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: Space Center has opened its new Artemis Gateway exhibit featuring a walkthrough mockup of a lunar orbit habitat. Designed by Northrop Grumman and used by NASA to assess the best configuration for the Gateway's Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO), the full-size module is outfitted with science racks, docking ports and astronaut crew quarters. The mockup is one of the first artifacts of the Gateway platform to go on display.
: A parking lot stood in for the moon on Thursday (Nov. 7), as a lunar rover took its first public drive. Intuitive Machines revealed its lunar terrain vehicle for NASA's Artemis program at Space Center Houston. Moon RACER (Reusable Autonomous Crewed Exploration Rover) features a Roush chassis, satellite relay and direct communications, Michelin tires and the sign off (literally) by two of the six Apollo astronauts to drive a car on the moon.
: A large, spinning NASA logo outside of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex inspired the cake for this year's "Taste of Space" culinary evening on Saturday (Nov. 2). Duff Goldman and his team at Charm City Cakes made the half-NASA "cake-ball" so the opposite side of the sphere resembled the moon for the 55th anniversary of the lunar landing. The rotating cake also had a chocolate astronaut and pulled-sugar nebulae.
: Taikonauts Cai Xuzhe, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze are on their way to spending six months on the Tiangong space station after launching on board China's Shenzhou-19 spacecraft on Tuesday (Oct. 29). Cai previously flew on Shenzhou-14 in 2022; his two crewmates are first-time fliers. Wang is the only female flight engineer currently in the taikonaut corps and she is the third Chinese woman to launch into space.
: When Edgar Mitchell lifted off for the moon on Apollo 14 in 1971, he wore his NASA-issued Omega Speedmaster atop his spacesuit and below it, a personal Rolex GMT-Master chronometer. The latter sold for a record $2.2 million at RR Auction on Thursday (Oct. 24). The watch, which can be seen in imagery from the mission, is one of only two moon-flown Rolexes to have been sold and commanded the most paid for an astronaut timepiece.
: NASA's first dexterous humanoid robot to fly into space is now on public display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. Robonaut 2 (R2) demonstrated its ability to assist and take over tasks from astronauts before short circuiting and being returned to Earth for repairs. R2 is exhibited opposite its 2011 ride to orbit, space shuttle Discovery, as a static but intact robot.
: Though the steel installation was in part a tribute to them, only two of the seven original astronauts attended the Nov. 10, 1964, dedication of the Project Mercury Monument at Launch Complex-14 in Cape Canaveral. Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra joined NASA, Air Force and government officials to celebrate the success of the first U.S. human space program. Encased in the landmark is a time capsule not to be opened until 2464.
On Monday (Nov. 4), the U.S. Space Force released the details of its new exhibit of a Centaur III propellant tank and RL-10 engine outside of the headquarters of Space Systems Command at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California. The upper stage components were dedicated at an Oct. 18 ceremony, which hailed the donation by United Launch Alliance and the Centaur's role in launching both U.S. military and civilian space missions.
: Swatch found the inspiration for its latest addition to its Omega collaboration in the photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts. The new MoonSwatch "Mission to Earthphase" features both moon and Earth phase indicators, a first in watchmaking history. The open-edition $325 Bioceramic watch displays both the phase of the moon as it appears from Earth and Earth as it appears if viewed from the lunar surface at the same time.
How good are you at recognizing astronauts? Would you be able to tell a real space traveler from an actor if the person in question was wearing a costume spacesuit? What if they were in a TV commercial, but never named? Have you seen Capital One's ad about a school's Career Day? Did you see former shuttle and space station astronaut Karen Nyberg standing next to baseball star Derek Jeter? "What's in your wallet?"
: After almost three weeks of weather waive offs atop an already extended mission, Crew-8 is back on Earth after 235 days in space. Matthew Dominick, Michael Barrett and Jeanette Epps of NASA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Pensacola, on Friday (Oct. 25). The mission was almost a month longer than the longest time a SpaceX Dragon has been in space.
: Blue Origin's 27th New Shepard mission to cross the boundary between Earth and space was the first flight of the RSS Kármán Line, the company's 2nd human-rated capsule. The suborbital launch Wednesday (Oct. 23) lofted 12 payloads, including a small stack of miniature monoliths modeled after the monuments in "2001: A Space Odyssey." The flown black slabs will be mounted on the covers of a new deluxe edition of the book.
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