Space · Friday, 4 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

NASA has one working ride to the space station. It has a leak, and no new launch date.

Space 1 min 19 sources

An oxidiser leak grounded the next crew flight. The second vehicle NASA paid for has not carried anyone since 2024, and the rocket under the first one is being retired by its owner.

1 of 2

of the crew vehicles NASA paid for that can fly today

Boeing's Starliner has not carried anyone since its 2024 test flight ended early [2]

flights by one Falcon 9 booster, on a rocket its owner plans to retire

booster 1063 is two flights short of SpaceX's reuse record [5]

260

Starlink launches flown from Florida on Falcon 9, now finished

those missions move to Starship, and Florida's Falcon 9 flights will carry other people's payloads [6]

people living on the space station while the next crew waits

their Russian supply ship leaves on 7 September and the next one launches on 9 September [4]

The lead story — what happened

NASA's next crew flight to the space station will not launch on 12 September. An oxidiser leak was found in the propulsion system of its SpaceX Dragon capsule. [1]
NASA announced the delay on 29 August. It has not set a new date. [1]
Four people are waiting on it: Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney of NASA, Josh Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency, and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos, Russia's space corporation. Their stay is meant to last seven months. [1]
There is no second vehicle to switch to. Boeing's Starliner capsule, which NASA funded so it would never depend on one company, has not carried a crew since 2024. [2]
That 2024 flight went wrong. Its two astronauts came home on a SpaceX Dragon instead. [2]
The rocket underneath Dragon is being wound down by its own maker. SpaceX plans to retire the Falcon 9 in favour of Starship, the much bigger rocket it is still testing. [2][3]
The wind-down has started. A Falcon 9 flight in late August was the last planned Starlink launch from Florida, after about 260 of them; those missions move to Starship. [6]
Falcon 9 is not failing. This week a booster called 1063 flew for the 35th time, two flights short of SpaceX's own reuse record. [5]
Phil McAlister, who worked at NASA for almost 20 years until he retired last year, wrote that the agency is about to lose its way to low Earth orbit. [2]
NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman, answered him in public late on Wednesday night. You cannot simply slap the word commercial on every problem, he wrote. [2]
Isaacman listed what NASA is already trying to do at once: return to the Moon, build a base there, get nuclear power under way, fly more science missions, and replace the space station with a commercial service. [2]
Seven people are living on the station now. A Russian Progress cargo ship undocks on 7 September and its replacement launches from Kazakhstan on 9 September. [4]

Who is involved

Jared Isaacman

the head of NASA, the US space agency; he argued in public that NASA cannot fund another crew vehicle
Phil McAlister

a NASA official for almost 20 years until he retired last year; he wrote that the agency is losing its way to low Earth orbit
SpaceX

the company that builds Dragon and Falcon 9, the only way a US crew reaches the station right now; it plans to retire Falcon 9
Boeing

the aircraft maker NASA paid to build Starliner as the second crew vehicle; it has carried a crew once, in 2024
Jessica Watkins

a NASA astronaut and the commander of the flight now waiting for a date

What is pushing on this

Risk of having one vehicle High↑

an ordinary leak has no second ride to fall back on [1][2]

Falcon 9's remaining life Easing↓

Starlink flights from Florida have already moved off it [6]

Jobs NASA is running at once High→

Isaacman names five other programmes competing for the same money [2]

Customers buying their own way up Building↑

two launch brokers bought whole Falcon 9 flights of their own [3]

How it unfolded

2024 Starliner's crewed test goes wrong and its two astronauts come home on a SpaceX Dragon [2]
Late August the last planned Falcon 9 Starlink launch from Florida flies [6]
29 August NASA says the next crew flight will not launch on 12 September, after a leak in the Dragon [1]
30 August a Falcon Heavy carries NASA's Roman telescope up from Florida [1]
Wednesday night Isaacman posts that NASA cannot solve every problem by calling it commercial [2]
Next no new date for the crew flight has been announced [1]

