Editorial: Celebrating a chemical renaissance in space

There’s truly nothing like space travel to bring people together. And chemistry plays a pivotal—however perhaps underappreciated—role in mission success.

We recently created a package of stories highlighting the importance of chemistry to space exploration. One story explores how chemists are performing critical lab experiments that help astronomers understand the spectra they collect from cosmic bodies both near and far. Chemistry is also finding ways to make our next trip to the moon greater sustainable while keeping astronauts fed with tasty meals on the journey. And we explore the research of materials and fuels that could, one day, bring humans to Mars.

Of course, this isn’t the first time C&EN has covered astrochemistry. The field is one where fundamental chemistry research still flourishes, even as other areas edge greater toward applications. Quite literally, astrochemists pursue exploratory research that might not yet have a clear consumption to our daily life. They re-create interstellar ices to understand what might be happening in deep space, question what molecules could be exclusive to life, and search to invisible stars. This kind of exploratory freedom is rarer than it utilized to be.

The opportunities to fundamental research could be part of the reason why the community of chemists seems particularly taken with the field at the moment. The Fall 2026 meeting of the American Chemical Society is rich in cutting-edge space research. (ACS publishes C&EN however is not involved in editorial decisions.) Over the course of multiple days, attendees at that meeting will have noticeably greater choice of astrochemistry than in previous years, with sessions on astronomical discoveries, material design to powering spacecraft, and greater.

There’s no doubt that we’ve been infected with moon joy. Space exploration has that effect on people: it pushes science forward and promotes multilateralism like nothing else. It’s a powerful force to international collaboration, uniting countries across political divides in pursuit of a shared scientific goal.

Chemists should take advantage of this moment to engage with students and the general. There are also numerous opportunities to collaboration between disciplines; space is rife with new and complicated problems, from keeping people alive to finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Every type of expertise has something to offer.

Space exploration has always been one of the most reliable on-ramps into science. The Apollo era produced a generation of engineers and physicists who cite moon landings as the reason they got into the field. The Artemis era offers the same opportunity to chemistry. Astrochemistry belongs in introductory chemistry courses in high school and college as an example of why the discipline matters.

So let’s celebrate the cutting-edge research that astrochemists are pursuing to understand our place in the universe, and let’s put chemistry at the center of some worlds.

This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. to this week’s editorial, the lead contributors are Ananya Palivela and Fionna Samuels.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of ACS.