space journey photos

NASA's Voyager probes have been traveling through space for nearly 46 years. Here are 18 groundbreaking photos from their incredible mission.

• Nearly 46 years after their launch, Voyager 1 and 2 will likely soon reach the end of their scientific mission . 
• NASA recently lost contact with Voyager 2 after sending it a bad command by mistake. 
• Here are 18 pictures the probes took over the course of their forty-plus-year journey. 

The Voyager probes are pioneers of science, making it farther into space than any other manufactured object. But now, they face a terminal problem: their power is running out.

The twin probes were originally sent on a four-year mission to tour the solar system, but they exceeded all expectations and are still going nearly 46 years later. That makes them NASA's longest-lived mission.

Scientists are now doing their best to  keep the probes going for as long as possible. They recently found a clever hack to extend Voyager 2's life for another three years and plan to do the same with Voyager 1.

But these are old machines and NASA is constantly scrambling to fix mistakes. Last year, Voyager 1 started sending garbled data from the outside of the solar system. NASA ultimately figured out one of its computers had gone dead.

Voyager 2 is now in limbo , as the agency revealed Friday it had lost contact with the probe when someone sent a wrong command. It could be the end of Voyager 2's mission if NASA can't fix the mistake, which the agency probably won't be able to do before October.

As the probes are nearing the end of their scientific mission, here are 18 images from Voyager that changed science.

The Voyager probes were designed to visit Jupiter and Saturn.

The Voyager mission included two probes — Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 — which NASA launched in 1977 within a few months of each other.

NASA took advantage of a rare planet alignment to turbocharge their journeys into space.

NASA originally built the probes to last five years, but they have exceeded that lifespan many times .

As of August 20 and September 5, 2023, Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 will have been traveling for 46 years, respectively. 

This is what Voyager 1 saw on its approach to Jupiter.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reached Jupiter in 1979.

As they flew by the planet, they took about 50,000 pictures of Jupiter. These blew away scientists, as the quality of the pictures was much better than those taken from Earth, according to NASA.

These snaps  taught scientists important facts about the planet's atmosphere, magnetic forces, and geology that would have been difficult to decipher otherwise.

The probes discovered two new moons orbiting Jupiter: Thebe and Metis.

They also spotted a thin ring around Jupiter.

The probe captured this picture as it was looking back at the planet backlit by the Sun. 

Voyager 1 discovered volcanoes at the surface of Io, one of Jupiter's moons.

Next stop: Saturn.

In 1980 and 1981, the probes reached Saturn . The flyby gave scientists unprecedented insight into the planet's ring structure, atmosphere, and moons.

Voyager snapped Saturn's rings in more detail than ever before.

And showed every secret that Enceladus, Saturn's moon, had to offer.

Saturn, snapped as the probe flew away, was shown in a new light.

By 1986, Voyager 2 had made it to Uranus.

By 1986, Voyager 1 has finished its grand tour of the solar system, and few out towards space. But Voyager 2 kept on its exploring our nearest planets, passing 50,600 miles away from Uranus in January 1986. 

Voyager 2 discovered two extra rings around Uranus , revealing the planet had at least 11, not 9. 

Voyager 2 also spotted 11 previously unseen moons around Uranus.

Here is a picture of Miranda, Uranus's sixth-biggest moon.

Voyager 2 was the first spacecraft to observe Neptune from a close distance.

In 1989, 12 years after its launch, Voyager 2 passed within 3,000 miles of Neptune. 

Here's Nepture taken by Voyager 2, in all its blue glory.

Voyager 2 took this unflattering pic of Triton's rough face.

It captured Triton, Neptune's moon in unprecedented detail. 

And snapped Triton's southern hemisphere.

As it flew by, Voyager 2 uncovered Neptune's rings.

As its parting gift, Voyager 2 took this beautiful picture of light grazing Neptune's south pole.

This is Voyager 2's last picture. Since it wouldn't come across another planet on its ongoing journey, NASA switched off its cameras after its flyby of Neptune to conserve energy for other instruments. 

Voyager 1 had one last trick up its sleeve.

As its last photographic hurrah in 1990, Voyager 1 took 60 images of the solar system from 4 billion miles away.

It gave us the Earth's longest selfie, dubbed the "pale blue dot."

This remains the longest-range selfie: a portrait of the Earth taken by a human-made probe from 4 billion miles away. 

After this picture, NASA switched off Voyager 1's cameras to save energy. NASA could switch the probes' cameras back on , but it is not a priority for the mission. 

Beyond the solar system

Though the probes are no longer sending pictures, they haven't stopped sending crucial information about space. 

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made instrument to cross into interstellar space by crossing the boundary between our solar system and the rest of the universe, called the heliopause. 

Voyager 2 was second, crossing that threshold in 2018 . The probe revealed that there was yet another  layer outside of our heliosphere.

The probes keep sending back measurements from interstellar space, like weird hums likely coming from vibrations made by neighboring stars.

Even after their instruments are switched off, the probes' mission continues.

NASA is planning to switch more of the probes' instruments in the hope of extending their life to the 2030s.

But even after all their instruments become quiet, their mission will carry on. As they drift off, they will still be carrying a golden record that carries crucial information about humanity. If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, they could use that information to reach out to us.

This article was originally published on June 6, 2022, and is being updated with the latest developments about Voyager 1 and 2. 

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In pictures: the history of space travel

Humans have been travelling to space for 60 years. Image:  Unsplash/Andy Holmes

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Stay up to date:.

• It's been 60 years since the first person flew in space.
• Since then, we have walked in space and flown to the moon.
• Today, the global space economy is worth $366 billion and brings many benefits to life on Earth.
• But space exploration has not been without its difficulties – and so far today it’s machines not men being sent to Mars.

Human space travel is 60 years old this year, and in those six decades it has helped us discover much about the universe. But it has also delivered many practical benefits back home.

From monitoring climate change to connecting people through satellites, space exploration has created solutions to some very down-to-Earth problems. Space technology is vital to global security and even helps to stop illegal logging, illegal fishing and illegal wildlife trade.

Have you read?

Who owns our orbit: just how many satellites are there in space, 6 space missions to look forward to in 2021, 5 ways space tech can help protect the planet.

Space is also a vital part of the global economy, accounting for $366 billion of economic activity every year, data from the World Economic Forum’s 2020 briefing paper, Six ways space technologies benefit life on Earth , shows.

Here are 15 images that show the history of those six decades in space.

1. The first man in space

On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in space. His single orbit of the Earth ushered in a new age of human space travel. Tragically he was killed in a plane crash just seven years after his pioneering space mission .

2. The first Black astronaut

US Air Force captain Robert H Lawrence Jnr was chosen as the nation’s first African American astronaut in 1967 – but he died in a fighter plane crash before he could make his first space flight.

3. The first US space walk

4. A man on the moon

Neil Armstrong, who stepped off the Apollo lunar lander on 20 July 1969 with the famous words “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” , took this shot of fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin walking on the lunar surface shortly afterwards.

5. Earthrise

The Apollo 11 astronauts were the first people to see the Earth rise over the Moon’s horizon – a striking reminder that they were far from home.

6. A ticker-tape welcome

New York laid on one of its trademark ticker-tape welcomes for the crew of Apollo 11 after the first Moon landing. Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins led the parade.

7. International collaboration in action

The US Space Shuttle Atlantis docking with Russia’s Mir space station. By July 1995, when this picture was taken, the former space race rivals were collaborating in space exploration. The shuttle ferried two Russian cosmonauts to the space station.

8. A tragic moment

The dangers associated with space travel were tragically highlighted by the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger and its seven crew members on 28 January 1986. TV audiences watched in horror as the spacecraft exploded shortly after launch. Failed seals on a rocket booster were blamed for the accident.

9. The first Black woman in space

In September 1992, Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to fly in space on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Dr Jemison, a physician with a degree in chemical engineering , worked as a general medical practitioner before joining NASA as a Mission Specialist.

10. Uncovering the secrets of the universe

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit by space shuttle Discovery in April 1990. In this picture, taken in 1993, NASA astronauts work on upgrades to Hubble , which has a better view of the universe than Earth-based telescopes .

11. Two galaxies meet

This remarkable image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows two galaxies grazing each other’s orbits. The gravitational forces of the galaxy on the left are distorting its neighbour, flinging stars and gas hundreds of thousands of light years across space.

12. The development that revolutionized space travel

The reusable US Space Shuttle not only simplified human space travel, its payload bay was used to deliver and recover satellites. But this was not without great risks. This image shows Space Shuttle Columbia lifting off on what would be its last mission in January 2003. The spacecraft broke up on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all on board.

13. A home in space

Built in space from components flown into orbit, the International Space Station was completed between 1998 and 2011 with contributions from 15 nations. The 67 metre-long pressurised section has been continuously occupied since November 2000 .

14. A helicopter on Mars

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter rode to the surface of Mars attached to the Perseverance rover and made its first flight in the thin Martian atmosphere in April 2021. It was the first powered, controlled flight in any world beyond Earth.

15. The future of human space flight?

After the Space Shuttle programme ended in July 2011, the US partnered with Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the Commercial Crew Programme to develop reusable craft to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. This image shows the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft making a soft landing in New Mexico in December 2019.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The best space photos of 2022

This year, space missions provided an entirely new way of looking at the cosmos, from the celestial backyard of our solar system to incredibly distant galaxies that were created shortly after the Big Bang.

The James Webb Space Telescope turned its infrared gaze on the universe for the first time in July, revealing unseen aspects and stunning new details of planets, stars and galaxies. The historic Artemis I mission journeyed to the moon and back. And a NASA spacecraft deliberately slammed into a tiny asteroid to test the technology that one day may be used to defend our planet from space rocks.

Explore the cosmos like never before as we look back on some of the most memorable space images from 2022.

Best of the Artemis I Mission

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Bill Ingalls/NASA

A full moon is in view near the Artemis I Space Launch System at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on June 14. The rocket was being prepared for a wet dress rehearsal several months before its launch.

Spectators watch the launch of the Artemis I rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early on November 16.

This photo was captured by a camera on the tip of one of Orion's solar arrays on the first day of the Artemis I mission. NASA said the spacecraft was 57,000 miles from Earth when the image was taken.

The Orion spacecraft made its second close flyby of the moon's surface on the 20th day of the mission and captured another selfie.

Best of the James Webb Space Telescope

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The "Cosmic Cliffs" are the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. This was one of the first batch of images released by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope in July. The telescope's infrared view reveals previously invisible areas of star birth.

The telescope’s images of Jupiter were so spectacular, they surprised NASA's scientists who were in awe of the rainbow auroras, giant storms and far-off galaxies on display.

The galaxy M74 shines at its brightest in this combined optical/mid-infrared image that features data from both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

In this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across, Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light.

Protostar L1527 is hidden in the neck of a dark, hourglass-shaped cloud of gas and dust.

Best of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test

Asteroid Didymos, bottom left, and its moonlet, Dimorphos, are seen about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft. This image was the last to show a complete view of both asteroids. The goal of the mission was to affect the motion of an asteroid in space.

DART's onboard DRACO imager captures the moonlet Dimorphos 11 seconds before impact.

The last complete image of Dimorphos shows a patch of the asteroid that is 100 feet across, 2 seconds before impact.

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• The Making of
• Where Are They Now
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• Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

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Mission Overview

The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018 and scientists hope to learn more about this region. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.

The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings — the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain. And beyond.

Interstellar Mission

The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun's sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.

› Learn more

Planetary Voyage

The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA in separate months in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As originally designed, the Voyagers were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of the two planets.

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Launch: Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. On September 5, Voyager 1 launched, also from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.

Highlights From SpaceX’s Starship Test Flight

The powerful rocket, a version of which will carry astronauts to the moon for NASA, launched for the third time on Thursday morning. It achieved a number of milestones before losing contact with the ground.

