What is flying right now, from low Earth orbit to interstellar space
This is our overview of the active space missions in 2026: crewed stations, Mars rovers and orbiters, lunar spacecraft, deep space probes and observatories, from NASA, ESA, China, Japan, India and others. Each card gives the launch date and status as of our last review (date at the bottom of the page). Use the filters to narrow by destination.
Looking for something specific? See current Mars missions, active deep space missions by destination, crewed missions and who is in space, upcoming missions to 2030, or our independent explainer on Boeing's Starliner.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen flew Orion around the far side of the Moon and back: the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first to carry a non-American (Hansen, of the Canadian Space Agency) to deep space.
The permanently crewed laboratory in low Earth orbit, with crews rotating on SpaceX Crew Dragon and Soyuz. NASA plans to operate it through 2030 and then de-orbit it. Who flies there, and recent crewed missions →
China's three-module station, supplied by Shenzhou crew ships and Tianzhou cargo ships. In November 2025 a debris strike cracked a Shenzhou-20 window, and China launched an uncrewed replacement spacecraft as the station's lifeboat.
Starliner's Crew Flight Test carried Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS, but thruster failures and helium leaks led NASA to return the capsule empty. The crew came home on SpaceX Crew-9 on 18 March 2025. NASA said in November 2025 that the next flight would carry cargo only. Full Starliner explainer →
Searching for signs of ancient life and sealing rock cores for possible return to Earth. Its helicopter, Ingenuity, made 72 flights before rotor damage ended its mission in January 2024.
Climbing Mount Sharp and reading its layered rocks as a record of how Mars changed from wet to dry. Still working more than 14 years after landing.
Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Hope and Tianwen-1. NASA lost contact with MAVEN in December 2025. Every Mars mission, with status →
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter maps candidate Artemis landing regions, joined by India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, South Korea's Danuri and China's Queqiao-2 relay. Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 (March 2025) completed its two-week surface mission; Intuitive Machines' IM-2 tipped over and ended a day after landing.
The largest space telescope ever flown, studying the first galaxies, star formation and exoplanet atmospheres. In 2025 it produced its first direct-imaging discovery of an exoplanet, TWA 7 b.
The fastest and closest-to-the-Sun spacecraft ever, flying through the solar corona on every close pass since December 2024. The Sun and its missions →
Will make dozens of close flybys of Europa to study its ice shell and the ocean beneath. Flew past Mars in March 2025; Earth flyby in late 2026. Europa →
Europe's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, the first spacecraft planned to orbit a moon other than our own (Ganymede, from 2034).
Juno has mapped Jupiter's interior, magnetic field and polar storms and made close flybys of Ganymede, Europa and Io. Its extended mission was approved through September 2025; its operation after that depended on NASA budget decisions.
Six spacecraft are cruising to or between asteroids. China's Tianwen-2, launched in May 2025, aims to bring back samples of the tiny near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa in 2027. All deep space missions →
Voyager 1 is about 170 AU from the Sun and expected to reach one light-day from Earth around November 2026; Voyager 2 is more than 140 AU away. NASA has been switching off instruments since 2024 to stretch their shrinking power supply.
After Pluto (2015) and Arrokoth (2019), New Horizons is studying the outer heliosphere and distant Kuiper Belt objects.
Two orbiters travelling together to Mercury. A thruster problem in 2024 pushed arrival back by about a year.
Mapping the whole sky in 102 infrared colours to study the early universe, galaxy history and the ices that seed planetary systems. It launched with NASA's PUNCH solar mission.
Highlights include the crewed ISS and Tiangong stations, NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers and seven Mars orbiters, lunar orbiters such as LRO, the James Webb Space Telescope, Parker Solar Probe, Europa Clipper and JUICE heading to Jupiter, asteroid missions such as Psyche, Lucy and Hera, New Horizons, and the two Voyagers in interstellar space.
NASA's active missions include the ISS, Perseverance, Curiosity, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, James Webb, Hubble, TESS, SPHEREx, Parker Solar Probe, Europa Clipper, Psyche, Lucy, OSIRIS-APEX, New Horizons and Voyager 1 and 2. NASA lost contact with MAVEN in December 2025, and Juno's status beyond its 2025 extension depended on budget decisions.
Artemis II, which flew around the Moon from 1 to 10 April 2026. See crewed missions for the full list since 2024.
BepiColombo enters Mercury orbit in November 2026, Hera reaches its asteroid in late 2026, and the Roman Space Telescope launches by May 2027. See upcoming missions.
Last reviewed on 2026-10-03.