The Next Decade in Space: Global Exploration Missions From 2026 to 2036

Key Takeaways

• The Moon is now a destination for multiple agencies racing toward permanent surface bases
• NASA’s SR-1 Freedom will pioneer nuclear electric propulsion on a Mars mission in 2028
• From Titan to Europa, the outer solar system will see unprecedented robotic visitors this decade

A Decade Unlike Any Before

Space exploration has entered one of its most active periods in more than half a century. Between 2026 and 2036, dozens of planned missions will send spacecraft to the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, several asteroids, Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s largest moon, and beyond. Governments, space agencies, and private companies across the United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, and elsewhere are committing billions of dollars and years of engineering effort to missions that will collectively reshape human understanding of the solar system. Some of these missions are already underway, launched years ago and still traveling toward their destinations. Others are in final assembly or undergoing testing. A few remain on the drawing board, subject to budget decisions and technical milestones that can still shift timelines.

What makes this particular decade stand out is not just the volume of planned missions but the diversity of their scientific ambitions. The search for biosignatures on ocean worlds. The return of samples from other planets. The first crewed landings on the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The first spacecraft to fly autonomously through the thick atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. These are not speculative futures — they are missions with assigned launch windows, contracted launch vehicles, and hardware already in production.

The Moon Returns to the Forefront

No destination has commanded more global attention since 2022 than the Moon. NASA’s Artemis program delivered Artemis II on April 1, 2026, sending four astronauts — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. That mission did not land, but it marked the first time humans had traveled to the vicinity of the Moon since the Apollo era. It set the stage for a sequence of increasingly ambitious missions.

Artemis III, scheduled for mid-2027, will test SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander in Earth orbit. The actual lunar landing has since been pushed to Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, which would become the first crewed lunar landing in over five decades. Artemis V is scheduled for late 2028, and NASA has announced plans for approximately annual landings thereafter. Each of these missions depends heavily on SpaceX delivering Starship to full operational capability, a vehicle that was still completing orbital flight testing in early 2026.

Commercial lunar landers are also proliferating. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2, planned for late 2026, will deliver NASA and ESA payloads to the lunar surface while also deploying ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder communications relay satellite into lunar orbit. This relay satellite is a precursor to ESA’s broader Moonlight Initiative, a future constellation of navigation and communications satellites that would serve as lunar infrastructure for arriving missions. Astrobotic’sGriffin lander, carrying scientific payloads, was scheduled for a July 2026 launch. Intuitive Machines plans its IM-3 mission in 2026, carrying payloads for NASA, ESA, and South Korea’s Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.

China’s lunar program operates in parallel and is arguably the most systematically planned of any space agency. Chang’e 7, expected to launch in August 2026, will target the lunar south pole with an orbiter, lander, rover, and a novel hopping mini-probe designed to enter permanently shadowed craters in search of water ice. It will carry 21 scientific payloads, including six from international partners. The mission will attempt a fixed-point landing near the illuminated rim of Shackleton Crater, one of the most scientifically compelling real estate on the Moon. Chang’e 7 is explicitly designed as scouting preparation for a future human outpost.

Chang’e 8, expected in 2029, will move from exploration to construction experiments. That mission will test in-situ resource utilization technologies, including 3D printing of structures using lunar regolith — essentially a test of whether the Moon’s surface materials can be used to build habitat components without shipping everything from Earth. Pakistan’s national space agency SUPARCO signed an agreement in February 2025 to fly a 35-kilogram rover on Chang’e 8 as part of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) program, which also includes Russia, South Africa, Belarus, and Azerbaijan.

The centerpiece of China’s human spaceflight ambitions is a crewed lunar landing by 2030. China’s China Manned Space Agency publicly confirmed in July 2023 that two astronauts would land on the Moon using the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft and the Lanyue lunar lander, both developed by the China Academy of Space Technology. The Long March 10 heavy-lift rocket, currently in development, will carry both spacecraft toward the Moon. An uncrewed rehearsal flight of the Mengzhou and Lanyue combination is planned for 2028 or 2029 before the crewed attempt. Testing of the lander has been underway since 2024. Whether China lands a crew before or after NASA’s Artemis IV mission remains one of the more consequential uncertainties in contemporary space policy.

