September's Space Firsts: Inspiration4, Perseverance, and a Month That Kept Delivering

Last day of September, and it’s worth pausing to take stock of what just happened above our heads, because this was not a quiet month for space.

The headline, obviously, was Inspiration4. SpaceX put four private citizens — no professional astronauts among them — into orbit aboard a Crew Dragon, and they stayed up there for several days before splashing down. This wasn’t a suborbital hop like the Bezos and Branson flights earlier this summer. This was a real orbital mission, flown entirely by private citizens, on a vehicle that a private company built and operates. That’s a genuinely new category of spaceflight, and it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to undersell in the moment because it went smoothly. A crewed orbital mission with no professional crew going off without a hitch is itself the story.

On the robotic side, Perseverance finally got its first confirmed sample of Mars rock into a collection tube. The rover’s first attempt at sample collection back in August came up empty — the rock apparently crumbled in a way that didn’t leave anything in the tube, which was a reminder that even a mission this meticulously engineered can hit surprises on an alien surface. This time it worked. That tube is now sealed and stowed, one of what’s supposed to eventually be dozens, all part of the plan to eventually get Martian material back to Earth via a future retrieval mission. It’s a slow, multi-mission relay race, but every successful sample is a real step in a chain that could end with actual Mars rock in a lab here on Earth.

And behind the scenes, NASA has been finishing up preparations for the Lucy spacecraft, which is slated to launch in October on a mission to the Trojan asteroids — the swarms of small bodies sharing Jupiter’s orbit, leading and trailing the planet. Lucy is going to visit more asteroids than any single mission before it, using a series of gravity assists to hop between targets over more than a decade. It doesn’t get the same attention as a crewed launch, but the science case is compelling: the Trojans are thought to be relatively unaltered relics from the early solar system, so this is close to a fossil-hunting mission using a spacecraft instead of a shovel.

Zoom out and you’ve got commercial crewed spaceflight, robotic exploration of Mars, and outer-solar-system science all advancing in the same four-week span. Add in that the James Webb Space Telescope is still on track for a launch later this year, and you start to see why people keep describing this period as some kind of inflection point for the industry. I’m generally wary of “turning point” framing — it gets applied to almost everything — but between a private orbital crew and a rock finally in a tube on Mars, September earned it.

October’s calendar is already looking busy with Lucy on deck. For now, though, it’s a good month to end on.