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Kenneth Chang

Here’s what happened during the third test flight of the most powerful rocket ever built.

Spacex launches starship for third time, the rocket, a version of which will eventually carry nasa astronauts to the moon, traveled almost halfway around the earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere..

“Five, four, three, two, three, one.” “This point, we’ve already passed through Max-Q, maximum dynamic pressure. And passing supersonic, so we’re now moving faster than the speed of sound. Getting those on-board views from the ship cameras. Boosters now making its way back, seeing six engines ignited on ship. Kate, we got a Starship on its way to space and a booster on the way back to the Gulf.” “Oh, man. I need a moment to pick my jaw up from the floor because these views are just stunning.”

The third try turned out to be closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as his company’s mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled about halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The test flight achieved several key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight was not, by design, intended to make it all the way around the Earth. At 8:25 a.m. Central time, Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly — lifted off from the coast of South Texas. The ascent was smooth, with the upper Starship stage reaching orbital velocities. About 45 minutes after launch, it started re-entering the atmosphere, heading toward a belly-flop splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Live video, conveyed in near real-time via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites , showed red-hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with Starship ended, and SpaceX later said the vehicle had not survived the re-entry, presumably disintegrating and falling into the ocean.

Even so, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency is counting on for some of its Artemis lunar missions.

SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower rocket booster and the upper spacecraft stage capable of flying over and over again — a stark contrast to the single-launch throwaway rockets that have been used for most of the space age.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Completing most of the short jaunt was a reassuring validation that the rocket’s design appears to be sound. Not only is Starship crucial for NASA’s lunar plans, it is the key to Mr. Musk’s pipe dream of sending people to live on Mars.

For Mr. Musk, the success also harks back to his earlier reputation as a technological visionary who led breakthrough advances at Tesla and SpaceX, a contrast with his troubled purchase of Twitter and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since he transformed the platform and renamed it X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon , a former CNN anchor who was sharing clips from a combative interview with Mr. Musk.

SpaceX still needs to pull off a series of formidable rocketry firsts before Starship is ready to head to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, Mr. Musk said he hoped for at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of those experiments may occur.

But if it achieves them all, the company could again revolutionize the space transportation business and leave competitors far behind.

Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communication efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “massive potential to change the game in transportation to orbit. And it could enable whole new classes of missions.”

NASA is counting on Starship to serve as the lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That journey is currently scheduled for late 2026 but seems likely to slide to 2027 or later.

The third flight was a marked improvement from the first two launch attempts.

Last April, Starship made it off the launchpad, but a cascade of engine failures and fires in the booster led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico.

In November, the second Starship launch traveled much farther. All 33 engines in the Super Heavy booster worked properly during ascent, and after a successful separation, the upper Starship stage nearly made it to orbital velocities. However, both stages ended up exploding.

Nonetheless, Mr. Musk hailed both test flights as successes, as they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.

Thursday’s launch — which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of the founding of SpaceX — occurred 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The 33 engines in the booster ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, and lifted the rocket, which was as tall as a 40-story building, into the morning sky.

Most of the flight proceeded smoothly, and a number of test objectives were achieved during the flight, like opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload doors, which will be needed to deliver cargo in the future.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the booster this time, but did have it perform engine burns that will be needed to return to the launch site. However, the final landing burn for the booster, conducted over the Gulf of Mexico, did not fully succeed — an area that SpaceX will attempt to fix for future flights.

SpaceX said the Super Heavy disintegrated at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

SpaceX engineers will also have to figure out why Starship did not survive re-entry and make fixes to the design of the vehicle.

Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is far from ready to go to Mars, or even the moon. Because of Mr. Musk’s ambitions for Mars, Starship is much larger and much more complicated than what NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts are to spend about a week in the South Pole region of the moon.

“He had the low price,” Daniel Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level official at NASA, said of Mr. Musk, “and NASA chose to take the risk associated with that configuration hoping that it would work out. And we’ll see if that turns out to be true.”

To leave Earth’s orbit, Starship must have its propellant tanks refilled with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That will require a complex choreography of additional Starship launches to take the propellants to orbit.

“This is a complicated, complicated problem, and there’s a lot that has to get sorted out, and a lot that has to work right,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Thursday’s flight included an early test of that technology, moving liquid oxygen from one tank to another within Starship.

Mr. Dumbacher does not expect Starship to be ready by September 2026, the launch date NASA currently has for Artemis III, although he would not predict how much of a delay there might be. “I’m not going to give you a guess because there is way too much work, way too many problems to solve,” he said.

Kenneth Chang and Michael Roston

A rare sight: Starship’s bright orange glow as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

Just past the 45-minute mark of the Starship vehicle’s journey through space on Thursday, something eerie happened. As it drifted high above Earth’s oceans and clouds, the spacecraft’s silvery exterior was overtaken by a brilliant and fiery orange glow.

Starship re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Views through the plasma pic.twitter.com/HEQX4eEHWH — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 14, 2024

When a spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere, the air beneath it gets hot — hot enough that it turns into a plasma of charged particles as electrons are stripped away from the air molecules. The charged particles create picturesque glows, like neon signs.

But seeing this happen in nearly real-time during a spaceflight is uncommon. That plasma disrupts radio signals, cutting off communication.

Such blackouts happen, for instance, when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule returns to Earth from the International Space Station with its complement of four astronauts. Mission controllers must wait with bated breath to be reassured that the spacecraft’s heat shield has held up and protected the crew during atmospheric re-entry.

Until Starship succumbed to the intense forces of re-entry on Thursday, SpaceX used its Starlink internet satellites to relay the live video feed. The Starlink satellites are in higher orbits, and sending signals upward — away from the plasma — is easier than trying to communicate through it to antennas on the ground.

