Space · Wednesday, 16 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

The US says it has weapons in orbit. It will not say what they are, or when they went up.

Two senior American officials said on Monday and Tuesday that the US Space Force operates weapons in orbit. Neither would describe them, and one said that withholding the details is the point.

1967

the year of the treaty that banned nuclear and other mass-casualty weapons from orbit

It left every other kind of orbital weapon unaddressed, which is the gap all three big space powers now work in. [3]

1,500+

pieces of debris from one Russian weapon test in 2021

Russia destroyed one of its own spacecraft with an anti-satellite missile, and the pieces are still up there. [1]

$12bn

in major contracts the US Space Force has awarded in the last year

The buyers include SpaceX, Rocket Lab, L3Harris and Boeing, for launches and tracking satellites. [1]

2 in 5 days

secret US Space Force missions flown by SpaceX this month

USSF-153 left California on 10 September and USSF-259 was set to follow on 15 September. [6]

The lead story — what happened

Troy Meink, the US Secretary of the Air Force, said on Monday that the United States now has on-orbit weapons that can defend its forces against attack. [2]
It is the first time the US has said in public that it has put an offensive weapon in space. [3]
Meink gave no details at all: not what the weapons are, not when they went into orbit, not whether they have ever been tested. [2]
He said the silence is deliberate. Saying that the weapons exist helps deterrence, he said, and describing them would not. [2]
A day later, General Douglas Schiess, the head of US Space Force operations, repeated it from the stage at the same conference in Maryland. [1]
Schiess told the story of one Space Force operator under missile fire who, in his words, locked onto a target and waged electromagnetic warfare. [1]
That phrase points at jamming a satellite's radio link rather than hitting it. Bleddyn Bowen, who studies military space at Durham University in Britain, told the BBC he expects a jammer too. [1][5]
A 1967 treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in orbit. It says nothing about any other kind, and the US, Russia and China have all worked inside that gap. [3]
A US Space Force spokesperson said its work in orbit now covers disruption, degradation and destruction of a rival's capabilities, for attack as well as defence. [3]
US officials accused Russia in 2024 of putting working anti-satellite weapons in orbit, and say Chinese satellites regularly manoeuvre close to American ones. [2]
Richard Palmer, a director at US Space Command, called the admission a landmark on Tuesday at a defence conference in Paris, and also declined to describe the weapons. [4]
Germany has a 35-billion-euro military space plan. Major General Michael Traut, who runs German Space Command, says Germany will not field destructive weapons in orbit but will fund jammers and lasers. [4]

Who is involved

Troy Meink

the US Secretary of the Air Force, the civilian in charge of the US Air Force and Space Force; he made the disclosure on Monday
Gen. Douglas Schiess

Chief of Space Operations, the officer who runs the US Space Force day to day; he repeated the claim on stage on Tuesday
The US Space Force

the newest branch of the US military, set up in 2019 to protect American satellites; it now says its job also includes attacking a rival's
Bleddyn Bowen

a British academic who studies military space at Durham University; he told the BBC the weapon is most likely a jammer
Richard Palmer

a director at US Space Command, the American military command that runs operations in orbit; he called the admission a landmark

How it unfolded

1967 a treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and nothing else
2021 Russia destroys one of its own satellites with a missile, leaving 1,500 pieces of debris
2024 US officials say Russia has put an anti-satellite weapon in orbit
Mon 14 Sep Troy Meink says the US operates on-orbit weapons, and refuses every detail
Tue 15 Sep Gen. Schiess repeats it on stage; US Space Command calls it a landmark

Where this points

Watch whether Russia or China answers with a claim of its own, because an announcement with no evidence attached only does its work if rivals believe it.

