After seven years of work and nearly $1 billion, the Smithsonian has completed the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum’s flagship building in Washington, DC.

On October 30, the museum debuted its last-to-open spaceflight exhibition, returning “home” with a gallery devoted to establishing a spacefaring civilization.

“Welcome to ‘At Home in Space’!” said curator Jennifer Levasseur, who guided us through a virtual tour of the gallery. “This is the story of long-duration spaceflight in the last few decades. We generally call it ‘reaching orbit.'”

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/at-home-in-space-opens-caps-air-and-space-museum-renovation/

Chinese space officials confirmed this weekend that the Asian nation plans to land its astronauts on the Moon within three years.

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country’s most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing “before 2030.”

China’s lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/china-releases-timeline-for-lunar-landing-on-the-moon-targeting-before-2030/

The Hubble Space Telescope still shines in the eyes of astronomers after 36 years in orbit, but it is not as nimble as it once was. Left alone, the observatory will plunge back into the atmosphere in the early-to-mid-2030s, closing the book on one of the most famous scientific instruments of the century.

NASA last raised the orbit of Hubble in 2002, when the Space Shuttle Columbia visited the observatory for a servicing mission. The final shuttle servicing flight in 2009 did not reboost the telescope’s orbit, and with the retirement of the shuttle fleet two years later, Hubble has steadily lost altitude with no way to stave off eventual destruction.

The space agency released a Request For Information (RFI) on Thursday asking commercial companies for ideas on how to reboost, service, or a controlled disposal of Hubble. Responses are due November 30. Specifically, NASA is looking for information about companies’ current and near-term capabilities for capturing Hubble and boosting it to an altitude of at least 373 miles (600 km), enhancing the telescope’s performance, or guiding Hubble to a controlled reentry.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/think-you-can-save-the-hubble-space-telescope-nasa-wants-to-know/

A new report from the analytics firm Quilty Space confirms that, outside of China, the world faces a significant shortage of rockets over the next five years.

The firm estimates that between now and 2030, there will be a shortfall of about 150 launches compared to demand from satellite operators and civil space agencies. If demand from the US military is added in—and SpaceX does not extend the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program to accommodate increased national security needs—the shortage could be doubled.

“What we wanted to get at is to understand how severe this launch crisis is and when will it be resolved,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. “What we learned is that the launch crisis is more severe than we thought and that it will not go away this decade for sure, and it might not abate until sometime late in the 2030s.”

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/analysts-find-looming-launch-crisis-is-more-severe-than-anticipated/

Welcome to Edition 9.17 of the Rocket Report! It’s been a while since an American company announced plans for a medium-lift new launch vehicle, but that’s what happened this week when a startup named Cowboy Space revealed specs for its Big Iron rocket, named for the classic country-western song by Marty Robbins. I’m a huge fan of the name. Maybe Cowboy Space is striking while the iron is hot as the space industry frets over demand for launch outpacing supply. However, Cowboy Space lags far behind so many other launch providers nearing the launch pad with their medium-class rockets, and the company didn’t have much hardware to show at this week’s big reveal. In other words, don’t mistake style for substance. But we’re rocket fans at Ars, and we wish them luck.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin’s new rocket plane reaches home port. The first of Virgin Galactic’s new Delta-class rocket planes left its Arizona factory Wednesday for a trip to Spaceport America in neighboring New Mexico, where it will undergo preparations for a test campaign culminating in suborbital flights to the edge of space, Ars reports. Virgin Galactic expects the craft’s first commercial spaceflight to take place “early” in the second quarter of 2027, but like every other projected date in aerospace, this should be taken with a grain of salt. Virgin Galactic halted commercial flights of its previous vehicle, VSS Unity, in 2024.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/rocket-report-winter-is-coming-for-themis-cowboy-space-adds-iron-to-the-fire/

Trump could still have hurt Musk’s businesses through regulatory review, particularly with the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Aviation Administration. And the two made up. But one indisputable takeaway from this brouhaha is that the US government now needed SpaceX more than SpaceX needed the US government.

“The dust-up with President Trump, when Musk threatened to take away Dragon, was utterly irresponsible,” said Chris Davenport, a professor at Arizona State University and author of Rocket Dreams. “If Falcon and Dragon go away, that is a huge disservice to the US government. NASA desperately needs SpaceX, and SpaceX knows it, and Elon knows it.”

This represented a truly remarkable shift for everyone who watched SpaceX fight so hard, for so long, to get its foot in the door at NASA and the Space Force. But as jarring as it is, this shift is no longer deniable.

What is Elon Musk thinking?

Around the time of his dispute with Trump, Musk came to fully believe that artificial intelligence was not just the next big thing. Rather, it was the industrial revolution of his lifetime. He began vectoring his two biggest companies, Tesla and SpaceX, toward dominating AI software, AI hardware, and computing power on the ground and in space to run it all.

This largely explains SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI and its subsequent IPO. It is also behind the potential merger of SpaceX and Tesla. This will give Musk more direct control over Tesla, something he values. But more critically, it gives him an immense pool of assets to deploy toward building data centers terrestrially and in space, autonomous vehicles, robots, massive rockets, and more.

No other company on Earth has the potential, at least in the near term, to own an entire stack of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk wants to manufacture the chips and electricity infrastructure for data centers, he wants to build the data centers that will power the AI revolution, he wants to develop and train the AI models that will provide its intelligence, and he wants to build physical products that he believes will become the shaping force of the 21st century.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/spacex-no-longer-needs-nasa-and-thats-a-problem-for-americas-space-agency/

United Launch Alliance announced Wednesday it plans to return its Vulcan rocket to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly threw the company’s 2026 launch schedule into oblivion.

The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date is pending range approval.

The launch is critical for ULA after its new flagship rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently during a flight in February. In both cases, the rocket overcame the nozzle failure and completed its mission, but officials at the US Space Force, ULA’s primary customer, lost confidence in Vulcan.

Space Force officials will closely scrutinize Vulcan’s return-to-flight mission. The Pentagon has entrusted ULA’s Vulcan rocket for roughly half of its major launches through the early 2030s. The Space Force certified the Vulcan rocket for national security launches in 2025, then flew two missions on Vulcan before its grounding after the February booster incident.

Making strides

In a statement, United Launch Alliance said engineers “made great strides” in understanding the booster anomaly that occurred in February. Engineers “have identified several potential contributors, which have been mitigated through design and process improvements to the nozzle,” ULA said.

“To support our customers, this upcoming launch will utilize the improved nozzle design, and additional testing and analysis will continue in parallel with the mission,” ULA said. “By flying the improved design, ULA gains valuable flight data that validates these improvements and is the most beneficial path in support of all our customers.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/ulas-vulcan-rocket-is-set-to-return-to-flight-on-friday-the-13th/

“We’re proud that the lead ship in Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship fleet will carry a name chosen by the people who share our excitement for what comes next,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive officer of Virgin Galactic.

But more significantly, the company said Apeiron would be moved from its Spaceship Factory in Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico later on Wednesday.

Apeiron won’t be making a free flight anytime soon. After being carried to New Mexico by the VMS Eve, aircraft engineers and technicians there will complete work on the vehicle’s avionics equipment and flight software. Following additional ground tests, Apeiron will be mated again to Eve for captive carry tests, followed by a drop test and ultimately a powered test flight above 80 km.

Is this the future of space tourism?

Presently, the company is saying it now expects Apeiron’s first commercial spaceflight to take place “early” in the second quarter of 2027. As with every other projected date in aerospace, this should be taken with a grain of salt. But it seems plausible that Apeiron may begin flying paying customers on suborbital space tourism missions over the next 12 to 18 months.

There is considerable skepticism about the commercial viability of Virgin Galactic’s space tourism ambitions. Success will require its vehicles to fly nearly flawlessly and with unprecedented durability to bring hundreds of people to space each year briefly. As this reality has dawned on investors, the markets have not been kind to the company in recent years. In 2021, at the height of space tourism euphoria, the company’s stock briefly reached a stratospheric valuation of $1,118 a share. More recently it has been trading in the vicinity $2.50 a share.

Whatever you might think of Virgin Galactic, however, it seems clear that any hopes of expanding the aperture of space tourism in the next decade will be flying beneath its wings.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/the-last-best-hope-for-space-tourism-just-rolled-onto-a-runway-in-arizona/

Blue Moon lunar lander concept of operations.

Credit: NASA

The chart shared by NASA showed Orion docking with the Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit, approximately 8,500 km above the Moon’s surface. However NASA is also working to have the option of docking with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.

According to Jeremy Parsons, the manager of the Artemis Program for NASA, such an orbit a few hundred km above the Moon would significantly reduce the propellant needed by Blue Moon to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up. This mass could be used elsewhere on the vehicle. The lower orbit would also offer more, and faster opportunities for astronauts to get off the lunar surface if needed. In short, it makes some aspects of a lunar landing significantly easier for Blue Origin.

Extended Centaur

As part of this, NASA announced Friday that it is working with United Launch Alliance to develop an “extended” version of the Centaur V upper stage. In concert with the core stage of the Space Launch System, this upper stage would allow Orion to reach low-lunar orbit.

This is a big deal. It has long been a point of embarrassment for NASA that Orion, with its low-performing Service Module, does not have the delta-V capability to launch from Earth, reach low-lunar orbit, and return to Earth for splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. But no one had seemed prepared to fix this problem before.

“Getting Orion to low-Lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long,” Isaacman said Friday.

Instead, NASA created workarounds like the Lunar Gateway, which was put in a near-rectilinear halo orbit that Orion could safely reach. The burden of performance to reach the lunar surface was pushed on to the lunar landers and the companies developing them.

Given the urgency of the situation, NASA has been trying to help lunar lander companies in any way they can, Isaacman said.

“We’re listening to the data, and looking at what’s happening around us,” he said. “What progress are our landing partners making? Where are they struggling? What can we do to be helpful? Their lives get easier if we can get Orion closer to the Moon, substantially. We could choose to continue on our track and say, maybe they’ll show up and meet our timelines. Or we can say well let’s start turning those knobs to help.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/nasa-updates-lander-plans-for-moon-landings-finally-solves-long-festering-orion-issue/

Public, private, or both?

But there’s no firm plan yet for when the military might get moving on actually setting up a new launch base. “It’s going to take a strong partnership with local and state governments,” Garrant said. “As far as decision timelines, we don’t have anything yet.”

There were 175 orbital launch attempts last year from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Space Force officials project the country’s established spaceports will need to support 700 launches per year by 2036.

A third launch site would offload some of the launch demand from limited real estate at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. It would also provide what Space Force leaders call “geographic resiliency” to mitigate the risk of a natural disaster or military attack knocking the Cape or Vandenberg offline.

The federal government already owns a third spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, used for suborbital rocket tests and small- and medium-class satellite launches. Small rockets can also launch from Pacific Spaceport Complex, owned by the state of Alaska.

There are also commercial options that might be available for a new military spaceport. Ars asked Garrant if the Space Force might consider leasing property from a privately owned launch base, such as the expansive spaceport SpaceX plans to build in southern Louisiana.

“We’ve discussed that we need to consider all of those opportunities: public-private partnership, new federal installation, state land, leveraging commercial land—all of those are possibilities. They all have pros and cons. We haven’t made that decision yet, but we’re not discounting any of those options.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/senior-commander-says-space-force-needs-new-spaceport-by-2030/