But Starship wasn’t the only spacecraft in recent weeks to give us a view of plasma heating. Varda Space, a startup that is developing technology for manufacturing in orbit, had cameras on a capsule it landed on Earth on Feb. 21. Before it parachuted to the ground, its Winnebago capsule recorded a day-glow re-entry. The company retrieved the video recording from the capsule and shared it online:

Here's a video of our capsule ripping through the atmosphere at mach 25, no renders, raw footage: pic.twitter.com/ZFWzdjBwad — Varda Space Industries (@VardaSpace) February 28, 2024

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Jeff Bezos’s rocket company could race SpaceX to the moon.

Which billionaire space company will get to the moon first: Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin?

At first glance, SpaceX seems to have a huge head start. It is about to launch the third test flight of Starship. A variation of Starship is scheduled to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as September 2026.

By contrast, Blue Origin has yet to launch anything into orbit, and its contract with NASA for a lunar lander for astronauts is for a mission that is launching in 2030.

But Blue Origin might still get there first. SpaceX faces major challenges with Starship, which is as tall as 16-story building, while Blue Origin plans to send a smaller cargo lander to the moon by the end of next year.

“This lander, we’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said during a n interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” this month.

The first launch of the Mark 1 version of the Blue Moon lander is what Blue Origin calls a “pathfinder” to test technologies like the BE-7 engine, the flight computers, avionics and power systems — the same systems that will be used in the much larger Mark 2 lander that will take astronauts to the moon’s surface.

The Mark 1 lander can carry up to three tons of cargo to the lunar surface, but will be small enough to fit inside one of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets . New Glenn has yet to fly, but the company says its debut journey will occur later this year.

After Blue Moon Mark 1 is launched into an orbit about 125 miles above Earth’s surface, the lander’s BE-7 engine will propel it toward the moon, slowing it down to enter orbit around the moon and then guiding it to the landing on the surface.

The smaller size means that the Mark 1 lander, unlike Starship, will not need to be refueled before leaving Earth orbit. Demonstrating that refueling technology in orbit will be a key test to validate Starship’s design. Refueling will also be needed for the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos have already been beaten to the moon by another billionaire, Kam Ghaffarian , one of the founders of Intuitive Machines, which put a small robotic lander named Odysseus near the lunar south pole in February . That was the first private spacecraft to successfully make it to the moon’s surface in one piece (although its journey had some hiccups ).

As with every American rocket mishap, the Federal Aviation Administration will open an investigation to review what went wrong and what SpaceX needs to do to correct it. But if, as Elon Musk says, there are at least six more Starship flights this year, SpaceX will have opportunities to complete a full test flight.

Starship's third flight went very far, but like its first two flights, it was not a complete success. The landing burn for the Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket — the aim was to “land” it in the Gulf of Mexico — was not fully successful, and the Starship craft did not survive re-entry. But it was marked significant progress, because none of the problems from the earlier flights recurred, and SpaceX engineers now have data to tackle the new problems.

Michael Roston

On the social media site X, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of Starship. The agency is counting on Starship to land astronauts on the moon’s surface as part of the Artemis III mission. Another vehicle, the Orion capsule, is to be used to bring those astronauts back to Earth.

SpaceX says Starship did not survive re-entry, but it achieved several key milestones during the flight. That marks significant progress since the second test flight. Elon Musk has said he hopes there will be a half-dozen Starship flights this year.

SpaceX says a dual loss of communication, both through its own Starlink satellites and other forms spacecraft communications with Earth, suggest that Starship did not survive re-entry. They’re still listening to see if radio contact resumes.

Video is gone. Telemetry is also stuck at a speed 25,707 kilometers per hour and an altitude of 65 kilometers. The reason is not clear.

Starship already has private customers booked for deep space trips.

Starship has not yet done a full orbit of the Earth, but SpaceX already has three private astronaut missions on its manifest for the spacecraft.

The first flight with astronauts aboard will be led by Jared Isaacman who previously bought an orbital trip on a Falcon 9 rocket that was known as Inspiration4 .

Then two other Starship flights will travel around the moon and back, one led by Yusaku Maezawa , a Japanese entrepreneur, and the other by Dennis Tito, who was the first private individual to buy a trip to the International Space Station in 2001.

Back in 2018 when Mr. Maezawa signed up for the lunar flyby, Mr. Musk said Starship would be ready by 2023.

Mr. Maezawa later called the mission ‘dearMoon,’ inviting people to apply for a seat on the trip. Last week, he acknowledged it was not going to happen this year.

“We were planning for our lunar orbital mission ‘dearMoon’ to take place in 2023, but seems like it will take a little longer,” he wrote on the social network X. “We’re not sure when the flight will be, but we will give you all an update once we know more.”

SpaceX is apparently also planning uncrewed cargo flights to the surface of the moon with Starship.

In March last year, a small start-up company, Astrolab, announced that it was sending a Jeep Wrangler-size rover to surface in the south polar region of the moon , and the ride would be a cargo Starship flight that would take it there.

SpaceX did not confirm the news.

This appears to be part of the expanding potential market for Starship. SpaceX also plans to use the rocket for launching its second generation of Starlink internet communications satellites .

Starship is re-entering Earth's atmosphere. We’re seeing the heating on the flaps, with video being transmitted to the ground through SpaceX's Starlink satellites. The view is incredible. Usually the plasma disrupts radio transmissions.

SpaceX skipped the restart of one of the Raptor engines on the upper stage of Starship. It did conduct the propellant transfer test and the opening and closing of the payload door, which means the flight achieved some of its experimental objectives during its coast around the Earth, but not others. Next stop: Re-entry through the atmosphere and a hard bellyflop in the Indian Ocean.

The music on the livestream is more old-fashioned than the ambient beats we’re used to during SpaceX video feeds. But there’s nothing old-fashioned about the views in space from the rocket, which are unreal, but have not always been visible as its connection to the ground comes and goes.

During this period of the flight, Starship is scheduled to perform several tests. The first, opening the payload door, is complete. It will also move several tons of liquid oxygen between two tanks within Starship. That’s a preliminary test for future in-orbit refueling between two Starships, which is critical for sending the vehicle to the moon. Finally, Starship will try to restart one of its Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, something it has not done before.

The payload door of the upper Starship rocket stage is now open. That’s how a future Starship will deploy Starlink satellites, and demonstrating that it works was one of the objectives of today's flight.

The engines on the upper-stage of the rocket successfully completed their burn. Starship is now coasting in space, on a trajectory that will re-enter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

We were watching the booster attempting to land in the Gulf of Mexico. But the camera feed cut off, and we're not sure what actually happened. The upper stage Starship is still continuing on its trajectory toward the Indian Ocean.

The Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket appears to be headed back to Earth. During the last attempt, the booster exploded at this point, so it looks like SpaceX has fixed that issue.

The large Super Heavy booster stage has separated from the Starship upper stage, which is on its way to space. The flight is looking good.

All 33 Raptor engines in the booster are working fine. So far everything looks good.

Less than 2 minutes until liftoff. Propellant tanks are full, and wind will not prevent an on-time liftoff.

Starship is less than 10 minutes away from its third launch. The countdown is going smoothly.

What will happen during Starship’s third test flight.

For its third test flight, Starship aims to fly part of the way around the Earth, starting from SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica Village, Texas, and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

The earlier test flights — both of which ended in explosions — aimed to come down in waters off Hawaii. SpaceX said it had set the new flight path to allow for safe testing of things it hadn’t done before with the Starship vehicle.

The journey will start at the site that SpaceX calls Starbase, which is a few miles north of where Texas and Mexico meet along the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket, nearly 400 feet tall, will be mounted next to a launch tower that is about 480 feet tall. It will be filled with methane and liquid oxygen propellants during the hours before liftoff.

Three seconds before launch, computers will begin to ignite the 33 engines in the Super Heavy rocket booster beneath Starship.

Starship and Super Heavy will begin their ascent over the Gulf. At 52 seconds into the flight, SpaceX says, the vehicle will experience the heaviest atmospheric stress of its trip, a moment flight engineers call max-q.

If the stainless steel spacecraft survives that stress, the next key moment will occur 2 minutes and 42 seconds into flight, when most of the Super Heavy booster’s engines power down. Seconds later, the upper Starship vehicle will begin “hot-staging,” or lighting up its engines before separating from Super Heavy.

Super Heavy’s journey will end about seven minutes after launch. SpaceX would typically aim to return the massive rocket booster to the launch site for a vertical landing. But for the test flight, the spent Super Heavy will perform a series of maneuvers before firing its engines one last time to slow its descent into the Gulf of Mexico.

As Super Heavy is descending, Starship will be gaining altitude. About eight and a half minutes into its flight, its engines will switch off. It will then begin coasting around the Earth.

While floating through space, Starship will attempt several things that the spacecraft has never done. Nearly 12 minutes into the flight, it will open a door that in the future could deploy satellites and other cargo into space. About 12 minutes later, it will transfer propellants from one tank to another while in space, a technique needed for future journeys to the moon and beyond. Then, 40 minutes into the flight, Starship will relight one if its engines while in space.

If the spacecraft makes it through those experiments, the conclusion of Starship’s journey will start at about the 49-minute mark. The spacecraft is set to pivot horizontally into a belly-flop to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. If it survives the extreme temperatures, Starship will splash down 64 minutes after it left Texas. The company has said in the past that it expects the belly-flop ocean landing to end in an explosion .

After SpaceX completes its testing campaign, future Starship flights will return to the Texas Starbase site after they complete their missions in orbit. SpaceX is also building a launch tower for Starship at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where flights could one day launch and land, including the Artemis III mission that NASA plans to use to return American astronauts to the moon’s surface.

SpaceX has started the company’s official live video stream from Texas, a sign that it is serious about igniting the rocket in about 20 minutes. You can watch it in the video player embedded above.

What went right and wrong during the 2nd Starship test flight.

The second test flight of Starship in November got a lot higher and faster than the first attempt seven months earlier.

During the first launch outside Brownsville, Texas, in April last year, things went wrong from the start — the exhaust of the engines of the Super Heavy booster excavated a hole beneath the launchpad, sending pieces of concrete flying up to three-quarters of a mile away and a plume of dust drifting 6.5 miles, blanketing the nearby town of Port Isabel. Several of the booster engines failed, and the upper stage never separated from the booster.

Instead, the rocket started making loop-de-loops before the flight termination system destroyed it.

During the second test flight , all 33 of the booster engines worked during ascent. A water deluge system protected the launchpad. The upper Starship stage separated from the booster and then made it most of the way to orbital velocity. However, the journeys of both the booster and the upper Starship stage still ended in explosions.

For the booster, as it dropped away from the upper stage, 13 of the 33 engines fired again to guide it toward the landing location. Although this particular booster was not going to be recovered, SpaceX wanted to test the re-entry techniques that are similar to what it currently uses for its smaller Falcon 9 rockets. However, something went wrong. Several engines shut down and then one blew up, causing the destruction of the booster.

In an update posted on the company’s website on Feb. 26 , SpaceX said the most likely cause of the booster failure was a blockage of a filter where liquid oxygen flowed to the engines. The company said it had made design changes to prevent that from happening again.

The upper stage continued upward for seven minutes after stage separation. This was itself an achievement because the company completed a step called hot-staging, during which the upper-stage engines ignite before the stage detaches from the Super Heavy booster.

Because the spacecraft was empty, extra liquid oxygen was loaded to simulate the weight of a future payload it could carry to orbit. But when the extra oxygen was dumped, a fire started, disrupting communication between the spacecraft’s flight computers. The computers shut down the engines and then set off the flight termination system, destroying the spacecraft.

The upper Starship stage reached an altitude of about 90 miles and a speed of about 15,000 miles per hour. For a spacecraft to reach orbit, it needs to accelerate to about 17,000 miles per hour.

What is Starship?

For Elon Musk, Starship is really a Mars ship. He envisions a fleet of Starships carrying settlers to the red planet in the coming years.

And for that eventual purpose, Starship, under development by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX rocket company , has to be big. Stacked on top of what SpaceX calls a Super Heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by pretty much every measure, the biggest and most powerful ever.

