NASA has shared a stunning image (above) captured by the crew of the Artemis II mission as they head toward the moon. It shows a tiny Earth, mostly in darkness and surrounded by the inky blackness of space.
The photo was taken on day four of the Artemis II mission that will see four astronauts fly around the moon before returning to Earth. On Monday, the crew — NASA’s Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, along with Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — will loop around our nearest neighbor, setting a new flight record in the process.
“One last look at Earth before we reach the moon,” NASA said in a post on X that shared the incredible photo.
“This view of the Earth was captured on April 5, the fourth day of the Artemis II mission, from inside the Orion spacecraft. The four astronauts will reach their closest approach of the moon tomorrow, April 6.”
One last look at Earth before we reach the Moon.
This view of the Earth was captured on April 5, the fourth day of the Artemis II mission, from inside the Orion spacecraft. The four astronauts will reach their closest approach of the Moon tomorrow, April 6. pic.twitter.com/z2NJUGWkKc
Tantalizingly for the crew, the Orion spacecraft is expected to pass within about 4,070 miles of the moon, giving astronauts their closest view of the cratered, rugged terrain in more than five decades.
But that’s not all. On Monday afternoon, shortly before 2 p.m. ET, the Artemis II crew will surpass the greatest distance from Earth ever reached by humans, set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 when it flew 248,655 miles from our planet. Then, about five hours later, the Artemis II astronauts will reach their farthest point from Earth, 252,760 miles, setting a new record.
The 10-day mission, which launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1, has so far been going mostly to plan. One hiccup, however, concerns the onboard toilet, which has been experiencing intermittent problems during the flight.
The latest issue has been caused by what engineers believe may be ice blocking a pipe that expels the astronauts’ urine into space. It means that for now, the crew members are having to use special bags to collect and store their liquid waste. Fortunately, the toilet still works for number-2 waste, which is dealt with differently.
Artemis II marks the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft and the second Orion flight overall. The mission is designed to test the spacecraft’s systems in preparation for more complex missions like Artemis IV, which will endeavor to return humans to the lunar surface after an absence of more than five decades.
As I’m writing this, NVIDIA is the largest company in the world, with a market cap exceeding $4 trillion. Team Green is now the leader among the Magnificent Seven of the tech world, having surpassed them all in just a few short years.
The company has managed to reach these incredible heights with smart planning and by making the right moves for decades, the latest being the decision to sell shovels during the AI gold rush. Considering the current hardware landscape, there’s simply no reason for NVIDIA to rush a new gaming GPU generation for at least a few years. Here’s why.
Scarcity has become the new normal
Not even Nvidia is powerful enough to overcome market constraints
Global memory shortages have been a reality since late 2025, and they aren’t just affecting RAM and storage manufacturers. Rather, this impacts every company making any product that contains memory or storage—including graphics cards.
Since NVIDIA sells GPU and memory bundles to its partners, which they then solder onto PCBs and add cooling to create full-blown graphics cards, this means that NVIDIA doesn’t just have to battle other tech giants to secure a chunk of TSMC’s limited production capacity to produce its GPU chips. It also has to procure massive amounts of GPU memory, which has never been harder or more expensive to obtain.
While a company as large as NVIDIA certainly has long-term contracts that guarantee stable memory prices, those contracts aren’t going to last forever. The company has likely had to sign new ones, considering the GPU price surge that began at the beginning of 2026, with gaming graphics cards still being overpriced.
With GPU memory costing more than ever, NVIDIA has little reason to rush a new gaming GPU generation, because its gaming earnings are just a drop in the bucket compared to its total earnings.
NVIDIA is an AI company now
Gaming GPUs are taking a back seat
Credit: appeconomyinsights.com
NVIDIA’s gaming division had been its golden goose for decades, but come 2022, the company’s data center and AI division’s revenue started to balloon dramatically. By the beginning of fiscal year 2023, data center and AI revenue had surpassed that of the gaming division.
