A German rocket reached orbit from Norway. No rocket had ever done that from Western Europe.

The rest of the day

34 more stories on this beat.

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

1. 02

   US firms drop out of France's space summit

   SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, K2 and Starcloud have pulled out of a space summit that France's president Emmanuel Macron is holding in Paris next week. An official at the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the US president on science, held a call with the companies late last month and said attending might not be in their interests. The worry was that European officials would adopt positions on contested questions such as sharing radio frequencies. France's space minister Philippe Baptiste publicly asked the Americans to come anyway. [4]

   Why it matters — Ars Technica reports that European buyers will now be pushed toward non-American satellite parts and services, which is money away from the same firms the call was meant to protect. It lands in the week a European rocket reached orbit on European Space Agency money. [4][1]

2. 03

   Saturn grew a ten-sided pattern

   A giant ten-sided wave of cloud is circling Saturn's south pole, a team led by Agustin Sanchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Spain reported in the journal Science Advances. Saturn's north pole has carried a six-sided version for more than forty years. Amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger first noticed a faint band in ground-based pictures in 2024, and Hubble images going back to 2023 then confirmed it. The northern hexagon was itself found in 1988, by scientists reviewing pictures Voyager took in 1980 and 1981. [5][6][7]

   Why it matters — The hexagon had been treated as a one-off. A second pattern, forming now and still strengthening, lets astronomers watch a planet-sized weather system being built instead of finding one already made. [5]

3. 04

   A single event may be dark matter

   The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, ten tonnes of very pure liquid xenon a mile underground in South Dakota, recorded one particle interaction its team cannot explain with any known background. Dark matter is the name for the 85% of the universe's mass that gives off no light and has never been detected directly. The team, led by Sam Eriksen of the University of Bristol, spent months ruling out other causes. They say only a handful of such events would count as a first detection, and they have one. [8]

   Why it matters — The search for these particles has produced nothing for decades. What makes this one worth reporting is where it turned up: in a stretch of the team's own existing data they had not previously examined. [8]

4. 05

   Mars is far hotter under its southern half

   The rock deep beneath the southern half of Mars is between 200 and 400 degrees Celsius hotter than the rock beneath the north, and may still be partly molten. Alexander Berne, formerly of Caltech and now at the University of Arizona, worked this out from tiny changes in the speed of three NASA orbiters, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as they circled the planet. Mars has long puzzled scientists because its north is flat and low and its south is cratered highland. [9]

   Why it matters — No new spacecraft was needed; the measurement was sitting in old tracking data. A partly molten south would change how long Mars stayed volcanic and where liquid water could have survived underground. [9]

5. 06

   A radio telescope mapped hydrogen from the young universe

   Astronomers using MeerKAT, a set of 64 radio dishes in South Africa's Northern Cape, detected hydrogen gas billions of light years away, from a time when the universe was much younger than its present 13.8 billion years. Hydrogen gives off a faint radio signal at a wavelength of 21 centimetres. As the universe expands, that wavelength is stretched, and how far it has stretched tells you how long the signal has been travelling. Until now the method needed a separate survey in visible light alongside it. [10]

   Why it matters — If radio alone is enough, the biggest structures in the universe could be charted without first finding every galaxy inside them. Team leader Sourabh Paul called the signal extremely faint and hard to pull out. [10]

6. 07

   An icy body is turning into a comet

   Astronomers led by Charles Schambeau of the University of Central Florida have watched an object called 450P/LONEOS grow a cloud of gas and dust, which is the first stage of becoming a comet. It is a centaur: an icy body orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune, thought to have drifted in from beyond Pluto. Centaurs have long been suspected of turning into short-period comets, but nobody had seen the change happen. Using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the team saw the cloud brighten between 2019 and 2024. [11]

   Why it matters — It fills in a step astronomers had only inferred from where these objects end up. 450P was found in 2004 and takes 22 years to go round the sun, so the change was caught on an object already on the books. [11]

