Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy says it's time for the agency to focus on the moon and Mars, not the "smorgasbord of priorities," like climate science, the agency has been directing its resources.

Researchers discovered a new 'tiny' moon using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has directed the agency to fast-track plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon.

South Korea's KASA is just one international space agency that will fly cubesats on the mission; Germany's DLR will also contribute its TACHELES cubesat. While Artemis 2 will send astronauts around the moon, the cubesats will have their own science objectives.

Space exploration is a risky endeavor, and unfortunately not all of the missions sent up will be successful, such was the fate of Lunar Trailblazer.

In a bold, strategic move for the U.S., acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced plans on Aug. 5, 2025, to build a nuclear fission reactor for deployment on the lunar surface in 2030. Doing so would allow the United States to gain a foothold on the moon by the time China plans to land the first taikonaut,

NASA's Artemis 2 mission — the first-ever crewed mission of the Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) — is targeting a liftoff between February and April of 2026. Aboard Orion will be NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Placing an atomic energy source on the lunar surface is “not science fiction,” experts say, but does pose technical challenges.

"Our society is built on technologies that are highly susceptible to space weather," said NASA's Heliophysics Division Director Joseph Westlake in the release. "Just as we use meteorology to forecast Earth's weather, space weather forecasts predict the conditions and events in the space environment that can affect Earth and our technologies."

As of Wednesday, Aug. 20, the moon phase is Waning Crescent, and it is 9% lit up to us on Earth, according to NASA's Daily Moon Observation.