Space Exploration.

SpaceX conducted about 165 orbital Falcon launches in 2025, breaking its own record of 134 set in 2024; the vast majority deployed Starlink satellites. No other organization or nation has come close to that annual cadence.

SpaceX Falcon 9 booster B1067 flew its record 32nd mission in December 2025, launching Starlink satellites from Florida and becoming the first orbital booster to reach that many flights. Because SpaceX keeps extending booster life, this figure is likely to keep climbing.

The International Space Station has been continuously occupied by rotating crews since Expedition 1 docked on November 2, 2000 — over 25 years of unbroken human presence in space as of November 2025, longer than any other sustained off-world human presence in history, with more than 290 astronauts from around the world having lived and worked aboard.

On 11 September 2024, the launch of Soyuz MS-26 with Don Pettit, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner brought the number of people in orbit to 19: nine aboard the ISS, three on the Soyuz, four on SpaceX's Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon, and three on China's Tiangong station. Counting suborbital tourists, a total of 20 people in space at once was reached in May 2023.

SpaceX's privately funded Polaris Dawn mission, commanded by Jared Isaacman with Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, reached an apogee of 1,408.1 km on 10 September 2024, surpassing the 1,373 km set by Gemini 11 in 1966. The mission also carried out the first commercial spacewalk.

Ed Dwight, selected in the early 1960s as the first Black U.S. astronaut candidate but never flown by NASA, reached space on 19 May 2024 aboard Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard NS-25 flight at 90 years 253 days old, edging out William Shatner, who flew at 90 in 2021.

Intuitive Machines' Odysseus (IM-1) lander touched down near Malapert A crater close to the lunar south pole on 22 February 2024 under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program — the first commercial lunar landing and the first U.S. Moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. It tipped onto its side but operated for about a week.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx collected material from asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and dropped its capsule into the Utah desert on 24 September 2023. Curators weighed 121.6 g of rock and dust — far more than JAXA's Hayabusa2 (5.4 g from Ryugu) and roughly twice the mission's 60 g goal.

Ingenuity, designed for up to five test flights, made 72 flights on Mars between April 2021 and January 2024, logging more than two hours of flight time and about 17 km of distance before rotor-blade damage ended its mission on its 72nd flight.

India's Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander touched down at about 69.4° S on 23 August 2023, making India the first nation to land in the lunar south polar region and the fourth nation to soft-land on the Moon. Its Pragyan rover confirmed sulfur in the regolith.

SpaceX's fully reusable Starship launch system stands about 121-124 m tall depending on version (Super Heavy booster plus Starship upper stage), surpassing the 110.6 m Saturn V. Its first integrated test flight launched from Starbase, Texas on 20 April 2023.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft deliberately struck Dimorphos, the moonlet of asteroid Didymos, on 26 September 2022. Telescope observations showed its 11 h 55 min orbit was shortened by about 33 minutes (±1 minute) — the first time humanity measurably changed a celestial body's motion.

SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission launched September 15, 2021, carrying four private citizens (led by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman) into orbit for three days aboard a Crew Dragon capsule — the first orbital spaceflight crewed entirely by private individuals, with no professional astronauts on board, also raising funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Dutch student Oliver Daemen flew aboard Blue Origin's first crewed New Shepard flight (NS-16) on 20 July 2021, alongside Jeff Bezos, at 18 years 334 days old, becoming the youngest person and the first person born in the 21st century to reach space. The flight was suborbital.

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, carried to Mars by the Perseverance rover, lifted off in Jezero Crater on 19 April 2021, hovering about 3 m above the surface for 39 seconds — the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

NASA's Perseverance rover, about 1,025 kg, landed in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 using the sky-crane system — heavier than Curiosity (899 kg), China's Zhurong (about 240 kg) and earlier rovers. It is caching rock cores for a possible future Mars sample return.

