Lunar missions once felt like the domain of history books rather than current events, but an upcoming trip around the moon is poised to generate headlines at a level not seen since the Apollo era.

NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, which is due to launch four astronauts on a round-the-moon journey as a warmup for a future lunar landing, is shaping up as the spaceflight highlight of 2026. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who took the agency’s helm this month after a tumultuous year, says it’s the top item on his must-see list.

“What’s not to be excited about?” he said last week on CNBC. “We’re sending American astronauts around the moon. It’s the first time we’ve done that in a half-century. … We’re weeks away, potentially a month or two away at most from sending American astronauts around the moon again.”

The Pacific Northwest plays a significant role in the back-to-moon campaign. For example, L3Harris Technologies’ team in Redmond, Wash., built thrusters for Artemis 2’s Orion crew vehicle. And Artemis 2 isn’t the only upcoming moon mission with Seattle-area connections: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, headquartered in Kent, plans to send an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the lunar surface in 2026 to help NASA get set for future moon trips.

“We are taking our first steps to help open up the lunar frontier for all of humanity,” Paul Brower, Blue Origin’s director of lunar operations, said in a recent LinkedIn post.

2026 could also be the year when Seattle-based Interlune sends its first prospecting instrument to the lunar surface to hunt for signs of helium-3, a rare material the company aims to bring back to Earth for use in fusion reactors or quantum computers.

As we close out 2025, here’s a look back at five of the past year’s space milestones and five trends to watch in the year to come.

Looking back at 2025

Blue Origin goes orbital: After a decade of development, Blue Origin launched its orbital-class New Glenn rocket for the first time in January, on a mission that lofted test equipment for its Blue Ring space mobility platform into orbit. A second launch in November sent NASA’s Escapade probes toward Mars and marked the first successful at-sea recovery of a New Glenn booster. On the suborbital side, Blue Origin’s New Shepard program provided rides to space for seven crews. Notable passengers included Lauren Sanchez, who became Bezos’ wife two months after her flight; Justin Sun, the crypto entrepreneur who paid $28 million for his space ticket; and Michaela Benthaus, the first wheelchair user to fly to space.

Amazon’s satellite network gets down to business: The first operational satellites for Amazon’s space-based broadband internet service were launched in April. The network’s name was changed from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in November. Terminals have been shipped to early-stage customers for a preview program, and the rollout is expected to gather steam in 2026. Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to grow its Starlink network, with more than 9,300 satellites providing high-speed internet service to more than 9 million customers worldwide.

Rubin Observatory delivers first images: A decade and a half ago, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi donated $30 million to support the creation of a giant sky-survey telescope in Chile. in June, the Rubin Observatory finally made its star-studded debut, with Simonyi in attendance. Researchers at the University of Washington played key roles in shepherding the $800 million project to completion.

A first for orbital data centers: Redmond-based Starcloud sent an Nvidia GPU chip into orbit in November, and weeks later it claimed to be the first company to train an artificial intelligence model in space. The achievement marked one small step in Starcloud’s campaign to create a network of data centers in orbit. Several tech titans — including Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Google’s Sundar Pichai — see orbital data centers as a way to satisfy the growing hunger for AI processing resources on Earth. Some say the trend is driving SpaceX’s plans to go public in 2026.

SpaceX’s Starship goes through ups and downs: Many of SpaceX’s ambitions, ranging from orbital data centers to moon landings to Mars migrations, depend on the successful development of its Starship super-rocket. Starship also plays a crucial role in the business models for lots of space startups, including Starcloud and a Seattle-based space travel venture called Orbite. Three Starship test flights ended badly in the first half of 2025, but SpaceX bounced back with two successful test flights in the second half of the year. Now SpaceX is working on an upgraded version of Starship — and dealing with the aftermath of a booster anomaly that occurred during a pressurization test in November.

Looking ahead to 2026

Artemis 2 to send humans around the moon: For the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, humans will leave Earth orbit. The current plan calls for the Artemis 2 mission to take place in the February-to-April time frame. A crew of four — three Americans and one Canadian astronaut — will climb into the Orion spacecraft and be sent into space atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. The round-the-moon route will be similar to the trajectory used for NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 flight in 2022. If Artemis 2 goes well, that could set the stage for an Artemis 3 crewed lunar landing as early as 2027 (but more likely later).

Blue Moon’s lunar delivery: Blue Origin’s uncrewed lander is tasked with delivering a NASA experiment called SCALPSS to the moon’s south polar region. Stereo cameras will document how the landing burn interacts with the dusty lunar surface — and the results will be factored into plans for future landings. This Blue Moon Mark 1 mission will blaze a trail for Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander, which is due to start taking astronauts to the lunar surface in 2030. Other robotic spacecraft scheduled for moon landings in 2026 include China’s Chang’e 7 rover, Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 lander, Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 lander and Astrobotic’s Griffin lander (which will be carrying two mini-rovers and Interlune’s helium-hunting camera).

