The Trump administration on Monday barred US citizens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from returning home amid an Ebola outbreak that continues to outpace response efforts.
Reuters first reported late Monday that Americans currently in the DRC or those who have recently traveled to the Ebola-stricken country have been put on a "do-not-board" list. They cannot travel back to the US until they have spent 21 days in a third country. The order, taken under a transportation authority known as Title 49, was independently confirmed by Politico on Tuesday.
Both outlets noted that roughly two dozen Americans who had been set to board flights home on Tuesday have already been blocked by the new rule. It remains unclear if the bar also applies to government workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has at least two dozen employees working in the DRC.
A long-standing ban on commercial supersonic flights over the United States would be overturned in a new rule proposed by the US Federal Aviation Administration. That could pave the way for the possible return of commercial supersonic airliners—as long as such aircraft can reduce the ground-level impacts of their sonic booms.
The FAA originally banned overland supersonic flights by civil aircraft in 1973, following US military tests involving supersonic flights over US cities such as Oklahoma City, Chicago, and St. Louis in the 1960s. But the Trump administration has championed the repeal of the ban to pave the way for supersonic airliners that could operate without disruptive sonic booms. So the FAA’s new rulemaking action on June 30, 2026, follows the direction of an executive order issued by President Trump on June 6, 2025.
The newly proposed rule would replace the 53-year prohibition with an interim “noise-based” certification standard requiring any sonic boom overpressure at the surface to be kept below 0.11 pounds per square foot. That proposed standard is based on the Colorado-based startup Boom Supersonic having demonstrated quiet Mach cutoff flights with its XB-1 aircraft—harnessing specific atmospheric conditions while flying just beyond supersonic speeds at higher altitudes so that the aircraft’s shockwaves are refracted upward into the atmosphere rather than traveling to the ground.
For roughly the last three billion years, half of the Moon has been hiding. Earth’s gravity caught the Moon early in its existence and slowed its spin until the same face was permanently turned toward us — a process called tidal locking, completed somewhere between three and four billion years ago, which left every human civilisation that ever existed staring at the same single hemisphere of the same single satellite for the entire duration of human history. No human being saw the other half until 7 October 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 probe transmitted the first photographs from a flyby trajectory. No human or human-built object touched the far side until 3 January 2019, when China’s Chang’e-4 mission soft-landed Yutu-2, a small rover, into Von Kármán crater. No spacecraft of any nationality had ever collected and returned physical material from the far side to a laboratory on Earth — until 25 June 2024, when the return capsule of Chang’e-6 parachuted into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia carrying 1,935.3 grams of lunar soil and rock fragments scooped and drilled from the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
According to a comprehensive reference summary of the Chang’e-6 mission architecture and operational sequence, the mission’s four-component spacecraft — a lander, an ascent vehicle, an orbiter, and an Earth-return capsule — launched from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island aboard a Long March 5 rocket on 3 May 2024. The spacecraft entered lunar orbit on 8 May, then spent approximately three weeks mapping potential landing sites and refining its trajectory. On 1 June, the lander and ascent vehicle separated from the orbiter and descended autonomously toward the surface, communicating with mission control in Beijing through the Queqiao-2 relay satellite that had been launched into a high lunar halo orbit in March 2024 specifically to bridge communications between far-side surface operations and Earth. Direct radio contact with the far side is impossible — the lunar mass itself blocks the signal — and every far-side mission, beginning with Chang’e-4 in 2019, has required a dedicated communications relay positioned to see both Earth and the lunar surface simultaneously.
Where the lander touched down
Chang’e-6’s landing site was within the Apollo Basin, a 538-kilometre-wide impact crater that sits inside the much larger South Pole-Aitken Basin — the largest, oldest, and deepest confirmed impact structure in the entire solar system. As reported by Scientific American’s coverage of the Chang’e-6 sample return and the scientific significance of the landing site, the South Pole-Aitken Basin stretches approximately 2,500 kilometres across the lunar surface and reaches depths of approximately 8 kilometres below the surrounding terrain. The basin was formed approximately 4 billion years ago, in the period of intense bombardment that followed the formation of the solar system, by an impact substantial enough to potentially have excavated material from the Moon’s mantle and brought it to the surface. If true — and the question of whether SPA Basin ejecta actually includes mantle material has been an open scientific question for decades — then samples from the basin would represent the first physical material from beneath the lunar crust that humans had ever held in a laboratory.
The lander spent approximately 49 hours on the surface, using a robotic scoop to collect material from the immediate surface and a drill to extract samples from up to two metres below ground. Per the Planetary Society’s overview of the Chang’e-6 surface operations and sample-handling sequence, a small 5-kilogram rover named Jinchan (“Golden Cicada”), which had been kept secret during the launch preparations, was deployed from the side of the lander and photographed the spacecraft from a distance of several metres — producing the first close-up image of a lunar far-side lander taken from the lunar surface. The collected samples were transferred into a sealed container inside the ascent vehicle, which lifted off from the top of the lander on 3 June at 23:38 UTC, rendezvoused with the orbiter in lunar orbit on 6 June, transferred the sample container into the Earth-return capsule, and was subsequently crashed back into the lunar surface. The orbiter and return capsule then began the journey back to Earth, with the return capsule separating from the orbiter shortly before atmospheric entry and executing a skip-reentry trajectory — bouncing off the upper atmosphere once to shed velocity before completing the descent — to a soft landing in Inner Mongolia on 25 June. Total mission duration was 53 days.
Why far-side samples matter
The asymmetry between the lunar near side and far side is, by every available scientific measure, one of the larger unsolved problems in planetary science. The near side — the half of the Moon humans see from Earth — is covered for approximately 30 percent of its surface by basaltic maria, the dark plains of solidified ancient lava that the early astronomers mistook for seas. The far side has almost none. As detailed in a planetary scientist’s analysis of what the Chang’e-6 samples could reveal about lunar history, less than 1 percent of the far side is covered by maria. The far side’s crust is substantially thicker than the near side’s. The far side contains substantially lower concentrations of the geochemically distinctive elements collectively known as KREEP — potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus — that dominate the near-side surface chemistry. Why the two halves of the same body should differ so dramatically in their geological and chemical composition has been a subject of active research and unresolved theorising since the first far-side photographs were transmitted by Luna 3 in 1959.
Initial analyses of the Chang’e-6 samples have already begun producing scientifically substantial results. As covered in a November 2024 paper in Science by Cui et al. of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, fragments of volcanic basalt from the samples have been dated to approximately 2.83 billion years old — substantially younger than most far-side material had been expected to be, suggesting that volcanic activity persisted on the far side for far longer than existing models predicted. A parallel analysis led by Zhang et al. at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, published in Nature the same month, produced essentially the same age estimate using a different sample fraction. Earlier work led by Wang et al. on volcanic glass beads from the Chang’e-5 mission to the lunar near side had identified evidence of unexpectedly recent volcanism dated to approximately 120 million years ago. Whether comparably young volcanism occurred on the far side remains an open question that the continued analysis of Chang’e-6 samples may eventually address. The far-side basalts that have been dated so far contain substantially lower concentrations of radioactive heat-producing elements than near-side basalts of comparable age, which raises a new puzzle: if the far-side magma source was as chemically cool as the analyses suggest, what kept it molten long enough to produce volcanism extending into the relatively recent geological past? The current working hypothesis, which the analysis of the remaining samples over the coming years will substantially refine, is that the thin crust beneath the South Pole-Aitken Basin allowed mantle material to remain partially molten and to erupt through the comparatively thinner overlying rock long after the rest of the far side had cooled.
The 1,935 grams of lunar soil in a laboratory in Beijing now represent the only physical samples humans have ever recovered from a hemisphere of the Moon that, for the entire duration of human civilisation and for billions of years before it, has been permanently hidden from view. The next missions in the series — Chang’e-7 in 2026 and Chang’e-8 in 2028 — will focus on the lunar south pole, searching for water ice and testing in-situ resource utilisation in preparation for the International Lunar Research Station that China plans to begin building by 2035. The same techniques that produced the Chang’e-6 sample return will be used, with modifications, for the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission scheduled to launch in 2028 — a mission that, on its current schedule, will deliver the first samples from the surface of another planet to Earth in approximately five years.
