Jan 5 2023
What’s next for batteries

Every year the world runs more and more on batteries. Electric vehicles passed 10% of global vehicle sales in 2022, and they’re on track to reach 30% by the end of this decade. 

Policies around the world are only going to accelerate this growth: recent climate legislation in the US is pumping billions into battery manufacturing and incentives for EV purchases. The European Union, and several states in the US, passed bans on gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035. 

The transition will require lots of batteries—and better and cheaper ones. 

Most EVs today are powered by lithium-ion batteries, a decades-old technology that’s also used in laptops and cell phones. All those years of development have helped push prices down and improve performance, so today’s EVs are approaching the price of gas-powered cars and can go for hundreds of miles between charges. Lithium-ion batteries are also finding new applications, including electricity storage on the grid that can help balance out intermittent renewable power sources like wind and solar. 

But there is still lots of room for improvement. Academic labs and companies alike are hunting for ways to improve the technology—boosting capacity, speeding charging time, and cutting costs. The goal is even cheaper batteries that will provide cheap storage for the grid and allow EVs to travel far greater distances on a charge.

At the same time, concerns about supplies of key battery materials like cobalt and lithium are pushing a search for alternatives to the standard lithium-ion chemistry. 

In the midst of the soaring demand for EVs and renewable power and an explosion in battery development, one thing is certain: batteries will play a key role in the transition to renewable energy. Here’s what to expect in 2023.

A radical rethink

Some dramatically different approaches to EV batteries could see progress in 2023, though they will likely take longer to make a commercial impact.

One advance to keep an eye on this year is in so-called solid-state batteries. Lithium-ion batteries and related chemistries use a liquid electrolyte that shuttles charge around; solid-state batteries replace this liquid with ceramics or other solid materials. 

This swap unlocks possibilities that pack more energy into a smaller space, potentially improving the range of electric vehicles. Solid-state batteries could also move charge around faster, meaning shorter charging times. And because some solvents used in electrolytes can be flammable, proponents of solid-state batteries say they improve safety by cutting fire risk. 

Solid-state batteries can use a wide range of chemistries, but a leading candidate for commercialization uses lithium metal. Quantumscape, for one, is focused on that technology and raised hundreds of millions in funding before going public in 2020. The company has a deal with Volkswagen that could put its batteries in cars by 2025.  

But completely reinventing batteries has proved difficult, and lithium-metal batteries have seen concerns about degradation over time, as well as manufacturing challenges. Quantumscape announced in late December it had delivered samples to automotive partners for testing, a significant milestone on the road to getting solid-state batteries into cars. Other solid-state-battery players, like Solid Power, are also working to build and test their batteries. But while they could reach major milestones this year as well, their batteries won’t make it into vehicles on the road in 2023. 

Solid-state batteries aren’t the only new technology to watch out for. Sodium-ion batteries also swerve sharply from lithium-ion chemistries common today. These batteries have a design similar to that of lithium-ion batteries, including a liquid electrolyte, but instead of relying on lithium, they use sodium as the main chemical ingredient. Chinese battery giant CATL reportedly plans to begin mass-producing them in 2023. 

Sodium-ion batteries may not improve performance, but they could cut costs because they rely on cheaper, more widely available materials than lithium-ion chemistries do. But it’s not clear whether these batteries will be able to meet needs for EV range and charging time, which is why several companies going after the technology, like US-based Natron, are targeting less demanding applications to start, like stationary storage or micromobility devices such as e-bikes and scooters. 

Today, the market for batteries aimed at stationary grid storage is small—about one-tenth the size of the market for EV batteries, according to Yayoi Sekine, head of energy storage at energy research firm BloombergNEF. But demand for electricity storage is growing as more renewable power is installed, since major renewable power sources like wind and solar are variable, and batteries can help store energy for when it’s needed. 

