On Nov. 4, 2015, the United States Air Force planned to launch an experimental rocket for small satellites from the Pacific Missile Range Facility off Barking Sands, Kauai, Hawaii. The launch didn't according to plan.
For this mission, the Air Force was testing out the Super Strypi rocket. The rocket used a rail to help with the liftoff.
Super Strypi left the ground, but the rocket quickly spun out of control. When it crashed, it destroyed all ofthe tiny satellites riding aboard the rocket. The cause? Likely a problem with the first stage motor.
The mission lost 13 tiny satellites known as cubesats. Cubesats are a popular option for space missions, because they are small and cheap, and they often operate in swarms. After failing to launch this batch of cubesats, the Super Strypi program never recovered from its failure, and the Air Force never tried launching another one.
The U.S. Air Force’s rail-launched Super Strypi rocket lifted off from Hawaii about 9:45 p.m. local time on Nov. 3, 2015,, roared toward the sky and failed less than a minute into the long-awaited flight. (Image credit: U.S. Air Force)
Why it mattered
The Super Strypi rocket was a 21st century take on a 1960s rocket. It was designed to be a modern version of the three-stage Strypi sounding rocket used for for reentry vehicle and anti-missile target tests. Its three stages, powered by Aerojet Rocketdyne solid rocket motors, was designed to reach orbit, rather than suborbital trajectories common to most sounding rockets.
The U.S. Air Force hoped Super Strypi would be a new tool for quick-response launches based on national security needs. Altogether, it was designed to launch small payloads of up to 300 kilograms into space for a mere $15 million per mission.
The rocket's primary payload was the ORS-4 satellite, short for Operationally Responsive Space 4, which was built for the Air Force by engineers at the University of Hawaii (who nicknamed it HiakaSat). It was designed to capture Earth imagery and monitor the environment over the course of a year.
The 12 other payloads on Super Strypi included eight cubesats for NASA's Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks mission, and as well as four others for universities that had been added as secondary payloads.
Since the Super Strypi failure, neither the Air Force or Space Force has opted to use the rocket for a new mission. The Space Force has turned instead to commercial companies for fast-turnaround launch support.
In June of this year, the U.S. Space Force teamed up with Rocket Lab to launch the Victus Haze mission with just 17 hours of notice, a new record to demonstrate short-turnaround launch response.
President Trump issued a declaration yesterday (Nov. 3), proclaiming space open to all humanity for exploration, and the right of American citizens to develop and settle the solar system according to United States laws.
"The American Declaration of Freedom in Space," describes space as the "province of all humans" and asserts that the United States will lead humanity's expansion into the cosmos. The proclamation reiterates the administration's goals with NASA's Artemis program to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and eventually sending astronauts to Mars, but introduces no new funding, programs or policy directives.
"Our Nation will lead the way in the exploration, development, use, and settlement of these new frontiers — forging an interplanetary civilization founded on the enduring and inalienable rights of freedom and individual liberty," the document says.
Trump invoked America's "frontier spirit," highlighting Apollo 11 astronauts as the first people in history to walk on the moon's surface and robotic rovers exploring Mars as examples of U.S. leadership, and emphasized the country's flourishing commercial space sector helping ensure "American space superiority for all eternity."
"The nation that leads in space will shape the future of humanity," the declaration says, and pledges that America will carry the values of faith, freedom and individual liberty into an interplanetary civilization.
The proclamation also highlights the success of NASA's Artemis II mission in April, which carried four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and set a record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. The follow-up to that mission, Artemis III, is scheduled to launch next summer (2027), and will test rendezvous and docking operations between NASA's Orion spacecraft and the program's two commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit.
Artemis IV will be the program's first lunar landing mission, and is targeted for 2028. A December 2025 executive order from the President reaffirmed the goal of meeting that timeline, as well as the deployment of the initial elements for a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.
Trump's declaration yesterday does not establish new NASA programs, allocate additional funding or issue instructions to federal agencies. Its sweeping language, though, does echo some of the principles in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which guarantees freedom of exploration while prohibiting national sovereignty claims on other planets.