7. 08

   Magnets shaped the newborn solar system

   Dust grains sealed inside a meteorite called DOM 08006, picked up in Antarctica in 2008, carry a magnetic record from the first 200,000 years of the solar system. The grains are rich in calcium and aluminium and are thought to be the oldest solar system material ever examined. Scientists had assumed gravity did almost all the work of flattening the original cloud of gas and dust into the disc the planets formed in. The new measurements say magnetism helped a great deal more than expected. [12]

   Why it matters — The change from a round cloud to a flat disc set where every planet, Earth included, could form. The evidence for how it happened had been sitting in a rock in a collection for eighteen years. [12]

8. 09

   The early universe's black holes may be far smaller

   Since it began observing in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has found black holes in the young universe weighing hundreds of millions of suns. Nothing should have been able to grow that big in under a billion years. A new analysis says those masses were overestimated and puts them at roughly one to ten million suns instead. The team argues the difference is the angle the objects are seen from. Their host galaxies are small, which made the old figures harder still to explain. [13]

   Why it matters — If the smaller numbers hold, one of the biggest problems Webb created for astronomy goes away with no new physics required. This is one team re-reading existing observations, not a fresh measurement. [13]

9. 10

   A thrown-out black hole traced to a merger

   In 2022 astronomers spotted a thin line of new stars more than 202,000 light years long, trailing from a galaxy about 7.5 billion light years away. At the far end of it something was moving at close to 1,000 kilometres a second. They named it RBH-1 and reasoned it was a supermassive black hole kicked out of its galaxy. A team led from the University of California, Santa Barbara has now used Hubble and Webb data to trace it back, and concludes that a merger of two black holes threw it out. [14]

   Why it matters — A merger violent enough to eject a black hole from its own galaxy also sends out gravitational waves, the ripples in space that detectors on Earth listen for. This is the first time the wreckage of such an event has been followed back to where it happened. [14]

10. 11

    A star close enough to feel a black hole spin

    Astronomers have found a star orbiting so close to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way that its path is bent by the hole's spin, not only by its mass. A spinning black hole drags space around with it, and a star passing through that region gets dragged too, moving the point of its closest approach a little further than gravity alone would. Watching this star over the next decade could produce the first measurement of how fast the galaxy's central black hole turns. [15]

    Why it matters — Mass and spin are the only two numbers a black hole has, and one of them has never been measured for the black hole at the middle of our own galaxy. [15]

11. 12

    Supernovas make more titanium than expected

    Two new papers examine how exploding stars build the chemical elements that everything, including human bodies, is made of, and how the explosions spread them. One measured how much titanium-44 a supernova produces. Titanium-44 is radioactive and lingers long after the explosion fades, which makes it a useful marker of what happened. The experimental result is 35% more than models predicted. Astronomers have watched supernovas for centuries and still do not fully understand how the explosions unfold. [16]

    Why it matters — A 35% gap is large enough to change the computer models of these explosions, and those models are how astronomers test what they think goes on inside a dying star. [16]

12. 13

    Swift is observing again after its rescue failed

    NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a 22-year-old telescope that catches gamma-ray bursts, switched two of its three instruments back on on 26 August. Both had been shut down in February to cut drag from the thin upper atmosphere, keeping the satellite up long enough for a rescue craft to reach it. That rescue was scaled back last month when the servicing spacecraft, Katalyst Space's LINK, could not hold its pointing steady. Swift's burst detector is still switched off. [17][18]

    Why it matters — Swift's orbit is still decaying and NASA has not said how long it has left. Its burst alerts are what tell other telescopes where to look within minutes of an explosion. [17]

13. 14

    The servicing craft keeps testing anyway

    Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, which failed to boost the Swift telescope to a safer altitude, spent this week running through as much of its equipment as it could. It raised its own orbit, lined up with Swift's, unfolded all three of its robotic arms and fired its three xenon-fuelled electric thrusters at the same time. It came within 12 to 15 kilometres of Swift and will get no closer. NASA says the team expects LINK to fall out of orbit after further operations. [18]