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.

NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket , which made its first flight in November 2022, holds the current record for the maximum thrust of a rocket: 8.8 million pounds. The maximum thrust of the Saturn V rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program was relatively paltry: 7.6 million pounds.

An even more transformative feature of Starship is that it is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is to land much like those for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

That means all of the really expensive pieces — like the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and six additional Raptors in Starship itself — will be used over and over instead of thrown away into the ocean after one flight.

That has the potential to cut the cost of sending payloads into orbit — to less than $10 million to take 100 tons to space, Mr. Musk has predicted.

Starship and Super Heavy are shiny because SpaceX made them out of stainless steel, which is cheaper than using other materials like carbon composites. But one side of Starship is coated in black tiles to protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat that it will encounter if it gets far enough in its flight to re-enter the atmosphere.

Here is what to know about Thursday’s SpaceX test flight.

The third try was closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as the company’s flight test of the mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled almost halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The flight achieved some key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight did not, by design, make it all the way around the Earth. At 9:25 a.m. Eastern time, Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly, lifted off from the coast of South Texas. About 45 minutes later it started its re-entry, but communications were lost a few minutes after that. The company said the rocket was lost before attempting to splash down in the Indian Ocean, a sign that more work needs to be completed on the vehicle.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and space telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Here’s what else to know:

Thursday’s flight demonstrated new capabilities for Starship. In addition to reaching orbital speeds, the Starship vehicle opened and closed its payload door and managed to move several tons of liquid oxygen between two tanks within the rocket, a key test needed for future missions.

The Starship system consists of two stages — the Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, which is also called Starship. The company intends both to be fully reusable in the future. Read more about Starship .

Thursday’s launch was the third of Starship. Here’s a recap of what happened last time .

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Space Travel Journey Pictures, Images and Stock Photos

Browse 23,900+ space travel journey stock photos and images available, or start a new search to explore more stock photos and images..

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Casual man standing on space platform watching planet Earth. 3D generated image. Earth texture is from Nasa (https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/sunrise-shadows-over-the-philippine-sea).

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Digitally generated image, perfectly usable for all kinds of topics related to speed, space or time travel.

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vintage rocket with rainbow stripes flying to the Saturn. Copy space for designer.

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An astronaut sitting on a crate on the lunar surface, holding up a smartphone recording the sun as it starts to rise over the earth. Credit: Earth image from NASA https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/79790/city-lights-of-asia-and-australia

A young boy wearing flying goggles has a rocket strapped to his back as he is ready to fly to new imaginary places. Image taken in Utah, USA.

Space station orbiting Mars. Texture: https://trek.nasa.gov/mars/index.html#v=0.1&x=65.52245971527248&y=6.767577998760544&z=1&p=urn%3Aogc%3Adef%3Acrs%3AEPSG%3A%3A104905&d=

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A composite image of an untethered astronaut in rear view, isolated and drifting off into deep space above the earth. The astronaut is CGI and the following NASA images have been used: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/iss003e7553/iss003e7553~orig.jpg https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/iss003e7559/iss003e7559~orig.jpg https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004800/a004874/phase_waning_crescent.0903_print.jpg

An astronaut wearing full spacesuit and backpack, standing in the lunar surface of the moon facing the camera. Behind the astronaut is the earth, with night lights visible from some countries and the sun rim lighting on side. Earth Image from NASA: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/NightLights/images/media/BlackMarble_2016_Asia_composite.png

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Sol 4132: Right Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Projection

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Sol 4130: Right Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Projection

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Sol 4128: Right Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Perspective

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Sol 4128: Left Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Perspective

Sol 4128: Left Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Projection

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Explore NASA's Best Photos of the Year

Explore nasa's best photos of the year, it was a wild year for nasa, and the space agency has the pictures to prove it..

NASA is a proud boomer that loves posting a good photo album. The space agency released 100 of its best 2023 photos on flickr , which go through the exciting highlights of the previous year.

From asteroid samples landing on Earth to selecting the first crew of astronauts to go to the Moon since Apollo, this album has got it all (and maybe a little bit more than it should). These images were all taken in 2023, and also selected by, NASA’s HQ photo team. Gizmodo picked the best of the best photos to help you relive some amazing moments in spaceflight.

On September 24, 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped off a sample return capsule containing rocky bits of asteroid Bennu. The capsule landed in the Utah desert, delivering a total of 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams) of material.

Crack it open

Once on Earth, curation teams transported the samples to a clean room for processing. NASA struggled to open a round sampler head at the end of an articulated arm that the spacecraft used to grab the sample before finally cracking it open on January 10 of this year.

This stellar photo shows Russia’s Soyuz rocket launching with Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, on September 15, 2023.

Welcome home

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonaut Dmitri Petelin are seen here minutes after landing in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan inside the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on September 27, 2023.

Breaking the record

Rubio logged 371 days in space as members of Expeditions 68-69 aboard the International Space Station (ISS), breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut in history.

The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft is seen here being hoisted on board the recovery ship Megan shortly after landing in the Atlantic Ocean on September 4, 2023, carrying NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

RIP Ingenuity

The space agency donated this aerial prototype of the Mars Helicopter to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Earlier this year, Ingenuity busted its blades and ended its mission on the Red Planet.

The new crew

In April 2023, four astronauts were selected for the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. NASA r evealed the identities of the four-person crew for the Artemis 2 mission : NASA astronauts Victor Glover, who will serve as pilot for the mission, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman as mission specialists, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen as mission commander.

NASA’s Psyche mission to explore a metal rich asteroid launched on board a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on October 13, 2023 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Protecting the Amazon

A group of Amazonian leaders visited NASA’s Earth Information Center on November 17, 2023, to discuss how data gathered by the space agency can be used to help protect the Amazon.

This NASA photo shows a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Dragon spacecraft on top of the launch pad at the space agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before the launch of the Crew-7 mission on August 26, 2023.

