NASA says Albania will sign the Artemis Accords at its Washington headquarters at 12 p.m. EDT on Monday, 21 September 2026, becoming the 73rd country signatory — the third to join in three weeks, after Türkiye and Djibouti.
NASA says the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has propellant for at least 22 years of potential science — more than double its 10-year design life — after an Aug. 31 burn used 18 kg of a 200 kg budget.
NASA said on September 18, 2026 that a $946 million contract modification buys three more SpaceX crew flights to the space station — Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 — taking the total to 17 missions and $5.92 billion through 2030.
NASA has confirmed and named McGetchin crater, a 222-meter-wide scar that appeared on the Moon between April and May 2024 — the largest freshly formed impact crater ever verified in the solar system.
NASA has confirmed Elias 2-24 b, a Jupiter-mass world less than a million years old orbiting a star 450 light-years away. It is the youngest planet ever found, and current formation models cannot yet explain it.
A Falcon 9 carried the classified USSF-259 mission from Vandenberg's SLC-4E on 16 September 2026 — the third classified Space Force flight from that pad in about a month, under an NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract whose ceiling was raised to roughly $17 billion in July.
A paper published September 14, 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal finds that tidal forces would drag a Venusian moon inside the planet's Roche limit within 0.03 to 1.7 billion years — no catastrophic impact required.
A first course-correction burn on August 31 used under 10% of its budgeted fuel, and NASA now says the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has propellant for at least 22 years — more than double its 10-year design life.
A Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Sept. 13, 2026 with the last three O3b mPOWER satellites, a flight Spaceflight Now and Space.com reported as the 700th of SpaceX's Falcon family.
Rocket Lab said on September 11, 2026 that it filed a bid protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office over NASA's decision to award the Mars Telecommunications Network to Blue Origin under a firm-fixed-price contract worth up to about $700 million.
Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket reached orbit on Sept. 5, the first privately built rocket to do so from mainland Europe, ending a 30-second failure in 2025.
ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo spacecraft separated its transfer module from two science orbiters on September 3, kicking off an eight-month arrival sequence at Mercury after an eight-year, 10-billion-kilometer journey.
NASA awarded Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a dedicated Mars communications orbiter, set to be operational by 2030.
Fermi Explorer Mission plans to launch a probe toward Alpha Centauri by 2029, using an AI-designed trajectory from Physical Superintelligence to become humanity's first interstellar spacecraft.
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and ESA's Sophie Adenot spent 6.5 hours outside the ISS replacing a navigation reflector and other maintenance work.
NASA's $4.3 billion Roman Space Telescope lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Sunday, beginning a month-long cruise to map billions of galaxies.
A deep partial lunar eclipse covered about 93% of the Moon in Earth's shadow early Friday, turning it copper-red for skywatchers across the Americas, Europe and Africa.
A private rescue mission to save NASA's aging Swift Observatory from an uncontrolled reentry has failed, after the rescue craft LINK lost maneuvering control weeks after launch.
SpaceX will build a second Starbase on 125,000 acres in southern Louisiana, targeting construction in 2027 and a first Starship launch in 2029, with 10 launch pads planned.
SpaceX reached its 100th Falcon 9 launch of 2026 on Tuesday, flying booster B1067 for a record 37th time — closing in on the Space Shuttle's 39-flight mark.
NASA's Roman Space Telescope is set to launch August 30 on a Falcon Heavy. Its microlensing survey is expected to find about 2,500 exoplanets other methods miss.