    Why it matters — Nobody has yet caught hold of a satellite that was never built to be caught. NASA says the data from this flight is meant to inform the servicing missions that come after it. [18]

14. 15

    A private Venus probe waits for a rocket

    A privately funded mission to look for signs of life in the clouds of Venus is stuck because the rocket meant to carry it has not flown. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with the company Rocket Lab, built a small cone-shaped probe that would fall through the Venusian clouds and measure individual particles for signs of organic molecules. Rocket Lab moved the mission onto its larger Neutron rocket, which was expected to debut in 2024 and has still not launched. [19]

    Why it matters — Sara Seager, the MIT planetary scientist leading the effort, said plainly that they are waiting on Neutron. A science mission tied to one specific rocket cannot start until that rocket works. [19]

15. 16

    A probe aimed at a star, arriving in 80,000 years

    A non-profit called the Fermi Explorer Mission said on 1 September that it plans to send a small probe toward Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, by 2029. The journey would take about 80,000 years. Co-founder Philip Johnston, who also runs Starcloud, a company planning to put data centres in orbit, said nobody now alive will see it arrive. He said the aim is to take the first step that can actually be taken. No spacecraft has ever been sent deliberately to another star. [20]

    Why it matters — The Voyager probes are drifting out of the solar system, but they were built to study planets rather than to reach anything. This would be the first craft pointed at a star on purpose. [20]

16. 17

    A ground-station maker opens a factory

    Northwood Space opened a 185,000 square foot headquarters and factory in Torrance, California, and expects to add more than 400 jobs over three years. The company, founded in 2024, makes the antennas and software used to talk to satellites from the ground. A traditional ground station uses a large dish that handles one satellite at a time; Northwood sells access to a shared network of flat electronic antennas that can hold several links at once. It raised $100 million in February and won a $49.8 million US Space Force contract. [21]

    Why it matters — Every new satellite fleet needs somewhere on the ground to talk to, and that half of the business attracts far less attention than the rockets do. [21]

17. 18

    Blue Origin starts a hangar for other firms' satellites

    Blue Origin has broken ground on a 120,000 square foot building at Cape Canaveral in Florida where satellites will be prepared and sealed inside rockets before launch. The US Space Force's Space Systems Command awarded the $78 million contract last year and wants the building finished by 2028. It will not be reserved for Blue Origin: it is meant to serve any company flying military payloads. The company says it will hold four processing bays and two encapsulation bays. [3]

    Why it matters — Blue Origin's own New Glenn rocket has been grounded since an explosion at its pad in May, and the company is now building three things at Cape Canaveral at once: the repaired pad, a second pad and this hangar. [3]

18. 19

    SpaceX fires 33 engines before Starship's orbital try

    SpaceX lit all 33 engines of Super Heavy, the first stage of its Starship rocket, on the pad at Starbase in Texas on 28 August. The upper stage was test-fired earlier in the month. The next flight, number 14, is scheduled for later this month and is meant to be the first Starship flight to reach orbit; the previous thirteen were all deliberately aimed short of it. It will carry Starlink Version 3 internet satellites, which are too large to fit on a Falcon 9. [3]

    Why it matters — Twenty of the new satellites flew on July's test and were dropped into the atmosphere on purpose, because the rocket was never going to orbit. This is the flight that would let SpaceX start delivering them for real. [3]

19. 20

    A study tells the US Space Force to plan for wartime factories

    A study paid for by the US Space Force says shortages of engineers and skilled manufacturing workers could stop the United States replacing military satellites after heavy losses in a war. It urges the service to treat the size of that workforce as a readiness question rather than an industry one. The Space Force is the branch of the US military responsible for satellites and space operations. [22]

    Why it matters — Military space strength is normally counted in satellites already in orbit. This study says the number that decides a long conflict is how many people can build the replacements. [22]

