone its orbital operations.

Not only was this the first spaceflight for Shux, Suave and Kapu, but they were the first citizens of their respective countries to launch on a mission to the ISS. Shux is a pilot in the Indian Air Force and is one of four astronauts selected for the Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) upcoming first human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan. Suave is a Polish astronaut from the European Space Agency, and Tibor Kapu is a member of HUNOR, Hungary's orbital astronaut program.

The Ax-4 mission launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on June 26 from storied Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. The crew spent a little more than a full day catching up to the ISS, and were scheduled to remain aboard the space station for about two weeks. Their mission lasted about four days longer than expected.

Departure procedures began this morning around 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT), with the Ax-4 crew entering Grace and closing the hatch at 5:07 a.m. EDT (0907 GMT). Now, crew and Dragon are on a 22.5-hour trajectory on course to splash down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, early Tuesday.

This will only be SpaceX's second West Coast crew recovery. The first was that of the Crew-9 ISS mission in March. SpaceX has shifted permanently to Pacific Ocean rather than Atlantic or Gulf recoveries, after instances of debris from Dragon's trunk surviving atmospheric reentry and crashing back to Earth.

The new reentry path minimizes the chances that such debris could cause damage or injury, SpaceX representatives have said.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the four Ax-4 astronauts is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday around 7:05 a.m. EDT (1105 GMT).

You'll be able to watch that milestone live via NASA, SpaceX and Axiom Space, the Houston company that organized the Ax-4 mission. Space.com will carry NASA's feed, if the agency makes it available.

NASA will begin its stream at 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT) to cover the closing of the hatches between the ISS and the Crew Dragon, which is expected around 4:55 a.m. EDT (0855 GMT).

The agency will pick up its coverage at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 GMT) for undocking. SpaceX and Axiom will begin their streams at this time, according to NASA.

NASA did not provide an estimated time for Ax-4's splashdown back on Earth, which will occur in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. The agency did say, however, that Axiom will stream the mission's reentry and return on the company's website.

Ax-4 is commanded by Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who has spent more total time in space than any other American (nearly 700 days!) and now serves as Axiom's director of human spaceflight.

Her crewmates are mission pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India; Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański, who's a European Space Agency astronaut; and mission specialist Tibor Kapu of Hungary. These three are the first people from their respective countries ever to visit the ISS.

Ax-4 launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on June 25 and arrived at the ISS a day later.

The four private astronauts have performed more than 60 scientific experiments and outreach activities during their time in orbit, which was expected to be two weeks. That was always a rough estimate, however: Dragon departure dates from the ISS are flexible, dependent on weather conditions near the splashdown site.

As its name suggests, Ax-4 is the fourth crewed ISS mission that Axiom has operated. The other three launched in April 2022, May 2023 and January 2024. All have used SpaceX hardware.

Houston-based company Axiom Space's fourth crewed mission to space is nearing its end, and its four astronauts are filling every last minute with science, amazing views of Earth and pierogis.

The crew of Axiom-4 (Ax-4) have been aboard the International Space Station (ISS) since their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked there on June 26. Their days have been filled with more than 60 research experiments and outreach events, breaking an Axiom mission record for on-orbit activities.

Lucie Low, Axiom's chief scientist, spoke with the Ax-4 crew during a mission science briefing on July 5. The four astronauts discussed some of the experiments they have been working on during their time aboard the orbital laboratory.

Ax-4 is commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who's currently Axiom's director of human spaceflight. She also holds the record for most cumulative days in space by an American, which is inching closer to 700 with each additional day she remains aboard the ISS. Before this mission, her record stood at 675. Whitson has been a helpful voice of experience as her crew navigates life in microgravity, according to Axiom.

Whitson explained to Low that the research the Ax-4 astronauts are conducting on orbit is not only helping the science community, but also the growing number of international partnerships in space. Whitson's crew includes mission pilot Shubhanshu "Shux" Shukla from India and mission specialists Sławosz "Suave" Uznański, a Polish astronaut from the European Space Agency, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary. The experiments they're conducting represent contributions from a total of 31 countries.

"Axiom-4 is a government-sponsored research mission for a global space community," Whitson said.

"I am so proud that ISRO [the Indian Space Research Organization] has been able to collaborate with national institutions all over the country," Shux told Low. "They came up with some fantastic research."

Axiom has published daily updates during the mission, describing experiment progress and highlighting outreach events that different Ax-4 crew members have taken part in, including a microalgae investigation Shux is working on to measure the affects of microgravity on the organism's biology and its potential use as an in-space resource.

Kapu boasted about Hungary's skill in dosimetry research. He has been taking part in a technology demonstration using the Rad Nano Dosimeter, a miniature device designed to be continuously worn to monitor a body's radiation exposure, carbon dioxide levels and the effects of magnetic fields. He is also cultivating radishes and peppers aboard the ISS, which he said are growing "extremely fast."

Suave told Low one of the experiments that has excited him the most is a brainwave interface device that allows someone to control a machine with only their brain — the first time such a demonstration has been conducted in space. Suave also took time alongside Whitson for another video downlink on July 6, Ax-4's flight day 12.

The pair spoke with Sonya Gavankar McKay, Axiom's director of digital strategy, from the space station's Columbus module. McKay virtually joined Whitson and Suave for a mission update and to share a quick meal.

Holding a food packet identical to one used by the Ax-4 crew in space, McKay speared her fork through a pierogi as she asked Suave how to say, "enjoy your meal," in Polish ("ciesz się posiłkiem," according to Google Translate).

Suave and Whitson, also with pierogis on their forks, let them float weightlessly in front of the camera for close-ups. "Pierogi is a very Polish dish," Suave explained, describing the cuisine as a quintessential comfort food.

He was also asked about some of his photography and the views he has captured of Earth from space. "I try to capture every moment," Suave said, adding that any free time he has, he spends by the ISS' giant cupola windows, staring back down at the planet below.

Potentially nearing the end of their scheduled two weeks in space, McKay asked Whitson how the Ax-4 had adjusted to the realities of weightlessness. Despite the crew's packed schedule, Whitson says they have managed to get the hang of things.

"What's amazing is how much the guys have really gotten their space legs," she said. "They're really getting very efficient and working much more efficiently, and they're way less stressed."

Following their SpaceX Falcon 9 launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on June 25, Ax-4 is expected to remain on orbit for about two weeks. Their earliest return would be July 10, but Axiom, SpaceX and NASA have yet to confirm a date.

The crew's departure from the ISS is largely dependent on weather at their spacecraft's splashdown site in the Pacific Ocean, with some wiggle room built in to the visiting crew's stay aboard the space station in the event of a delay. The departures of both the Ax-1 and Ax-3 missions were held up nearly a week due to unfavorable weather at their splashdown zones.

On June 18, SpaceX was testing the upper stage of its Starship vehicle on a test stand at its Starbase site near Boca Chica Beach in Texas when Starship exploded in a dramatic fireball. SpaceX wrote on social media that there were no hazards to the surrounding communities following the explosion.

But Sheinbaum contests that claim. In a press conference held on Wednesday (June 25), the Mexican president said there is a "general review underway of the international laws that are being violated" due to the fact that "there is contamination" stemming from Starship's explosion, according to Yucatan Magazine. The Guardian reports that Sheinbaum added that her government is looking to file "the necessary lawsuits" over the alleged contamination.

SpaceX's Starbase testing and manufacturing facility is located near Boca Chica Beach. The area is at the very southeastern tip of Texas along the Rio Grande river, which divides the United States and Mexico. The Mexican city of Heroica Matamoros sits just across the border from Boca Chica and nearby Brownsville, Texas.

This isn't the first time SpaceX has been threatened with environmental lawsuits, not to mention other legal cases. A coalition of environmental groups sued the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2023, claiming the agency did not conduct proper analyses of the damage Starship could cause to the surrounding areas, which are home to protected species of birds.

In 2024, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) reported that SpaceX had violated the Clean Water Act after releasing pollutants into nearby body of waters, according to CNBC. SpaceX refuted the claims, calling the reporting "factually inaccurate."

Starship launches — and explosions — have left significant amounts of debris throughout Boca Chica Beach and surrounding areas in the past. When Starship launched on its debut flight on April 20, 2023, the rocket's 33 first-stage Raptor engines sent chunks of cement and other debris flying for miles.

Local residents described the launch as "terrifying" and compared it to an earthquake. Pieces of debris rained down in every direction, even crushing a nearby car.

That flight ended in an equally dramatic fashion when SpaceX triggered its onboard flight termination system, causing the vehicle to explode some three minutes after liftoff. Fragments of the Starship vehicle were found along shores surrounding the area in the days following the flight.

