Updated November 2, 2026. A meteor shower is a burst of visible meteors that happens when Earth passes through the stream of debris left by a comet or an asteroid. In the 2026 to 2027 season, the standouts are the Geminids, which peak on December 13 and 14, 2026. The Perseids follow on August 12…
Updated November 2, 2026. NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars on February 18, 2021, in Jezero Crater, and the sources I reviewed say it is still operating. The plan to bring its samples back to Earth, however, lost its funding in 2026. Japan and China are preparing missions of their own. Perseverance and the…
Updated November 2, 2026. A reusable rocket has parts that come back to Earth and fly again. The goal is to lower the cost of each launch. The math looks simple. According to Wikipedia, the first reusable stages flew only with the space shuttle, in 1981. A vertical landing of an orbital booster came on…
Updated November 2, 2026. Blue Origin is the space company of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. It builds two rockets. New Shepard makes short trips to the edge of space, and New Glenn is a large orbital rocket. The company is also developing the Blue Moon lunar lander, which is meant to land on…
Updated November 2, 2026. China has its own space station, Tiangong. It has also brought back samples from the far side of the Moon, which no one had done before. Its stated goal is to put astronauts on the lunar surface before 2030. Between the station in orbit and that goal lie missions in progress…
Updated November 2, 2026. The International Space Station, or ISS, is a research laboratory that circles Earth about 250 miles (400 km) up. According to Wikipedia, people have lived aboard it without a break since November 2, 2000, which is more than 25 years. The station has an end date, because it is expected to…
Updated November 2, 2026. The James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared observatory that launched on December 25, 2021. According to Wikipedia, it can detect objects up to 100 times fainter than the ones Hubble can see. Its first full-color images were released on July 11, 2022. It cost just under $10 billion and works…
Updated November 2, 2026. NASA is the space agency of the United States, and it is the best known in the world. The law that created it was signed on July 29, 1958. The agency began operating on October 1 of that same year, with headquarters in Washington. Its headquarters is in Washington, D.C., in…
Updated November 2, 2026. The Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-31. It has a mirror 7 feet 10 inches (2.4 meters) wide and has orbited Earth for more than 36 years. According to Wikipedia, it is expected to keep working until sometime between 2030 and…
Updated November 2, 2026. Artemis is NASA’s program to return astronauts to the Moon, and the program is now flying crews again. In April 2026, the Artemis II mission carried four people around the Moon and broke the record for the farthest humans have traveled from Earth. The next flight, Artemis III, changed roles. The…