Show and tell

NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Jessica Watkins, and Robert Hines took part in STEM demonstrations with students at the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library on March 30, 2023.

This photo shows Russia’s Soyuz rocket after being rolled out by train to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 12, 2023. The rocket launched Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, and Nikolai Chub to the ISS.

A sample from asteroid Bennu is shown here being prepared atop a microscope slide at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The museum unveiled the first public display of the asteroid sample on November 3, 2023.

NASA astronaut Alvin Drew poses for a photo with an adorable astronaut-wannabe during the White House Easter Egg Roll on April 10, 2023.

Prepare for landing

The Russian Search and Recovery Forces’ All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) team are shown here while preparing for the landing of the Expedition 69 astronauts on September 27, 2023.

NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Jessica Watkins, and Robert Hines looking at an interactive recreation of the ISS observatory module, called Cupola, at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Doing it for the kids

Students are shown here taking part in a Minecraft Artemis demonstration during Space Education Day on June 20, 2023, at the Microsoft Technology Center in Arlington, Virginia.

Sample drop-off

Thir photo shows Lockheed Martin System Safety Engineer Victoria Thiem and On Scene Commander of Recovery Stuart Wylie performing preliminary checks on the sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission shortly after it landed in the Utah desert.

NASA’s Artemis 2 crew speaking at the White House on December 14, 2023.

Future astronauts

NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, NASA associate administrator Bob Cabana, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson are seen here speaking with the 2021 astronaut candidate class at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington on October 18, 2023.

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From literature to AI: UC grad shares career path to success

Humanities and storytelling lead to lucrative tech entrepreneurship.

Before Katie Trauth Taylor worked with international organizations like NASA, Boeing and Hershey, and before receiving accolades for her work in the generative AI space, she was in a much different industry: English and literature. 

Taylor earned her master's in English and Comparative Literature in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences. She completed her educational journey at Purdue University with a doctorate degree in rhetoric and composition. After working as a graduate assistant at Purdue and UC, she became a research professor at Miami University. 

It might seem from there that her career was set — perhaps a tenured professorship or a university administrative position. That might have been her path, but Taylor had her eyes set on different goals.

So how did Taylor transition from literature and composition to tech entrepreneurship? She enjoys sharing that part of her story.

A&S masters grad Katie Trauth Taylor, who has launched two businesses. Photo/Provided

“I love that question, and I think it's so important for everyone in the humanities to see that they have just as much entrepreneurial potential as any other person.”

Taylor founded Untold Content in 2015, jumping from academia to entrepreneurship. Untold Content is a business-to-business content strategy company that recognizes storytelling patterns and frameworks that will help innovative companies make their ideas clear, compelling and impactful to an audience.  

She then took innovation to the next level in 2022 with the launch of Narratize, a generative-AI storytelling platform that transforms the ideas of scientific, technical and medical innovators into impactful and detailed content and stories quickly.

It's so important for everyone in the humanities to see that they have just as much entrepreneurial potential as any other person.

Katie Trauth Taylor Entrepreneur and A&S master's grad in English

English to entrepreneurship

With 10 years of successful partnerships with lucrative companies like AAA and Boeing, Taylor is just getting started. And yet, it took a while for her to get here.

“I think sometimes we feel stuck — like, ‘I have to follow a path because I made us a choice about what to major in or what to study.’

  “But really, once you get out into the workforce, you see that everything is almost interdisciplinary and you can see and cut across those boundaries more seamlessly as long as you're a strong critical thinker, a great communicator and hungry to constantly learn.” 

Taylor was just that person during college. As she matriculated through her institutions, she formed bonds and met many mentors along the way who pushed her towards starting her own business.

“I think wherever you want to grow in your professional life, you just have to ask those questions. Ask, ‘what do I need to learn to get there and find my mentors?’ And sometimes, mentors are thrust upon you in the most wonderful ways. And it surprises you,” said Taylor. 

Along the way she continued her love for storytelling and sharing that passion. And yet, she felt that she could help scientists, tech moguls and medical professionals share their stories in more effective and impactful manners. 

“I had a mentor somewhere along the way, who said ‘look me in the eyes. You know, you could just start a business, right?’” 

And Taylor did just that with Untold Content while she was a research professor at Miami University. Untold Content kept growing and growing, so she made her decision and pursued her new passion fulltime, as the leader of the then up-and-coming narrative storytelling strategy company.

Making her mark in tech

“I never got a business degree, but here I am running my second company,” Taylor said.

The generative AI leader took herself into a new avenue of business and networking. However, she identified the potential of using generative AI to push the ideas of innovators in science, technology and medicine into impactful storytelling and long-form content.  As such, she found what would be her company’s foothold in the tech industry. 

“We came to generative AI as a way to solve a problem that we had already discovered, so we already knew the problem. The problem was, it is so challenging to communicate effectively within science, tech and medical industries, and there are so many roadblocks related to that,” said Taylor.

“I've always been in love with that problem. So, we were in this really intensive moment in my first company where we were trying to ask ‘how do we solve that problem at scale?’And so, we were designing tech platform for communicating internally and help people craft more clear and impactful messages.”

She received the perfect gem of knowledge pertaining to this issue during her time at UC from associate professor of English Laura Micciche — a lesson at the basis of her women-led companies.

UC for me was completely life-changing. The people I met were the most generous and thoughtful subject-matter experts that I have ever met, and they remain strong forces in my success today.

Katie Trauth Taylor A&S alum, tech entrepreneur

“Laura Micciche taught me about rhetoric and composition and the way that words hold power and how they structure society and public rhetoric the way they shape opinion,” Taylor said.

Taylor and her company never left their storytelling roots. Her team consists of data scientists, engineers and ‘narrative scientists,’ people who are science, tech and medical communicators with journalistic and marketing backgrounds. 

“Narrative scientists see the way words make meaning. And that is essentially the design of the predictive models,” said Taylor. “That is the most exciting, possible moment to be able to bring those diverse skill sets together. That's where the magic happens with Gen AI. And that's where we see solutions that will actually be transformative.”

