2026 in Space

In addition to Artemis II, which more than 50 years after the last time will take humanity back toward the Moon, there will be several robotic missions attempting a lunar landing and more. It will be a year of awe and wonder.

BY EMILIO COZZI e MATTEO MARINI

2026 will be rich in major space events, with a calendar of significant scientific and technological importance. The exploration of the Solar System, toward the Moon and beyond, will shape new chapters in humanity’s epic beyond the atmosphere, helping us better understand the cosmos and build bridges toward extraterrestrial soils. New launch systems, space observatories, and horizons never before reached. Looking to the Moon and dreaming of Mars.

The Moon Draws Closer

Between early February and late April, the launch of Artemis II is expected. The second mission of Nasa’s lunar exploration program, open to international cooperation, will be the first to carry a crew.
The astronauts who will board the Orion capsule and set course for the Moon have already completed full dress rehearsals while awaiting the transfer of Nasa’s launch vehicle, the Space Launch System, to the launch pad.
Last December, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina H. Koch, all Nasa astronauts, together with Canadian payload specialist Jeremy Hansen, donned their suits and followed simulated countdown procedures up to 30 seconds before liftoff, entering and exiting the spacecraft.

Artemis II will be the first mission to send humans back toward the Moon since the final Apollo mission in December 1972. There will be no lunar landing, which is instead planned for Artemis III. The Orion capsule will follow a free-return trajectory, similar to that flown by the astronauts of Apollo 8, the first to orbit the Moon, and Apollo 13, which was forced to abort its mission and return home due to an onboard explosion. Orion will loop around our natural satellite and then turn back toward Earth, all governed by the laws of gravitational mechanics.

Beyond Artemis, the Earth–Moon system will see a significant increase in traffic. In the first part of the year, Blue Origin’s first lunar mission is expected, sending the Mk-1 lunar lander for the company’s first attempt at a Moon landing.
This will represent an important milestone not only for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, but for the entire Artemis program. The troubled development of Starship, the vehicle chosen by Nasa to carry the Artemis III crew to the lunar surface, prompted the now former acting administrator to consider an alternative solution. If Mk-1 proves successful, with navigation, descent and landing systems to be tested, and above all cryogenic propulsion using hydrogen and oxygen kept at extremely low temperatures in space, Blue Origin’s proposal for an alternative lander as early as 2027, the planned date for Artemis III, will be difficult for the new Nasa administrator, Jared Isaacman, to ignore.

As shown by recent developments in its lunar program, China will not stand by. On the contrary, Beijing is consolidating its leading position, at least in robotic exploration.
In August, the launch of Chang’e 7 by the national space agency is planned. The mission will be dedicated to exploring the Moon’s south pole, the region chosen as the site of future human landings. It is an ambitious mission, like China’s other lunar expeditions. It is worth recalling that China is the only country to have successfully achieved a soft landing on the far side of the Moon and to have returned soil samples from there.
For Chang’e 7, one spacecraft will remain in lunar orbit to enable communications with Earth, while a lander, a rover, and a hopper, a small probe capable of moving by hopping, will descend to the surface. The mission will land to explore the surroundings of Shackleton crater and assess conditions for a future settlement. There, in fact, the first laboratories, and the first permanent home on lunar soil, built by Italy, could take shape, because just a short distance away are areas constantly illuminated by sunlight and regions in perpetual shadow that could host reserves of water ice.

US robotic missions will also try to keep pace. Three private missions are expected to head for the Moon within the next twelve months. These are IM-3 by Intuitive Machines with the Nova-C lander, Blue Ghost by Firefly, which should carry the first Western mission to the far side, and Griffin by Astrobotic Technology toward the south pole.

A Place in the Sun

Smile has been widely discussed, and will continue to be, not only for the valuable scientific contribution it promises, but also because it is a probe of the European Space Agency launching in cooperation with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
It will lift off in spring aboard a Vega C rocket. In orbit it will study the interaction between the solar wind, the flow of charged particles from our star, and Earth’s magnetosphere. The goal is to improve space weather forecasting, which, like atmospheric weather, affects human activities beyond the atmosphere, with potential risks to satellite operations and astronaut health.

