What to Watch in Space and Tech This October

October always feels like the month the science calendar gets crowded, and this one is shaping up to be a doozy. Three things I’m keeping tabs on over the next few weeks: the Nobel Prizes, a genuinely exciting NASA mission, and a Blue Origin flight that might carry the most unexpected passenger yet.

First up, Nobel week starts October 4. Every year around this time the physics, chemistry, and medicine committees start announcing their picks, and every year there’s a scramble to explain to friends and family why some obscure-sounding research on protein folding or quantum whatever actually matters. I’ll be watching physics and chemistry especially closely — both fields have had a run of prizes lately that reward decades-old foundational work finally getting its due, and there’s always a chance of a surprise pick that sends science journalists sprinting to their laptops.

Then there’s Lucy. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral in mid-October, and if you haven’t been following it, you should start. Lucy is headed toward Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids — two swarms of rocky bodies that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, one trailing ahead of the planet and one behind. These are thought to be leftover material from the early solar system, essentially time capsules from 4.5 billion years ago. Lucy is planned to visit several of them over the course of a roughly decade-plus journey, which is an absurd amount of patience to ask of a spacecraft, but that’s deep space exploration for you. Named after the famous hominin fossil, the mission is explicitly framed as being about origins — of the solar system, much like the original Lucy skeleton reshaped our understanding of human origins. I love a good on-the-nose science metaphor.

And then there’s the wildcard: Blue Origin has been teasing a second crewed New Shepard flight this fall, and the rumor mill is churning hard on the idea that William Shatner could be on it. If that actually happens, it’s hard to overstate how fitting it would be — the man who played Captain Kirk, arguably the most famous fictional space traveler in American pop culture, actually leaving Earth’s atmosphere for real. I’d take the rumor with a grain of salt until Blue Origin confirms a crew list, but if it’s true, expect it to dominate headlines for a solid week regardless of what else is happening in space that month.

None of these stories are connected to each other in any meaningful way, but that’s kind of the fun of covering this beat — you get prestigious 90-year-old prizes for foundational physics sitting right next to a spacecraft chasing 4-billion-year-old asteroid rubble, sitting right next to a 90-year-old actor possibly floating in zero gravity for eleven minutes. Buckle up, it’s going to be a good month for space nerds.