For space historians, three years stand out as landmarks of human exploration: 1957, 1961, and 1969. It was in 1957 that the former Soviet Union launched the beeping, beachball-sized Sputnik, becoming the first country to place a satellite in orbit. In 1961, the Soviets went further, when Yuri Gagarin made a one-orbit journey around the Earth, achieving the feat of being the first person in space. In 1969, the U.S. crowned the decade-long space race when Apollo 11 stuck the first crewed lunar landing. It’s not likely that 2026 will join that celebrated trifecta, but the year fast approaching is going to be a busy and historic one. Want the moon? There will be plenty going on there. Want a new space station? That’s teed up. Want to see a rising space power take a big step toward launching humans into space? India’s got you covered. Here’s what to look for as the calendar rolls over and the new year arrives.

Pandora planet hunter, Jan. 5

Time was, we knew of only eight planets in all of the cosmos—the handful of local worlds that orbit our local sun. In 1992 that changed, when astronomers spotted two planets orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light years from Earth. Since then more than 6,000 other so-called exoplanets have been found, leading scientists to conclude that there is at least one planet orbiting all of the trillions upon trillions of stars in the universe. With so many planetary laboratories on which so much planetary chemistry could be playing out, who’s to say at least some of them wouldn’t be cooking up life? The little Pandora spacecraft aims to find out.

The flyweight ship, tipping the scales at a mere 716 lbs., measuring 17 inches across, and costing just $20 million—a steal compared to the James Webb Space Telescope’s $10 billion price tag—is budgeted to operate for just a year but it will do yeoman’s work in that short time.

One of the techniques astronomers use to detect exoplanets is known as the transit method. When an orbiting planet crosses the Earth-facing side of its parent star, a bit of the light from the star is temporarily blocked, reducing overall luminosity by a tiny but detectable amount. The greater the dimming, the greater the diameter of the star. 

Many space- and ground-based telescopes hunt for exoplanets this way, but Pandora will take it a step further, looking not just at the intensity of the starlight but at the chemical spectrum of that portion of it that passes through the atmosphere of the planet. If biological ingredients like water or methane or carbon dioxide are present, the spectrum will change in ways particular to each compound. These chemical fingerprints may not show that life is present on the planet, but they would suggest that it may be. If life is out there, Pandora could point the way.

Gaganyaan-1 crew capsule, Early Jan.

During the early decades of space exploration, only the U.S. and the former Soviet Union had the capacity to send human beings into space. Both countries achieved that singular feat in 1961, and it would be 42 years before another nation—China—would join them. Now a fourth national player is preparing to join the club, with India poised to launch its three-person Gaganyaan-1 spacecraft atop a human-rated version of its powerful HLVM3 rocket as early as January.

This first mission will be an uncrewed test flight—following the careful steps the U.S. and the Soviet Union took when they were initially test-launching their Mercury and Vostok craft. The U.S. sent up an instrument package to measure the vibration and g-loads and other forces that would affect an astronaut. The Soviets famously sent a mannequin, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich, that tested the cosmonaut’s pressure suit. Gaganyaan-1 will be carrying a similar humanoid robot named Vyomitra. This flight will be the first of three uncrewed missions before India launches a crew of vyomanauts, or sky travelers, as early as 2027. 

When that time comes, the crew of four, who have already been selected from the nation’s elite fliers, will spend a minimum of three days in space, inside a Gaganyaan-1 crew compartment that will keep them comfortable but a bit cramped, with a habitable volume about equivalent to an SUV. This first crewed flight—to say nothing of the uncrewed one that will come first—is modest compared to the intrepid missions the U.S., Russia, and China have flown in space stations and lunar ships. But Russia’s, China’s, and America’s first flights were modest too. It’s enough, for now, that the most populous country on Earth is at last becoming a major space power.

Artemis II moon mission, Feb. 5

Far and away, the biggest space news of the year will be the mission of NASA’s Artemis II. The fraternity of men to have visited the moon once numbered 24, after Apollo 17, the ninth crewed lunar mission, returned to Earth and closed out the Apollo program. Only five of those men—all in their 90s—are still with us. In February, if all goes well, their ranks will be joined by four more people: Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen. Together, they are the crew of Artemis II.

Flying the brand new Orion spacecraft—which cost more than $20 billion to develop—and launching atop the brand new Space Launch System rocket, which cost more than $24 billion, the crew will embark on a 10-day translunar journey that will take them farther from Earth than any humans have ever traveled. Artemis II will not land on the moon, and it won’t even orbit the moon. It will instead make a looping swing around its far side before lunar gravity takes hold of the ship and slingshots it back home. In 1970, the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft flew a similar route, reaching 158 miles beyond the far side of the moon at its most remote remove. For 55 years, that crew held the distance record, but Artemis II will seize their crown, when the spacecraft travels a whopping 4,700 miles beyond the lunar backside. From that distance the crew will be able to take dramatic photographs of the sphere of the Earth and the sphere of the moon in the same frame. 

Artemis II will make other kinds of history too. During the Apollo era, flying to the moon was an all male, all white, all American game. No more. Koch will become the first woman to make a lunar journey, Glover will be the first person of color, and Hansen will be the first non-U.S. citizen. Just when Artemis III will follow Artemis II on a mission to return humans to the surface of the moon is not certain, but NASA is aiming for no later than 2030. Artemis II is the first big step to make that mission possible.