NASA's Swift space telescope has reached the end of its long and winding road.
Swift fell uncontrolled to Earth today (Nov. 4), 22 years after it launched but just three months after a private spacecraft was supposed to boost it to a higher, life-extending orbit.
The 3,200-pound (1,450 kilograms) observatory reentered Earth's atmosphere at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT) today over northern Sumatra, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who cited U.S. Space Force data. The fall likely didn't make much of an impact; NASA officials predicted beforehand that most of the minibus-sized Swift would burn up as it fell, and they put the odds of any of the surviving pieces hurting anyone on Earth at just 1 in 2,100.
Swift — officially known as the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer — launched to Earth orbit in November 2004 on a two-year mission to study gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful explosions in the universe. "Swift" was not an acronym but rather referred to the spacecraft's observational agility.
"Swift needed to detect and locate gamma-ray bursts, communicate their position to other observatories, and then swing its telescopes around to image the burst locations before their afterglows faded out," S. Bradley Cenko, Swift's principal investigator (PI) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in an Oct. 23 statement. "This typically took Swift about a minute to do."
Swift didn't just observe GRBs. It also studied a variety of other cosmic bodies and phenomena, from faraway supernova explosions and feeding black holes to asteroids and comets in our own solar system.
And it kept doing this long after its warranty expired — for about 20 years after, in fact. The space telescope didn't conduct its final science observation until this past Oct. 20. (Swift underwent a name change during this stretch: In 2018, it was rechristened the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory after its first PI, who died the previous year.)
"Swift delivered an incredible, lasting return on investment for the nation, designed for a two-year primary mission but productive for more than 10 times as long," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in the same Oct. 23 statement.
"In that time, Swift played a major role in advancing our understanding of the changing universe and was part of a revolution in astrophysics that showed how critical rapid-response observations are to the entire community," he added.
Katalyst Space’s LINK robotic servicing spacecraft captured this view of one of its solar panels in Earth orbit in August 2026. (Image credit: Katalyst Space))
Swift was incredibly productive, observing more than 2,000 GRBs and 1,400 supernovas over the course of its long scientific life. But it could have gathered even more data, had a dramatic rescue mission worked out.
In September 2025, NASA awarded the Arizona company Katalyst Space a $30 million contract to design, launch and operate a robotic spacecraft that would meet up with Swift and boost it to a higher orbit, thus extending its operational life.
Swift was falling back to Earth: It had no onboard thrusters to counteract the effect of atmospheric drag, which had been pulling the observatory down ever since it launched. The process was accelerating as Swift got lower, so Katalyst had to work fast. And the company did: It launched its refrigerator-sized, three-armed LINK servicing spacecraft on July 3, targeting an August capture of Swift.
That didn't happen, however. LINK suffered problems with its propulsion system and orientation-maintaining reaction wheels, which nixed the planned meetup. Still, it was a worthwhile effort, according to NASA.
"From the beginning, this was a high-risk, high-reward mission," Domagal-Goldman said in a statement on Sept. 25, the day that LINK itself crashed back to Earth.
"And while we'll be sad to see Swift's mission come to a close, we knew this boost effort would be worthwhile either way — advancing U.S. spacecraft servicing technology, challenging us to meet unprecedented mission timelines, and testing how we operate satellites to extend their time in low Earth orbit," he added.
Swift's crash today wasn't exactly unusual, by the way. At least three large objects — dead satellites or spent rocket bodies — fall back to Earth every day on average, a 2025 report found. And that number is bound to rise in the coming years, as humanity builds out more and more megaconstellations in Earth orbit.
The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission in April 2026 caused significant disturbances in Earth's ionosphere that could have triggered temporary, localized errors in GPS positioning, a new study has found.