Imagine throwing a refrigerator at a mountain travelling 135,000 kilometres per hour through deep space, after a ten-year flight, and asking the refrigerator to land softly enough to keep ten scientific instruments intact. This is, in essential respects, what the European Space Agency attempted in November 2014, and remarkably it almost entirely worked. The mother spacecraft, Rosetta, had launched from Kourou in French Guiana on 2 March 2004, carrying Philae folded against its side, on a trajectory that would take both vehicles past Earth three times and Mars once for gravity-assist accelerations, past two asteroids (21 Lutetia and 2867 Šteins) for scientific flybys, and across approximately ten and a half years of continuous deep-space travel — much of it in deliberate hibernation, with most systems powered down to conserve energy across the long stretches between gravity assists. The original target had been a different comet entirely, Comet 46P/Wirtanen, but a failure of an Ariane 5 rocket in late 2002 had delayed the launch and forced the European Space Agency to select a different target. The new target was Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a 4-kilometre-wide irregular ice-and-dust body in a 6.5-year orbit between Jupiter and the inner solar system, named after the two Soviet astronomers who had discovered it in 1969. Rosetta and Philae arrived at the comet on 6 August 2014. Rosetta became the first spacecraft in history to enter orbit around a comet. Philae’s planned descent followed three months later.
According to the European Space Agency’s official announcement of the Philae touchdown, the descent itself began at 08:35 UTC on 12 November 2014, when Philae separated from Rosetta at a distance of approximately 22.7 kilometres from the comet’s centre. The lander then drifted slowly toward the surface for approximately seven hours at a relative velocity of about one metre per second — roughly the pace of a brisk walk. The plan, on touchdown, was for two harpoons fired from the bottom of the lander to anchor it to the comet’s surface and for a small thruster on the top of the lander to push it down against the recoil. The combined gravitational pull of the comet on the 100-kilogram lander was approximately one-hundred-thousandth of Earth’s surface gravity — so weak that any upward force on Philae’s body would, without the anchoring systems, simply send it bouncing back into space. The first touchdown occurred at 15:34 UTC at a site the mission team had named Agilkia, after the Egyptian island where the original Philae obelisk now sits.
Why the lander bounced
The anchoring systems did not work. The harpoons did not fire. The top-mounted thruster did not fire. The ice screws built into the landing legs could not penetrate the unexpectedly hard surface material of the comet — which, contrary to the team’s expectations of soft snow-like consistency, turned out to be more like solid water ice. The result was that Philae, on contact, behaved exactly as a 100-kilogram object behaves when it touches a surface at one metre per second in essentially zero gravity with no anchoring of any kind: it bounced. The first bounce sent the lander approximately one kilometre back up into the comet’s tenuous atmosphere, where it drifted slowly for nearly two hours before falling back to the surface for a second bounce, and then a final, much smaller bounce, before coming to rest at 17:31 UTC at a location the team named Abydos — about a kilometre from the originally planned landing site, against the wall of a cliff, in a position where direct sunlight reached the lander’s solar panels for only approximately 1.5 hours per 12.4-hour comet rotation period, rather than the 6 to 7 hours per rotation that the mission team had planned for.
The science programme proceeded anyway. As reported in a comprehensive reference summary of the Philae mission and its scientific operations on the comet, all ten of the lander’s onboard scientific instruments were operated at least once during the approximately 57 hours that Philae remained active on the comet’s surface — drawing on the energy stored in the lander’s primary battery, which had been charged on the journey out and was not dependent on solar power for the initial science sequence. The instruments captured the first photographs ever taken from the surface of a comet, performed the first in-situ chemical analysis of cometary nucleus material, detected organic compounds including the amino-acid precursor glycine, measured the magnetic and thermal properties of the surface, and characterised the dust environment in the immediate vicinity of the lander. At 00:08 UTC on 15 November 2014, the primary battery was exhausted. The lander entered hibernation. The mission team’s hope was that as the comet’s orbit took it closer to the Sun in the subsequent months, additional sunlight on the solar panels might allow the secondary battery to recharge sufficiently to wake the lander up. This hope was substantially realised — Philae communicated sporadically with Rosetta between 13 June and 9 July 2015 — but the contact never stabilised into the sustained science operations the team had hoped for, and after 9 July 2015 no further signals were received.
What the mission found
Per National Geographic’s overview of the scientific discoveries that emerged from the Rosetta and Philae mission across the subsequent years of analysis, the combined results from the orbiter and the lander substantially revised the existing scientific understanding of cometary composition and the role of comets in the early solar system. The water on Comet 67P, as measured by Rosetta’s mass spectrometers, has a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio approximately three times higher than the water in Earth’s oceans — which substantially weakened the long-standing hypothesis that the bulk of Earth’s water was delivered by comet impacts during the early bombardment of the inner solar system. Cometary water, in 67P at least, does not match Earth water. Asteroids or another source must have supplied the difference. The mission also identified complex organic molecules in the comet’s outgassing material, including molecular oxygen (a finding the team had not predicted and could not initially explain), glycine, methylamine, ethylamine, and other carbon-based compounds that are precursors to the building blocks of biology. The two-lobed “rubber duck” shape of Comet 67P, photographed at high resolution by Rosetta’s cameras, turned out to be the result of two separate cometesimals having gently merged in the early solar system rather than a single body having been eroded into the irregular form.
As described in the comprehensive reference on the broader Rosetta mission and its final operational disposition, the orbiter itself was deliberately crashed into the comet on 30 September 2016, after the comet’s outbound orbit had carried it too far from the Sun for Rosetta’s solar panels to continue generating sufficient power. Philae’s exact landing location was identified in photographs taken by Rosetta’s high-resolution camera less than a month before the orbiter’s own demise — the lander wedged into a dark crack on the comet’s smaller lobe, its three legs visible in the image, exactly where the bounces had carried it on the afternoon of 12 November 2014. The two spacecraft now sit on the surface of Comet 67P together, accompanying it through its 6.5-year orbits around the Sun for the foreseeable astronomical future, the first human artefacts ever to permanently reside on the surface of a comet.
A growing body of evidence suggests that leaving Earth may do far more than challenge the human body. According to a new study, the absence ofgravityitself could temporarily reshapeconsciousness, loosening the brain’s most strongly ingrained assumptions and opening the door to alteredperceptions, expanded awareness, and even experiences that resemble some aspects of psychedelic states.
As humanity prepares for longer stays on the Moon, commercial space tourism, and eventual missions to Mars, researchers contend that understanding what happens to the mind in microgravity may be just as important as understanding the engineering that gets astronauts there. According to them, gravity may not simply keep people anchored to the ground—it may also help anchor human consciousness itself.
In a new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers Dr. Annahita Nezami and Dr. Elisa Raffaella Ferre of Birkbeck, University of London, explored decades of neuroscience, psychology, and spaceflight research to propose that Earth’s gravitational pull acts as a deeply embedded “super-prior” within the brain. By disrupting this ancient reference point, microgravity may trigger widespread changes across neural networks that underpin perception, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.
“Human consciousness has evolved under the constant pull of terrestrial gravity, yet its role in shaping perception and awareness has received limited theoretical attention,” researchers write. “As spaceflight transitions from short missions to long-duration habitation, understanding how consciousness responds to non-terrestrial gravity becomes increasingly urgent.”
Every human brain evolved under the constant force of Earth’s gravity. From before birth onward, sensory systems constantly rely on gravity cues to determine which way is up, where the body is in space, and how to interpret movement.
Researchers argue that this constant exposure has made gravity one of the brain’s most reliable assumptions. In the language of predictive neuroscience, the brain constantly generates expectations about the world and updates them using incoming sensory information. Gravity, they say, functions as a basic expectation—a “1G super-prior”—that helps stabilize consciousness.
Remove that constant, and things begin to change.
In orbit, vestibular signals from the inner ear become unreliable. Visual, proprioceptive, and balance information no longer align as the brain evolved to expect. The resulting mismatch generates anticipation errors, forcing widespread recalibration.
Those changes are already well documented among astronauts. Space travelers commonly experience spatial disorientation, altered body perception, sleep disturbances, mood swings, and, in some cases, feelings of depersonalization or derealization—states in which individuals feel separated from themselves or perceive their surroundings as unreal.
Astronauts have also reported more positive and profound experiences. Many describe feeling “unmoored,” “expanded,” and deeply interconnected with humanity, or overwhelmed by awe while viewing Earth from orbit. This phenomenon, known as the Overview Effect, has been associated with lasting shifts in values, increased environmental concern, and enhanced feelings of oneness.
The study suggests that these experiences might originate from the same neurocognitive processes triggered when gravity’s stabilizing role is weakened.
“By perturbing the most stable embodied reference – gravity itself – spaceflight offers a rare window into how fundamental expectations shape consciousness,” researchers write. “The loosening of perceptual boundaries in microgravity has been proposed as a neurocognitive foundation for the Overview Effect.”
Brain imaging studies lend support to the idea. MRI scans of astronauts before and after extended-duration missions have revealed structural changes, including fluid redistribution, enlargement of brain ventricles, and gray matter remodeling. Functional MRI studies have also found changes in connectivity among vestibular, sensory, and default mode network regions involved in awareness and the combining of internal and external information.
Especially intriguing are changes observed in the default mode network, a system involved in introspection, self-referential thought, and consciousness. Activity inside this network appears to diminish after spaceflight, with some changes persisting for months after astronauts return to Earth.
Electroencephalography studies have likewise detected reductions in alpha-wave activity during and after missions, another sign that brain function is being reorganized in response to microgravity.
These neural changes led the researchers to an unexpected comparison.
Many of the same large-scale patterns recorded after spaceflight resemble effects previously documented under psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin and LSD. In both situations, highly organized brain networks appear to loosen, while communication between previously separate regions increases.
Researchers stress that the mechanisms are entirely different. Psychedelics act through serotonin receptors, whereas microgravity represents an environmental disruption rather than a pharmacological one. Yet both seem to converge by weakening the brain’s highest-level assumptions and increasing the combination of sensory information.
According to researchers, this convergence phenomenon suggests that spaceflightcould provide scientists with a natural, drug-free model for studying transformative states of consciousness.
The researchers argue that terrestrial gravity, microgravity, and psychedelic statesmay represent different conditions along a spectrum defined by the strength of the brain’s deeply ingrained “1G super-prior.” As that stabilizing role weakens, top-down constraints relax, potentially increasing neuroplasticity and mental flexibility.
The implications go beyond astronaut health. Understanding how consciousness changes in unfamiliar environments may provide new clues to the neural foundations of self-awareness. It could also prove increasingly important as private citizens spend more time in space and human settlements expand away from Earth.
Researchers suggest that microgravity offers scientists something that cannot be replicated on Earth—a chance to observe what happens when one of evolution’s oldest assumptions suddenly disappears.
“By situating consciousness in an environment for which evolution offers no precedent, spaceflight positions microgravity as a powerful natural neurocognitive catalyst for transformative experience,” researchers write. “In stepping beyond Earth’s gravity, we gain a unique vantage point from which to examine the contingent foundations of human awareness and the conditions under which it can be fundamentally transformed.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter:@LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email:LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
On my way to Tash Rabat from Son-Kul, both in Kyrgyzstan, sitting on the comfortable seats of a minibus, I had to pinch myself just to realize that it wasn’t a dream. I could see green valleys on one side of the road and the rugged brown Pamir Plateau on the other. As someone whoContinue reading "Capturing the night sky in Kyrgyzstan"
The popular framing of the question — why has no human walked on the Moon since 1972? — usually proceeds as though there is some technical answer to be found. The rockets must have stopped working. The engineering must have been forgotten. The expertise must have been lost in the half-century since Apollo 17 splashed down. The actual answer is substantially simpler and substantially less satisfying. The Apollo programme was not cancelled because it stopped being possible. It was cancelled because it stopped being useful for what it had been built to accomplish. The capability question is a downstream consequence of a political question that was settled in the early 1970s, when the American government decided that the goal of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon — having been achieved on 20 July 1969 with Apollo 11 — was no longer worth paying for, and that the remaining momentum of the Apollo programme should be redirected toward other priorities.
According to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s editorial reconstruction of the Apollo cancellations, the decisions to end the lunar programme were made in a sequence that began almost immediately after Apollo 11’s success. By December 1969 — five months after Neil Armstrong’s first footstep — one of President Richard Nixon’s top aides told NASA that “the President says that he doesn’t have enough money within the next couple of years and must accept limitation of [space] activity” and that Nixon “did not see the need to go to the moon six more times.” On 4 January 1970, the Apollo 20 mission was formally cancelled. In September 1970, Apollos 18 and 19 followed. The remaining missions — Apollos 14 through 17, the latter three already in advanced preparation — were allowed to proceed and were completed by December 1972. The Saturn V production line was shut down in 1970. The remaining unflown Saturn Vs were sent to museums, where they remain as the largest functional rockets ever built, permanently grounded.
Why the political momentum collapsed
The Kennedy speech of 25 May 1961 — “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” — was framed in terms of national capability and human aspiration, but the actual policy logic that funded it was strategic competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957, put Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961 (six weeks before Kennedy’s speech), and were widely perceived to be ahead of the United States in space capability. The Apollo programme was, in essential terms, a national project to recover technological prestige from a position of perceived inferiority. It was funded at scales that no comparable peacetime project before or since has matched — peaking at approximately 4.4 percent of the entire US federal budget in 1966.
The strategic logic for that funding evaporated essentially the moment Armstrong stepped off the lunar module ladder in July 1969. The Soviets, by 1969, had already effectively conceded the lunar race — their N1 super-heavy rocket failed in four successive test launches between 1969 and 1972, and the Soviet crewed lunar programme was wound down quietly. There was no longer any external competitor to beat. There was no longer any strategic prestige to be gained from continued lunar landings. And the public, which had supported Apollo as a Cold War project, had never developed the underlying enthusiasm for lunar exploration as a scientific or exploratory enterprise that would have been required to sustain funding in the absence of the Cold War rationale. Polls throughout the late 1960s consistently showed that a majority of Americans thought Apollo was not worth the cost, even at the peak of the programme’s popularity.
The internal NASA decisions
Per The Planetary Society’s analysis of how Nixon shaped the post-Apollo NASA, the popular blame placed on Nixon for ending Apollo is partially deserved but oversimplifies the institutional dynamics. NASA itself, under Administrator Thomas Paine, agreed to terminate Saturn V production and cancel later Apollo missions in order to free up budget for the post-Apollo programmes the agency wanted to pursue — an experimental space station that would become Skylab, and a reusable spacecraft that would become the Space Shuttle. The choice was framed within NASA as a redirection of resources from the now-completed lunar landing programme toward new objectives, rather than as an abandonment of human spaceflight. The institutional case for shutting down the Saturn V line was that it was no longer needed for the missions the agency intended to pursue, and that maintaining a manufacturing line for a rocket the agency was not going to use would have consumed budget that could be spent on the Shuttle.
That decision turned out to be one of the more consequential institutional choices of the post-Apollo era. The Shuttle programme that NASA selected as its successor to Apollo was, by every available assessment, a substantially less ambitious vehicle than what the Saturn V could have supported, while also being substantially more expensive per launch than Apollo had been. The Shuttle operated from 1981 to 2011, completed 135 missions, lost two crews and 14 astronauts in catastrophic accidents, and never carried humans beyond low Earth orbit. The capability that had allowed twelve men to walk on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 was, by the time the last Saturn V was sent to a museum in the mid-1970s, no longer institutionally sustainable. Restarting it would require essentially rebuilding the entire programme from scratch — which is what NASA’s Artemis programme has, in fact, been attempting to do for the past several years, at substantial cost and with substantial delays.