Lithium-ion batteries aren’t ideal for stationary storage, even though they’re commonly used for it today. While batteries for EVs are getting smaller, lighter, and faster, the primary goal for stationary storage is to cut costs. Size and weight don’t matter as much for grid storage, which means different chemistries will likely win out. 

One rising star in stationary storage is iron, and two players could see progress in the coming year. Form Energy is developing an iron-air battery that uses a water-based electrolyte and basically stores energy using reversible rusting. The company recently announced a $760 million manufacturing facility in Weirton, West Virginia, scheduled to begin construction in 2023. Another company, ESS, is building a different type of iron battery that employs similar chemistry; it has begun manufacturing at its headquarters in Wilsonville, Oregon.

Shifts within the standard

Lithium-ion batteries keep getting better and cheaper, but researchers are tweaking the technology further to eke out greater performance and lower costs.

Some of the motivation comes from the price volatility of battery materials, which could drive companies to change chemistries. “It’s a cost game,” Sekine says.

Cathodes are typically one of the most expensive parts of a battery, and a type of cathode called NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) is the dominant variety in EV batteries today. But those three elements, in addition to lithium, are expensive, so cutting some or all of them could help decrease costs. 

This year could be a breakout year for one alternative: lithium iron phosphate (LFP), a low-cost cathode material sometimes used for lithium-ion batteries. 

Recent improvements in LFP chemistry and manufacturing have helped boost the performance of these batteries, and companies are moving to adopt the technology: LFP market share is growing quickly, from about 10% of the global EV market in 2018 to about 40% in 2022. Tesla is already using LFP batteries in some vehicles, and automakers like Ford and Volkswagen announced that they plan to start offering some EV models with the chemistry too.

Though battery research tends to focus on cathode chemistries, anodes are also in line to get a makeover.

Most anodes in lithium-ion batteries today, whatever their cathode makeup, use graphite to hold the lithium ions. But alternatives like silicon could help increase energy density and speed up charging.

Silicon anodes have been the subject of research for years, but historically they haven’t had a long enough lifetime to last in products. Now though, companies are starting to expand production of the materials.

In 2021, startup Sila began producing silicon anodes for batteries in a wearable fitness device. The company was recently awarded a $100 million grant from the Department of Energy to help build a manufacturing facility in Moses Lake, Washington. The factory will serve Sila’s partnership with Mercedes-Benz and is expected to produce materials for EV batteries starting in 2025.

Other startups are working to blend silicon and graphite together for anodes. OneD Battery Sciences, which has partnered with GM, and Sionic Energy could take additional steps toward commercialization this year.  

Policies shaping products

The Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed in late 2022, sets aside nearly $370 billion in funding for climate and clean energy, including billions for EV and battery manufacturing. “Everybody’s got their mind on the IRA,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials researcher at MIT and founder of multiple battery companies.

The IRA will provide loans and grants to battery makers in the US, boosting capacity. In addition, EV tax credits in the law incentivize automakers to source battery materials in the US or from its free-trade partners and manufacture batteries in North America. Because of both the IRA’s funding and the EV tax credit restrictions, automakers will continue announcing new manufacturing capacity in the US and finding new ways to source materials.

All that means there will be more and more demand for the key ingredients in lithium-ion batteries, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel. One possible outcome from the IRA incentives is an increase in already growing interest around battery recycling. While there won’t be enough EVs coming off the road anytime soon to meet the demand for some crucial materials, recycling is starting to heat up.

CATL and other Chinese companies have led in battery recycling, but the industry could see significant growth in other major EV markets like North America and Europe this year. Nevada-based Redwood Materials and Li-Cycle, which is headquartered in Toronto, are building facilities and working to separate and purify key battery metals like lithium and nickel to be reused in batteries. 

Li-Cycle is set to begin commissioning its main recycling facility in 2023. Redwood Materials has started producing its first product, a copper foil, from its facility outside Reno, Nevada, and recently announced plans to build its second facility beginning this year in Charleston, South Carolina.

