When JoeBen Bevirt founded the company now known as Joby Aviation in 2009, electric aircraft were on few people’s minds. Tesla’s first electric vehicle, the Roadster, had arrived on the market just one year earlier, and it was not yet evident that EVs would transform the automotive industry, let alone aviation. But Bevirt was convinced that he could revolutionize urban transportation with electric air taxis, also known as electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs for short).

In a departure from many conventional aircraft manufacturers, Bevirt embraced a rapid, iterative design process that Joby refers to as “design, build, and test.” According to Jon Wagner, who spent five years as senior director of battery engineering for Tesla before joining Joby in 2017, “the original concept was that the more times you go through the process, each time you can identify improvements or problems that need to be addressed. And if you have a very good system for going through that iterative process quickly and at a low cost, then you can take risk, because if it fails, you just go again.”

With no existing supply chain for electric aircraft, Joby applied this iterative design strategy to almost every component of its eVTOL, including its all-important electric power train. Joby cycled through several generations of a geared electric motor before Wagner joined the company, leading development of a direct-drive motor with superior reliability, performance, and noise characteristics. With Joby’s aircraft now undergoing certification with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, IEEE Spectrum caught up with Wagner to learn more about the company’s power-train technology and where he expects it to go in the future. Our interview with him has been edited for concision and clarity.

What can you tell us about the design of Joby’s electric motor?

Wagner: It’s a direct-drive motor running the propeller. That direct-drive motor has a fairly large diameter in order to get the high torque density that we want. Essentially, the challenge there is, we want to spin the propellers relatively slowly compared to most aviation propellers, to reduce the sound. The trade-off there is when you spin them slowly, you need a lot of torque, and so we have a fairly high-torque direct-drive motor.

That’s arranged as a single magnet ring—the spinning part is the magnet ring; it’s well integrated onto the propeller system. The stationary portion is typically called the stator. For us it’s copper coils and magnetic steel that focuses the electromagnetic forces. That is made up of essentially two motors, so the stator is divided into two separate sets of coils, each driven by separate inverters, each sourced by separate batteries for redundancy.

At a high level, that’s the layout. The details are how you separate those coils electrically, how you separate the inverters both physically and electrically, and then, really, what stitches all of this together is a thermal system. And the thermal system is very key to achieving low weight. Essentially, when we talk about the innovation we bring, it’s typically not invention, it’s integration. We typically pick solutions that the world knows about—there’s very little here that’s Ph.D. thesis work. It’s integration work.

How important is manufacturability in the design of your motors, and does the fact that Joby is building its motors in house change your calculus there?

Wagner: It really does. Table stakes for a good design is manufacturability, so it’s fundamental, and it was architected into the entire concept. Where the vertical integration that Joby has developed creates an advantage for us is actually exactly in manufacturability and how it pertains to performance.

In a mature industry like the automotive industry, you typically see a very diverse supply chain and a very advanced kind of outsourced supply-chain methodology. The most efficient way to run these very mature companies is to break your system up into pieces that can be outsourced to suppliers who are going to do a really good job of each piece. And that actually works really well once the supply chain is mature, and they know how to make all those parts, and also once the industry knows what they need from each part.

The downside is that when you break a problem up into three pieces, you now have interface boundaries between each of these pieces, and those interface boundaries always create inefficiencies, and that typically manifests as either complexity of the design or mass or potentially introducing reliability [concerns].

Here’s where the vertical integration comes in. We were able to design highly integrated solutions without taking the manufacturing penalty that would come from finding a supply chain where they would make each part to integrate to each other. And so by having that vertical integration in our team, we essentially address the manufacturing challenges, and we get the mass and performance benefits of a highly integrated solution.

Where Superconducting Motors Could Matter

Aviation motors are a hot topic in machine design, and there’s been considerable interest in the use of superconductive or carbon nanotube coils, for example. Are you exploring any of these?

Wagner: Superconducting is a very interesting vector, and there is a lot of interesting work going on with superconducting materials. Essentially the win here is reducing the losses; losses are heat generation and energy that doesn’t turn into useful work for the airplane. And the first thing I’ll say is that motors without superconducting materials actually are quite efficient. We’re talking low to mid 90 percent efficient already. With these kinds of efficiencies, the win is somewhat small, and the effort is very high. And so we have looked at superconducting motors, but we’re not really working actively on this right now.

Where this really gets interesting is often in a larger size, so bigger scale. We live in the hundreds of kilowatts scale. When you get to the multiple megawatts kind of scale, 1 to 10 megawatts, for motors in that size, there could be some big advantages. Five percent of 10 megawatts ends up being a lot, and so you could potentially get big gains there.

There are challenges. The challenges with superconducting motors are that you need to get them very cold in order to maintain the superconducting features. And then if you want to take advantage of that superconducting performance, you essentially have a motor that if you lose the ability to keep it cold, it has almost no productive use. So in other words, it was never designed to work when it isn’t superconducting, and therefore your cryogenic cooling system, if there’s any failure in that system, you essentially cannot produce any power anymore, and so you end up being very reliant on the cryogenic cooling system. Potentially even the motor could fail very rapidly after a failure of the cooling system.

These are solvable problems, but they bring challenges, and that’s part of the reason why I think we’ll see this first with the largest motors.

How do you expect Joby’s power-train solutions to evolve in the future, balancing the availability of new technologies and materials against the difficulty of certifying new designs?

Wagner: We essentially set out more than 10 years ago to build an airplane that demonstrates a shift out of fossil fuels, and the best way to do it at that time—and it turns out, still now—is with batteries. And so we’re now at the late stages of development into the certification, in the stable-design state. We essentially know it’s going to work, right? And that’s very exciting, because I think what we’ll see from here as we branch forward is continual improvement in batteries.

We know that battery energy density is a huge problem. It’s very heavy for the amount of energy stored. It’s much worse than for fossil fuels, so right now, and probably well into the future, battery-based energy storage for aviation has somewhat limited market potential. We don’t really see batteries being able to handle long-haul. Those kinds of trips that most of us utilize, I don’t think we’ll see battery energy storage for those anytime in the near future.

It’s no secret that Joby has a very active effort going with hydrogen as the primary energy source. We’ve been doing that for many years. We look at taking hydrogen and using fuel cells to convert that hydrogen to electricity and then essentially using the same electric propulsion system downstream. We think that’s a very exciting direction, both for regional transport and long-range transport, but especially for long-range transport, really the best solution.

There are challenges that we’re actively working to solve. Number one, how do you store the hydrogen? Number two, how do you refuel and what does the ground infrastructure look like to get that source of fuel from the source of hydrogen onto an airplane? And then, number three, how do you convert that hydrogen to electricity? Based on what I see, the future of aviation absolutely comes down to storing energy, and hydrogen is fundamentally, at a molecular level, about three times better than fossil fuels at storing energy per mass. And that’s a really big deal.

The opportunity is so big on hydrogen; when you have three times better on something like the storage density, it means that it’s worth putting a lot of research into how to make this work, because that’s going to pay off at the very end. And so we’re firmly in it for that. I’m very excited about that future, which yet may be decades off but has to start somewhere.

For decades, satellites have been beaming data from Earth to space and back via radio waves. But with the growing number of spacecraft in orbit and the increasing quantities of data beaming back to Earth, radio spectrum is hitting its physical limits. For about a decade, companies and research institutions have been working on higher-bandwidth, optical technologies that would remove current data transmission bottlenecks. Perhaps the most ambitious among those companies is Singapore-based deep-tech startup Transcelestial, which has been testing its commercial-grade Earth-to-space laser communication terminal in trials in space over the past few weeks.

The company, which has sold hundreds of ground-to-ground internet-beaming laser terminals, launched its demonstration payload to space in November aboard the 6GStarLab satellite developed by UK-headquartered Open Cosmos, and has further satellite launches scheduled for later this year. The satellites, Transcelestial says, will form the backbone of a future constellation that will provide fiber-grade-level connectivity from orbit to the world’s unconnected by the end of this decade.

Other companies have been using laser terminals to beam data between satellites. SpaceX Starlink has been relying on space-to-space laser terminals since 2021, forming an orbital mesh network that can route vast amounts of data through space in real time without needing a ground station. The constellation, however, still requires conventional radio waves to beam connectivity to users on Earth, meaning there is only so much data that can pass through the overall network at any given moment.

But using lasers to beam data to Earth comes with challenges that so far have been difficult to solve. Transcelestial and other companies, however, believe they’ve finally cracked the problem.

High-Speed Laser Internet Technology

Laser light transmits at higher frequencies than radio waves, and can therefore pack more data by orders of magnitude. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation offers a peak user bandwidth of 200 megabits per second—which gets diluted as the number of users in an area grows. By comparison, Transcelestial’s test satellite can beam data to Earth at rates up to 1 gigabit per second. The company’s upcoming satellites will provide an even greater bandwidth of up to 10 Gbps. In the future, Transcelestial’s CEO and co-founder, Rohit Jha, estimates that every satellite could beam 100 Gbps or more to Earth.

“Scaling for an optical system is actually quite easy,” Jha says. “Ultimately, we can deliver 100 Gbps just by putting more terminals on the satellite. It will be like undersea cables from space.”

Other Earth-to-space laser data transmission experiments have been conducted, says Mohammad Danesh, Transcelestial’s co-founder and chief technology officer, but they required bespoke science-grade equipment costing millions of dollars. In 2023, NASA tested a record-breaking 200 Gbps laser link between a ground station and NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 satellite in low Earth orbit. That same year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a more modest demo with a 10 Gbps laser connection between low Earth orbit and the ground.

Transcelestial believes it can take the technology mainstream by reducing costs through a combination of supply chain management and manufacturing experience that the company has acquired over the years developing its point-to-point laser communication systems for internet distribution in hard-to-reach areas on Earth.

“The biggest challenge is building a reliable and scalable optical ground station network,” Danesh said, referring to the stations that communicate with satellites in orbit. “The optical ground stations that people are building today cost millions of dollars, and that’s not scalable. You need to be able to manufacture these at scale at a commercial rate, where you can have dozens of these all around the world. And that’s the approach we’ve been taking.”

The multiple ground stations, Danesh adds, will help overcome the difficulty laser light has to get through clouds by providing alternative downlink and uplink locations all over the world.

“If location A is cloudy or rainy or for whatever reason is not working really well, then you start relaying information and find another location where you can download the data,” Danesh says. “This will be a game-changer in space because even with RF, this capability doesn’t fully exist yet, and it can sometimes take days to access your data.”

Secure Laser Communication in Space

Transcelestial is just one of a constellation of companies developing laser communication technologies for space. Lasers, in addition to higher bandwidth, are also much narrower and more focused compared to radio waves. This means they are far more resilient to jamming and interception. This inherent security has come to the fore since the war in Ukraine exposed the vulnerabilities of radio frequency communications to jamming and spoofing.

“In case of laser communications, you have to be literally within the line of sight of the communication beam to be able to disrupt it,” says Laurynas Mačiulis, the CEO of Astrolight. “It’s practically very difficult.”

Astrolight, based in Lithuania, has also developed a space-to-ground laser communications terminal, which it plans to launch to space later this month aboard two small satellites developed by the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. The company has a more modest goal than Transcelestial, hoping to enable operators of Earth-observing satellites to get their data down faster and provide back-up communications for users needing extra security.

The company previously tested secure laser communication links to transmit data between two ships on the sea and between two ground stations as part of NATO’s REPMUS and DiBax exercises. In both cases, the terminals passed the tests with flying colors, providing reliable high-bandwidth communications even in rainy and foggy weather, 24 hours a day, for two weeks.

According to media reports, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hinted that his company is also looking at ground-to-space laser communication technology to overcome the bandwidth bottleneck that currently plagues Starlink users in more densely populated areas.

Transcelestial launched this demo version of its laser communications terminal into space on board the 6G Starlab mission.Transcelestial

Jha thinks that laser communications is the future as the technology can deliver a cost per transmitted bit orders of magnitude better compared to radio frequency systems, despite the initially higher price tag. He believes Transcelestial could even leapfrog Starlink, offering fiber-grade connectivity across the equatorial band (where billions of the world’s least connected people live) with a constellation of only 40 satellites—compared to more than 10,000 for Starlink.

Instead of beaming internet directly to individual users on Earth like Starlink does, Transcelestial envisions delivering tens to hundreds of gigabits to local telecom companies, who would further distribute connectivity to users via local ground-based infrastructure. In the future, Jha envisions orbital lasers replacing even undersea cables, offering a cheaper, more reliable service that could not be easily disrupted by adversaries or natural disasters.

Joachim Horwath, the chief technology officer of Germany-based laser communications developer Mynaric, cautions that the challenges presented by the atmospheric interference might be more difficult to surmount than some think.

“Laser communications offer clear advantages for space-to-ground links, particularly when it comes to very high data throughput, inherent security, and the ability to deploy the technology without relying on scarce RF spectrum,” says Horwath. “However, atmospheric conditions remain a key technical challenge. Clouds, turbulence, and weather variability can affect optical link performance, which means these systems require strategies like site diversity or hybrid architectures to ensure reliability. Because of this, we don’t expect laser communications to replace RF entirely.”

5G covers under 40% of landmass. This Whitepaper details how 3GPP Release 17 addresses six satellite challenges: delay, Doppler, path loss, polarization, spectrum, and architecture.

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Later this year, a certain airship will lift off from New Mexico to embark on a Pacific crossing for its longest flight yet. But the real test won’t begin until it arrives in Japan. There, the airship’s builder, New Mexico–based Sceye, and its funder and partner, the Japanese telecom giant SoftBank Corp., plan to test the craft’s mettle as a floating cell tower 20 kilometers in the sky.

They are not alone in planning base stations in the stratosphere. In theory, floating platforms can provide better line-of-sight coverage than ground towers, with less latency and more capacity than satellites in low Earth orbit. So, some engineers think the stratosphere will be a crucial piece of future mobile networks—if they can get the craft working.

“There is still, in my view, some work to be done on the aerospace part to perfect the aircraft, but this technology is coming,” says Halim Yanikomeroglu of Carleton University, in Ottawa, who is unaffiliated with Sceye.

How to build a base station in the sky

Sceye’s craft is an example of a high-altitude platform station (HAPS), delivering Internet access from Earth’s stratosphere. HAPS come in many different designs. Sceye’s choice is an autonomously piloted, helium-filled airship that is solar-powered during the day and battery-powered at night.

In past tests, Sceye showed that its airship can ascend into the stratosphere, then keep position through day and night with electric fans. Although a 20-km altitude is above most ground weather, staying in place is still an engineering feat due to the stratosphere’s fierce winds. Now, the company is testing longer-duration flights, ramping up to multimonth-long runs like its planned Pacific crossing.

A HAPS base station may need to stay in one place for months, if not even longer to be useful for networking. The record belongs to a fixed-wing aircraft from Airbus-owned Zephyr, which last year reportedly stayed aloft for 67 days.

Sceye can’t match that mark yet, but Sceye’s CEO Mikkel Frandsen believes his company’s lighter-than-air design has a different advantage: payload capacity. Where craft like Zephyr’s can carry just a few kilograms, Frandsen says, Sceye is testing payloads as heavy as 250 kg.

The extra capacity translates to more capable networking equipment. In Japan, Sceye will test an antenna the company calls SceyeCELL, a module of MIMO panels designed for use in the stratosphere.

Why telecom companies want HAPS

In total, Frandsen says Sceye is planning “two, likely three” commercial tests with multinational telecom companies this year.

One reason for this interest may be that, unlike the satellites of Starlink, SceyeCELL transmits data at frequencies that mobile phones already use. Sceye’s antenna also operates with the same 3GPP standards as terrestrial base stations, called eNodeB for 4G and gNodeB for 5G. This means a smartphone on the ground shouldn’t tell the difference between a terrestrial base station and Sceye’s floating one. HAPS researchers say this sort of seamless connectivity is crucial.

What else, according to researchers, must a HAPS network demonstrate to show it’s ready for the real world? The HAPS itself must stay in position; then, its antenna must show its quality.

Devices on the ground must maintain a reliable link with low latency and stable throughput. HAPS promises to float above the weather with better line-of-sight coverage, but those promises are no good if its coverage falters in storms below, or among the high densities of urban high-rises. If multiple HAPS are to serve the same city, they need to communicate with each other. And an aerial network must not interfere with traditional cell signals.

“’For HAPS to work…in areas where terrestrial base stations do exist, it is really essential to have proper interference management,” Yanikomeroglu says.

Sceye isn’t testing inter-HAPS communication yet, but Frandsen says they are working on other requirements: “We intend to show that we can backhaul into the customer’s core network. We intend to show that we can beam on the front end, direct-to-device, with expected speeds, with minimum levels of interference.”

A bridge through the stratosphere?

Past HAPS concepts, like the balloons of Google’s now-shuttered Loon, largely aimed to bring Internet connectivity to remote areas. “These projects have proven not to be very sustainable from an economic perspective, especially in comparison with satellite systems,” says Marco Giordani of the University of Padova, in Italy, who is unaffiliated with Sceye.

Because of those headwinds, HAPS proponents are now thinking about using HAPS for permanent use in more populated areas. “HAPS has a wide coverage,” says Animesh Yadav of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, also unaffiliated with Sceye. “If you are just using it for rural areas, you are just underusing it.”

For example, according to Frandsen, SoftBank is interested in using HAPS to densify satellite coverage. Most phones today lack the required antenna for a good connection to low Earth orbit. SoftBank is not alone in trusting HAPS to bridge this gap.

“In this case, the HAPS can act as a relay station, to receive the traffic from ground users and then relay and forward the traffic up to the satellites and back,” says Giordani. “This, I think, it’s very promising.”

HAPS proponents envision a network of the future—if not 6G, then 7G or beyond—that meshes Earth, sky, and space, with HAPS as a floating middle layer. Some researchers have proposed more ambitious ideas, like mounting HAPS with the equipment for tasks like edge computing and federated learning.