What “lost capability” actually means
As covered by AmericaSpace’s detailed history of the Apollo cancellations, the popular claim that humanity “lost the capability” to return to the Moon is partially true and partially misleading. The engineering knowledge from Apollo was documented and survives in archives, technical reports, and the institutional memory of the relatively small number of engineers from the era who are still alive. The capability that was lost is not the knowledge itself but the institutional infrastructure that supported it: the Saturn V manufacturing line, the supplier networks, the specialised workforce, the test facilities, and the political-economic configuration that allowed roughly 400,000 people working across NASA and its contractor network to be mobilised on a single objective with a national-priority budget. None of these things are recoverable in their original form. They have to be rebuilt, which is essentially what the Artemis programme is now doing, and which is partly why the rebuild has taken decades and substantially exceeded its original budget.
The deeper point is that the question “why has no one been back to the Moon in fifty-three years?” has the same answer as the question “why was anyone there in the first place?” The Apollo programme was a Cold War project that happened to produce, as a byproduct, the most ambitious feat of exploration in human history. When the Cold War rationale for the project ended, the project ended. The capability that had been built for the project was allowed to decay because the institutional reasons for maintaining it had decayed first. The current revival of crewed lunar exploration — through Artemis, through China’s parallel programme, through the commercial-spaceflight ecosystem that has emerged over the past decade — is taking place because new institutional reasons have emerged: geopolitical competition with China, commercial interest in lunar resources, scientific interest in the lunar south pole, and a renewed sense in several capitals that human presence beyond Earth orbit is strategically valuable. Whether the new reasons will sustain a sustained human presence on the Moon, or whether the next round of lunar landings will be followed by another half-century pause, depends on whether the institutional infrastructure being built now is durable enough to survive the eventual evaporation of whatever specific political momentum is currently funding it. The Apollo experience suggests that this is not a question to be answered with technological optimism.
For the first forty years of human spaceflight, getting into space required being a professional astronaut or cosmonaut. The selection processes were intensely competitive, the training programmes took years, the candidates were chosen from elite military pilot or scientific backgrounds, and the small number of people who eventually made it through the filtering and onto a launch vehicle were essentially all employees of the few national space agencies that operated launch programmes. From 1961 through 2001, approximately 400 individuals went to space, every one of them a professional. The first paying civilian, the American businessman Dennis Tito, finally reached the International Space Station in April 2001 by purchasing a seat on a Russian Soyuz for approximately $20 million. Six more spaceflight participants followed over the next eight years, all via the same Russian-operated route. Then the door closed. From 2009 to 2021, no private citizen reached space at all. The institutional pipeline that had briefly opened during the Russian post-Soviet financial squeeze closed again as the ISS partnership stabilised.
According to a detailed industry flight log of every commercial space tourism mission to date, the reopening of that door in 2021 was not gradual but discontinuous. Within a single ten-week period — Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity on 11 July 2021, Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin’s New Shepard on 20 July 2021, and Jared Isaacman’s all-civilian Inspiration4 mission on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in September 2021 — three different commercial providers began operating crewed flights for paying customers. The civilian-to-space pipeline that had been closed for twelve years suddenly had three independent operational paths. The cumulative number of private civilians flown to space, which had been seven for over a decade, began to climb rapidly. By the end of 2022 it had passed twenty. By the end of 2024 it had passed eighty. By early 2026 the figure had reached approximately 120, and despite Blue Origin’s January 2026 decision to pause New Shepard flights to focus on lunar missions, the underlying trajectory has continued.
The arithmetic of the shift
The total number of human beings who have left Earth’s atmosphere across the entire history of spaceflight is, by current estimates, approximately 700. NASA has contributed roughly 360 of these. The Soviet and subsequent Russian programmes have contributed approximately 135. The European Space Agency, JAXA in Japan, the Canadian Space Agency, the Chinese taikonaut programme, and several smaller national programmes account for most of the rest. The 120 commercial civilians who have flown since 2021 represent approximately 17 percent of this cumulative total — roughly one in six of every person who has ever crossed into space, all of them in the past five years, almost none of them with the professional training that defined every previous generation of spacefarer.
The rate dynamics are the more striking part. Per CBS News’s coverage of the broader commercial spaceflight phenomenon, the major national astronaut corps have been operating at roughly stable launch cadences for the past decade — NASA sends approximately 8 to 12 astronauts to the ISS per year, Roscosmos sends roughly 4 to 6 cosmonauts, the Chinese taikonaut programme launches a similar number to its Tiangong space station, and ESA contributes a handful through its partnership arrangements. The total professional astronaut launch rate sits at roughly 25 to 30 humans per year, and has been at this level for most of the post-Shuttle era. The commercial civilian launch rate, by contrast, was effectively zero from 2009 to 2021 and has been climbing rapidly since. Blue Origin’s New Shepard alone flew approximately 30 civilians across multiple missions in 2024-2025. Virgin Galactic flew another seven commercial missions before pausing operations in 2024 for an upgraded vehicle. SpaceX flew the Polaris Dawn mission (four civilians) in September 2024 and continues operating crewed Crew Dragon flights for paying customers. Multiple Axiom Space missions have carried paying civilians to the ISS. The total commercial civilian launch rate for 2024-2025 substantially exceeded the professional astronaut rate.
What civilian flights actually involve
The two halves of the commercial spaceflight industry — suborbital and orbital — are different enough that they are essentially separate products. Suborbital flights, operated by Blue Origin (New Shepard) and Virgin Galactic, briefly cross the boundary of space (the internationally recognised Kármán line at 100 kilometres altitude, or the US-recognised 80 kilometres) and return immediately. The full flight, from launch to landing, typically lasts about 10 to 12 minutes. Passengers experience approximately 3 to 6 minutes of weightlessness at apogee, see the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space through windows, and then re-enter and land. Ticket prices range from approximately $200,000 to $600,000 depending on operator. As reported by Mexico Business News’s industry overview, suborbital flights account for the substantial majority of commercial civilian spaceflights to date by passenger count.
Orbital flights are an entirely different proposition. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Axiom Space’s missions to the International Space Station place passengers into sustained low Earth orbit, with mission durations typically ranging from several days to several weeks. Ticket prices for orbital missions start at approximately $55 million and can exceed $200 million for chartered Crew Dragon flights. The 2024 Polaris Dawn mission, funded by Jared Isaacman and operated by SpaceX, reached an altitude of 1,400 kilometres — the highest crewed Earth orbit since the Apollo programme — and included the first commercial spacewalk in history. The orbital civilian flights are substantially rarer than suborbital ones (fewer than 20 total individuals to date) but represent the more technologically ambitious frontier of the commercial spaceflight industry.
What the trend means
As covered by a March 2026 Yahoo News analysis of Blue Origin’s decision to pause New Shepard operations, the commercial spaceflight industry is now mature enough that operational decisions by individual providers (Virgin Galactic pausing for vehicle upgrades, Blue Origin pausing to redirect engineering resources to lunar missions) substantially affect industry-wide launch cadence but do not threaten the basic existence of the category. Multiple additional providers are at various stages of operational development: Vast’s Haven-1, a single-module commercial space station, is targeted for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in May 2026, with the company aiming to become the world’s first standalone commercial space station operator; Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane is in late-stage development; and Axiom Space’s commercial space station is intended to begin operations and eventually replace the ISS by 2030. Virgin Galactic’s Delta-class vehicle, designed for monthly commercial flights, is targeted to enter operations in late 2026.
