SpaceX raised USD 75 billion in what became the largest IPO in market history, pricing its 555.6 million shares at USD 135 each and reaching a valuation of roughly USD 1.77 trillion. Musk, as ever, got the headlines. Shotwell, as ever, got the job done.

The engineer who almost became a barista
Shotwell was born in 1963 in Evanston, Illinois, the middle daughter of a brain surgeon and an artist. She was a cheerleader, a varsity basketball player, and finished at the top of her high school class. None of that pointed obviously toward aerospace.

The nudge came from her mother, who dragged a teenage Shotwell to a “Society of Women Engineers” panel at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Shotwell recalled being largely bored until she spotted one particular woman on the panel: impeccably dressed, composed, effortlessly credible. “Her shoes were marvellous, her bag matched,” she told Marie Claire in 2017, “and she just made mechanical engineering accessible to me.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in applied mathematics from Northwestern University, then spent over a decade at the Aerospace Corporation before four years at Microcosm, a low-cost rocketry firm. In 2002, a former colleague offered her a tour of a barely-known startup called SpaceX. She spoke to its founder for three or four minutes.

“I wasn’t looking for a job. I didn’t have a resume,” she said. SpaceX called that afternoon, and after a month of deliberation she became employee number 11, joining as Vice-President of Business Development.

She had been clear-eyed about the stakes. If SpaceX failed, she told the Stanford Business School podcast, she was done with the industry entirely. “I’d rather sell real estate or be a barista.”

In September 2008, Shotwell was in a Glasgow hotel bathroom on a conference call to price SpaceX’s bid on a USD 1.6 billion NASA resupply contract while the company’s fourth Falcon 1 launch counted down half a world away.

It was, Musk believed, the last launch the company could afford before going bankrupt. The rocket reached orbit, the NASA contract followed, and Musk promoted Shotwell to President and COO before the year was out. She has held both roles for the 18 years since.

The operator behind the visionary
Colleagues describe a complementary dynamic that is as much about temperament as function. “Elon creates the urgent, sometimes uncomfortable disruption,” Derek Huerta, a former satellite engineer at SpaceX, told CNBC.

Shotwell supplies the operational continuity that converts disruption into delivery. Former NASA programme manager Kathryn Lueders, who worked directly with Shotwell for over 15 years, described her as “the steady interface for customers, stakeholders and the public.” Another former employee called her simply “the glue.”

She combines exacting standards with a rare social fluency. She can deliver tough feedback, said one colleague, and it would “taste like honey.” She earned a reputation for walking onto the factory floor or into mission control and asking forensically specific questions, from manufacturing tolerances to astronaut training simulations. Her compensation reflects her standing.

According to SpaceX’s IPO filing, her total package for 2025 came to USD 85.8 million, against a base salary of USD 1.08 million. By comparison, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg received USD 9.4 million in the same year, despite Boeing’s revenue being more than four times larger. Shotwell’s 12.6 million shares were valued at over USD 2 billion at the close of the IPO’s first session.

Selling the impossible, just late
The IPO has brought Shotwell into sharper public focus, and with it a clearer articulation of her philosophy.

“We fail on timeline, but that feels like the right fail to make,” she said. Musk’s formulation, which she repeated to investors, is that SpaceX makes the impossible but makes it late.

She has offered a counter-intuitive defence of failure itself: “If a launch goes perfectly, all you’ve learned is that that launch vehicle on that day worked. When you have failure, you actually get this treasure trove of data.”

SpaceX’s prospectus promises AI data centres in orbit by 2028, a Starship that operates with airline-like turnaround times, and a self-sustaining Mars colony. When pressed on a timeline for the colony, Shotwell ventured 2035, then immediately qualified that she is “so bad at predicting timelines.”

The financial reality is demanding: the company took on USD 29 billion in debt after absorbing xAI, with AI capital expenditure alone reaching USD 12.7 billion in 2025. The company moved, she said, “from those penurious Falcon 9 Dragon days to the more expensive capital-intensive Starship, and then to AI, because it is next-level expensive.”