With the flood of money from the IRA and other policies around the world fueling demand for EVs and their batteries, 2023 is going to be a year to watch.

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Jan 4 2023
What’s next for the chip industry

The year ahead was already shaping up to be a hard one for semiconductor businesses. Famously defined by cycles of soaring and dwindling demand, the chip industry is expected to see declining growth this year as the demand for consumer electronics plateaus.

But concerns over the economic cycle—and the challenges associated with making ever more advanced chips—could easily be eclipsed by geopolitics.

In recent months, the US has instituted the widest restrictions ever on what chips can be sold to China and who can work for Chinese companies. At the same time, it has targeted the supply side of the chip industry, introducing generous federal subsidies to attract manufacturing back to the US. Other governments in Europe and Asia that are home to major chip companies have introduced similar policies to maintain their own positions in the industry.  

As these changes continue to take effect in 2023, they will throw a new element of uncertainty into an industry that has long relied on globally distributed supply chains and a fair amount of freedom in deciding who they do business with.

What will these new geopolitical machinations mean for the more than $500 billion semiconductor industry? MIT Technology Review asked experts how they think it will all play out in the coming year. Here’s what they said.

The great “reshoring” push

The US committed $52 billion to semiconductor manufacturing and research in 2022 with the CHIPS and Science Act. Of that, $39 billion will be used to subsidize building factories domestically. Companies will be able to officially apply for that funding in February 2023, and the awards will be announced on a rolling basis. 

Some of the funding could be used to help firms with US-based factories manufacture military chips; the US government has long been concerned about the national security risks of sourcing chips from abroad. “Probably more and more manufacturing would be reinstated within the US with the purpose to rebuild the defense supply chain,” says Jason Hsu, a former legislator in Taiwan who is currently researching the intersection of semiconductors and geopolitics as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Hsu says that defense applications are likely one of the main reasons the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC decided to invest $40 billion in manufacturing five- and three-nanometer chips, currently the two most advanced generations, in the US. 

But “reshoring” commercial chip production is another matter. Most of the chips that go into consumer products and data centers, among other commercial applications, are produced in Asia. Moving that manufacturing to the US would be likely to push up costs and make chips less commercially competitive, even with government subsidies. In April 2022, TSMC founder Morris Chang said that chip manufacturing costs in the US are 50% higher than in Taiwan. 

“The problem is going to be that Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia—they’re going to buy the chips manufactured in the US—are going to have to figure out how to balance those costs, because it’s going to still be cheaper to source those chips in Taiwan,” says Paul Triolo, a senior vice president at the business strategy firm Albright Stonebridge, which advises companies operating in China.

If chip companies can’t figure out how to pay the higher labor costs in the US or keep getting subsidies from the government—which is hard to guarantee—they won’t have an incentive to keep investing in US production in the long term.

And the United States is not the only government that wants to attract more chip factories. Taiwan passed a subsidy act in November to give chip companies large tax breaks. Japan and South Korea are doing the same.

Woz Ahmed, a UK-based consultant and former chip industry executive, expects that subsidies from the European Union will also be moving along in 2023, although he says they likely won’t be finalized until the following year. “It’ll take them a lot longer than it will [take] the US, because of the horse trading amongst all the member states,” he says.

Navigating a newly restricted market

The controls the US introduced in October on the export of advanced chips and technologies represented a major escalation in the stranglehold on China’s chip industry. Rules that once barred selling this advanced tech to a few specific Chinese companies were expanded to apply to virtually all entities in China. There are also novel measures, like restricting the sale of essential chipmaking equipment to China.

The policies put the industry in uncharted enforcement territory. Which chips and manufacturing technologies will be considered “advanced”? If a Chinese company makes both advanced and older-generation chips, can it still source US technologies for the latter? 

The US Department of Commerce answered some questions in a Q&A at the end of October. Among other things, it clarified that less advanced chip production lines can be spared the restrictions if they are in a separate factory building. But it’s still unclear how—and to what extent—the rules will be enforced. 

