Employees and their families drove onto Kennedy Space Center grounds before sunrise on January 17 to pick viewing spots near the Vehicle Assembly Building.

NASA planned a wet dress rehearsal for Artemis 2 that would load the SLS with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen and exercise a practice countdown to T-29 seconds.

On January 26, NASA was working toward conducting the Artemis 2 wet dress rehearsal as soon as January 31.

Artemis 2 will be the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972 if it launches as planned.

Artemis 1 required three wet dress rehearsals between April and June and scrubbed its first two launch attempts in late summer because of propellant leaks.

NASA held two days of briefings about Artemis 2 in late September 2025.

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson is the Artemis launch director.

Jared Isaacman was identified at the briefing as NASA administrator during the January 17 rollout event.

John Honeycutt is the Artemis 2 mission management team chair.

A six-week U.S. government shutdown that began October 1 paused communications about the Artemis 2 mission.

Temperatures at Kennedy Space Center during the pre-dawn January 17 rollout were in the low 40s Fahrenheit.

By integrating the uncertainty-aware framework, future satellites can autonomously prioritize high-confidence data for transmission.

Fast AI’s millisecond-range retrieval speeds enable rapid processing of global CO2 measurements while distinguishing true atmospheric signals from measurement noise.

Researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University developed a lightweight machine learning framework that enables satellites to quantify uncertainty in trace gas retrievals in real time.

The shift toward Orbital Edge AI is driven by increasing density of satellite data streams and limited bandwidth for downlinking raw information.

Next-generation climate missions are moving toward providing "answers" rather than just images, increasing the need for on-board data-quality assessment.

The system named "Fast AI" combines probabilistic modeling with ensemble learning to achieve retrieval speeds in the millisecond range per sounding.

The framework maintains high computational efficiency while providing uncertainty estimates suitable for climate science and policy-relevant data assimilation.

The framework was validated using archival data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission covering the period from 2017 to 2024.

Heritage full-physics algorithms required minutes per satellite sounding to process atmospheric greenhouse gas retrievals.

The uncertainty-aware framework was published in the December 26, 2025 issue of the Journal of Remote Sensing.

By owning capacity and controlling encryption on a dedicated Astranis satellite, Oman will ensure continuity of vital services and national security communications without being subject to the data-sharing policies or kill switches of foreign-owned megaconstellations.

Oman’s investment in a dedicated satellite is driven by a mandate for digital sovereignty and concerns about geopolitical instability and vulnerability of undersea fiber-optic cables.

Astranis’ Satellite-as-a-Service model enables smaller nations to deploy a dedicated 400 kilogram geostationary satellite for a fraction of the cost of traditional three-ton spacecraft.

The Oman-Astranis partnership aligns with Oman Vision 2040’s goal to establish the Sultanate as a regional hub for secure geospatial intelligence and communications.

Astranis will manufacture and operate a MicroGEO satellite for Oman under the terms of the agreement.

Industry analysts expect the market to bifurcate between consumer-grade global internet providers and specialized 'statist' providers offering hardware-level isolation as more countries seek defined orbital priorities.

The Oman-Astranis contract is part of a broader early-2026 trend labeled the 'Sovereign-Commercial Nexus' in which governments use commercial satellite buses to achieve rapid national autonomy in space.

France commissioned Loft Orbital on January 21, 2026 to develop the nation’s first sovereign synthetic aperture radar satellite.

The contracted Astranis satellite will provide dedicated bandwidth for Omani national interests outside the control of global telecommunications conglomerates.

Satellogic made a seven-figure commitment on January 8, 2026 for high-frequency sovereign monitoring.

On January 26, 2026, Oman’s MB Group and Astranis Space Technologies Corp. signed a nine-figure agreement for the procurement of a dedicated sovereign communications satellite.

A proposed X-ray telescope under study would use thicker and heavier mirrors to achieve Webb-like sharpness and comparable sensitivity in X-rays.

Origins is a proposed deep-infrared telescope designed to take advantage of superheavy-lift launch capability.

Astronomy gains access to vastly more of the electromagnetic spectrum by placing telescopes above Earth’s atmosphere.

If engineers reduce the cost of a large observatory to half the cost of Webb, NASA could fly two new Great Observatories for the same price.

Dr. Martin Elvis is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

SpaceX’s Starship had a fully successful test on October 13, 2025.

At least three teams are developing large telescopes that would take advantage of superheavy-lift rockets.

Dr. Martin Elvis is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian and has published nearly 500 papers on supermassive black holes.

Dr. Martin Elvis is a Member of the Aspen Center for Physics.

Dr. Martin Elvis’s publications on supermassive black holes have been cited over 38,000 times.

The folding and deployment design of Webb introduced over 300 places where a single mistake could have ended the mission.

A 2025 study proposes GO-LoW, a very low-frequency radio telescope composed of 100,000 tiny telescopes.

If engineers reduce the cost of a large observatory to one-third the cost of Webb, NASA could potentially fly a full spectrum-spanning set of observatories.

Webb’s large mirror was made about ten times lighter in weight per square meter than the Hubble mirror.

The James Webb Space Telescope uses a 6.5-meter-diameter mirror.

The Ariane 5 rocket has a roughly four-meter-diameter payload fairing that required Webb’s mirror to fold for launch.

Telescope mass matters because larger mirrors improve telescope performance.

Superheavy-lift rockets have diameters about twice as wide as the rockets that have been in use for decades.