The study, by a team of researchers from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, analyzed data from high-precision networks of fixed, ground-based GPS receivers, used by U.S. scientific institutions to measure the minuscule motions of Earth's tectonic plates in the lead-up to earthquakes. By measuring how long it takes GPS signals to travel from space to ground stations, the researchers were able to reconstruct how the passage of the Artemis II mission's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket changed the concentrations of free electrons in the ionosphere — the electrically charged layer of Earth's atmosphere at altitudes above 30 miles (50 kilometers).
The measurements found that the ionospheric disturbances resulting from the sheer power of the Artemis II launch were more significant than any caused by other rocket launches to date and up to ten times more intense than those observed following the test launches of SpaceX's Starship, which is twice as powerful as the SLS based on liftoff thrust.
During the mission's launch, ground-based GPS stations detected changes in the ionospheric electron density equivalent to positioning errors of several meters. Such inaccuracies could easily throw self-driving cars off track, potentially causing traffic collisions, according to Charles Lin, an earth science professor at National Cheng Kung University and one of the co-authors of the paper.
"A positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes," Lin told Space.com. "It could have a strong impact not only on self-driving cars but also on drone positioning."
NASA's SLS rocket lifts off during the launch of the Artemis II mission on April 1, 2026 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)
GPS receivers determine their position on Earth's surface at any single moment by measuring their distance to four different GPS satellites. When concentrations of free electrons in the upper atmosphere change — for example during a solar storm or after a rocket passage — the signal reaches Earth either faster or more slowly, resulting in inaccurate measurements.
Satellites of the U.S. GPS constellation and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems orbit Earth at an altitude of around 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers), far above the upper edge of the ionosphere, meaning the positioning, navigation and timing signal these satellites transmit must pass through this volatile atmospheric layer to reach Earth.
Severe solar storms can disrupt GPS signals for days by dumping energy into the atmosphere in the form of charged particles from the sun. The impact of rocket launches, triggered by the supersonic flight of the rocket body through the high-altitude air, is much more short-lived. As the rocket soars up, it creates a shock wave, which virtually punches a hole into the ionosphere.
In the aftermath of the Artemis II launch, the researchers observed two such holes — one left behind by the 212-foot-long (65 meters) SSL core stage, and the other caused by two subsequent thruster burns of the rocket's upper stage. In both cases, these holes stretched across the American continent from East to West like giant 3,100-mile (5,000-kilometer) contrails.
The solid rocket boosters of NASA's SLS rocket ignite during the launch of the Artemis II mission on April 1, 2026 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: NASA)
Despite the enormous power of the SLS core stage, the disturbance caused by the second-stage burns directly inside the ionosphere was far more prominent.
Those two burns, at altitudes around 115 miles (185 kilometers), took place more than an hour after lift-off and allowed the Orion capsule to break free from Earth's gravity and head for the moon.
"Rocket launches from the ground to space produce that kind of effect, but we have never seen this kind of orbital maneuver in an interplanetary mission," said Lin. "In the future, as we are going to see many more missions going to the moon and to Mars, these space weather effects will become much more significant."
In May 2026, four Russian military satellites came close to ICEYE-X36, a private synthetic aperture radar satellite widely believed to be providing battlefield intelligence for Ukraine, in an apparently aggressive and risky "grey zone" maneuver that spooked many in the space industry.
Close enough to jam or interfere with the satellite's signal, blind it with a laser, fire a metal dart at it or, simply, force it to maneuver and burn fuel, the satellites' seemingly intimidatory behavior has increased the West's desire to develop defensive technology for satellites. In October 2026, it was reported that one of those same four Russian satellites passed within 500 meters (1,650 feet) of the same ICEYE satellite.
Now, U.K. startup Shield Space is racing to apply the lessons of drone warfare in Ukraine to develop swarms of up to 100 very small, low-cost, attritable drone-like autonomous spacecraft called cubesats. Released by a car-sized carrier in Earth orbit, these microwave-sized spacecraft will act as interceptors to protect Western satellites, and their deployment will mark a next step in the evolution of orbital warfare. Shield Space says that these space drones will use "effectors" like lasers or microwaves, or "kinetic standoff" techniques, to defend Western satellites even if controllers lose contact with them.
