NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Missions
Why Mars landings are an unforgiving engineering problem
Mars has just enough atmosphere to destroy a spacecraft and not enough to land one. Entry, descent, and landing compresses every hard problem in spaceflight into about seven autonomous minutes — and it sets a hard ceiling on how much mass we can put on the surface.
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Missions
The long road back to the Moon
With Artemis II flown and a crewed landing now planned for Artemis IV in 2028, NASA's return to the Moon has shifted from promise to schedule. Here is where the program actually stands, and the dependency that still governs its timeline.
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Missions
NASA is about to name its next Artemis crew
On June 9, NASA names the astronauts for Artemis III. Under the agency's current plan it is a demonstration mission, not the landing itself — the first crewed surface landing is now Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028.