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NASA Announces Further Delays in Artemis Moon Missions

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson speaks during a news conference about the agency's Artemis campaign at the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2024. (Photo by amid farahi / AFP)
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson speaks during a news conference about the agency's Artemis campaign at the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2024. (Photo by amid farahi / AFP)
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NASA Announces Further Delays in Artemis Moon Missions

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson speaks during a news conference about the agency's Artemis campaign at the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2024. (Photo by amid farahi / AFP)
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson speaks during a news conference about the agency's Artemis campaign at the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2024. (Photo by amid farahi / AFP)

NASA chief Bill Nelson announced on Thursday new delays in the US space agency's Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, pushing back the next two planned missions including the planned lunar landing.

Nelson told a news conference that the next Artemis mission, sending astronauts around the moon and back, has slipped to April 2026, with the subsequent moon landing mission pushed to 2027, Reuters reported.

The Artemis program was established by NASA during President-elect Donald Trump's first administration with the goal of returning astronauts to the moon for the first time since the US space agency's Apollo 17 mission. The program is intended to establish a lunar base as a step toward the more ambitious goal of human missions to Mars. The United States is estimated to spend roughly $93 billion on the program through 2025.

The Artemis program has made noteworthy progress but also has experienced various delays and rising costs. In 2022, NASA carried out the Artemis I mission, a 25-day uncrewed voyage around the moon ending when the Orion capsule carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins made a successful splash down in the Pacific.

That marked the first flight of NASA's massive Space Launch System rocket, a powerful and over-budget vehicle tasked with launching humans to space aboard the Orion capsule built by Lockheed Martin. SpaceX's Starship is contracted to land astronauts on the moon's surface.

The follow-up Artemis II mission, a flight carrying astronauts around the moon in Orion but without a landing, has experienced delays, including one announced by Nelson in January pushing back its time table to September 2025. Nelson on Thursday said it would be further delayed until April 2026.
The Artemis III mission is planned as the lunar landing. Nelson in January said that mission was pushed back to September 2026. Nelson said this will now be in mid-2027.

NASA is using SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other contractors in the Artemis program.
The trip by the Artemis astronauts to the moon is planned as a relay among multiple spacecraft in space, initially launching off Earth aboard Orion then transferring in space to the Starship system to go to and from the lunar surface.
The United States and China, an ascending power in space, are racing to land astronauts on the moon. Both nations are courting partner countries and leaning on private companies for their moon programs.
The Artemis program has been NASA's top priority under Nelson. The program will lean heavily on SpaceX's Starship rocket. Trump's first NASA chief, former US congressman Jim Bridenstine, launched the Artemis program and persuaded Congress to increase the agency's budget to fund it. Trump has picked billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, an associate of SpaceX founder Elon Musk, to succeed Nelson as NASA chief.
SpaceX is hoping for swift advances in Starship development during the second Trump administration, whose space agenda is expected to give the Artemis program a greater focus on the more ambitious goal of landing people on Mars, Musk's premier space aspiration.

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Trove of Everyday Items Dating Back to 1800s Found at Buckingham Palace

11 September 2026, United Kingdom, London: Members of the Massed Bands of the Guards Division perform on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in London during a commemorative Changing of the Guard ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. (dpa)
11 September 2026, United Kingdom, London: Members of the Massed Bands of the Guards Division perform on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in London during a commemorative Changing of the Guard ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. (dpa)
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Trove of Everyday Items Dating Back to 1800s Found at Buckingham Palace

11 September 2026, United Kingdom, London: Members of the Massed Bands of the Guards Division perform on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in London during a commemorative Changing of the Guard ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. (dpa)
11 September 2026, United Kingdom, London: Members of the Massed Bands of the Guards Division perform on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in London during a commemorative Changing of the Guard ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. (dpa)

A pair of battered, hobnailed boots and a decades-old newspaper cutting are among a trove of everyday objects unearthed during restoration work at Buckingham Palace, reported the BBC.

The misplaced items are thought to belong to staff who worked at the palace decades ago and were found by workers carrying out the £369 million refurbishment.

A ticket for a “whist drive” - a card game event hosted by the Palace on April 14, 1949 - was found embedded in a lump of brick.

Several betting slips, a bottle of spring water, an empty Silk Cut cigarette carton and a newspaper article about the gang jailed for the 1963 Great Train Robbery were also found under floorboards.

Blank Littlewoods Football Pool betting slips from 1957 and a scrap of West End theatre listings from The Standard newspaper in 1889 were also found, alongside fragments of Minton decorative ceramic tiles from a fireplace hearth, with the design dated to around the mid-1800s, according to BBC.

Among the discoveries was a typed schedule detailing Queen Elizabeth II's plans to host a diplomatic reception in her Silver Jubilee year of 1977.

It revealed the monarch would work the room in a “clockwise direction,” and that aides were asked to encourage the 350 British guests to mingle with the diplomats at the annual gathering.

Also discovered were pages from the Daily Express newspaper in 1966 detailing the “maximum security” prison where the Great Train Robbers were incarcerated.

The article had pictures of Durham Prison, revealing that “the men who were found guilty of stealing a fortune in mailbags spend their week stitching them for nine shillings.”

