The famous annual South by Southwest festival, known as SXSW, kicks off in Austin, Texas on Friday (March 7).
If you’re in the neighborhood, this year’s nine-day event features a number of panels and guests that space enthusiasts will enjoy.
The 2050 Track focuses on “big-picture thinking” and scientific discovery, with plenty of space-related themes. We picked out four awesome panels to check out at SXSW 2025.
Meet the astronauts flying on NASA’s Artemis 2 moon mission
March 7 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. CST, Austin Convention Center, Ballroom EF
Four astronauts will appear for the “Meet the Astronauts Going to the Moon with NASA’s Artemis 2” panel. Pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and commander Reid Wiseman, all from NASA, as well as mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, will talk to guests about their upcoming mission to fly past the moon— the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The uncrewed Artemis 1 mission launched to lunar orbit in November 2021 to collect engineering and radiation data, which ensured that the Space Launch System megarocket and Orion spacecraft can safely carry humans on the Artemis 2 lunar flyby mission. The earliest that Artemis 2 will launch is April 2026. The astronauts will fly near the moon aboard Orion to collect data that will help the next mission, Artemis 3, send astronauts to the moon’s surface in 2027.
Related: NASA’s Artemis program: Everything you need to know
Learn about Europe’s Euclid ‘dark universe’ space telescope
March 10 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. CST; Austin Marriott Downtown, Waterloo Ballroom 1-2
Experts from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will come together to discuss the Euclid space telescope‘s fascinating work for the “Using ESA’s Euclid Telescope To Probe The Dark Universe” panel. Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on July 1, 2023, Euclid is the first space telescope built with the purpose of helping scientists understand the invisible parts of the universe: dark energy and dark matter.
Over the Euclid mission’s expected six-year lifespan, the spacecraft will chart over 1.5 billion galaxies, generating a massive dataset for astrophysicists to study. Euclid recently discovered an “Einstein ring,” a ring of light created when a distant object, like a galaxy, becomes distorted by gravity. The light-forming Einstein ring that Euclid snapped a photo of had been traveling to us for about 4.4 billion years.
The panel’s experts are senior research scientist Jason Rhodes (NASA/JPL), research associate Guadalupe Canas Herrera (ESA), multimedia lead for the NASA’s Astrophysics Division Elizabeth Landau, and postdoctoral researcher Marco Bonici (University of Waterloo).
The era of the private moon lander
March 10 at 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST; Austin Marriott Downtown, Waterloo Ballroom 1-2
This panel, called “A Fast and Furious Return to the Moon,” examines the role that private companies are playing in moon missions. That role is getting bigger and bigger; on Sunday morning (March 2), for example, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost spacecraft became the second commercial craft to land on the moon, delivering 10 NASA science payloads to the Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) region of the lunar near side.
Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft was the first private lander to survive its lunar touchdown, doing so in February 2024. The Houston-based company’s second lander, named Athena, just arrived in lunar orbit ahead of a Thursday (March 6) touchdown try. And yet another private lander — Resilience, built by Tokyo-based ispace — is en route to the moon, on a long and looping path that should get it there in late May or early June.
Participants in the March 10 SXSW panel include Firefly CEO Jason Kim and Regina Blue, the deputy programmatic manager for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS for short. CLPS books rides for agency science gear on private landers. Blue Ghost is flying under the CLPS banner, like Odysseus and Athena (though Resilience is not).
Telescopes of the future
March 9 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. CST; Austin Marriott Downtown, Waterloo Ballroom 3
John Mulchaey, Carnegie Science’s deputy for science and the Carnegie Observatories’ director and chair, will lead a discussion on the march of progress for telescopes, both on the ground and in space, during the “Talking Telescopes: The Future of American Observation” panel. Guests can expect to learn about how global collaboration and investment play an important role in the telescopes of the future.
In recent telescope news, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope, which will map the sky in 3D, is scheduled to launch March 4, with a livestream of the action. The James Webb Space Telescope is hunting for dark matter, and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope just provided important data to help scientists determine that a potentially problematic asteroid’s trajectory will probably miss Earth. If you’re looking to skygaze on your own, here are our 2025 picks for the best telescopes.