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

Armies moving into orbit High↑

The US said this week that it operates weapons in orbit and would give no details. [2] SpaceX was booked to fly a second secret US Space Force mission in five days on Tuesday night. [6] Germany has a 35-billion-euro military space plan and says it will fund jammers and lasers. [4]

Orbits getting crowded Building↑

More than 300 launches in 2025 put over 4,000 new payloads into orbit, about ten a day. [8] The European Space Agency's single measure of whether that is sustainable got about ten times worse in one year. [8] Tuesday night's flight was SpaceX's 110th of 2026. [6]

Craft that can go and meet another craft Building↑

Two spacecraft owned by the Californian company Impulse Space flew within 200 metres of each other and photographed the approach. [7] Bleddyn Bowen, who studies military space at Durham University in Britain, told the BBC that a satellite built to close in and grab another one is among the things the US weapon could turn out to be. [5]

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.

02
A second secret launch in five days

SpaceX was scheduled to launch a second classified US Space Force mission in five days on Tuesday night, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. [6] The mission is called USSF-259. The first, USSF-153, left the same base on 10 September. [6] Neither payload has been described. The live broadcast was expected to stop shortly after the rocket's first stage landed on a ship at sea, about eight and a half minutes in. [6] It was to be SpaceX's 110th launch of 2026, and the thirteenth landing for that particular booster. [6]

Why it matters — The flight is public and the cargo is not, which is the same split the two officials made at the conference this week. Anyone can count American military launches; nobody outside the US government can say what they carry.
03
Two private craft meet 200 metres apart

Two spacecraft owned by Impulse Space, a Californian company, flew within 200 metres of each other in low Earth orbit and took photographs of the approach. [7] Both are called Mira. They are orbital transfer vehicles: dishwasher-sized tugs that carry up to 300 kilograms of somebody else's equipment from wherever a rocket drops it to the exact orbit the customer wanted. [7] The two launched separately, in January and November 2025, and the company announced the meeting on 8 September. [7]

Why it matters — Flying up to another object in orbit is the same skill whether the aim is to repair it, refuel it or interfere with it. Impulse sells that skill, and the photographs are how it shows customers what its tugs can do.
04
Europe's yearly count of orbit gets worse

The European Space Agency published its 2026 Space Environment Report, the count it has made every year since 2017. [8] More than 300 launches in 2025 put over 4,000 new payloads up, about ten a day. [8] Just over three dead satellites or rocket stages came down each day. [8] ESA's single-number measure of whether current behaviour is sustainable in the long run got about ten times worse in one year. [8] A new measure this year covers the chance that a surviving fragment injures somebody on the ground. [8]

Why it matters — ESA now says that clearing up existing junk is required, not optional, because debris collides and makes more debris. It has cut its projection window from 200 years to 100 and the numbers still come out higher than last year's did. [8]
05
The Moon has too little water for a city

Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell, two astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, worked out how long a settlement could live off the Moon's ice. [9] The ice sits in polar craters that have had no sunlight for four billion years. [9] They assumed a generous billion tonnes of it and 98% recycling, the rate the space station manages. [9] On those figures a million-person city runs dry in just over a century. [9] Best estimates of lunar ice are about 30 times smaller, which brings that down to roughly a decade. [9]

Why it matters — A village of a thousand people, or a town of ten thousand, would last centuries on the same ice, so the finding is about size rather than about going at all. Elvis writes that surveys only reach a few metres down, and the rubble layer goes tens of metres, so the first job for anyone planning bigger is to look deeper. [9]
06
Cartilage printed on the space station

Astronauts printed cartilage tissue aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday. [10] Jessica Meir of NASA and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency took cartilage cells out of a research fridge called MERLIN. [10] They loaded them into a printer called Auxilium, inside a sealed glovebox in the Japanese laboratory module. [10] NASA says cartilage printed in weightlessness comes out better than cartilage printed on Earth. [10] The sessions can be run remotely from the ground. [10]

Why it matters — Damaged cartilage does not heal well, and the aim of this work is implants grown from a patient's own cells. That is a result for people who will never leave the ground. [10]
07
A third pilot for NASA's quiet jet

