Image (Credit): An artist’s rending of NASA efforts to create a permanent Moon Base. (NASA)
NASA is quickly learning that it needs to get out front with its own PR to promote efforts to build a Moon base near the lunar South Pole. With budget cuts always looming in the background, public support will be essential to ensure the US has a long-term presence on the Moon.
This latest video from NASA does a good job explaining the status of the various vendors creating landers and rovers for phase 1 of the Moon base, which extends to 2029. This phase will be limited to robotics preparing the lunar surface for later astronauts. The video covers the efforts of Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Voyager Lunar Systems, and Northrop Grumman.
The video is a helpful way to keep the public informed, but the best publicity will be success. The lunar landings to date by commercial partners have been mostly disappointing. The success of these upcoming missions is what will convince the public that we can really settle on the Moon.
Image (Credit): On July 31, 2026, NASA officials and others pose for a photo before cutting the ribbon to open the Flight Dynamics Research Facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. (NASA/Keegan Barber)
Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.
Friday was a historic day for NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. A stellar lineup of VIPs from NASA, GSA, Congress, Virginia and Langley employees celebrated the ribbon-cutting ceremony for NASA’s newest and most advanced wind tunnel: the Flight Dynamics Research Facility. The $53 million, 25,000-square-foot FDRF, built by BL Harbert International, is the first wind tunnel added to NASA’s wind tunnel assets in 40 years. The project was started in June 2022, with construction completed in March 2026.
On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The names were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III. The memory card will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance out.
An international research team has discovered evidence of a moonlike body. It marks the first time such an object has been detected outside our solar system—though just how close it comes to being a moon is a question researchers are still grappling with. Although more than 6,000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, there’s been a lack of definitive evidence of moons in other planetary systems. The new findings challenge that by focusing on an object orbiting the brown dwarf CD-35 2722 B in a system 73 light-years away.
Extreme space weather events on Earth occur during intervals of strong solar wind driving. The solar wind drives plasma convection and currents in the near-Earth space environment. For low values of the driver, the Earth’s response is linear, estimated by parameters such as the polar cap index based on ground magnetometer activity. Curiously, for extreme solar wind driving, the Earth’s response appears not to increase beyond a saturation limit. Theorists have advanced a host of explanations for this saturation effect, but there is no consensus. Here we demonstrate that this saturation is a manifestation of the regression to the mean effect arising from random uncertainty in the timing and magnitude of solar wind measurements. Our results reveal that data analysis underpinning the saturation theories is nonlinearly biased, thereby challenging the validity of the theories. Correcting for the uncertainties reveals that the Earth’s response to solar wind driving is linear throughout, and that the impact of extreme geomagnetic storms can be twice as large as previously thought. We show that regression to the mean is a fundamental property of the relationship between measurement and the truth, where the truth corresponding to the measurement is closer to the mean. This effect is particularly pronounced for uncertain measurements of extreme values and is likely to manifest across various fields, from extreme climate studies to chronic medical pain.
Citation: Sivadas, N., Sibeck, D., Subramanyan, V. et al. Regression to the mean can explain saturation of geomagnetic storms. Nature 655, 1143–1147 (2026).
Image (Credit): Members of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope propellant, safety, and quality assurance team. (NASA/Sydney Rohde (Rocz))
The image above, taken on July 20th, shows one of the many teams working on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as it gets ready for its launch on August 30th. The pictured individuals are part of the propellant, safety, and quality assurance team.
Technicians completed fueling NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, bringing it an important step closer to launch. On July 25, the team completed operations that carefully loaded 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel into the observatory at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After launch and separation from the rocket, Roman will use this onboard propellant to perform maneuvers as it travels to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, located about one million miles from Earth. There, about four times the distance to the Moon, it will have an ideal home for astronomy.
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the LINK spacecraft in the Pegasus XL Rocket after launch. (Northrop Grumman)
“Over the weekend, Katalyst’s LINK servicing spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications. Preliminary investigation shows that two of LINK’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system. LINK is designed to approach, capture, and boost NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to a higher orbital altitude.”
-Statement by NASA regarding the private sector LINK mission to save the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is slowly losing altitude and is expected to burn up in the atmosphere by year’s end if nothing is done. The LINK mission was launched from the Marshall Islands on July 3rd aboard a Pegasus rocket.
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