India is entering its first sustained phase of human spaceflight during this same window. ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan confirmed in February 2026 that the Gaganyaan crewed mission to low Earth orbit remains targeted for 2027, following three uncrewed test flights. Four Indian Air Force astronauts, including Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair and Ajit Krishnan, have been in training for the mission. Chandrayaan-4, government-approved and targeted for 2028, would be India’s first lunar sample-return mission, placing ISRO alongside the United States, Russia, and China as the only entities to have retrieved material from another world. Chandrayaan-5, also an approved mission, would build on that foundation. ISRO’s chairman has also disclosed plans for an Indian space station, with the first module targeted for 2028 and full completion by 2035.

Mercury in Focus: BepiColombo Arrives

On November 6, 2026, the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission is scheduled to enter orbit around Mercury after an eight-year journey involving one Earth flyby, two Venus flybys, and six Mercury flybys for deceleration. If successful, it will become only the second spacecraft ever to orbit the innermost planet, following NASA’s MESSENGER mission, which concluded in 2015 when it was deliberately crashed into Mercury’s surface. BepiColombo will then separate into two distinct orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. Science operations will begin in early 2027.

Mercury is a poorly understood planet despite its proximity to Earth. Its unusual magnetic field, its disproportionately large iron core, and the presence of water ice in permanently shadowed polar craters are all puzzles that BepiColombo is specifically designed to address. The mission will also provide new measurements of Mercury’s motion that allow scientists to evaluate aspects of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity with higher precision than previously possible. The delay from a 2024 power glitch extended what was already a decade-long journey — a reminder that even missions heading to the solar system’s closest neighbors operate on timescales that dwarf most other scientific endeavors.

Mars: A New Era of Exploration

Mars is arguably the most contested destination of the coming decade. Multiple agencies and nations are competing to return samples from its surface, land rovers with advanced instruments, and now, in an unexpected development, test nuclear propulsion on the journey there.

NASA’s SR-1 Freedom spacecraft, announced at the agency’s “Ignition” event on March 24, 2026, by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, is planned to launch in December 2028 during the next favorable Mars transfer window. SR-1 Freedom will carry a 20-kilowatt fission reactor fueled by high-assay low-enriched uranium, generating electricity through a closed Brayton cycle power conversion system to drive xenon ion thrusters. The reactor will activate within 48 hours of launch, making this the first nuclear-propelled spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence. The mission’s primary payload, called Skyfall, will deploy three Ingenuity-class helicopters into the Martian atmosphere to scout future human landing sites and map subsurface water ice deposits using ground-penetrating radar. The hardware for the propulsion element was repurposed from the now-cancelled Lunar Gateway Power and Propulsion Element, which had already been manufactured and tested. No cost figure was disclosed at the time of announcement.

ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover, once canceled and then revived, is now planned for the 2028 Mars launch window as well. The rover, named after the British chemist Rosalind Franklin who contributed foundational work to the understanding of DNA’s structure, is ESA’s contribution to the former ExoMars program. It carries a two-meter drill that can extract subsurface samples below the region most damaged by surface radiation, giving it a better chance of detecting preserved organic molecules or other biosignatures than any previous Mars mission. ESA and Russia originally collaborated on ExoMars, but the partnership collapsed following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. ESA subsequently identified NASA as the mission’s launch and landing partner.

China has laid out plans for Tianwen-3, a Mars sample-return mission, with a possible launch as early as 2028. Tianwen-3 would be among the most technically complex robotic missions ever attempted, requiring a spacecraft to land on Mars, collect samples, launch an ascent vehicle from the Martian surface, rendezvous in Mars orbit, and return those samples to Earth. The original NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return program, once a flagship priority, was effectively cancelled when NASA’s 2026 budget requests eliminated the mission over cost concerns that had ballooned toward $10 billion. The cancellation left the fate of the samples already cached by the Perseverance rover uncertain, though SR-1 Freedom’s supplemental mission mandate was partly framed around preparing for eventual human retrieval.