"We're talking about deploying 100 cubesats on a protect-and-defend mission for less than £100 million [$134 million US], which is how [much] you would pay for one satellite previously," said Graeme Ritchie, co-founder and CEO of Shield Space.
Launched in 2023, NASA's civilian project Starling demonstrated that a swarm of four small satellites can cooperate and operate autonomously in space on a civilian science mission without relying heavily on real-time commands from ground control. But that seems like a far cry from the adversarial or defensive missions Shield Space and its competitors imagine. It is telling that the leading space powers appear not to have demonstrated swarm combat in space — although they tend to be reluctant to reveal their space warfare capabilities.
In the fourth quarter of 2027, Shield Space plans to take this next step in space warfare's evolution by demonstrating rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) with two very small spacecraft. This effort, named Project Broadsword, will launch on SpaceX's Transporter-21 rideshare mission. It will send up an 8U cubesat and a smaller 3U target craft, which Shield Space plans to maneuver from 100 kilometers (62 miles) apart to within 100 meters (330 feet) of each other and, through four stages of autonomy, from human-in-the-loop to "approximately" fully autonomous. (A cubesat unit, or U, is a cube that measures 10 cm, or about 4 inches, on a side.)
Russia's Luch-2 satellite approaches another geostationary satellite on April 12, 2024, as tracked by the French company Aldoria's observation stations. (Image credit: Aldoria)
The gaps between a true satellite-defense capability and this demonstration appear to be great, in terms of the technological and practical challenges of squeezing propulsion and power systems, AI compute power, sensors, the lasers the swarm needs to communicate and weapon systems onto small, lightweight maneuvering satellites. But it is a gap that Shield Space believes it can bridge through the purchase of relatively cheap off-the-shelf technology rather than more expensive bespoke designs.
"Yes, it's a problem because of size, weight and power," Ritchie told Space.com. "We've had to totally innovate from scratch some elements of the mission… but we have only got roughly 100 cm by 100 cm [40 by 40 inches], so saving space or having systems that are already completely integrated is the main aim."
"We have commissioned EnduroSat to build us an autonomous 8U cubesat that has chemical propulsion and its own imagery-collecting capability, which we will put our software on," said Dan Molland, co-founder and CTO of Shield Space, "and which we will then use to conduct our RPO.
"The good thing about cubesats is they're very standardized and they're very off the shelf," he added. "There's always some level of adjusting you've got to do, but these cubesats are a lot more plug and play than more conventional platforms, which are usually all custom-built."
Illustration of two Shield Space cubesats in orbit. (Image credit: Shield Space)
Yet to focus on the technical issues may be to miss the point. "It takes an extraordinary amount of data to train the models and algorithms to achieve a fully autonomous mission," said Ritchie, "and the problem [unlike in the Ukraine war] is that data is not readily available.
"We can train AI using synthetic data, but it's just not quite good enough for space. It's incredibly important to gather data from missions like this if we really want autonomous missions in the future."
There is also the complexity of the AI needed in a war-fighting system. "Starling is a really great example," Molland told Space.com. "With Starling, you're essentially just asking a guidance system to make sure you stay within a given range of this or that satellite… But if you are controlling a swarm to deliver [a] military mission, you have a much more complex set of questions."
It also comes with the challenge of ensuring that AI complies with any rules of engagement.
But Ritchie and Molland believe these technical challenges can be overcome, and they have an aggressive schedule of demonstrations planned that they think will prove it.
Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor of astropolitics at Durham University in the U.K. and author of the book "War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics" (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),is more cautious about Shield Space's plans for the evolution of space warfare.
"They remind me of a late Cold War missile-defense scheme called Brilliant Pebbles," he told Space.com. "It was one of the more advanced research and development programs in the Strategic Defense Initiative."
The plan was to defend the U.S. against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by using thousands of small autonomous orbiting interceptors to destroy them by collision.