The structural shift that the cumulative 120 commercial civilians represent is not yet visible at the level of cultural recognition. Most people, asked how many private citizens have been to space, would probably guess a number an order of magnitude lower. The transition from spaceflight as an exclusively professional activity to spaceflight as a commercial product purchasable by paying customers has, by every available indication, now happened — quietly, gradually, and faster than most observers anticipated. The next question is whether the trajectory continues. If the rate-acceleration of the past five years extends through the rest of the decade, the cumulative number of private civilians in space will, by 2030, substantially exceed the cumulative number of professional astronauts who flew across the entire 60-year history of spaceflight before commercial operations began. Whether that crossing point gets noticed at the time, or whether it gets registered only in retrospect like most of the structural shifts of the past several years, is a separate question. The numbers themselves are no longer particularly contestable.
When Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore packed for their trip to the International Space Station in early June 2024, they packed for approximately a week. The mission profile was eight to ten days. The clothes they brought, the personal items they brought, the level of mental preparation they brought were all calibrated to a trip about the length of a tropical vacation. Two hundred and eighty-six days later — having lived aboard the ISS for the better part of a year, having become full members of two consecutive Expedition crews, having watched their original spacecraft return to Earth without them in September because NASA had concluded it was no longer safe to ride home in — they finally landed in the Gulf of Mexico aboard a SpaceX capsule on 18 March 2025. The eight-day mission had, by then, become the longest single accidental extension of a human spaceflight in NASA history, and the most public engineering crisis the Boeing Commercial Crew Program had yet encountered.
According to Space.com’s coverage of the Starliner thruster crisis, the immediate problems began as Starliner approached the ISS for docking on 6 June 2024. Five of the capsule’s 28 maneuvering thrusters, mounted on the service module, began misfiring or shutting down entirely. Helium leaks were detected in the propulsion system manifolds. The docking was eventually completed, but the underlying questions about the vehicle’s ability to safely undock from the station and execute the precise series of deorbit burns required to bring the astronauts home became, in subsequent weeks, increasingly serious. The original plan had assumed Starliner would carry Williams and Wilmore back to Earth within ten days of arrival. By late July 2024, NASA and Boeing engineers were still trying to determine whether the propulsion problems could be safely characterised, much less corrected. The astronauts remained aboard the ISS while ground engineers ran simulations.
The decision
The formal decision came on 24 August 2024. Per NASA’s official announcement of the uncrewed-return decision, the agency concluded that bringing Williams and Wilmore home aboard Starliner posed risks it was not willing to accept. The specific failure mode that worried engineers most concerned Teflon seals inside the thrusters that appeared to be degrading and bulging when the thrusters fired at high temperatures — a problem that could not be fully characterised because the service module containing the affected thrusters was scheduled to burn up during atmospheric reentry, eliminating the possibility of post-flight inspection. The agency’s administrator at the time, Bill Nelson, summarised the rationale: “Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine. A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine.” Starliner would return to Earth uncrewed. Williams and Wilmore would be folded into the ISS’s regular crew rotation and would eventually come home aboard a SpaceX vehicle.
Starliner undocked from the ISS on 6 September 2024, executed its deorbit burn successfully, and landed at White Sands, New Mexico — without crew, without serious incident, and without resolving any of the underlying engineering questions about whether it could have safely brought Williams and Wilmore home if it had been required to. Three weeks later, on 28 September 2024, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule launched to the ISS carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Two of the four seats were left intentionally empty, reserved for Williams and Wilmore’s eventual return. That return would not happen for another six months.
What the 286 days actually involved
The “stranded” framing that dominated media coverage of the situation became, over the subsequent months, a source of mild frustration for the astronauts themselves. Williams and Wilmore were not stranded in the literal sense. They were absorbed into the ISS’s standard crew rotation as members of Expedition 71 and then Expedition 72. They conducted scientific research. They performed maintenance on station systems. Williams became ISS commander in September 2024 and completed multiple spacewalks during her extended mission, including one that pushed her cumulative spacewalk time to a record for a female astronaut. Both Williams and Wilmore have repeatedly described their extended stay in terms that emphasise their professional engagement with the work rather than any sense of isolation or distress.
Williams’s total accumulated spaceflight time across her career, by the time of her March 2025 return, reached 608 days — the fourth-highest cumulative total of any NASA astronaut and the highest of any NASA woman. The 286-day mission itself sits comfortably within the range of routine modern ISS expeditions; Scott Kelly’s 340-day mission in 2015-2016 was longer, and Frank Rubio’s 371-day mission in 2022-2023 was longer still. The physiological recovery required upon return was substantial but within standard parameters for long-duration ISS missions. Bone density loss, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular deconditioning, and the cluster of vision-related changes documented in long-duration spaceflight all applied to both astronauts, but the rehabilitation protocols were well-established and the recovery proceeded along expected lines.
What the mission means for Boeing
The Starliner programme, by every available measure, is in substantial trouble. As reported by CNBC’s coverage of the March 2025 return, Boeing’s $4.2 billion Commercial Crew Program contract with NASA — signed in 2014, alongside a smaller $2.6 billion contract awarded to SpaceX — has now produced exactly one crewed flight that failed to return its crew aboard its own vehicle, after more than a decade of development delays, two uncrewed test flights (one of which also failed to reach the ISS), and multiple billion-dollar cost overruns absorbed by Boeing itself. SpaceX’s competing Crew Dragon, by contrast, has completed eleven operational crewed missions to the ISS since its first crewed flight in May 2020, has carried more than fifty astronauts safely to and from the station, and has now also rescued the two astronauts that Boeing’s vehicle was unable to return.
Whether Starliner ever flies humans again remains, as of mid-2026, an open question. As documented in NASA’s official return-announcement statement, the agency has not committed to a specific date for the next Starliner mission, crewed or uncrewed. The engineering questions about the service-module thrusters remain partially unresolved because the affected hardware no longer exists. Boeing has indicated that it intends to address the propulsion issues in subsequent vehicles and that it remains committed to the Commercial Crew Program. NASA, for its part, has indicated that it still wants a second commercial crew provider as a backup to SpaceX. Whether the second provider continues to be Boeing, and whether the next Starliner flight occurs in 2026, 2027, or later, will depend on technical, financial, and political decisions that the agency has not yet made publicly. The 286 days that Williams and Wilmore spent in orbit after their eight-day mission ended are, in this respect, a piece of operational evidence whose institutional consequences are still in the process of being worked out.
The record sits at the top of every list of human spaceflight endurance achievements, has been there since 1995, and is currently held by a man who has been dead for three years. Valeri Polyakov, born in Tula, Russia in 1942, trained as a medical doctor specialising in space medicine before joining the Soviet cosmonaut corps in 1972, and spent the better part of his subsequent career attempting to answer a single question with his own body: whether a human being could survive, biologically and psychologically, the round-trip duration of a flight to Mars. His first flight, in 1988-1989, lasted 240 days — at the time among the longest space missions ever attempted. His second flight, launched on 8 January 1994 aboard Soyuz TM-18, was specifically planned to extend beyond the projected duration of a Mars mission. He stayed in space for 437 days. He returned on 22 March 1995. No human being has stayed in space continuously for longer since.
According to Astronomy.com’s 2022 obituary of Polyakov following his death at age 80, the specific scientific purpose of the 437-day mission was Mars-mission validation. The transit time to Mars on a standard low-energy trajectory is approximately 7 to 9 months in each direction; combined with a surface stay of approximately 1 year (the typical “long-stay” mission profile), the total mission duration for a crewed Mars expedition would be approximately 14 to 18 months. Polyakov’s 437 days — slightly over 14 and a half months — covers the round-trip duration of the shortest plausible Mars mission profile. The Soviet (later Russian) space medicine community had been planning a Mars mission, in some form, since the 1960s; Polyakov’s flight was the medical proof-of-concept that the human body could endure the required time in microgravity.