NASA also has two small spacecraft, called ESCAPADE, expected to perform a gravity assist at Earth in November 2026 before heading toward Mars. These twin orbiters will study Mars’s magnetosphere and how the solar wind strips its atmosphere — science directly relevant to planning long-duration crewed missions, since understanding radiation exposure in Martian orbit matters as much as understanding the surface.

Visiting Phobos: Japan’s MMX Mission

One of the most scientifically audacious missions of 2026 is JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft, planned for launch in November or December 2026. MMX will travel to the Martian system, observe both Phobos and Deimos from orbit, and attempt to collect a surface sample from Phobos before returning to Earth by 2031. The scientific stakes are high. Phobos’s origin remains debated — it may be a captured asteroid or a remnant of a giant impact on Mars. Either answer carries implications for the history of the entire inner solar system. If Phobos contains material ejected from Mars by ancient impacts, those samples could preserve a geological record of conditions on early Mars going back billions of years, before the planet became the cold desert it is today. A French-built rover, provided through a partnership between CNES and the German Aerospace Center DLR, will be included on the mission.

Asteroid Reconnaissance and Sample Return

The mid-2020s have become a golden age for asteroid science. China’s Tianwen-2 mission is already en route to the near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamo’oalewa, a quasi-moon of Earth with an unusual orbit that some scientists believe may be a fragment of the Moon. Tianwen-2 is expected to reach the asteroid in the summer of 2026, collect a sample using touch-and-go contact, and return that material to Earth by 2027. A later phase of the same mission will continue to the main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS.

ESA’s Hera mission will arrive at the binary asteroid system 65803 Didymos in late 2026 to study the aftermath of NASA’s DART impact from September 2022. DART deliberately crashed into Didymos’s moonlet, Dimorphos, and successfully altered its orbit — humanity’s first demonstration of planetary defense. Hera will now characterize what that impact actually did: the crater morphology, the physical properties of the asteroid’s interior, and the long-term effects on the system. The mission carries two CubeSats, Milani and Juventas, to conduct close-proximity observations. The data Hera returns will determine whether DART-style kinetic impactors can be scaled up for real planetary defense scenarios involving larger threats.

NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX mission, formerly OSIRIS-REx after it successfully returned a sample from asteroid Bennu in September 2023, is now en route to asteroid 99942 Apophis. Apophis will make an exceptionally close pass by Earth in April 2029 — within 32,000 kilometers, closer than many geostationary satellites. OSIRIS-APEX will be waiting in orbit around Apophis when that flyby occurs, observing how Earth’s gravitational tidal forces reshape the asteroid’s surface in real time. No other mission has ever had the opportunity to watch an asteroid deform under gravitational stress.

JAXA’s DESTINY+ mission, targeting a 2028 launch, will fly by the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the parent body of the Geminid meteor shower. Phaethon is unusual in that it behaves somewhat like a comet despite being classified as an asteroid, brightening and emitting material as it passes close to the Sun. DESTINY+ will collect dust from Phaethon’s coma and study its surface at close range, seeking to understand why this body produces one of the most prolific annual meteor showers visible from Earth.

Jupiter and Its Ocean Worlds

NASA’s Europa Clipper, launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in October 2024, will arrive at Jupiter in April 2030 after a gravity assist from Earth in December 2026. Its primary mission is to determine whether Jupiter’s moon Europa — which harbors a subsurface ocean beneath a shell of ice — has the chemical conditions, energy sources, and structural environments needed to support life. Europa Clipper conducts 49 close flybys of Europa at varying altitudes, mapping its surface in high resolution, probing its ice shell with radar, and sampling trace gases from any active plumes. The spacecraft’s total estimated lifecycle cost is approximately $5.2 billion. What it finds in the 2030s will heavily influence whether any follow-on lander mission enters development.

