Victor Grösser

Space in April–October 2026: Artemis II Around the Moon, Roman Launches, Starship Reaches Orbit

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Period covered: April–October 2026. Written on 20 October 2026.

Most of this blog is about AI, but I follow spaceflight for the same reason I follow model releases: it's engineering under hard constraints, done in public, where you can see what works. These six months had three milestones I want to write down properly, plus a few smaller stories. All numbers come from the sources at the bottom.

Artemis II: humans around the Moon again

On 1 April 2026, NASA's Space Launch System launched Orion on Artemis II, the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft. The crew: NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

On 6 April, six days into the mission, they passed the record for the farthest distance humans have travelled from Earth, previously held by Apollo 13 since 1970. NASA's official figure for their farthest point is 252,756 miles (about 406,800 km) from Earth; NASA updated its release on 7 May to reflect the official mileage, with 695,081 miles flown in total.

They splashed down off San Diego on 10 April at 5:07 p.m. PDT, after a nearly ten-day flight.

The heat shield story

The part I found most interesting is the heat shield. After Artemis I in 2022, engineers had found unexpected char loss on Orion's Avcoat heat shield. Instead of only redesigning the shield, NASA changed the re-entry trajectory for Artemis II, shortening the maximum downrange distance so the shield spent less time in the temperature range where the Artemis I problem occurred.

In a 15 October analysis, NASA reported that it worked: Orion entered within 192 feet of its targeted entry interface, splashed down 0.59 miles from the predicted point, and the cracking and char loss were reduced by a factor of ten compared to Artemis I, with nine spots of char loss versus many more on the earlier flight. Peak velocity was about 39 times the speed of sound and external temperatures exceeded 4,000 °F, while the cabin stayed in the mid-70s °F.

I like this as an engineering lesson: sometimes the cheapest fix is changing how you operate a system rather than rebuilding it. It's the same instinct as changing a prompt or a retrieval step before retraining a model.

Blue Origin's setback

Blue Origin had planned to launch its first Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander, Endurance, on New Glenn as soon as late summer, carrying NASA science payloads (designated "Moon Base 1" at a NASA event on 26 May). Spaceflight Now reported on 30 June that, after a New Glenn anomaly, the company was working through return-to-flight logistics. It's a reminder that the lunar programme depends on several commercial vehicles all maturing at once.

July: the end of Pegasus and a satellite rescue

On 3 July Northrop Grumman flew the 46th and final Pegasus XL, the air-launched rocket, carrying Katalyst Space Technologies' LINK spacecraft on a NASA-backed mission to capture NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and raise it to a higher orbit. The day before, the final Atlas V in the 551 configuration launched Amazon Leo satellites. Small entries in a launch log, but both mark the end of long-running vehicles.

August: the Roman Space Telescope

On 30 August 2026 at 7:26 a.m. EDT, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. Roman separated from the upper stage at 7:57 a.m. and began a roughly three-month journey to the Sun–Earth L2 point, about a million miles from Earth.

Roman is a dark-energy and dark-matter mission with a field of view SpaceX describes as at least 100 times larger than Hubble's. Reuters called it a roughly $4 billion project and noted its origin as a repurposed spy-satellite telescope. For data people, Roman is interesting because its value is in survey scale: billions of galaxies, and a lot of downstream machine learning.

September: Starship reaches orbit, with a caveat

On 28 September (US time), on its 14th test flight, SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time. NPR reported that the 33-engine Super Heavy booster lifted off from Starbase in Texas, that one of the ship's six engines shut down early, and that SpaceX still decided to go for orbit. Starship orbited Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific; the planned ten-hour mission was cut to about three hours because of the engine issue.

Reuters reported the same day that the engine failure could complicate NASA's lunar plans, since Starship is one of the two vehicles NASA selected to land astronauts on the Moon. In-space propellant transfer, which a lunar Starship needs, is still to be demonstrated.

What comes next

NASA's Artemis page describes Artemis III, planned for 2027, as a demonstration mission in low Earth orbit to evaluate one or both commercial human landing systems from SpaceX and Blue Origin. The return of astronauts to the lunar surface is now tied to Artemis IV, and NASA anticipates a further surface mission, Artemis V, in 2028. That makes the next year mostly about Starship and Blue Moon: refuelling, reliability and cadence.

What I take from it

The successes of this period come from the same loop: fly, measure, adjust. Artemis II fixed a heat-shield risk with a trajectory change backed by test data; Starship reached orbit on an iterative test campaign and still published a partial failure. That's how I like to build software and AI systems too: small, measurable steps in public, with honest notes about what didn't work.

On the AI side of the same months, see my AI models recap for July–October 2026 and the open-weight models recap. More links: links & repos.

Sources

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