NASA Orion Spacecraft, CC-BY-NC 2.0, Creative Commons
Dr. Kent Montgomery, head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M-Commerce, considers the major space projects planned for 2021. One is the DART project, in which NASA and the Japanese space agency are sending a spacecraft to collide with an asteroid, as a way of developing a method of protecting Earth against a disastrous collision. Also, NASA will attempt to land an Orion space capsule on the moon, with plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2024.