NASA said on 15 September that Mike Lippert, the newest test pilot on its X-59 aeroplane, ran its engines on the ground for the first time. [11] The X-59 is shaped so that flying faster than sound makes a soft thump instead of a bang. [11] NASA plans to fly it over American towns and ask people what they heard. [11] The answers go to the regulators who currently forbid supersonic flight over land. [11] The two established X-59 pilots, Nils Larson and Jim Less, coached Lippert through the run. [11]

Why it matters — A third trained pilot is what keeps a flight-test programme moving when one person is unavailable. The rule the survey is aimed at was written around the old, loud sonic boom. [11]
08
NASA asks strangers to fix its statistics

NASA's Human Research Program picked ten winning entries in a public competition about a problem it cannot design away. [12] Artemis II carried four astronauts, each measured on hundreds of body readings over time. [12] That is a huge number of measurements from a tiny number of people, which ordinary statistics handles badly. [12] The contest asked anyone at all for methods that draw trustworthy conclusions from data shaped like that. [12] First place went to Praniil Nagaraj, whose entry treats four astronauts as a detailed case series rather than a failed population study. [12]

Why it matters — Every crewed flight has this problem and it gets sharper as missions get longer while crews stay tiny. NASA put the question outside its own building instead of solving it in-house. [12]
09
Green, red and purple over Kyrgyzstan

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir photographed the aurora from the International Space Station on 7 September and posted one of the pictures the next day. [13] The station was 411 kilometres up and over Kyrgyzstan at the time. [13] Stacking several frames produced a long exposure in which the green glow sits among star trails, moonlight, passing satellites and city lights. [13] The US weather agency NOAA traced the display to a fast stream of solar wind out of a hole in the Sun's atmosphere, plus the tail end of several earlier eruptions. [13]

Why it matters — The colour depends on which gas the incoming particles hit and how high up. Oxygen glows green between about 100 and 200 kilometres and red above that, and the purple Meir saw is those colours mixing. [13]
10
A night set aside for looking at the Moon

International Observe the Moon Night falls on Saturday 19 September. [14] The date is picked for the first quarter moon, when the Moon is up in the late afternoon and evening. [14] At that phase the line between lunar day and night runs across the middle of the disc, the Sun sits low along it, and craters and mountains throw long shadows. [14] NASA keeps a map of hundreds of registered events, from star parties run by local astronomy clubs to online sessions hosted by observatories, and anyone can register one of their own. [14]

Why it matters — Nothing is required to take part. The Moon at first quarter is the one target in the sky that rewards a pair of binoculars as much as a telescope. [14]

02 Lesson why it matters

Some things only start working on the day you say you have them

A weapon in orbit that nobody has been told about cannot change a single decision anyone makes.

The twist

The weapon had been in orbit for a while and had changed nobody's plans. It started doing its job on the day an official said it was up there.

How it works

A country builds something in orbit and tells nobody
Its only job is to change what a rival decides to do
A rival cannot decide around a thing it has not been told about
So the country says the thing exists
And holds back every detail, because details are what a rival would plan against

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

The second secret Space Force launch

the same split, one step further: the rocket and the landing are shown, the payload is never named, and the broadcast is cut at the point where the two separate
Two Impulse Space craft meeting in orbit

the company flew the manoeuvre and then released the photographs, because a customer cannot buy a capability nobody has been shown
Europe's yearly count of orbit

ESA boiled its whole assessment down to one number on purpose, so that satellite operators who will never read the report still meet the finding
NASA's competition on four astronauts' data

NASA published the problem it could not solve rather than keeping it inside, and ten methods came back from people it had never met

Where you've seen this

Burglar alarms

the box screwed to the front wall is what stops somebody trying the door; a hidden alarm only catches them afterwards

Speed cameras

they are painted bright yellow on purpose, because a hidden one collects fines and a visible one slows the traffic

Restaurant hygiene ratings

a score filed at the council office changes no kitchen, and the same score stuck on the door changes several

The catch

It only works while people believe the claim, and the US offered no evidence of any kind.

And the whole of it

Nobody in this story can see the other side's hardware. Each of them is working out what the others have from a sentence somebody chose to say out loud, and so is everyone reading about it afterwards.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The US has had something in orbit for a while and told nobody. What changed this week is that Troy Meink said it out loud on Monday and General Douglas Schiess repeated it on Tuesday, and both of them refused to say what it is, when it went up, or whether it has ever been tested.

Why it works on us — A claim with no details in it cannot be checked and cannot be argued with, so every listener fills the gap with whatever they already fear.

Who gains

The US Space Force — Its officials have been asking for orbital weapons for years, and an admission that they already exist is the strongest budget argument it has made in public. [2]
Companies selling craft that can move around in orbit — Impulse Space released photographs of two of its tugs 200 metres apart in the same week a government said orbit now holds weapons. [7]
SpaceX — It flew one of the two secret US Space Force missions this month and was booked for the second, on its 110th launch of the year. [6]
Germany's military space programme — Its 35-billion-euro plan for jammers, lasers and attacks on ground stations is easier to defend once the US has said orbital weapons are already up there. [4]
Firms that remove space junk — ESA's report now says active removal is required, not optional, to stop debris generating more debris. [8]

Who pays

Satellite operators with nothing military about them — One Russian anti-satellite test in 2021 left more than 1,500 pieces of debris in orbit, and ESA says fragments now collide and make more fragments. [1][8]
Anyone trying to check the American claim — No capability, no date and no test result was given, so nobody outside the US government can confirm it or dispute it. [2]
Russian and Chinese satellites — The US Space Force says its work in orbit now includes disruption, degradation and destruction of a rival's capabilities. [3]
People under a re-entry — ESA added a measure of on-ground casualty risk to its 2026 report and says the trend is upward, because more launches mean more things coming back down. [8]
Anyone planning a city on the Moon — On best current ice estimates, Elvis and McDowell put a million-person settlement about a decade from running dry even with space-station-grade recycling. [9]

What nobody knows yet

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

01

What the weapon actually is.

Neither official named it. Bleddyn Bowen, asked by the BBC, gave three guesses and would not pick between them: a radio jammer, a vehicle that rams a satellite, or a craft that grabs one and moves it. [5]
02

When it went into orbit.

Meink would not say. Ars Technica notes that space hardware usually takes years to build, so the programme probably started under an earlier US president. [2]
03

Whether it has ever been tested.

Meink was asked and explicitly refused to answer either way. [2]
04

How many there are, and what they do.

Schiess said Space Force personnel operate on-orbit weapons and then gave no number and no function. [1]
05

What the two classified Space Force missions launched on 10 and 15 September are carrying.

The Space Force says only that both are classified, and the launch broadcasts were expected to end shortly after the booster landed. [6]
06

Whether the Moon holds enough water to matter.

Elvis and McDowell's arithmetic rests on estimates of ice that nobody has dug up, and surveys reach only a few metres into a rubble layer tens of metres deep. [9]
07

Whether the two Impulse Space craft could have done anything to each other.

The company released pictures of a 200-metre approach and did not say whether either craft carries anything that could grab, push or disturb the other. [7]
08

Whether Russia or China will answer with a claim of its own.

Neither has commented on the US statements, and the US has not published evidence for its own earlier claims about Russian anti-satellite hardware. [2][3]

04 Hope carry this

Astronauts printed cartilage on the International Space Station on Tuesday, and NASA says tissue printed in weightlessness comes out better than tissue printed on Earth. The aim is replacement cartilage grown from a patient's own cells.

Also true today

Jessica Meir photographed the aurora from 411 kilometres above Kyrgyzstan on 7 September. Green, red and purple were all in the sky at once.
Saturday is International Observe the Moon Night. NASA's map already lists hundreds of registered events, and the Moon at first quarter shows its craters to a pair of binoculars.