NASA plans to return Americans to the moon for the first time in half a century during the Artemis III mission to the lunar south pole, scheduled for September 2026. It’s an ambitious mission profile that calls for several unprecedented maneuvers—and 2025 could provide the first glimpse of how they will play out.
SpaceX’s Starship, sometimes referred to by the company simply as “Ship,” is the largest and most powerful rocket to ever fly. When stacked atop the firm’s Super Heavy booster, it stands nearly 400 feet tall—nearly as high as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines generate close to 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, nearly double NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS).