SpaceX's Transporter-1 rideshare mission launched 143 spacecraft on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on 24 January 2021, including 48 Planet SuperDoves and 10 Starlinks, beating the 104 satellites launched by India's PSLV-C37 in February 2017.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch spent 328 days in space aboard the International Space Station, from 14 March 2019 to 6 February 2020, setting the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. During the mission she also took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir carried out the first all-female spacewalk on 18 October 2019, spending 7 hours 17 minutes outside the International Space Station to replace a failed battery charge-discharge unit.

China's Chang'e 4 mission achieved the first successful soft landing on the far side of the Moon on January 3, 2019, in the South Pole-Aitken basin — a location that cannot communicate directly with Earth due to the Moon blocking line-of-sight, requiring a dedicated relay satellite (Queqiao) positioned beyond the Moon to relay signals.

NASA's New Horizons flew past the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) on 1 January 2019 at a distance of about 3,500 km, when Arrokoth was about 6.6 billion km from the Sun. Arrokoth turned out to be a pristine contact binary, offering clues to how planetesimals formed.

NASA's Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2 (OAO-2, 'Stargazer'), launched on 7 December 1968, was the first successful space telescope. Its ultraviolet telescopes observed until early 1973, providing the first high-quality ultraviolet observations of many stars and galaxies.

NASA JPL's twin MarCO-A and MarCO-B, six-unit CubeSats each about the size of a briefcase, launched with InSight on 5 May 2018 and relayed the lander's data to Earth in near-real time during its Mars landing on 26 November 2018 — the first CubeSats to travel to another planet.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft used its xenon ion engines to change its velocity by about 11.5 km/s (25,700 mph) between 2007 and 2018 — more than any other spacecraft achieved with its own propulsion, and enough to reach and orbit both Vesta and Ceres.

NASA's Opportunity rover drove 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across Mars's Meridiani Planum between landing on 25 January 2004 and its last contact on 10 June 2018, far outlasting its planned 90-day mission. It surpassed the Soviet Lunokhod 2's roughly 39 km in 2014.

NASA/ESA/ASI's Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years, from orbit insertion on 1 July 2004 until its deliberate plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on 15 September 2017, completing 294 orbits. It discovered Enceladus's ice plumes and delivered ESA's Huygens probe to Titan.

SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 first-stage booster vertically for the first time on December 21, 2015, after launching 11 satellites into orbit — the first time an orbital-class rocket booster had been recovered intact after a real orbital mission, a breakthrough that dramatically reduced launch costs by enabling booster reuse.

NASA's New Horizons probe, the fastest-launched spacecraft in history, completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, after a nine-and-a-half-year journey — sending back the first detailed images and data from Pluto and its moon Charon, revealing a surprisingly geologically active world.

NASA's Dawn orbited the giant asteroid Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012, then used its ion engines to travel to the dwarf planet Ceres, entering orbit on 6 March 2015 — the first spacecraft to orbit two destinations beyond Earth. It remains in orbit around Ceres after running out of fuel in 2018.

Ceres, with a diameter of approximately 940 km, is the largest known object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — first discovered in 1801 and originally classified as a planet, then an asteroid, and since 2006 reclassified as a dwarf planet, though it remains by far the largest body in the asteroid belt regardless of category.

The European Space Agency's Philae lander, deployed from the Rosetta spacecraft, achieved the first controlled landing on a comet on November 12, 2014, touching down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — though its anchoring harpoons failed to fire, causing it to bounce before settling in a shadowed location that limited its solar power, it still returned the first-ever images and data from a comet's surface.

ESA's Rosetta arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014 after a ten-year journey and accompanied it through perihelion for more than two years, ending with a controlled descent onto the nucleus on 30 September 2016.

SpaceX's Dragon capsule on the COTS Demo Flight 2 mission was captured by the station's robotic arm and berthed to the International Space Station on 25 May 2012 — the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous and berth with another spacecraft.