"With enough investment, a lot is feasible," Bowen said. "But you're looking at many years of development and testing, solving the problem of testing kinetic weapons in space without leaving debris, and finding someone to buy the system."
It is clear from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine that the future of warfare includes swarms of low-cost autonomous drones — and Shield Space is already planning an aggressive schedule of missions to prove that this pattern applies to the final frontier as well.
According to Ritchie, the startup hopes to quickly go from the first RPO demonstration to testing two full-sized 16U cubesats. It will then move on to a full carrier of 10 such cubesats, and then to a "super carrier" of 10 carriers, which will be deployed across multiple orbits.
"We then get towards our future vision, which we call space-based carrier strike," said Ritchie. In this scenario, "responsive launch or pre-positioned carriers will give us an ability to protect and defend entire orbits, should you choose."
The three Americans currently living off Earth just made sure their electoral voices were heard.
Anil Menon told us today (Nov. 3) that he and fellow NASA astronauts Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins voted in the U.S. midterm elections from the International Space Station (ISS).
"Yes, you can even vote from space! All three U.S. crew members had the privilege of voting from space station. We filled out an electronic ballot and sent it securely to the election officials," Menon wrote in an X post this morning.
Yes, you can even vote from space! All three US crew members had the privilege of voting from space station. We filled out an electronic ballot and sent it securely to the election officials. https://t.co/hJCExQ2nKrNovember 3, 2026
That post included a 29-second video, in which Menon — wearing, like many of us today, an "I voted" sticker — shows us his "voting booth."
It's actually his room on the ISS, Menon explained. "Inside of it is my computer, where I was able to fill out an electronic form and send it to Harris County so I could vote today," he said.
Most NASA astronauts register to vote in Texas' Harris County; it's home to Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency's human spaceflight hub.
Americans have been able to vote from space since 1997, when Texas passed a law allowing this to happen. The first person to take advantage of the legislation was NASA astronaut David Wolf, who cast his ballot from Russia's Mir space station that same year. (The ISS didn't welcome its first crew until November 2000.)
"Just like any other American away from home, astronauts may fill out a Federal Post Card Application to request an absentee ballot," NASA officials wrote in an astronaut-voting explainer.
The process is somewhat involved, however.
"After an astronaut fills out an electronic ballot aboard the orbiting laboratory, the document flows through NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System to a ground antenna at the agency's White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico," they added. "From New Mexico, NASA transfers the ballot to the Mission Control Center at NASA Johnson and then on to the county clerk responsible for casting the ballot. To preserve the vote's integrity, the ballot is encrypted and accessible only by the astronaut and the clerk."
NASA's Near Space Network enables astronauts on the International Space Station to communicate with Earth and electronically deliver ballots from space. (Image credit: NASA)
Delaney and Watkins launched to the ISS on Oct. 1 on SpaceX's Crew-13 mission. Menon has been there since mid-July, arriving aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The trio currently share the orbiting lab with four other people — Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and cosmonauts Anna Kikina, Pyotr Dubrov and Sergey Teteryatnikov. Kutryk and Teteryatnikov are members of Crew-13, whereas Dubrov and Kikina shared the Soyuz with Menon.
Europe's Hera planetary defense spacecraft is closing in on the binary asteroid system targeted by NASA's DART deflection test, and can now tell the two rocky bodies apart.
Hera is nearing the end of its voyage to the Didymos asteroid system, having launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in October 2024. The spacecraft snapped the image of Didymos and the smaller Dimorphos on Oct. 18 from a distance of 795 miles (1280 kilometers) from the pair, which are currently about 122 million miles (197 million km) from Earth.
"With this image, the smaller Dimorphos asteroid becomes visible for the first time," Michael Kueppers, Hera project scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), said in a statement. "Before this acquisition, the spacecraft was still resolving the Didymos system as a single dot. But now, even though Dimorphos is made up of only around one pixel in this initial image, it is clearly well separated from its parent body."