BBC wrote that King Charles and Queen Camilla are currently residing in Clarence House, which stands beside St James's Palace and was once the Queen Mother's home.

They will not live in Buckingham Palace after the refurbishment is completed.

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Europe Puts into Orbit Two Earth Observation Satellites

A Vega-C rocket carrying European satellites FLEX and Sentinel-3C lifts off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on September 15, 2026. (AFP)
A Vega-C rocket carrying European satellites FLEX and Sentinel-3C lifts off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on September 15, 2026. (AFP)
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Europe Puts into Orbit Two Earth Observation Satellites

A Vega-C rocket carrying European satellites FLEX and Sentinel-3C lifts off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on September 15, 2026. (AFP)
A Vega-C rocket carrying European satellites FLEX and Sentinel-3C lifts off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on September 15, 2026. (AFP)

The European Space Agency has successfully put into orbit two satellites designed to better detect extreme weather events linked to climate change, officials said.

The European Vega-C rocket successfully launched the Sentinel-3C and Flex satellites after lifting off from the Kourou space center in French Guiana at 10:21 pm Monday (0121 GMT Tuesday), according to an AFP journalist on the scene.

The two satellites were placed into a sun-synchronous orbit nearly two hours after liftoff.

The first satellite, Flex (Fluorescence Explorer), will provide data on the impact of heatwaves on plant matter.

It will monitor fluorescence, the red light emitted by plants when they carry out photosynthesis, aiming to establish the link between "plant stress and fluorescence" and to "quantify it", head of the Flex program Thierry Huiban told AFP at Thales Alenia Space in April.

The second satellite, the Sentinel-3C from the European Union's Copernicus Earth observation program, will measure the marine environment -- including temperature, wave height and ocean currents -- as well as land use and land cover, aiming to optimize yields to prevent food crises.

Such missions are "essential" in helping with the "climate change we are experiencing", said Simonetta Cheli, Director of Earth Observation Programmes at the European Space Agency (ESA), speaking from Kourou.

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Astrophysics Study Suggests Venus May Have Swallowed Its Moon

Data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter is used in an undated composite image of the planet Venus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters)
Data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter is used in an undated composite image of the planet Venus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters)
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Astrophysics Study Suggests Venus May Have Swallowed Its Moon

Data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter is used in an undated composite image of the planet Venus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters)
Data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter is used in an undated composite image of the planet Venus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters)

A California-based astrophysicist presented a new theory on Monday to explain why Venus, the planet most like Earth in size, mass and structure, lacks its own moon. Call it a case of celestial cannibalism.

The extremely slow speed at which Venus rotates on its axis would have doomed any natural satellite that may once have orbited that planet to gradually spiral closer to its parent and ultimately be consumed in a cataclysmic smash-up.

So goes the theory offered by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, and published on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal, marking a departure from past explanations for why Venus, the second planet from the sun, is without a lunar companion.

"If it had a moon, and it ‌likely did at ‌some point, it could not have kept it," astrophysicist Stephen Krane, lead ‌author ⁠of the study, told ⁠Reuters on Monday. "That moon would have crashed down on the planet in a relatively short time scale."

Krane said data from computer models based on planetary physics and simulating the gravitational mechanics of hypothetical Venusian moons of various sizes showed them all meeting the same fate - sooner or later collapsing into their mother planet.

Such a presumed moon-gobbling event likely occurred within the first billion years in the history of Venus, Krane said.

Scientists previously theorized that Venus, ⁠known as Earth's "twin," either never acquired its own moon to begin ‌with, or possibly had a moon that was obliterated in ‌the massive impact from another celestial object.

EARTH SPINS MORE SWIFTLY THAN VENUS

The UC Riverside study, focusing on Earth-moon ‌dynamics, found that planetary rotational speed was the key factor.

In contrast to Venus, which takes 243 ‌Earth days to complete a single rotation - slightly longer than its orbit around the sun - Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours, more than 200 times more rapidly than Venus, Krane said.

The transfer of energy from Earth's faster rotation is gradually pushing our moon farther away, causing it to recede from Earth at the rate of ‌4 centimeters (1.6 inches) a year - precisely measured by mirrors left on the lunar surface in 1969 by Apollo 11's astronauts.

Venus, the third brightest object ⁠in the night sky ⁠after the sun and moon, looms large as point of study for scientists seeking to learn more about Earth's history, and its future.

Similar in its rocky structure but slightly smaller than Earth, Venus is enveloped in a thick, toxic atmosphere that has created a runaway greenhouse effect, scorching its surface at temperatures as high as 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead.

While there is no proof a Venusian moon ever existed, it is unlikely that Venus, in its infancy, somehow avoided the kind of world-shattering collision with another proto-planet that is widely believed to have formed Earth's moon, according to Krane.

The dawn of the inner solar system was crowded with large rocky objects hurtling through space and smashing into one another, with Venus probably taking more celestial hits than Earth because Venus was closer to the sun.

Scientists hope to unlock more secrets of Venus with two forthcoming NASA missions set for launch in the late 2020s or early 2030 dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS to study the planet's atmosphere and geologic features.