The National Space Society invites you to the next Space Forum
Thursday, December 11, 2025, 9:00 pm to 10:15 pm EST
Space 2025 Year In Review
With special guest
Larry Boyle
Vice President, Chicago Society for Space Studies
Join us for one of the National Space Society’s most anticipated annual events—the 2025 Year in Space Review, presented by longtime NSS Space Forum speaker Larry Boyle. Each December, we step back and look at the milestones that shaped our journey beyond Earth. This year’s review spans record-setting achievements, international missions, scientific breakthroughs, and new rockets that are reshaping how humanity explores space.
Human spaceflight saw both celebration and expansion.
On Nov 2, 2025, NASA and its international partners marked 25 continuous years of human presence aboard the International Space Station, a living laboratory that has hosted more than 290 people from over 20 nations. New missions—such as Axiom Mission 4, featuring astronauts from the U.S., India, Poland, and Hungary—demonstrated the growing diversity of crews heading to orbit. Spacewalk records were broken, and taikonauts aboard Tiangong conducted an ambitious series of EVAs as China continued to expand its capabilities.
2025 was a dynamic year on the Moon.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program achieved its strongest performance yet with Firefly’s Blue Ghost M1 delivering NASA and commercial payloads to Mare Crisium. Other missions, including IM-2 and Hakuto-R Mission 2, faced partial setbacks, underscoring both the challenge and accelerating pace of lunar exploration. The year also saw hard lessons, including the loss of NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer.
Across the Solar System, spacecraft delivered new discoveries.
NASA’s Lucy revealed its first new asteroid target, while China launched Tianwen-2, an ambitious asteroid-sample and comet-rendezvous mission. At Mars, the twin ESCAPADE probes began their cruise, first entering a staging orbit around the Sun–Earth L₂ point before transferring to Mars to study the planet’s interaction with the solar wind. Meanwhile, in June, missions like Solar Orbiter captured the first ever off-ecliptic images of the Sun’s south pole.
Launch activity reached unprecedented levels.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn flew twice in 2025, achieving a successful booster landing on its second attempt. These flights, along with ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, JAXA’s H3, and China’s new Long March 8A and Zhuque-3 rockets, contributed to a worldwide total of more than 280 successful launches. The Eastern Range capped the year with a record-setting 100th launch in November.
From human spaceflight to deep-space science, 2025 was a year defined by ambition, innovation, and global partnership. Join us as Larry Boyle takes us through the stories that shaped it!
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Larry Boyle was the President of the CSSS between 1989 and 2002 and is now the Vice-President. The CSSS started in 1977. He was a reference librarian at the Franklin Park Public Library, which allowed him to research the events in the world’s space programs. Now retired, Larry has been interested in the U.S. space program since childhood. He went to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the Apollo 17 launch to the Moon in 1972 and attended a launch of the space shuttle. He received his Library Degree at Rosary College and a BS from Loyola University in Chicago. Larry’s hallmark presentation has been his Space: The Year in Review program which he has been giving since 1979.
Register today to reserve your seat and ask your questions. Use the link below.
Register no later than December 11 at 8 pm EST