We’ll see this play out in 2023. Chinese companies will likely look for ways to circumvent the rules. At least one has already tried to make its chips seem less advanced. Non-Chinese companies will also be motivated to find work-arounds—the Chinese market is gigantic and lucrative. 

“If you don’t have enough enforcement people on the ground, or they can’t get the access, as soon as people realize that, lots of people will break the rules,” Ahmed says.

Several experts believe that the US may hit China with yet more restrictions this year. Those rules may take the form of more export controls, a review process for outbound US investments, or other moves targeting chip-adjacent industries like quantum computing. 

Not everyone agrees. Chris Miller, an international history professor at Tufts University, thinks the US administration may take a break and focus on the current restrictions. “I don’t expect major expansion of export controls on chips [in 2023],” says Miller, the author of the new book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “The Biden administration spent most of the first two years in office working on those restrictions. I think they are hoping that the policy sticks and they don’t have to make changes to it for some time.”

How China will respond

So far, the Chinese government has had little response to the new US export controls except for some diplomatic statements and a legal dispute that it filed with the World Trade Organization, which is unlikely to yield much result. 

Will there be a more dramatic response to come? Most experts say no. China doesn’t seem to have a big enough advantage within the chips sector to significantly hit back at the US with trade restrictions of its own. “The Americans own enough of the core technology that they can [use it] against people who are downstream in the supply chain, like the Chinese. So by definition, that means [China doesn’t] have tools for retaliation,” says John Lee, the director of East West Futures Consulting. 

But the country does control 80% of the world’s refining capacity for rare-earth materials, which are essential in making both military products like parts for fighter jets and everyday consumer device components like batteries and screens. Restricting exports could provide China with some leverage. The Chinese could also choose to sanction a few US companies, whether in the chip industry or not, to send a message.

But so far, China doesn’t seem interested in a scorched-earth path when it comes to semiconductors. “I think the Chinese leaders realized that that approach will be just as costly to China as it would be to the US,” says Miller. The current Chinese chip industry cannot survive without working with the global supply chain—it depends on other companies in other countries for lithography machines, core chip IP, and wafers, so avoiding aggressive retaliation that further poisons the business environment is “probably the smartest strategy for China,” he says. 

Instead of hitting back at the US, China is likely to focus more on propping up the domestic chip industry. It’s been reported that China may announce a trillion yuan ($143 billion) support package for domestic companies as soon as the first quarter of 2023. Offering generous subsidies is a tried and tested method that has helped boost the Chinese semiconductor industry in the last decade. But there remains the question of how to allocate that funding efficiently and to the right companies, especially after the efficiency of China’s flagship government chip investment fund was questioned in 2022 and shaken by high-level corruption investigations. 

The Taiwan question

The US doesn’t call all the shots. To pull off its chip tech blockade, it must coordinate closely with governments controlling key processes of chipmaking that China can’t replace with domestic alternatives. These include those of the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

That won’t be as easy as it sounds, because despite their ideological differences with China, these places also have an economic interest in maintaining the trade relationship.

The Netherlands and Japan have reportedly agreed to codify some of the US export control rules in their own countries. But the devil is in the fine print. “There are certainly voices supporting the Americans on this,” says Lee, who’s based in Germany. “But there’re also pretty strong voices arguing that to simply follow the Americans and lockstep on this would be bad for European interests.” Peter Wennink, CEO of Dutch lithography equipment company ASML, has said that his company “sacrificed” for the export controls while American companies benefited.

Fissures between countries may grow bigger as time goes on. “The history of these tech restriction coalitions shows that they are complex to manage over time and they require active management to keep them functional,” Miller says.

Taiwan is in an especially awkward position. Because of their geographical proximity and historical relationship, its economy is heavily entangled with that of China. Many Taiwanese chip companies, like TSMC, sell to Chinese companies and build factories there. In October, the US granted TSMC a one-year exemption from the export restrictions, but the exemption may not be renewed when it expires in 2023. There’s also the possibility that a military conflict between Beijing and Taipei would derail all chip manufacturing activities, but most experts don’t see that happening in the near term. 