The teams at Narratize and Untold Content continue with these tenets in mind under Taylor’s leadership.

To the future

Narratize and Untold Content work to help a variety of stakeholders understand the ideas and insights of innovators around the world, from consumers to potential investors. However, given the recent surge in open AI, creatives like journalists and marketers are concerned.

AI software continues to evolve, and as technology advances, it is inevitable that jobs may be lost. And yet, Taylor has her own response to this question: ‘What happens to creatives as AI continues to get better?'

“It's the question everybody is asking. How do we keep pace with this rapid rise of technology? We set out really early on to ask how do we empower people? How do we do AI with good intent?”

One of the major pillars of both companies is to keep AI in the hands of creatives and to ensure AI is nothing but human-led. 

“And that means that we design the user experience to pull insights from the person and to support the person in their workflow and embed the AI into those workflows so they can be more effective in their work and do that more efficiently.”

The focus is on teaching and empowering creatives with generative AI, and according to Taylor, the best path forward is through embracing AI and maintaining focus on amplifying storytelling. An emphasis on focus that she strengthened during her time at UC. 

"UC for me was completely life-changing. The people I met were the most generous and thoughtful subject-matter experts that I have ever met," Taylor said, "and they remain strong forces for my success today."

Featured image at top: Graphic representation of artificial intelligence. Credit/Steve Johnson on Unsplash.

By Serigne Thiam

Student Journalist , A&S Department of Marketing and Communication

[email protected]

• Department of English
• College of Arts and Sciences
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Russia's long-duration space journey on Earth put 6 people in isolation for a year

"One year is a challenging duration that will be filled with many biomedical experiments on board."

Russia kicked off another of its Scientific International Research In Unique terrestrial Station (SIRIUS) project initiatives last week, this time a 360-day isolation of individuals to imitate flight conditions of a deep space journey. 

The mission is known as SIRIUS-23. The nearly year-long stint by the six-person crew is carried out under the auspices of the legendary Institute for Bio-Medical Problems (IBMP) under the Russian Academy of Sciences. Last month, IBMP celebrated 60 years of research since its establishment to investigate issues related to long-term human space exploration. 

SIRIUS-23 is the fourth stage of earlier IBMP isolation experiments: SIRIUS-17 (17 days in 2017); SIRIUS-19 (120 days in 2019), with the stage-3 SIRIUS-23 mission taking place in 2021 and lasting 240 days. 

The SIRIUS-23 crew entered their home-away-from-home isolation facility on Nov. 14. This set of individuals will carry out a lunar mission simulation that involves a flyby of the moon to select a landing site, multiple simulated landings of four crew members for surface operations, orbiting the moon, and carrying out tele-operation of a rover on the lunar surface .

Related : Mars on Earth: What months of simulated astronaut missions taught this scientist

Mixed-gender crew

Watching the event in Moscow was Anastasia Stepanova, a PhD student in space resources at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. She is a veteran of multiple space simulation missions here on Earth. 

In 2019, Stepanova participated in the four-month SIRIUS-19 lunar flight simulation experiment organized jointly by IBMP and NASA's human research program.

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"Sirius-23 is different in many ways then the previous SIRIUS-17, 19 and 21 simulations," Stepanova told Space.com. "NASA, which was a partner for many years, couldn't participate in 2023. There's no need to have English and Russian languages in the crew, since all crew members are Russian speaking, for the first time in the history of IBMP isolation experiments."

Stepanova also points out that in the mixed gender SIRIUS-23 crew there are more women than men.

Intra-group interaction

"The crew was excited to start their moon journey and nervous to talk in front of the press," Stepanova said. "One year is a challenging duration that will be filled with many biomedical experiments on board."

As part of the experiment, the psychophysiological aspects of the crew's activities will be studied, Stepanova said. That appraisal includes crew response to various types of technical malfunctions that could lead to an accident with serious consequences that pose a threat to life and health for crew members. 

In addition, problems of intra-group interaction and leadership with different gender composition will be assessed, as well as problems of long-term and regular extravehicular activity, accompanied by physical exertion and night work, Stepanova said.

NASA isolation studies

—  Life on Mars: Inside The HI-SEAS Isolation Habitat (Gallery)

 — Astronauts share isolation workout tips from space (video)

—  There's a Mock Moon Mission Underway in Russia

As for NASA's non-involvement in SIRIUS-23, Anna Schneider, a public affairs specialist at NASA Johnson Space Center, told Space.com in a statement:

"NASA's Human Research Program is participating in isolation research and other Earth-based analogs, including the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) and the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA), Antarctica, as well as evaluating other domestic and international analogs, to ensure key research goals can be completed to inform future human spaceflight missions. The agency is not participating in the 12-month SIRIUS 23 mission."

Meanwhile, the SIRIUS-23 crew is settling in for the long-haul:

• Yuri Sergeevich Chebotarev (Russia) - crew commander
• Anzhelika Anatolyevna Parfyonova (Russia) - flight engineer 
• Ksenia Dmitrievna Orlova (Russia, resident of the state of Asgardia ) - crew doctor 
• Olga Sergeevna Mastitskaya (Belarus) - researcher 
• Ksenia Sergeevna Shishenina (Russia) - researcher 
• Rustam Nazimovich Zaripov (Russia) — researcher

Now tucked inside their sealed-off facility, the primary goal of the SIRIUS-23 experiment is to study how the human body adapts to the conditions and negative effects associated with isolation in an artificial habitat, according to the IBMP.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Leonard David is an award-winning space journalist who has been reporting on space activities for more than 50 years. Currently writing as Space.com's Space Insider Columnist among his other projects, Leonard has authored numerous books on space exploration, Mars missions and more, with his latest being "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published in 2019 by National Geographic. He also wrote "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet" released in 2016 by National Geographic. Leonard  has served as a correspondent for SpaceNews, Scientific American and Aerospace America for the AIAA. He has received many awards, including the first Ordway Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History in 2015 at the AAS Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium. You can find out Leonard's latest project at his website and on Twitter.

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