Here is a glimpse of what may happen in spaceflight in 2022.
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The Boca Chica area of Texas has a prototype of a spaceship. The rocket has completed one successful test landing, but several other attempts have ended in explosions.
Sometime this coming year, two rockets that have never been to space are expected to lift off.
Both of them are very large and different from two rockets.
The S.L.S. is NASA's interplanetary launch vehicle. Billions of dollars over budget is behind schedule. Each launch costs $2 billion and can only be used once. NASA says it can't get astronauts back to the moon without a giant rocket. The first test flight will be a capsule that will take a person to the moon. Artemis 1 is scheduled to launch in March or April.
The building of Starship is being built by a single company. The company's founder, Elon Musk, wants to send humans to Mars. NASA is planning to land astronauts on the moon. Multiple high-altitude test flights have been completed by the top half of the spaceship. It completed a successful landing. Sometime during the year, a prototype with no crew is set to pair with a large booster stage. When the rocket is launched from Texas, it will head to space before splashing down on the coast of a Hawaiian island.
Russia's Luna-25 lunar lander is one of several that may head for the moon this year.
The next year could be dominated by trips to the moon if missions to Mars were the year. There are at least nine missions from countries and private companies that could attempt to land on the moon.
NASA sponsors five of the others and some have better chances of occurring on time. A small satellite called CAPSTONE could be launched from New Zealand in March by Rocket Lab, which will use it to circle the moon and return to Earth. A future NASA and European moon base would be studied. The work of private companies is being sponsored by NASA. NASA relied on companies like SpaceX to carry cargo to the International Space Station. The first company to attempt the trip may be the Houston company.
The rest of the moon's robotic visitors come from other countries. India may attempt a lunar landing in the summer. Russia wants to land on the moon. A South Korean moon orbiter could be on a rocket in August. A Japanese company, ispace, is working on a landing craft that will carry cargo to the moon. In the thin lunar air, which of these missions sticks to its schedule?
Wang Yaping emerged from the Tianhe module of the space station in November.
China has kept its word about its space program. There is a good chance that the space station will be finished in 2022.
Two different crews of astronauts were sent to live in China in the year 2021. The second crew will come home sometime in 2022, and a laboratory module called Wentian may launch to the space station in the middle of the year. The third piece, the Mengtian lab, could complete the space station later in the year.
The Long March 5B is China's largest rocket. When that rocket re-entered the atmosphere, it startled many people and raised the possibility of injury and damage. It is not clear whether China will change how it is managed after the rocket splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Earthlings could play the game of where will it come down twice more in the year 2022.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test is headed for the asteroid Dimorphos.
NASA plans to deliberately crash into an asteroid. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test is expected to hit Dimorphos, a small rock that is close to Didymos. If a giant space rock is heading toward Earth, some scientists say that humanity's best bet is to divert its path so it misses our world. The data from the DART mission would show the effectiveness of this approach.
There are other asteroids. Psyche, a large object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is made mostly of iron and other metals. Psyche was the core of an object that failed to form into a planet in the early history of the solar system. A NASA science mission named after an object is planned for launch in the summer. Scientists would get their first look at this strange metallic world with the arrival of the spacecraft in the year 2026.
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A guide to the craft.
The New York Times has an interactive section aboutexploring the solar system.