Of course, engineers must first prove that HAPS are capable of the basics.

Jupiter’s orbit is one of the harshest places in the solar system when it comes to radiation exposure. The planet has a potent magnetic field that extends out past its huge system of moons, and that field breaks down and ionizes sulfur dioxide gas spewed by the volcanic moon Io, feeding a giant radiation belt of fast-moving charged particles. It’s a challenging environment in which to operate a camera, to say the least.

A self-healing CMOS imager could help extend the lifetime of cameras sent into such high-radiation areas. The imager, presented last month at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, also performs aggressive compression to minimize the amount of data a spacecraft has to transmit from faraway locales like Io. The imager could also be used in satellites in Earth’s orbit, which catch damage from cosmic rays, too.

Engineers controlling Interplanetary craft have already healed radiation-damaged circuits using heat. In December 2023, NASA used the method to repair JunoCam, a visible-light camera in orbit around Jupiter. By its 56th orbit, all of Juno’s images taken with the tool were corrupted by radiation damage. The NASA team tried heating the entire camera to see if it would help—and it worked. As the spacecraft approached Io again, images began streaming in.

The new self-healing imager system is designed to fix these kinds of problems as they arise, one pixel at a time.

At the heart of the prototype imager is a 128-by-128-pixel array. As in other CMOS imagers, each pixel is made up of a photodiode and several transistors to amplify and control the photodetector’s signal. Other circuits on the chip detect regions of interest in the images by searching for edges, performing image compression, and reading out the pixels by row and column.

Not all of the data in an image is important, says Quan Cheng, who worked on the prototype imager at the Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzen, and at Kyoto University. Cheng, who is now at Brown University, presented the circuit design at ISSCC. “We just capture the region of interest.” That cuts down on the imager’s data output by about 75 percent.

Fixing Radiation Damage to Electronics

Radiation harms circuits in multiple ways, says Cheng. Bombardment by high-speed protons, electrons, and gamma rays can trap charges in the semiconductor and degrade the oxide layer used for insulation in CMOS devices. Radiation can also knock atoms out of their places in the semiconductor crystal. All that adds up to damaged pixels, current flowing when no photons are being detected in the pixel array—called “dark current”—and higher current leakage in other parts of the chip. Adding a bit of heat—slowly through a process called annealing—can fix much of this damage. The annealing heat provides enough energy to allow trapped charges to escape and move atoms back into place to repair the crystalline structure of the silicon.

The imager detects damaged or “hot” pixels by periodically performing a readout while the camera is shuttered and sensing whether any pixels exceed a defined current threshold. To heal a damaged pixel, the system heats it by applying a strong current. Imaging can still be performed by other parts of the array while a pixel is healing. During the healing process, readouts from the affected column of pixels are “masked” by a control circuit. The line that’s blacked out of such an image is filled in by averaging the readouts from pixels in the columns adjacent to it. Damage to digital logic in the imager can also be healed. The chip is designed to detect logic errors and similarly heats up transistors by applying a strong voltage pulse.

The team tested the chip by bombarding it with a radiation dose that’s equivalent to what the imager would experience during 30 days near Jupiter, about 20 kilograys. Radiation exposure increased dark current in the device by about 181 times, making an image unrecognizable. Four rounds of healing led to nearly full recovery of the image, and almost entirely eliminated current leakage in the logic section caused by radiation damage as well.

The design is not intended to replace other radiation hardening approaches such as adding shielding, but as an add-on, says Longyang Lin, a microelectronics researcher at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen who worked with Cheng. “It’s intended to further extend the lifetime” of imagers, he says.

“Their method requires far less space than competitive approaches by taking advantage of the addressability of the pixel array and pulsing power into the target circuit,” says Matt Francis, CEO of Ozark Integrated Circuits, in Arkansas, which specializes in circuits for extreme environments. Hardening semiconductors can entail enclosing sensors or using different materials with wider bandgaps. These designs tend to take up more real estate on a chip, or increase costs, says Francis.

There’s a moment in John Williams’s Star Wars overture when the brass surges upward. You don’t just hear it; you feel propulsion turning into pure possibility.

On 16 March 1926, in a snow-dusted field in Auburn, Mass., Robert Goddard created an earlier version of that same feeling. His first liquid-fueled rocket—a spindly, 3-meter tangle of pipes and tanks—lifted off, climbed about 12.5 meters, traveled roughly 56 meters downrange, and crashed into the frozen ground after 2.5 seconds. A few witnesses, Goddard’s helpers, shivered in the cold. The little machine defied common sense. It rose through the air with nothing to push against. Anyone who still insisted spaceflight was impossible now faced a question: Why had this contraption risen at all?

Six years earlier, The New York Times had ridiculed Goddard, declaring that rockets could never work in a vacuum and implying that he had somehow forgotten high-school physics. Nearly half a century later, as Apollo 11 sped moonward, the paper published a terse, almost comically understated correction. By then, Goddard had been dead for 24 years.

The Alpha Trap

Breakthroughs often demand qualities that facilitate early success but later become obstacles. When the world insists something is impossible, the pioneer needs an inner certainty strong enough to endure mockery and isolation. Later, though, that certainty can become a liability. Call this the “alpha trap”: The mindset and habits that once made creation possible can later block growth. This “alpha” has nothing to do with dominance or bravado. It means epistemic stubbornness, the fierce insistence on testing reality against a consensus that says the work isn’t merely hard, but impossible.

Such efforts often begin with a lone visionary. But most ideas eventually need a team. The first stage selects for people willing to stand entirely alone, and that’s when the trap starts to close.

The mockery scarred Goddard. It drove him inward, toward a small circle of confidants. Through the early 1930s, his rockets climbed higher each year. The Guggenheim family and Smithsonian Institution funded him, giving him the rarest resource in early innovation: time. By the mid-1930s, his designs were reaching more than a thousand meters.

But the work gradually changed. The impossible had become merely difficult—and difficult tasks demand teams, not loners. And yet Goddard acted as though he were still guarding a fragile, misunderstood dream. He resisted collaboration, and despite conversations with the U.S. military, never established a partnership, instead concentrating expertise in his own workshop. Elsewhere in the United States, more freewheeling amateurs and academics partnered to develop early liquid-propelled and later solid-fuel rockets.

Meanwhile, on the Baltic coast at Peenemünde, hundreds of German engineers divided labor into synchronized streams of propulsion, guidance, structures, testing, and production. By 1942, they were flight-testing the V-2. Postwar analysts studying the wreckage saw many of Goddard’s ideas reflected there: liquid propellants, gyroscopic stabilization, exhaust vanes, fuel-cooled chambers, and fast turbopumps, all concepts he’d tested or patented in painstaking, protracted isolation.

Doctor’s Orders

The alpha trap had caught others before him. In 1846, physician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that one maternity ward at Vienna General Hospital had far higher death rates than another. He traced the difference to a deadly habit: Doctors moved straight from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands. When he required handwashing with chlorinated lime, deaths plummeted within months.

But the medical establishment resisted. Many refused to accept that physicians themselves could spread disease. Rejection embittered Semmelweis. He grew combative, antagonizing colleagues and publishing in ways that failed to persuade, and framing disagreement as a moral failure rather than as dialogue. Brilliant scientifically, he was disastrous socially. Isolation replaced alliance building, and alliance building was precisely what his discovery needed. In 1865, he died in an asylum, his ideas dismissed as delusions. Acceptance, though, came later through the collaborative networks of Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur.

The same trait that lets an inventor defy consensus can also blind them to what they need next. When allies became essential, Semmelweis’s anger slowed adoption. When scale became essential, Goddard’s secrecy slowed diffusion. The stubbornness that shielded them early began to repel the help their work required. Goddard kept behaving as though the main problem was still disbelief, and not coordination.

Both men leave visionary and cautionary legacies. A NASA Center bears Goddard’s name despite his isolation; Semmelweis is remembered as the doctor who could have saved countless lives had he found a way to connect with his colleagues rather than combat them.

We love to celebrate the lone genius, yet we depend on teams to bring the flame of genius to the people. The alpha mindset can conquer the impossible and then become its own obstacle. Both men were right about their breakthroughs. But ideas born in solitude must eventually live among multitudes. A founder’s duty is to know when to shift from sole guardian to steward of something larger. That shift requires self-awareness: the discipline to ask whether isolation still serves the work or has become a hindrance.

Escaping the alpha trap means treating stubbornness as an instrument, not an identity. Stubbornness and its cousin, suspicion, are vital when you truly stand alone, but dangerous the moment potential allies appear. Goddard’s dream touched the stars, but it took teams of others to lift it there. And that orchestral surge in Star Wars? It swells from the ensemble, not a single bold trumpet.

Through the Artemis program, NASA hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the moon in its southern polar region. China, Russia, and the European Space Agency (ESA) have similar plans, all of which involve building bases near the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs)—craters that contain water ice—that dot the South Pole-Aitken Basin. For these and other agencies, it is vital that these bases be as self-sufficient as possible since resupply missions cannot be launched regularly and take several days to arrive.

Therefore, any plan for a lunar base must come down to harvesting local resources to meet the needs of its crews as much as possible—a process known as In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). In a recent study, researchers at The Ohio State University (OSU) proposed using a specialized laser-based 3D-printing method to turn lunar regolith into hardened building material. According to their findings, this method can produce durable structures that withstand radiation and other harsh conditions on the lunar surface.

The research team was led by Sizhe Xu, a graduate research associate at OSU. He was joined by colleagues from OSU’s Department of Integrated Systems Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Materials Science & Engineering. Their paper, “Laser directed energy deposition additive manufacturing of lunar highland regolith simulant,” appeared in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Challenges of Lunar 3D Printing

The importance of ISRU for human exploration has prompted the rapid development of additive manufacturing systems, or 3D printing. These systems have proven effective at fabricating tools, structures, and habitats, effectively reducing dependence on supplies delivered from Earth. Developing such systems for long-duration missions is one of the most challenging aspects of the process, as they must be engineered to operate in the extreme environment on the moon. This includes the lack of an atmosphere, massive temperature variations, and the ever-present problem of moon dust.

Scientists use two types of lunar regolith for their experiments and research: Lunar Highlands Simulant (LHS-1) and Lunar Mare Simulant (LMS-1). As part of their research, the team used LHS-1, which is rich in basaltic minerals, similar to rock samples obtained by the Apollo missions. They melted this regolith with a laser to produce layers of material and fused them onto a base surface of stainless steel or glass. To assess how well these objects would fare in the lunar environment, the team tested their fabrication process under a range of different environmental conditions.

One thing they noticed was that the fused regolith adhered well to alumina-silicate ceramic, possibly because the two compounds form crystals that enhance heat resistance and mechanical strength. This revealed that the overall quality of the printed material is largely dependent on the surface onto which the regolith is printed. Other environmental factors, such as atmospheric oxygen levels, laser power, and printing speed, also affected the stability of the printed material.

Where 3D-Printed Material Could Help

Deployed to the moon’s surface, this process could help build habitats and tools that are strong, resilient, and capable of handling the lunar environment. This has the added benefit of increasing independence from Earth, which is key to realizing long-duration missions on the moon. In addition to assisting astronauts exploring the moon in the near future (as part of NASA’s Artemis program), this technology could also lead to resilient habitats that will enable a long-term human presence on the moon, Mars, and beyond.

However, there are several unknown environmental factors that could limit the effectiveness of these systems on other worlds, and more data is needed before they can be addressed. In their study, the team suggests that instead of being powered by electricity, future scaled-up versions of their method could rely on solar or hybrid power systems. Nevertheless, the potential for space exploration is clear, and the technology also has applications for life here on Earth. Sarah Wolff, an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering and a lead author on the study, explained:

There are conditions that happen in space that are really hard to emulate in a simulant. It may work in the lab, but in a resource-scarce environment, you have to try everything to maximize the flexibility of a machine for different scenarios. If we can successfully manufacture things in space using very few resources, that means we can also achieve better sustainability on Earth. To that end, improving the machine’s flexibility for different scenarios is a goal we’re working really hard toward.

As the saying goes, “solving for space solves for Earth.” In environments where materials and resources are limited, laser-based 3D printing is one of several technologies that could support sustainable living. This applies equally to extraterrestrial environments and to regions on Earth experiencing the effects of climate change.

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) using low earth orbit (LEO) satellites present unique technical challenges, from managing large satellite constellations to ensuring reliable communication links. In this webinar, we’ll explore how to address these complexities using comprehensive modeling and simulation techniques. Discover how to model and analyze satellite orbits, onboard antennas and arrays, transmitter power amplifiers (PAs), signal propagation channels, and the RF and digital receiver segments—all within an integrated workflow. Learn the importance of including every link component to achieve accurate, reliable system performance.

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What’s the difference between a stupid idea and a brilliant one? Sometimes, it just comes down to resources. Practically unlimited funds, like limitless thrust, can get even a mad idea off the ground.

And so it might be for the concept of putting AI data centers in orbit. In a rare moment of unalloyed agreement, some of the richest and most powerful men in technology are staunchly backing the idea. The group includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. In all likelihood, hundreds of people are now working on the concept of space data centers at the firms directly or indirectly controlled by these men—SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Amazon, Blue Origin, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Google, among others.

Likely costs to design, build, and launch a 1-GW orbital data center, based on a network of some 4,300 satellites and including operating costs over a five-year period, would exceed US $50 billion. That’s about three times the cost of a 1-GW data center on Earth, including five years of operation.John MacNeill

In an interview, McCalip says his initial rough calculations a few years ago suggested that data centers in space would cost in the range of 7 to 10 times more, per gigawatt of capacity, than their terrestrial counterparts. “It just wasn’t practical,” he says. “Not even close.” But when Elon Musk began publicly backing the idea, McCalip revisited the numbers using publicly available information about Starlink’s and Tesla’s technologies and capabilities.

That changed the picture substantially. The figures in his online analysis assume an orbital network of data-center satellites that borrows heavily from Musk’s tech treasure chest—“essentially…you just start putting some radiation-resistant ASIC chips on the Starlink fleet and you start growing edge capacity organically on the Starlink fleet,” McCalip says. The network would rely on the kind of watt-efficient GPU architecture used in Teslas for self-driving, he adds. “You start dropping those onto the backs of Starlinks. You can slowly grow this out, and this would be approximately the performance that you would get.”

Bottom line, with some solid but not necessarily heroic engineering, the cost of an orbital data center could be as low as three times that of the comparable terrestrial one. That differential, while still high, at least nudges the concept out of the instantly dismissible category. “I have my particular views, but I want the data to speak for itself,” McCalip says.

For this illustration, we picked a configuration with an aggregate 1 GW of capacity. The network would consist of some 4,300 satellites, each of which would be outfitted with a 1,024-square-meter solar array that generates 250 kilowatts. The data center on that satellite, powered by the array, might have at least 175 GPUs; McCalip notes that a popular GPU rack, Nvidia’s NVL72, has 72 GPUs and requires 120 to 140 kW.

The total cost of the satellite network would be around US $51 billion, including launch and five years of operational expenses; a comparable terrestrial system would cost about $16 billion over the same period.

Stupid? Not stupid? You decide.

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

In past missions to Mars, like with the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers, the robots relied mostly on human instructions from millions of miles away in order to safely navigate the Martian landscape. The Perseverance rover, on the other hand, has zipped across the alien, boulder-ridden land almost completely autonomously, smashing previous records for autonomous driving on Mars.

Whereas the Curiosity rover completed about 6.2 percent of its travels autonomously, Perseverance had completed about 90 percent of its travels autonomously, as of its 1,312th Martian day since landing (28 October 2024). Perseverance was able to accomplish such a feat—using remarkably little computing power—thanks to its specially designed autonomous driving algorithm, Enhanced Autonomous Navigation, or ENav.

The full details on ENav’s inner workings and how well it has performed on Mars are described in a study published in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics in November 2025.

There are some advantages, but some serious challenges when it comes to autonomous navigation on Mars. On the plus side, almost nothing on the planet moves. Rocks and gravel slopes—while formidable obstacles—remain stationary, offering rovers consistency and predictability in their calculations and pathfinding. On the other hand, Mars is in large part uncharted terrain.

“This enormous uncertainty is the major challenge,” says Masahiro “Hiro” Ono, supervisor of the Robotic Surface Mobility Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped develop ENav.

Creating a Highly Autonomous Rover

While some images from the space-borne Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter exist, these are usually not high enough resolution for ground-based navigation by a rover. In December, NASA engineers performed the first test of a navigation technique that uses a model based on Anthropic’s AI to analyze MRO images and generate waypoints—the coordinates used to guide the rover’s path—for more complete automation.

RELATED: NASA Let AI Drive the Perseverance Rover

But in the majority of today’s navigation, Perseverance must rely on images the rover itself takes, analyze these to assess thousands of different paths, and choose the right route that won’t end in its own demise. The kicker? It must do so with the equivalent computing capacity of an iMac G3, an Apple computer sold in the late 1990s.

The rover’s processor must undergo radiation hardening, a process that makes them resilient to the extreme levels of solar radiation and cosmic rays experienced on Mars. Although other radiation-hardened CPUs with more computing power were available at the time of Perseverance‘s development, the one used is proven to be reliable in the harsh conditions of outer space. By reusing hardware from previous missions—the same CPU was used in Curiosity—NASA can reduce costs while minimizing risk.

Given its limited computing resources, the ENav algorithm was strategically designed to do the heaviest computing only when driving on challenging terrains. It works by analyzing images of its surroundings and assessing about 1,700 possible paths forward, typically within 6 meters from the rover’s current position. Assessing factors such as travel time and terrain roughness, it ranks possible paths. Finally, it runs a computationally heavy collision-checking algorithm, called ACE (approximate clearance estimation) on only on a handful of top-ranked potential paths.