The International Space Station has a mass of approximately 420 tonnes and a pressurized volume roughly equivalent to a six-bedroom house — the largest space station ever built, assembled in orbit from over 40 major components launched and joined together between 1998 and 2011 through the cooperation of five space agencies.

NASA's MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury on 18 March 2011 after a 6.6-year journey with six planetary flybys. It mapped the entire planet, found water ice in permanently shadowed polar craters, and ended its mission by impacting the surface on 30 April 2015.

Space Shuttle Discovery flew 39 missions between August 1984 and March 2011, spending a cumulative 365 days in space — more flights than any other crewed spacecraft. It is now displayed at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft returned to Earth on June 13, 2010, carrying microscopic dust particles collected from asteroid Itokawa — the first asteroid sample ever returned to Earth, following a difficult seven-year round-trip mission plagued by technical problems that nearly caused its total loss.

JAXA's IKAROS, launched on 21 May 2010 alongside the Akatsuki Venus probe, deployed a 20 m-wide, 7.5-micrometre-thick polyimide sail in June 2010 and confirmed acceleration by solar radiation pressure, becoming the first spacecraft to use solar-sail propulsion in interplanetary space. It flew past Venus in December 2010.

The International Space Station, built by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada with assembly starting in November 1998, is widely described as the most expensive object ever built. ESA estimates its total cost at about EUR 100 billion; other estimates in U.S. dollars exceed $150 billion depending on what is counted.

NASA's New Horizons probe launched on January 19, 2006, reaching a speed of approximately 58,536 km/h (16.26 km/s) relative to Earth shortly after launch — the fastest launch speed of any spacecraft ever sent from Earth, needed to reach Pluto within a human-scale mission timeframe (it arrived after a 9.5-year journey in 2015).

NASA's Stardust spacecraft flew through the coma of comet Wild 2 in January 2004, capturing dust grains in ultra-light aerogel, and its capsule landed in the Utah desert on 15 January 2006. Analysis revealed minerals formed at high temperatures near the young Sun, showing material was mixed widely across the early solar system.

ESA's Huygens probe, carried by NASA's Cassini, parachuted through the haze of Saturn's moon Titan and landed on 14 January 2005, about 1.2 billion km from Earth — the most distant landing ever achieved and the first in the outer solar system. It transmitted from the surface for about 72 minutes.

SpaceShipOne, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and built by Scaled Composites, became the first privately funded crewed vehicle to reach space on June 21, 2004, piloted by Mike Melvill, crossing the 100 km Kármán line — winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize later that year after repeating the feat within two weeks.

China launched its first crewed spaceflight, Shenzhou 5, on October 15, 2003, carrying astronaut Yang Liwei on a 21-hour orbital mission — making China the third nation in history (after the Soviet Union and the United States) to independently develop and launch human spaceflight capability.

NASA astronauts Franklin Chang-Díaz and Jerry Ross are tied for the record with 7 spaceflights each, both flying aboard the Space Shuttle multiple times across their careers spanning the 1980s through the 2000s.

American businessman Dennis Tito paid a reported $20 million to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in April 2001 — the first private space tourist, spending nearly 8 days in orbit, a trip arranged through the company Space Adventures.

NASA astronauts Susan Helms and Jim Voss performed an 8 hour 56 minute spacewalk on March 11, 2001, while preparing the International Space Station for a new module — the longest single spacewalk in history.

NASA's NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros on 14 February 2000, mapping it for a year before touching down on its surface on 12 February 2001 — also the first landing on an asteroid, though it was never designed as a lander.

Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev made 16 spacewalks across five missions to Mir between 1988 and 1998, totaling about 82 hours outside — both still records for an individual.

NASA's Sojourner rover, part of the Mars Pathfinder mission, became the first wheeled vehicle to operate on Mars after landing on July 4, 1997 — a small, microwave-oven-sized rover that operated for nearly three months, proving the viability of robotic rovers for planetary exploration and paving the way for later, much larger rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance.