In terms of national-level scientific space missions, ISRO successfully soft-landed Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon, Roscosmos's Luna 25 failed to land on the Moon, NASA's OSIRIS-REx returned an asteroid sample from 101955 Bennu back to Earth and NASA's Lucy probe performed a flyby of asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh.

This year also saw the first time citizens of Antigua and Barbuda and Pakistan crossed the 50 mi (80 km) altitude mark, which is the United States's definition of outer space.

They did so in a suborbital launch organized by Virgin Galactic, however, they did not managed to cross the Kármán line (100 km or 62 mi).

On November 1, NASA's Lucy probe performed a flyby of asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh, revealing it to be a binary pair.

[3][4] ISRO launched its third lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 on 14 July 2023 at 9:05 UTC;[5] it consisted of lander, rover and a propulsion module,[6] and successfully landed in the south pole region of the Moon on 23 August 2023.

[7][8] Russian lunar lander Luna 25 was launched on 10 August 2023, 23:10 UTC, atop a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome.

[14][15] On 7 March, JAXA/MHI H3's maiden flight was terminated in-flight due to failure to ignite the second stage, resulting in the loss of the ALOS-3 land observation satellite.

The flight goal, which was to demonstrate the viability of 3D printing for major structural components of a rocket, was achieved when Terran 1 passed max q and continued to perform nominally.

[17] Following the failed launch, Relativity retired the rocket in favor of developing the much larger, reusable Terran R vehicle.

Space Pioneer is the first private company to reach orbit on its first attempt using a fully liquid fueled rocket.

[19] On 20 April, SpaceX's Starship had its first test flight,[20] aiming to complete about three-quarters of an orbit and landing in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Kauai.

[22] On 30 May, the North Korean Chollima-1 made its first orbital launch attempt, carrying the military reconnaissance satellite Malligyong-1.

On 15 September, the Firefly Alpha made its successful flight for a tactically responsive mission for the U.S. Space Force.

On January 27, ESA reported the successful demonstration of a braking sail-based satellite deorbiter, ADEO, which could be used by space debris mitigation measures.

[30][31] In April, Chinese media first reported on tests of flexible organic solar cells on balloons in the 35 km stratosphere.

[58] TSS Wentian airlock Fei Junlong and Zhang Lu successfully completed this mission in a way that they had not trained before.