“So Taiwanese companies must be hedging against the uncertainties,” Hsu says. This doesn’t mean they will pull out from all their operations in China, but they may consider investing more in overseas facilities, like the two chip fabs TSMC plans to build in Arizona. 

As Taiwan’s chip industry drifts closer towards the US and an alliance solidifies around the American export-control regime, the once globalized semiconductor industry comes one step closer to being separated by ideological lines. “Effectively, we will be entering the world of two chips,” Hsu says, with the US and its allies representing one of those worlds and the other comprising China and the various countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Africa where China is pushing for its technologies to be adopted. Countries that have traditionally relied on China’s financial aid and trade deals with that country will more likely accept the Chinese standards when building their digital infrastructure, Hsu says.

Though it would unfold very slowly, Hsu says this decoupling is beginning to seem inevitable. Governments will need to start making contingency plans for when it happens, he says: “The plan B should be—what’s our China strategy?”

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future.

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Dec 24 2022
What’s next for AI

In 2022, AI got creative. AI models can now produce remarkably convincing pieces of text, pictures, and even videos, with just a little prompting.

It’s only been nine months since OpenAI set off the generative AI explosion with the launch of DALL-E 2, a deep-learning model that can produce images from text instructions. That was followed by a breakthrough from Google and Meta: AIs that can produce videos from text. And it’s only been a few weeks since OpenAI released ChatGPT, the latest large language model to set the internet ablaze with its surprising eloquence and coherence. 

The pace of innovation this year has been remarkable—and at times overwhelming. Who could have seen it coming? And how can we predict what’s next?

Luckily, here at MIT Technology Review we’re blessed with not just one but two journalists who spend all day, every day obsessively following all the latest developments in AI, so we’re going to give it a go. 

Here, Will Douglas Heaven and Melissa Heikkilä tell us the four biggest trends they expect to shape the AI landscape in 2023.

Over to you, Will and Melissa.

Get ready for multipurpose chatbots

GPT-4 may be able to handle more than just language

The last several years have seen a steady drip of bigger and better language models. The current high-water mark is ChatGPT, released by OpenAI at the start of December. This chatbot is a slicker, tuned-up version of the company’s GPT-3, the AI that started this wave of uncanny language mimics back in 2020.

But three years is a long time in AI, and though ChatGPT took the world by storm—and inspired breathless social media posts and newspaper headlines thanks to its fluid, if mindless, conversational skills—all eyes now are on the next big thing: GPT-4. Smart money says that 2023 will be the year the next generation of large language models kicks off.

What should we expect? For a start, future language models may be more than just language models. OpenAI is interested in combining different modalities—such as image or video recognition—with text. We’ve seen this with DALL-E. But take the conversational skills of ChatGPT and mix them up with image manipulation in a single model and you’d get something a lot more general-purpose and powerful. Imagine being able to ask a chatbot what’s in an image, or asking it to generate an image, and have these interactions be part of a conversation so that you can refine the results more naturally than is possible with DALL-E.

We saw a glimpse of this with DeepMind’s Flamingo, a “visual language model” revealed in April, which can answer queries about images using natural language. And then, in May, DeepMind announced Gato, a “generalist” model that was trained using the same techniques behind large language models to perform different types of tasks, from describing images to playing video games to controlling a robot arm.

If GPT-4 builds on such tech, expect the power of the best language and image-making AI (and more) in one package. Combining skills in language and images could in theory make next-gen AI better at understanding both. And it won’t just be OpenAI. Expect other big labs, especially DeepMind, to push ahead with multimodal models next year.

But of course, there’s a downside. Next-generation language models will inherit most of this generation’s problems, such as an inability to tell fact from fiction, and a penchant for prejudice. Better language models will make it harder than ever to trust different types of media. And because nobody has fully figured out how to train models on data scraped from the internet without absorbing the worst of what the internet contains, they will still be filled with filth.   

