Looking Ahead: 2026 in Space

Happy New Year! The turning of the calendar is always a good time for looking ahead and obviously we here at Spacing Out are most excited for the space-related things happening (or at least scheduled to happen, you know how these things can go) in the upcoming year. So join me as I list some of the things we are expected to be able to look forward to in 2026!

Launches

There’s a lot of launches scheduled for 2026, but there’s one that stands out from all the rest. After decades of waiting and years of delay, humans are going back to the Moon! Not to land on it, but the Artemis 2/II/Two mission (seriously, I’ve seen it written all of these ways) will carry astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen out of Earth orbit, the first time for humans to do so since 1972. What’s more, Koch represents the first woman to break Earth orbit, Glover the first person of color, and Hansen the first non-American (he’s Canadian). This one is gonna be big y’all!

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The exact launch date is, at this time, still unknown. Technically speaking NASA is officially aiming for April, but have acknowledged that if everything goes well they may launch as early as February, making this probably the first space mission ever to launch months early. Either way, there will be humans around the Moon in 2026!

The Moon is going to be a popular target again in 2026. Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace both will look to follow up their previous successes (partial for Intuitive Machines, total for Firefly) with putting private landers on the surface of the Moon with new missions. Intuitive Machine’s IM-3 mission is due for launch in the first half of the year while Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 is just scheduled for 2026. This one’s going to include an orbiter and a lander though! And the next in China’s highly successful series of lunar missions, Chang’e 7, which will include a lander, a rover, and a “hopper” is also due for launch sometime in 2026, aiming for the lunar south pole.

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In the commercial human spaceflight world, 2026 will surely see more launches of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which had its second successful launch in October. We’ll also get to see the first launch of the Block 3 version of SpaceX’s Starship. Hopefully it will perform as well as the last two test launches did (and not like the three before, which ended in unfortunate but undeniably spectacular explosions in midair).

2026 will also see a return to space for the beleaguered Boeing Starliner after a…hmm, let’s just say “ignominious” first crewed flight in 2024 that saw Starliner return to Earth without its crew after its thruster performance was deemed too risky for it to bring humans home. This newly renovated version, due for launch in “early 2026”, will not have humans aboard because nobody wants to go through that rigamarole again (especially NASA).

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The future of human spaceflight will also take an intriguing next step, though one without humans on board yet, when the first commercial space station launches. Vast’s Haven-1, a small, single-module space station is due to reach Earth orbit sometime in the middle of the year. It’s designed to be a fully standalone structure and could represent the first step into a post-ISS world.

But if you ask me which mission launch I’m most excited about in 2026, I’m going to pick Japan’s MMX mission. That’s Martian Moons eXploration (yes, I know, that’s not how acronyms work) which will perform the amazing and never-before-done task of exploring Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos. For all the missions we’ve sent to the Red Planet, we know shockingly little about its moons, and MMX will not only explore them, but take a sample from Phobos and bring it back to Earth. I am stupid excited about this one y’all!! 

You Have Arrived

There are a few spacecraft already in flight that are due to reach their destinations in 2026, and honestly I couldn’t tell you which of these has me most excited. For starters, China’s Tianwen-2 is going to enter orbit around the Near Earth Asteroid Kamo’oalewa. Shortly thereafter it will descend to the surface, use a big ol’ claw to grab ahold and act as an anchor, and then gather a sample. It will be the first time this “anchor and attach” method has been used on an asteroid!

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The follow-up to NASA’s highly successful Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission in 2022, which smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to alter the asteroid’s path, is also due to arrive. Hera is a European Space Agency mission that will enter orbit around the asteroid Didymos late in 2026. It was Didymos’s moon, Dimorphos, that the DART mission targeted, and from this close-up position Hera will be able to make highly accurate in-situ measurements of how effectively DART’s impact altered Dimorphos’s movements (as well as just how big a hole DART punched into this poor rock that was just drifting along minding its own business). That, in turn, will have big implications for our ability to protect our planet from impacts by punching rocks in the face.

And after 8 years of cruising the spacecraft with the best name ever, BepiColombo, will enter orbit around Mercury (a year late, but that’s what happens when you suffer thruster failures at key moments). This is exciting not only because it will give me a reason to frequently say BepiColombo out loud, but also because Mercury remains a highly mysterious world and we haven’t had a spacecraft in the vicinity since MESSENGER died in 2015. Who doesn’t need a little more Mercury (and a lot more BepiColombo) in their life?

Look, Up in the Sky!

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Then, of course, there are the sky events to look forward to—the ones we can predict anyway. The big ones are probably the eclipses. A partial solar eclipse on February 17 will be largely only visible to the penguins in Antarctica, but it will be followed the night of March 2-3 by a total lunar eclipse. This will be centered almost perfectly over the Pacific, so bits of the westernmost of North America and easternmost Asia and Australia will see the whole thing.

Then the big solar eclipse is on August 12. The path of totality for this one most goes over the northeast Atlantic, though it clips the Iberian peninsula and the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik is right in the way. This eclipse is followed on the night of August 27-28 by a partial lunar eclipse visible from…well, basically everywhere that isn’t Asia or Australia. It’s not a total lunar eclipse, but the moon will be 93% covered at maximum, so it’s still worth staying up for in my opinion!

Meteor showers tend to be one of the more predictable astronomical phenomena, with Moon phase being the big thing that will alter a shower’s visibility from year to year. This year the Moon phase is perfect for Earth’s most prolific meteor shower, the Perseids in August. There will be basically no Moon to worry about. I’m definitely finding a dark site for that one!

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Other ones that could prove good are the Lyrids in April, a medium-ish shower that will only have a small crescent Moon to contend with in 2026, and the Leonids in November, which will have a first-quarter Moon to deal with but that will set around midnight. The year will top off with what will hopefully be a pretty decent show from the potentially prolific Geminids, which will also only have a first-quarter Moon to compete with.

While this isn’t technically an observable sky event, neither does it have anything to do with launches or spacecraft so I’m putting hit here. Our interstellar visitor, the comet 3I/ATLAS, will spend 2026 making its way out of the solar system and back into the void, but it’s going to buzz Jupiter when it does. On March 16^th it will pass within 33 million miles (54 million km) of our solar system’s chonkiest planet.

The Unknown

Then, of course, there will be the things that we cannot predict, and which I therefore cannot currently know are worth looking forward to. This could include sky events like the Sun getting spicy and causing brilliant auroral displays or new comets lighting up the night. It could include delays or updates or mishaps for scheduled and existing missions. And it will almost certainly include new and amazing discoveries from our fleet of spacecraft and observatories as we learn new things about everything from our own solar system to the farthest reaches of the universe.

Whatever space-related surprises 2026 has in store for us, I hope they’re awesome. Everyone can use more awesome space stuff in their lives, it’s just a fact!