What the mission actually required
Polyakov’s working environment for those 437 days was the Mir space station — a Soviet-era orbital outpost launched in 1986, roughly the size of a school bus, with a total internal working volume of approximately 350 cubic metres distributed across multiple modules connected by narrow passageways. By 1994, Mir was already eight years old and showing signs of wear. The cooling system was unreliable. The toilet had recurring problems. The communications systems were limited by the standards even of the time. Polyakov’s living conditions were substantially harsher than the conditions available to modern astronauts on the International Space Station, which has approximately three times the pressurised volume of Mir and substantially more comfortable accommodations across essentially every dimension. Polyakov adapted by establishing a strict daily routine: approximately two hours of mandatory exercise (a mix of treadmill running and resistance training), scientific work, medical self-experimentation, communications with ground controllers, and disciplined sleep schedules.
As reported by RocketSTEM’s coverage of the mission, Polyakov’s medical training proved decisive. He was, in essential respects, both the experimental subject and the experimenter. He documented in detail the physiological changes his body underwent over the 14-and-a-half months: bone density loss in weight-bearing skeletal regions at approximately 1 to 2 percent per month, muscle atrophy despite his exercise protocol, cardiovascular changes including some loss of cardiac muscle mass, and the cluster of vision-related changes that have since been named Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome. He tested countermeasures against these changes, refined the exercise protocols in real time, and produced the medical baseline against which all subsequent long-duration spaceflight has been measured.
The landing
The moment that became the iconic image of the mission was not the launch, not any specific event during the 14 months in orbit, but the landing itself. As described in Britannica’s biographical entry on Polyakov, when the Soyuz TM-20 capsule containing Polyakov touched down on the steppes of Kazakhstan on 22 March 1995, ground crews approached with stretchers, fully expecting that a man who had spent 14.5 months in microgravity would be unable to support his own weight. Polyakov refused the stretcher. He climbed out of the capsule on his own, walked the short distance to a nearby lawn chair, and sat down. The gesture was deliberate. He had spent the entire mission, and arguably his entire career, attempting to demonstrate that long-duration spaceflight did not necessarily produce a human being too physiologically broken to function on arrival. Walking himself from the capsule to the chair was the visible answer.
His first words to the assembled press, in Russian, translated to the equivalent of: “We can fly to Mars.” The statement was not a metaphor or an aspirational quote. It was a clinical assessment from a doctor who had just personally completed the experiment.
Why the record still stands
Per Space.com’s history of ultra-long-duration spaceflight, no human being has stayed in space continuously for as long as Polyakov did in any of the 31 years since his return. NASA’s Scott Kelly came within approximately three months, completing 340 days aboard the ISS in 2015-2016 as part of the agency’s “Year in Space” study. NASA’s Christina Koch reached 328 days in 2019-2020. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio set the American single-mission record at 371 days during an unplanned mission extension in 2022-2023. The current cumulative space-time record is held by the Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, who has accumulated approximately 1,110 days across five separate missions — but no individual mission of his, or any other cosmonaut’s, has exceeded Polyakov’s 437 consecutive days.
The reason the record has not been broken is not that humans cannot endure longer missions — Polyakov demonstrated that they can. It is that the modern crewed-spaceflight programmes have, for various operational, political, and risk-management reasons, settled on six-month rotations as the standard ISS expedition duration, with occasional yearlong missions conducted as specific scientific experiments. The radiation exposure accumulated during longer missions, in low Earth orbit, is substantial; over the full lifetime of a cosmonaut or astronaut, multiple yearlong missions are generally not considered medically advisable. Polyakov accepted this risk in 1994 because the mission was designed to deliver a specific scientific result that no shorter flight could provide. The result was delivered. The result has not been substantially improved upon since.
The peculiar feature of the current moment is that Polyakov’s mission was conducted to validate human Mars exploration, and 31 years later, no human being has yet flown to Mars. The medical baseline is in place. The proof of biological feasibility is on the books. The next step — actually sending a crew to Mars — has been planned, replanned, postponed, and refigured by multiple space agencies across three decades, with the leading current candidate (SpaceX’s Starship-based architecture) targeting the early 2030s. Whether the eventual crew on the first Mars mission will benefit directly from the data Polyakov collected, or whether the record-holder will quietly remain the holder of a piece of human endurance that was waiting for a use case that never materialised, is one of the open questions of the next decade. The 437 days are sitting on a shelf. The doctor who walked himself off the Soyuz in March 1995 is no longer alive to see whether they get used.
Among the range of proposed alternatives, one potential candidate involves what are called solar light sails, a theoretical propulsion system that relies on pressure generated from solar radiation against a large surface to move a spacecraft.
Such concepts have been proposed since the 1980s, some of which combine the idea of using sunlight as a power source with the implementation of lasers, which could propel such futuristic starships to speeds our best current technologies cannot attain.
However, not all spacecraft propulsion experts are necessarily sold on the idea of solar light sails just yet. According to new findings detailed in a paper by researchers Jiaze Li and Chao Shen of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, this novel form of propulsion may have a few hurdles to cross before it can attain the near-light-speeds many experts had hoped for.
A Tale of Three Forces
According to Shen and Li’s recent research, a key problem arises once a solar light sail spacecraft begins nearing the speed of light: drag forces resulting from the very source of energy used to propel the devices could place significant limitations on their maximum attainable speeds.
A combination of different forces can be expected to occur as sunlight strikes a light sail, the authors say, which includes incident light, specular reflection, and diffuse scattering.
Incident light describes the physical momentum generated by light energy in the form of photons as they strike the sail, whereas specular reflection describes the momentum produced as photons reflect off the sail. Finally, diffuse scattering is a separate form of momentum generated by photons, which, rather than bouncing away upon impact, is actually absorbed by the sail, the energy from which is thereafter released in random directions.
New Limitations on Solar Light Sails
Based on these primary forces, the authors identify that once a light sail begins reaching relativistic speeds, it also becomes subjected to intense Doppler effect—the phenomenon that occurs as changes in the frequency of waves result as their source and an object or observer’s distance changes in relation to it.
In the case of solar light sails, the more the frequency of light waves striking the sail decreases, the less the amount of thrust generated by the three forces the paper identifies. In simpler terms, the faster a solar light sail spacecraft attempts to travel, the harder it becomes for it to accelerate.
Relativistic Light Aberration
At approximately 75% of the speed of light, the researchers say that an additional hindrance emerges, as what physicists call relativistic light aberration takes over. This phenomenon, first described by Einstein more than a century ago, involves relativistic corrections of light sources for observers who move at velocities approaching light speed.
In the case of our prospective future solar light sailors, this would mean that the weakest of the three forces impacting the sail (diffuse scattering) would begin to impose an active drag once the sail reaches approximately three-quarters of light speed. While the overall force of lasers helping to propel the light sail would remain positive at this stage in the system’s acceleration, the authors note an inevitable decline in efficiency.
The authors do concede that while their paper examines the radiative dynamics of solar light sail propulsion, it does not account for other factors that may include drag resulting from encounters with materials like gases, dust, or other physical sources (i.e., non-radiative sources), which could also impact overall speeds.
Additional factors worthy of consideration, but which the authors do not directly address in their paper, include the melting point of any materials used for solar light sail propulsion, which could be heated to extreme temperatures due to combined exposure to solar radiation, laser energy, and friction from movement.
Fundamentally, the team reports that their paper “provides a rigorous and in-depth theoretical foundation for lightsail dynamics,” which illustrates that while this future propulsion concept has its merits, we may still be far from seeing its realization for practical space travel.
By outlining the factors that contribute to constraints on light sail propulsion, Li and Shen aim to improve our overall understanding of this prospective future technology, thereby helping engineers to realize its potential for use in space exploration at some point in the future.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
The last human being to walk on the Moon stepped off the lunar surface at 5:40 AM Coordinated Universal Time on 14 December 1972. His name was Eugene Cernan. He was the commander of Apollo 17. As he climbed the ladder back into the lunar module, he said, “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” In the 53 years since that moment, no human being has set foot on the Moon. The Apollo programme produced six successful crewed landings between 1969 and 1972, deposited 12 American astronauts on the lunar surface, and accumulated a cumulative total of approximately 80 hours of human presence on the Moon before being terminated for budgetary and political reasons. The return that Cernan invoked turned out to take substantially longer than anyone in 1972 expected.
According to Aerospace Global News’s coverage of NASA’s revised Artemis programme in early 2026, the agency has restructured its lunar return strategy substantially over the past several years. The Artemis programme, originally announced in 2017 and formally launched in 2019, set out to return humans to the Moon by the mid-2020s. The schedule has slipped repeatedly. Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight around the Moon, succeeded in November 2022. Artemis II, the first crewed mission of the programme, successfully sent four astronauts on a 10-day flyby of the Moon in April 2026 — the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972, with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen launching from Kennedy Space Center on 1 April and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on 10 April after travelling approximately 695,000 miles and breaking the human distance-from-Earth record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Artemis III, which was originally planned to be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo, has been restructured into a 2027 rendezvous and docking test in low-Earth orbit. The first actual crewed lunar landing of the Artemis era will now be Artemis IV, scheduled for 2028 — subject to further delays that have been a recurring feature of the programme since its inception.
Why Artemis is not just Apollo redux
The structural difference between Apollo and Artemis is that Apollo was designed to win a race. Artemis is designed to stay. Apollo’s six successful lunar landings deposited 12 American astronauts on the lunar surface, who collectively logged approximately 80 hours of moonwalks across roughly 300 hours of total surface presence, spread across six missions over three and a half years, with individual missions lasting between 21 hours and 75 hours on the surface. The Apollo astronauts collected rocks, deployed scientific instruments, drove a lunar rover on the later missions, and returned home. Once the Cold War political imperative had been satisfied and the immediate scientific goals had been met, the programme was cancelled, the Saturn V rockets stopped being built, and the institutional capacity to send humans to the Moon was allowed to atrophy.
The Artemis programme is structured around a different objective. NASA’s stated long-term goal is what the agency calls “sustained human presence” at the lunar south pole — meaning multiple missions per year, progressively longer surface stays, a lunar habitat module, infrastructure for refuelling and resupply, and eventually a permanent base from which scientific and exploration activities can be conducted on a continuous basis. The Artemis landing site is specifically the south polar region of the Moon, which is scientifically and strategically valuable because permanently shadowed craters in the area contain substantial deposits of water ice. Water ice can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used as breathable air, drinking water, and rocket propellant. A lunar base with access to water ice can, in principle, sustain itself far more cheaply than a base that must have all its supplies launched from Earth.
The new mission architecture
Per BBC Sky at Night Magazine’s analysis of the Artemis III restructuring, the central technical challenge that has driven the schedule changes is the development of the commercial lunar landers. NASA has contracted with SpaceX (which is developing a lunar variant of Starship) and Blue Origin (which is developing the Blue Moon lander) to provide the actual surface-landing capability. Both vehicles are still under active development. SpaceX’s Starship must demonstrate several critical technologies before it can be used for a crewed lunar landing — including cryogenic fuel transfer in orbit, autonomous docking with the Orion crew capsule, and at least one successful uncrewed landing on the lunar surface. The cumulative technical demands have pushed the realistic timeline for the first crewed Artemis landing well beyond the original 2024 target, and the restructured Artemis III rendezvous-and-docking test in 2027 is intended to demonstrate the orbital procedures that the eventual landing mission will require.
The geopolitical context has also shifted substantially since the Artemis programme began. China’s space programme has announced a target of landing its own astronauts on the Moon by 2030 — the first crewed lunar landing in Chinese history, and a milestone that would substantially close the gap with the United States in space capability. China is also developing the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in partnership with Russia and several other countries, with completion targeted for the 2030s. The lunar south pole, with its water ice and its strategic value as a base for further exploration, is the destination for both programmes. The competing timelines mean that the next decade of lunar activity will involve at least two distinct national efforts converging on the same small region of the Moon.
What “sustained presence” actually means
As reported by World Today News’s coverage of the Artemis timeline and goals, the path from a single Artemis IV landing in 2028 to genuine sustained human presence on the Moon involves a long sequence of additional missions, infrastructure deployments, and technological developments that NASA’s current programme has scheduled into the 2030s. The agency’s planning documents anticipate progressively longer crewed surface stays, the deployment of habitat modules that can support multi-month occupancy, lunar surface mobility systems for exploring beyond the immediate landing area, in-situ resource utilisation systems that can extract and process water ice into usable resources, and eventually a permanent lunar outpost from which continuous human occupation becomes possible.
Whether the species will actually achieve sustained lunar presence in the 2030s remains genuinely uncertain. The Artemis programme has slipped repeatedly. The development of the commercial landers continues to be technically demanding. The political and budgetary support for the programme has fluctuated across administrations. China’s competing programme adds geopolitical pressure that may accelerate or complicate the US timeline depending on how the relationship between the two space programmes develops. What is no longer uncertain is the basic strategic direction: the leading human space programmes are now committed, at least in principle, to making the Moon a place where humans live rather than a place where they briefly visit. If that commitment holds, the next decade will produce the first sustained off-world human presence in the history of the species — a transition that would be, in civilisational terms, at least as significant as the first lunar landing itself was in 1969. The first Moon landing required getting there. This one requires staying.
On March 1, 1982, a Soviet probe the size of a small car settled onto a basalt plain on Venus, opened its camera covers, and began taking photographs while the atmosphere outside tried to crush it. The surface temperature was about 465 degrees Celsius — hot enough to melt lead, zinc and tin. The atmospheric pressure was roughly 92 times what a person feels at sea level on Earth, the equivalent of standing under almost a kilometre of seawater. Venera 13 was engineered to last around half an hour in those conditions. It lasted 127 minutes, scraped a soil sample, ran a chemical analysis on it, and beamed home the first colour photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet.
The images are not pretty in the way Mars panoramas are pretty. They show a flat, rocky landscape under a sky stained the colour of weak tea. A corner of the lander juts into the frame. A discarded lens cap sits on the ground beside a soil sampling arm. The rocks look like slabs of broken pavement.
They are also among the most extraordinary pictures in the history of spaceflight.
A probe built like a deep-sea bathysphere
To understand what Venera 13 did, start with the environment it had to survive. The Venusian surface sits under a carbon-dioxide atmosphere so thick it behaves almost like a fluid. Pressure at the ground is around 9.2 megapascals — comparable to the pressure at roughly 900 metres underwater. The temperature stays around 465 degrees Celsius day and night, with almost no seasonal variation, because the atmosphere holds heat the way an iron skillet does.
Soviet engineers at the Lavochkin design bureau approached the problem the way naval architects approach a submarine. The Venera 13 lander was a titanium pressure vessel, roughly spherical, wrapped in thermal insulation and topped with a heat shield. Inside the sphere, the electronics sat in a sealed compartment pre-chilled before atmospheric entry. The idea was simple: build a thermos flask strong enough to take the pressure, fill it with cold instruments, and race the heat.
The race was always going to be lost. The only question was how long the probe could keep working before its insides reached the temperature of its outside.
The descent
Venera 13 launched in 1981 on a Proton rocket from Baikonur. It cruised for four months and reached Venus on March 1, 1982. The lander separated from the carrier bus, plunged into the upper atmosphere at around 11 kilometres per second, and slowed through a sequence of aerobraking, parachutes and finally a disc-shaped aerodynamic brake that turned the dense lower atmosphere into a kind of friction landing pad.
It touched down in the southern hemisphere at 7.5 degrees south, 303 degrees east, just east of an elevated region called Phoebe Regio. Within seconds, pyrotechnic charges blew the lens caps off the cameras. One cap landed in the field of view, and there it sits in the photographs, a tiny piece of Soviet metallurgy resting on Venusian basalt.