20. 21

    Sierra Space signs defence customers for its spaceplane

    Sierra Space said it has signed both national security and commercial customers to carry payloads on the first orbital flight of Dream Chaser, a winged spaceplane designed to land on a runway rather than splash down. The vehicle has been in development for years and the company says it is now moving toward a debut flight later this year. [23]

    Why it matters — A first flight that already carries paying customers is a different proposition from a test flight, both for the company and for whoever owns the hardware on board. [23]

21. 22

    Scientists propose sifting Moon dust for alien debris

    A group of researchers wants to send a mission to sort through about a cubic metre of Moon soil, looking for microscopic particles shed by alien technology. The Moon has no wind, no water and no shifting plates, so anything that lands on it stays there. The idea is that debris drifting through the galaxy would slowly collect in lunar dust the way tiny fragments of plastic collect in Earth's oceans. The New York Times reported the proposal. [24]

    Why it matters — It is a proposal, not a mission, and nothing has been found. It is a way of looking for other civilisations that does not depend on anybody deliberately sending a signal. [24]

22. 23

    NASA funds an idea to map minerals across the solar system

    NASA's early-stage research programme is funding a concept called Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys, which would do for other worlds what the Landsat satellites have done for Earth for more than fifty years: chart which minerals sit where. The United States plans a crewed Moon base in the 2030s and wants to know where helium-3 and other materials are before committing to a landing site. Its proposer said landing in the wrong place can cost an entire programme. [25]

    Why it matters — Scouting ahead is cheap compared with landing. This is early-stage funding, which buys a study rather than a spacecraft. [25]

23. 24

    Curiosity finds pits it has not seen in 14 years

    NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been driving on Mars for fourteen years, found broad shallow pits about a centimetre across dotted through the bedrock in both patches of ground it worked this week. Pits are common where a hard nodule weathers out of softer rock and leaves a void behind. These were much wider and shallower than the usual kind, and there was no sign of whatever had been sitting in them. The rover photographed them with the camera on its arm. [26]

    Why it matters — Fourteen years in, a rover on well-travelled ground is still turning up surface features its team cannot yet account for. [26]

24. 25

    A paper says orbits could hold more satellites safely

    A paper in the journal Scientific Reports trains a machine-learning model on where debris and satellites actually sit in low Earth orbit, then predicts the chance of collisions across different heights and orbital tilts. The authors report that the model reproduces the way risk rises with crowding and with the mass already up there. They also report that a region can carry meaningfully more satellites for only a moderate rise in risk. [27]

    Why it matters — Most arguments about crowded orbits are about the total number of satellites. This one is about which particular heights and tilts are already full and which are not. [27]

25. 26

    Reuters describes hunter satellites in orbit

    Reuters published a review of documents, tracking data and interviews with current and former military officials describing how the United States and China are preparing for conflict extending into orbit. It reports that in June a Chinese uncrewed spaceplane released a small satellite that looped around another Chinese satellite before returning toward the spaceplane, according to the tracking firm LeoLabs. Little else is known about that object. The US military flies a similar uncrewed spaceplane of its own. [28]

    Why it matters — Both countries now treat satellites as weapons systems rather than as equipment. Almost nothing either side does in this area is announced, so the public record comes from commercial tracking companies. [28]

26. 27

    Hubble photographs a bubble blown by dying stars

    Hubble released a picture of N44, a star-forming cloud in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy orbiting the Milky Way about 160,000 light years away. At its centre is a hollow roughly 210 by 140 light years across, cleared by the winds and explosions of the stars inside it. The gas that was pushed out piled up into a dense shell around the hollow, and new stars are now forming inside that shell. [29][30]

    Why it matters — One frame holds both halves of the same process: stars tearing apart the cloud they were born in, and that destruction starting the next generation off. [29]

27. 28

    A Falcon 9 booster flies for the 35th time

    A SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage flew for the 35th time on 2 September, carrying 27 Starlink internet satellites up from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and landing on a ship in the Pacific. That is two flights short of the company's own reuse record, set the week before by a different booster. On Sunday SpaceX planned its 80th Starlink launch of the year, on a booster flying for the 19th time. [31][32]

