Space Technology Mission Directorate

Goddard Space Flight Center
Space Technology Mission Directorate
Technology
Technology Demonstration
NASA and industry partners will fly and operate a commercial robotic arm in low Earth orbit through the Fly Foundational Robots mission set to launch in late 2027. This mission aims to revolutionize in-space operations, a critical capability for sustainably living and working on other planets.
Posted December 2, 2025
Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI)
CoECI News
Get Involved
Opportunities to Contribute to NASA Missions & Get Involved
Prizes, Challenges, & Crowdsourcing News
Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program
Space Technology Mission Directorate
Crater rims are vital landmarks for planetary science and navigation. Yet detecting them in real imagery is tough, with shadows, lighting shifts, and broken edges obscuring their shape. This project invites you to develop methods that can reliably fit ellipses to crater rims, helping advance future space exploration.
Posted November 25, 2025
Centennial Challenges
Artemis
Centennial Challenges News
Earth's Moon
Marshall Space Flight Center
Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program
Space Technology Mission Directorate
By Savannah Bullard One year after winning second place in NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, members of the small business Starpath visited NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of their prize opportunity to test their upgraded lunar regolith excavation and transportation rover in the center’s 20-foot thermal vacuu
Posted September 26, 2025
Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory
Goddard Space Flight Center
Missions
NASA Headquarters
SBIR
Space Technology Mission Directorate
Driving rapid innovation in the American space industry, NASA has awarded Katalyst Space Technologies of Flagstaff, Arizona, a contract to raise a spacecraft’s orbit.
Posted September 24, 2025
Armstrong Flight Research Center
Flight Innovation
Space Technology Mission Directorate
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, is building a new subscale aircraft to support increasingly complex flight research, offering a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to crewed missions.
Posted September 24, 2025
Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC)
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Psyche Mission
Space Communications & Navigation Program
Space Operations Mission Directorate
Space Technology Mission Directorate
Tech Demo Missions
The project has exceeded all of its technical goals after two years, setting up the foundations of high-speed communications for NASA’s future human missions to Mars.
Posted September 18, 2025
Space Technology Research Grants
Space Technology Mission Directorate
NSTGRO Homepage Andrew ArendsUniversity of California, DavisAstronaut-Powered Laundry Machine Allan AttiaStanford UniversityComputational Modeling of Lithium Magnetoplasmadynamic Thruster for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Michael AuthUniversity of California, Santa BarbaraNon-Contact, Real-Time Diagnostics of Battery Aging in 18650 Cells During the L
Posted September 12, 2025
Space Technology Mission Directorate
NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program
Technology
Through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, NASA nurtures visionary yet credible concepts that could one day “change the possible” in aerospace, while engaging America’s innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in the journey.   These concepts span various disciplines and aim to advance capabilities such as finding resources on di
Posted June 23, 2025
Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI)
Johnson Space Center
Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program
Space Technology Mission Directorate
Editor’s note: This release was updated June 6, 2025, to correct the name of one of the awardees. NASA continues to collaborate with global communities to solve complex challenges through crowdsourcing with a series of 25 new NASA Open Innovation Service (NOIS) contracts managed by the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The contract aims […]
Posted June 5, 2025
Game Changing Development Program
Kennedy Space Center
Science Mission Directorate
Space Technology Mission Directorate
NASA’s RASSOR (Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot) manipulates a simulant of regolith – the fragmental material found on the Moon’s surface – during a site preparation test inside of the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 27.
Posted June 3, 2025
Sign up for our newsletter:

Categories

1
1
198
1
10
12
1
1
28
3
1
3
1
1
121
3
1
Io
4
5
4
1
11
169
3
310
1
2
42
21
51
2
2
2
4
6
3
9
265
1
4
6
1
1
2
1
4
214
28
5
10
6
17
6
101
1
5
36
10
1
2
36
1
1
2
5
13
11
1
1
17
1
3
3
571
2
85

Recent Posts

Newsletter Archive