The steady hand and the key-man question
The IPO has surfaced questions about SpaceX’s “key-man risk,” the dependency on Musk’s vision and public profile. Shotwell is the principal hedge against that risk. During Musk’s feud with the Donald Trump administration in June 2025, when he threatened to decommission the Dragon capsule, she quietly assured NASA officials the tensions would pass.

She has also defended him on personal grounds, sending a company-wide letter after harassment allegations in 2022 against her communications team’s advice.

“I don’t believe he could have done what he was accused of. But he is imperfect. I’m imperfect.” She has called him “probably the best CEO in history” and endorsed the supermajority voting control he holds.

Pressed on her own ambitions, Shotwell remains characteristically understated. She is preparing a 1,000-acre Texas ranch to become a vineyard. Given a Starship and a free itinerary, she says she would go to the moon, not Mars. Six months is a long journey.

It is a telling deflection. The woman who kept a failing rocket company solvent through sheer commercial tenacity, who priced a billion-dollar government contract from a Glasgow hotel bathroom, and who rang the opening bell on the largest public offering in stock market history has earned the right to a modest aspiration. The moon is, after all, reachable.

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Eclipse will support space station resupply, commercial spacecraft, critical national security missions, and scientific payloads for domestic and international markets. The whole development comes amid the growing interest in space start-ups as the Donald Trump administration eyes an efficiency drive in the sector.

Talking about Firefly, the start-up gained prominence in the space race after becoming the second private firm to score a moon landing in a successful first attempt with its uncrewed Blue Ghost spacecraft earlier in 2025.

The Texas-based company was valued at more than USD 2 billion in November 2024, when it raised USD 175 million in a late-stage funding round. Firefly also makes small- and medium-lift launch vehicles for commercial launches to the Earth’s orbit.

A Responsive Space Company

Firefly Aerospace is on a mission to launch, land, and operate spacecraft on an “anywhere and anytime” basis. The start-up’s small- to medium-lift launch vehicles, lunar landers, and orbital vehicles are enabling it to service the entire lifecycle of government and commercial missions from low Earth orbit to the Moon and beyond.

With more than 700 employees, Firefly is quickly growing to support regular launches, on-orbit missions, and lunar landings. Spearheading the start-up’s efforts, Firefly’s small-lift rocket Alpha has emerged as a cost-effective option to launch more than 1,000 kg to low Earth orbit in support of commercial, civil, and national security missions.

Alpha can be launched domestically or internationally through Firefly’s launch facilities at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and new launch capabilities coming soon at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia, as early as 2025 and at the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden as early as 2026.

Alpha is built with patented tap-off cycle engines, which reduce complexity with fewer parts and improve reliability compared to staged combustion or gas generator cycles. Firefly also utilises advanced carbon fibre composites for Alpha’s entire airframe and linerless cryogenic propellant tanks, enabling a strong, lightweight vehicle at value prices.

Equipped to launch with just 24-hour notice, Alpha can be paired with the start-up’s Elytra vehicle to support responsive on-orbit missions post-launch, such as relocation, space domain awareness, and de-orbiting services. Firefly has also set up its automated in-house manufacturing, along with rapid, iterative testing to support responsive space missions.

Talking about “Eclipse”, Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman are co-developing the new medium-lift launch vehicle that combines the best technologies, systems, and mission experience from both companies to fill a void in the global launch market.

Eclipse will first launch from Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) with the ability to lift more than 16,000 kg to orbit in support of space station resupply missions, commercial spacecraft, national security missions, and scientific payloads for the domestic and international market. Designed for reusability, Eclipse has been optimised for return to launch site (RTLS) and propulsive landing of the first stage.

Eclipse has a high-strength, lightweight carbon composite airframe and tanks that reduce vehicle mass and lift heavier payloads at a lower cost. Patented tap-off cycle architecture further removes the need for excess engine components to reduce complexity and improve reliability.

Betting Big On Lunar Missions

With launch, lunar, and orbital vehicles, Firefly is now providing end-to-end cislunar services in support of the United States, other international government agencies, and the commercial lunar market.

Firefly mission managers guide each payload through integration planning, verification, launch, and mission operations. Compatible with multiple launch providers, Blue Ghost can be launched aboard Firefly’s Eclipse launch vehicle to provide a seamless mission experience.