Seattle space companies count down to liftoff: In addition to Blue Origin, several other companies headquartered near the Emerald City are planning big space missions in 2026. Kent-based Stoke Space could launch its first fully reusable Nova rocket from Florida. Bothell-based Portal Space Systems’ Starburst space vehicle is due to make its orbital debut. And Tukwila-based Starfish Space is scheduled to demonstrate how its maneuverable Otter spacecraft can give satellites an in-space boost.

Golden Dome takes shape: A proposed $175 billion missile defense system known as the Golden Dome is already attracting interest from space ventures — particularly ventures that are focusing on in-space mobility (such as Portal Space and Starfish Space) or in-space data processing (such as Starcloud and Seattle-based Sophia Space). Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics is building an orbital carrier that would serve as a “pre-positioned launch pad in space” for the U.S. Space Force, under the terms of a deal that could be worth as much as $60 million. Other big-ticket military projects are likely to come to light in 2026.

Whither NASA? Or will NASA wither? Isaacman is taking over at NASA following a year of layoffs and science program cuts. He has pledged to land astronauts on the moon during the current presidential term, but funding remains a hurdle. “I almost guarantee you he’s going to be walking up the street to the White House, saying ‘I really need more money,’” NASAWatch’s Keith Cowing said on Israel’s i24 TV.

Bonus: Coming to a sky (or a screen) near you: Keep an eye out for a total lunar eclipse on March 3 that will be visible over the U.S., weather permitting. There’s also a solar eclipse on Aug. 12 that will bring totality to narrow stretches of Greenland, Iceland and Spain. Although this eclipse can’t be seen in Seattle’s skies, you should be able to catch the highlights online.

AI has attracted unprecedented levels of capital and attention. And questions are growing about the so-called AI bubble: Are too many startups chasing the same ideas? Are valuations running ahead of real adoption? And will all this investment pay off — or pop?

GeekWire polled a handful of Seattle-area venture capitalists about whether they think an AI bubble exists, and how startups should prepare as they plan for 2026.

Taken together, the investors paint a picture of a market that is overheated in places, but far from broken. They see clear signs of excess in AI — especially in early-stage private companies where valuations often outpace real traction. But they largely reject the idea of a catastrophic bubble, and most argue that the technology itself is already delivering real value.

They differ on the details: Some see the biggest excess in data center buildouts. Others point to narrative-driven startups raising at huge valuations without real customer traction. One investor puts AI’s full impact 10 to 20 years out. Another sees immediate opportunity as companies rethink their software spending, making longtime vendors vulnerable.

Their advice to startup founders: ignore the hype, focus on real customer problems, build durable revenue and efficient businesses, and be ready for some market cooling.

Read their full responses below.

Sabrina Albert (Wu), partner at Madrona

“There’s clear froth in parts of the AI market, especially in early-stage private valuations where companies are priced well ahead of fundamentals, which fits a classic ‘bubble’ definition. In the public markets, the strongest AI companies are backing valuations with outsized earnings and growth, so it doesn’t look like a traditional bubble there.

The most pronounced exuberance is in the private markets, particularly at seed and Series A, where many investors are trying to get in earlier on AI exposure. As a result, capital is chasing startups with limited traction and valuations that price in outcomes that may take years of execution to justify.

Startups should focus on durable business fundamentals early on. Build repeatable revenue through annual or multi-year contracts, solve real customer problems, and differentiate by integrating deeply into the customer tech stack to create real product and company flywheels. Long-term success comes from delivering measurable value and defensible growth over time.”

Cameron Borumand, general partner at Fuse

“Many factors are at play here. You have a new and genuinely transformative technology in AI. Over the long term, it will radically reshape how nearly every industry operates. At the same time, history tells us that new technologies tend to be overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term. The most profound, fully realized impacts of AI may still be 10-to-20 years away.

In the near term (the next few years), I expect some pullback in the public markets as investors come to terms with the fact that true ‘enterprise readiness’ for AI will take time. This doesn’t suggest anything catastrophic — just that the roughly 21 percent year-over-year growth we’ve seen in the Nasdaq is unlikely to be sustainable and may revert closer to the 30-year average of around 10 percent. After a few meaningful pullbacks, pundits will inevitably claim that AI is overhyped. In reality, this would simply represent a normalization after an extraordinary, AI-fueled run in the public markets.

Late-stage private markets will see some overly hyped companies — this happens in every boom cycle. The winners will be bigger than ever, but the losses will also be bigger than ever. When you have companies like Anthropic growing from $1 billion to a projected $9 billion of revenue in 2025, it’s clear that AI is already delivering real, material impact in the world.