—Will Douglas Heaven

AI’s first red lines

New laws and hawkish regulators around the world want to put companies on the hook 

Until now, the AI industry has been a Wild West, with few rules governing the use and development of the technology. In 2023 that is going to change. Regulators and lawmakers spent 2022 sharpening their claws. Next year, they are going to pounce. 

We are going to see what the final version of the EU’s sweeping AI law, the AI Act, will look like as lawmakers finish amending the bill, potentially by the summer. It will almost certainly include bans on AI practices deemed detrimental to human rights, such as systems that score and rank people for trustworthiness. 

The use of facial recognition in public places will also be restricted for law enforcement in Europe, and there’s even momentum to forbid that altogether for both law enforcement and private companies, although a total ban will face stiff resistance from countries that want to use these technologies to fight crime. The EU is also working on a new law to hold AI companies accountable when their products cause harm, such as privacy infringements or unfair decisions made by algorithms. 

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission is also closely watching how companies collect data and use AI algorithms. Earlier this year, the FTC forced weight loss company Weight Watchers to destroy data and algorithms because it had collected data on children illegally. In late December, Epic, which makes games like Fortnite, dodged the same fate by agreeing to a $520 million settlement. The regulator has spent this year gathering feedback on potential rules around how companies handle data and build algorithms, and chair Lina Khan has said the agency intends to protect Americans from unlawful commercial surveillance and data security practices with “urgency and rigor.”

In China, authorities have recently banned creating deepfakes without the consent of the subject. Through the AI Act, the Europeans want to add warning signs to indicate that people are interacting with deepfakes or AI-generated images, audio, or video. 

All these regulations could shape how technology companies build, use and sell AI technologies. However, regulators have to strike a tricky balance between protecting consumers and not hindering innovation — something tech lobbyists are not afraid of reminding them of. 

AI is a field that is developing lightning fast, and the challenge will be to keep the rules precise enough to be effective, but not so specific that they become quickly outdated. As with EU efforts to regulate data protection, if new laws are implemented correctly, the next year could usher in a long-overdue era of AI development with more respect for privacy and fairness. 

—Melissa Heikkilä

Big tech could lose its grip on fundamental AI research

AI startups flex their muscles 

Big Tech companies are not the only players at the cutting edge of AI; an open-source revolution has begun to match, and sometimes surpass, what the richest labs are doing. 

In 2022 we saw the first community-built, multilingual large language model, BLOOM, released by Hugging Face. We also saw an explosion of innovation around the open-source text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion, which rivaled OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. 

The big companies that have historically dominated AI research are implementing massive layoffs and hiring freezes as the global economic outlook darkens. AI research is expensive, and as purse strings are tightened, companies will have to be very careful about picking which projects they invest in—and are likely to choose whichever have the potential to make them the most money, rather than the most innovative, interesting, or experimental ones, says Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a research organization.

That bottom-line focus is already taking effect at Meta, which has reorganized its AI research teams and moved many of them to work within teams that build products. 

But while Big Tech is tightening its belt, flashy new upstarts working on generative AI are seeing a surge in interest from venture capital funds. 

Next year could be a boon for AI startups, Etzioni says. There is a lot of talent floating around, and often in recessions people tend to rethink their lives—going back into academia or leaving a big corporation for a startup, for example. 

Startups and academia could become the centers of gravity for fundamental research, says Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. 

“We’re entering an era where [the AI research agenda] will be less defined by big companies,” he says. “That’s an opportunity.” 

—Melissa Heikkilä

Big Pharma is never going to be the same again

From AI-produced protein banks to AI-designed drugs, biotech enters a new era

In the last few years, the potential for AI to shake up the pharmaceutical industry has become clear. DeepMind’s AlphaFold, an AI that can predict the structures of proteins (the key to their functions), has cleared a path for new kinds of research in molecular biology, helping researchers understand how diseases work and how to create new drugs to treat them. In November, Meta revealed ESMFold, a much faster model for predicting protein structure—a kind of autocomplete for proteins, which uses a technique based on large language models.

Between them, DeepMind and Meta have produced structures for hundreds of millions of proteins, including all that are known to science, and shared them in vast public databases. Biologists and drug makers are already benefiting from these resources, which make looking up new protein structures almost as easy as searching the web. But 2023 could be the year that this groundwork really bears fruit. DeepMind has spun off its biotech work into a separate company, Isomorphic Labs, which has been tight-lipped for more than a year now. There’s a good chance it will come out with something big this year.

Further along the drug development pipeline, there are now hundreds of startups exploring ways to use AI to speed up drug discovery and even design previously unknown kinds of drugs. There are currently 19 drugs developed by AI drug companies in clinical trials (up from zero in 2020), with more to be submitted in the coming months. It’s possible that initial results from some of these may come out next year, allowing the first drug developed with the help of AI to hit the market.

But clinical trials can take years, so don’t hold your breath. Even so, the age of pharmatech is here and there’s no going back. “If done right, I think that we will see some unbelievable and quite amazing things happening in this space,” says Lovisa Afzelius at Flagship Pioneering, a venture capital firm that invests in biotech. 

—Will Douglas Heaven

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future.

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Dec 23 2022
What’s next in space in 2023

We’re going back to the moon—again—in 2023. Multiple uncrewed landings are planned for the next 12 months, spurred on by a renewed effort in the US to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade. Both private space companies and national agencies are set to make the 240,000-mile trek to our celestial neighbor, where they will test landing capabilities, look for usable water ice, and more.

Previous years were “all about Mars,” says Jill Stuart, a space policy expert from the London School of Economics in the UK. “Now we’ve shifted back to the moon.”

That is not all 2023 has in store. We’re also likely to see significant strides made in private human spaceflight, including the first-ever commercial spacewalk, compelling missions heading out into—or back from—other solar system destinations, and new rockets set to take flight.

Here’s what the next year has lined up for space.

Moon landings

A lunar lander will already be on its way when 2023 begins. Launched in December on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the private spacecraft Hakuto-R, developed by Japanese firm ispace, is on a four-month journey to reach the moon, where it will deploy rovers built by the space agencies of Japan and the United Arab Emirates, among other goals. If successful, Hakuto-R could become the first private mission to land on the moon in March.

We say “could” because two private landers from the US—one from the firm Astrobotic and the other from Intuitive Machines, called Peregrine and Nova-C, respectively—are also set to reach the moon around the same time. Both are NASA-backed missions with various instruments on board to study the lunar environment, part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, which aims to spur commercial interest in the moon ahead of human missions planned for later this decade under its Artemis program.

The first part of that program, Artemis I, saw an uncrewed Orion spacecraft launch to the moon on NASA’s giant new Space Launch System rocket in November 2022. While the next Artemis mission, a crewed flight around the moon, is not planned until 2024, these next 12 months will lay important groundwork for Artemis by studying the moon’s surface and even looking for water ice that could be a potential target for future human missions, among other goals. “The moon is getting a lot more attention than it has done for many years,” says Jon Cowart, a former NASA human spaceflight manager now at the Aerospace Corporation in the US.

Intuitive Machines has a second lunar landing planned in 2023. Also on the books are landings from the space agencies of India and Japan, with Chandrayaan-3 and SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon), respectively. India hopes to launch in August 2023. It will be the country’s second attempt—the first crash-landed on the moon in 2019. A date for SLIM, which will test precision landing on the moon, has not yet been set. Russia reportedly has plans for the moon in 2023 too with its Luna-25 lander, but the status of the mission is unclear.

Private space travel

Since May 2020, SpaceX has been using its Crew Dragon spacecraft to ferry astronauts to space, some to the International Space Station (ISS) under contract with NASA and others on private missions. But SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission, currently slated for March 2023, will be a big new step.