As of October 2024, Perseverance has driven more than 30 kilometers (18.65 miles) and collected 24 samples of rock and regolith. Source: JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/NASA

Exploring the Red Planet with ENav

Perseverance landed on Mars on 18 February 2021. In their study, Ono and his colleagues describe how the rover was initially deployed with strong human navigation oversight during its first 64 Martian days on the Red Planet, but then went on to predominantly use ENav to travel to one of the major exploration targets: the delta formed by an ancient river that once flowed into Jezero Crater billions of years ago. Scientists believe it could be a prime spot for finding evidence of past alien life, if life ever existed on Mars.

After a brief exploration of an area southwest of its landing site, Perseverance jetted counterclockwise around sand dunes toward the ancient river delta at a crisp pace, averaging 201 meters per Martian day. (It’s too cold for the rover to travel at night.) Over the course of just 24 Martian days of driving, the rover traveled about 5 kilometers into the foothill of the delta. 95 percent of all driving that month was performed using the autonomous driving mode, resulting in an unprecedented amount of autonomous driving on Mars.

Past rovers, such as Curiosity, had to stop and “think” about their paths before moving forward. “That was the main speed bump for Curiosity, why it was so slow to drive autonomously,” Ono explains.

In contrast, Perseverance is able to think and drive at the same time. “Sometimes [Perseverance] has to stop and think, particularly when it cannot figure out a safe path quickly. But most of the time, particularly on easy terrains, it can keep driving without stopping,” Ono says. “That made its autonomous driving an order of magnitude faster.”

Opportunity held the previous record for autonomous driving on Mars, traveling 109 meters in a single Martian day. But on 3 April 2023, Perseverance set a new record by driving 331.74 meters autonomously (and 347.69 meters in total) in a single Martian day.

Ono says that fine-tuning the ENav algorithm took a lot of work, but he is happy with its performance. He also emphasizes that efforts to continue advancing autonomous navigation are critical if humans want to continue exploring even deeper into space, where Earthly communication with rovers and other spacecraft will become increasingly difficult.

“The automation of the space systems is unstoppable direction that we have to go if we want to explore deeper in space,” Ono says. “This is the direction that we must go to push the boundaries and frontiers of space exploration.”

This article was updated on 27 February to clarify NASA’s reasoning for selecting the CPU used in the Perseverance rover.

This article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “Perseverance Masters Self-Driving on Mars.”

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In December, NASA took another small, incremental step towards autonomous surface rovers. In a demonstration, the Perseverance team used AI to generate the rover’s waypoints. Perseverance used the AI waypoints on two separate days, traveling a total of 456 meters without human control.

“This demonstration shows how far our capabilities have advanced and broadens how we will explore other worlds,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Autonomous technologies like this can help missions to operate more efficiently, respond to challenging terrain, and increase science return as distance from Earth grows. It’s a strong example of teams applying new technology carefully and responsibly in real operations.”

Mars is a long way away, and there’s about a 25-minute delay for a round-trip signal between Earth and Mars. That means that one way or another, rovers are on their own for short periods of time.

The delay shapes the route-planning process. Rover drivers here on Earth examine images and elevation data and program a series of waypoints, which usually don’t exceed 100 meters apart. The driving plan is sent to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which transmits it to one of several orbiters, which then relay it to Perseverance. (Perseverance can receive direct comms from the DSN as a backup, but the data rate is slower.)

AI Enhances Mars Rover Navigation

In this demonstration, the AI model analyzed orbital images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, as well as digital elevation models. The AI, which is based on Anthropic’s Claude AI, identified hazards like sand traps, boulder fields, bedrock, and rocky outcrops. Then it generated a path defined by a series of waypoints that avoids the hazards. From there, Perseverance’s auto-navigation system took over. It has more autonomy than its predecessors and can process images and driving plans while in motion.

There was another important step before these waypoints were transmitted to Perseverance. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a “twin” for Perseverance called the “Vehicle System Test Bed” (VSTB) in JPL’s Mars Yard. It’s an engineering model that the team can work with here on Earth to solve problems, or for situations like this. These engineering versions are common on Mars missions, and JPL has one for Curiosity, too.

“The fundamental elements of generative AI are showing a lot of promise in streamlining the pillars of autonomous navigation for off-planet driving: perception (seeing the rocks and ripples), localization (knowing where we are), and planning and control (deciding and executing the safest path),” said Vandi Verma, a space roboticist at JPL and a member of the Perseverance engineering team. “We are moving towards a day where generative AI and other smart tools will help our surface rovers handle kilometer-scale drives while minimizing operator workload, and flag interesting surface features for our science team by scouring huge volumes of rover images.”

AI’s Expanding Role in Space Exploration

AI is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in our lives, showing up in places that don’t necessarily have a strong use case for it. But this isn’t NASA hopping on the AI bandwagon. They’ve been developing automatic navigation systems for a while, out of necessity. In fact, Perseverance’s primary means of driving is its self-driving autonomous navigation system.

One thing that prevents fully autonomous driving is the way uncertainty grows as the rover operates without human assistance. The longer the rover travels, the more uncertain it becomes about its position on the surface. The solution is to relocalize the rover on its map. Currently, humans do this. But this takes time, including a complete communication cycle between Earth and Mars. Overall, it limits how far Perseverance can go without a helping hand.

NASA/JPL is also working on a way that Perseverance can use AI to relocalize. The main roadblock is matching orbital images with the rover’s ground-level images. It seems highly likely that AI will be trained to excel at this.

It’s obvious that AI is set to play a much larger role in planetary exploration. The next Mars rover may be much different than current ones, with more advanced autonomous navigation and other AI features. There are already concepts for a swarm of flying drones released by a rover to expand its explorative reach on Mars. These swarms would be controlled by AI to work together and autonomously.

And it’s not just Mars exploration that will benefit from AI. NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan will make extensive use of AI. Not only for autonomous navigation as the rotorcraft flies around but also for autonomous data curation.

“Imagine intelligent systems not only on the ground at Earth but also in edge applications in our rovers, helicopters, drones, and other surface elements trained with the collective wisdom of our NASA engineers, scientists, and astronauts,” said Matt Wallace, manager of JPL’s Exploration Systems Office. “That is the game-changing technology we need to establish the infrastructure and systems required for a permanent human presence on the moon and take the U.S. to Mars and beyond.”

This past December, the U.K. startup Space Forge turned on an orbital furnace aboard its ForgeStar-1 satellite, producing a stream of superhot plasma that could someday enable production of near-ideal semiconductor crystals in orbit. Hailed as a breakthrough in orbital manufacturing, the milestone is a first for a free-flying commercial satellite and a payload not operated by humans.

Founded in 2018, Space Forge is one of several companies founded on the premise that made-in-space materials can help bring about ultra-efficient next-generation electronics, ultrafast optical networks, and breakthroughs in pharmaceutical research. Space Forge’s flying furnace is specifically designed to make seed crystals that would be used later, on Earth, to produce substrates of gallium and aluminum nitride or silicon carbide for high-performance power devices.

Semiconductors have been made in space before. Astronauts grew crystals of indium antimonide and germanium in the 1970s aboard the Skylab space station, and similar experiments have been taking place on the International Space Station. Between 1973 and 2016, around 160 semiconductor crystals were grown in microgravity aboard various spacecraft, according to a meta-analysis study published in the journal Nature in 2024. The study found that 86 percent of those space-grown crystals grew larger, were more uniform, and showed better performance than their counterparts grown on Earth.

“There is potential for significant energy savings, perhaps as much as 50 percent within large infrastructure installations such as 5G towers,” says Joshua Western, Space Forge’s cofounder and CEO, in an interview.

E. Steve Putna, the director of the Texas A&M Semiconductor Institute, says that “space-grown crystals have demonstrated significantly higher electron mobility,” which could translate to a 20 to 40 percent increase in switching efficiency compared with Earth-grown counterparts. (Putna has no involvement with Space Forge.)

Why Space Fabrication Makes Better Crystals

On Earth, most semiconductors today are fabricated using highly pure materials such as silicon, gallium arsenide, or gallium nitride, produced by depositing vaporized precursor chemicals layer by layer on substrates inside a vessel called a reactor. The fabrication processes are very tightly controlled, but the resulting semiconductor crystals nevertheless have small amounts of impurities and defects, which can cause heat during operation and slightly reduce performance.

Western says that the superior vacuum in space does away with those impurities, thus increasing the quality of the crystals produced. ”For example, if you’re worried about nitrogen interfering with your growth process, on Earth [in a vacuum chamber] nitrogen might be present at concentration of around 10 to the –11” (10 to the power of minus 11, or 1 x 10^-9 percent). “In space, above 500 kilometers altitude, it’s naturally present at 10 to the –22.”

ForgeStar-1 was photographed during its successful test.Space Forge

Moreover, the microgravity environment gives the crystal growth process a “better head start,” he says, creating uniform conditions in which the crystals form. “On Earth, you have trouble that, perhaps, some crystals grow around the interior of the reactor and not in other parts because the process between hot and cold is influenced by gravity,” Western says. “Microgravity effectively prevents convection from taking place, so you get a continually uniform deposition area.”

Such advantages are responsible for the enhanced performance and efficiency of the resulting electronic components made with space-grown crystals, says Western. “The thermal performance of a semiconductor is directly driven by how good its lattice structure is and how good its purity is,” he says. “If you can change those things, then you are able to produce semiconductors that require much less cooling because they run at a lower temperature, which allows you to significantly reduce energy consumption. Or you can trade off that significant reduction in energy consumption for significantly higher output.”

Putna says the decreased internal resistance and reduced heat generation that results from fewer defects in the semiconductor structure could be “a game changer for AI data centers where cooling costs are a primary bottleneck” for wider deployment. In power electronics, more perfect crystals can allow a smaller chip to handle higher voltages without failing, he adds.

Will the Performance Boost Justify the High Costs?

Still, launching stuff into space and returning it back to Earth is expensive. Currently, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches payloads to low Earth orbit for an estimated US $1,500 per kilogram. Materials made on the ISS can be returned to Earth on SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon capsule, but demand for its services is high and availability limited.

Western says the seed crystals Space Forge will create in space will be further sprouted in terrestrial foundries while passing on their out-of-this-world qualities. From a single kilogram of space-grown semiconductor, manufacturers on Earth will grow tonnes of high-performance material, he says. “There will be a level of degradation over time and over generations of growth,” he concedes, “but it will be multiple growth runs before the quality degrades to the point of the current state of the art.”

Putna insists that “if a space-grown substrate increases the yield of a $10,000 high-end AI processor from 50 percent to 90 percent or allows a quantum computer to function closer to room temperature rather than near absolute zero, the launch cost becomes a negligible fraction of the total value created.”

Not everyone is convinced. Matt Francis, CEO of the electronics company Ozark Integrated Circuits, says that the price of silicon substrates plummeted over the past few years, making infrastructure operators less likely to buy costly space-grown crystals. And terrestrial fabrication technologies, he points out, keep improving. Ozark specializes in rugged ICs for aerospace and other applications.

“While I remember paying $20K a wafer in the early days, we are down in the hundreds-of-dollars range in volume markets like power,” Francis says. “When they were a prized commodity, maybe sending to space made sense. While the cost of space is decreasing, it’s not decreasing faster than the cost of producing wafers.” In some cases, Francis notes, it might turn out to be possible to get performance superior to a space-grown device by using multiple conventional devices, and at lower overall cost.

Space Forge has yet to test its return technology. Although the ForgeStar-1 satellite will deploy a novel heat shield during its de-orbit maneuver later this year, this spacecraft is designed only to put the orbital furnace through its paces and prove it can “repeatedly create and maintain the manufacturing environment required for the chemistry process” needed to grow superconductor crystals, according to Western.

The satellite will ultimately perish during its return to Earth, meaning Space Forge will only get its first batch of space-grown crystals back home with the follow-up mission, expected to launch at some point next year. The amount of material brought back will be at best a few kilograms.

Other companies are betting on the potential of space-grown crystals. Colorado-based Voyager Technologies recently patented a new method for growing crystals of novel fiber-optic materials in orbit, which the company claims could significantly speed up data transmission. London-headquartered ACME Space wants to test its balloon-launched orbital factory Hyperion later this year, also eyeing the semiconductor, pharmaceuticals, and optical-fiber markets. California-based Varda Industries raised an impressive $329 million last year to begin manufacturing pharmaceuticals in space. Since 2023, the company has conducted multiple orbital flights to test its return technology and is planning additional tests this year. Some analysts estimate the in-orbit manufacturing market could reach $28.19 billion by 2034.

Amid this enthusiasm, Anne Wilson, a professor of biochemistry at Butler University, in Indianapolis, and an author of the 2024 Nature metanalysis, sounds a note of caution. “I don’t think that microgravity is going to be ideal for the manufacture of bulk materials,” she says. “However, niche materials for specific applications might be worth the investment.”

UPDATE 1 MARCH, 2026: NASA announced on 27 February that the agency will launch an additional test flight after Artemis II and before a lunar landing attempt. The new Artemis III, in 2027, would have an Orion spacecraft attempt to rendezvous and dock with one or more proposed lunar landing craft in low Earth orbit. The first moon landing of the project would come on Artemis IV or V, still currently scheduled for 2028.

All mentions of Artemis III in the original story refer to NASA’s previous program structure, in which that third flight would have been the crewed landing on the moon. —IEEE Spectrum

Original article from 9 February, 2026 follows:

Artemis, depending on whom you ask, is NASA’s bid to reclaim its heritage, to resume the business of human exploration, to take astronauts to the moon and beyond and win what’s been billed by some U.S. politicians as the “new space race” with China. Artemis II, the project’s first circumlunar test mission with a crew, is now preparing for launch, perhaps in March. If it succeeds, and if NASA can deliver on an 18 December executive order from the Trump administration, Artemis astronauts will land near the moon’s south pole by 2028 and start building a lunar outpost by 2030, steps to “ensuring American space superiority.”

But there are influential voices in the American space community who warn that unless things change quickly, the race has already been lost.

“We cannot control what China is doing,” said Michael Griffin in congressional testimony in December of last year. He was NASA administrator from 2005 to 2009, when the agency began assembling the hardware for what is now Artemis. “We can only control what we are doing. Of those efforts, I am forced to say that mediocrity would be an improvement.”

RELATED: NASA’s Rivalry/Not-Rivalry With China’s Space Agency Takes Off

“Look at the architecture that we have developed to land American astronauts on the moon,” said Jim Bridenstine in his own testimony in September. He was NASA administrator from 2018 to 2021, when Artemis was named as America’s new lunar venture. “It is extraordinarily complex.”

Other NASA veterans have expressed the same worry. They say that Artemis, with its much-delayed Space Launch System rocket, Orion crew capsule, and—most critically—two competing, unproven lunar landers, is hobbled by its history of convoluted, meandering decision-making. They say it needs better organization, perhaps even a new landing ship, even at this late date.

Meanwhile, the Chinese space program claims it’s on track to a lunar landing by its stated goal of 2030. In Western eyes, China does not have superior technology or resources, but it’s been better at setting long-term goals and sticking to them.

“If we don’t do this, it’s not just ‘Oh, that’s too bad, China got to the moon first,’” says Lisa Porter, who worked with Griffin at NASA. (The two of them are now co-presidents of a management, scientific, and technology consulting firm, LogiQ.) “Now China gets to establish the standards for the future.”

The Origins of NASA’s Artemis Program

Artemis rose from the ashes of the space shuttle Columbia disaster. After the shuttle disintegrated upon reentry in 2003, President George W. Bush outlined a “Vision for Space Exploration.”

RELATED: Inside the Spacecraft That Will Carry Humans Around the Moon

NASA’s current moon effort, in other words, is finally launching astronauts after two decades of work. By 2005, with Griffin in charge, the agency laid out a program called Constellation, whose components included a conical capsule called the Crew Exploration Vehicle (later Orion) and a big rust-colored rocket called Ares V (later SLS). To speed development and save money, much of the hardware was repurposed from the shuttle program. The idea was to build on known technology. And there was no rush: At the time, Griffin said Constellation astronauts would walk on the moon by 2018.

In 2006, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin [left] and Scott J. Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems, detailed plans for the Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon. Bill Ingalls/NASA

That plan lasted only until the Bush administration was succeeded by Barack Obama’s—and at every juncture after that, an already complicated project became even more so. With costs growing and deadlines being pushed back, the Obama White House canceled Constellation in 2010. The U.S. Senate, worried about jobs, uncanceled the launch rocket and the crew capsule, but it became a rocket without a destination. The Obama administration suggested going to a near-Earth asteroid. The Trump White House restored the moon as a goal in 2017, but by then the Orion spacecraft no longer had an engine powerful enough to put astronauts in a low lunar orbit, and work on a lunar landing ship, then called Altair, had been stopped.

“There’s a regrettable history in this country,” says Griffin now, “of, whenever possible, a new administration wants to discontinue what was being done before and do something new. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not.”

Industry’s Role in NASA’s Lunar Ambitions

There has been a sea change, in the meantime, in how the American space effort does business. No longer does NASA try to run every program itself; where possible, it lets industry manage them, with the government as a “customer.”

Proponents say it works great: Companies, competing for NASA’s business, have incentive to move faster and be more creative. Costs drop, sometimes so dramatically that NASA can afford to hire two companies for a job in case one runs into trouble. But it’s become messy, at least so far, in the case of the HLS—the Human Landing System, the all-important spacecraft that would actually bring Artemis’s astronauts to the lunar surface.

In 2021 NASA awarded seed money to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, to adapt its giant Starship spacecraft as a lunar lander. Two years later, it made a second award, to Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, to build a lander for later Artemis flights. They were two aggressive companies, owned by two of the world’s wealthiest technologists.

