A new age of commercial moon exploration is upon us, and one of the most exciting missions yet is about to launch--one laden with rovers, a drill, and even a hopper spacecraft that will try to "jump" into a permanently dark lunar crater to search for ice. The IM-2 mission, from Texas-based company Intuitive Machines, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, February 26. The lander, nicknamed Athena and about the size of a car, is partially funded by NASA, as the US space agency attempts to create a new lunar economy that can support upcoming planned human missions to the moon. "NASA and the space industry is creating a new business, getting science and payloads to the surface of the moon," says Laura Forczyk, founder of the Georgia-based space consultancy firm Astralytical. "And these uncrewed missions are preparing us to send humans."

On March 8, a piece of space debris plunged through a roof in Naples, FL, ripped through two floors and (fortunately) missed the son of homeowner Alejandro Otero. On Tuesday, NASA confirmed the results of its analysis of the incident. As suspected, it's a piece of equipment dumped from the International Space Station (ISS) three years ago. NASA's investigation of the object at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral confirmed it was a piece of the EP-9 support equipment used to mount batteries onto a cargo pallet, which the ISS' robotic arm dropped on March 11, 2021. The haul, made up of discarded nickel-hydrogen batteries, was expected to orbit Earth between two to four years (it split the difference, lasting almost exactly three) "before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere," as NASA predicted at the time.

NASA's first mission to the moon's surface since the Apollo missions in the 1970s has begun with the launch of a new Vulcan rocket carrying a robotic lander with seven scientific instruments. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 7.18am GMT (2.18am EST) on 8 January, forms the first part of NASA's ambitious Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, with six more launches planned for this year. Unlike previous NASA missions, which were carried out almost entirely in-house, these efforts will be public-private partnerships, aided by space companies. The Vulcan rocket was built by both Lockheed Martin and Boeing as part of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), and the Peregrine lander was built by space robotics company Astrobotic. The lander will take 46 days to reach the moon, before attempting to land on 23 February.

Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the moon in Greek mythology. NASA has chosen her to personify its path back to the moon, which will see astronauts return to the lunar surface by 2025 - including the first woman and the next man. Artemis 1, formerly Exploration Mission-1, is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the moon and Mars. Artemis 1 will be the first integrated flight test of NASA's deep space exploration system: the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Artemis 1 will be an uncrewed flight that will provide a foundation for human deep space exploration, and demonstrate our commitment and capability to extend human existence to the moon and beyond.

Millions have dreamt about driving across the US -- but now science has taken the guesswork out of planning the epic trip. An Orgeon-based data scientist used a sophisticated algorithm to generate the perfect journey, factoring in things like logistics for traffic and the most scenic routes for a three-month vacation. Each stop is a national natural landmark, national historic site, national park or national monument, all in the lower 48 states. In total the route boasts 50 iconic sights. The 13,699-mile-long route stops at Mount Rushmore, the San Francisco Cable Cars, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and other well-known spots.

NASA announced that the launch of the Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory and College of Science-led Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE, is scheduled for December 2023. The NASA-funded instrument will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to the International Space Station. AWE Principal Investigator Dr. Michael Taylor from USU's College of Science leads a team of scientists that will provide new details about how the weather on Earth interacts with, and affects, space weather. To do that, the AWE instrument, measuring about 54 centimeters by one meter and weighing less than 57 kilograms, will peer into Earth's upper atmosphere from an orbit of about 400 kilometers above to provide unprecedented images of Earth's gravity waves as they rise through the mesopause, the mesosphere's upper boundary, and into other parts of the ionosphere. Atmospheric gravity waves are generated by weather events on Earth, including strong winds that shoot upward as they collide with large mountains, hurricanes that create gravity waves directly through high winds and indirectly by interacting with underlying topography, and seismic activities such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Impacts from atmospheric gravity waves and space weather can adversely affect satellites that provide seemingly ubiquitous services across the globe and for human spaceflight missions.

A 3D-printed rocket built by California-based startup Relativity Space was due for blastoff on its first mission to orbit on Wednesday in a key test of the US company's novel strategy for cutting manufacturing costs. The 35-metre-tall (115-foot) Terran 1 rocket, 85 percent of which was fabricated from a 3D printer, was set to lift off from a United States Space Force base launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 1 pm Eastern time (18:00 GMT) on Wednesday. "The launch that we're preparing for is an opportunity to demonstrate a whole bunch of things all at once," said Josh Brost, Relativity Space's senior vice president of revenue. He called the Terran 1 "by far the largest 3D-printed structure that's ever been assembled". The rocket – nicknamed GLHF for "Good Luck, Have Fun" – will not carry a commercial payload, as it is an inaugural flight, but will instead carry a failed 3D-printed rocket part from a previous attempt to build a craft.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A Tokyo company aimed for the moon with its own private lander Sunday, blasting off atop a SpaceX rocket with the United Arab Emirates' first lunar rover and a toylike robot from Japan that's designed to roll around up there in the gray dust. It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the moon. The company ispace designed its craft to use minimal fuel to save money and leave more room for cargo. By contrast, NASA's Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the moon last month. The lunar flyby mission ends Sunday with a Pacific splashdown.

If you happened to be sneaking onto Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in late July, you wouldn't have made it far. Last month, Space Force conducted a demonstration where two robot dogs built by Ghost Robotics conducted patrols in advance of potential broader adoption of the platforms for critical perimeter security. The robot dogs are known as Vision 60 Q-UGVs, for quadruped unmanned ground vehicles. Bearing more than a passing similarity to Boston Dynamics' YouTube sensation quadrupeds, they are designed as task agnostic roving sensor platforms capable of detecting a variety of threats. Ghost Robotics describes its Vision 60 model as a "mid-sized high-endurance, agile and durable all-weather ground drone for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications."

'Robot dogs' are being tested by the US Space Force so they can carry out patrols of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The $150,000 (£123,000) four-legged bots can be equipped with a wide variety of optical and acoustic sensors, allowing them to serve as the'eyes and ears' around sensitive areas of the base. They are being used for patrols'to save significant man hours', according to a statement from the Department of Defense. Space Launch Delta 45 – the unit responsible for all space launch operations from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral – used at least two Vision 60 unmanned ground vehicles (Q-UGVs), or'robot dogs', during the two-day test last month. Built by Ghost Robotics, the robots can be operated either autonomously or by a human controller.