Blue Ghost Lander has been designed and built to be easily adapted to serve each customer’s unique cislunar needs. Firefly’s vertically integrated approach with shared components across the start-up’s launch vehicles further enables scaled efficiencies, quality assurance, and lower costs that the company passes on to its customers.

Firefly has been awarded four task orders through the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, supporting three missions to the Moon in 2025, 2026, and 2028. The “Blue Ghost Mission 1”, named “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, launched on January 15 and performed the first fully successful commercial Moon landing on March 2. Blue Ghost then completed more than 14 days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight) and just over five hours of operations into the lunar night.

This achievement marked the longest commercial operations on the Moon to date. The second mission will have the task of providing payload services in lunar orbit and on the lunar surface in 2026, utilising a two-stage spacecraft configuration with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander stacked on an Elytra Dark orbital vehicle.

Elytra vehicle will first deploy Blue Ghost and the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder satellite in lunar orbit. Blue Ghost will then touch down on the far side of the Moon and operate government and commercial payloads for more than 10 days on the surface. Elytra will remain in lunar orbit to provide a communications relay and enable radio frequency calibration services for NASA’s LuSEE-Night telescope.

As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload (CLPS) initiative, Firefly’s third mission to the Moon in 2028 will utilise Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, Elytra Dark orbital vehicle, and a rover to investigate the unique composition of the Gruithuisen Domes, a part of the Moon that has never been explored. During mission operations, Elytra will first deploy Blue Ghost into lunar orbit and then remain in orbit to provide long-haul communications. Blue Ghost will then land in the Gruithuisen Domes, deploy the rover, and operate six NASA-sponsored payloads for more than 14 days on the lunar surface, the start-up informed.

Meet Elytra

As part of Firefly’s end-to-end space transportation services, Elytra is offering robust on-orbit solutions when and where customers need them. The start-up’s line of highly mobile and scalable orbital vehicles provides on-orbit transfers, hosting, delivery, and servicing across cislunar space and beyond. Available to launch on Alpha and Eclipse, Elytra can service the entire lifecycle of government and commercial missions.

While Elytra Dawn supports responsive hosting, rideshare, and delivery missions in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and beyond, the lightweight orbital vehicle can be rapidly deployed on Firefly’s Alpha launch vehicle to meet customers’ urgent mission needs. With an upcoming mission in 2025, Elytra Dawn offers multiple on-demand deployment opportunities for rideshare customers.

Next is Elytra Dusk, which supports larger, more advanced on-orbit missions from LEO to GEO (Geostationary Orbit). With enhanced manoeuvrability, power, and autonomy, the intelligent platform offers responsive on-orbit tasking, such as relocation, space domain awareness, and de-orbiting services.

Elytra Dark serves as persistent orbital infrastructure in support of a wide variety of missions from LEO to lunar orbit and beyond. Multiple Elytra Dark vehicles can be coordinated for more advanced space domain awareness and on-orbit servicing.

Autonomous vehicles are ruggedised to support interplanetary transfers and deployments across extreme environments. An iteration of Elytra Dark will serve as the transfer vehicle for Blue Ghost Mission 2, enabling additional customer opportunities for lunar orbit delivery and operations.

Elytra Mission 1, set for a 2025 launch, will demonstrate the responsive on-orbit capabilities of Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle. In support of Xtenti’s (space logistics player) follow-on study contract with the NRO, Elytra will utilise Xtenti’s FANTM-RiDE dispenser to deploy multiple US government and commercial payloads on demand.

Image Credits: Firefly Aerospace

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Using satellite imagery from nearly two decades ago, researchers showed that ship tracks dropped after a new fuel regulation. The International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) 2020 fuel sulphur regulation certainly affected ship track formation. The COVID-19 trade disruptions also contributed.

First, a worldwide climatology of ship tracks was created using powerful computing techniques. They employed AI to automatically identify ship tracks in 17 years of daytime NASA Aqua satellite photos (2003-2020). The top map displays ship tracks as a fraction of the low-level marine cloud layer.

We can’t fully comprehend the situation without a complete and large-scale survey of ship tracks, said NASA’s Tianle Yuan.

In 1960s weather satellite photos, ship tracks appeared as “anomalous cloud lines.” Ship exhaust aerosols combine with water vapour to generate smog. Highly concentrated droplets scatter more light than non-polluted marine clouds seeded by sea salt. The above natural-color picture from December 7, 2021, shows a pattern of ship tracks crossing each other off North America’s Pacific coast.

IMO’s 2020 global regulation capped sulphur at 0.5% (down from 3.5%), changing ship exhaust’s chemical and physical composition. Fewer sulphur emissions mean fewer ship-tracking aerosol particles.

Similar but locally specified sulphur controls, like the IMO Emission Control Area off the west coast of the US and Canada, have not had the desired effect because operators have changed their routes and planned longer trips to avoid designated zones.

According to researchers, ship-track density declined in every significant maritime corridor in 2020. (See map) Ship-tracking data show that the COVID-19 pandemic cut the amount of shipping by 1.4% over a few months. This adjustment alone couldn’t explain the drop in recorded ship tracks, which remained low through 2021. The new worldwide fuel regulations reduced ship tracks in 2020, researchers found.

Tianle Yuan and colleagues observed that economic activity changes leave distinct fingerprints on satellite data. Trans-Pacific ship track patterns reflect trade troughs and increases. A general trend in shipping activity between 2003 and 2013—reflected in ship-track clouds—reversed for nearly a year after the 2008 global financial crisis. A more significant decline between 2014 and 2016 presumably reflected Chinese raw material and commodity imports and exports.

Ship tracks can be used as climate change case studies. “Ship tracks are ideal natural laboratories for researching the interplay between aerosols and low clouds. This is a critical climatic uncertainty right now,” Tianle Yuan said.

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So, how do companies in Houston prepare for the inevitable?  Many fortune 500 companies, like those trained in sustainability by the Centre for Sustainability and Excellence (CSE), are based in Houston.  Dominated by the energy industry, retail, clothing, communications, finance, transportation, and software sectors are also represented.

More and more frequently, these major companies are hiring sustainability professionals: employees, managers, directors, and VPs to oversee Sustainability Strategy to deal with challenges locally and internationally.  Houston itself has a hard-working Office of Sustainability, a Sustainability Indicators Project and a city Sustainability Action Plan which includes emissions reduction, clean water, efficient infrastructure, and resiliency.

As the need in Houston expands, whether due to population growth or weather concerns, those trained in a focused sustainability methodology will be leading the way.  During its most recent Houston training, CSE partnered with NASA sustainability practitioners to present NASA’s commitment to and sustainability evolution at the Johnson Space Center.

Regardless of where you work, expertise or sector, being prepared to embed social responsibility within an organisation opens a wide range of job opportunities.

As companies are forced to rebuild from disaster, mitigate for the inevitable and design strategies to take Houston into the 2020s, training becomes key.  Module 1 of CSE’s Certified Sustainability (CSR) Practitioner Program addresses the crucial business case for sustainability.  Modules 2 and 3 look at local and international legislation and standards.  By the time attendees reach Module 8, they are ready to apply important skills to the future trends identified by CSE’s field experts and ongoing research.

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The Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA’s Scott Tingle, Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is scheduled to dock to the space station’s Rassvet module at 3:43 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 19. Coverage of docking will begin at 3 a.m. on NASA Television and the agency’s website, followed at 5 a.m. by coverage of the opening of hatches between the spacecraft and station.

The arrival of Tingle, Shkaplerov and Kanai will restore the station’s crew complement to six. They will join Expedition 54 Commander Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos and his crewmates, Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA. The crew members will spend more than four months conducting approximately 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences and technology development.

Vande Hei, Acaba and Misurkin are scheduled to remain aboard the station until February 2018, and Tingle, Shkaplerov and Kanai are scheduled to return to Earth in April.

This crew continues the long-term increase in crew size on the U.S. segment from three to four, allowing NASA to maximize time dedicated to research on the space station. Highlights of upcoming investigations include demonstrating the benefits of manufacturing fiber optic filaments in a microgravity environment, a new study looking at structures that are vital to the design of advanced optical materials and electronic devices and examining a drug compound and drug delivery system designed to combat muscular breakdown in space or during other prolonged periods of disuse, such as extended bed rest on Earth.

For more than 17 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space. A global endeavor, more than 200 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 2,100 research investigations from researchers in more than 95 countries.

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The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers ‘learn’. In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.

NASA hosted a Reddit Ask Me Anything at 3 p.m. EST yesterday on this discovery.

“Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them,” said Paul Hertz, Director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington. “This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come.”

The discovery came about after researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained a computer to learn how to identify exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler – the minuscule change in brightness captured when a planet passed in front of, or transited, a star. Inspired by the way neurons connect in the human brain, this artificial ‘neural network’ sifted through Kepler data and found weak transit signals from a previously-missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, in the constellation Draco.

While machine learning has previously been used in searches of the Kepler database, this research demonstrates that neural networks are a promising tool in finding some of the weakest signals of distant worlds.

Other planetary systems probably hold more promise for life than Kepler-90. About 30 percent larger than Earth, Kepler-90i is so close to its star that its average surface temperature is believed to exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, on par with Mercury. Its outermost planet, Kepler-90h, orbits at a similar distance to its star as Earth does to the Sun.

“The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system. You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer,” said Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow and astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.

Shallue, a senior software engineer with Google’s research team Google AI, came up with the idea to apply a neural network to Kepler data. He became interested in exoplanet discovery after learning that astronomy, like other branches of science, is rapidly being inundated with data as the technology for data collection from space advances.

“In my spare time, I started googling for ‘finding exoplanets with large data sets’ and found out about the Kepler mission and the huge data set available,” said Shallue. “Machine learning really shines in situations where there is so much data that humans can’t search it for themselves.”

Kepler’s four-year dataset consists of 35,000 possible planetary signals. Automated tests, and sometimes human eyes, are used to verify the most promising signals in the data. However, the weakest signals often are missed using these methods. Shallue and Vanderburg thought there could be more interesting exoplanet discoveries faintly lurking in the data.

First, they trained the neural network to identify transiting exoplanets using a set of 15,000 previously-vetted signals from the Kepler exoplanet catalogue. In the test set, the neural network correctly identified true planets and false positives 96 percent of the time. Then, with the neural network having ‘learned’ to detect the pattern of a transiting exoplanet, the researchers directed their model to search for weaker signals in 670 star systems that already had multiple known planets. Their assumption was that multiple-planet systems would be the best places to look for more exoplanets.

“We got lots of false positives of planets, but also potentially more real planets,” said Vanderburg. “It’s like sifting through rocks to find jewels. If you have a finer sieve then you will catch more rocks but you might catch more jewels, as well.”

Kepler-90i wasn’t the only jewel this neural network sifted out. In the Kepler-80 system, they found a sixth planet. This one, the Earth-sized Kepler-80g, and four of its neighboring planets form what is called a resonant chain – where planets are locked by their mutual gravity in a rhythmic orbital dance. The result is an extremely stable system, similar to the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Their research paper reporting these findings has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. Shallue and Vanderburg plan to apply their neural network to Kepler’s full set of more than 150,000 stars.

Kepler has produced an unprecedented data set for exoplanet hunting. After gazing at one patch of space for four years, the spacecraft now is operating on an extended mission and switches its field of view every 80 days.

“These results demonstrate the enduring value of Kepler’s mission,” said Jessie Dotson, Kepler’s project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “New ways of looking at the data – such as this early-stage research to apply machine learning algorithms – promises to continue to yield significant advances in our understanding of planetary systems around other stars. I’m sure there are more firsts in the data waiting for people to find them.”

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This work was performed through the Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship Program executed by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute.

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The policy calls for the NASA administrator to ‘lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.’ The effort will more effectively organize government, private industry, and international efforts toward returning humans on the Moon, and will lay the foundation that will eventually enable human exploration of Mars.

