Stoke Space has never reached orbit. It raised $1bn this week and announced a bigger rocket for 2029.

The rest of the day

9 more stories on this beat.

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

1. 02

   A European capsule maker raises $450m

   The Exploration Company, a European firm founded in 2021, raised $450m this week, one of the largest scale-up rounds a European space company has closed. [5][6] It is building Nyx, a capsule meant to carry cargo up to space stations and bring it back down, and Storm, a rocket engine designed to be flown again rather than thrown away. [5] Nyx has flown twice at reduced size, with mixed results, and its first trip to the International Space Station is planned for 2028. [5]

   Why it matters — It has already won more than $2bn in contracts, including deals with Axiom Space, Starlab and Vast to carry supplies to commercial space stations that have not been built. [5] Its customers are betting on a capsule that has not flown at full size, and it is betting on stations that do not yet exist.

2. 03

   NASA drops a telescope from next year's proposals

   On or about 8 September, NASA removed the option to propose joint observations with the Swift telescope from the next round of proposals for IXPE, its X-ray observatory. [7] IXPE's Guest Observer programme lets astronomers anywhere apply for observing time on any topic, and a joint option lets a single proposal book two telescopes at once, so the pairing is committed a year before anyone observes anything. [7] The deadline for this round is unchanged at 17 September, and NASA's notice gives no reason for the removal. [7]

   Why it matters — Whatever is unsettled about Swift's future, this is where it shows up first: not in an announcement, but in what astronomers are permitted to ask for next year. [7]

3. 04

   A cargo ship was burned up on purpose

   The Progress 94 freighter undocked from the International Space Station at 11:18 in the morning, US eastern time, on Monday. [8] It was due to burn up in the atmosphere later the same day. [8] Progress ships are uncrewed Russian freighters flown by Roscosmos, Russia's space agency. This one launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan in March on a Soyuz rocket, reached the station two days later and docked itself to a module called Poisk, carrying about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies. [8] The crew filled it with rubbish before it left. [8]

   Why it matters — Destroying the ship is how the station empties its bins, and nothing about a Progress is meant to survive the trip home. [8] The two fundraises above are being spent on the opposite idea, hardware built to come back. [1][5]

4. 05

   A paper says black holes grow with the universe

   Two theoretical physicists, Valerio Faraoni and Massimiliano Rinaldi, argue in a new paper that black holes expand along with the expanding universe rather than sitting immune to it. [9] The standard description of a black hole, written more than a century ago, treats it as a still object in an unchanging empty void, because that makes the sums workable. [9] The pair tracked the boundary beyond which light cannot escape. The only answer that held together was one where it grows at exactly the rate the universe does. [9] The paper is a preprint and unreviewed. [9]

   Why it matters — If it survives review, the enormous early black holes the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding would not have had to eat their way to that size. The expansion would have carried them there. [9]

5. 06

   Comets caught boiling near a young star

   Astronomers led by Aline Novais at Lund University in Sweden report signs of comets falling towards PDS 70, a young star about 370 light years away. [10] They found absorption lines of sodium in archived data from HARPS, an instrument built to hunt planets, which appeared and vanished over a few nights and moved faster than the star itself. [10] That pattern fits gas boiling off a comet crossing in front of the star, and does not fit a steady wind from the surrounding disc of dust. [10] The work is published in Nature Communications. [10]

   Why it matters — PDS 70 is one of the few systems whose planets have been photographed directly, and water vapour was already found in its inner disc. [10] Comets carrying ice inwards is one of the leading explanations for where Earth's own water came from. [10]

6. 07

   Schoolchildren name two merging galaxies

   Students from Waiakea High School and the Volcano School of Arts and Sciences, both on Hawaii's Big Island, used the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea to observe NGC 7253. [11] It is a pair of spiral galaxies caught in each other's gravity and slowly merging into one. [11] They had time on the telescope through Project Hokulani, an internship for local students. [11] They gave the image a Hawaiian name, Na 'Uhane Mahoe Huki Pu i ke Ola, which means the twin spirits pulling together creating life. [11]

   Why it matters — Maunakea is one of the best sites on Earth for a telescope and also land many Native Hawaiians hold sacred, which has made the observatories there the subject of a long dispute. [11] This image was taken and named by schoolchildren from the island itself.

7. 08

   The next wave of Mars missions is mostly not American

   The Planetary Society published a survey of what is coming next at Mars on 7 September, written by the planetary scientist Ari Koeppel. [12] NASA's plan to bring Martian rock back to Earth is on indefinite hold, and its three new robotic Mars missions were chosen outside the open, peer-reviewed competition that normally decides them. [12] Japan's MMX spacecraft will try to scoop 10 grams off Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, and fly it home. [12] Europe's Rosalind Franklin rover, held up since the 2008 financial crisis, now has a launch contract for 2028. [12]

   Why it matters — Nobody knows whether Phobos is an asteroid Mars captured or debris knocked off Mars itself, and 10 grams would settle it. [12] The samples NASA has already collected and sealed on Mars still have no ride home. [12]

8. 09

   Pixxel's buyers turn out to be governments

   Pixxel, the Indian company whose $100m fundraise was reported on Monday, has told Payload who is actually buying from it. [14][15] Its satellites read the ground by splitting light into many narrow bands, which shows what a surface is made of rather than only what it looks like. [14][15] The customer list is almost all public bodies. It holds contracts from the US National Reconnaissance Office, a place in NASA's $476m programme for buying small-satellite data, and the lead on India's first private Earth-watching fleet. [14] About 25 satellites are in build. [14]

   Why it matters — Chief executive Awais Ahmed said today's demand is a fraction of what is coming, and compared this kind of imaging with radar imaging seven or eight years ago. [14] A company selling mainly to defence ministries and space agencies has the same exposure as the rocket firms above: most of its money is promised by buyers whose own programmes are unfinished.

9. 10

   A neural network to help a spacecraft find its bearings

   A team led by Jian Guan has published a design in Scientific Reports for a small neural network that reads star-tracker pictures. [13] A star tracker is the camera a spacecraft uses to work out which way it is pointing: it photographs a patch of sky and measures the centre of each star to a fraction of a pixel. [13] The usual methods assume each star is one neat blob, so a close pair of stars confuses them. The paper reports its network spotting those pairs every time, against about 54 per cent for the conventional method. [13]

   Why it matters — Almost everything a spacecraft does depends on knowing which way it is pointing, from aiming an antenna at Earth to holding a telescope steady. [13] The authors say their result is simulated, was run on a desktop graphics card, and has not been tried on space-qualified hardware. [13] The work was funded by China's civil space programme. [13]