But this is why all those NASA veterans are sounding the alarm. For one thing, neither Starship nor Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers have so far proved themselves ready to carry astronauts. And, say Griffin and Porter, they are going to have a very difficult time even getting close.

SpaceX says it is adapting its Starship spacecraft into a lunar lander variant for future Artemis missions.SpaceX

The showstopper, they say, is in the choice of propellants. For 60 years American spacecraft have mostly maneuvered in space with so-called hypergolics, like hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, that ignite on contact with each other to provide thrust. They’re highly toxic, but very reliable. SpaceX and Blue Origin both favor cryogenic fuels, like liquid hydrogen or liquid methane.

That makes great sense for the long term. Cryogenic fuels have a much higher specific impulse, the amount of thrust per unit of propellant, than hypergolics, and someday they may even be made from water ice near the moon’s south pole. But to be kept liquid in a rocket’s fuel tank, they have to be hundreds of degrees below zero—not an easy problem when the sun routinely heats orbiting spacecraft above 120 °C. To fill a moon-bound Starship with liquid methane, SpaceX proposed launching it into low Earth orbit, then sending a succession of other Starships to dock with it and tank it up. It would be an uphill battle, because the fuel just delivered would keep boiling off in the sun’s heat.

How many Starship launches would it take to fill the first ship? Four? Ten? Twenty? Nobody has ever tried large-scale refueling in orbit–much less with multiple launches of the largest rocket ever built. “It’s an odd choice from a program manager’s point of view to put an unproven technology in series with an operational mission,” says Griffin.

Can Simplifying Lunar Missions Lead to Success?

In a detailed paper sent to Congress, Griffin and Porter suggest that NASA call on industry to come up with a simpler, smaller landing ship, so that a moon-landing mission could be done with just two launches, one for Orion and one for the lander.

Private industry is sharing in the increased urgency.Blue Origin announced at the end of January that it is stopping its short suborbital flights for space tourists so that it can “shift resources to further accelerate development of the company’s human lunar capabilities.” Lockheed Martin, which builds Orion, hassaid it was working with other companies on a lander that the company privately proposed to be built largely with existing components. And SpaceX, in October, posted an online update: “We’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the moon…” SpaceX and Blue Origin did not reply to requests for interviews.

Management of all this now falls to Jared Isaacman, newly installed as NASA’s chief. At a Senate hearing on 3 December, he called himself an advocate of competition. “I think the best thing for SpaceX is a Blue Origin right on their heels and vice versa.” And he took it a step further: “I think competition among world powers is actually a really good thing, just as long as we don’t lose.”

What are the odds? Lisa Porter, for one, says she’s concerned, and hopes the United States will see its space plans as a national priority.

“This country has shown,” she says, “that when we feel an existential threat, we can do incredible things.”

This is part 3 of a three-part series, Back to the Moon. Part 1 is about the technology behind NASA’s Artemis II mission. Part 2 looks at China’s lunar ambitions.

This article appears in the April 2026 print issue as “NASA’s Lunar Return Struggles.”

UPDATE 1 MARCH, 2026: NASA announced on 27 February that the agency will launch an additional test flight after Artemis II and before a lunar landing attempt. The new Artemis III, in 2027, would have an Orion spacecraft attempt to rendezvous and dock with one or more proposed lunar landing craft in low Earth orbit. The first moon landing of the project would come on Artemis IV or V, still currently scheduled for 2028.

All mentions of Artemis III in the original story refer to NASA’s previous program structure, in which that third flight would have been the crewed landing on the moon. —IEEE Spectrum

Original article from 2 February, 2026 follows:

Slow and steady wins the race, or so goes the fable. The China Manned Space Agency, or CMSA, has repeatedly denied any rivalry with the United States akin to the race to the moon in the 1960s. But step-by-step, one element at a time over a period of decades, it has built a human space program with goals that include landing astronauts on the moon by 2030 and starting a base there in the following years. And—partly because launch dates for NASA’s Artemis III moon landing keep slipping toward that same time frame—U.S. space leaders are ratcheting up the space race rhetoric.

“We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including in the high ground of space,” said Jared Isaacman, the new head of NASA, in December. “This is not the time for delay, but for action, because if we fall behind—if we make a mistake—we may never catch up, and the consequences could shift the balance of power here on Earth.”

NASA’s Artemis II is almost ready to take its crew on a circumlunar test flight, and the White House has said that U.S. astronauts should prioritize a lunar landing by 2028—but could China slip in ahead? How would a Chinese moon flight work? Does the Chinese space program have technology that matches or beats the United States?

RELATED: Inside the Spacecraft That Will Carry Humans Around the Moon

“Nobody [in China] would argue that we are in a space race,” says Namrata Goswami, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively about China’s space effort, “but they might be engaged in activity that showcases China as a space power, and they are very serious about getting somewhere first.”

What Are the Mengzhou and Lanyue Spacecraft?

China’s lunar hardware builds on existing engineering. It is based on a multipurpose crew ship called Mengzhou, with capacity for six or seven astronauts, though as few as three may actually fly on a trip from Earth to low lunar orbit. (China watchers dispense with the word “taikonaut” for its crew members, by the way; the word was coined in 1998 and has not been used by the Chinese government itself. China generally uses the word yuhangyuan, roughly translated as “traveler of the universe.”)

Mengzhou, according to what the CMSA has shown, includes a crew section in the shape of a truncated cone or frustum, with a service module holding power and propulsion systems in the rear. If you squint at it, you’ll see a resemblance to the American Artemis or Apollo spacecraft, the SpaceX Crew Dragon, or the yet-to-be-flown European Nyx. Basic aerodynamics make a blunt cone a very efficient shape for safely launching a spacecraft and returning it through Earth’s atmosphere.

The Mengzhou command ship uses parachutes and airbags during a 2025 landing test in northwest China.Wang Heng/Xinhua/Getty Images

Mengzhou is billed as reusable, with an outer heat shield that can be replaced after flight. Landings would take place in China’s western desert. “Coupled with the landing method of airbag cushioning,” says the CMSA in a translated statement, “the spacecraft itself can be better protected from damage and allow the reuse of the spacecraft.”

The ship would be launched by a new heavy-lift Long March 10 booster, one of two used for a given moon mission. The Long March 10, as configured for lunar flight, would stand 92.5 meters high at launch and generate thrust of 2,678 tonnes. (The rocket for Artemis II is more powerful: 3,992 tonnes.)

Mengzhou would leave for the moon after another Long March 10 has launched a lunar landing craft called Lanyue. The two would rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit. Two astronauts would transfer to Lanyue and land on the moon’s surface; Mengzhou would wait for them in orbit for the trip home. Lanyue has a stated mass of 26 tonnes and could carry a 200-kilogram rover.

Chinese authorities say testing of Lanyue began in 2024. Mengzhou should go on its first robotic flight in 2026; Lanyue, in 2027. The first joint test mission is planned for 2028 or 2029, with the first crew going to the moon a year after that.

What Is China’s Long-Term Plan for Space?

But to focus on their hardware is to miss out on a major difference between the Chinese and U.S. moon-landing efforts. Artemis is the product of a start-again stop-again debate that’s been going on in the U.S. government since Apollo ended in the 1970s. Goals have shifted repeatedly—often when new presidents took office. Conversely, the Chinese campaign is the outgrowth of a plan called Project 921, first backed by the Chinese Communist Party in 1992. There have been updates and some technical setbacks, but China has pretty much stuck to it ever since.

“What the Chinese space effort has done that others have not is integrate everything,” says Goswami. “It’s not just ‘We’re going to mount a mission.’ It’s bigger than that. They view space as an activity and not missions.”

RELATED: NASA Still Has a Lot of Work to Do to Return to the Moon

In other words, she says, each new piece of technology is part of a coordinated effort to create a sustained presence in space, which pays economic, geopolitical, and sometimes military dividends. Each part, so far, has fit together with other parts: The first orbiting capsule, called Shenzhou 1 in 1999, led to the first flight by an astronaut, Yang Lewei, on Shenzhou 5 in 2003. That led to space stations (the Tiangong series, starting in 2011), to which Shenzhou crews have been flying since in regular rotation (Shenzhou 22 launched in November). Mengzhou will eventually take over as the workhorse crew vehicle for Earth-orbiting flights.

In the meantime, there has been a steady cadence of robotic lunar orbiters and landers (Chang’e-6 returned the first-ever soil sample from the moon’s far side in 2024), soon to be followed, we’re now told, by Chinese astronauts.

They started slowly, deliberately, with long breaks between missions, only recently picking up speed. At times they have unabashedly looked to other countries for guidance: The Shenzhou crew capsule in the 1990s borrowed heavily from the design of the Russian Soyuz. And several engineers today point out that the Mengzhou-Lanyue plan sounds in many ways like what then-administrator Michael Griffin proposed for NASA’s Constellation program back in 2005—a crewed ship launched by one rocket, a moon lander by another, with astronauts transferring to the lander once they reach lunar orbit. A crew capsule and lunar lander would be too much for one launch, as with the Apollo–Saturn V, because landings would be more ambitious than could be achieved with Apollo’s minimalist lunar module, with longer stays and equipment for a lunar base.

“The Chinese are pursuing an architecture a lot like the Apollo architecture was. Which is understandable because their ambitions are to go fast, and Apollo worked,” says a former senior NASA manager who, like several others, asked not to be quoted by name.

“I have a lot of friends who have been watching the Chinese space program for the last couple of decades,” this person continued. “And the one hallmark that we can say is that when China announces dates for things, they typically maintain them.”

“Our Great Rival”

And that is why Jared Isaacman talks of urgency at NASA. He has so far generally avoided the word “China” in public. The Chinese, in his words, are usually “our great rival” or “a competitor.” Some NASA veterans say China may turn out to be giving the agency a helpful push to be faster and more agile. They say Apollo succeeded, in large part, because of the race to beat the Soviet Union. A Chinese challenge—even unstated, even illusory—may help Artemis move along.

“We have a great competitor that is moving at absolutely impressive speeds,” Isaacman told NASA employees, “and it’s unsettling to consider the implications if we fail to maintain our technological, scientific, or economic edge in space. And the clock is running.”

This is part 2 of a three-part series, Back to the Moon. Part 1 is about the technology behind NASA’s Artemis II mission. Part 3 discusses the organizational challenges faced by NASA in returning astronauts to the moon.

As a kid in the 1970s, I watched the Apollo moon missions on TV, drawn like a curious moth to the cathode-ray tube’s glow. The English band Pink Floyd blared through the speakers of my mom’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, beckoning us to the dark side of the moon.

The far side of the moon, the term most scientists prefer, is indeed dark (half the time), cold, and inhospitable. There’s regolith and a couple of Chinese landers—Chang’e 4 in January 2019 and Chang’e 6 in June 2024—and not much else. That could change in about a year, as Contributing Editor Ned Potter reports in “The Quest to Build a Telescope That Can Hear the Cosmic Dark Ages.” Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 with the LuSEE-Night radio telescope aboard will attempt to become the third successful mission to land there.

The moon’s far side is the perfect place for such a telescope. The same RF waves that carried images of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface, Roger Waters’s voice, and hundreds of Ned Potter’s space and science segments for the U.S. broadcast networks CBS and ABC interfere with terrestrial radio telescopes. If your goal is to detect the extremely faint and heavily redshifted signals of neutral hydrogen from the cosmic Dark Ages, you just can’t do it from Earth. This epoch is so-called because we Earthlings have yet to sense anything from this time period, which started about 380,000 years after the big bang and lasted 200 million to 400 million years. The far side of the moon may be a terrible place to live, but it’s shielded from all the noise of Earth, making it the ideal spot to place a radio telescope.

As Potter emphasized to me recently, LuSEE-Night won’t listen for a signal from Dark Ages hydrogen directly. “Will the hydrogen from the Dark Ages send a signal? No,” says Potter. “But all that hydrogen out there may absorb a little bit of energy from the cosmic microwave background, interfering with that even more distant remnant of the big bang.”

The far side may not stay quiet for much longer. Several countries, including China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, are making slow but steady progress toward establishing a lunar presence. As they do so, they’ll place more relay satellites into orbit around the moon to support exploratory activities as well as moon bases planned for the next decade and beyond. That means the window on a noise-free far side is closing. LuSEE-Night, a project 40 years in the making, might just get there in the nick of time.

Potter is tracking emerging protocols that could preserve the far side’s electromagnetic silence even as such efforts advance. Radio astronomers he’s talked to have shared ideas about how to prevent this emerging problem from turning into a crisis. “There are no bad guys in this story, at least not yet,” says Potter. “But there are a lot of well-meaning people who could complicate the picture a great deal if they don’t know that there’s a picture to complicate.”

It’s a busy time for moon missions. In addition to Blue Ghost Mission 2, the Chinese are sending Chang’e 7 to the moon’s south pole, while NASA’s Artemis II is scheduled to enter the first of three launch windows this month. Artemis II will be the first mission to put humans into lunar orbit since the last Apollo mission in 1972. And IEEE Spectrum readers will enjoy a front row seat, thanks to the enterprising reporting of a true legend in the business, our own Ned Potter.

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “See You on the Far Side of the Moon.”

UPDATE 1 MARCH, 2026: NASA announced on 27 February that the agency will launch an additional test flight after Artemis II and before a lunar landing attempt. The new Artemis III, in 2027, would have an Orion spacecraft attempt to rendezvous and dock with one or more proposed lunar landing craft in low Earth orbit. The first moon landing of the project would come on Artemis IV or V, still currently scheduled for 2028.

All mentions of Artemis III in the original story refer to NASA’s previous program structure, in which that third flight would have been the crewed landing on the moon. —IEEE Spectrum

Original article from 29 January, 2026 follows:

“We’re going to the moon.” Reid Wiseman, the commander of Artemis II, said the words emphatically, his way of opening a news briefing last September. He may have practiced the line, but he said it with such force that it underscored the moment—the Artemis II astronauts will be the first to circle the moon in more than 50 years, a risky and complicated mission.

So yes, humans are going to the moon. Artemis II is now aiming for launch, perhaps in March. But target launch dates have also come and gone in 2024 and 2025. Wiseman and his three crewmates—Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency—were publicly assigned to this mission in April 2023. “We really see the light at the end of the tunnel,” said Wiseman at the September briefing.

The Artemis spacecraft, with its Orion crew capsule atop the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, has never carried astronauts before. The uncrewed Artemis I flew in 2022. This year’s flight, if all goes well, will be the one test with a crew before astronauts try to land near the lunar south pole on Artemis III.

RELATED: NASA’s Rivalry/Not-Rivalry With China’s Space Agency Takes Off

Tension is building, not only because of the upcoming launch but also because of staff and budget cuts, leadership changes at NASA—and a chorus of voices warning that the Chinese space agency may actually beat Artemis III to the moon.

So how, after all these years, changes of plan, delays, and so much money spent, is Artemis II going to do it?

Artemis II Builds on the Past

Although the Artemis spacecraft is on a new mission, in many ways, the vehicle is not new at all. It relies heavily on mature technologies from earlier phases of the U.S. space program—the space shuttle, the International Space Station, and Apollo itself.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, say engineers who’ve worked on Artemis. When you’re trying to do something very difficult, the best systems aren’t always the newest. “We try to rely on proven technology, as much as we can, as long as it meets our needs for performance and weight,” says Tim Straube, Orion’s deputy manager for avionics, power, and software at NASA in Houston.

Artemis isn’t reusable, but it’s built from many used and spare parts. It will leave from Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a launch pad built in the 1960s and used for two Apollo flights, three Skylab flights, and 53 space-shuttle launches. The SLS rocket, 98 meters tall with Orion on top, uses four engines originally built for space shuttles. The SLS main stage is mostly orange because its liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks are covered with insulation very much like that used on the space shuttles’ giant external tank. The two strap-on solid-rocket boosters are made from casings previously used on shuttle flights; they helped power a shuttle for its first two minutes after liftoff, then were jettisoned, recovered, and refurbished.

An expanded view shows NASA’s SLS Block 1 moon rocket.John MacNeill/IEEE Spectrum

Three of the booster’s four RS-25 engines flew on space-shuttle missions, one of them on 15 flights dating back to 2001. The fourth was assembled late in the shuttle program but never used. L3Harris, the contractor responsible for the engines, points out that all four include refurbished components that were carried on the very first shuttle flight in 1981.

The Orion crew module has the classic truncated cone shape that engineers calculated back in the 1950s as optimal for dissipating heat on reentry. Five meters wide at the base, it has about 9 cubic meters of habitable space for the astronauts, compared with about 6 for Apollo. Its exterior is covered with about 1,300 thermal tiles, similar to those used on the space shuttles and wrapped in a silvery reflective coating, like Apollo’s. At its base is a heat shield made of an ablative mixture called Avcoat, reformulated from the Apollo era.

An exploded view shows the Orion spacecraft.John MacNeill/IEEE Spectrum

Orion is the only part of the Artemis vehicle that is intended to make the 2.25-million-kilometer round trip, from launch to lunar flyby to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, about 100 km off the coast of Southern California. At launch, it will be nestled under a protective cover with an abort rocket at its apex. Behind it is the ship’s service module, supplied by the European Space Agency, carrying consumables, electronics, four photovoltaic arrays, attitude-control thrusters, and a rocket engine, which, like the RS-25s in the booster, is a veteran of space-shuttle missions. ESA says the engine flew on six flights of the shuttle Atlantis between 2000 and 2002, then was kept in storage for 20 years.

New Tech in Artemis II

“You’ll find a lot of heritage throughout this vehicle,” says Paul Benfield, Orion Artemis II mission senior manager at Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the crew module. He has worked on its development since before it was even given the Orion name in 2006. And while much of its design dates back to then, it also takes advantage of systems that have grown increasingly sophisticated in the years since.