For startups, there’s no better time to be building than now. M&A markets are back, customers have budget, and talent wants to work on interesting projects. With that said, there is a lot of noise, so it’s best to go deep and really focus on a core customer problem. Most of the growth we’ve seen to date is in the infrastructure layer — the next few years will be about the next generation of AI-powered applications.”

Chris DeVore, founding managing partner at Founders’ Co-op

“Yes, a significant amount of capital being deployed globally in AI (and particularly in the data center buildout) is almost certainly being misallocated. Specifically in startups, outside a few presumed winners (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor), the concern is less overcapitalization and more the prices at which financings are being done relative to the actual cash flows and margin potential of the companies being financed.

That said, unlike some recent bubbles I can think of (crypto, metaverse, etc.) there are actual babies in the bathwater this time. LLMs are remarkably capable tools even at their current state of development, and will remain core to many software development and knowledge work tasks long after rationality has returned to the financial landscape.

The founder and investor challenge in moments like the current one is how to make decisions that will look smart ten years from now, not just in the current moment. Are there ways to apply LLMs to create durable business value in segments of the economy that are not likely to be overcapitalized or competed to zero by the near-term flood of dollars? The only alternative strategy is to try to pick winners in the capital wars and pay whatever the market demands for those assets, but history suggests that’s a very low odds proposition for even the best players.

The recipe for success in times like this is not that different from any other time: pick a customer segment that you understand better than anyone else, engage deeply with those customers to understand what problems you can uniquely solve with LLMs that were too hard or expensive to solve previously, build quickly and iteratively to show value to those customers, and maintain that pace of shipping and learning for as long as you can.

That may sound simple, but it’s remarkable how few founding teams are able to pull it off, and that why startups are so hard, and so fun.”

Sheila Gulati, managing director at Tola Capital

“Broadly, I don’t think we’re in an AI bubble right now. Similar concerns existed when we launched the Azure platform about fifteen years ago. Back then, people were initially worried about racing to a zero-margin business. 

Today’s massive AI infrastructure buildouts will shape the operational software layers that drive real-world performance — compute orchestration, data pipelines, memory systems, and large-scale inference efficiency. Value is shifting toward packaging and deploying intelligence across enterprise workflows. 

Enterprise software startups should position themselves in the growing TAM of delivering full, end-to-end solutions and new ways of doing things where humans collaborate with AI agents. Winning startups will encompass both the growing IT TAM and economics of a portion of the labor market as well.

We are now seeing unprecedented malleability of CIO budgets. The deeply entrenched application stack can now shift to new players which are built with AI from the ground up. The market opportunity is massive, and companies should set their sights on building the new megacaps, not minor feature companies.”

Andy Liu, co-founding partner at Unlock Venture Partners

“Yes, we are in an AI bubble, but not in the way most people think.

Capital and valuations are running well ahead of fundamentals, particularly for companies without clear customer pull, durable differentiation, or credible/reasonable paths to profitability. We’re seeing a growing gap between narrative-driven AI companies where ‘AI’ is largely a positioning exercise, and value-driven AI companies that use the technology to deliver measurable, repeatable value for customers.

The bubble seems most pronounced at the early and growth stages where AI storytelling can temporarily substitute for traction and raise capital at lofty valuations. Some strong companies will emerge from this cycle, but there will be meaningful drawdowns, recaps, or shutdowns as many startups fail to grow into those expectations.

Looking ahead to 2026, my advice to founders is straightforward:

• Build real businesses, not decks. Products today can be built quickly with real revenue before raising capital.
• Prioritize efficiency, customer ROI, and unit economics.
• Use AI to create real leverage, not excuses for burning capital.

2026 is going to be an incredible moment to build. The cost of experimentation and building products has collapsed, and founders no longer need educational credentials (CS degrees or an MBA) to create real products and revenue. The next generation of durable AI companies will be built by small teams who focus less on hype and more on efficient execution. We’re definitely excited to see more teams building incredible products this upcoming year.”

Annie Luchsinger, partner at Breakers

“From my perspective, what we’re seeing is less an AI bubble and more a classic venture cycle playing out around a genuinely transformative platform shift. Venture has always adapted to new normals alongside major technology inflections (cloud, mobile, social), and AI is the fastest-moving one we’ve seen to date.

The difference this time is speed, scale, and capital availability. AI adoption is happening at a faster clip and at a much larger scale than prior platform shifts, all while private-market capital has reached historic highs. As those forces collide, pricing, timelines, and investor behavior evolve.

Capital moving ahead of fundamentals is not new. There will be some shakeouts, but that doesn’t mean underlying value creation isn’t happening. Companies with real technology, real distribution, and real customers will endure.”