2025 in space from ESA, KING 5, Business Casual, and the Marsh Family

Today's year-end retrospective is this year's version of 2024, another busy year in space, according to NASA, ESA, Reuters, and New Scientist. Unfortunately, NASA hasn't uploaded a year-end review video, so I'm featuring ESA highlights 2025.

2025 was a landmark year for Europe in space. From celebrating 50 years of ESA to new missions, scientific breakthroughs, the year reaffirmed Europe’s leadership in science, exploration, climate action and innovation.

At least the European Space Agency is still informing the public. I consider NASA not producing an equivalent video about 2025 for YouTube an example of one of 2025's science breakdowns.

KING 5 SEATTLE did provide some NASA footage in A look back at 2025's key moments in space travel.

NASA sets its sights on another lunar landing within the next three years.

I'm looking forward to Artemis II next year.

Business Casual (not the original account) uploaded 2025 Space, in 5 minutes.

From the 3rd interstellar object to enter our solar system, 3I Atlas, to the potential discovery of life on [M]ars, 2025 was groundbreaking year in space exploration.

I think this account is a bit suspect — there is another Business Casual account that is larger and older, but currently inactive — but this is a good montage showing space events around the world, including Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, and others flying on Blue Origin to the edge of space. The Marsh Family sang about that event in "Flight from Earth" - Marsh Family parody of Katy Perry's "Firework" on the Blue Origin space launch.

This is a song about Jeff Bezos’s launch of six female celebrities into zero gravity this week, via his elite suborbital tourism outfit, Blue Origin. In lots of respects it was very slick, exciting, impressive, and a tribute to technological advances, entrepreneurial investment, and the potential of the human species to navigate new frontiers. In lots of other respects it was a bizarre, vacuous, self-indulgent, problematic, transparent PR stunt hiding behind money, reputations, weird notions of girl power, and leaving in its wake a rather foul taste and lots of environmental damage. While we have no issue with the women involved, their quest for exhilaration and a life-altering opportunity etc., we do have issues with the framing and coverage of this joyride – as many others clearly do.

If you want to celebrate women, progress, science, space travel, and the future, surely there are better models and better mechanisms out there? If you have billions of dollars, surely there are better ways you can spend it?

We chose to adapt the anthemic 2010 song “Firework” by Katy Perry – one of Bezos’s invited trail-blazing space tourists – and whatever you think about her, this is a tough song to deliver live! We shared the relentless belts between the three girls. Apologies we forgot to isolate the clicker so you may get some of that too. The original song (co-written with Ester Dean and producers Stargate and Sandy Vee) was on her biggest album Teenage Dream and is on our pump-up football playlist.

I'm not normally this cynical about space, but I couldn't resist.

That's a wrap for today's look at space. Stay tuned for more year-end retrospectives through New Year's Eve.