The Consumer Electronics Show is coming up in January, and while most of the company’s there will be for consumer products, some space industry companies will showcase their projects. One of those companies is Sierra Space.

A new year means a new theme for Kennedy Space Center’s most prominent building. So we say goodbye to the “Launch America” campaign this year and hello to the Artemis Program.

This year’s TIME “Person of the Year” title goes to the man who led the space industry to a new era of affordability and reusability, built an electric vehicle empire, and tweets about pooping in his spare time. Of course, we are talking about Elon Musk.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos plans to send Cosmonaut Anna Kikina to space on a SpaceX Dragon Capsule next September.

On Saturday morning, the crew of Blue Origin’s NS-19 launched just past the boundary of space. This time the New Shepard capsule was full.

Watch Alan Shepard’s eldest daughter Laura Shepard Churchley and Good Morning American co-anchor Michael Strahan launch to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

This has been a big year for Space Tourism, from the sub-orbital hops of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to the multi-day orbital journey of the Inspiration4 crew. This raised a number of questions about what it means to be an astronaut. Many claimed that these space-tourists are nothing but passengers, and calling them astronauts dilutes the title provided to space heroes like Neil Armstrong, while others said that reaching space should be enough for the title. The FAA has now put this question to bed, issuing this year’s space tourists FAA Commercial Astronaut wings, but shutting down the program moving forward.

It’s crazy to think it’s already been one year since SpaceX‘s first high-altitude Starship flight, but here we are. Starship SN8 might not have landed in one piece, but the baby step led to SN15’s landing several months later.

Starting Wednesday morning, we saw three launches from three different continents within 24 hours. It all started in Russia with a launch to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket.

NASA‘s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) will launch this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Initially, it was assigned to fly on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket, but it was moved to SpaceX to save on launch costs. IXPE’s three identical telescopes will study the polarization of cosmic X-rays. Its mission will be to map out the magnetic fields of black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, supernova remnants, magnetars, quasars, and active galactic nuclei. The total cost of IXPE and its two-year planned mission is $188 million.

Launch Date: Thursday, December 9, 1:00 – 2:30 a.m. EST

Early Tuesday morning United Launch Alliance launched its fourth and final Atlas V rocket of 2021. For STP-3, it was ULA’s largest variant with five solid rocket motors.

United Launch Alliance is scheduled to conduct the third Space Test Program mission, or STP-3, for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command in the early hours of Tuesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Here’s how to the ULA’s Atlas V rocket launch.

On Monday, NASA announced the newest class of astronaut candidates. Ten candidates were selected by NASA, including a SpaceX employee, military test pilots, and engineers.

Astra announced today that its next launch will be from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This will be the company’s first from the state with more following in the future.

This week we saw new contracts from NASA, Rocket Lab’s groundbreaking design for Neutron, SpaceX pizza, and oh yeah there was an email from Elon Musk about Starship. Catch up on this week’s top stories below.

With Boeing’s Starliner taking a few years longer than planned to get off the ground, NASA intends to purchase three more Crew Dragon flights to the ISS from SpaceX.

This week SpaceX is preparing to launch a fresh branch of 48 Starlink satellites on top of its Falcon 9 rocket. This is the second Starlink mission to launch from Florida’s Space Coast since SpaceX completed its original orbital shell on Starlink L28 in May. The name, Starlink 4-3, stands for it being the third launch of the fourth orbital shell of satellites. Although 4-2 hasn’t launched yet, the names are set up well before the launch takes place. This shell will contain 336 satellites at an orbit of 560 km.

Alongside the Starlink satellites will be two BlackSky satellites. We’ve seen plenty of these Earth-observing satellites launch on Rocket Lab’s Electron.

Launch Date: Wednesday, December 2, 6:12 p.m. EST

On Thursday, NASA announced the selected contractors to develop designs for the future commercial space stations to replace the International Space Station.

As promised, Rocket Lab gave us the details on its next generation rocket called Neutron. One thing that’s certain is everything has changed compared to its current Electron launch system.

On Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris chaired her first meeting of the National Space Council (NSpC) of the new administration. Before this meeting, we were unsure how Biden’s NSpC would work, but it’s clear now it will continue the work President Trump forged – but now also climate change.

A pair of astronauts planned to conduct a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station on Tuesday, but NASA delayed the plan to repair a faulty antenna system. The scheduled spacewalk was pushed back due to the risk of debris endangering astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron.

A new report issued by the NASA OIG voices concerns surrounding ISS decommission. The International Space Station is set to retire soon, and the agency itself doesn’t have a successor in the works.

In an internal email seen by Space Explored, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX intends to build “several million [Starlink user terminal] units per year.” In order to have the internet bandwidth to support this goal, SpaceX will need to deploy its V2 Starlink satellites in orbit. It turns out, however, that this goal is entirely reliant on its next-gen Starship rocket that is currently in development in South Texas.

In an email sent to SpaceX employees, obtained by Space Explored, Elon Musk addressed the ‘crisis’ of Starship Raptor engine production and said the company could face a ‘genuine risk of bankruptcy’ if the company is unable to achieve a Starship flight rate of once every two weeks next year.