Where this points

Watch the new crew date against Starship's next test, which SpaceX is thought to be aiming at mid-September. If the crew slips past it, the rocket meant to replace Falcon 9 will have reached orbit first. [1]

The rest of the day

17 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
India aims an imaging satellite at a far higher orbit

India's space agency ISRO set a GSLV Mark II rocket to send EOS-05, a 2,367-kilogram Earth-imaging satellite, toward geosynchronous orbit at 5:25 p.m. Eastern time on 3 September. It would be India's first imaging satellite at that height. [7]

Why it matters — At 35,786 km up a satellite keeps pace with Earth's turn and hovers over one patch of ground, so it can watch continuously instead of passing over twice a day. India lost its last attempt when a GSLV third stage failed in 2021. [7]
03
The last Florida Starlink flight on a Falcon 9

A Falcon 9 launch in late August was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral. From here Starlink flies from Florida on Starship, SpaceX's launch vice-president Kiko Dontchev said; about 260 Starlink missions had gone up from there on Falcon 9. [6]

Why it matters — It is the clearest sign yet that the rocket NASA's crews depend on is being retired by the company that owns it.
04
A US policy sets a target of 1,000 launches a year

A new national space transportation policy signed by US President Donald Trump calls for more spaceports, to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030. It tells the US defence department and NASA to coordinate on ground infrastructure and to publish range schedules. [6]

Why it matters — Launch pads and range slots, not rockets, are what the industry says it will run out of first. Most launch schedules are not public until days or weeks beforehand. [6]
05
Swift's telescopes switch back on

NASA restarted two of the three instruments on its 21-year-old Swift observatory on 26 August. They had been dark since February to cut the spacecraft's drag through the thin upper atmosphere and keep it in orbit long enough to be rescued. [8][9]

Why it matters — The rescue was abandoned. A robot craft called LINK, launched on 3 July, lost two of its three reaction wheels and part of its thruster system, and its mission was cut back to a rendezvous demonstration. [9]
06
Two European rocket startups raise fresh money

Spain's PLD Space closed a 108 million euro extension round led by Mitsubishi Electric, and Germany's HyImpulse closed over 50 million euros. PLD has now raised 488 million euros since 2011 and wants 30 launches a year by 2030. [10]

Why it matters — European launch money used to lag well behind the United States. Both companies are still short of orbit: PLD aims for a first orbital test in late 2026, HyImpulse in late 2027 or early 2028. [10]
07
Rideshare brokers buy their own rockets

Two launch integrators, Exolaunch and SEOPS, have bought Falcon 9 flights to run shared-ride programmes of their own. A French broker called RIDE! signed with MaiaSpace for spare room on up to six flights from 2028. [3]

Why it matters — Customers stop being customers when they think the service may end. The fear at the Small Satellite Conference in Utah was that SpaceX shared rides would disappear the way Northrop Grumman's Pegasus rocket did. [3]
08
Satellites are being given more computing on board

At the same conference, Luxembourg's Edge Aerospace hired Redwire to build its data processing units in the United States. The ground-station operator KSAT agreed with Unibap to put computing on two demonstration satellites, launching no earlier than late 2027. [3]

Why it matters — Sending every raw image down to the ground is the slow, expensive part. Doing the sums in orbit and sending the answer is the way around a crowded downlink. [3]
09
A new commander takes the US Space Force

General Douglas Schiess became the third Chief of Space Operations of the US Space Force at a ceremony at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on 3 September, succeeding General Chance Saltzman. [11]

Why it matters — He takes over a service whose subject has changed. Militaries now treat satellites as weapons systems, and a Chinese spaceplane released a small satellite in June that looped around another Chinese satellite and came back. [18]
10
Space Force research money moves closer to use

The US Space Force's latest round of small-business research contracts favours technology near operational use rather than open-ended research, a shift from a programme that had drawn scepticism from the industry it funds. [12]