ESA’s JUICE spacecraft, launched in April 2023, will arrive at Jupiter in July 2031. Unlike Europa Clipper, JUICE will eventually settle into orbit around Ganymede, becoming the first spacecraft ever to orbit a moon other than Earth’s own. Ganymede also harbors a subsurface ocean and has its own magnetic field — a feature unique among solar system moons — and the mission will also study Callisto and conduct targeted flybys of Europa. Together, Europa Clipper and JUICE represent a coordinated two-agency investigation of the Jovian system that will define understanding of these worlds for generations.

Saturn’s Moon Titan Beckons

The most conceptually striking mission of the decade is unquestionably NASA’s Dragonfly. A nuclear-powered rotorcraft the size of a car, Dragonfly is designed to fly autonomously across the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, using eight rotors to take advantage of Titan’s dense nitrogen atmosphere and low gravity. It is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in July 2028 and will take approximately six years to reach its destination, arriving at Titan in late 2034.

The mission is led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory under principal investigator Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle. Dragonfly will travel up to 175 kilometers cumulatively across Titan’s surface during its primary mission, landing at multiple sites to sample the complex organic chemistry that coats the moon’s dunes, lake shores, and crater floors. Titan is the only world in the solar system other than Earth with stable liquid on its surface — though those liquids are methane and ethane, not water. It is also rich in complex carbon-based molecules that may resemble the prebiotic chemistry present on Earth before life emerged. NASA confirmed the mission in April 2024 with a revised total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion, reflecting delays caused by COVID-19 supply chain disruptions and a mandatory design review process.

The Wikipedia article on Dragonfly and the NASA Inspector General’s report both note the cost has grown substantially from the original proposal — nearly twice the initial estimate. This tension between scientific ambition and fiscal reality is one that will define mission selection throughout the decade. There’s something ly unresolved in how agencies like NASA will prioritize when multiple flagship-class missions compete for the same constrained budgets.

Venus Gets a Second Look

Venus was long neglected by planetary science, having received little dedicated attention since NASA’s Magellan mission ended in 1994. That changed after phosphine was controversially reported in Venus’s atmosphere in 2020, reigniting interest in the planet as a potential subject of astrobiological inquiry. Two smaller private missions and one larger private effort address the near-term window.

Rocket Lab and MIT’s Venus Life Finder mission was planned for a summer 2026 launch on an Electron rocket with a Photon upper stage. This small probe will descend through Venus’s clouds for approximately five minutes, using fluorescence spectroscopy to detect organic molecules. If it finds complex organics, a follow-up mission could attempt more detailed chemical analysis.

ESA’s EnVision and NASA’s DAVINCI are both targeting early 2030s launch windows, though as of early 2026 the fate of DAVINCI remained uncertain following the NASA science program cuts proposed in the administration’s 2026 budget request. EnVision is a Venus orbiter that will map the surface with radar and study the planet’s geological history, including whether Venus has been volcanically active in the recent past and whether it ever hosted a habitable climate. DAVINCI would descend through Venus’s atmosphere while sampling its chemistry, providing the most detailed compositional data yet from below the cloud layers.

New Telescopes and the Search for Other Worlds

Two major observatories slated for launch in 2026 will collectively transform the search for planets around other stars. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope completed final assembly at Goddard Space Flight Center on November 25, 2025, and was on track for launch as early as fall 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, with a contractual deadline of May 2027. Roman provides a panoramic field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared capability, conducting a census of exoplanets using gravitational microlensing and surveying billions of galaxies to probe dark energy. Over its five-year primary mission, scientists expect Roman to detect more than 100,000 new worlds and billions of galaxies. The Coronagraph Instrument on board will also be the first space-based coronagraph to directly image individual planets around nearby stars, testing technology that future missions will build upon.

