The moon races back into view: 2026 will test who owns the night
Three nations, two private rockets and one cold, dusty rock hanging 384,000 kilometres away. The Moon is no longer scenery; it is a scoreboard.
Artemis ii has already left the pad
At 06:47 local time, Orion’s LAS tower snapped away and the world’s most expensive four-seater commuter capsule slipped into a ten-day free-return trajectory. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen are now travelling farther from Earth than any Apollo crew, but the real exam is inside the hull: NASA’s first life-support checkout with humans since 1972. If the carbon-dioxide scrubbers hiccup, the Artemis timetable folds; if they hum, the agency buys political oxygen for a 2027 landing attempt.
They will skim the lunar far side at 1,300 m/s, close enough to read the tyre tracks left by Chang’e 4 five years ago. The Chinese National Space Administration is already preparing the sequel. Chang’e 7, an orbiter-lander-hopper trio, is booked on a Long March 5 for August. Its target: the Shackleton-de Gerlache ridge where orbital neutron data whisper of water ice at −230 °C. A detachable ‘mini-hopper’ will drop into a permanent shadow, fire a 1.5 m drill and sniff for H₂O with a mass spectrometer the size of a shoebox. Find ice in bulk and the cost of exporting potable water from Baikonur collapses; Beijing’s South Pole outpost plan jumps from PowerPoint to gantry.
Firefly wants the other side – literally
While Artemis loops, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost M2 is scheduled to slam down on the far side late next year. On board: NASA’s three CLPS payloads, a British radiation sensor and the UAE’s Rashid 2 rover. The mission inherits the same line-of-sight headache that killed Beresheet—no direct Earth link—so Firefly will park a relay cube-sat in halo orbit first. Success buys the company a seat at the table when NASA carves up the $2.6 billion Lunar Terrain Vehicle contract; failure gives Astrobotic the narrative again.
Spain wants its own table. PLD Space’s Miura 5 has no public launch date, but the Guiana Space Centre has already reserved pad ELA-1 for “NET Q4 2026.” The two-stage kerolox launcher is reusable, throttleable and, crucially, ITAR-free—an attractive taxi for EU institutions tired of asking Washington for seats. First payload slot: 450 kg to trans-lunar injection, price tag €35 million. If the ignition sequence reaches T-0, Spain becomes the sixth country to orbit its own lunar mission; if it does not, the European Space Agency’s in-house Themis booster gets the budget instead.
Down-range, the solar system keeps score
ESA’s Hera probe will slip into Dimorphos orbit this November, measuring the crater DART carved with 22,000 km/h of kinetic spite. The data set will recalibrate kinetic-impactor models from Palermo to Pasadena; expect every future asteroid movie to quote the Hera figure for momentum multiplication.
Meanwhile, Rocket Lab’s Neutron will fling a 20 kg probe into Venus’ cloud tops during the 2026 transfer window. The payload is a laser-fluorescence package designed by MIT to hunt phosphine at 55 km altitude. A positive detection revives the 2020 controversy; a null result buries it under sulfuric acid. Either way, Rocket Lab becomes the first private firm to fly its own science to another planet—an achievement that unlocks planetary-protection insurance contracts worth hundreds of millions.
What matters tomorrow
By New Year’s Eve 2026, the lunar surface could host Chinese drills, US crew-rating certificates and Spanish logos. The price of a kilo to the Moon will have dropped from $1 million to, at best, $50,000. Whoever lands first writes the traffic rules—radio frequencies, safety zones, even where you are allowed to pee. The scoreboard is lighting up. Orion is already en route; everyone else is still on the launch manifest. In space, second place is just another crater.