Why it matters — Research money that never reaches a working system is the complaint small suppliers make most often about defence contracts.
11
A Japanese startup books a rocket that has never reached orbit

Sarmony, a Japanese radar-imaging startup, signed on 25 August to launch its first demonstration satellite on Space One's Kairos rocket in 2028. Kairos has flown three times and failed to reach orbit each time, breaking apart just over a minute after liftoff in March. [6]

Why it matters — When launch is scarce, buyers take rides on vehicles with no successful flights behind them. Sarmony's satellite uses the flat DiskSat shape, which the US research centre Aerospace Corporation demonstrated with four craft launched eight months ago and is now pushing at the industry. [19]
12
Radar catches penguins moving in the dark

Researchers used Sentinel-1 radar satellites to watch three emperor penguin colonies through the Antarctic winter from 2017 to 2024. All three moved, and groups within them sometimes shifted away from the ice edge together even while it looked stable. [13]

Why it matters — Emperor penguins are the only bird that breeds through the polar night, which is exactly when ordinary camera satellites see nothing. Radar makes its own light, so it works in the dark. [13]
13
Black holes may have come before the first stars

A group of theoretical physicists proposed that black holes formed in the early universe before any stars did, using heat from the cosmic microwave background, the faint glow left over from the Big Bang. [14]

Why it matters — It is an attempt to explain the little red dots the James Webb telescope found: distant galaxies that appear to hold surprising numbers of astonishingly ancient black holes. [14]
14
Mercury's crust points to fiercer volcanoes

A study led by Christian Renggli of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research used the silica content read from infrared light to argue that Mercury was shaped by more powerful volcanism than thought. Its lava plains are over a kilometre thick and date from 4.1 to 3.5 billion years ago. [15]

Why it matters — Silica controls how thick and sticky magma is, so reading it from orbit tells you what kind of eruptions built a surface you cannot visit. [15]
15
A comet flared 20,000 times brighter

Comet 220P/McNaught, which loops around the Sun every 5.5 years, had two outbursts after passing closest to the Sun on 14 June that took it to 20,000 times its usual brightness. It is now at magnitude 9.2 and fading, still within reach of a small telescope. [16]

Why it matters — Sunlight turns a comet's ices straight to gas, and the dust that comes with it reflects the light. Outbursts are not predictable, so the show arrived without warning. [16]
16
A model maps where orbital crowding turns into risk

A study in Nature trained a machine-learning model on debris population, mass and near-miss data across the range of orbital heights and tilts. It found that the number of satellites can rise a lot for only a moderate rise in predicted collision risk. [17]

Why it matters — Risk is not spread evenly through orbit, so where a fleet is placed matters as much as how many satellites it holds. [17]
17
The station changes its Russian supply ship

Roscosmos flight engineer Pyotr Dubrov is loading rubbish and old equipment into the Progress 94 cargo craft before it undocks on 7 September. Progress 96 launches from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on 9 September and docks two days later. [4]

Why it matters — Cargo keeps arriving on schedule while the crew rotation waits, which is why nobody on board is in any danger from the delay.
18
India's own launch gap stays open

Space writer Jatan Mehta argued in a six-part series that the recent success of Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket does not close India's shortage of orbital launch capacity, because the country is short of spaceports, suppliers and medium and heavy rockets. [6]

Why it matters — A small rocket working is not the same as a country being able to launch what it wants, which is the same gap Europe is now spending to close.

02 Lesson why it matters

A spare you never use is not being saved

Flying is how a spacecraft becomes reliable. So the one kept in reserve falls behind the one in service, fastest when nothing is going wrong.

The twist

A spare made of people and practice is not preserved by resting. It gets worse at the job it was bought for, and it gets worse fastest while nothing is going wrong.

