Space Exploration in 2026: History, Current Missions and What Comes Next

Space exploration has moved from a two-country contest to a crowded field of government agencies and private companies, and 2026 is one of its busiest years yet. NASA astronauts have already flown around the Moon and back; European probes are closing in on an asteroid pair and on Mercury; and NASA is trying to work out who will run a space station after the International Space Station is retired.

How it started: from Sputnik to Apollo

The modern space age began in October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, according to NASA's history office. The best-known milestone of the subsequent US-Soviet space race came on 20 July 1969, when NASA's Apollo 11 mission made what the agency describes as humanity's first crewed lunar landing; five more crewed landings followed over the next three years, according to NASA's history pages.

Artemis II: humans back around the Moon

NASA's current Moon programme, Artemis, reached its first crewed milestone this year. Artemis II launched on 1 April 2026 and splashed down on 10 April, a mission lasting 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes, according to NASA's mission page. The crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — flew the Orion spacecraft on a free-return trajectory around the Moon using the Space Launch System rocket, NASA says. Apollo 17, in 1972, was the last time astronauts travelled beyond low-Earth orbit, according to NASA's history of the Apollo landings, making Artemis II humans' return to deep space after roughly 50 years.

NASA restructures the road to a Moon landing

On 27 February 2026, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a restructuring of the missions that follow Artemis II, according to spaceflight news outlet Spaceflight Now. Artemis III, previously planned as a 2028 south-pole landing, was redefined as a 2027 low-Earth-orbit test in which astronauts will dock with uncrewed commercial lunar landers from companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin to test navigation, communications, propulsion, life-support systems and new spacesuits before any landing is attempted.

Under the revised plan, the first crewed Moon landing shifts to Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, with a second landing mission, Artemis V, to follow later in 2028, Spaceflight Now reported. Isaacman said the original plan asked for too many untested milestones at once and that NASA needed to "get back to basics" with a stepped approach.

Europe reaches an asteroid pair and Mercury

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft is approaching the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system to study the aftermath of NASA's 2022 DART mission, which deliberately struck the smaller asteroid Dimorphos to test whether an impactor could shift an asteroid's path, according to ESA. ESA says Hera's propulsion system has performed reliably enough that mission planners designed a more aggressive braking manoeuvre, moving its arrival up by about a month to November 2026.

Separately, the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission, launched on 20 October 2018 on an Ariane 5 rocket, is due to enter orbit around Mercury on 21 November 2026 in a single autonomous braking burn that ground controllers cannot correct in real time, ESA's mission updates page states. The mission's two orbiters — ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA's Mio — are set to separate on 9–10 December 2026, with the science phase beginning in April 2027.

What happens to the International Space Station

NASA intends to retire and deorbit the International Space Station by around 2030, according to a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of the agency's plans. Rather than build a government-owned successor, NASA is working with six aerospace companies on commercially owned stations that NASA would certify for its astronauts, the GAO says.

The GAO review describes the transition timeline as very ambitious and notes unresolved structural issues on the station, including cracks in a transfer tunnel in the Russian segment that have caused air leaks; the leaks were sealed as of February 2026, but the underlying structural issue remains, according to GAO. NASA officials told GAO they are confident the station could be extended into the late 2030s if a commercial replacement is not ready in time.

Why this matters now

Each of these programmes answers a different question about exploring beyond Earth: whether humans can safely return to the Moon and go on to Mars (Artemis), whether an asteroid's path can deliberately be changed to protect Earth (Hera/DART), what an unexplored inner planet is made of (BepiColombo), and who will keep a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit once the ISS is gone. Their overlapping 2026 timelines are one reason space exploration is drawing sustained public attention this year rather than at a single launch event.