NEW YORK — A NASA spacecraft will make another close brush with the sun, the second of three planned encounters through the sizzling solar atmosphere.

The Parker Solar Probe made its record-breaking first pass within 3.8 million miles (6 million kilometers) of the scorching sun in December, flying closer than any object sent before.

Plans called for it to attempt that journey again on Saturday. Since the flyby happens out of communication range, the mission team won’t hear back from Parker until Tuesday afternoon.

Parker is the fastest spacecraft built by humans, and is once again set to hit 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) at closest approach.

Launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun, Parker has since flown straight through its crownlike outer atmosphere, or corona.

Scientists hope the data from Parker will help them better understand why the sun’s outer atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles constantly blasting away from the sun.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — It’s lights out for the first private lunar lander to pull off a fully successful moon mission.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander fell silent over the weekend, wrapping up two weeks of science experiments for NASA. The end came as the sun set at the moon, no longer providing energy for the lander’s solar panels.

“Mission is completed,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim said via X late Sunday night. “But the Ghost still lives on in our hearts and minds for the journey it’s taken us on!”

The lander operated five hours into the lunar night as planned before it died Sunday evening. Photos of the lunar sunset and glow will be released on Tuesday, Kim said.

Blue Ghost launched from Cape Canaveral in January as part of NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program. It landed at the moon’s far northeastern edge on March 2. It carried a drill, vacuum and other science and tech instruments for NASA. Firefly confirmed Monday that all 10 experiments worked.

Late last week, Blue Ghost observed a total solar eclipse from the moon — a total lunar eclipse as seen from Earth.

The Texas-based Firefly became the first private company to land on the moon without falling or crashing after a string of failed missions by other companies over the past few years. Only five countries — the United States, Russia, China, India and Japan — have achieved a successful landing.

A Japanese company’s lunar lander shared the SpaceX rocket ride, but took an even longer route to get to the moon. That lander from ispace is targeting an early June touchdown.

Another Texas company, Intuitive Machines, ended up sideways in a crater near the moon’s south pole earlier this month, dooming the mission. It was the second incomplete mission for Intuitive Machines. Its first lander put the U.S. back on the moon last year for the first time since the Apollo era after a less-than-perfect landing that hampered communications.

Firefly is already working on its next lunar lander and striving for one moon landing a year.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Last-minute problems forced a launch delay Monday for SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship, attempting a comeback following an explosion on the last test flight.

The countdown got down to the 40-second mark, but it was halted because of issues with the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket, the world’s largest and most powerful.

Starship was supposed to blast off from the southern tip of Texas with four mock satellites on board for a space-skimming test flight. If the problems can be fixed quickly, another launch attempt could come Tuesday, according to SpaceX.

The last Starship demo ended in an explosion over the Atlantic in January, with flaming debris streaming over the Turks and Caicos.

Starship has already been booked by NASA for astronaut moon landings later this decade. SpaceX’s Elon Musk intends to use the mammoth rockets to settle Mars.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.

“We’re on the moon,” Mission Control reported, adding the lander was “stable.”

A smooth, upright landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Blue Ghost — named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon’s gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.

The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 15-footer (4 meters tall) built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines’ lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.

The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency’s top science officer Nicky Fox.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

Kim said everything went like clockwork.

“We got some moon dust on our boots,” Kim said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.

Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.

Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits.

For this test, the satellite was expected to remain inside the second stage while circling Earth. The mission was expected to last six hours, with the second stage then placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA’s practices for minimizing space junk.

The first-stage booster aimed to land on a barge in the Atlantic minutes after liftoff so it could be recycled.

New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.

Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which honors John Glenn, is five times taller.

Blue Origin poured more than $1 billion into New Glenn’s launch site, rebuilding historic Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pad is 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the company’s control centers and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Bezos — taking part in the launch from Mission Control — declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he does not see Blue Origin in a competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator.

Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, if everything goes well, with the next one coming up this spring.

“There’s room for lots of winners” Bezos said from the rocket factory over the weekend, adding that this was the “very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry … to lower the cost of access to space.”

New Glenn is the latest in a series of big, new rockets to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s upgraded Ariane 6 and NASA’s Space Launch System or SLS, the space agency’s successor to the Saturn V for sending astronauts to the moon.

The biggest rocket of all, at approximately 400 feet (123 meters), is SpaceX’s Starship. Elon Musk said the seventh test flight of the full rocket could occur later Thursday from Texas. He hopes to repeat what he pulled off in October, catching the returning booster at the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.

Starship is what NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. The first two moon landings under the space agency’s Artemis program, which follows the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, will see crews descending from lunar orbit to the surface in Starships.

Blue Origin’s lander, dubbed Blue Moon, will make its debut on the third lunar touchdown by astronauts.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pushed for competing moon landers similar to the strategy to hire two companies to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Nelson will step down when President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Monday.

Trump has tapped tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to run NASA. Isaacman, who has twice rocketed into orbit on his own privately financed SpaceX flights, must be approved by the Senate.

New Glenn’s debut was supposed to send twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. But the space agency pulled them from last October’s planned flight when it became clear the rocket wouldn’t be ready in time. They will still fly on a New Glenn rocket, but not until spring at the earliest. The two small spacecraft, named Escapade, are meant to study the Martian atmosphere and magnetic environment while orbiting the red planet.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Blue Origin called off the debut launch of its massive new rocket early Monday because of technical trouble.

The 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn with a prototype satellite from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. But launch controllers had to deal with an unspecified rocket issue in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time. Once the countdown clock was halted, they immediately began draining all the fuel from the rocket.

Blue Origin did not immediately set a new launch date, saying the team needed more time to resolve the problem.

The test flight already had been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn. It is five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket that carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos founded the company 25 years ago. He took part in Monday’s countdown from Mission Control, located at the rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Orlando, Florida.

No matter what happens, Bezos said Sunday evening, “we’re going to pick ourselves up and keep going.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.