Aerosopace companies Firefly and ISpace (Japan) launched their lunar probes on a SpaceX rocket, January 15, 2025.
Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon in the Mare Crisium basin, March 2, 2025. Its mission will study the moon in preparation for human exploration in the future.
Japanese country ISpace's Hakuto-R Mission 2 (Resilience) crashed onto the lunar surface on June 5, 2025.
Gina Ortiz Jones won a runoff election on June 7, 2025 and became the first gay mayor of San Antonio. She is also the first Asian-American female mayor of a major city in Texas, and the first female mayor in Texas to have served in a war.
Jones is a former Air Force officer, and Iraq War veteran, and served as Under Secretary of the Air Force during the Biden Administration. She defeated a hatemonger Rolando Pablos, an anti-gay advocate.
Boeing Starliner crew Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore
Boeing Starliner mission patch
Astronauts Sunita 'Suni' Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth yesterday, March 18, 2025 after nine months in space. They launched aboard the Boeing Starliner capsule to the International Space Station in June 2024 for an eight-day mission. However, the Starliner's thrusters malfunctioned as it approached the ISS, and NASA determined it was too risky for the crew to return. The spacecraft returned uncrewed on September 7, 2024.
SpaceX Crew-9 launched on September 28, 2024 to the ISS with astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Crew-10 (L-R): Kirill Peskov, Nichole Ayers, Anne McClain, Takuya Onishi
NASA SpaceX Crew-10 mission patch
SpaceX Crew-10 lifted off successfully from the Kennedy Space Center here at Cape Canaveral tonight, a little after 7pm. Its crew consists of Commander Anne McClain (NASA), Pilot Nichole Ayers (NASA), Takuya Onishi (JAXA), and Kirill Peskov (Roscosos). It is the first flight for Ayers and Peskov, the second for McClain and Takuya Onishi.
They will dock with the International Space Station and participate in Expeditions 72-73, before returning to earth, scheduled for July 2025.
Blue Ghost Mission 1, launched January 15, 2025, landed on the moon this morning. The robotic mission is the first commercial company, FireFly Aerospace, to successfully land on the moon.
The spacecraft landed at Mare Crisium and will study the moon's regolith, the loose, fragmented rock, and soil. The Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) will determine how lunar regolith sticks to a range of materials exposed to the moon's environment during landing and lander operations.
The Next Generation Lunar Retroflectors (NGLR) will measure the distance between Earth and the moon precisely, using reflectors on Earth.
The Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) will take images of the interaction of Earth's magnetosphere with the flow of charged particles from the sun.
The Reconfigurable, Radiation Tolerant Computer System (RadPC) will demonstrate a radiation-tolerant computing technology.
These are among the instrumentation Blue Ghost will employ while it studies the lunar surface.