Starship's upper stage has exploded and/or crashed into the sea on eight of its nine of its test flights to date (on two launches, the company managed to return the vehicle's Super Heavy booster to Starbase, where it was caught by the 'chopstick' arms on its launch tower).

On its fifth flight in November 2023, Starship managed to make a pinpoint splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the Transporter-14 rideshare mission June 23, sending 70 payloads from different customers into orbit. The satellites included cubesats and other spacecraft bound for low-Earth orbit, as well as two reentry capsule designed for recovery back on Earth.

The first came from Varda Space — the company's fourth "Winnebago" series spacecraft designed to test first-of-its-kind on-orbit pharmaceutical manufacturing. Its mission is still underway. The second, Tranporter-14's largest payload and the last to be released, was European spacecraft manufacturer The Exploration Company's "Mission Possible" Nyx capsule, carrying remains contributed by loved ones through Celestis Memorial Spaceflights.

Celestis offers various tiers of space memorial services that range all the way to launching remains into deep space. Their "Earth Rise" package includes launching DNA of customers' deceased loved ones (or even pets) into space and returning them to Earth. Unfortunately, their return this time around did not go as smoothly as planned.

For their 25th launch, dubbed "The Perseverance Flight", Celestis paired with The Exploration Company's Mission Possible to carry its memorial payload to space and back aboard the Nyx capsule. At least that was the plan.

Nyx performed nominally throughout its entire mission, all the way up until just minutes before its expected Pacific Ocean splashdown. "The capsule was launched successfully, powered the payloads nominally in-orbit, stabilized itself after separation with the launcher, re-entered and re-established communication after black out," the company wrote in an online update.

For any spacecraft reentering through Earth's atmosphere, a period of communication blackout occurs as intense friction with surrounding air forms a layer of superheated plasma around a vessel's hull. Following the most intense stages of falling back from orbit, communications are typically reestablished during a ship's last stretch to landing. Nyx's return, up to that point, was no different — until it was.

The Exploration Company's capsule encountered an anomaly shortly after reestablishing communications. "[Nyx] encountered an issue afterwards, based on our current best knowledge, and we lost communication a few minutes before splash down. We are still investigating the root causes and will share more information soon," the company said in their update.

Nyx's parachute failed to deploy, according to a later statement form Celestis. "The parachute system failed, resulting in the Nyx capsule impacting the Pacific Ocean and dispersing its contents at sea," they said. In short, the capsule and its contents plummeted into the drink.

"Though we currently believe that we cannot return the flight capsules, we hope families will find some peace in knowing their loved ones were part of a historic journey, launched into space, orbited Earth, and are now resting in the vastness of the Pacific, akin to a traditional and honored sea scattering," Celestis said.

The Exploration Company echoed that sentiment. "We apologize to all our clients who entrusted us with their payloads," their update reads.

Mission Possible was The Exploration Company's second foray into space, and the first for its Nyx capsule, which they are designing with the intent of transporting crew and cargo to and from LEO and beyond. And they aren't letting the snag at the end of the endeavor slow them down.

"We have been pushing boundaries in record time and cost. This partial success reflects both ambition and the inherent risks of innovation. Leveraging the technical milestones achieved yesterday and the lessons we will extract from our ongoing investigation, we will then prepare to re-fly as soon as possible," the company said.

Houston-based Axiom Space launched its fourth crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) early Wednesday (June 25), lifting off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KCS), in Florida. The mission lifted off from KSC's Launch Complex-39A at 2:31 a.m. EDT (0631 GMT).

After a particularly long orbital chase — 28 hours between launch and rendezvous — the crew's Dragon spacecraft docked with the space station Thursday morning, at 6:31 a.m. (1031 GMT).

The Ax-4 astronauts rode a brand-new SpaceX crew Dragon to orbit. As such, naming rights for the spacecraft fell to the crew, who revealed their choice shortly after launch. Their pick: Grace.

Aboard Crew Dragon Grace is former NASA astronaut and Axiom's director of human spaceflight Peggy Whitson. Whitson holds the record for cumulative days spent in space by an American. That number began climbing again following her launch Wednesday, and is counting upward from 675. Her record will reach just shy of 700 days by the time the two-week Ax-4 mission returns to Earth.

Whitson is commander for Ax-4, and is joined by a trio of international, government-sponsored crew members: Shubhanshu Shukla, from India, serving as mission pilot, Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański of the European Space Agency, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, also a mission specialist. The latter three are the first from their nations to journey on a mission to the ISS.

Crew Dragon Grace docked with the zenith (space-facing) port on the station's Harmony module. Hatches between spacecraft and ISS were opened at 8:14 a.m. EDT (1214 GMT), with the station's current crew awaiting the ingress of the Ax-4 astronauts for a short welcome ceremony.

"With your arrival right now, there are 11 astronauts from six countries, and all of us are here in order to advance human space exploration and scientific research, symbolizing international cooperation. So from this moment, you are also a part of Expedition 73," said Exp. 73 commander JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi during opening remarks. "Welcome aboard," he added, before handing off the microphone to his new crewmates as they received their astronaut wings.

"We're looking forward to getting a lot of work done with you guys, and I really appreciate all the support you provided for to us in advance of actually even getting here," Whitson said in response.

"I'm very, very confident that the next 14 days are going to be amazing, advancing science and research and working together," said Shukla, mentioning that the view so far had surpassed his expectations.

"This is an ultimate scientific laboratory where we come to do science, to test the technologies of our countries, to do technology demonstrations and science outreach that I can't wait to do for the for the next two weeks, and we will all try to do our best representing our countries," Uznański said as he was handed the microphone.

Finally, as his wings were clipped to his jumpsuit, "I really feel that this is the best crew that you could join. It really feels great to be part of Expedition 73," said Kapu. "I'm 100% sure that this is going to be awesome."

The Ax-4 astronauts will spend about 14 days aboard the orbiting lab, completing a record number of science investigations and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach events. In total, they have over 60 experiments to undertake — more than any previous Axiom mission to date.

The crew's return date is largely dependent on weather at Dragon's splashdown zone in the Pacific Ocean. It will be SpaceX's second West Coast crew recovery, following a shift from Atlantic Ocean or Gulf recoveries due to the potential for spacecraft debris surviving atmospheric reentry and crashing back to Earth.

That flight — known as Ax-4, because it's the fourth crewed trip to the ISS by Houston company Axiom Space — lifted off on Wednesday morning (June 11) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast.

Ax-4 is carrying four people from four different nations to the orbiting lab, so the mission's larder is quite diverse.

For example, Ax-4 pilot Shubhanshu Shukla is bringing up some delicacies from his native India, including a variety of sweets.

During a press conference on June 3, Shukla said he's carrying mango nectar to the orbiting lab, as well as moong dal halwa and carrot halwa. (Halwa is a sweet dish made by roasting lentils, wheat or flour in ghee, then boiling that mixture in sugary milk.)

"Some of them are my favorites, and I am so happy to be able to carry them, share it with my colleagues and also the astronauts who are on the station right now," Shukla said.

Ax-4 mission specialist Tibor Kapu of Hungary said he has packed some "space chocolate," which was provided by Stuhmer, a company from his native land.

"They modified one of their traditional models of chocolate, basically to comply with NASA rules," Kapu said during the press conference. "So we are extremely happy to fly that, because for us it, it brings tradition and innovation together."

Also going up are several spicy, paprika-like Hungarian pastes, he added.

"I'm extremely happy about those as well, because we tend to eat less salty foods on the International Space Station, because it actually contributes to bone loss," Kapu said.

"So, because of that, astronauts tend to like, you know, spicy, and those [pastes] are really spicy," he added. "We had also the chance to try this out in quarantine. And let me just tell you, we have so many coworkers here who found these excellent, and they just love it."

Fellow mission specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, put together an entire menu for Ax-4. Polish chef and restaurateur Mateusz Gessler helped in this endeavor, as did Lyofood, a family-run Polish company with freeze-drying expertise.

That menu features pierogi, the famous Polish stuffed dumplings, as well as "tomato soup with noodles, Polish 'leczo' stew with buckwheat, and apple crumble for dessert," ESA officials said in a statement.

"I wanted a truly Polish menu that I could share with my fellow astronauts," Uznański-Wiśniewski said in the same statement. "Food brings psychological comfort, and I instantly thought it would be worth taking some Polish delicacies into orbit."

The fourth Ax-4 crewmember is commander Peggy Whitson, a record-setting former NASA astronaut who currently serves as Axiom's director of human spaceflight. She didn't discuss her food choices during the June 3 press conference (though she did seem enthusiastic about Kapu's spicy Hungarian pastes).

Ax-4 is historic; it will mark the first time that anyone from India, Hungary or Poland has lived on board the ISS. The mission is flying to the orbiting lab in a brand-new SpaceX Dragon and will spend about two weeks up there, during which time the crew will conduct about 60 different scientific experiments.

Axiom's fourth astronaut mission (Ax-4) to the International Space Station (ISS) has a new launch date. The crew of four will liftoff aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than June 25, NASA announced Monday evening (June 23).

Liftoff is scheduled for 2:31 a.m. EDT (0631 GMT) from Launch Complex-39A, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida.. The launch had been indefinitely delayed last week due to a leak detected aboard the ISS. No update was given about that leak in NASA's announcement of the new launch date.

The leak in the station's Zvezda module isn't new, but a change in the pressure data that measures the leak's severity prompted NASA and Axiom to postpone the Ax-4 launch until safety could be assured.

The Ax-4 crew consists of former NASA astronaut and Axiom's director of human spaceflight Peggy Whitson. Whitson will serve as mission commander to Shubhanshu Shukla of India, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland, and Tibor Kapu, from Hungary. All three will be the first astronauts from their respecitve nations to launch on a mission to the ISS.

The mission is expected to last two weeks. While aboard the orbiting lab, the Ax-4 crew will conduct more science experiments and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach events than any previous Axiom mission — more than 60 in total.

If all stays on schedule with Wednesday's early morning launch, the crew's Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the ISS at approximately 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) Thursday, June 26. A livestream of the launch and rendezvous will be lived stream on Space.com.

This was the ninth test flight for the rocket, and the third catastrophic failure in a row, just this year.

Is this what we should expect from the very ship some are counting on to take humans further than we’ve ever been in the solar system? Or does this failure point to deeper concerns within the broader program?

A decade of development

The Starship program from Elon Musk’s space technology company, SpaceX, has been in development for more than a decade now and has undergone many iterations in its overall design and goals.

The Starship concept is based upon the SpaceX Raptor engines to be used in a multistage system. In a multistage rocket system, there are often two or three separate blocks with their own engine and fuel reserves. These are particularly important for leaving Earth’s orbit and travelling to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

With Starship, the key factor is the ability to land and reuse vast amounts of the rocket stages again and again. The company’s Falcon 9 vehicles, which used this model, were fantastically successful.

Initial tests of Starship began in 2018 with two low-altitude flights showing early success. Subsequent flights have faced numerous challenges with now four complete failures, two partial failures and three successes overall.

Just two days ago, during the latest failed attempt, I watched alongside more than 200 other space industry experts at the Australian Space Summit in Sydney. Broadcast live on a giant screen, the launch generated an excited buzz – which soon turned to reserved murmurs.

Of course, designing and launching rockets is hard, and failures are to be expected. However, a third catastrophic failure within six months demands a pause for reflection.

On this particular test flight, as Starship positioned itself for atmospheric reentry, one of its 13 engines failed to ignite. Shortly after, a booster appeared to explode, leading to a complete loss of control. The rocket ultimately broke apart over the Indian Ocean, which tonnes of debris will now call home.

Polluting Earth in pursuit of space

We don’t know the exact financial cost of each test flight. But Musk has previously said it is about US$50–100 million.

The exact environmental cost of the Starship program – and its repeated failures – is even harder to quantify.

For example, a failed test flight in 2023 left the town of Port Isabel, Texas, which is located beside the launch site, shaking and covered in a thick cloud of dirt. Debris from the exploded rocket smashed cars. Residents told the New York Times they were terrified. They also had to clean up the mess from the flight.

Then, in September 2024, SpaceX was fined by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for 14 separate incidents since 2022 where the launch facilities discharged polluted water into Texas waterways. Musk denied these claims.

That same month, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed a fine of US$633,009 in civil penalties should be issued to SpaceX. This was on the grounds of using an unapproved launch control room and other violations during 2023. Musk denied these claims too and threatened to countersue the FAA for “regulatory overreach”.

It’s unclear if this suit was ever filed.

Two other failed launches in January and March this year also rained rocket debris over the Caribbean, and disrupted hundreds of commercial flights, including 80 which needed to be diverted and more than 400 requiring delayed takeoff to ensure they were entering safe air space.

Success of different space programs

Until last year, the FAA allowed SpaceX to try up to five Starship launches a year. This month, the figure was increased to 25.

A lot can go wrong during a launch of a vehicle to space. And there is a long way to go until we can properly judge whether Starship successfully meets its mission goals.

We can, however, look at past programs to understand typical success rates seen across different rocketry programs.

The Saturn V rocket, the workhorse of the Apollo era, had a total of 13 launches, with only one partial failure. It underwent three full ground tests before flight.

SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rocket, has had more than 478 successful launches, only two in flight failures, one partial failure and one pre-flight destruction.

The Antares rocket, by Orbital Sciences Corporation (later Orbital ATK and Northrop Grumman) launched a total of 18 times, with one failure.

The Soyuz rocket, originally a Soviet expendable carrier rocket designed in the 1960s, launched a total of 32 times, with two failures.

No sign of caution

Of course, we can’t fairly compare all other rockets with the Starship. Its goals are certainly novel as a reusable heavy-class rocket.

But this latest failure does raise some questions. Will the Starship program ever see success – and if so when? And what are the limits of our tolerance as a society to the pollution of Earth in the pursuit of the goal to space?

For a rocketry program that’s moving so fast, developing novel and complex technology, and experiencing several repeated failures, many people might expect caution from now on. Musk, however, has other plans.

Shortly after the most recent Starship failure, he announced on X (formerly Twitter), that the next test flights would occur at a faster pace: one every three to four weeks.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Houston-based company has sent the DNA and other remains of loved ones, pets and celebrities into outer space on a series of missions using a variety of rockets, including United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur.

Such vehicles have carried the cremated remains and/or DNA samples of a number of "Star Trek" legends, including Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry and James "Scotty" Doohan. Celestis has also helped fly "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull and the symbolic remains of four former U.S. presidents: George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, aboard last year's deep-space "Enterprise Flight."

Now, Celestis has announced that it has entered into a new launch services collaboration with European spacecraft manufacturer The Exploration Company (TEC).

TEC will host a special Celestis Memorial Spaceflight payload on its upcoming "Mission Possible" flight, which is slated to blast off atop a Falcon 9 rocket on SpaceX's Transporter 14 rideshare mission on Monday (June 23) at 5:18 p.m. EDT (2118 GMT) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Perseverance Flight will carry over 150 flight capsules containing cremated remains and DNA samples from customers around the globe.

It will be TEC’s second demonstrator prior to the inaugural mission of its Nyx Earth orbital launch vehicle, which is scheduled to lift off and dock with the International Space Station sometime in 2028. Mission Possible will mark the first time that a TEC spacecraft hauls customer payloads to orbit.

According to Celestis, Perseverance will reach low Earth orbit and complete two or three circuits of our planet before reentering the atmosphere. The memorial capsules will then splash down in the Pacific Ocean, to be recovered and returned to clients as cherished keepsakes. This will be Celestis' 12th such "Earth Rise" flight, and its 25th space mission overall.

"Celestis is pleased to offer a new type of Earth Rise mission, thanks to The Exploration Company," Charles Chafer, the company's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. "Our participants' capsules will orbit the Earth and return via the Mission Possible capsule, creating a spectacular liftoff and recovery experience."

Celestis will also be creating history, making three-year-old Matteo Barth the youngest German (and youngest European overall) to send his DNA into space. Inside TEC's Mission Possible capsule, the child will symbolically join Dieter Barth, his late grandfather, when they’re launched, in honor of the older man's lifelong interest in space and exploration.

Editor's note: This article was updated on June 22 at 5:10 p.m. EDT to note the change of launch dates to Monday, June 23, 2025.

Houston-based Axiom Space was set to launch its fourth astronaut mission (Ax-4) with SpaceX last week, but the mission is being postponed again due to an air leak detected in Russia's Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS). The mission was originally slated for June 11, and has been pushed down the calendar three times now, due to the issues aboard the ISS.

The leak in Zvezda isn't new, but a recent pressure change within the module is prompting NASA and Axiom to hold off on the Ax-4 launch until they are sure it poses no danger to the incoming crew. "Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed," NASA wrote in a June 14 update. Now, the Ax-4 mission has been delayed indefinitely, while NASA continues evaluating the situation up in low-Earth orbit.

"Because of the space station's interconnected and interdependent systems, NASA wants to ensure the station is ready for additional crew members, and the agency is taking the time necessary to review data," NASA said in an update yesterday (June 19).

"NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX appreciate the historic nature of this mission for the nations of India, Poland, and Hungary, as well as the world," NASA added in the post.

Ax-4 is commanded by Axiom's director of human spaceflight and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. Joining her are Shubhanshu Shukla of India, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland, and Tibor Kapu, from Hungary. The three will be the first astronauts from each of their nations to launch on a mission to the ISS.

The quartet will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, aboard a brand-new Crew Dragon spacecraft. When the new launch date is announced, the mission will liftoff from Launch Complex-39A, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida.

Their mission is scheduled to last about two weeks, during which the Ax-4 crew will carry out more than 60 research experiments and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach events  — a record number of science for an Axiom mission.

Each of Axiom's crewed missions grow the company's experience in orbit, and their understanding of how best to operate in microgravity. In the future, Axiom plans to launch its own module to the ISS, which will eventually grow in its components and undock from the orbital lab to become its own independent space station.

UPDATE for 11 a.m. ET: Blue Origin has successfully launched 6 passengers to space an back on NS-33. See our full wrap story on the launch, photos and video.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin plans to launch six people to suborbital space Sunday, after a round of weather delays last weekend.

The mission — known as NS-33, because it will be the 33rd overall flight of the company's New Shepard vehicle — was originally scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas site on Saturday (June 21) morning. But Mother Nature didn't cooperate; high winds forced a scrub. The launch was then targeted for Sunday at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT; 7:30 a.m. local Texas time). But the weather didn't cooperate again.

Now, Blue Origin has set a new liftoff target for Sunday, June 29, at 10:38 a.m. EDT (1438 GMT; 9:38 a.m. local Texas time).

New Shepard is an autonomous, fully reusable vehicle that consists of a first-stage booster and a crew capsule. Its flights last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown; passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space.

The people going up on the NS-33 mission are Allie and Carl Kuehner, a husband and wife who are both into conservation and exploration; philanthropist and beekeeper Leland Larson; entrepreneur Freddie Rescigno, Jr.; lawyer and author Owolabi Salis; and retired attorney Jim Sitkin.

You can learn more about each of them in our NS-33 crew reveal story.

NS-33 will be Blue Origin's 13th human spaceflight mission overall and its fourth of 2025 so far. (Most of the company's flights have been uncrewed research missions.)

The company first launched people to the final frontier on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Bezos and his brother Mark went up on that landmark New Shepard flight, along with aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:00 a.m. EDT on June 28 with the new launch date announced by Blue Origin.

NS-33 will be Blue Origin's 13th crewed launch to date, and the fifth New Shepard launch of 2025. The mission will carry six passengers to the edge of space, where they will experience several minutes of weightlessness before their capsule parachutes back down to terra firma.

The crew includes Allie and Carl Kuehner, Leland Larson, Freddie Rescigno, Jr., Owolabi Salis, and James Sitkin. Here's a bit of background on each of them.

The NS-33 mission is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin's Launch Site One in West Texas, on Saturday during a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT). A livestream of the launch will be available on Space.com beginning 30 minutes before liftoff, as well as on Blue Origin's website.

The Texas-based company, which successfully operated its Blue Ghost lander on the lunar surface earlier this year, announced today (June 18) that it's working on a new moon project: a "lunar imaging service" called Ocula.

"Powered by a constellation of Elytra vehicles in lunar orbit, and eventually Mars orbit, Ocula will provide critical data that informs future human and robotic missions and supports national security with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in an emailed statement. "This service will fill a void for our nation with advanced lunar imaging capabilities and a sustainable commercial business model."

Firefly is developing its Elytra vehicle for a variety of uses in Earth orbit and deep space, including the region around the moon. The Ocula project will equip Elytra probes with high-resolution telescopes developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in the California Bay Area.

These scopes will be able to resolve features as small as 8 inches (20 centimeters) on the lunar surface from an altitude of 31 miles (50 kilometers), according to Firefly.

"With ultraviolet and visible spectrum capabilities, the telescopes are designed to support situational awareness of other objects in cislunar space, enable fine-grained lunar surface details and identify concentrations of ilmenite, which indicates the presence of helium-3," Firefly representatives wrote in the emailed statement. (Helium-3, a potential fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors, is thought to be more abundant on the moon than it is on Earth.)

Ocula data could also help researchers and planners select landing sites for future robotic or crewed missions, the company added. Firefly aims to license the data to both government and commercial customers.

If all goes according to plan, Ocula will kick off next year, on the second Blue Ghost lunar landing mission. An Elytra with an LLNL scope will serve as the transfer vehicle for that mission, which will put Blue Ghost down on the moon's far side (and also deliver a European Space Agency probe to lunar orbit).

Elytra will serve as a communications relay for Blue Ghost and its payloads for the duration of the lander's roughly two-week-long surface mission. After those duties are done, Elytra will begin its Ocula work, imaging the lunar surface in detail for more than five years.

Another scope-equipped Elytra will launch in 2028, on the third Blue Ghost mission. And other spacecraft will follow in the ensuing years, if all goes to plan.

"Firefly will expand its constellation of Elytra vehicles in lunar orbit to further enhance the Ocula service and enable faster revisit times for situational awareness, resource detection and mission planning," Firefly wrote in the statement. "Longer term, the service can also be extended to Mars and other planetary bodies."

That mission, Ax-4, is Axiom's fourth crewed flight to the International Space Station (ISS). It was slated to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on June 11, but a liquid oxygen leak discovered in the booster delayed things by a day. That was followed by the detection of another leak, but this time at Ax-4's orbital destination.

Cosmonauts aboard the ISS recently spotted a "new pressure signature" in Zvezda, the Russian service module at the aftmost end of the space station. Zvezda has been leaky for a while, but this change in pressure prompted another delay in the Ax-4 launch out of an abundance of caution. That delay, which NASA and Axiom announced on June 12, was indefinite; no new target date was identified.

Zvezda first sprang a leak in 2019, and the module has been managed periodically with pressure checks and maintained with whatever is the space equivalent of Flex Tape. It seemed the appropriate repairs had been effectuated, and NASA's worry about the potential risk to incoming crew has subsided enough for the agency and Axiom to announce a new tentative launch date for June 19.

"Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed," NASA wrote in a June 14 update.

However, the space agency didn't taking the initial results as definitive.

"Teams are also considering the stable pressure could be the result of a small amount of air flowing into the transfer tunnel across the hatch seal from the main part of space station," officials wrote in the update. "By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal between the space station and the back of Zvezda."

Now, NASA is leaning into its uncertainty, and pushed the Ax-4 launch further, to June 22. "The change in a targeted launch date provides NASA time to continue evaluating space station operations after recent repair work in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module," NASA Space Operations said on social media late Wednesday (June 17).

The fixes to the leaky Falcon 9 first stage, on the other hand, are more definitive. That booster, designated B1094, is one of the newer ones in SpaceX's fleet, with only one previous launch under its belt. The rocket stage supported the Starlink 12-10 mission at the end of April, and apparently showed signs of a leak during that flight as well.

SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability, Bill Gerstenmaier, told reporters during a June 9 press conference that technicians "discovered that we had not fully repaired the booster during refurbishment — or we didn't, actually, didn't find the leak and didn't get it corrected."

But the repairs are complete now. SpaceX announced on June 12 that it has completed a new "wet dress rehearsal," or fueling test, with the rocket, and the launch vehicle is ready for the Ax-4 liftoff.

Mission operators and crew are working toward an early morning June 22 liftoff. Launch is scheduled for 3:42 a.m. EDT (0742 GMT), from Launch Complex-39A, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Aboard a brand-new SpaceX Crew Dragon atop the Falcon 9, Axiom's director of human spaceflight and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will serve as mission commander for Ax-4. The other three crew members are Shubhanshu Shukla of India, serving as mission pilot, and Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Tibor Kapu, from Poland and Hungary, respectfully, both serving as mission specialists.

It will be the first time astronauts from India, Poland or Hungary have ever visited the ISS, and their mission will bring more research experiments to the ISS than any previous Axiom flight, totaling more than 60 science investigations and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach events.

Editor's note: This story was updated June 18 to reflect the further delay of the Ax-4 launch from June 19 to June 22.

That six-passenger suborbital flight will lift off from the company's West Texas launch site, on a date that hasn't been announced yet.

The upcoming mission is known as NS-33, because it will be the 33rd overall launch of Blue Origin's reusable, autonomous New Shepard vehicle. It will be the company's 13th human spaceflight mission.

Here's a brief rundown of the six NS-33 passengers, using information provided by Blue Origin.

• Allie Kuehner, an environmentalist, adventurer and explorer who serves on the board of the conservation nonprofit Nature is Nonpartisan.
• Carl Kuehner, Allie's husband and a conservationist as well. He serves as chairman of Building and Land Technology, a real estate firm "dedicated to building communities and ecosystems that promote long-term growth and sustainability," according to Blue Origin.
• Leland Larson, a philanthropist, gardener and beekeeper who previously led School Bus Services, Inc. and Larson Transportation Services, both of them family-owned Oregon businesses.
• Freddie Rescigno, Jr., the founder, president and CEO of the wire and cable company Commodity Cables. He's also a competitive golfer.
• Owolabi Salis, a financial consultant and lawyer who wrote the book "Equitocracy." Salis "is also a key member of The Soul Maker Ministry, which preaches diversity given the diverse nature of the universe," Blue Origin wrote. "He is dedicating this mission to victims of discrimination and civil rights violations."
• Jim Sitkin, a retired attorney and lifelong adventurer who currently volunteers for a non-governmental organization that works with government and community leaders in Central Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

New Shepard flights last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to the touchdown of the vehicle's crew capsule. (New Shepard's first-stage booster also comes back to Earth for a safe landing and eventual reuse).

During this brief time, New Shepard passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curve of Earth against the blackness of space.

Blue Origin's first crewed mission was in July 2021, a flight that included Bezos and his brother Mark. NS-33 will be the company's fourth human spaceflight of 2025.

The Ax-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) had been scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast on Wednesday morning (June 11), but a propellant leak in the booster nixed that plan.

And now, another leak — this one in Ax-4's destination — has further postponed the liftoff.

Cosmonauts recently detected a "new pressure signature" in the Zvezda service module, part of the Russian segment of the ISS, NASA officials announced in an update today (June 12).

This development isn't exactly a shock; this area first sprang a leak back in 2019, and cosmonauts have been dealing with it ever since, as the recent spot check shows.

The cosmonauts "sealed some additional areas of interest and measured the current leak rate," NASA officials wrote in the update. "Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure."

“The crew aboard the International Space Station is safely conducting normal operations," NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in an emailed statement. "We’re assessing this latest update and will provide additional information as available.”

Still, the agency and Axiom Space, the Houston company that organized Ax-4, decided that grounding the mission for now is the prudent course of action.

Doing so "provides additional time for NASA and Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary," NASA wrote in today's update, referring to Russia's space agency.

No new target launch date has been announced.

As its name suggests, Ax-4 will be Axiom's fourth crewed mission to (and from) the ISS. The roughly two-week-long flight will be commanded by record-breaking former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now Axiom's director of human spaceflight.

The three other crew members are pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India, Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Hungarian mission specialist Tibor Kapu.

Nobody from India, Poland or Hungary has ever visited the ISS, so this trio will make history when Ax-4 is finally able to get off the pad.

The four-person Ax-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was supposed to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday morning (June 11). But that's no longer the plan.

"Standing down from tomorrow’s Falcon 9 launch of Ax-4 to the @Space_Station to allow additional time for SpaceX teams to repair the LOx leak identified during post static fire booster inspections. Once complete — and pending Range availability — we will share a new launch date," SpaceX announced via X on Tuesday evening (June 10).

LOx is liquid oxygen, one of the two propellants used by the Falcon 9's Merlin engines. The other is RP-1, a rocket-grade kerosene.

As SpaceX's post mentioned, the company noticed the LOx leak after static-firing the rocket's first stage, an activity that took place on Sunday (June 8). Static fires are common prelaunch tests in which a rocket's engines are briefly ignited while the booster is anchored to the pad.

Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability, discussed the leak during a press conference on Monday (June 9) that was held after Ax-4's launch readiness review.

This Falcon 9 first stage has one flight under its belt, and the leak was also seen on that mission, during its reentry to Earth's atmosphere, Gerstenmaier said.

SpaceX "discovered that we had not fully repaired the booster during refurbishment, or we didn't, actually, didn't find the leak and didn't get it corrected," he said.

Gerstenmaier said on Monday that SpaceX was still troubleshooting the leak, though he expressed confidence that the issue wouldn't prevent an on-time liftoff.

"We're installing a purge that will essentially mitigate the leak, if it still continues, if we see it on launch day," he said. "So we will be fully ready to go fly."

Ax-4 will be the fourth astronaut mission to the ISS organized by the Houston company Axiom Space. It will be commanded by Peggy Whitson, a record-breaking former NASA astronaut who is now Axiom's director of human spaceflight.

The other crewmembers are pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India; mission specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland and the European Space Agency; and Hungarian mission specialist Tibor Kapu. No astronaut from any of these three countries has ever visited the ISS before.

The Ax-4 astronauts will spend about two weeks living and working aboard the orbiting lab, performing about 60 different science experiments. They'll then return to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Ax-4 is scheduled to lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 2:31 a.m. EDT (0631 GMT). That's a full two weeks after the missions initial launch date. SpaceX had targeted June 10 but was met with a handful of delays related to high atmospheric winds, a leak detected on the launch vehicle and, most recently, a leak in one of the modules on the International Space Station. The latter have both since been addressed, and the mission given a nod to proceed.

You can watch the launch live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX and Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that organized the mission. The webcast will be at the top of this story, as well as on Space.com's homepage, when the time comes.

As the mission's name suggests, Ax-4 will be Axiom Space's fourth crewed trip to the ISS. Its astronauts will launch aboard a brand-new SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which will earn its wings on the flight.

Ax-4 is led by commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who is currently Axiom's director of human spaceflight. Whitson has spent 675 days in space to date, more than any other American.

The mission's other three crewmembers are pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India; Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański of the European Space Agency; and mission specialist Tibor Kapu of Hungary.

These latter three will make history on Ax-4, becoming the first people from their respective countries to launch on a mission to the ISS.

After launch, the crew will spend a little more than a day catching up to the space station. Docking is expected Thursday (June 26), around 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).

The Ax-4 astronauts will spend about two weeks living and working on the orbiting lab. They'll conduct 60 scientific experiments during that time — more than any previous Axiom Space mission has performed.

The mission will end with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Ax-4's return date has not yet been set; it will depend on weather conditions in the splashdown zone.

The Crew Dragon capsule that will fly SpaceX's next astronaut mission has arrived at the launch pad.

That flight, called Ax-4, is scheduled to lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket on June 10 from historic Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

SpaceX just took a step toward meeting that timeline: It has delivered the Dragon to Pad 39A's hangar, the company announced via X on Thursday (June 5).

That capsule — a brand-new vehicle, with no flights yet under its belt — will carry four people to and from the International Space Station (ISS) for the Houston-based company Axiom Space. It will be Axiom's fourth such mission, which explains the Ax-4 name.

Ax-4 will be commanded by Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who currently serves as Axiom's director of human spaceflight. She holds the American record for most total time spent in space: 675 days.

Whitson's three crewmates are India's Shubhanshu Shukla, who is Ax-4's pilot, and mission specialists Sławosz Uznański and Tibor Kapu. Uznański, a European Space Agency astronaut, is from Poland, and Kapu is from Hungary.

Nobody from either country, or from India, has ever lived aboard the ISS before, so Ax-4 will break new ground.

The Ax-4 astronauts are expected so spend two weeks living and working on the ISS, conducting about 60 different science experiments. Then they'll head back down to Earth, eventually splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Axiom's first astronaut mission, Ax-1, launched in April 2022. Ax-2 and Ax-3 followed in May 2023 and January 2024, respectively. All have used SpaceX hardware to get to and from the ISS.

Or, in English, a swan.

The Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) astronauts, including American commander Peggy Whitson, Indian pilot Shubhanshu Shukla and mission specialists Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, chose a small plush swan named "Joy" as their zero-gravity indicator. The doll, attached to a tether, will be released to float aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule, signaling that the Ax-4 crew safely made it into low Earth orbit.

"Joy, the baby swan, embodies the shared pursuit of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Hungarian to Orbit program (HUNOR) to soar high above our home planet," reads Axiom Space's description of the zero-g indicator. "In this way, Joy represents cultural unity as three nations realize the return to human spaceflight, together as one crew."

The Ax-4 crew chose a swan because it symbolizes similar characteristics across their different countries.

"'Joy' represents the shared aspirations of three nations united in their return to human spaceflight," said Whitson as she revealed the zero-g indicator during the crew's pre-launch press briefing on Tuesday (June 3). "This one is rich in cultural symbolism. It stands for wisdom in India, resilience in Poland and grace in Hungary. Through 'Joy,' we'll celebrate our diversity and our unity in the shared journey of space exploration."

"In Indian culture, the swan is the vehicle of Goddess Saraswati, symbolizing wisdom, learning and purity," said Shukla. "It is said to have the rare ability to separate milk from water, a symbolism that is a powerful reminder of discernment in an age of distraction. To carry the symbol is to carry the essence of our mission: pursuit of knowledge, clarity of purpose and grace under pressure."

"The biggest journey is about to start in just couple of days. I still do not realize how big this moment will be," said Uznański-Wiśniewski. "This will be such a joy, just as the name of our extra passenger in our Dragon and on the ISS."

The Ax-4 crew arrived at a baby swan after deciding they wanted it to be an animal, as inspired by the interests of one of their children.

"We wanted to go with with a dinosaur or a lion, but we just couldn't find the right one," said Kapu. "We were extremely happy when we found 'Joy.'"

"Joy," as named by Kapu, is otherwise known as "Alina Swan," a part of Aurora's "Adorable Palm Pals" line of pocket-size play dolls. Measuring all of 5 inches tall (12.7 centimeters), Joy/Alina is fluffy to the touch and is filled with bean pellets, such that (in a gravity environment) it sits in your hand or wherever you chose.

Flying zero-g indicators is a tradition that can be traced back to the first human spaceflight in 1961. Soviet-era cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin brought a small doll with him on his Vostok mission to see it float. Since then, the Russian crews that followed Gagarin into Earth orbit flew small dolls, often chosen by their children.

The custom reached the United States with the introduction of crewed capsules after the end of the space shuttle program. Now, commercial spaceflights operated by SpaceX and Boeing, as well as NASA Artemis flights, include zero-g indicators.

Once at the International Space Station, Joy will join the Expedition 53 dolls, including "Droog," a crocheted origami crane, flown by SpaceX's Crew-10 and an angel blowing a horn selected by Russia's Soyuz MS-27 crew.

"A team that has joy is a team that is healthy," said Kapu. "That has become my personal motto, because it captures the essence of this crew. We are focused, we are committed, but above all, we are joyful, and the joy is a sign of trust, resilience, and in my mind, friendship. So, in the spirit of sharing that joy, we wanted to bring one more crew member with us, a symbol of what holds us together."

It is believed that "Joy" is the first swan to be used as a zero-g indicator. Northrop Grumman, an aerospace company that resupplies the space station for NASA, had swan dolls made in reference to its Cygnus series of cargo vehicles, but they were not used for the same purpose.

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The next astronaut launch to the International Space Station (ISS) has been delayed again.

That liftoff — which will kick off Ax-4, the fourth crewed mission by Houston company Axiom Space — had been scheduled for this coming Sunday (June 8). But that's no longer the plan.

Axiom Space announced via X today (June 3) that the new target is next Tuesday (June 10). The four-astronaut mission will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida that day at 8:22 a.m. EDT (1222 GMT).

It's the second shift to the right for Ax-4 in the last few weeks. Axiom had been working toward a May 29 launch, but that got pushed to June 8 in the middle of last month as part of a series of ISS schedule adjustments.

Axiom Space's X post today didn't give a reason for the two-day slip to June 10.

The Ax-4 crew consists of commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who has spent more time in space than any other American (and currently serves as Axiom's director of human spaceflight); pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India; Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański of the European Space Agency; and Hungarian mission specialist Tibor Kapu.

Ax-4 will be triply historic, marking the first time that anyone from India, Poland or Hungary has lived on board the ISS.

The quartet will ride to the ISS in a brand-new SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. They're expected to spend about two weeks aboard the orbiting lab, during which time they'll conduct about 60 science experiments.

They'll then ride the Dragon back to Earth, arriving home with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back today (May 31), becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space.

For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet.

"It was perfection," said Green soon after returning to Earth. "There are not a lot of times in your life when most of the time you're just doing your best, struggling through the hard times, enjoying the good ones, but there are very few things in life that were true perfection. And when I looked out at space and back down to the Earth, [it] was perfect."

The New Shepard launch vehicle — which included the capsule and a propulsion module, both of which are reusable — lifted off today at 8:39 a.m. CDT (9:39 a.m. EDT or 1339 GMT) from Blue Origin's Launch Site One near Van Horn in West Texas. About two and a half minutes into the flight, the booster cut off its engine and then separated, allowing the capsule to continue its coast upward into space and for it to return to Earth to make a propulsive, vertical landing on a concrete pad not far from where it launched.

The six NS-32 passengers, self-dubbed "The Pathfinders," meanwhile, reached an apogee, or maximum altitude, of 340,290 feet (104 km) above the ground, qualifying Rocket, Alemán, Williams, Jeris, Green and Jorge for Blue Origin-issued astronaut wings and their entry in the Association of Space Explorers' Registry of Worldwide Space Travelers.

The RSS First Step then descended back to Earth, using parachutes and a last-second jet of compressed air to make a soft touchdown about 10 minutes after it left Earth. Blue Origin personnel were soon on hand to inspect the vehicle, open the hatch and welcome the NS-32 crewmates home.

Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand.

Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space.

"It was such an incredible ride," said Alemán. "Very moving, very spiritual, even better than I ever imagined. For me, as someone who has been traveling — thank you to the gods — all my life, it is like a cherry on top of a cake."

For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe. Jeris spent his childhood watching rockets take off from Florida and then travelled to more than 149 countries as he waited his own chance to fly into space.

Green and Jorge were cheered on during the flight from a launch viewing party at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, home to U.S. Space Camp. An experienced radiologist, Green was both an attendee and counselor at Space Camp prior to chairing the Space Camp Alumni Association, and she is now a member of the rocket center's education foundation board.

As a high school and middle school teacher in Galveston, Texas, Jorge has brought students to Space Camp, as well as attended Space Academy for Educators herself. This was her second experience being weightless, having earlier conducted student-designed experiments aboard a parabolic flight.

The NS-32 launch was Blue Origin's 12th human spaceflight since 2021 — bringing the total passenger count to 64 — and the company's 30th flight above the Kármán Line since 2015. This was the first launch since Bezos' fiancé Lauren Sánchez flew with an all-woman crew that included pop star Katy Perry and TV morning show host Gayle King in April.

Blue Origin is gearing up for the launch of its next space tourism flight, and you can watch the mission live here at Space.com.

The 32nd overall mission of Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle, known as NS-32, is set to lift off today (May 31) from the company's Launch Site One in West Texas. The mission marks the 12th human flight for the New Shepard program.

Blue Origin is aiming for a launch window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on Saturday. A livestream of the New Shepard launch will be available on Blue Origin's website 30 minutes before liftoff, and it will be simulcast on YouTube and Blue Origin's X account. The broadcast will also be carried at the top of this page as well as the Space.com homepage and YouTube channel. The webcast will include commentary, mission updates and information about the crew members flying on NS-32.

The NS-32 crew includes entrepreneurs, professionals and a science educator. Among them are Aymette Medina Jorge, a U.S.-based STEM advocate; Dr. Gretchen Green, a radiologist and lifelong space enthusiast; and Jaime Alemán, a former ambassador to the U.S. and lifelong adventurer, having visited all 193 U.N.-recognized countries.

Also flying on the mission are Jesse Williams, a businessman and mountaineer, who has summited six of the seven highest peaks on Earth, including Mt. Everest; Mark Rocket, an aerospace entrepreneur set to become the first New Zealander to reach space; Paul Jeris, an entrepreneur, avid traveler and lifelong space enthusiast, who was inspired by his NASA engineer father.

NS-32 will carry the six passengers on a roughly 11-minute journey that will take them past the Kármán line — the internationally recognized boundary of space, which lies 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth. The capsule will separate from the rocket booster shortly after liftoff and spend several minutes in microgravity before descending back to the desert floor under parachutes downrange in Texas.

During the brief mission, the NS-32 crew will experience a few minutes of weightlessness, allowing them to float freely inside the capsule and observe Earth from space. Through the capsule’s large panoramic windows, the crew will see the planet's curvature and the stark contrast between the bright blue atmosphere and the blackness of space.

Many astronauts describe this as the "overview effect" — a profound shift in perspective that evokes a deep sense of connection to Earth and the fragility of its environment.

That was one of the takeaways from a new update that Elon Musk just gave about SpaceX's plans to help humanity settle the Red Planet — an ambitious goal that has driven the billionaire for decades.

"Progress is measured by the timeline to establishing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars," Musk said in the 42-minute presentation, which SpaceX posted on X on Thursday (May 29), referring to the ongoing work with Starship.

The huge rocket consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable: a booster called Super Heavy and a 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage known as Starship, or simply Ship.

