It's launch day for Artemis II
The mission will take four astronauts on a 10-day test trip around the moon.
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Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The View from Space.
🗓️ It’s launch day for Artemis II. Some 400,000 people are packed on beaches and causeways in Florida to witness ‘a fiery spectacle not seen in almost 54 years: a fully crewed Nasa rocket heading back to the moon’, the Guardian reports:
‘The launch of Artemis II, scheduled for 6.24pm ET if weather and any late technical gremlins grant their consent, marks the first time since the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972 that humans will have left lower Earth orbit.
“The nation, and the world, has been waiting a long time to do this again,” Reid Wiseman, a veteran Nasa astronaut and the Artemis II commander, told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday as the crew of three Americans and one Canadian arrived to enter quarantine ahead of launch.
Their 10-day test flight, which will not land on the moon, is a mission packed with milestones. Two of the crew, Nasa’s Christina Koch and Victor Glover, will become respectively the first woman and first person of color to fly into cislunar space, the area between Earth’s orbit and the moon.’
💰 Changes to NASA’s Artemis mission have left Europe ‘holding the bag’, reports Payload Space:
‘NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman this week proposed widespread changes to the Artemis program—at the expense of years of hard work, and millions of euros invested by the European space sector into the lunar Gateway station, which is now no longer part of the US lunar return plan.
While several international partners contributed hardware to Gateway, ESA and European space primes were developing many of the key components of the planned lunar orbiting station, including: Lunar I-Hab, one of two habitation modules designed to house future Artemis crew members; the Lunar View module, which would provide refueling for the station’s power and propulsion element, cargo logistics, and viewing ports for future crew members; the Lunar Link telecommunications element of the Gateway, to enable comms links between the Gateway station and lunar surface hardware and personnel.
Additional contributions as subcontractors for elements of the HALO module, as well as countless subcomponents and capabilities. (ESA is also contributing a European Service Module for the Orion spacecraft designed to fly Artemis astronauts to and from lunar orbit.)
Collectively, these projects cost Europe hundreds of millions of euros—with big contracts going to Thales Alenia Space, Airbus, Redwire, and Beyond Gravity. Now, international partners are thinking about how their investments can contribute to NASA’s lunar base plans.’
🇪🇺 The European Union is boosting funding and redirecting its space program towards military and security uses in what could make Brussels the central driver of European space policy, according SpaceNews:
‘The report, titled “A Geopolitical Awakening: The European Union and Space,” argues that a potential doubling or tripling of EU space spending — alongside rising national and European Space Agency budgets — could accelerate Europe’s long-standing push for “strategic autonomy” in space.
The European Union, a bloc of 27 countries with its own budget and regulatory authority, already funds and oversees a growing portfolio of satellite systems used across the continent. In July, the European Commission proposed a 2028–2034 budget that would increase defense and space spending fivefold to roughly $150 billion over seven years.
Gleason describes Europe’s space ecosystem as divided among three centers of power: the EU, intergovernmental organizations such as the European Space Agency and EUMETSAT, and national space programs.
He says that balance is expected to shift.
The EU is evolving into “the central political and financial driver of European space,” while ESA remains the technical backbone and individual countries retain control over military capabilities, the report says.”’
🌿 Kayrros announced the launch of its biodiversity platform, reports ESG Today:
‘According to Kayrros, the new platform aims to address the finance sector’s biodiversity “blind spot” typified by fragmented and incomplete data that limits investors’ ability to assess nature-related risks and meet evolving regulatory requirements. As biodiversity regulation accelerates, including TNFD, SFDR, CSRD and France’s Article 29, financial institutions are facing growing pressure to integrate measurable biodiversity metrics into investment decision-making.
The company said that its platform is designed to address this gap by utilizing machine learning, satellite imagery and geospatial data to deliver nature impact insights at the individual asset level. The platform provides up-to-date metrics, enabling investors to integrate biodiversity risks into due diligence, portfolio construction and reporting.’
🚀 PayloadSpace reports that SpaceX’s Transporter-16 sent 119 payloads, including from ICEYE, K2 and Unseenlabs, to orbit:
‘SpaceX’s Transporter-16 mission lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base this morning, bringing 119 payloads to orbit on the company’s first rideshare mission of 2026. Many of the satellites and payloads on board T-16 are joining growing EO constellations. …
The future isn’t all visual, however, and T-16 is also bringing up a pool of sats focused on RF sensing, with many payloads aiming to provide better situational awareness over the oceans. Communications technologies on orbit are rapidly advancing, and the launch brought a handful of payloads pushing the technological envelope on comms.
And as with past Transporter rideshares, many of the payloads onboard are catching a secondary ride through the growing pool of orbital transfer vehicles and reentry spacecraft.’
💰 The FT reports that venture capitalists are ‘pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into start-ups planning to launch AI systems into space’, after Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang poured rocket fuel on the idea in recent weeks.
‘Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin are both working on projects to launch AI data centres made up of thousands of satellites into orbit, while Nvidia this month unveiled new AI chips designed to work in space.
That has helped drive investor interest in US start-ups Starcloud and Aetherflux, which are also developing solar-powered orbital AI data centres.
The companies’ planned systems would handle requests sent from terrestrial users to AI apps such as ChatGPT or Claude Code, beaming the responses back to Earth. In the coming years, advocates believe AI computers in space could operate more cheaply than comparable systems on Earth.’
⏳ And you can watch the Artemis II launch countdown here: