2026 space calendar

August 2026

• August 12
  Skywatching

  Total solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain

  The Moon's shadow crosses the Arctic, eastern Greenland, western Iceland, and northern Spain, clipping a corner of Portugal on the way out. Totality runs up to 2 minutes 18 seconds. Iceland has not had one since 1954 and mainland Spain not since 1905. Europe, Africa, and parts of North America get a partial eclipse the same day. source

• August 12-13
  Skywatching

  Perseid meteor shower peaks under a new moon

  The year's most-watched shower peaks with no moonlight at all: the new moon falls on August 12, the same day as the solar eclipse. The nominal peak rate is about 100 meteors per hour in ideal conditions, and 50 to 75 per hour is a realistic count from a dark site in the hours before dawn. source

• August 27-28
  Skywatching

  Deep partial lunar eclipse

  Earth's umbra covers 93 percent of the full Moon at greatest eclipse, close enough to total that most of the disk turns copper. The partial phase lasts 3 hours 18 minutes. The Americas get the whole event on the night of August 27; Europe and Africa catch it near moonset on the 28th. source

• August 30
  Mission

  Roman Space Telescope launches

  NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to lift off at 7:26 a.m. EDT on a Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center, bound for the Sun-Earth L2 point. Its 2.4 meter mirror matches Hubble's, but the field of view is at least 100 times wider, which is what makes a survey of dark energy and a statistical census of exoplanets practical. NASA says the launch is coming about nine months ahead of schedule. source

September 2026

• September 3
  Mission

  BepiColombo drops its transfer module

  The Mercury Transfer Module that has provided cruise propulsion since 2018 separates, leaving the two science orbiters to coast into Mercury capture in November. source

• September 12
  Mission

  Crew-13 launches to the International Space Station

  Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney of NASA fly with Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral. NASA pulled the flight forward from November to keep station crew rotations on their usual cadence after Artemis II. source

• September
  Mission

  JUICE swings past Earth

  ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer comes back to Earth for a gravity assist, the third of the four flybys in its cruise plan. One more Earth pass follows in January 2029, and the spacecraft reaches Jupiter in July 2031. source

October 2026

• October 4
  Anniversary

  Sputnik 1: 69 years of the Space Age

  The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite on October 4, 1957, a 58 cm sphere whose radio beeps could be heard by amateurs worldwide. source

• October 4
  Skywatching

  Saturn at opposition

  Saturn sits opposite the Sun, rising at sunset and staying up all night at its brightest for the year. The rings are still tilted only a few degrees to our line of sight as they reopen after the March 2025 ring plane crossing, so they show as a narrow ellipse rather than the wide one of a few years ago. source

• October 21-22
  Skywatching

  Orionid meteor shower peaks

  Dust from Halley's Comet gives about 20 meteors per hour at best. The Moon is roughly 80 percent full at the peak in 2026, so expect a lower count than that. source

November 2026

• November 2
  Anniversary

  26 years of continuous human presence in orbit

  Expedition 1 docked with the International Space Station on November 2, 2000. Someone has lived off Earth every day since. source

• November 16-17
  Skywatching

  Leonid meteor shower peaks

  A quiet year for the Leonids at about 15 meteors per hour, with the Moon around 45 percent full. The shower only turns dramatic in the years when Earth runs through a fresh dust trail from comet Tempel-Tuttle. source

• November 18
  Mission

  Voyager 1 reaches one light-day from Earth

  At 2:16 a.m. PST the probe will be 16,094,799,096 miles (25,902,068,356 km) out, the distance light covers in a day. Nothing built by people has been that far before. A command sent at that moment takes 24 hours to arrive, and any answer another 24 to come back. source

• November 21
  Mission

  BepiColombo enters orbit around Mercury

  The joint ESA and JAXA mission is captured by Mercury, ending an eight-year cruise whose arrival slipped 11 months after a 2024 thruster fault. The two orbiters separate on December 9-10, and science operations begin in April 2027. source

• November
  Mission

  ESCAPADE burns for Mars

  NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes, built by Rocket Lab and launched on New Glenn in November 2025, have spent a year looping in the space near Earth. An engine burn at low perigee this month, which gets extra efficiency out of the Oberth effect, sends them on toward a September 2027 arrival at Mars. source

• November
  Mission

  Hera arrives at the DART impact site

  ESA's Hera spacecraft reaches the Didymos and Dimorphos asteroid pair about a month ahead of the original plan, four years after NASA's DART deliberately struck the moonlet, to measure the crater and the orbit change up close. source

December 2026

• December 3
  Mission

  Europa Clipper swings past Earth

  NASA's Europa Clipper takes a gravity assist from Earth, the second of the two planetary flybys that shape its trajectory after Mars in March 2025. It reaches Jupiter in April 2030. source

• December 13-14
  Skywatching

  Geminid meteor shower peaks

  The strongest annual shower peaks overnight with up to 120 meteors per hour under dark skies. A thin crescent moon sets by mid-evening, leaving the prime midnight-to-dawn window moonless. source

• December 14
  Anniversary

  54 years since humans last stood on the Moon

  Apollo 17's Gene Cernan climbed back into the lunar module on December 14, 1972. The Artemis program plans to end the drought with a crewed south pole landing in 2028. source

Dates to watch

Confirmed missions that do not have a firm date yet. They move up into the calendar as soon as one is announced.

• Starship Flight 14Targeted for the end of August 2026

  The first attempt to put Starship in orbit, and the first try at catching the ship back at the tower, which still needs FAA approval for the expanded landing zone. Flight 13 flew on July 24 and splashed down intact after deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites. source

• Chang'e 7 to the lunar south polePlanned for the second half of 2026

  China's orbiter, lander, rover, and hopper stack arrived at the Wenchang launch site in April and flies on a Long March 5. The hopper is the part that matters: it is meant to jump into permanently shadowed ground near Shackleton Crater and look for water ice. source

• New Glenn return to flightCompany goal: before the end of 2026

  Blue Origin is rebuilding Launch Complex 36 after a booster exploded during a May 28 static fire, and is moving to a pad design that raises the rocket vertically rather than replacing the transporter-erector destroyed in the blast. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has said pad recovery could instead run to 2028. source

• Blue Moon MK1 lunar landing attemptAwaiting New Glenn's return to flight

  Blue Origin's first robotic lander, Endurance, came through thermal vacuum testing at Johnson Space Center and is now waiting on its rocket. It is bound for the area near Shackleton Crater. source

• Neutron's first flightNo earlier than Q4 2026

  Rocket Lab's reusable medium-lift rocket slipped to late 2026 after a tank qualification failure in January. source

• MMX sample return to PhobosLaunch window opens late 2026

  JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration probe has been at Tanegashima since the spring, waiting on an H3 and on the transfer window to Mars that opens once every 26 months. It would bring back the first sample ever collected in the Mars system. source

• First Amazon Leo launch on VulcanNo earlier than September 2026

  ULA's first flight for the constellation, carrying 45 satellites on a version of Centaur V reworked for low orbit. It also serves as a certification flight for that configuration. source

• Commercial lunar landersSecond half of 2026

  Astrobotic's Griffin-1, carrying Astrolab's FLIP rover, and Intuitive Machines' IM-3, headed for the Reiner Gamma magnetic swirl, are both working toward launches before the end of the year. Neither has a firm date. source

• Virgin Galactic Delta test flightsGlide flights planned for Q3 2026

  Flight testing of the new Delta-class spaceplane starts with glide flights, and the company expects rocket-powered flights to space in Q4. Private passengers follow six to eight weeks behind the research missions, which puts most of the waiting list into 2027. source

• Starliner-1 cargo flightNo earlier than Q4 2026

  Boeing's uncrewed cargo run doubles as the validation flight for the fixes made after Crew Flight Test. It was retargeted from April 2026, and Boeing says the remaining constraint is finding a slot in the station's schedule. source

Earlier in 2026

• Jan 15Crew-11 returns early because of a crew member's medical concern
• Jan 30Blue Origin pauses New Shepard tourist flights for at least two years
• Feb 12Ariane 64 debuts, lofting 32 Amazon Leo satellites
• Feb 13Crew-12 launches to the International Space Station
• Apr 1-10Artemis II carries four astronauts around the Moon, the first crewed lunar flight since 1972
• Apr 19New Glenn reflies a recovered booster for the first time
• May 22Starship V3 debuts on Flight 12 with Raptor 3 engines
• May 28A New Glenn booster explodes during a static-fire test, damaging its launch pad
• Jun 9NASA names the Artemis III crew for 2027 docking tests
• Jul 20Viking 1's first successful Mars landing turns 50
• Jul 24Starship Flight 13 deploys 20 Starlink V3 satellites and survives its splashdown intact