Starship has nine test flights under its belt, the most recent of which launched on Tuesday (May 27). Ship reached space on that mission but experienced an anomaly shortly thereafter, apparently due to a propellant leak; SpaceX lost control of the vehicle, and it fell back to Earth in an uncontrolled reentry over the Indian Ocean.

Ship also had issues — more serious ones, in fact — on Flight 7 and Flight 8, which launched in January and March of this year, respectively. On both occasions, Ship exploded less than 10 minutes into flight, raining debris down on the Atlantic.

Musk seemed undaunted after Flight 9 on Tuesday, noting Ship's improved performance compared to the two previous liftoffs and stressing that the company has a wealth of data to analyze going forward.

He struck a similar tone during the video update, which was filmed at Starbase, the newly incorporated South Texas city that serves as Starship's manufacturing and launch hub.

"So with each launch — especially in the early days of Starship — each launch is about learning more and more about what's needed to make life multiplanetary and to improve Starship to the point where it can be taking, ultimately, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to Mars," he added.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built; the current version stands about 397 feet (121 m) tall. But it will get even larger in the coming years, if all goes according to plan.

The next iteration of the vehicle, known as Version 3, will be 408 feet (124.4 m) tall when fully stacked, Musk said during the presentation. This is the variant that is expected to be capable of flying to, and helping to populate, Mars. Musk said it will be reliably and rapidly reusable, and the upper stage will be refueled in Earth orbit — a necessary ability for deep-space travel, as launching with all the necessary fuel onboard would leave little available mass for payload (such as people and habitat modules).

Version 3 should fly soon: "We're aiming to launch for the first time at the end of this year," Musk said.

If everything works out, Starship could be headed for Mars just a year or so later, he added.

The Red Planet and Earth align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months. The next such opportunity comes in 2026, in November and December, and SpaceX will try to hit it; the goal is to send five Starship Version 3 vehicles to the Red Planet to prove out the vehicle and its associated tech, Musk said.

These first Mars Ships — and it will be just Ships, as Super Heavy will come back down to Earth shortly after liftoff for inspection and reflight — will be uncrewed. But they will carry some Optimus humanoid robots, which are built by Tesla, the car company that Musk leads.

"That would be an epic picture — to see Optimus walking around on the surface of Mars," he said.

It's unclear when we'll be getting those photos, however, because hitting the 2026 launch target will be tough. The biggest hurdle, according to Musk, will be mastering off-Earth refueling of Ship.

"We'll try to make that opportunity, if we get lucky," Musk said. "I think we probably have a 50/50 chance right now."

If Starship does indeed fly to Mars in 2026, SpaceX will ramp up the ambition and the activity, sending about 20 Ships to the Red Planet between 2028 and 2029. And there could be people on those flights.

"Assuming the first missions are successful and they land successfully, we'd send humans on the next mission, and we really start building the infrastructure for Mars," Musk said.

Or, "maybe, just to be safe, we might just do two landing episodes with Optimus and do the third one with humans," he added. "We'll see."

SpaceX has already been scouting out possible sites for the Mars city. The right place will be relatively far from Mars' frigid poles, have accessible water ice and be relatively flat, to facilitate safe rocket landings and liftoffs. The leading candidate right now, according to Musk, is Arcadia Planitia, a volcanic plain in the Red Planet's northern hemisphere.

One hundred Ships could fly to Mars during the third launch window from now (in 2030-2031), and 500 or so in the one after that (in 2033), according to one of the slides in Musk's presentation.

The end goal is a self-sufficient city on Mars, which will be able to survive even if it somehow becomes cut off from our civilization on Earth. Such a city will likely consist of more than a million people, and require the transport of millions of tons of cargo across deep space.

Such a city would, in Musk's view, be built and serviced with the aid of Starship — perhaps most efficiently by a future version that stands 466 feet (142 m) tall when fully stacked. When this city is mature, several thousand Ship upper stages could be arriving and leaving during each Earth-Mars launch window, he said.

"This is, like, an incredible thing to have — this amazing city on Mars, the first city on another planet and a new world. And it's also an opportunity, I think, for the Martians to rethink how they want civilization to be," Musk said. "All right, let's get it done!"

The NS-32 suborital mission, which will be Blue Origin's 12th human flight to date, is expected to lift off from Launch Site One in West Texas during a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT). Blue Origin will stream the launch live, beginning 30 mins prior to launch; Space.com will air the webcast if, as expected, the company makes it available.

The suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, lasting approximately 11 minutes, will carry six civilians with varied professional and personal achievements, highlighting the increasing accessibility of space tourism. Here's some information about the six people who will fly on the NS-32 mission, which Blue Origin provided in a mission update.

Aymette (Amy) Medina Jorge

As a STEM educator from Galveston, Texas, Amy Medina Jorge has led over 60 student-driven space experiments, including biometric sensor tests and in-flight 3D printing on zero-G flights. Born in Puerto Rico, she advocates for Hispanic representation in STEM fields and was honored with the 2023 AIAA and Challenger Center Trailblazing STEM Educator Award. Her seat is sponsored by Farmacias Similares, a Mexican company focused on social impact and accessible healthcare across Latin America.

Dr. Gretchen Green

A radiologist with over 20 years of clinical experience specializing in women's imaging, Dr. Gretchen Green is also a lifelong space enthusiast. Her journey began with Space Camp in 1986, where she later returned as a Crew Trainer and eventually chaired the Space Camp Alumni Association. She currently serves on the board of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Education Foundation.

As a nationally recognized expert witness and entrepreneur, Green founded The Expert Resource to help doctors build expert witness practices. Green is also a certified life coach who has biked across the U.S., reached the North Pole, and holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Brown.

Jaime Alemán

A Panamanian attorney and former ambassador to the U.S., Jaime Alemán is also a seasoned traveler, having visited all 193 United Nations-recognized countries, both the North and South Poles — and now he's headed to space. Alemán holds degrees from Notre Dame and Duke Law School and is a senior partner at Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee — a law firm he co-founded in 1985.

He also serves on the board of one of Panama's largest private banks and holds board positions with Special Olympics International, Duke Law School and the Woodrow Wilson Center's Latin America Program.

Jesse Williams

Canadian entrepreneur Jesse Williams has launched multiple ventures, including eDirect Software, Car History Group and Just Think Media. An avid cyclist and mountaineer, Williams has summited six of the seven highest peaks on Earth, including Mt. Everest. Several symbols on the NS-32 mission patch — bike gears and Mt. Everest — represent his adventurous spirit.

Mark Rocket

The CEO of Kea Aerospace and president of Aerospace New Zealand, Mark Rocket is set to become the first New Zealander to reach space. Christchurch-based Kea, which was founded in 2018, focuses on developing sustainable aerospace technology aimed at advancing high-altitude flight and environmental monitoring. Rocket was also a seed investor of Rocket Lab, co-directing the company from 2007 to 2011. The kea parrot on the mission patch symbolizes his homeland of New Zealand.

Paul Jeris

A seasoned real estate businessman and global traveler, Paul Jeris' passion for space was sparked early by his father, a NASA engineer. Growing up on Florida's Space Coast, he spent summers watching historic launches of the Apollo, space shuttle, Mariner, Voyager and Viking missions.

A dedicated explorer, Jeris has traveled to over 149 countries with the goal of visiting every nation on Earth. But his ultimate dream has always been to journey into space and witness the planet's beauty from above. He also gives back to the travel community by serving on several local and regional tourism boards.

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, announced on Tuesday (May 27) that it's targeting Saturday (May 31) for its next crewed suborbital flight.

That mission — called NS-32, because it will be the 32nd overall mission of the reusable New Shepard vehicle — will lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas site during a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local Texas time). Blue Origin will stream the action live, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff.

NS-32 will carry six people to suborbital space and back, on a flight that will last a total of 10 to 12 minutes.

Those passengers are Panamanian businessman and attorney Jaime Alemán, who served as that nation's ambassador to the United States; radiologist, life coach and explorer Gretchen Green; entrepreneur and real estate developer Paul Jeris; award-winning middle school and high school teacher Aymette Medina Jorge; the aptly named Mark Rocket, an entrepreneur from New Zealand; and Canadian entrepreneur, adventurer and mountaineer Jesse Williams.

You can learn more about all six in Blue Origin's NS-32 crew reveal update.

Blue Origin's first-ever crewed spaceflight took place on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Bezos himself flew on that mission, along with his brother Jeff, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.

The company has flown a number of celebrities on its crewed missions, including famed "Star Trek" actor William Shatner in October 2021 and pop star Katy Perry just last month.