Multiple redundancy is critical, says Benfield. Orion is controlled by two vehicle-management computers, each of which has two flight-control modules, or FCMs, to handle its major systems. If at any point one of the four FCMs disagrees with the others, it will take itself offline and reset itself to make sure its outputs are consistent with the others’. If all four FCMs fail, there is a fifth, entirely separate computer running different code, to get the spacecraft home.

Guidance and navigation, too, have advanced. Orion uses three inertial measurement units and two star trackers to determine its position and trajectory. An optical navigation camera takes shots of Earth and the moon so that guidance software can determine their distance and position and keep the spacecraft on course. When Orion is in range, it can even use GPS signals for guidance.

All that makes for a very complicated vehicle. But as a result, other things can be simpler. Of the four astronauts, only Wiseman, the commander, and Glover, the pilot, have a control panel in front of them, with three flat readout screens, a cursor control (a mouse wouldn’t work in microgravity), and two joysticks for attitude and translational movement of the spacecraft. Whereas a space shuttle’s flight deck had more than 2,020 displays and controls, Orion has about 60. “As you climb into Orion, it’s going to look more like a modern airliner cockpit, with a glass-cockpit-type design, than what you would have seen in Apollo and the shuttle,” says Benfield.

Flight Plan for Artemis II

Countdown, ignition…and liftoff. The vehicle will take the astronauts on one 95-minute elliptical Earth orbit with an apogee of about 2,300 km, then a higher 23-hour orbit with an apogee of about 75,000 km, and then, if all is working well, on a path to the moon that will bring them within about 6,500 km of the lunar surface before they head back to Earth. The mission is supposed to take about 10 days, though specific numbers depend on the actual launch date.

During those 10 days, Wiseman and Glover expect to spend less than 2 hours manually flying their ship. Most of that will be on the first day, when they practice flying in formation with their rocket’s spent upper stage. Almost everything else—engine firings, attitude adjustments—will be controlled by the vehicle’s computers, based on commands from the ground.

The high point should come as the astronauts swing around the moon’s far side. They will not go into orbit, but for about 45 minutes they will be out of touch with Earth, peering out of Orion’s four main windows, cameras firing.

“We could see parts of the moon that never have had human eyes laid upon them before,” said astronaut Koch. “And believe it or not, human eyes are one of the best scientific instruments that we have.”

Orion should be on a free-return trajectory, which would bring it back to Earth with minimal course corrections. Four days later, the capsule and crew should be bobbing in the Pacific, west of San Diego, to be recovered quickly by a U.S. Navy amphibious transport ship.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, secured to the mobile launcher, were rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B on 17 January 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Joel Kowsky/NASA

Next Step: Artemis III

If the mission goes well, Artemis III should be next up, but there’s a lot of work still to be done. SpaceX, which won a contract in 2021 to build a lunar-landing version of its massive, reusable Starship, is behind schedule. It has promised, under pressure from NASA, to speed things along with “a simplified mission architecture.” Meanwhile, competitors, including Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, have signaled they’re working quietly on alternative vehicles. Without major progress on a landing ship, some prominent space experts warn that NASA cannot expect to beat Chinese astronauts to the moon by 2030.

RELATED: NASA Still Has a Lot of Work to Do to Return to the Moon

But first things first: The Artemis II team says it’s ready.

“Going to the moon is crazy. It’s nuts,” said Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian member of the crew, at a briefing in November. “I mean, it’s 400,000 km away, and when you start to really look at how difficult this is and how precise your trajectory has to be, this stuff is crazy.”

“But,” he added, “it’s super cool that we can do it.”

This is part 1 of a three-part series, Back to the Moon. Part 2 looks at China’s lunar ambitions. Part 3 discusses the organizational challenges faced by NASA in returning astronauts to the moon.

This story was updated on 3 February 2026 to change the expected launch window for Artemis II. At the time of publication, NASA was targeting a launch window beginning on 6 February 2026. The agency has now said it will aim for March 2026.

In the 1990s, astronomers confirmed the first planets orbiting stars beyond our sun. Since then, the tally has risen steadily, and last year it crossed a striking milestone: more than 6,000 known exoplanets. NASA’s Exoplanet Archive has captured not just the growing count but how dramatically the pace has accelerated, as new techniques and space telescopes have come on line. The steepest rises coincide with data releases from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which discovered thousands of new planets.

With such an extensive catalog of worlds, researchers can look for patterns. They can compare planet sizes, masses, and compositions; track how tightly planets orbit their stars; and measure the prevalence of different kinds of planetary systems. Those statistics allow astronomers to estimate how frequently planets form, and to start making informed guesses about how often conditions arise that could support life. The Drake Equation uses such estimates to tackle one of humanity’s most profound questions: Are we alone in the universe?

The sample is still shaped by the limits of current instruments, which favor large planets in close-in orbits, but that bias may soon ease. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to survey wide swaths of the sky, is expected to find thousands of new planets, especially colder worlds far from their stars. It may reshape the discovery curve once again.

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Six Thousand Alien Worlds and Counting.”

Most Common Methods of Discovery

Types of Planets Found

TERRESTRIAL

These small, dense worlds are made mostly of rock and metal and are comparable in size to Earth or Mars. They can have widely varying temperatures and atmospheres, and some may ultimately prove capable of hosting liquid water.

NEPTUNE-LIKE

These planets are similar in size to Neptune and have thick atmospheres rich in hydrogen and helium surrounding denser, ice-rich interiors. They are larger than super-Earths but far less massive than gas giants.

SUPER-EARTH

These planets are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune and span a wide range of compositions, from rocky worlds with thick atmospheres to gas-rich planets. They are among the most common exoplanets and have no direct counterparts in our solar system.

GAS GIANT

These massive planets are dominated by hydrogen and helium and lack a solid surface, like Jupiter and Saturn. Some orbit extremely close to their stars as “hot Jupiters,” while others circle at much greater distances.

THE “GOLDILOCKS ZONE” [green] is the range of distances from a star where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface, depending on the star’s size and brightness. Liquid water is considered essential for life as we know it.

Thousands of satellites are tightly packed into low Earth orbit, and the overcrowding is only growing.

Scientists have created a simple warning system called the CRASH Clock that answers a basic question: If satellites suddenly couldn’t steer around one another, how much time would elapse before there was a crash in orbit? Their current answer: 5.5 days.

The CRASH Clock metric was introduced in a paper originally published on the Arxiv physics preprint server in December and is currently under consideration for publication. The team’s research measures how quickly a catastrophic collision could occur if satellite operators lost the ability to maneuver—whether due to a solar storm, a software failure, or some other catastrophic failure.

To be clear, say the CRASH Clock scientists, low Earth orbit is not about to become a new unstable realm of collisions. But what the researchers have shown, consistent with recent research and public outcry, is that low Earth orbit’s current stability demands perfect decisions on the part of a range of satellite operators around the globe every day. A few mistakes at the wrong time and place in orbit could set a lot of chaos in motion.

But the biggest hidden threat isn’t always debris that can be seen from the ground or via radar imaging systems. Rather, thousands of small pieces of junk that are still big enough to disrupt a satellite’s operations are what satellite operators have nightmares about these days. Making matters worse is SpaceX essentially locking up one of the most valuable altitudes with their Starlink satellite megaconstellation, forcing Chinese competitors to fly higher through clouds of old collision debris left over from earlier accidents.

IEEE Spectrum spoke with astrophysicists Sarah Thiele (graduate student at Princeton University), Aaron Boley (professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada), and Samantha Lawler (associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada) about their new paper, and about how close satellites actually are to one another, why you can’t see most space junk, and what happens to the power grid when everything in orbit fails at once.

Does the CRASH Clock measure Kessler syndrome, or something different?

Sarah Thiele: A lot of people are claiming we’re saying Kessler syndrome is days away, and that’s not what our work is saying. We’re not making any claim about this being a runaway collisional cascade. We only look at the timescale to the first collision—we don’t simulate secondary or tertiary collisions. The CRASH Clock reflects how reliant we are on errorless operations and is an indicator for stress on the orbital environment.

Aaron Boley: A lot of people’s mental vision of Kessler syndrome is this very rapid runaway, and in reality this is something that can take decades to truly build.

Thiele: Recent papers found that altitudes between 520 and 1,000 kilometers have already reached this potential runaway threshold. Even in that case, the timescales for how slowly this happens are very long. It’s more about whether you have a significant number of objects at a given altitude such that controlling the proliferation of debris becomes difficult.

Understanding the CRASH Clock’s Implications

What does the CRASH Clock approaching zero actually mean?

Thiele: The CRASH Clock assumes no maneuvers can happen—a worst-case scenario where some catastrophic event like a solar storm has occurred. A zero value would mean if you lose maneuvering capabilities, you’re likely to have a collision right away. It’s possible to reach saturation where any maneuver triggers another maneuver, and you have this endless swarm of maneuvers where dodging doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Boley: I think about the CRASH Clock as an evaluation of stress on orbit. As you approach zero, there’s very little tolerance for error. If you have an accidental explosion—whether a battery exploded or debris slammed into a satellite—the risk of knock-on effects is amplified. It doesn’t mean a runaway, but you can have consequences that are still operationally bad. It means much higher costs—both economic and environmental—because companies have to replace satellites more often. Greater launches, more satellites going up and coming down. The orbital congestion, the atmospheric pollution, all of that gets amplified.

Are working satellites becoming a bigger danger to each other than debris?

Boley: The biggest risk on orbit is the lethal non-trackable debris—this middle region where you can’t track it, it won’t cause an explosion, but it can disable the spacecraft if hit. This population is very large compared with what we actually track. We often talk about Kessler syndrome in terms of number density, but really what’s also important is the collisional area on orbit. As you increase the area through the number of active satellites, you increase the probability of interacting with smaller debris.

Samantha Lawler: Starlink just released a conjunction report—they’re doing one collision avoidance maneuver every two minutes on average in their megaconstellation.

The orbit at 550 km altitude, in particular, is densely packed with Starlink satellites. Is that right?

Lawler: The way Starlink has occupied 550 km and filled it to very high density means anybody who wants to use a higher-altitude orbit has to get through that really dense shell. China’s megaconstellations are all at higher altitudes, so they have to go through Starlink. A couple of weeks ago, there was a headline about a Starlink satellite almost hitting a Chinese rocket. These problems are happening now. Starlink recently announced they’re moving down to 350 km, shifting satellites to even lower orbits. Really, everybody has to go through them—including ISS, including astronauts.

Thiele: 550 km has the highest density of active payloads. There are other orbits of concern around 800 km—the altitude of the [2007] Chinese anti-satellite missile test and the [2009] Cosmos-Iridium collision. Above 600 km, atmospheric drag takes a very long time to bring objects down. Below 600 km, drag acts as a natural cleaning mechanism. In that 800 km to 900 km band, there’s a lot of debris that’s going to be there for centuries.

Impact of Collisions at 550 Kilometers

What happens if there’s a collision at 550 km? Would that orbit become unusable?

Thiele: No, it would not become unusable—not a Gravity movie scenario. Any catastrophic collision is an acute injection of debris. You would still be able to use that altitude, but your operating conditions change. You’re going to do a lot more collision-avoidance maneuvers. Because it’s below 600 km, that debris will come down within a handful of years. But in the meantime, you’re dealing with a lot more danger, especially because that’s the altitude with the highest density of Starlink satellites.

Lawler: I don’t know how quickly Starlink can respond to new debris injections. It takes days or weeks for debris to be tracked, cataloged, and made public. I hope Starlink has access to faster services, because in the meantime that’s an awful lot of risk.

How do solar storms affect orbital safety?

Lawler: Solar storms make the atmosphere puff up—high-energy particles smashing into the atmosphere. Drag can change very quickly. During the May 2024 solar storm, orbital uncertainties were kilometers. With things traveling 7 kilometers per second, that’s terrifying. Everything is maneuvering at the same time, which adds uncertainty. You want to have margin for error, time to recover after an event that changes many orbits. We’ve come off solar maximum, but over the next couple of years it’s very likely we’ll have more really powerful solar storms.

Thiele: The risk for collision within the first few days of a solar storm is a lot higher than under normal operating conditions. Even if you can still communicate with your satellite, there’s so much uncertainty in your positions when everything is moving because of atmospheric drag. When you have high density of objects, it makes the likelihood of collision a lot more prominent.

Canadian and American researchers simulated satellite orbits in low Earth orbit and generated a metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures the number of days before collisions start happening if collision-avoidance maneuvers stop. Sarah Thiele, Skye R. Heiland, et al.

Between the first and second drafts of your paper that were uploaded to the preprint server, your key metric, the CRASH Clock finding, was updated from 2.8 days to 5.5 days. Can you explain the revision?

Thiele: We updated based on community feedback, which was excellent. The newer numbers are 164 days for 2018 and 5.5 days for 2025. The paper is submitted and will hopefully go through peer review.

Lawler: It’s been a very interesting process putting this on Arxiv and receiving community feedback. I feel like it’s been peer-reviewed almost—we got really good feedback from top-tier experts that improved the paper. Sarah put a note, “feedback welcome,” and we got very helpful feedback. Sometimes the internet works well. If you think 5.5 days is okay when 2.8 days was not, you missed the point of the paper.

Thiele: The paper is quite interdisciplinary. My hope was to bridge astrophysicists, industry operators, and policymakers—give people a structure to assess space safety. All these different stakeholders use space for different reasons, so work that has an interdisciplinary connection can get conversations started between these different domains.

Isolation dictates where we go to see into the far reaches of the universe. The Atacama Desert of Chile, the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the vast expanse of the Australian Outback—these are where astronomers and engineers have built the great observatories and radio telescopes of modern times. The skies are usually clear, the air is arid, and the electronic din of civilization is far away.

It was to one of these places, in the high desert of New Mexico, that a young astronomer named Jack Burns went to study radio jets and quasars far beyond the Milky Way. It was 1979, he was just out of grad school, and the Very Large Array, a constellation of 28 giant dish antennas on an open plain, was a new mecca of radio astronomy.

But the VLA had its limitations—namely, that Earth’s protective atmosphere and ionosphere blocked many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that, even in a remote desert, earthly interference was never completely gone.

Could there be a better, even lonelier place to put a radio telescope? Sure, a NASA planetary scientist named Wendell Mendell, told Burns: How about the moon? He asked if Burns had ever thought about building one there.

“My immediate reaction was no. Maybe even hell, no. Why would I want to do that?” Burns recalls with a self-deprecating smile. His work at the VLA had gone well, he was fascinated by cosmology’s big questions, and he didn’t want to be slowed by the bureaucratic slog of getting funding to launch a new piece of hardware.

But Mendell suggested he do some research and speak at a conference on future lunar observatories, and Burns’s thinking about a space-based radio telescope began to shift. That was in 1984. In the four decades since, he’s published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers on radio astronomy. He’s been an adviser to NASA, the Department of Energy, and the White House, as well as a professor and a university administrator. And while doing all that, Burns has had an ongoing second job of sorts, as a quietly persistent advocate for radio astronomy from space.

And early next year, if all goes well, a radio telescope for which he’s a scientific investigator will be launched—not just into space, not just to the moon, but to the moon’s far side, where it will observe things invisible from Earth.

“You can see we don’t lack for ambition after all these years,” says Burns, now 73 and a professor emeritus of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The instrument is called LuSEE-Night, short for Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment–Night. It will be launched from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket and carried to the moon’s far side atop a squat four-legged robotic spacecraft called Blue Ghost Mission 2, built and operated by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas.

In an artist’s rendering, the LuSEE-Night radio telescope sits atop Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 2 lander, which will carry it to the moon’s far side. Firefly Aerospace

Landing will be risky: Blue Ghost 2 will be on its own, in a place that’s out of the sight of ground controllers. But Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 pulled off the first successful landing by a private company on the moon’s near side in March 2025. And Burns has already put hardware on the lunar surface, albeit with mixed results: An experiment he helped conceive was on board a lander called Odysseus, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, in 2024. Odysseus was damaged on landing, but Burns’s experiment still returned some useful data.

Burns says he’d be bummed about that 2024 mission if there weren’t so many more coming up. He’s joined in proposing myriad designs for radio telescopes that could go to the moon. And he’s kept going through political disputes, technical delays, even a confrontation with cancer. Finally, finally, the effort is paying off.

“We’re getting our feet into the lunar soil,” says Burns, “and understanding what is possible with these radio telescopes in a place where we’ve never observed before.”

Why Go to the Far Side of the Moon?

A moon-based radio telescope could help unravel some of the greatest mysteries in space science. Dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, and gravitational waves could all come into better focus if observed from the moon. One of Burns’s collaborators on LuSEE-Night, astronomer Gregg Hallinan of Caltech, would like such a telescope to further his research on electromagnetic activity around exoplanets, a possible measure of whether these distant worlds are habitable. Burns himself is especially interested in the cosmic dark ages, an epoch that began more than 13 billion years ago, just 380,000 years after the big bang. The young universe had cooled enough for neutral hydrogen atoms to form, which trapped the light of stars and galaxies. The dark ages lasted between 200 million and 400 million years.

LuSEE-Night will listen for faint signals from the cosmic dark ages, a period that began about 380,000 years after the big bang, when neutral hydrogen atoms had begun to form, trapping the light of stars and galaxies. Chris Philpot

“It’s a critical period in the history of the universe,” says Burns. “But we have no data from it.”

The problem is that residual radio signals from this epoch are very faint and easily drowned out by closer noise—in particular, our earthly communications networks, power grids, radar, and so forth. The sun adds its share, too. What’s more, these early signals have been dramatically redshifted by the expansion of the universe, their wavelengths stretched as their sources have sped away from us over billions of years. The most critical example is neutral hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, which when excited in the laboratory emits a radio signal with a wavelength of 21 centimeters. Indeed, with just some backyard equipment, you can easily detect neutral hydrogen in nearby galactic gas clouds close to that wavelength, which corresponds to a frequency of 1.42 gigahertz. But if the hydrogen signal originates from the dark ages, those 21 centimeters are lengthened to tens of meters. That means scientists need to listen to frequencies well below 50 megahertz—parts of the radio spectrum that are largely blocked by Earth’s ionosphere.