Precisely to better understand the mechanisms that give rise to solar storms, the launch of SunRise, the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, is scheduled for July. Six small satellites, cubesats, will fly in formation to form a single large instrument using interferometry, similar to the technique used to capture the first image of a black hole. They will study solar activity at low radio frequencies, with the aim of mapping in three dimensions the regions of most intense activity.

New Views of the Cosmos

The launch of the next major space telescope is expected in the fall. Nasa’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will observe the Universe on large scales in visible and near infrared wavelengths. Its 2.4 meter primary mirror is the same size as Hubble’s, but with a wide field of view to investigate the Universe and its structure, including some of the most mysterious phenomena such as dark energy and dark matter. Thanks to its coronagraph, the instrument that blocks starlight, it will be a formidable hunter of exoplanets.

In the search for worlds orbiting other stars, great interest is focused on the launch of the European mission Plato, Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars, which will concentrate on the search for rocky planets most similar to Earth.
The probe is equipped with 26 telescopes to study more than one million stars, in particular yellow dwarfs like the Sun, subgiant stars, and red dwarfs, the most abundant stellar population, both to capture the dips in brightness caused by planetary transits and to characterize the mass and age of the stars themselves. Italy plays a leading role thanks to the Italian Space Agency and the National Institute for Astrophysics.

Close Encounters

Among the many episodes of space exploration, rendezvous, and gravitational maneuvers, three deserve special mention. In July 2026, the Chinese mission Tianwen-2 will reach its first destination, the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa, which orbits near Earth and may be a fragment of the Moon torn away following an impact with another celestial body. Tianwen-2 will attempt to collect samples to be sent back to Earth in 2027, before proceeding to its second target, comet 311P Panstarrs.

In November, the long odyssey of BepiColombo will come to an end. The European Space Agency probe will enter orbit around Mercury after more than eight years. In fact, BepiColombo, named in honor of Italian engineer and mathematician Giuseppe Bepi Colombo, whose calculations revolutionized the way spacecraft travel through the Solar System, has already flown past Mercury several times, using a series of gravity assists to slow down and adjust its trajectory in preparation for entering Mercury orbit. From there, in the coming years, BepiColombo will study up close one of the most elusive planets. Mercury is very difficult to observe with telescopes because of its proximity in the sky to the Sun. The mission will help us understand how it formed, the characteristics of its magnetic field, and its thin atmosphere.

Europe will also take center stage in one of the most anticipated events, the arrival of Hera at its target. Launched in November 2024, the Esa probe is headed toward the binary asteroid system Didymos–Dimorphos to study the effects caused by the impact of Dart, the projectile launched by Nasa that struck the smaller of the two bodies in November 2021 and significantly altered its trajectory.
Hera represents an important part of the joint program with Nasa to design a planetary defense system, that is, to understand how to act should a large object threaten to hit Earth. Calculations of the effects of the collision will make it possible to study ways to deflect a celestial threat without risks to the world’s population.

Setting Course for Mars

Japan and Europe will set sail together toward Mars. The mission is MMX of the Japanese space agency Jaxa, aimed at exploring the moons of the Red Planet. In particular Phobos, the larger of the two natural satellites, from which Jaxa will attempt to collect samples to bring back to Earth in 2031. If successful, it will be a historic achievement.
MMX also carries a small European rover built in France and Germany, Idefix, named after Obelix’s dog, the companion of Asterix. For this reason, a successful mission could also mark Europe’s first steps on extraterrestrial soil.

In November 2026, a new favorable launch window opens, an opportunity that occurs every 26 months, to reach Mars with less effort thanks to the minimum distance between the two planets. Nasa’s Escapade mission, launched in 2025 aboard New Glenn and parked two million kilometers from Earth, will dive back toward Earth to exploit a gravity assist that will send it toward its final destination, the Red Planet.

And who knows whether in 2026 Elon Musk might also decide to take advantage of this window for yet another show of force. In March 2025, he declared that by the end of 2026 he would launch the first uncrewed Starship toward Mars, a Starship that, at present, has never completed a full orbit around Earth.
All things considered, the only mission in some sense “Martian” launched by SpaceX is that of the Starman mannequin, seated at the wheel of a convertible Tesla Roadster, whose orbit crosses that of Mars without ever meeting it. Not exactly Musk’s vision.