Nicole Junkermann on Space Exploration’s New Era: Crewed Flights, the Moon and SpaceX’s Starship

Byline: Nicole Junkermann

From routine Crew Dragon flights to Starship’s first trip to orbit, SpaceX has changed what space exploration looks like this decade. Nicole Junkermann’s writing on space looks at what that progress means for the people who make the journey and for everyone on the ground.

At 11:10 Eastern time on the morning of October 1, 2026, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida with four astronauts from three space agencies on board. That evening their capsule, Crew Dragon Grace, docked with the International Space Station. Crew-13 was the 21st crewed orbital flight of a Crew Dragon, and for most people it registered as an ordinary Thursday news item. That ordinariness is one of the biggest changes in space exploration this decade. It’s also the change at the center of Nicole Junkermann’s thinking about space: what happens once reaching orbit stops being rare.

On May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley flew to the station on SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission. It was the first crewed orbital launch from American soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011, and the first time a commercially built and operated spacecraft had carried astronauts to orbit. Dragon has since flown regular NASA crew rotations and opened orbit to private crews as well. Inspiration4, in September 2021, was the first orbital mission with an all-civilian crew. Polaris Dawn, in September 2024, included the first commercial spacewalk. Fram2, in 2025, became the first crewed flight to circle Earth over its poles. Nicole Junkermann’s writing on space keeps returning to this widening of access, and private crew flights are one of its most visible results.

SpaceX is among the companies NJF Capital, the venture arm of Nicole Junkermann’s NJF Holdings, has invested in, as her personal website notes. Her technology journal calls her association with SpaceX the clearest example of frontier engineering in her work. What Nicole Junkermann writes about space, though, keeps coming back to people, and to who gets the chance to take part.

Reusable Rockets Opened the Door

In a note on space technology and its promise, Nicole Junkermann points out that for decades the toughest part of space was getting off the ground at all. The price of each launch decided who could fly and how much they could attempt. As launches have become cheaper and more frequent, she argues, the field has turned more experimental and far more open, and universities and small teams now put their own instruments in orbit.

Falcon 9 shows what that looks like in practice. Its first stages fly back and land on drone ships or landing zones, then fly again. Booster B1067 first flew in June 2021, sending a Dragon cargo capsule to the space station, went on to launch two astronaut crews, and on August 25, 2026, completed its 37th flight. SpaceX flew 165 Falcon 9 missions in 2025, its busiest year yet. It’s a practical example of the shift Nicole Junkermann describes.

The same rockets carry exploration far beyond Earth orbit. In October 2024 a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched NASA’s Europa Clipper toward Jupiter, where it will study the ice-covered moon Europa and the ocean scientists believe lies beneath its surface when it arrives in 2030. In March 2025 Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, which had launched on a Falcon 9, touched down on the Moon and began its science work. For Nicole Junkermann, missions like these show how much more becomes possible once reaching space stops being the hard part.

Starship and the Return to the Moon

SpaceX’s next step is Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, built to be fully reusable. The program has moved quickly. In October 2024 the launch tower at Starbase, Texas, caught a returning Super Heavy booster with its mechanical arms. On September 28, 2026, Starship reached orbit for the first time on its 14th flight and deployed 26 Starlink satellites. At the time of writing, SpaceX is preparing a 15th flight that aims to catch the ship as well as the booster. Starship is the sort of frontier engineering Nicole Junkermann’s technology journal has in mind when it points to SpaceX.

The Moon is where Starship’s exploration work begins. NASA selected SpaceX in April 2021 to develop a version of Starship as a crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, and in February 2026 SpaceX said it would focus on building a lasting presence on the Moon before sending people to Mars. A lander that size is designed to carry far more equipment and supplies to the lunar surface than Apollo ever could, which opens the door to longer stays and much bigger experiments. It’s the kind of decades-long project Nicole Junkermann’s writing tends to favor.

Mars and the worlds beyond it remain the longer dream. In a short video on the future of space travel and new worlds, Nicole Junkermann asks whether people might one day call more than one planet home. She treats it as an open question worth exploring, and her hope is that dreaming about new worlds goes hand in hand with caring for this one.

Nicole Junkermann on Keeping People at the Center

Nicole Junkermann’s note on space measures its promise in human terms. She tends to describe its benefits through ordinary people, such as farmers, city planners and scientists, who make better decisions because of what orbit shows them. Human spaceflight fits that view in a very direct way. Research on the International Space Station, which Dragon serves with both crew and cargo flights, studies how the human body, materials and medicines behave in microgravity, and that work feeds back into life on Earth.

Nicole Junkermann also takes a long view. Her personal website quotes her saying, “What interests me isn’t what’s popular today,” and her focus is on what will still matter ten years from now. Space exploration runs on even longer clocks. Europa Clipper won’t reach Jupiter for another few years, and a permanent base on the Moon will take far longer than that to build.

As seen recently, a motivational video by Nicole was published about space and space exploration.

Elsewhere on the same site, she sums up her outlook in a single line: “Progress only matters if it is human led and human shaped.” In The Human Code, her April 2026 essay on the principles behind her work, Nicole Junkermann wrote that a more capable future “will only be worth building if it also remains more human.” Crews from several countries now ride SpaceX rockets to orbit on a regular schedule, and Starship is being built to take astronauts back to the Moon. Both fit the kind of progress Nicole Junkermann describes, with people still at the center of it.