Which is why the lunar far side holds such appeal. It may just be the quietest site in the inner solar system.

“It really is the only place in the solar system that never faces the Earth,” says David DeBoer, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “It really is kind of a wonderful, unique place.”

For radio astronomy, things get even better during the lunar night, when the sun drops beneath the horizon and is blocked by the moon’s mass. For up to 14 Earth-days at a time, a spot on the moon’s far side is about as electromagnetically dark as any place in the inner solar system can be. No radiation from the sun, no confounding signals from Earth. There may be signals from a few distant space probes, but otherwise, ideally, your antenna only hears the raw noise of the cosmos.

“When you get down to those very low radio frequencies, there’s a source of noise that appears that’s associated with the solar wind,” says Caltech’s Hallinan. Solar wind is the stream of charged particles that speed relentlessly from the sun. “And the only location where you can escape that within a billion kilometers of the Earth is on the lunar surface, on the nighttime side. The solar wind screams past it, and you get a cavity where you can hide away from that noise.”

How Does LuSEE-Night Work?

LuSEE-Night’s receiver looks simple, though there’s really nothing simple about it. Up top are two dipole antennas, each of which consists of two collapsible rods pointing in opposite directions. The dipole antennas are mounted perpendicular to each other on a small turntable, forming an X when seen from above. Each dipole antenna extends to about 6 meters. The turntable sits atop a box of support equipment that’s a bit less than a cubic meter in volume; the equipment bay, in turn, sits atop the Blue Ghost 2 lander, a boxy spacecraft about 2 meters tall.

LuSEE-Night undergoes final assembly [top and center] at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and testing [bottom] at Firefly Aerospace outside Austin, Texas. From top: Space Sciences Laboratory/University of California, Berkeley (2); Firefly Aerospace

“It’s a beautiful instrument,” says Stuart Bale, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is NASA’s principal investigator for the project. “We don’t even know what the radio sky looks like at these frequencies without the sun in the sky. I think that’s what LuSEE-Night will give us.”

The apparatus was designed to serve several incompatible needs: It had to be sensitive enough to detect very weak signals from deep space; rugged enough to withstand the extremes of the lunar environment; and quiet enough to not interfere with its own observations, yet loud enough to talk to Earth via relay satellite as needed. Plus the instrument had to stick to a budget of about US $40 million and not weigh more than 120 kilograms. The mission plan calls for two years of operations.

The antennas are made of a beryllium copper alloy, chosen for its high conductivity and stability as lunar temperatures plummet or soar by as much as 250 °C every time the sun rises or sets. LuSEE-Night will make precise voltage measurements of the signals it receives, using a high-impedance junction field-effect transistor to act as an amplifier for each antenna. The signals are then fed into a spectrometer—the main science instrument—which reads those voltages at 102.4 million samples per second. That high read-rate is meant to prevent the exaggeration of any errors as faint signals are amplified. Scientists believe that a cosmic dark-ages signature would be five to six orders of magnitude weaker than the other signals that LuSEE-Night will record.

The turntable is there to help characterize the signals the antennas receive, so that, among other things, an ancient dark-ages signature can be distinguished from closer, newer signals from, say, galaxies or interstellar gas clouds. Data from the early universe should be virtually isotropic, meaning that it comes from all over the sky, regardless of the antennas’ orientation. Newer signals are more likely to come from a specific direction. Hence the turntable: If you collect data over the course of a lunar night, then reorient the antennas and listen again, you’ll be better able to distinguish the distant from the very, very distant.

What’s the ideal lunar landing spot if you want to take such readings? One as nearly opposite Earth as possible, on a flat plain. Not an easy thing to find on the moon’s hummocky far side, but mission planners pored over maps made by lunar satellites and chose a prime location about 24 degrees south of the lunar equator.

Other lunar telescopes have been proposed for placement in the permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole, just over the horizon when viewed from Earth. Such craters are coveted for the water ice they may hold, and the low temperatures in them (below -240 °C) are great if you’re doing infrared astronomy and need to keep your instruments cold. But the location is terrible if you’re working in long-wavelength radio.

“Even the inside of such craters would be hard to shield from Earth-based radio frequency interference (RFI) signals,” Leon Koopmans of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said in an email. “They refract off the crater rims and often, due to their long wavelength, simply penetrate right through the crater rim.”

RFI is a major—and sometimes maddening—issue for sensitive instruments. The first-ever landing on the lunar far side was by the Chinese Chang’e 4 spacecraft, in 2019. It carried a low-frequency radio spectrometer, among other experiments. But it failed to return meaningful results, Chinese researchers said, mostly because of interference from the spacecraft itself.

The Accidental Birth of Radio Astronomy

Sometimes, though, a little interference makes history. Here, it’s worth a pause to remember Karl Jansky, considered the father of radio astronomy. In 1928, he was a young engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., assigned to isolate sources of static in shortwave transatlantic telephone calls. Two years later, he built a 30-meter-long directional antenna, mostly out of brass and wood, and after accounting for thunderstorms and the like, there was still noise he couldn’t explain. At first, its strength seemed to follow a daily cycle, rising and sinking with the sun. But after a few months’ observation, the sun and the noise were badly out of sync.

In 1930, Karl Jansky, a Bell Labs engineer in Holmdel, N.J., built this rotating antenna on wheels to identify sources of static for radio communications. NRAO/AUI/NSF

It gradually became clear that the noise’s period wasn’t 24 hours; it was 23 hours and 56 minutes—the time it takes Earth to turn once relative to the stars. The strongest interference seemed to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, which optical astronomy suggested was the center of the Milky Way. In 1933, Jansky published a paper in Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers with a provocative title: “Electrical Disturbances Apparently of Extraterrestrial Origin.” He had opened the electromagnetic spectrum up to astronomers, even though he never got to pursue radio astronomy himself. The interference he had defined was, to him, “star noise.”

Thirty-two years later, two other Bell Labs scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, ran into some interference of their own. In 1965 they were trying to adapt a horn antenna in Holmdel for radio astronomy—but there was a hiss, in the microwave band, coming from all parts of the sky. They had no idea what it was. They ruled out interference from New York City, not far to the north. They rewired the receiver. They cleaned out bird droppings in the antenna. Nothing worked.

In the 1960s, Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson used this horn antenna in Holmdel, N.J., to detect faint signals from the big bang. GL Archive/Alamy

Meanwhile, an hour’s drive away, a team of physicists at Princeton University under Robert Dicke was trying to find proof of the big bang that began the universe 13.8 billion years ago. They theorized that it would have left a hiss, in the microwave band, coming from all parts of the sky. They’d begun to build an antenna. Then Dicke got a phone call from Penzias and Wilson, looking for help. “Well, boys, we’ve been scooped,” he famously said when the call was over. Penzias and Wilson had accidentally found the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, the leftover radiation from the big bang.

Burns and his colleagues are figurative heirs to Jansky, Penzias, and Wilson. Researchers suggest that the giveaway signature of the cosmic dark ages may be a minuscule dip in the CMB. They theorize that dark-ages hydrogen may be detectable only because it has been absorbing a little bit of the microwave energy from the dawn of the universe.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

The plan for Blue Ghost Mission 2 is to touch down soon after the sun has risen at the landing site. That will give mission managers two weeks to check out the spacecraft, take pictures, conduct other experiments that Blue Ghost carries, and charge LuSEE-Night’s battery pack with its photovoltaic panels. Then, as local sunset comes, they’ll turn everything off except for the LuSEE-Night receiver and a bare minimum of support systems.

LuSEE-Night will land at a site [orange dot] that’s about 25 degrees south of the moon’s equator and opposite the center of the moon’s face as seen from Earth. The moon’s far side is ideal for radio astronomy because it’s shielded from the solar wind as well as signals from Earth. Arizona State University/GSFC/NASA

There, in the frozen electromagnetic stillness, it will scan the spectrum between 0.1 and 50 MHz, gathering data for a low-frequency map of the sky—maybe including the first tantalizing signature of the dark ages.

“It’s going to be really tough with that instrument,” says Burns. “But we have some hardware and software techniques that…we’re hoping will allow us to detect what’s called the global or all-sky signal.… We, in principle, have the sensitivity.” They’ll listen and listen again over the course of the mission. That is, if their equipment doesn’t freeze or fry first.

A major task for LuSEE-Night is to protect the electronics that run it. Temperature extremes are the biggest problem. Systems can be hardened against cosmic radiation, and a sturdy spacecraft should be able to handle the stresses of launch, flight, and landing. But how do you build it to last when temperatures range between 120 and −130 °C? With layers of insulation? Electric heaters to reduce nighttime chill?

“All of the above,” says Burns. To reject daytime heat, there will be a multicell parabolic radiator panel on the outside of the equipment bay. To keep warm at night, there will be battery power—a lot of battery power. Of LuSEE-Night’s launch mass of 108 kg, about 38 kg is a lithium-ion battery pack with a capacity of 7,160 watt-hours, mostly to generate heat. The battery cells will recharge photovoltaically after the sun rises. The all-important spectrometer has been programmed to cycle off periodically during the two weeks of darkness, so that the battery’s state of charge doesn’t drop below 8 percent; better to lose some observing time than lose the entire apparatus and not be able to revive it.

Lunar Radio Astronomy for the Long Haul

And if they can’t revive it? Burns has been through that before. In 2024 he watched helplessly as Odysseus, the first U.S.-made lunar lander in 50 years, touched down—and then went silent for 15 agonizing minutes until controllers in Texas realized they were receiving only occasional pings instead of detailed data. Odysseus had landed hard, snapped a leg, and ended up lying almost on its side.

ROLSES-1, shown here inside a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, was the first radio telescope to land on the moon, in February 2024. During a hard landing, one leg broke, making it difficult for the telescope to send readings back to Earth.Intuitive Machines/SpaceX

As part of its scientific cargo, Odysseus carried ROLSES-1 (Radiowave Observations on the Lunar Surface of the photo-Electron Sheath), an experiment Burns and a friend had suggested to NASA years before. It was partly a test of technology, partly to study the complex interactions between sunlight, radiation, and lunar soil—there’s enough electric charge in the soil sometimes that dust particles levitate above the moon’s surface, which could potentially mess with radio observations. But Odysseus was damaged badly enough that instead of a week’s worth of data, ROLSES got 2 hours, most of it recorded before the landing. A grad student working with Burns, Joshua Hibbard, managed to partially salvage the experiment and prove that ROLSES had worked: Hidden in its raw data were signals from Earth and the Milky Way.

“It was a harrowing experience,” Burns said afterward, “and I’ve told my students and friends that I don’t want to be first on a lander again. I want to be second, so that we have a greater chance to be successful.” He says he feels good about LuSEE-Night being on the Blue Ghost 2 mission, especially after the successful Blue Ghost 1 landing. The ROLSES experiment, meanwhile, will get a second chance: ROLSES-2 has been scheduled to fly on Blue Ghost Mission 3, perhaps in 2028.

NASA’s plan for the FarView Observatory lunar radio telescope array, shown in an artist’s rendering, calls for 100,000 dipole antennas to be spread out over 200 square kilometers. Ronald Polidan

If LuSEE-Night succeeds, it will doubtless raise questions that require much more ambitious radio telescopes. Burns, Hallinan, and others have already gotten early NASA funding for a giant interferometric array on the moon called FarView. It would consist of a grid of 100,000 antenna nodes spread over 200 square kilometers, made of aluminum extracted from lunar soil. They say assembly could begin as soon as the 2030s, although political and budget realities may get in the way.

Through it all, Burns has gently pushed and prodded and lobbied, advocating for a lunar observatory through the terms of ten NASA administrators and seven U.S. presidents. He’s probably learned more about Washington politics than he ever wanted. American presidents have a habit of reversing the space priorities of their predecessors, so missions have sometimes proceeded full force, then languished for years. With LuSEE-Night finally headed for launch, Burns at times sounds buoyant: “Just think. We’re actually going to do cosmology from the moon.” At other times, he’s been blunt: “I never thought—none of us thought—that it would take 40 years.”

“Like anything in science, there’s no guarantee,” says Burns. “But we need to look.”

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “The Quest To Build a Telescope That Can Hear the Cosmic Dark Ages.”

The thunderous roar that echoed across Huntsville, Alabama, on 10 January wasn’t a rocket launch but something equally momentous: the end of an era. Two massive test stands at Marshall Space Flight Center that helped send humans to the moon collapsed in carefully choreographed implosions, their steel frameworks crumbling in seconds after decades standing as monuments to U.S. spaceflight achievement.

The Dynamic Test Stand and the Propulsion and Structural Test Facility, better known as the T-tower for its distinctive shape, represented more than just obsolete infrastructure. Built in the 1950s and ’60s, these structures witnessed the birth of the space age, serving as proving grounds where engineers pushed the limits of rocket technology and ensured every component could withstand the violence of launch.

T-tower’s Role in Rocket Testing

The T-tower came first, constructed in 1957 by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency before NASA even existed. At just over 50 meters tall, it was designed for static testing, where rockets are fired at full power while restrained and connected to instruments that measure every vibration, temperature spike, and pressure fluctuation. Here, engineers tested components of the Saturn family of launch vehicles under the direction of Wernher von Braun, including the mighty F-1 engines that would eventually power Apollo missions. The tower later proved essential for testing space shuttle solid rocket boosters before being retired in the 1990s.

The Dynamic Test Stand told an even more dramatic story. Built in 1964 and rising over 105 meters above the Alabama landscape, it once stood as the tallest human-made structure in North Alabama. Unlike the T-tower’s static tests, this facility subjected fully assembled Saturn V rockets to the mechanical stresses and vibrations they would experience during actual flight, everything shaking, flexing, and straining just as it would during launch, but without leaving the ground. Engineers couldn’t afford failures once these rockets reached the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center: Saturn V was too powerful, too expensive, and too important to risk.

The stand’s role didn’t end with Apollo. In 1978, it became the first location where engineers integrated all space shuttle elements together: orbiter, external fuel tank, and solid rocket boosters assembled as one complete system. Its final mission came in the early 2000s, when it served as a drop tower for microgravity experiments, a far quieter purpose than its explosive origins.

Both facilities earned designations as National Historic Landmarks in 1985, recognition of their irreplaceable contributions to human spaceflight. That makes their demolition bittersweet but necessary. The structures are no longer safe, and maintaining aging facilities drains resources that could support current missions. Marshall is removing 19 obsolete structures as part of a broader campus transformation, creating a modern, interconnected facility ready for NASA’s next chapter.

“These facilities helped NASA make history. While it is hard to let them go, they’ve earned their retirement. The people who built and managed these facilities and empowered our mission of space exploration are the most important part of their legacy,” said acting Marshall director Rae Ann Meyer in a statement.

NASA has worked to preserve that legacy. Detailed architectural drawings, photographs, and written histories now reside permanently in the Library of Congress. Auburn University created high-resolution digital models using LiDAR and 360-degree photography, capturing the structures in exquisite detail before their destruction. These virtual archives ensure future generations can still appreciate the scale and engineering achievement these towers represented, even after the steel has been cleared away.

I know now how the sparks can climb,
in broadening arcs of ions—
the heat they grow inside themselves
like some permission or belief.

But at ten, it seemed mystical;
their frown, glowing, then invisible.
Gone. Save the odor of ozone.
I was young and scared and alone.

But the buzz and brightness began
anew in darker shades of blue. Then
electrons leaping spoke to me,
not in words, but in dignity:

how they escaped the box where they
were born. Joined in a plasma haze,
they rose unafraid. So it seemed.
I imagined them as sunbeams,

then as disrupting solar flares—
distant but, in time, reaching here
as unseen bursts to recombine,
smaller parts of the grand design.

Brain Chip Helps Blind People See

Elon Musk says his company Neuralink is aiming to restore partial sight to fully blind patients in 2026. The company plans to test its newest and most powerful implant, Blindsight, in humans early this year. The chip will be wirelessly connected to an external video camera and implanted into the brain’s visual cortex. Bypassing the eyes, it is designed to generate the perception of vision based on what the camera captures, even for people born blind. The resulting vision will be low resolution in early tests but will hopefully get better over time, Musk says, though some experts worry he is overpromising on the quality of the brain-computer interface.

Foldable iPhones Arrive

It’s like the 1990s all over again! You will soon be able to punctuate your angry conversations by slamming your iPhone shut. Apple plans to bring a foldable version of its phone to market in late 2026, aiming not just to catch up with the competition but improve on some longstanding issues with existing popular foldable phones. The iPhone Fold, as it’s called, will have an inner hinge mechanism that leads to a less visible crease in the display, the company claims. The device is expected to cost at least US $2,000—that’s $800 more than some 2025 base iPhone prices. The phone will have to compete with strong rivals that have already cultivated model loyalty, like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold series.

Double Rendezvous in Deep Space

In July 2026, a Chinese sample-return mission is expected to rendezvous with 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, a near-Earth asteroid. The mission, called Tianwen-2, will also use instruments that include multiple spectrometers and cameras, a magnetometer, and a dust analyzer to collect data about the asteroid. After more than six months of study, Tianwen-2 will leave the asteroid and drop the collected sample down to Earth before heading off to investigate 311P/PanSTARRS, a complicated celestial object that’s part asteroid and part comet.

Sending Humans Back to the Moon

In another giant leap for mankind, the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972 is scheduled to launch in April 2026. The 10-day flight will usher in NASA’s efforts to have a sustained human presence on the moon by testing hardware and systems for future lunar exploration. This will be the first time a crew assesses the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for human use. While the astronauts won’t actually land on the moon, they will get as close as 7,400 kilometers from its surface and spend time investigating how near-lunar space travel affects their health.

