Image (Credit): The Expedition 1 crew of Yuri P. Gidzenko (left), William M. Shepherd, and Sergei K. Krikalev in the ISS’s Zvezda Service Module. (NASA)
It was 25 years ago on this day that the Expedition 1 crew arrived at the International Space Station (ISS), which marked the beginning of very successful space collaboration between five space agencies from the United States, Russia, the European Union, Japan, and Canada.
The Expedition 1 crew, arriving at the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule, consisted of NASA astronaut William M. Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri P. Gidzenko and Sergei K. Krikalev. This first mission of four months focused on the continued assembly of the station, with the Expedition 2 crew arriving in March 2001 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.
In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth, traveling through 16 sunrises and sunsets.
The living and working space in the station is larger than a six-bedroom house (and has six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym, and a 360-degree view bay window).
A spacecraft can arrive at the space station as soon as four hours after launching from Earth.
The space station travels an equivalent distance to the Moon and back in about a day.
Image (Credit): Drawing of the International Space Station with all of the elements labeled. (NASA)
A Flagstaff-based space company has won a $30 million contract to raise the orbit of a space-based NASA observatory next year before it can drop uncontrolled back into Earth’s atmosphere. NASA officials say they are in a race against time as the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and its three-telescope system studying gamma rays from space needs a rescue.
NASA has activated a global planetary defense group to study a massive interstellar object exhibiting strange, possibly artificial characteristics—fueling speculation that it could be an alien probe operating within our solar system. The object, designated 3I/ATLAS, is approximately the size of Manhattan and was first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21. It has been selected as the first-ever official target of the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN)—a NASA-backed coalition of global agencies and astronomers tasked with identifying and tracking potential threats to Earth.
Japan’s space agency successfully launched Sunday its most powerful flagship H3 rocket, carrying a newly developed unmanned cargo spacecraft for its first mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said the HTV-X1 spacecraft successfully lifted off atop the No. 7 H3 rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center in the country’s south and confirmed it entered targeted orbit 14 minutes after liftoff. The spacecraft was separated and placed into a planned orbit, JAXA said. If everything goes smoothly, it is expected to arrive at the ISS in a few days to deliver supplies. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, currently at the ISS, is set to catch the craft with a robot arm in the early hours of Thursday.
A team of astronomers has found evidence of a candidate gas giant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, a Sun-like star in the closest stellar system to our own. Initial observations hinting at the planet’s existence were made in August 2024 using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The Alpha Centauri system is located just 4 light-years from Earth. The findings, detailed in twopapers accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could represent a major milestone. As Charles Beichman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory noted in a JWST news release, “With this system being so close to us, any exoplanets found would offer our best opportunity to collect data on planetary systems other than our own.”
Pope Leo XIV has appointed a new head astronomer to run the Vatican Observatory, one of the oldest scientific observatories in the world. Rev. Richard D’Souza, 47, will succeed Guy Consolmagno, an American physicist who was known as the “pope’s astronomer” for ten years. Both men are members of the Jesuit Order.
After nearly six months onboard the International Space Station (ISS), the four astronauts of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission have safely returned to Earth. This weekend’s splashdown off the coast of California concludes a long-duration science expedition that supported dozens of investigations sponsored by the ISS National Laboratory. NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov played a vital role in advancing science in space, contributing to biomedical research, physical and materials sciences, technology demonstrations, and student-led experiments. Their work helped push the boundaries of discovery in low Earth orbit (LEO) The orbit around the Earth that extends up to an altitude of 2,000 km (1,200 miles) from Earth’s surface. The ISS’s orbit is in LEO, at an altitude of approximately 250 miles. to benefit life on Earth and support a sustainable and robust space economy.
The problem with a poorly-planned downsizing of an organization is that you may lose too many people in key positions and the disarray demotivates those who remain. Hence, it should be no surprise that this is what we are seeing at NASA as well as other agencies.
NASA is now looking at losing about 20 percent of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees, who have been harassed and prodded towards the door. That represents the loss of an amazing amount of talent. Of course, the White House doesn’t seem to care given its proposed budget cutting NASA’s 2026 budget by about 24 percent.
It will not be long before we have a blame game about “Who lost the Moon?” once China surpasses us in the race to the Moon. We may even be asking “Who lost Mars” now that we have abandoned retrieving a Mars soil sample while China and Japan have plans to bring back Martian soil. All of this is foreseeable to the average person, but for some reason no light seems to penetrate the persistent fog in Washington, DC.
We already read stories about whether Boeing even knows how to build a new airplane, Will we soon have stories about that nation that once put men on the Moon but lost its way?
The United States was behind the Soviets in the space race when it found the will to dream big. I am seeing no signs of dreaming in this nightmarish dismantling of science in this country. We have to work hard to remain ahead of this latest space race, and should we stumble there are plenty of other countries waiting to fill the void.
We are making the same mistake that Russia did when it invaded Ukraine and put its space hopes on hold. The difference here is that we have trained the guns on our own space and science programs.
Image (Credit): The arrow indicates the impact site for ispace’s Resilience lunar lander, as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera on June 11, 2025. (NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
It doesn’t look like much, but NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently spotted the small crater made by the crashed ispace lunar lander named Resilience. The Japanese lander crashed on the Moon’s surface earlier this month after the company’s second try at a lunar landing.
The Moon is littered with debris and pockmarks from various successful and failed missions. The Apollo crew alone left enormous amounts of trash, debris, and space equipment scattered around the Moon. The Russians also left quite a bit of space equipment on the Moon many years ago, as well as its most recent Luna-25 mission, which crash-landed.
We can only hope that the Artemis mission will soon enough be adding to the equipment on the Moon without the drama of crash landings.
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