A vest flown around the Moon cut a solar-storm dose by 60%

The vest that worked

When NASA flew Artemis I around the Moon in 2022, it carried two headless torso mannequins fitted with radiation detectors. One, named Zohar, wore a vest called AstroRad. The other, Helga, wore nothing. The results were published this week in Science Advances, and they are the first flight data anyone has on wearable radiation shielding beyond Earth’s magnetic field [1].

The vest is flexible, with a core of high-density polyethylene shaped to sit over bone marrow and the organs most easily damaged. Run the measured numbers against real solar storms and the vest performs well. In a 1972-class event it would have cut a crew member’s dose by about 60%, from 222 millisieverts to 87.5. In a repeat of 1989 the cut would be roughly 40% [1].

That is about the same protection as the storm shelter already built into the Orion capsule. The difference is what you can do while protected. A shelter is a cupboard: you sit in it and wait. A vest you can wear while fixing something [1].

And the storms may have no ceiling

For decades, space physicists have noticed something reassuring. Push the solar wind harder and Earth’s magnetic response rises with it - but only up to a point. Past that, the response seemed to flatten out, as if the planet had a built-in limit.

A Nature paper published in July, and written up this week, argues that the flattening was never real. It comes from Nithin Sivadas of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Maria Walach of Lancaster University [2]. The limit, they say, is an artefact of where we measure from.

Nearly all solar-wind readings come from spacecraft parked at a point called L1, about 1.5 million km closer to the Sun than we are. The wind changes on the way in, and timing is uncertain. So the most extreme reading at L1 is usually paired with a less extreme event at Earth, purely by chance. That is a well-known statistical trap called regression to the mean: measure something noisily, and the biggest measurements are the ones most likely to be flukes [2].

Correct for it, and the flattening vanishes. The relationship stays straight all the way up. In plain terms, a one-in-a-thousand-year storm could hit power grids and satellite fleets about twice as hard as the models say [2].

The machines get a different answer

Bodies get shielding. Machines mostly do not, because shielding is heavy and a charged particle that hits a chip does not need to deliver much energy to do damage. It only has to land in the wrong place.

That is why “radiation-hardened electronics” showed up this week in an unlikely place: a Scientific American account of how Golden Dome, the US missile-defence programme, might actually be built. Voyager Technologies, one of the firms angling for the work, spent the last two years buying companies that already make space hardware. Among them were makers of radiation-hardened electronics, electric thrusters and solid-fuel motors [3]. Nobody buys a chip company for fun. They bought it because putting weapons in orbit means putting computers in orbit, and orbital computers are a specialist trade.

The scale explains the appetite. One analysis, by Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, puts the requirement at roughly 1,900 interceptors. That is what it takes to keep continuous cover over every point on Earth with two shots at each threat [3]. There is no published design yet. As Harrison puts it, “There is no architecture” [3].

The money is real even where the architecture is not. A new Aerospace Corporation analysis of the proposed 2027 budget puts the Space Force at $71.3 billion. That is a 120% rise on 2026, and the largest percentage increase for any US military service since 1952. The growth sits in missile warning, moving-target tracking, command and control, and classified programmes [4].

Two rockets came home

On 18 August the Beijing company LandSpace launched its second Zhuque-3 rocket from Jiuquan. The first stage flew back down and landed on its legs about 390 km downrange, in Minqin County, Gansu [5]. It is the second Chinese orbital booster recovery ever, after a state-owned Long March 10B on 10 July. It is the first by a private Chinese company, and the first Chinese recovery on land using landing legs [6].

The first Zhuque-3 flight, eight and a half months earlier, reached orbit but crashed its booster during the landing burn. LandSpace says it fixed that by using fewer engines in the landing burn, adding a predicted landing point to the onboard control system, and improving the heat protection [5]. The rocket lifts 21,000 kg to low orbit expendable, or 18,300 kg when the stage comes back - roughly Falcon 9 territory [5].

The same week, SpaceX finally got a Starship back. The vehicle from July’s thirteenth test flight splashed down in the Indian Ocean on 24 July and, unusually, did not break up. A recovery ship towed it engine-first for 24 days and reached Christmas Island on 18 August [7]. That matters because the heat shield, some 18,000 ceramic tiles, is the company’s central unsolved problem. Until now every ship has been judged only through sensors and camera footage [7].

Volume kept climbing regardless. SpaceX flew its 100th mission of 2026 on 18 August, its third straight year past the century mark [8]. On 15 August it put two Falcon 9s up 38 minutes apart from opposite coasts, beating its own record by 27 minutes [9]. Blue Origin is adding a second pad at Cape Canaveral while repairing the first after a New Glenn exploded there in May [10]. China returned to flight on 16 August with back-to-back launches, six days after a Long March 7A broke up in flight [11].

None of that has fixed the shortage. Satellite operators still cannot buy rides: about 270 orbital launches a year, prices never lower, and Quilty Space’s research director Caleb Henry describes “an industry in panic” [12].

The Moon is filling up with junk

A spent Falcon 9 upper stage weighing about four tonnes hit the Moon near Einstein Crater on 5 August at 5,400 mph [13][14]. South Korea’s Danuri orbiter and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter both photographed the new crater; a Chinese commercial debris-tracking satellite recorded the impact [14]. Danuri’s team had spotted the incoming stage in late June and could not rule out a close pass. A manoeuvre planned for an eclipse happened to move the orbiter clear [14].

Around 3,000 human-made objects and roughly 200 tonnes of material now sit on the lunar surface [13]. Almost none of it is governed. The only international rules that touch lunar disposal are the COSPAR planetary-protection guidelines, written to stop biological contamination of scientifically interesting sites, not to manage where spent rockets fall [15]. Crewed landings are two to four years away [15].

“We’re in a transitional moment,” the astronomer and space historian Jonathan McDowell told Space.com. Governance, he said, has not kept up [13].

Also this week

Astronomers using Webb found three active supermassive black holes inside one galaxy 12.5 billion light-years away. We see it as it was less than 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. Lead author Hannah Ubler of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics calls it the first such trio found in the distant universe [16]. Curiosity, marking 14 years on Mars, photographed its first field of polygon cracks, a honeycomb pattern thought to form from repeated wetting and drying [17].

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he is “extremely confident” Artemis 3 will fly in 2027, with SLS stacking under way at Kennedy [18]. Mike Fincke retired after exactly 30 years, four spaceflights, two ISS commands, and the rare distinction of having launched on three different spacecraft [19]. ESA’s Sophie Adenot became the first French woman to walk in space, replacing a station antenna with NASA’s Anil Menon [21]. And NASA’s early-concepts programme funded SPARK, a swarm of small spherical flying robots meant one day to explore the caves of Saturn’s moon Titan [20].

Underneath all of it sits a question nobody has settled. Ars Technica argued this week that the United States has not yet reckoned with what it would mean for China to land people on the Moon first. Nor with what China might claim where its rovers drive [22]. The Artemis II crew, back from lunar orbit in April, spent the week saying thank you [23].