How it works

NASA paid two companies so one fault could never stop its flights
Only one of the two flies; the other has carried a crew once, in 2024
A vehicle gets reliable by flying, because each flight finds a fault and fixes it
The one held back stops finding faults, and the gap to the flying one widens
So when the flying one springs a leak, the spare is not ready to step in

Where you've seen this

Hospitals

a surgeon who stops doing a rare operation is slower at it next time, though nothing about the operation changed

Second suppliers

a factory kept on the books and given no orders loses the staff and tooling that made it a second supplier

Languages

the one you learned and stopped speaking stays on your CV and leaves your mouth

Fire drills

a plan nobody rehearses is a document, and the first rehearsal is the fire

The catch

Some spares really do keep. A spare tyre sits in a boot for ten years and works. This bites when the spare is a practice rather than an object, and needs people who are still doing it.

And the whole of it

Nobody here chose this. NASA bought two vehicles, Boeing built one and stopped flying it, SpaceX built one and kept flying it, and each decision looked right from where it was made. Most of us are holding something we have not used in years and still calling it a backup. From the inside, an untouched spare and a working one look exactly the same.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

NASA paid two companies so that a fault in one spacecraft could never stop its flights, and today it has one working vehicle with a leak in it and no date for the next crew.

Why it works on us — A second name on a contract feels like a second option, because the contract is the part you can count and readiness is not.

Who gains

SpaceX — It is the only company that can carry a NASA crew to the station, and the gap behind it has no date on it. [1][2]
Exolaunch and SEOPS — The two launch brokers bought whole Falcon 9 flights, and the fear that SpaceX rideshares will end is what fills their order books. [3]
PLD Space and HyImpulse — European investors put 108 million and over 50 million euros into two rocket firms that have not reached orbit, in a market where launch is scarce. [10]
Space One — Its Kairos rocket has failed to reach orbit on all three flights and it still signed a Japanese customer for a 2028 launch. [6]

Who pays

The four astronauts of the delayed crew flight — Their seven-month mission has no launch date, and NASA has not said when one will come. [1]
Small-satellite operators — They planned around cheap SpaceX shared rides and are now buying room from brokers who had to buy entire rockets. [3]
NASA's Moon, nuclear power and science programmes — Isaacman argues that paying for another crew vehicle would come out of the five programmes already running. [2]
Astronomers who use Swift — Its X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes sat dark from February to 26 August to protect a rescue that was then abandoned. [8][9]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

When the next crew flight will actually launch.

NASA said on 29 August that a new target date would be announced once available, and none has been given. [1]
02

Whether Boeing's Starliner will carry a crew again, and when.

It has not flown anyone since the 2024 test flight that sent its astronauts home on a SpaceX Dragon, and no return date appears in the reporting. [2]
03

When Falcon 9 actually stops flying.

SpaceX has moved its Florida Starlink launches to Starship and is said to plan Falcon 9's retirement, but no retirement date is public and a booster flew for the 35th time this week. [5][6]
04

What SpaceX's booster reuse record actually stands at.

Space.com says the 35th flight leaves booster 1063 two short of the record but does not print the number itself. [5]
05

Whether India's EOS-05 reached its orbit.

The launch was set for 5:25 p.m. Eastern time on 3 September and no result appears in the sources we read. India's previous attempt at this orbit was lost to a third-stage failure in 2021. [7]
06

How much of Swift's science comes back.

Two of three instruments restarted on 26 August. NASA says it hopes to return the third, the Burst Alert Telescope, within the next few weeks, without naming a date. [8][9]
07

Whether the US target of 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030 is reachable.

The policy names the number and tells agencies to coordinate on ground infrastructure, but names no money. [6]
08

How many emperor penguins there are.

The radar study tracked movement at three colonies from 2017 to 2024 and does not give a population figure for any of them. [13]

04 Hope carry this

NASA switched off two of the three instruments on its 21-year-old Swift telescope in February, to slow its fall out of orbit. They came back on this week, and the first picture the X-ray telescope took was of Tycho's supernova remnant, 13,000 light-years away.