“The directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery,” said President Trump. “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints — we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

The policy grew from a unanimous recommendation by the new National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, after its first meeting Oct. 5. In addition to the direction to plan for human return to the Moon, the policy also ends NASA’s existing effort to send humans to an asteroid. The president revived the National Space Council in July to advise and help implement his space policy with exploration as a national priority.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, America will lead in space once again on all fronts,” said Vice President Pence. “As the President has said, space is the ‘next great American frontier’ – and it is our duty – and our destiny – to settle that frontier with American leadership, courage, and values. The signing of this new directive is yet another promise kept by President Trump.”

Among other dignitaries on hand for the signing, were NASA astronauts Sen. Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt, Buzz Aldrin, Peggy Whitson and Christina Koch. Schmitt landed on the moon 45 years to the minute that the policy directive was signed as part of NASA’s Apollo 17 mission, and is the most recent living person to have set foot on our lunar neighbor. Aldrin was the second person to walk on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Whitson spoke to the president from space in April aboard the International Space Station and while flying back home after breaking the record for most time in space by a U.S. astronaut in September. Koch is a member of NASA’s astronaut class of 2013.

Work toward the new directive will be reflected in NASA’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget request next year.

“NASA looks forward to supporting the president’s directive strategically aligning our work to return humans to the Moon, travel to Mars and opening the deeper solar system beyond,” said acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot. “This work represents a national effort on many fronts, with America leading the way. We will engage the best and brightest across government and private industry and our partners across the world to reach new milestones in human achievement. Our workforce is committed to this effort, and even now we are developing a flexible deep space infrastructure to support a steady cadence of increasingly complex missions that strengthens American leadership in the boundless frontier of space. The next generation will dream even bigger and reach higher as we launch challenging new missions, and make new discoveries and technological breakthroughs on this dynamic path.”

A piece of Moon rock was brought to the White House as a reminder of the exploration history and American successes at the Moon on which the new policy will build. Lunar Sample 70215 was retrieved from the Moon’s surface and returned by Schmitt’s Apollo 17 crew. Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission to land astronauts on the Moon and returned with the greatest amount of rock and soil samples for investigation.

The sample is a basaltic lava rock similar to lava found in Hawaii. It crystallized 3.84 billion years ago when lava flowed from the Camelot Crater. Sliced off a parent rock that originally weighed 8,110 grams, the sample weighs 14 grams, and is very fine grained, dense and tough. During the six Apollo surface excursions from 1969 to 1972, astronauts collected 2,196 rock and soil samples weighting 842 pounds. Scientific studies help us learn about the geologic history of the Moon, as well as Earth. They help us understand the mineral and chemical resources available to support future lunar exploration.

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Orbital ATK’s eighth contracted cargo delivery flight to the station launched at 7:19 a.m. EST on an Antares rocket from Pad 0A at Wallops, and is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station Tuesday, Nov. 14.

This is the fifth flight of an enhanced Cygnus spacecraft, and the second using Orbital ATK’s upgraded Antares rocket. The spacecraft for this mission is named in honor of Gene Cernan, the last human to step foot on the Moon. Cernan, who passed away in January at age 82, set records for both lunar surface extravehicular activities and the longest time in lunar orbit.

Expedition 53 astronauts Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) and Randy Bresnik of NASA will use the space station’s robotic arm to grapple Cygnus, about 4:50 a.m. Tuesday. Cygnus will remain at the space station until Dec. 4, when the spacecraft will depart the station and deploy several CubeSats before its fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere as it disposes of several tons of trash.

The resupply mission will support dozens of new and existing investigations as Expeditions 53 and 54 contribute to about 250 science and research studies.

Highlights from the new experiments will include studies on antibiotic resistance, high-speed data transmission, plant growth and improved power and communication technologies.

The E. coli AntiMicrobial Satellite (EcAMSat) mission will investigate the effect of microgravity on the antibiotic resistance of E. coli, a bacterial pathogen responsible for urinary tract infection in humans and animals. Antibiotic resistance could pose a danger to astronauts, especially since microgravity has been shown to weaken human immune response. The experiment will expose two strains of E. coli to three different doses of antibiotics; one of these strains is deficient in the gene responsible for the increased antibiotic resistance in microgravity. Results from this investigation could help determine appropriate antibiotic dosages to protect astronaut health during long-duration missions and help us understand how antibiotic effectiveness may be increased in microgravity, as well as on Earth.

The Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) project will study high-speed optical transmission of data and small spacecraft proximity operations. It will test functionality of laser-based communications using CubeSats that provide a compact version of the technology.

Results from OCSD could lead to significantly enhanced communication speeds between space and Earth and a better understanding of laser communication between small satellites in low-Earth orbit.

The Biological Nitrogen Fixation in Microgravity via Rhizobium-Legume Symbiosis (Biological Nitrogen Fixation) investigation examines how low-gravity conditions affect the nitrogen fixation process of Microclover, a resilient and drought tolerant legume. The nitrogen fixation process, a process by which nitrogen in the atmosphere is converted into a usable form for living organisms, is a crucial element of any ecosystem necessary for most types of plant growth. This investigation could provide information on the space viability of the legume’s ability to use and recycle nutrients and give researchers a better understanding of this plant’s potential uses on Earth.

As space exploration increases, so will the need for improved power and communication technologies. The Integrated Solar Array and Reflectarray Antenna (ISARA), a hybrid solar power panel and communication solar antenna that can send and receive messages, tests the use of this technology in CubeSat-based environmental monitoring. ISARA may provide a solution for sending and receiving information to and from faraway destinations, both on Earth and in space.

For more than 17 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space. A global endeavor, more than 200 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 2,100 research investigations from researchers in more than 95 countries.

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Liftoff aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Space Launch Complex 2W is targeted for 1:47 a.m. PST (4:47 a.m. EST) at the opening of a 65-second launch window. JPSS, a collaborative effort between NOAA and NASA, represents significant technological and scientific advancements in observations used for severe weather prediction and environmental monitoring.

JPSS satellites circle Earth from pole-to-pole and cross the equator 14 times daily providing full global coverage twice a day. Polar satellites are considered the backbone of the global observing system.

NOAA’s National Weather Service uses JPSS data as critical input for numerical forecast models, providing the basis for mid-range forecasts. These forecasts enable emergency managers to make timely decisions to protect American lives and property, including early warnings and evacuations.

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“It was my pleasure today to attend the first meeting of the new National Space Council. The council includes government leaders from civil and military space, and the group also heard from space industry leaders. The council has historic roots in the earliest days of the Space Age, and it has been established by the president to streamline and coordinate national space policy.

“The council is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, who continues to demonstrate extraordinary interest in our work. In fact, he recently visited the Marshall Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center and the Kennedy Space Center. He addressed the workforce at our centers with great passion and introduced our new astronaut candidates class. At today’s meeting he made it clear that space is a national priority.

“The vice president also announced a call for renewed U.S. leadership in space – with a recommendation to the president that NASA help lead and shape the way forward. Specifically, NASA has been directed to develop a plan for an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system, returning humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.

“The recommendation to the president would modify the existing National Space Policy to provide focus and direction to some of NASA’s current activities and plans, and remove a previous guideline that NASA should undertake a human mission to an asteroid as the next human spaceflight milestone beyond low-Earth orbit. The National Space Council acknowledged the strategic importance of cis-lunar space — the region around the Moon — which will serve as a proving ground for missions to Mars and beyond and advance our stepping stone approach to going farther into the solar system. Based on a number of conversations I’ve had with the council, we have highlighted a number of initiatives underway in this important area, including a study of an orbital gateway or outpost that could support a sustained cadence of robotic and human missions, as well as ensuing human missions to the lunar and Mars surfaces, and other destinations.

“The direction builds on the hard work we have already been doing on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, our efforts to enable our commercial partners and work with our international partners in low-Earth orbit at the International Space Station, and what we have been learning from our current robotic presence at the Moon and Mars. It adds further definition to the exploration plan we have been implementing, and strengthens and provides a context for studies and planning efforts underway across our human spaceflight, science and technology directorates. Among new areas, we will work with industry and the international community on robotic lunar landers that explore the nature of the Moon and its resources, such as water.

“We have already been planning human missions to cis-lunar space beginning with Exploration Mission-2, and with the upcoming budget process, we will look to solidify this work with our new goals in place.

“Working in close coordination across government through the new National Space Council, and with our commercial and international partners, we are going to chart a new future in space with opportunities for all.”

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