Teams from ESA, Airbus, NASA and Lockheed Martin stand before the service module for Artemis III at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Last week, ESA officially handed over its third European Service Module to NASA. The module will power Orion on Artemis III, the mission set to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in over 50 years.

The handover took place on 10 September during the third quarterly European Service Module project meeting of the year at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US. Each European Service Module is the result of thousands of hours of design,

Muscle weakening, bone density loss and an impaired immune system: the systemic health impacts of spaceflight bear many similarities to ageing. Sharon van Rijthoven, a student from Delft University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, compared the effects of ageing and altered gravity from a cellular perspective during her internship at the European Space Agency (ESA).

Cindy Evans, Artemis lead for geology training, and Juliane Gross, Artemis sample curation lead, joined the PANGAEA training in the Lofoten islands, Norway, in july 2025.

From microscopic cosmic dust particles to Apollo-era Moon rocks, these geology nerds take extra care in how samples are handled, documented and stored. They lead geology training and sample curation for Artemis III, the next mission to return humans to the Moon.

Here is what Cindy and Juliane told us after exploring with the PANGAEA crew one of the few locations in the world that shares geological features with the lunar highlands.

Cindy and

A loss of attitude control and an open valve contributed to the loss of Isar Aerospace’s first Spectrum rocket in March as the company gears up for a second flight.

Canada’s Telesat is pitching Lightspeed as a bridge to IRIS² as its LEO broadband constellation is set to come online in 2027, at least three years before Europe’s sovereign multi-orbit network is due to enter service.

CEO says years of scaling up production are paying off as Pentagon ramps constellation orders

EchoStar is looking for ways to expand its communications business as an “asset-light growth company,” CEO Hamid Akhavan said Sept.