ESA’s PLATO mission is also scheduled for launch in December 2026. PLATO — PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars — will search for small planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars by monitoring stellar brightness over long periods. Unlike Kepler and TESS, PLATO is designed to characterize not only the planets it finds but their host stars in extraordinary detail, allowing scientists to determine planetary ages and refine measurements of planetary radii and masses to levels previously unattainable. The mission will use 26 small cameras operating simultaneously and will stare at the same star fields for years at a time.

ESA’s ARIEL mission, targeted for 2031, will take a different approach: rather than finding new exoplanets, it will study the atmospheres of 1,000 already-known worlds across a wide range of sizes, temperatures, and types. ARIEL provides statistical baselines that no individual planet observation can offer. These three missions, Roman, PLATO, and ARIEL, together constitute a generational effort to characterize the population of planets in the galaxy with enough specificity to begin answering whether Earth-like conditions are common or rare.

The Gravitational Universe: LISA Takes Shape

One of the longest-anticipated missions in astrophysics history is ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, formally adopted by ESA’s Science Programme Committee in January 2024. LISA will be the first space-based observatory designed specifically to detect gravitational waves — the ripples in spacetime first confirmed by LIGO on Earth in 2015. Three spacecraft, separated by 2.5 million kilometers, will form a triangular constellation in a heliocentric orbit trailing Earth by 50 million kilometers. Laser beams exchanged between the spacecraft will measure distance changes down to billionths of a millimeter, allowing the mission to detect low-frequency gravitational waves that are entirely invisible to ground-based detectors.

Launch is planned for 2035 on an Ariane 6 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. OHB System AG signed the prime contract with ESA in June 2025 to begin spacecraft construction, and Thales Alenia Space signed contracts in June and January 2026 for key subsystems including the propulsion system. NASA is contributing ultra-stable lasers, 30-centimeter telescopes, and charge management systems from Goddard Space Flight Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

LISA’s science targets include merging supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, binary star systems spiraling toward each other across thousands of light-years, and potentially signatures from the very first moments after the Big Bang. It will work in conjunction with ESA’s planned NewAthena X-ray observatory, expected to launch in 2037, to observe the same events in gravitational and electromagnetic light simultaneously. Budget concerns associated with NASA’s proposed 2026 science cuts created uncertainty about NASA’s continued contribution, though construction on the European side continued uninterrupted.

Commercial and National Developments

The competitive pressure between NASA’s Artemis program and China’s lunar ambitions is reshaping international space politics in ways that are still developing. China’s International Lunar Research Station and the United States-led Artemis Accords represent two distinct frameworks for how nations ought to cooperate — or at least coexist — in cislunar space. As of April 2026, more than 40 nations had signed the Artemis Accords, while the ILRS program was attracting membership from nations seeking an alternative alignment.

Japan’s JAXA remains one of the most active exploration agencies of the decade. In addition to MMX and BepiColombo’s Mercury operations, JAXA is developing DESTINY+ for the Phaethon flyby and is collaborating with ESA and India on the LUPEX lunar polar exploration rover, which will investigate water ice at the Moon’s south pole. ESA’s Comet Interceptor mission, planned for 2028 or 2029, will be placed at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point to await an opportunity to fly past a dynamically new long-period comet — one that has never before passed close to the Sun and therefore preserves the pristine chemistry of the early solar system. The mission cannot target a specific comet because no such comet has been identified yet.

ESA’s ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover will use a new landing system developed with NASA after the withdrawal of the original Russian platform. Its 2028 launch window is shared with SR-1 Freedom and Dragonfly, making 2028 one of the most consequential individual years for space science in living memory.

On the commercial side, SpaceX’s Starship development is foundational to multiple Artemis missions. Its progress will determine whether the crewed lunar landing schedule holds. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which flew its first successful orbital mission in early 2025, is integral to Blue Moon lunar lander missions and the company’s own astronaut ambitions. The interplay between these commercial vehicles and government mission schedules creates a dependency structure far more complex than anything that existed during Apollo.