The camera was a scanning photometer, not a frame camera. It swept side to side, building a panorama line by line, the way an old fax machine built a page. Each full sweep took several minutes. Over the course of the mission, Venera 13 returned two colour panoramas and several black-and-white ones, transmitted in real time through the carrier bus as it flew overhead on its way past Venus.
The first colour photographs from another world
The cameras carried red, green and blue filters mounted on a rotating wheel. Each filter swept across the scene in turn, and engineers on the ground reconstructed the colour image by combining the three passes. The result was a panorama that ran from one edge of the lander out to the horizon and back, showing the sampling arm, the lens cap, and the rocks beyond.
The sky in the images is yellow-orange because the thick atmosphere filters out blue wavelengths long before light reaches the ground. The rocks themselves are mostly basaltic, with hints of weathering. The horizon is close — only a few hundred metres away — because the dense air refracts light in ways that compress the visible distance.
Those original images have been mistaken many times. As Tech Times has documented, high-resolution “colourised” versions that circulate on social media are usually modern reinterpretations, not the raw frames. The actual Venera transmissions were low-resolution scans, grainy and limited by the bandwidth a small spacecraft could push through the atmosphere of another planet in 1982. The wonder is not their fidelity. The wonder is that they exist at all.
The soil scoop that should not have worked
Cameras were only part of the payload. Venera 13 also carried a drill arm designed to grind into the surface, lift a soil sample through a small airlock, and feed it into a chamber inside the pressure vessel for X-ray fluorescence analysis. The drill had to work at 465 degrees, under 92 atmospheres, on a surface no engineer had ever touched.
It worked. The sample was collected and analysed within minutes of landing. The results showed a composition consistent with basalt, similar to volcanic rocks found in some terrestrial rift zones. It was the first direct chemical reading of the soil of another planet.
The drill mechanism alone is a small monument to Soviet engineering. A motor that has to survive the pressure of the deep ocean while glowing at the temperature of a pizza oven, then drive a bit into hardened rock, then retract the sample through a sealed valve without letting the outside atmosphere flood in — every step is a potential failure point. None of them failed.
Why 127 minutes
Mission planners had budgeted for around half an hour of surface operations. The probe ran for nearly four times that. Why?
Part of the answer is that the pre-cooling worked better than expected. The interior of the pressure vessel was chilled before entry, and the thermal insulation slowed the heat soak. Part of the answer is that the lander happened to settle in a slightly cooler microenvironment — surface temperatures on Venus vary by a few degrees with elevation, and the area near Phoebe Regio sits a little above the mean radius of the planet.
The rest was margin. Soviet engineers, having lost earlier Venera probes to the heat, had over-built the thermal protection of the 13 and 14 series. They expected most of their margin to be eaten by unknowns. On Venera 13, the unknowns turned out to be merciful, and the margin became extra science.
The companion probe Venera 14 landed a few days later, in 1982, in a region hundreds of kilometres away. It survived for 57 minutes — still nearly double its design life, but less than half of what its sister achieved. Same engineering, different luck.
The long road from Venera 7
Venera 13 did not appear out of nowhere. It was the end of a decade-long arc of Soviet attempts on Venus, each one learning from the wreckage of the last. Earlier missions had gradually pushed the boundaries — Venera 7 became the first spacecraft to transmit from the surface of another planet in 1970, sending temperature data after a hard landing.
Venera 8 followed and improved on that achievement. Venera 9 and 10 returned the first black-and-white images from the Venusian surface in 1975, though stuck lens caps cost each probe half its planned panorama. Venera 11 and 12 landed safely but failed to image anything at all because lens caps on both probes refused to separate.
By the time Venera 13 was being built, the lens-cap problem had become institutional folklore. Engineers reworked the pyrotechnic releases, tested them in chambers that simulated the Venusian atmosphere, and built in redundancy. On Venera 13, the caps came off cleanly. One of them, photographed at the foot of the soil sampling arm, has become one of the more poetic objects in the history of robotic exploration: a piece of debris from another planet, captured by the spacecraft that dropped it.
What the images actually showed
Beyond the lens cap, the photographs revealed a surface that geologists could read. The rocks at the Venera 13 site appear in slabs — thin, layered, fractured — suggesting either rapid cooling of a basaltic lava flow or chemical weathering by the dense atmosphere. The soil between the slabs looks fine-grained, almost like dark sand. No dunes are visible. No obvious craters. No water-cut features, because liquid water cannot exist on the Venusian surface at any pressure.
Leonid Ksanfomality, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences who had worked on the Venera programme, later argued that subtle shapes in the panoramas might be biological — a claim covered with appropriate scepticism by outlets including Sci-News. The mainstream interpretation is that the shapes are artefacts of the scanning camera, the low resolution, and the human tendency to find faces in clouds. But the fact that anyone could even pose the question — using photographs from the surface of Venus, taken in 1982 — is itself a measure of what Venera 13 made possible.
The chemical results were more substantive. The X-ray fluorescence spectrometer found high potassium content, consistent with alkaline basalts, and the data fed directly into the geological maps later refined by NASA’s Magellan radar mission in the 1990s.
What hellish heat does to electronics
Surviving Venus is not a problem anyone has fully solved since. Silicon-based electronics begin to fail above about 250 degrees Celsius. Lithium batteries cannot hold charge. Lubricants vaporise. Solder melts. Every consumer-grade component that makes modern spacecraft cheap and capable would last seconds on the Venusian surface.
NASA’s Glenn Research Center has spent years developing silicon-carbide electronics that can run at Venus surface temperatures without insulation, with prototype circuits demonstrated running for weeks at 500 degrees Celsius in test chambers. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter, which flew from 2006 to 2014, used infrared instruments to see through the cloud deck down to the surface without ever having to land on it. The European approach is telling: study Venus from above, where the engineering is merely difficult, rather than from below, where it is brutal.
The upcoming American DAVINCI mission, scheduled for the early 2030s, will send a descent probe back through the Venusian atmosphere — but its science is concentrated on the descent itself, not the surface landing. Even with four decades of electronics progress, no one is yet planning to beat Venera 13’s 127 minutes by an order of magnitude.
The country that built it
Nine years after Venera 13 landed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Lavochkin bureau survived the transition, and the Russian space programme inherited the Venera files, but no successor mission to the Venusian surface has ever flown. The last attempt, Vega 1 and 2 in 1985, dropped balloons and landers as part of a Halley’s Comet flyby and represented the final flowering of the Venera lineage.
The same institutional momentum that produced Venera 13 also produced the automated Buran shuttle that landed itself in a Baikonur blizzard in 1988, a different expression of the Soviet preference for letting machines handle the parts of spaceflight that humans cannot. Venera 13 was the same idea applied to a place where no human could ever go: send the robot, build it tougher than it needs to be, accept that you will never get it back.
What is still down there
Venera 13 is still on Venus. The lander never moved after it touched down. The cameras stopped scanning. The radio fell silent. But the titanium pressure vessel, the dish of the heat shield, the discarded lens cap, the small circular impression where the drill bit into the soil — all of it remains, slowly being cooked at 465 degrees in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and traces of sulphuric acid.
The corrosion rate is slow. Sulphuric acid attacks titanium only weakly at those temperatures, and the dense atmosphere protects the surface from the kind of micrometeorite weathering that pits the Moon. Estimates suggest the lander’s main structure could remain recognisable for thousands of years, possibly longer. The colour photographs it took were transmitted in real time and stored on tape reels in Moscow, but the camera that recorded them is still sitting on the ground, pointed at the same patch of basalt, waiting in the dark orange light for nothing in particular.
It has been there for forty-four years. Today, somewhere in the southern hemisphere just east of Phoebe Regio, in the heat and the pressure and the silence, a small piece of the Soviet Union is still on Venus, and a lens cap it dropped on a Monday afternoon in March 1982 is still resting on the ground beside it.
A new Australian initiative is sending Year 9-12 students to one of the most extreme scientific environments on Earth, and asking them to contribute to real research while they’re there. For most students,...
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