    Why it matters — Sunday's flight was set to be the 659th landing of a Falcon booster. Reuse has climbed far enough that a stage's 35th flight carries ordinary cargo rather than a test. [32][31]

28. 29

    Perseverance photographs a moon crossing the sun

    NASA's Perseverance rover photographed Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, passing in front of the sun on 12 August, using the main camera on its mast. Phobos orbits less than 6,000 kilometres above Mars and goes round in 7 hours and 39 minutes, faster than the planet itself turns. It covers about a quarter of the sun's disc at most, so it never makes a full eclipse. Rovers have been taking these pictures since Opportunity managed the first in 2004. [33]

    Why it matters — Viking caught Phobos's shadow crossing its landing site in 1977. Repeating the same measurement across five decades is what turns single pictures into a record of how the moon's orbit is changing. [33]

29. 30

    York Space shows a satellite for very low orbit

    York Space Systems unveiled a satellite platform built to work in very low Earth orbit, the band close enough to Earth that there is still enough air to drag a spacecraft down. Satellites there see the ground more sharply and their signals have less distance to cross, but they need to keep firing thrusters simply to stay up. [34]

    Why it matters — York sells the standard body of a satellite rather than the instrument that goes on it, so a new platform is a bet on what its customers will want to fly next. [34]

30. 31

    The US Space Force will study charging satellites at a distance

    Yank Technologies won a US Space Force small-business contract to study whether satellites could be recharged in orbit using wireless power. Most satellites run on solar panels and a fixed battery, and when the battery fades the spacecraft is finished even if everything else works. Sending power across a gap would remove the need for one spacecraft to physically dock with another during a servicing visit. This is a study contract, not a mission. [35]

    Why it matters — Docking with a satellite that was never designed to be docked with is the hardest part of servicing it, as the scaled-back Swift boost showed this month. [35][18]

31. 32

    China's space station is passing overhead

    China's Tiangong space station is making bright evening passes over parts of the eastern United States this week, reaching roughly the brightness of Jupiter, which is enough to see with the naked eye. Three astronauts are aboard. Days earlier, two of them spent five and a half hours outside the station repairing a solar array. [36]

    Why it matters — There are two crewed space stations in orbit now, and the newer one is bright enough that anyone with a clear sky can watch it go over. [36]

32. 33

    The station crew cleans up after four spacewalks

    The crew of the International Space Station spent the week stowing tools and cleaning the cooling systems, helmets and visors of the spacesuits used on the 1 September spacewalk, the last of four in a month. They also ran an emergency medical drill and tested a new European exercise machine intended for long missions. A Russian Progress cargo ship carrying about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies is due to launch on 9 September and dock on 11 September. [39][41][42][38]

    Why it matters — An older Progress ship undocks on 7 September and burns up over the Pacific, which is how the station frees a docking port for the next delivery. [38]

33. 34

    A US farm agency will test satellite images for crop forecasts

    The US Department of Agriculture will run a pilot using satellite imagery, working with NASA and other federal agencies, to try to improve its estimates of how much land is planted and how much it yields. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced it at a farm show in Iowa after a month of meetings with farmers, who along with traders have criticised how reliable the figures are. The plan puts satellite data and crop models alongside the existing surveys of farmers. [40]

    Why it matters — These estimates move grain prices worldwide, so a change in how they are produced reaches anyone who buys food. [40]

34. 35

    GE wins a contract for a Mach 5 test aircraft

    GE Aerospace will build a flying testbed powered by a dual-mode ramjet, an engine designed to work both at moderate speeds and above five times the speed of sound. The US Defense Innovation Unit awarded the contract under a programme for frequent hypersonic flight testing. The vehicle is called Derecho and is aimed at a first flight in 2028. GE has been developing the engine since 2023 and this would be its first demonstration in the air. [37]

    Why it matters — An air-breathing engine takes its oxygen from the atmosphere instead of carrying it, which is the main thing separating this class of vehicle from a rocket. [37]