An AI Supercomputer the Size of a City

Meta is spending its way to AI excellence, experts say. The company plans to take its first “AI supercluster” online in 2026, consuming as much as 1 gigawatt of power. Prometheus, as it’s called, is on a site near Columbus, Ohio, with a footprint that approaches the size of Manhattan. But it’s just part of a wider project that will cost Meta hundreds of billions of dollars, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In addition to Prometheus, Meta is developing an even larger data center, Hyperion, that will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts and is expected to be operational in 2028.

Mining the Moon and Mars

How can missions to Mars refuel on the red planet? Blue Origin suggests that its in situ resource-utilization system, called Blue Alchemist, could be the answer. The company plans to run an autonomous demonstration of the system in a simulated lunar environment this year, demonstrating how it uses electric current to extract breathable oxygen and valuable metals from regolith without also releasing toxic chemicals or carbon emissions. Blue Origin claims that Blue Alchemist could facilitate lunar and Martian settlements, both for humans and robots. It could also help make deep-space exploration possible by using asteroids, the company says.

Who Needs Tritium?

By the end of the year, we could be one step closer to commercial fusion energy. The first-ever project to demonstrate the deuterium-tritium fuel cycle—the most viable route to practical fusion energy—plans to be operational by late 2026. Unity-2 will run through the entire D-T fuel process, including discharge, purification, and resupply, to establish that tritium recycling is a sufficient method to produce fusion energy. It will also be a testbed for related technology—members of industry will be able to stress-test their fusion-related innovations with Unity-2 and push them up the technology readiness scale.

A Self-Driving Car of Your Own

You may soon see privately owned completely self-driven cars on the road, as automotive startup Tensor plans to release its SAE Level 4 car to consumers in the second half of 2026. This level of autonomy means that the car comes equipped with tools for control, including a steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake, but can safely travel without a person in the driver’s seat. Although some driverless taxi services, such as Waymo, function at Level 4, Tensor’s product would likely be the first private car at this level of self-sufficiency. Tensor’s chief business officer suggests that riders can even watch Netflix or do work while on the road in the company’s cars.

Deciding the Future of Chipmaking

2026 could be a monumental year for the future of chips. Intel announced that it plans to decide whether it will pursue its advanced 14A chipmaking process this year. The company’s chief financial officer says that Intel will pursue 14A manufacturing capacity only if enough external customers commit to using the process. Stepping away from 14A would signal that Intel is forgoing efforts to compete with TSMC and Samsung for chip-technology leadership.

Social Media Ads Fully Created by AI

Soon, an algorithm will determine not only what ads you see on social media, but also what’s in them. Meta plans to fully automate ad creation and delivery on its platforms by the end of 2026, putting every step of the process in the “hands” of AI. Though there are already some AI tools integrated into the company’s ad platform, Meta wants to do more. It’s developing a way for any brand to present only a product and budget to an AI tool, which will then create an entire ad (including text, images, and video), determine the users to target, and offer business suggestions.

“Robo-Umps” Make It to the Big Leagues

Major League Baseball (MLB) will take a big swing on new tech for the 2026 season. The league will debut the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System to check the accuracy of umpires’ pitch calls. Each team will start the game with two challenges. ABS uses an array of 12 cameras around each stadium to track a pitch’s movement to determine whether it crossed through the strike zone, delivering its verdict in about 15 seconds. The Korea Baseball Organization debuted a similar system for its league in 2024, and MLB has previously tested the tech in the minor leagues, spring training games, and the 2025 All-Star Game.

Ten years ago, ride-sharing giant Uber embraced a sci-fi future in which clean, quiet electric aircraft would shuttle passengers around crowded cities. Uber’s well-funded Elevate initiative, which included a white paper and three high-profile annual summits, effectively launched the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) industry, promising investors, regulators, and the general public that these futuristic flying taxis were “closer than you think.”

At the time, California-based Joby Aviation was still in stealth mode. But behind the scenes, this pioneering eVTOL developer—which has received more than US $3 billion in total funding, including around $900 million from Toyota—was playing a major role in shaping Uber’s vision. It later stepped in to keep that vision alive, acquiring the Elevate program in 2020 after Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi decided to axe it.

Now, Joby, which was founded in 2009 and has become the dominant eVTOL startup, says it is finally on the verge of making “urban air mobility” a reality. It plans to conduct its first passenger flights in 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

“Dubai continues to be our global launchpad for commercial service, and our progress here is a testament to the UAE’s visionary approach to advanced air mobility,” says Anthony Khoury, Joby’s UAE general manager, in an email interview. “Dubai is on track to be the first city in the world to offer a fully integrated, premium air taxi network, and we are sprinting toward that target.”

Joby Struck a Six-Year Exclusive Deal with Dubai

The company first announced its UAE plans at the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2024, striking a deal with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) that gives it an exclusive right to operate air taxis there for six years from the launch of commercial operations.

Joby’s exclusive Dubai deal will help fortify its lead in the global race to commercialize electric air taxis

Joby also signed an agreement with U.K.-based Skyports to design, build, and operate four “vertiport” sites in Dubai—places for the eVTOL aircraft to load and unload passengers and charge their batteries. The first vertiport will be near Dubai International Airport, with additional ones planned for Dubai Mall, the Atlantis the Royal resort, and American University in Dubai.

Joby won’t be the first eVTOL developer to carry passengers. That distinction goes to China’s EHang, which is already conducting limited sightseeing and demonstration flights with its two-seat, autonomous electric multicopters. (Joby’s aircraft are piloted.) If Joby pulls off its goal, however, it will be the first to routinely fly passengers from point to point over urban traffic, in keeping with Uber Elevate’s original vision. Its exclusive agreement in Dubai will help fortify its lead in the global race to commercialize electric air taxis, which includes a handful of other Western eVTOL developers, plus a growing number of Chinese players. Besides its Dubai deal, Joby also has a partnership with Delta to start an airport shuttle service in the United States.

The Joby S4 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft has six electric motors, each weighing 28 kilograms and capable of a peak output of 236 kilowatts.Joby Aviation

Operating a reliable air taxi service is a demanding proposition that will require Joby’s aircraft, charging infrastructure, and scheduling software to perform safely and reliably day in and day out. Since every new and complex technology has teething problems, Joby envisions fairly limited initial operations in 2026.

“We will transition from test flights to more complex proving runs and eventually nonpaying passenger flights out of the completed vertiports, ensuring a seamless passenger experience ahead of full commercial launch,” says Khoury. He adds that Joby is currently working with Skyports to ready its initial vertiports and with government agencies in Dubai and the UAE to receive the necessary approvals for its operations.

“Dubai’s approach is deeper and more comprehensive than what you see in many of the headlines,” said Clint Harper, an aviation infrastructure and policy advisor who recently participated in an advanced air mobility workshop with Dubai’s RTA. “In our workshop,” he says, “the RTA staff had fantastic questions and concerns regarding safety, security, and system-level integration. Everyone recognized and appreciated strong government support and wanted to deliver the right system solution, not just a one-off demo. I was thoroughly impressed and inspired.”

Initial Air Operations Will Precede an Airworthiness Certificate

Notably, all of this groundwork is taking place in advance of Joby receiving an initial type certificate for its aircraft from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. In the United States (and elsewhere), a type certificate is typically a prerequisite for conducting commercial operations with paying passengers. Joby claims it’s making good progress toward FAA certification, but how quickly (or slowly) that process moves is largely out of its hands. In recent years, the FAA has been taking longer to certify even conventional airplanes and helicopters, which the industry blames on staffing shortages at the agency and more cautious decision-making in the wake of the Boeing 737 Max crisis.

This perception that certification delays have more to do with bureaucracy than safety may be why Dubai is willing to approve some early operations by Joby in advance of FAA type certification. Interestingly, the United States is now following the UAE’s example. In September, the FAA and U.S. Department of Transportation began soliciting proposals for an eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), which will select at least five projects to demonstrate eVTOL operations in the national airspace starting as early as summer 2026.

The FAA has stated that the eIPP won’t allow eVTOL developers to bypass certification requirements or carry paying passengers. However, it will enable them to undertake additional testing and demonstration flights as a stepping-stone to commercial operations. Joby says it’s planning to take part in the eIPP, meaning its air taxis could also be flying over U.S. cities in 2026—even if the only person on board is the pilot.

To the untrained eye, it did not look like a particularly complicated mission. A large black quadcopter drone, more than two meters spanning the propeller tips, sat parked on the grass. Nestled between the legs of its landing gear was a red balloon filled with water. Not far away, on a concrete pad, a stack of wood pallets was ablaze, the flames whipping around in a heavy wind. A student at the University of Maryland (UMD) would fly the Alta X drone all of about 25 meters to the fire. There it would drop the water balloon to extinguish the flames.

In the XPrize contest, drones must distinguish between dangerous fires—like this one—and legitimate campfires. Jayme Thornton

But, of course, it was complicated. The drone needed to hover at about 13.5 meters overhead, and the balloon was configured to detonate at a specific point in midair to ensure optimal water dispersal, as calculated by UMD’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering. On a signal, Andrés Felipe Rivas Bolivar, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering, launched the Alta X toward the fire. As a second, smaller drone outfitted with a thermal camera surveyed the scene from above, Rivas maneuvered the balloon-laden drone to the proper position. After about a half minute, he released the water bomb...and the balloon plummeted to the ground just wide of the platform, bursting with a thwaaaap.

On this warm but blustery day in mid-October, a team of about 20 UMD students and professors were gathered at a fire and rescue training center in La Plata, Md., to demonstrate the building blocks of what could be the future of wildfire fighting. They called their team Crossfire. Their guests were a handful of officials from the XPrize Foundation, which has organized a pair of competitions to vastly speed up wildfire detection and suppression. Twelve other teams are competing with Crossfire in the semifinals for the autonomous wildfire-suppression track of the competition. In the final round, to be held in June 2026, five of those teams will have to find a fire within 1,000 square kilometers of what XPrize calls “environmentally challenging” terrain and then navigate to and extinguish it, all within 10 minutes. The winner collects a US $3.5 million purse—and, hopefully, the world’s wildfire-fighting armies get a powerful new weapon for their arsenals.

The Wildfire Problem

Wildfires are growing more severe and affecting more people worldwide. The November 2018 Camp Fire that burned down 620 square kilometers of Northern California, including most of the town of Paradise, was the most deadly and destructive in the state’s recorded history, and it sent Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant utility responsible for starting the fire, into bankruptcy. XPrize had long been based in the Los Angeles area, so that catastrophe was undoubtedly on the minds of its staffers when they formulated the competition in 2019. “This was just something that was really personal and close to a lot of the individuals at the organization,” says Andrea Santy, program director for the wildfire competition. XPrize eventually organized a separate track of the competition to award $3.5 million for detecting small fires with satellites.

Andrea Santy, one of the program managers from XPrize in charge of the wildfire competition, looks on during Crossfire’s trials.Jayme Thornton

Santy says XPrize’s competition designers met with more than 100 experts in the field, including fire scientists, agency officials, and technologists—“all the experts that you would want at the table were at the table.” Where their views aligned, Santy says, XPrize researchers detected the “core problems.” One of the most important was response time. In the best case, an hour can often pass between when a fire is first detected and when it’s extinguished. XPrize aims to shrink that drastically. An additional $1 million will go to the teams that (per the rules) “successfully demonstrate accurate, precise, and rapid detection.”

Arnaud Trouvé, chair of the UMD’s Fire Protection Engineering department, thinks even the 10-minute limit may not be good enough. “On a red flag day with high-wind conditions, a fire that starts is going to be taking a big size within a matter of tens of seconds,” he said as we waited for the Alta X to try again. “So even the 10 minutes you have to go do something will be too slow.” Whatever comes from the XPrize, he says, will be adopted, but more likely in developed areas, where fires spread more slowly and could be extinguished early on, when firefighters are often busy evacuating residents.

In any event, the time limit pointed most teams—and all the teams to make the semifinals—toward drones. Firefighters have worked, or tried to work, given bureaucratic and other hurdles, with drones for years, but mainly for reconnaissance, says Bob Roper, a senior wildfire advisor for the Western Fire Chiefs Association. Many of the hurdles around using drones have been cleared, but no drone exists yet that can carry enough suppressant to be useful on its own, says Roper. (The smallest helicopter bucket carries 270 liters.) Roper says government-funded fire agencies seldom “have available unrestricted dollars to be able to develop something that’s new.” By sprinkling startups and universities with research funding, the XPrize is poised to make, he says, “a quantum leap difference.”

Team Crossfire

Word of the XPrize wildfire competition reached Trouvé’s desk soon after it launched in April 2023. He joined forces with colleagues in aerospace and mechanical engineering and with xFoundry, a new organization that uses competitions to spur entrepreneurship. (xFoundry’s founder, Amir Ansari, happened to be one of the sponsors of the first XPrize in 1994; his sister-in-law Anousheh is the CEO of the XPrize Foundation.) It didn’t take long to sketch out most of what they brought to La Plata.

The University of Maryland’s Yaseen Taha [right] pilots a spotter drone while Brian Tran looks on. Jayme Thornton

The day began with tests of the detection drone. Its dock opened like flower petals unfolding and the drone, a much smaller quadcopter than the Alta X, shot up into the air. Using a handheld controller, undergraduate Yaseen Taha flew it to a point 35 meters above the burning pallets. Like all the technology Crossfire has deployed, the scout was an off-the-shelf model, made by the Chinese manufacturer DJI. It came with a lot of important features already programmed in, including obstacle avoidance and lidar, and cost just $25,000, according to xFoundry head of products and ventures Phillip Alvarez. “We get a really nice, well-polished system for a pretty low price here, and then we can spend the rest of development on solving the hard stuff,” he said. In total, Crossfire has spent around $300,000, most of it raised from UMD donors, he added.

xFoundry’s Philip Alvarez stands behind the Crossfire team’s drone that’s used for detecting wildfires. Jayme Thornton

The hard stuff, some of it anyway, was visible on a large display monitor showing the feeds from the drone’s two cameras. On the right was the infrared feed; on it, a red square labeled “fire” bracketed the burning pallets. A smaller red fire square appeared up and to the right of this; this was a pile of glowing embers in a bin not far away. These were meant to represent a campfire—the contest rules required systems to distinguish between potentially destructive conflagrations and “decoy fires” that don’t pose a threat. Crossfire’s system made those distinctions based on the drone’s color video feed. That feed runs through an open-source deep learning model known as YOLO (“You Only Look Once”), which recognizes images.

One of Crossfire’s drones scans the terrain and distinguishes between a burning pile of pallets and a small fire in a bin. Robb Mandelbaum

To train it, UMD students fed 40,000 photographs of fires to the model—manually identifying the blazes in about 1,200 of these. The result was that when the program processed the color feed from the drone, it concluded that pallets were a fire, marked on the screen in a blue box, and ignored the bin. Now both camera feeds indicated a blaze in the same place, and the monitor threw up a warning in red: “FIRE DETECTED.” As turkey vultures looked on from high above, the drone identified the fire again from a higher altitude, then with the cameras pointed at a different angle, it finally flew a preprogrammed back-and-forth route through the air that looks like a lawnmower’s path.

An electric Ford F150 truck serves as charger and home base for Crossfire’s system. Jayme Thornton

An electric Ford F-150 pickup, front trunk open, sat off to the side powering a bank of computers that operate the two drones. In the field, it will also process feeds from cameras mounted on poles throughout the forest—an early detection system that will trigger the scouting drone. This was designed by Alvarez, who happens to have a Ph.D. in biophysics, using an even newer version of image-reading AI developed just last year.

All of the teams, Santy says, have proposed something broadly similar: sensors and cameras on the ground or on one or more drones, or both, and AI interpreting the data. How teams get to the fire has been driven by regulation—the FAA has restrictions on drones weighing more than 25 kilograms (55 pounds), as well as autonomous systems dropping payloads, which is why Rivas had to pilot the Alta X. “Some are looking at how we can address the problem within the current regulations, so they’re trying to stay within the 55 pounds,” says Santy. Others are designing systems that ultimately could be deployed only under new regulations. That primarily comes down to either using a swarm of smaller drones or one heavy-lift drone. Teams that fly heavy in the finals will have to get FAA approval for the contest, just as Crossfire would need it to operate the Alta X autonomously.

Crossfire’s fire-suppression drone flies toward a fire carrying a balloon full of water. Jayme Thornton

Curiously, the XPrize appears not to have spurred much innovation in actually putting out a fire. Most teams are using water, though they’re dropping it in a variety of different ways. It’s a work in progress, says Santy. “Teams have been thinking very hard about what works under challenging conditions” like wind, drone movement, and proximity to the fire.

The University of Maryland’s Dahlia Andres works on the Crossfire team’s fire-suppression drone.Jayme Thornton

Crossfire’s approach of detonating water balloons in midair—which has yet to be patented so the team would not describe it in detail—could eventually change the calculation about how much suppressant is needed to fight fires. Typically, aircraft flying at high altitude release a lot of water, which, says Trouvé, mostly misses the burning biomass. “Releasing the water at low elevations and directly above the burning biomass requires much less water,” he says.

With a new balloon installed on the Alta X, the team attempted to attack the fire a second time. This time, Rivas spent several minutes maneuvering the drone to get it in place before dropping the balloon, which appeared to partially detonate, spewing water as it fell. The balloon didn’t completely burst until it hit the platform, spraying water all over and creating a huge puff of steam. But when the smoke cleared, the fire still burned. Crossfire’s detonators, it turned out, were rated for warmer weather than this October day. “We’ve tested this probably 20 different times, and 20 different times it’s been successful,” Alvarez said ruefully.