Haven-1 space station module, May

There has never been as improbable a machine as the International Space Station (ISS). Larger than a football field, weighing in at a cool one million pounds, it was assembled in orbit—at a construction site 250 miles high, speeding around the planet at 17,500 miles per hour.  Over the course of the last 25 years, it has been continuously occupied by rotating teams of more than 280 astronauts and cosmonauts from 26 countries. But the ISS is getting old, and the 15-country partnership that built, operates, and staffs it has decided that it will be deorbited by the end of this decade. That will leave a void in the sky—one that the Long Beach, Calif. aerospace company Vast is poised to fill.

In 2021, NASA launched the Commercial Low Earth Development Program (CLD), partnering with industry to build and launch private stations to take the place of the ISS. Multiple companies, including Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, and Axiom Space have signed on to the program, but first out of the blocks is Vast. As early as May, the company plans to launch its Haven-1 station, which it hopes to have staffed by a crew of four barely a month later.

Haven-1 is designed to be a comfortable, livable ship—with private sleeping quarters for each astronaut, high-speed Internet, a fold-down dining table for communal meals, and a large domed window to provide constant views of the Earth below. But it is also a modest ship compared to the ISS. Consisting of just a single bus-sized module, it provides about 45 cubic meters of habitable volume—or more than eight and a half times less than the ISS. At first crews will spend just two weeks aboard per rotation—barely time to unpack compared to the year or more some ISS astronauts are aloft. But Vast envisions bigger things to come. By 2030, it hopes to have launched five more interconnected modules that will expand the station’s lab and crew capacities, and provide a destination for paying customers from both the government and the private sector. Space, increasingly, is becoming a place not just to visit, but to live.

Boeing Starliner, April

NASA paid Boeing top dollar back in 2014 to build a crew vehicle to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The space agency actually cut two checks that day: one to Boeing for $4.2 billion and one to SpaceX for $2.6 billion. The SpaceX investment has paid off spectacularly. Since 2020, the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft has carried 19 crews to space—most of them traveling to the ISS. As for Boeing’s Starliner? Not so much. 

It wasn’t until June 2024 that that spacecraft carried its first crew—NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—for a shakedown crew that was supposed to have the pair aboard the ISS for just eight days. That week-plus stretched into nine months due to thruster problems aboard Starliner that NASA concluded made the ship unsafe for crews. Williams and Wilmore ultimately hitched a ride home aboard a Dragon ship.

Boeing has spent the months since the crew’s March 2025 return working on the thrusters. In November, NASA announced that Starliner will once again be trusted to fly, in April 2026, when it makes an uncrewed run at the station, both to deliver cargo and to determine if the ship can resume crewed missions. Boeing is hoping the answer is yes.

Even if Starliner does go back into flight rotation, it is unlikely ever to be seen as one of NASA’s better bets. The original contract called for a minimum of six crewed flights to the station. In its November announcement, NASA revealed that the two parties had “mutually agreed” to modify the contract, cutting that number to four, with an option for the final two flights remaining open, depending on the ship’s performance. With the ISS set to be deorbited in 2030, the Starliner program may come tumbling back to Earth with it.

Griffin-1 lunar lander and rover, July

It’s been 55 years since the Soviet Union landed the first uncrewed rover—Lunokhod-1—on the surface of the moon. Since then China, India, and Japan have left their own tire tracks in the lunar soil with their own robotic vehicles. But while the U.S. has sent no fewer than five rovers to Mars, it has given the moon a pass. That will change as early as July, when Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and California-based Astrolab team up to send a golf-cart-sized rover named FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Program) to the Nobile Crater region near the moon’s south pole.

FLIP is part of a NASA initiative to enlist the private sector to design and build rovers that the space agency will lease in its return-to-the-moon Artemis program, and Astrobotic and Astrolab have built an impressive machine. Weighing in at over half a ton and able to carry up to 110 lbs. of cargo, FLIP is equipped with four wheels mounted on casters that allow it to make what are called zero-point turns—rotating in place in a tight pivot rather than having to drive in wide circles to reverse course. It has an infrared guidance system that allows it to detect and steer around obstacles, driving semi-autonomously, with NASA merely having to give it a destination and allowing the rover to find its own way there. 

This rover is just step one for the two companies. Next on the launch manifest is the larger, 6-ft. tall FLEX (Flexible Logistics and Exploration) rover, big enough to carry more than 3,000 lbs. of payload and convey a crew of two astronauts across the surface. A firm launch date has not yet been set for FLEX, though 2028 is the target. That fits nicely with NASA’s hopes to have Artemis astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. When the crews arrive, their ride could be waiting.

These ambitious missions are not the only ones queuing up to fly in 2026. Also heading to the launch pad is Blue Origin’s Blue Moon spacecraft, which is planned to lift off as early as January atop the company’s New Glenn rocket, aiming for a landing in the south lunar pole. The spacecraft has the propulsive oomph to carry up to three tons of cargo and crew to the surface—and it’s that crew part of the equation that makes it especially newsworthy. In 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to adapt its Starship spacecraft to serve as the lunar landing vehicle for the crew of Artemis III and beyond. But SpaceX has stumbled badly, with serial failures of the giant Starship rocket, and in October, Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation and interim administrator of NASA, announced he was opening up the contract to competitors including Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin. A successful Blue Moon landing might be a black eye for SpaceX but it will be a big win for NASA.

Meantime, as early as fall 2026, NASA’s $4 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope may embark on a journey to a spot in space one million miles away. From that remote vantage point, without Earth getting in the way of its field of view, it will conduct new observations of exoplanets; new surveys of the structure of the Milky Way; and new studies of dark energy, the mysterious, invisible force that causes the universe to expand continuously at an ever-accelerating rate. 

Across the long, 13.8 billion years since the birth of the universe, any one year is just a temporal eyeblink. But if all goes according to plan, the next of those blinks, 2026, may mean very big things for the human species’ quest to explore and study the cosmos.