Solar Science and Space Weather

Several missions are also targeting the Sun itself and the interactions between solar activity and the broader planetary environment. ESA’s Solar Orbiter continues operations through at least late 2026, with a possible extended mission to 2030. The joint ESA-China SMILE mission is planned to launch on April 9, 2026, to study how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere. NASA’s SunRISE mission, a cluster of six CubeSats, was planned for a summer 2026 launch to map solar radio bursts and the Sun’s magnetic field, providing data directly relevant to protecting future astronauts from solar particle events during deep space missions.

Space weather has taken on operational significance as the number of crewed and commercial satellites in orbit has multiplied. Understanding when and how the Sun will produce damaging bursts of charged particles matters for astronaut safety on Artemis flights, for the survivability of satellite constellations, and for the long-term reliability of power grids on Earth. The investment in solar science during this decade reflects that rising awareness.

A Broader Picture of Exploration

A theme running through nearly every mission in this decade is international complexity. Nearly none of the major missions are purely national efforts. BepiColombo is a European-Japanese collaboration. SMILE combines ESA and China’s National Space Administration. LUPEX pairs JAXA with ISRO and ESA. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope involves CNES, ESA, JAXA, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy as partners alongside NASA. Even China’s Chang’e 7 carries payloads from Switzerland, Thailand, Italy, Russia, and South Korea.

This internationalization is partly practical — sharing costs and expertise makes missions financially viable that no single agency could afford alone. But it is also geopolitical. In a decade when direct cooperation between the United States and China in space is constrained by US law, cooperation through multilateral frameworks like scientific instrument packages offers a workaround that serves everyone’s interests in data sharing, even without formal bilateral agreements.

The question of who will be on the Moon first — NASA or China — remains ly open. Both programs have faced delays, cost overruns, and political pressure. Both are progressing. If NASA’s Artemis IV lands in early 2028 as scheduled and China’s crewed landing follows later that year or in 2029 or 2030, the near-simultaneous presence of both nations’ astronauts on the lunar surface within months of each other would represent a situation with no historical precedent: two major powers, not cooperating, exploring the same body in the same era.

The scientific ambition of the decade is also remarkable by any historical standard. By 2036, if current schedules hold, humanity will have returned samples from Mars’s moon Phobos, landed a flying drone on Titan, sent multiple spacecraft through Europa’s orbital environment, mapped Venus in unprecedented detail, and confirmed or refuted whether the clouds of Venus harbor organic chemistry. ESA’s JUICE will be orbiting Ganymede. LISA will be measuring gravitational waves from black hole mergers billions of light-years away. Roman and PLATO will have catalogued thousands of planets around other stars.

Not all of this will go to plan. History suggests that among a set of this many missions, at least a few will encounter launch failures, spacecraft anomalies, or funding cuts that alter or end them entirely. Predicting which ones is impossible. What is not in doubt is that the ten-year period from 2026 to 2036 will produce more new knowledge about the solar system and the wider universe than any comparable decade in the history of spaceflight.

Summary

The window from 2026 to 2036 encompasses one of the most ambitious periods of human exploration ever assembled. The Moon is preparing to receive human visitors for the first time in over five decades, with NASA, China, India, and a growing commercial sector all contributing. Mars is attracting nuclear-propelled spacecraft, new rovers, and competing sample-return architectures. The outer solar system will see Europa Clipper and JUICE reveal the secrets of Jovian ocean worlds, while Dragonfly explores Titan’s prebiotic chemistry from the air. New space telescopes will survey billions of galaxies and thousands of exoplanets. Gravitational wave astronomy will move into space for the first time with LISA in 2035. This period of exploration is happening simultaneously across multiple agencies, multiple nations, and multiple scientific disciplines, representing a qualitative shift in humanity’s relationship with the cosmos that no single mission — however spectacular — could deliver alone.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

When will astronauts next land on the Moon?

NASA’s Artemis IV mission is targeted for early 2028 as the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972. That mission will use the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, with the crew descending to the surface using SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System. China is separately pursuing its own crewed lunar landing by 2030 using the Long March 10 rocket and the Lanyue lander.

What is NASA’s SR-1 Freedom mission?

SR-1 Freedom is NASA’s planned nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft, scheduled to launch toward Mars in December 2028. It will be the first nuclear-propelled spacecraft to leave Earth’s sphere of influence, using a 20-kilowatt fission reactor to power xenon ion thrusters. The mission will deploy three Ingenuity-class helicopters called Skyfall to scout future human landing sites and map subsurface water ice on Mars.

What is NASA’s Dragonfly mission and when will it reach Titan?

Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA, confirmed with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion. It is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in July 2028 and arrive at Saturn’s moon Titan in late 2034. The eight-rotor craft will fly autonomously between sites on Titan’s surface, analyzing organic chemistry relevant to the origin of life.

When will Europa Clipper reach Jupiter?

NASA’s Europa Clipper, launched in October 2024, will arrive at Jupiter in April 2030 following a gravity assist at Earth in December 2026. It will then conduct 49 close flybys of Europa to assess whether that moon’s subsurface ocean has the conditions needed to support life. The mission’s total lifecycle cost is estimated at approximately $5.2 billion.

What is China planning for the Moon over the next decade?

China’s Chang’e 7 spacecraft is expected to launch in August 2026 to survey the lunar south pole for water ice. Chang’e 8 is planned for 2029 to test in-situ resource utilization including 3D printing of structures from lunar regolith. A crewed landing using the Lanyue lander and Mengzhou spacecraft is planned by 2030, and China aims to establish a permanent International Lunar Research Station with Russia and other partners during the 2030s.

What are JUICE and how does it differ from Europa Clipper?

ESA’s JUICE, launched in April 2023, is a Jupiter orbiter that will ultimately enter orbit around Ganymede, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a moon other than Earth’s own. While Europa Clipper focuses on multiple flybys of Europa to determine its habitability, JUICE will study all three of Jupiter’s large icy moons — Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — and will characterize Ganymede’s interior and unique magnetic field over an extended orbital campaign beginning in 2031.

What is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and what will it study?

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is an infrared observatory assembled at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and on track for launch as early as fall 2026. It has a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s and will survey billions of galaxies to probe dark energy, conduct a census of exoplanets through gravitational microlensing, and directly image planets around nearby stars using its onboard coronagraph. Its five-year primary mission is expected to detect more than 100,000 worlds beyond our solar system.

What happened to the Mars Sample Return mission?

NASA’s original joint NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission, designed to retrieve samples cached by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth by approximately 2033, was effectively cancelled due to projected costs approaching $10 billion. The decision left those cached samples without a confirmed retrieval plan. China’s Tianwen-3 is now pursuing its own independent Mars sample return mission with a possible 2028 launch, while SR-1 Freedom’s Skyfall helicopters will support site preparation for eventual crewed retrieval.

What is LISA and why is it significant?

LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, is a planned ESA-led space observatory consisting of three spacecraft flying in a triangular formation with 2.5-million-kilometer separations, targeted for launch in 2035 on an Ariane 6 rocket. It will be the first space-based observatory dedicated to gravitational wave detection, measuring ripples in spacetime generated by supermassive black hole mergers and other extreme cosmic events invisible to ground-based detectors. ESA formally adopted the mission in January 2024, and NASA is contributing telescopes, laser systems, and charge management technology.

What is India planning for human spaceflight this decade?

ISRO is targeting its first crewed orbital mission, Gaganyaan, for 2027, with three preceding uncrewed test flights. Chandrayaan-4, a government-approved lunar sample-return mission, is planned for 2028, which would make India only the fourth entity after the United States, Russia, and China to retrieve material from another world. ISRO’s chairman also disclosed plans for a national space station with a first module launching in 2028 and full construction targeted for 2035.