Flight 8 launched March 6 from SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility on the southern tip of Texas. The mission largely mirrored that of Flight 7, during which the both vehicles' first stage Super Heavy boosters successfully rocketed back to Starbase to be caught by the launch tower's "Mechazilla" chopstick-like arms. Ship, however, for both Flight 7 and Flight 8, did not fare as well as its Super Heavy counterpart. (Starship Flight 9 is scheduled to launch on May 27.)

Flight 7 and Flight 8 each ended in dramatic explosions over the Atlantic Ocean that could be seen from Florida, the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, raining fiery Starship debris into the drink below. Flight 7's Ship encountered a propellant leak and fire in the spacecraft's "attic," leading to its explosion and loss. Side-by-side, Flight 8 followed a very similar trajectory, but instead of a fire in the attic, Starship's last flight suffered a "flash" in what could be comparatively called its "basement," which brought about its blazing demise.

In this case, "basement" is Ship's business end with six powerful Raptor rocket engines. The flight plan for Starship's eighth launch called for Ship to deploy four dummy payloads simulating SpaceX Starlink satellites about 17.5 minutes after liftoff, followed by a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean off of Western Australia roughly 50 minutes later. But it never got the chance to do either, and now we know why.

A "flash" occurred near one of Ship's center, sea-level Raptor engines, followed by an "energetic event" that led to that engine's shutdown, SpaceX said in an update. The two remaining sea-level Raptors immediately terminated their thrust, as well as one of Ship's vacuum-optimized Raptor engines, causing the vehicle to begin tumbling out of control.

About two minutes after the initial flash, SpaceX lost communication with the vehicle, which triggered the spacecraft's automated flight termination software and subsequent self-destruct.

"The most probable root cause for the loss of Starship was identified as a hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center Raptor engines that resulted in inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition," SpaceX wrote.

Super Heavy, too, though successfully returned to Starbase and the warm embrace of "Mechazilla," didn't do so without incident. Only 11 of the Flight 8 booster's 13 engines used for its initial boostback burn were successful in reigniting. Its landing burn as it approached the launch tower saw 12 of 13 engines relight, including one of the previously unlit engines from the boostback burn.

SpaceX traced the cause to "torch ignition issues" on each of the malfunctioning engines, as a result of "thermal conditions local to the igniter," the company said. To mitigate these overheating issues on Starship's upcoming flight, SpaceX says they have reinforced the affected areas with additional insulation.

Fixes for Starship's upper stage came down to tightening some bolts at some of Ship's more critical junctures and improving the plumbing so flammable gases don't ignite when they aren't supposed to:

"Starship’s upper stage will receive additional preload on key joints, a new nitrogen purge system, and improvements to the propellant drain system. Future upgrades to Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine which will include additional reliability improvements to address the failure mechanism."

SpaceX says their investigation included more than 100 long-duration test firings of the Raptor engine at the company's McGregor, Texas, test facility, and that its efforts were overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in conjunction with NASA, the National Transportation and Safety Board and the U.S. Space Force. Now, the FAA agrees Starship is ready to fly again.

In a statement released May 22, the FAA says they, "conducted a comprehensive safety review of the SpaceX Starship Flight 8 mishap and determined that the company has satisfactorily addressed the causes of the mishap, and therefore, the Starship vehicle can return to flight."

The same day SpaceX released their Flight 8 investigation results, the company also officially announced the date for Flight 9. Starship's next launch is scheduled for no earlier than Tuesday, May 27, and will be the first launch of a flight-proven Super Heavy booster. Flight 9 will liftoff on the same first stage that supported Starship Flight 7, during a launch window that opens at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT).

SpaceX will stream the mission live on their website, as well as their account on X. Space.com will also carry the broadcast on our homepage, starting about 30 minutes before liftoff.

The suborbital space tourism company last went to the final frontier in June 2024, on the final flight of its VSS Unity space plane. Virgin retired Unity to focus on developing its new, more efficient "Delta class" vehicles — and the first of those advanced, six-passenger ships remains on track to debut next year, according to the company.

"An enormous amount of work is taking place across our company, as well as at our key suppliers," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said during an earnings call with investors on May 15. "We continue to expect our first [Delta] research spaceflight will take place in summer of 2026, with private astronaut flights following in fall of 2026."

That call, which reported Virgin Galactic's financial results for the first quarter of 2025, provided a number of other updates as well.

For example, Colglazier said the company — which currently has about 675 customers on its manifest — plans to start accepting flight reservations again in the first quarter of 2026. New customers will be brought onboard via a new "highly bespoke education sales process" that will feature distinct "waves."

"This approach has several intended benefits for customers," Colglazier said. "Tailoring the number of new arrivals into our future astronaut community during each wave allows us to provide a white-glove onboarding experience that will form the foundation of each customer's journey to space. From a yield-management perspective, this allows us to adjust our pricing wave by wave."

Ticket prices have not yet been set, though it's expected to be higher than the $600,000 that the most recent customers paid, he added.

Virgin Galactic is currently building two Delta-class ships but plans to expand the fleet over time. The company will be quite busy once the first one comes online. Each of the new space planes is designed to fly twice per week, Colglazier said — a big leap in cadence over VSS Unity, which flew seven commercial passenger missions from June 2023 until its retirement a year later.

Virgin Galactic employs an air-launch strategy. Like VSS Unity, each Delta ship will lift off from a runway beneath the wings of a large carrier aircraft, which will drop the space plane at altitude. The spaceship will then ignite its onboard rocket motor, powering its own way to suborbital space, and come back down to Earth for a landing on the same runway from which it took off.

In last quarter's earnings call, Virgin Galactic mentioned the possibility of making the carrier aircraft a multipurpose vehicle — using it to haul something other than a space plane into the sky. Over the past few months, the company has continued investigating this potential vehicle variant, which it calls HALE ("High Altitude Long Endurance")-Heavy.

"Since last quarter, we've connected with leaders within the Department of Defense, national laboratories and aerospace and defense companies to ascertain the potential product market fit of our carrier aircraft capabilities with government customer needs," Colglazier said.

"We've been encouraged by initial feedback, which has identified both existing and emerging missions that could potentially benefit from access to HALE-Heavy support aircraft," he added. "Examples of these missions could include airborne research and development testing; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support; command and control node capabilities; and multiple opportunities within the emerging Golden Dome [missile defense] initiative."

To date, all of Virgin Galactic's suborbital missions have lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico. But the company is looking to fly from a second site as well, likely in either Europe or the Middle East.

Virgin Galactic is making progress on this goal as well, Colglazier said during the May 15 call.

"We are midway through our feasibility assessment with the Italian government for a spaceport in southern Italy," he said.

That flight — known as NS-32, because it will be the 32nd overall mission of of the autonomous, reusable New Shepard vehicle — will lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas launch site on a date yet to be announced.

NS-32 will carry six people on a brief trip to and from suborbital space. The crew consists of the aptly named Mark Rocket, Jaime Alemán, Gretchen Green, Paul Jeris, Aymette Medina Jorge and Jesse Williams, Blue Origin announced on Wednesday (May 21).

Rocket is an entrepreneur from New Zealand with considerable spaceflight bona fides. He's the CEO of Kea Aerospace and the president of Aerospace New Zealand, for example, and was a seed investor in the launch company Rocket Lab, which he also served as co-director until 2011, according to Blue Origin's Wednesday update.

Alemán is a Panamanian businessman and attorney who previously served as that nation's ambassador to the United States.

"He serves on Special Olympics International’s Board of Directors, Duke Law School's Board of Visitors, and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin America Board," Blue Origin wrote in the update. "A lifelong adventurer, Jaime will become the first person to travel to all 193 U.N.-recognized countries, the North and South Poles, and space."

Green is a radiologist, life coach, explorer and Space Camp alumna who bicycled across the United States at age 16 to help fight hunger. Jeris is an entrepreneur and real estate developer whose passion for space was inspired by his father, a NASA engineer.

Medina Jorge is an award-winning middle school and high school STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teacher who has led more than 60 space and zero-gravity flight experiments. Her seat on NS-32 is sponsored by Farmacias Similares, "a Mexican company committed to social impact and accessible healthcare across Latin America," Blue Origin wrote.

Williams is a Canadian entrepreneur, adventurer and mountaineer who has summitted six of Earth's seven highest peaks, including Mt. Everest.

You can learn more about all six of these people in Blue Origin's update.

NS-32 has a tough act to follow. Blue Origin's most recent launch, NS-31, sent singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and three other women to the final frontier on April 14. It was the first human spaceflight with no male crewmembers since June 16, 1963, when the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova launched to Earth orbit for a three-day solo mission.

New Shepard flights are considerably shorter than that; they last just 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff until capsule touchdown. During that brief window, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see Earth against the blackness of space.