Every year, NASA's Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge invites student innovators to build and demonstrate concepts that can benefit future human missions to the moon and beyond. This year's theme is "Inflatable Systems for Lunar Operations," which could greatly reduce the mass and stowed volume of payloads sent to the moon.

This is critical for the Artemis Program as it returns astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo Era over fifty years ago. It will also reduce the costs of sending payloads to the moon, Mars, and other deep-space destinations.

The BIG Idea Challenge is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) as part of a collaborative effort between its Game Changing Development (GCD) program and the agency's Office of STEM Engagement. The competition is managed jointly by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) and funded by the GCD and the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Project.

On Oct. 28, 2023, NASA's C-130 Hercules and crew safely touched down at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, after an around-the-globe journey to deliver the agency's Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO). The United States research station, operated by the National Science Foundation, is host to NASA's Antarctic long-duration balloon campaign in which the GUSTO mission will take a scientific balloon flight beginning December 2023.