In fiscal year 2026 (which began on July 1, 2025, and ends on June 30, 2026), NVIDIA’s gaming revenue has contributed less than 8% of the company’s total earnings so far. On the other hand, the data center division has made almost 90% of NVIDIA’s total revenue in fiscal year 2026. What I’m trying to say is that NVIDIA is no longer a gaming company—it’s all about AI now.
Considering that we’re in the middle of the biggest memory shortage in history, and that its AI GPUs rake in almost ten times the revenue of gaming GPUs, there’s little reason for NVIDIA to funnel exorbitantly priced memory toward gaming GPUs. It’s much more profitable to put every memory chip they can get their hands on into AI GPU racks and continue receiving mountains of cash by selling them to AI behemoths.
The RTX 50 Super GPUs might never get released
A sign of times to come
NVIDIA’s RTX 50 Super series was supposed to increase memory capacity of its most popular gaming GPUs. The 16GB RTX 5080 was to be superseded by a 24GB RTX 5080 Super; the same fate would await the 16GB RTX 5070 Ti, while the 18GB RTX 5070 Super was to replace its 12GB non-Super sibling. But according to recent reports, NVIDIA has put it on ice.
The RTX 50 Super launch had been slated for this year’s CES in January, but after missing the show, it now looks like NVIDIA has delayed the lineup indefinitely. According to a recent report, NVIDIA doesn’t plan to launch a single new gaming GPU in 2026. Worse still, the RTX 60 series, which had been expected to debut sometime in 2027, has also been delayed.
A report by The Information (via Tom’s Hardware) states that NVIDIA had finalized the design and specs of its RTX 50 Super refresh, but the RAM-pocalypse threw a wrench into the works, forcing the company to “deprioritize RTX 50 Super production.” In other words, it’s exactly what I said a few paragraphs ago: selling enterprise GPU racks to AI companies is far more lucrative than selling comparatively cheaper GPUs to gamers, especially now that memory prices have been skyrocketing.
Before putting the RTX 50 series on ice, NVIDIA had already slashed its gaming GPU supply by about a fifth and started prioritizing models with less VRAM, like the 8GB versions of the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, so this news isn’t that surprising.
So when can we expect RTX 60 GPUs?
Late 2028-ish?
Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek
The good news is that the RTX 60 series is definitely in the pipeline, and we will see it sooner or later. The bad news is that its release date is up in the air, and it’s best not to even think about pricing. The word on the street around CES 2026 was that NVIDIA would release the RTX 60 series in mid-2027, give or take a few months. But as of this writing, it’s increasingly likely we won’t see RTX 60 GPUs until 2028.
If you’ve been following the discussion around memory shortages, this won’t be surprising. In late 2025, the prognosis was that we wouldn’t see the end of the RAM-pocalypse until 2027, maybe 2028. But a recent statement by SK Hynix chairman (the company is one of the world’s three largest memory manufacturers) warns that the global memory shortage may last well into 2030.
If that turns out to be true, and if the global AI data center boom doesn’t slow down in the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA delays the RTX 60 GPUs as long as possible. There’s a good chance we won’t see them until the second half of 2028, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they miss that window as well if memory supply doesn’t recover by then. Data center GPUs are simply too profitable for NVIDIA to reserve a meaningful portion of memory for gaming graphics cards as long as shortages persist.
At least current-gen gaming GPUs are still a great option for any PC gamer
If there is a silver lining here, it is that current-gen gaming GPUs (NVIDIA RTX 50 and AMD Radeon RX 90) are still more than powerful enough for any current AAA title. Considering that Sony is reportedly delaying the PlayStation 6 and that global PC shipments are projected to see a sharp, double-digit decline in 2026, game developers have little incentive to push requirements beyond what current hardware can handle.
DLSS 5, on the other hand, may be the future of gaming, but no one likes it, and it will take a few years (and likely the arrival of the RTX 60 lineup) for it to mature and become usable on anything that’s not a heckin’ RTX 5090.
If you’re open to buying used GPUs, even last-gen gaming graphics cards offer tons of performance and are able to rein in any AAA game you throw at them. While we likely won’t get a new gaming GPU from NVIDIA for at least a few years, at least the ones we’ve got are great today and will continue to chew through any game for the foreseeable future.
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