NASA officials projected confidence today in their plans to launch the Artemis III earth-orbital test flight in mid-2027 and land American astronauts on the Moon in 2028.  Whether SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK2 gets there first is up in the air, but NASA expects both will deliver crews to the surface by the end of that year. The South Pole is still the destination, but they acknowledged more data is needed from robotic landers before making a final decision.

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NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel will soon open a formal recommendation that NASA re-examine plans for the Artemis IV mission.  Currently that will be a landing at the Moon’s South Pole, the first time American astronauts set foot on the Moon since 1972. ASAP has a number of concerns especially about the Human Landing Systems being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. ASAP also pointed out challenges in NASA’s future low Earth orbit plans both for operations of the International Space Station and commercial replacements for it as SpaceX phases out Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft.

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A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identifies four locations on the Moon separate from the South Pole where human exploration could yield valuable scientific findings. The NASA-requested study picked one site on the farside, two on the nearside, and one on the western edge that straddles both. NASA is intent on establishing a Moon Base at the South Pole and landing astronauts there starting in 2028, but these are options for the future or if those plans change.

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency successfully launch the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission this afternoon EDT. MMX will not land on Mars, but instead explore its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, returning samples of Phobos to Earth in 2031. Japan and the U.S. have returned samples of asteroids, but this will be the first from a moon other than our own and could solve the mystery of whether Phobos is an asteroid captured by Mars’s gravity or a piece of Mars ejected by a collision.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 18-24, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess, except for pro forma sessions, until after the midterm elections.

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is getting ready to launch its Martian Moons eXploration mission early next week. The spacecraft will collect samples of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, and return them to Earth in 2031. Today NASA highlighted its role in the MMX mission, including two scientific instruments, MEGANE and P-Sampler, that will help determine whether Phobos and its companion, Deimos, are captured asteroids or remnants of a collision.

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The Starship second stage of SpaceX’s Integrated Flight Test-13 is back at Starbase, TX after surprisingly surviving splashdown in the Indian Ocean in July. To date, it is the only Starship not to explode after reaching the water and tipping over, with residual fuel usually causing an explosion. SpaceX was delighted to get post-recovery data especially about performance of the tiles, but returning it to Texas was no easy task. Meanwhile, the FAA is opening a public comment period on SpaceX’s request to significantly increase the number of launches and landings at Starbase.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 11-17, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess, except for pro forma sessions, until after the midterm elections.

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NASA’s Crew-12 mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California this morning, bringing the 237-day mission to an end. Their replacements on Crew-13 arrived a week ago and the busy cadence on the International Space Station continues with a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship departing tomorrow and a SpaceX Cargo Dragon arriving next week.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 4-10, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess until after the midterm elections, except for pro forma sessions.

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