Last year delivered doses of drama and excitement in the space business, with a record number of launches, breathtaking vistas of other worlds, and a multitude of breakthroughs and setbacks. 2026 is shaping up to be another thrilling year in the cosmos.

For the first time in more than half a century, astronauts are again training to fly around the moon, not as a distant dream but as a concrete mission with hardware on the pad and dates on the calendar.

Artemis II will send astronauts around the moon in February-April 2026, marking NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in 50+ years and paving the way for future crewed lunar landings. Are you ready for NASA’s most significant human spaceflight in a generation?

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Hera spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the binary asteroid system Didymos in November 2026 to investigate the aftermath of NASA's 2022 DART impact, which successfully altered the orbit of the moonlet Dimorphos.