Hera performed braking maneuvers earlier in October to slow its approach and put it on course to rendezvous with the binary system. The spacecraft is designed to make follow-up observations of the asteroids using 12 payloads, providing new insights that will prove valuable for planetary defense efforts. The mission also carries a pair of cubesats for a closer look and eventual landing on the 495-foot-wide (151 meters) Dimorphos.
A series of images captured by the DART spacecraft as it sped to impact the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL)
For now, Hera is continuing its approach and preparing for arrival, with a big reveal expected to occur later this month.
"Our views will grow much sharper as Hera comes closer," said ESA's mission manager Ian Carnelli. "We will unveil the first detailed images of Dimorphos — the first object in the solar system to have had its orbit measurably shifted by human action — on 25 November."
An Astrobee, a tiny robot cube, is zipping around the International Space Station helping out the astronauts on board. (Image credit: NASA/Jessica Watkins)
A tiny robot cube is zipping around the International Space Station, trying to help astronauts with the endless challenging tasks onboard.
What is it?
Reminiscent of Rocky rolling around the lab helping out Dr. Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary, the Astrobee robot is a helpful assistant for astronauts aboard the space station.
A metal cube about the size of a toaster, the Astrobees are free-flying robotic assistants that NASA developed to help out astronauts. The first two Astrobee robots (named Bumble and Honey) were sent to the station in 2019. The third Astrobee robot, named Queen, joined later that year, and 7 years later, the program is still going strong.
So what can a free-floating cube help with? The robots are designed to assist the astronauts onboard with testing new technologies in microgravity and helping mission team members back on Earth to better observe inside the station. The little robot cubes can even help astronauts with everyday chores in space.
In this image, snapped by NASA astronaut and Crew-13 commander Jessica Watkins, we can see one of the Astrobee robots helping out in the station's Kibo laboratory.
Why is it incredible?
The idea of a robot assistant helping out with chores and technology development aboard an orbiting space laboratory sounds positively science fiction.
While Astrobee is certainly not the first robot in space or aboard the space station, its compact shape and ability to fly autonomously gives it a unique quality. It really looks like a companion aboard the space station.
While the robotic space helpers of today might be cute little cubes, the success of the Astrobee program begs the question of how robots in space might continue to evolve. Will astronauts on the moon have robotic companions autonomously exploring and helping out? What will they look like?
On Nov. 3, 1957, a Soviet space dog named Laika became the first animal to orbit Earth. Laika was a 3-year-old stray husky-spitz mix from the streets of Moscow, and she was recruited by the Soviet space program for her small size and calm temperament.
Unfortunately for Laika, this mission was a one-way trip. The Soviets didn't design a way to bring her back down to Earth. With only 7 days worth of oxygen and a little bit of food on board, Laika launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with a Russian Sputnik rocket. This was the same kind of rocket used to launch the first Sputnik satellite.
Laika was alive when she reached orbit, but she died shortly afterward because the spacecraft's heat shield had broken off. Laika overheated before she had the chance to die of starvation of oxygen deprivation.
Laika, the first Soviet space dog to enter Earth orbit, is seen in a training capsule prior to her launch. (Image credit: Roscosmos)
Why it mattered
Laika has remained one of space history's most beloved and tragic figures. People around the world have dogs as pets who they love as members of their own families. And even nearly 70 years after this flight, it is so heartbreaking to think of Laika on that frightening journey from which she never returned.
Laika was one of many different animals that were used in early spaceflight testing. Both the U.S. and Russia launched a number of primates on flights testing early flight technology. Sadly, like Laika, many of these brave creatures did not make it back.
Unbelievably, though, some did survive the journey. For example, the chimpanzee named Ham and nicknamed the "astrochimp" survived a 1961 test flight to space. Though, the team behind that flight was so unsure of how it would go that Ham didn't get his name until after it was found that he'd survived his return.
NASA's Artemis IV moon mission will be a complicated affair — especially if SpaceX's Starship ends up being the lunar lander.