Crossfire’s drone carries a water balloon skyward, finds the fire, and drops the balloon.Jayme Thornton

But the third attempt, several hours later, was the charm. Rivas whisked the Alta X over the fire. Taha, on the other side of the fire, checked its position and motioned for release. The balloon exploded a few meters below the drone, and a shower of water blanketed the fire. The thermal camera on the observation drone confirmed the fire had been extinguished. Muted “yays” and a smattering of applause broke out.

Crossfire’s Abdullah Shamsan, Derek Paley, Matthew Ayd, and Joshua Gaus [from left] monitor a drone flight. Jayme Thornton

Crossfire is already looking beyond the competition, regardless of whether it makes it to the finals in 2026. Along with Taha, aerospace engineering professor Derek Paley has talked to some 40 potential customers—mainly fire departments and government agencies—for the system Crossfire is developing. He’s currently uncertain whether there are enough organizations willing to adopt the technology to make it commercially viable. So far, he says, “it’s a little bit of an uphill battle, but we’re hoping with the visibility brought to the problem by XPrize” and the momentum of being a finalist—and, better still, some prize money in hand—“we’ll have enough to have a compelling business model.”

Roper, of the Western Fire Chiefs Association, acknowledges that “political considerations” around existing fleets of crewed aircraft will challenge the transition to drones, but he says that these can gain a foothold by operating when and where crewed aircraft can’t, at night, for example. Still, it will take multiple companies commercializing the technology to prod fire departments to purchase drones. Even then, he says, “it’s probably going to have to be adopted either at the federal or the state level first and then there’s a trickle-down effect to the local fire departments.”

If not, Paley says, “our tech is applicable to law enforcement, and other aspects of public safety. It’s just a question of, are we starting a wildfire company, or are we starting a robotics company.”

The most precise timekeepers ever made, atomic clocks, might one day help robotic and crewed missions on Mars stay in sync with each other, as well as enable the equivalent of GPS on the red planet. But, as Einstein made clear, time flows at different rates depending on where you are. Now, scientists have estimated the speed at which clocks tick on Mars—an average of 477-millionths of a second faster than clocks on Earth, per day. These findings might suggest ways in which future networks on Mars can avoid problems such clock differences might produce.

Atomic clocks monitor the vibrations of atoms. Optical atomic clocks, which use intersecting laser beams to entrap and monitor the atoms, are currently accurate down to 1 attosecond, or a billionth of a billionth of a second. These clocks have many applications besides keeping time—for example, they are key to the precisely timed signals that GPS and other global navigation satellite systems rely on to help users pinpoint their own locations.

However, because the gravity of massive objects warps spacetime, the rate of time passes different at different gravitational field strengths. In other words, the weaker a planet’s gravitational pull, the faster clocks on its surface tick. And the average strength of Mars’s gravitational pull is roughly three times as weak as Earth’s.

Mars Timekeeping and GPS Technology

In 2024, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., estimated the rate at which clocks ticked on the moon, which has an average gravitational pull about six times as weak as Earth’s. Given NASA’s plans for missions to Mars, the researchers have now analyzed timekeeping on Mars and detailed their research in a study published online on 1 December in The Astronomical Journal.

“With an understanding of these relativistic effects comes the hope that humans will someday become an interplanetary species,” says Neil Ashby, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an affiliate of NIST.

Using years of data collected from previous Mars missions, the scientists calculated the strength of gravity on the Martian surface. They also had to account for how the gravitational effects of the sun and the other planets on Mars changed over time over the course of the Red Planet’s eccentric, elongated orbit.

Although clocks on Mars will on average tick 477 microseconds faster than on Earth per day, this value can increase or decrease by as much as 226 microseconds per day over the course of the Martian year, depending on effects from its celestial neighbors. Such variations could prove challenging when it comes to coordinating missions on Mars.

“Microseconds matter in navigation and communications,” says Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist at NIST. “Current 5G networks rely on microsecond-level synchronization. GPS clocks are synchronized to a few nanoseconds.”

This difference between Mars and Earth in clock speeds has not been a problem in past missions, because they relied “on one-way radio communication from ground stations on Earth and Mars,” Ashby says. “There was no need for rovers to be synchronized with each other.”

This new research “is important if you have multiple assets on Mars and they need to be in sync with each other and independent from Earth,” Patla says. “This could be important in returning to the same location for further exploration or prospecting.”

One possible way for Martian missions to deal with this difference between Earth and Martian clocks may be to deploy a GPS-like constellation of satellites around the planet so that both rover clocks and constellation clocks “share a common, Mars-centric system time,” Ashby says.

In such a scheme, only small local corrections would need to be applied when comparing clocks on Mars. “‘Mars system time’ would remain internally self-consistent and largely independent of Earth, and only the Earth-Mars link would require periodic calibration to account for the larger interplanetary offsets,” Patla says.

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For decades, atomic clocks have provided the most stable means of timekeeping. They measure time by oscillating in step with the resonant frequency of atoms, a method so accurate that it serves as the basis for the definition of a second.

Now, a new challenger has emerged in the timekeeping arena. Researchers recently developed a tiny, MEMS-based clock that makes use of silicon doping to gain record stability. After running for 8 hours, the clock deviated only by 102 nanoseconds, approaching the standard of atomic clocks while both requiring less physical space and less power to run. Doing so has been a challenge in the past because of the chaos that even slight temperature variations can introduce into timekeeping.

The group presented their new clock at the 71st Annual IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting last week.

Saving Space and Power

The MEMS clock is built from a few tightly connected parts, all integrated on a chip smaller than the face of a sugar cube. At its center, a silicon plate topped with a piezoelectric film vibrates at its natural frequencies, while nearby electronic circuitry measures those vibrations. A tiny, built-in heater gently keeps the whole structure at an optimal temperature. Because the resonator, electronics, and heater are all close together, they can work as a coordinated system: The resonator creates the timing signal, the electronics monitor and adjust it, and the heater prevents temperature swings from causing drift.

This clock is unique in a few ways, explains project advisor and University of Michigan MEMS engineer Roozbeh Tabrizian. For one, the resonator is “extremely stable amid variations in environment,” he says. “You could actually change the temperature from -40 °C all the way to 85 °C and you essentially don’t see any change in the frequency.”

The resonator is so stable because the silicon from which it’s crafted has been doped with phosphorus, Tabrizian says. When a material is doped, impurities are added into it, typically to change its conductive properties. Here, though, the group used doping specifically to stabilize mechanical properties. “We’re controlling the mechanics in a very tight way so that the elasticity of the material does not change upon temperature variations,” he says.

Some other materials, like the commonly used timing-crystal quartz, can also be doped for robustness. But “you cannot miniaturize [quartz] and you have a lot of limitations in terms of packaging,” Tabrizian explains. “Semiconductor manufacturing benefits from size miniaturization,” so it is an obvious choice for next-generation clocks.

The doping also allows the electronics to actively tune out any small drifts in frequency over long periods. This attribute is “the most distinctive aspect of our device’s physics compared to previous MEMS clocks,” Tabrizian says. By making the silicon conductive, the doping lets the electronics subtly adjust how strongly the device is mechanically driven, which counteracts slow shifts in frequency.

This system is also unique in its integration of autonomous temperature sensing and adjustment, says Banafsheh Jabbari, a graduate student at the University of Michigan who led the project. “This clock resonator is operating in two modes [or resonant frequencies], essentially. The main mode of the clock is very stable and we use it as the [time] reference. The other one is the temperature sensor.” The latter acts like an internal thermometer, helping the electronics automatically detect temperature shifts and adjust both the heater and the main timing mode itself. This built-in self-correction helps the clock maintain steady time even as the surrounding environment changes.

These features mean that it’s the first MEMS clock to run for 8 hours and only deviate by 102-billionths of a second. Linearly scaled up to a week of operation, that equates to just over 2 microseconds of drift. That’s worse than the top-of-the-line laboratory atomic clocks by a few orders of magnitude, but it rivals the stability of miniaturized atomic clocks.

What’s more, the MEMS clock has a significant space and power savings advantage over its atomic competition. The more isolated from their environments and the more power they use, the more precisely atomic clocks can probe the oscillations of atoms, Tabrizian explains, so they’re typically the size of a cabinet and draw a lot of power. Even chip-scale atomic clocks are 10 to 100 times as large as the MEMS clock, he says. And, “more importantly,” this new clock requires 1/10th to 1/20th the power of the mini atomic clocks.

Timekeeping for Next-Gen Tech

Jabbari’s work came out of a DARPA project with the goal of making a clock that could operate for a week and deviate by only 1 µs, so there’s still more to be done. One challenge the team faces is how the doped silicon will behave over longer operating periods, like a week. “You see some diffusion and some changes in the material,” Tabrizian says, but only time will tell how well the silicon will hold up.

It’s important to both researchers that they continue their efforts because of the wide-ranging applications they foresee for a small, power-efficient MEMS-based clock. “Essentially all modern technology that we have needs some sort of synchronization,” Jabbari says, and she thinks the clock could fill gaps in time synchronization that currently exist.

For situations in which technology has robust access to GPS satellites, there’s no problem to solve, she says. But in more extreme scenarios, like space exploration and underwater missions, navigation technology is forced to rely on internal timekeeping—which must be extremely bulky and power hungry to be accurate. A MEMS clock could be a small and less power-intensive replacement.

There are also more day-to-day applications, Tabrizian says. In the future, when more information will need to be delivered faster to each phone (or whatever devices we’ll be using in 50 years), accurate timing will become crucial for data-packet delivery. “And, of course, you cannot put a large atomic clock in your phone. You cannot consume that much power,” he says, so a MEMS clock could be the answer.

Even with promising applications, it could be a tough road ahead for this project because of existing competition. SiTime, a company already producing MEMS clocks, is even now integrating its chips in Apple and Nvidia devices.

But Tabrizian is confident about his team’s capabilities. “Companies like SiTime put a lot of emphasis on system design,” thus increasing system complexity, he says. “Our solution, on the other hand, is entirely physics based, looking into the very intricate, very fundamental physics of a semiconductor. We’re trying to get around the need for a complex system by making the resonator 100 times more accurate than the SiTime resonator.”

Particle accelerators are usually huge structures—think of the 3.2-kilometer-long SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, Calif. But scientists have been hard at work trying to shrink these accelerators down by using lasers to perform the accelerating. These particle accelerators would be the size of single room, and cost much less as well. Now, a startup says its laser-powered accelerator, the first commercial version of such a device, has successfully accelerated a beam of electrons. These could first be used in radiation tests of electronics designed for satellites and spacecraft.

The concept behind the new device was first detailed in 1979. An extremely powerful and ultrashort laser pulse strikes a gas, producing a plasma. The plasma oscillates in the laser’s wake, and electrons are dragged along in the plasma’s path, accelerating them to relativistic speeds.

These “wakefield accelerators“ can generate acceleration fields up to 1,000 times as great as what conventional particle colliders are capable of. Scientists have long suggested that wakefield accelerators could shrink kilometer-scale facilities to the size of a room or smaller.

“Democratization is the name of the game for us,” says Björn Manuel Hegelich, founder and CEO of TAU Systems in Austin, Texas. “We want to get these incredible tools into the hands of the best and brightest and let them do their magic.”

TAU has now successfully generated electron beams using its commercial laser-powered wakefield accelerator. “Laser-powered accelerators have been around in academic labs for more than 20 years,” Hegelich says. “What’s most exciting is that until now, they haven’t been available as tools for industry. This result is a major step to change that paradigm and make compact accelerators useful for the world outside of academia.”

The new accelerator uses a laser supplied by the Thales Group in France, which TAU notes displays exceptional stability. “The goal here is to focus on reliability and reproducibility rather than record performance,” Hegelich says.

The first units for customers will fit in a single room. “For the future, our aim is to reduce the laser to a large cabinet size,” Hegelich says.

TAU’s first commercial accelerator will be deployed at the startup’s facility in Carlsbad, Calif., which will operate as a showroom for customers to become familiar with the technology. TAU plans to offer use of its accelerator to commercial and government customers starting in 2026.

“This first commercial system will operate in the range of 60 to 100 million electron volts (MeVs) at 100 hertz with capacity to upgrade to higher energies in the future,” Hegelich says. “We’re not rushing to the highest energies yet because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the 100 to 1,000 MeV range, where conventional accelerators are too large to be of practical use.” For comparison, the linear accelerator at SLAC can achieve electron energies up to 50 billion electron volts.

How to Use a Room-Size Particle Accelerator

At 60 to 100 MeV, which requires a laser system with about 200 millijoules of pulse energy, the accelerator will be used in radiation tests of space-bound electronics. “There is a 5 to 10 times supply-demand gap for the most demanding types of testing that this technology can immediately help address,” Hegelich says. “We believe the space industry is going to play an increasingly important role in the world economy, and solving this [radiation testing] problem will significantly accelerate the industry’s growth potential.”

After that, TAU plans to increase the laser energy to about 1 joule, bringing the electron beam energy into the 100- to 300-MeV range, Hegelich says. This will allow radiation testing of thicker devices, as well as unlock high-precision, high-throughput medical imaging and “radiation therapy that’s competitive with the best proton therapy at a fraction of the cost.”

The 100- to 300-MeV range will also enable imaging of advanced 3-D microchips. “Advanced chips are the hardware underlying artificial intelligence,” Hegelich says. “AI has become extremely important to the world economy, and there’s no indication that the trend will level off anytime soon. We want to accelerate the design and manufacturing cycle to help the industry keep up with its ambitions.”

Current state-of-the-art tools for such imaging “currently take hours for high-resolution failure analysis to inform the manufacturing process, while our next-generation sources will be bright enough to take the necessary measurements in minutes or less,” Hegelich says.

A next-generation multijoule laser could help generate electron-beam energies in the 300- to 1,000-MeV range. This could drive an X-ray–free electron laser, “the brightest terrestrial sources of X-rays ever devised,” Hegelich says. These could be used in next-generation X-ray lithography “to push Moore’s Law to its fundamental limit. There’s been a lot of buzz around this topic lately, and every proposed solution requires a particle accelerator to make it happen. Our accelerators are small enough to make such proposals economically viable without the need to reinvent the modern chip fab.”

Such a powerful accelerator could also be used in fundamental science. “Campus-sized accelerators and light sources have been used as tools for some of the most cutting-edge scientific research and engineering for almost 100 years, unravelling new insights into the fundamental nature of energy and matter, chemistry, biology, and materials science,” Hegelich says. “The problem is that there are so few of them because of their size and cost. Our technology shrinks down campus-sized accelerators and light sources to room-sized or smaller. Imagine how much more we will learn as these tools become ubiquitous.”

The new accelerator will cost US $10 million and up, depending on the application and feature set. “Much of the manufacturing cost is in the ultrahigh-intensity laser that powers the accelerator,” Hegelich says. “These lasers are still scientific systems in their infancy, so there is a significant opportunity to reduce the cost and footprint as they mature.”

CADmore Metal has introduced a fresh take on 3D printing metal components to the North American market known as cold metal fusion (CMF). John Carrington, the company’s CEO, claims CMF produces stronger 3D printed metal parts that are cheaper and faster to make. That includes titanium components, which have historically caused trouble for 3D printers.

3D printing has used metals included aluminum, powdered steel, and nickel alloys for some time. While titanium parts are in high demand in fields such as aerospace and health care due to their superior strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, and their suitability for complex geometries, the metal has presented challenges for 3D printers.

Titanium becomes more reactive at high temperatures and tends to crack when the printed part cools. It can also become brittle as it absorbs hydrogen, oxygen, or nitrogen during the printing process. Carrington says CMF overcomes these issues.

“Our primary customers tend to come from the energy, defense, and aerospace industries,” says Carrington. “One large defense contractor recently switched from traditional 3D printing to CMF as it will save them millions and reduce prototyping and parts production by months.”

How CMF Enhances Titanium 3D Printing Efficiency

CMF combines the flexibility of 3D printing with new powder metallurgy processes to provide strength and greater durability to parts made from titanium and many other metals and alloys. The process uses a combination of proprietary metal powder and polymer binding agents that are fused layer by layer to create high-strength metal components.

The process begins like any other 3D printing project: A digital file that represents the desired 3D object directs the actions of a standard industrial 3D printer in laying down a mixture of metal and a plastic binder. A laser lightly fuses each layer of powder into a cohesive solid structure. Excess powder is removed for reuse.

Where CMF differs is that the initial parts generated by this stage of the process are strong enough for grinding, drilling, and milling if required. The parts then soak in a solvent to dissolve the plastic binder. Next, they go into a furnace to burn off any remaining binder, fuse the metal particles, and compact them into a dense metal component. Surface or finishing treatments can then be applied such as polishing and heat treatment.

“Our cold metal fusion technology offers a process that is at least three times faster and more scalable than any other kind of 3D printing,” says Carrington. “Per-part prices are generally 50 to 60 percent less than alternative metal 3D printing technology. We expect those prices to go down even more as we scale.”

3D printing with metal powders such as titanium makes it possible to create parts with complex geometries.CADmore Metal

The material used in CMF was developed by Headmade Materials, a German company. Headmade holds a patent on this 3D printing feedstock, which has been designed for use by the existing ecosystem of 3D printing machines. CADmore Metal serves as the exclusive North American distributor for the metal powders used in CMF. The company can also serve as a systems integrator for the entire process by providing the printing and sintering hardware, the specialized powders, process expertise, training, and technical support.

“We provide guidance on design optimization and integration with existing workflows to help customers maximize the technology’s benefits,” says Carrington. “If a turbine company comes to us to produce their parts using CMF, we can either build the parts for them as a service or set them up to carry out their own production internally while we supply the powder and support.”

With the global 3D printing market now worth almost US $5 billion and predicted to reach $13 billion by 2035, according to analyst firm IDTechEx, the arrival of CMF is timely. CADmore Metal just opened North America’s first CMF application center, a nearly 280-square-meter (3,000-square-foot) facility in Columbia, S.C. Carrington says that a larger facility will open in 2026 to make room for more material processing and equipment.