China and the U.S. are engaged in a new stage of the second space race, and NASA Chief Bill Nelson allegedly attributes our rival’s success to ‘stealing’.

The politics of Earth play out on the Moon, too.

China and Russia’s space agencies are planning a rival to NASA’s Lunar Gateway. Here’s what you need to know about their ambitions and timeline.

Second time’s the charm.

Orbital Flight Test-2 will test @BoeingSpace’s #Starliner spacecraft from launch to docking to return to Earth, providing data to prove it’s ready to fly astronauts. What you need to know: https://go.nasa.gov/3sNEGlI.

Watch starting at 6pm ET (22:00 UTC): https://go.nasa.gov/3NlzX2o

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is “fully deployed,” according to the agency’s science administrator Thomas Zurbuchen — and that’s certainly a reason to celebrate after decades of hard work and a ten billion dollar price tag.

But the massive space observatory isn’t out of the woods just yet. As it spins around the Sun in a chaotic orbit, it will likely encounter plenty of space debris along the way — and an impact, its team says, is likely inevitable.

“Some small impacts from micrometeorites will happen,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Michelle Thaller said during a livestream over the weekend. “You know, over the lifetime of the mission there will be some damage to the mirrors of the telescope.”

Probs just an exterrestial’s ear ring or something 🤔

China’s Yutu-2 rover just won’t stop making — or at least claiming – weird discoveries on the Moon. Case in point, Chinese space authorities now say it’s found several mysterious glass spheres found on the far side of the lunar surface.

The team behind the discovery published a paper about the findings in the journal Science Bulletin, in which they describe the objects as “translucent glass globules.”

The spheres are roughly a centimeter in diameter, they say, and were spotted in images taken by the panorama camera on the Yutu-2 rover on the dark side of the Moon.