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At 6:32 PM ET Wednesday afternoon, NASA launched its Artemis 2 mission from Kennedy Space Center. This mission is the first crewed mission of the Artemis Program, an initiative to return humans to the surface of the Moon.

Later today, NASA is set to launch its Artemis 2 mission around the Moon. This is the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The launch will be live streamed from various sources, including official and unofficial streams. Here’s your guide for how to find all of today’s and future coverage.

NASA’s Artemis 2 mission to the Moon is set to launch as soon as later tonight, and it will be the most influential mission to space in recent history. But why? This will not be our first time going to the Moon, and they aren’t even landing. So why is Artemis 2 so important?

After waiting years, the time is finally here for another launch of NASA’s Space Launch System with Artemis 2. This time the stakes are much higher as a crew of four will be riding on top and will circle the Moon, a first since Apollo 17 back in 1972.

As NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope advances toward launch, the mission is beginning to transition from a completed observatory into an active scientific program. In recent weeks, the agency has opened the first round of community science proposals for the telescope.

As NASA’s Artemis program moves from planning into early missions, public attention tends to focus on the spacecraft carrying astronauts back to the Moon. Heavy-lift rockets, crew capsules, and lunar landers dominate the conversation around humanity’s return to deep space. Yet beneath those visible systems, another layer of the space economy is beginning to take shape. 

At the edge of the Arctic, buried deep inside a frozen mountain on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, lies one of humanity’s quietest insurance policies. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores more than a million seed samples from around the world to form a living archive designed to protect the genetic diversity of Earth’s crops in the event of disaster.

Astrolab and Interlune announced plans to collaborate on integrating excavation technology with Astrolab’s FLEX rover platform. Prototype testing is expected to take place at the Texas A&M University Space Institute, currently under construction near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced changes to the Artemis mission profiles that will lead to at least a one-year delay in returning humans to the lunar surface. However, the agency believes these changes will strengthen the program overall, allowing for faster launch turnarounds and better testing of flight hardware before it’s needed for surface ops.

Virgin Galactic has become one of the most intriguing, controversial, and headline-grabbing players in the commercial space industry. Founded in 2004 as part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, the company set out to make space tourism a reality by flying paying customers to the edge of space on reusable suborbital spaceplanes. While its journey has been far from smooth, the company is positioning itself for a comeback in 2026 after an extended operational pause.

NASA has signed a contract with Vast for the sixth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, with a launch targeted no earlier than summer 2027. The mission is expected to last up to 14 days in orbit and will fly aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.

As NASA moves deeper into a new era of space-based astronomy, another flagship observatory is quietly approaching the launch pad. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to survey the universe at a scale no previous space telescope has achieved, has completed assembly and is undergoing final environmental testing ahead of being shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a planned liftoff as soon as late 2026.

As NASA’s Artemis program moves forward, questions occasionally arise about the role of the Lunar Gateway, the planned lunar-orbiting station intended to support long-term exploration. It remains part of NASA’s publicly stated architecture, but it is also reasonable to examine what Artemis could look like if that element were delayed, scaled back, or ultimately not flown. 

SpaceX is signaling a recalibration of its near-term priorities, placing renewed emphasis on the Moon as the fastest path toward a self-sustaining off-world settlement, while maintaining Mars as a longer-term objective. The shift is being framed not as a retreat from interplanetary ambition, but as a sequencing decision driven by logistics, cadence, and risk reduction. 

When people picture Artemis 2, the first human flight to the Moon in more than 50 years, they usually visualize Orion’s cone-shaped crew capsule riding atop NASA’s Space Launch System, the American heavy-lift rocket that gets it off the pad in Florida. But once Orion is in space, the mission quickly becomes a story of international systems engineering, with one of the most critical pieces being European-built.

In a statement today, Blue Origin announced it was pausing all New Shepard launches for at least two years in order to shift its priorities to its lunar programs in support of national initiatives. This comes as the company has made multiple moves to bolster itself as a new player in national defense and civil space.

When astronomers talk about the “dark universe,” they’re usually referring to things that can’t be seen directly – dark matter, which makes up most of the universe’s mass, and the earliest stages of galaxy formation. Now, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have helped confirm the existence of a rare object that connects both ideas: a starless, gas-rich structure dominated by dark matter, known as Cloud-9.

Blue Origin announced yet another project it had undertaken for its missions for space domination across all sectors. Called Terrawave, it will be a constellation of over 5,000 satellites designed to bring symmetrical, high-speed internet connections worldwide.

After three decades of discovering exoplanets, astronomers are turning to a harder question: which of those distant worlds might truly be capable of supporting life? NASA has taken an early step toward answering it by selecting industry partners to mature key technologies for the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, a next-generation space telescope designed to directly image Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars.

As the International Space Station approaches the end of its operational life later this decade, low Earth orbit is entering a transition that may be just as consequential as the station’s original construction. NASA has made clear that, rather than replacing the ISS with another government-owned outpost, it intends to purchase services from commercially owned space stations, freeing the agency to focus its resources on deep space exploration and the Artemis program.

After a four-mile ride, Artemis 2‘s Space Launch System arrived at its launch site ahead of a pre-launch test that will determine when NASA’s return to human flights to the Moon can begin.

Early Thursday morning, the crew of SpaceX Crew-11 safely splashed down off the coast of California. The crew completed their long-duration mission on the International Space Station but had it cut short by a handful of weeks due to a crew medical concern, warranting an early return.

NASA shared the launch data available for its Artemis 2 mission to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in over 50 years. There are a lot of stipulations regarding when Artemis 2’s SLS rocket can launch, which also means there are far fewer days than you may think.