For all of the changing components of the Artemis program over the past several years, one of its most persistent may be the question of how many refueling flights Starship will need to land astronauts on the moon.
By summer 2021, it was common knowledge that Starship would require multiple launches to pull off an Artemis moon landing. A Government Accountability Office audit at the time, for example, estimated that it could take up to 16.
Earlier this month, a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said the refueling number could be as high as 22. But that estimate was quickly refuted by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, who posted on his social media platform, X, that it would actually be closer to six or eight.
Perhaps an even bigger head scratcher, though, is how the refueling process will be carried out. Where (and when) will Starship's upper stage gas up when it's off planet? NASA released a graphic during a recent Artemis update that outlined an order of operations for the spacecraft on Artemis IV, which will be the program's first crewed lunar landing.
The mission will launch a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the four Artemis IV astronauts aboard NASA's Orion capsule to high Earth orbit, where they will rendezvous and dock with the Starship lunar lander.
NASA's Artemis IV mission outline featuring Starship as the lunar lander. (Image credit: NASA)
Using Starship's engines, the two spacecraft will burn for the moon, and separate upon their arrival in low lunar orbit. Two astronauts will remain aboard Orion, while the other two will head down to the lunar surface in Starship.
After a little run through the regolith and a celebration of America's triumphant return to the moon, the duo will board Starship again to launch back to lunar orbit and dock with Orion before beginning the trip back to Earth.
All that seems well and good for a mission to the moon, and even has some resemblances with missions from NASA's Apollo days. What doesn't seem as immediately obvious when mapping out the Artemis IV mission outline, though, are the steps that Starship will be taking during its refueling process before the astronauts ever make it to space.
Orion will rendezvous with Starship in high Earth orbit — but that's not where the lander will launch initially. According to NASA's Artemis IV outline, SpaceX will first launch a depot ship to low Earth orbit (LEO), which will serve as the repository for all the fuel the Starship lander will eventually need.
The graphic shows a tanker Starship docked with the depot with "(multiple)" written next to it, so we don't know how many refueling flights will be needed for this initial depot fill. Once that's done, SpaceX will launch the Starship lunar lander to join the depot in LEO for its first pit stop.
Then, and this is where some of the head scratching begins, Starship will undock from the depot and raise its altitude to what NASA has labeled the "final tanking orbit," or FTO.
The baseline concept for NASA's Artemis IV Starship refueling operations. (Image credit: NASA)
At some point after the Starship lander departs LEO, SpaceX will launch another round of "(multiple)" tanker ships to fill the depot with even more propellant. It will apparently then send the depot to meet the lander for another refill in FTO, where, as the name suggests, the two will dock for the pair's final fuel transfer.
After bidding the depot a second farewell, Starship will ascend to high Earth orbit to meet Orion.
NASA's graphic shows SLS launching Orion before Starship gets the last of its fuel, and the agency's website explainer for Artemis IV says the unusually choreographed order of operations for the mission does serve a purpose.
However many fuel boosts Starship ends up needing to get from LEO to the surface of the moon, its staggered orbital staging will apparently create some flexibility around when SLS can launch the Artemis IV astronauts to begin their mission.
And while Starship's orbital dance seems unnecessarily complicated, NASA says the new approach will actually reduce the amount of fuel SpaceX needs for the mission.
That's partly because Starship will take Orion directly to low lunar orbit, instead of the much higher orbit envisioned in previous mission plans.
But keep in mind: None of this is set in stone. If SpaceX can't demonstrate that its orbital refueling strategy works, or if it can't pull off an uncrewed lunar landing mission by the end of next year, NASA could still select Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander for Artemis IV — assuming Blue Moon is able to check its required boxes in time. Regardless of which company's lander delivers the first Artemis astronauts to the moon's surface, exactly how the pieces of those missions will come together should become clearer as the launch date gets closer. So, while SpaceX's refueling remains an open one for the time being, it's one of many for which we'll soon have an answer.