Four commercial astronauts, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is paying for the flight and also funded SpaceX’s first all-private human spaceflight in 2021, will target a maximum orbit of 1,200 kilometers, higher than any human spacecraft since the Apollo missions. And in a first for commercial human spaceflight, the crew will don spacesuits and venture outside the spacecraft.

“Polaris Dawn is really exciting,” says Laura Forczyk from the space consulting firm Astralytical. “My understanding is that the entire vehicle will be evacuated. Everybody is going to at least stick their heads out.”

The mission may help NASA decide whether a future Crew Dragon mission could be used to service the Hubble Space Telescope, a capability that the agency has been investigating with SpaceX. “We’ll have some idea whether it’s feasible,” says Forczyk.

Two more private missions using Crew Dragon—Axiom-2 and Axiom-3—are planned to head for the ISS in 2023, as well as two NASA flights using Crew Dragon. A competing vehicle from the US firm Boeing is also set to launch with crew for the first time in April 2023, following multiple delays.

Meanwhile, we wait to see if Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin will be allowed to launch with humans again. The company has been grounded following an uncrewed launch failure in September 2022. Another private spaceflight pioneer, Virgin Galactic, has been relatively quiet since it launched its founder Sir Richard Branson into space in July 2021. 

All these developments in commercial human spaceflight may be overshadowed by the first orbital flight attempt of SpaceX’s massive and reusable Starship rocket, which was undergoing launchpad tests earlier this month and should launch in 2023, if not by the end of 2022.

If successful, the rocket, which would surpass NASA’s Space Launch System as the largest rocket to make it to orbit, could transform our exploration of space. “The ability to take more mass up opens up new opportunities,” says Uma Bruegman, an expert in space strategies at the Aerospace Corporation. That could include, one day, human missions to Mars—or beyond. But there’s a long way to go yet. “It’s definitely an important year [for Starship],” says Cowart. “They’ve got a lot to do.” One of its nearer-term goals will be preparing for the moon—NASA chose Starship’s upper stage as the initial lunar lander for the Artemis program.

Into the solar system

Moons of the solar system’s biggest planet are also on the agenda next year. April 2023 will see a gripping new mission launch from the European Space Agency (ESA) called JUICE, for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer.” Scheduled to arrive in orbit at Jupiter in 2031, the spacecraft will perform detailed studies of the Jovian moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, all of which are thought to harbor oceans that could contain life beneath their icy surfaces.

“It’s the first mission that’s fundamentally focused on the icy moons,” says Mark McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at ESA. “We now know these icy moons have very deep water oceans, and they could have the conditions for life to have developed.”

JUICE will map these oceans with radar instruments, but McCaughrean says it will also be able to look for possible biosignatures on the surface of Europa’s ice, which could rain down from plumes ejected into space from its subsurface ocean.

Later in 2023, ESA is scheduled to see another major mission launch: its Euclid telescope, which was switched from a Russian rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The telescope will probe the “dark universe,” observing billions of galaxies over a third of the sky to better understand dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos.

In October, NASA should launch a significant science mission of its own when Psyche takes flight following a delay from 2022. The spacecraft will head to 16 Psyche, an unusual metal-rich asteroid that has never been seen up close.

A number of other intriguing developments are expected in 2023. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to return to Earth in September with pieces of an asteroid called Bennu, which could offer new insight into the structure and formation of the solar system. Amazon aims to send up the first satellites for Project Kuiper in early 2023, the start of a 3,000-satellite orbiting communications network it hopes will rival SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. And several new rockets are set to launch, including the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket (it will carry Astrobotic’s moon lander and some of Amazon’s satellites) and possibly Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket. Both are heavy-lift rockets that could take many satellites into space.

“There’s a huge swathe of activity,” says Cowart. “I’m very excited about this year.”

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to let you know what to expect in the coming year.

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