Starship reached orbit for the first time and released 26 Starlink satellites too big for the Falcon 9. An engine failure cut the flight from ten hours to three

The rest of the day

10 more stories on this beat.

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

1. 02

   Starliner to fly again, empty first

   NASA and Boeing plan to fly Starliner, Boeing's crew capsule, to the space station with nobody aboard in December or January. [9][12] If that works, a crew led by astronaut Woody Hoburg would follow in mid-2028. [9] Starliner's only crewed flight, in June 2024, went wrong: leaking helium and failing thrusters kept its two astronauts on the station for 286 days. [9][13] NASA will pay Boeing $359 million to rebuild the thrusters and certify the Vulcan rocket, made by United Launch Alliance, for crews. [10] It also ordered two more flights, making six. [10]

   123

   2,0242,0272,029

   1. 1Crew test goes wrong2,024
   2. 2Empty test flight2,027
   3. 3First crew flight2,029

   Why it matters — SpaceX plans to retire its Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket, so NASA is paying to keep a second way for astronauts to reach orbit. [9][11] NASA says it will buy at least one crew flight to low orbit every six months into the 2030s, and would welcome a third capsule. [11]

2. 03

   The space station's big robot arm is stuck

   Canadarm2, the 58-foot (about 18-metre) robot arm outside the International Space Station, stopped moving after a routine move, Ars Technica reported on Monday. [14] The rail cart that carries it along the station's main beam froze too. [14] On Sunday evening engineers were still checking whether the fault was in the software or the hardware. [14] The Canadian company MDA built the arm, which went up in 2001 on a design life of 15 years. [14]

   15 yearsDesigned to last

   vsvs

   25 yearsCanadarm2 so far

   Why it matters — Two cargo ships, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus and Japan's HTV-X, cannot dock by themselves and need the arm to catch them. [14] SpaceX's Dragon docks on its own, but SpaceX plans to retire it within four years. [14]

3. 04

   US gets room to grow its space base in Greenland

   President Trump and the leaders of Denmark and Greenland signed a defence deal at the UN in New York on 22 September. [16][18] It lets the US expand Pituffik Space Base in the north-west, which supports missile warning, missile defence and watching space for the US and NATO. [16][17] It also allows new US sites at Narsarsuaq in the south and Mestersvig in the east. [16] The text names Golden Dome, Trump's planned missile-defence shield, as one way the US may help defend the region. [17]

   17US bases in 1945

   ↓→

   1US bases today

   ↓→

   3US sites under the deal

   Why it matters — The deal mentions Golden Dome only once and makes no concrete proposal, the BBC reported, and Denmark's prime minister said nothing about its details had been decided. [16][17] About 200 US soldiers are at Pituffik today, down from thousands of soldiers on 17 bases and sites in 1945. [17] Greenland stays part of Denmark, and no country outside NATO may put forces there. [16]

4. 05

   Britain sets up a squadron to counter threats in orbit

   Britain's Royal Air Force is forming No. III Space Effects Squadron to disrupt, degrade and deny hostile activity against UK interests in space. [21] Its head, Air Chief Marshal Harvey Smyth, described it at a conference in London on 23 September. [21] He said Britain is building ways to fight in orbit, such as jamming signals and countering weapons that attack satellites, but gave no details. [21] He said five Russian military satellites had moved close enough to reach two Finnish commercial ones quickly. [21] It is one of six space squadrons Britain plans. [21]

   Why it matters — Bleddyn Bowen, a Durham University expert, said it probably resembles a US jammer that blocks a satellite's signals without damaging it, and whose effects can be switched off. [21] The RAF is moving from only watching space to trying to control it. [21]

5. 06

   Juice swings past Earth toward Jupiter

   Juice, the European Space Agency's probe to Jupiter's icy moons, passed 8,640 km above the Indian Ocean on Monday 28 September. [19] The pass was planned to bend its path by about 20 degrees and add about 3.5 km per second to its speed. [19] It launched in April 2023 and swung past the Moon and Earth in 2024 and Venus in 2025. [19] One more pass of Earth, in January 2029, is left before it reaches Jupiter in 2031. [19][20]

   Why it matters — Borrowing speed from planets saves the fuel Juice needs to slow down at Jupiter, and later at its moon Ganymede in 2034. [19] On the way past, it was also set to take pictures of Earth and measure its magnetic field. [20]

6. 07

   A satellite company splits from SpinLaunch

   Meridian Space has split from SpinLaunch, a California start-up building a machine to fling payloads toward space, Payload reported on 28 September. [22] Meridian takes the satellite-internet business, and SpinLaunch keeps the launch work. [22] Meridian's antenna, called a reflect-array, uses less power, so its satellites can be smaller and lighter. [22] Its long-term plan is flat satellites, so that a whole network of more than 250 can go up on one dedicated launch. [22]

   Why it matters — Its first test satellite flies on SpaceX's Transporter-18 shared launch, due no earlier than 1 October. [22] It is aimed at governments and regional firms that want their own network instead of renting SpaceX's Starlink or Amazon's Leo, and says it can build one for under $1 billion. [22]

7. 08

   An Indian satellite that does its sums in orbit

   TakeMe2Space, an Indian start-up, plans to launch MOI-1A, a satellite under 50 kg carrying Nvidia computer chips, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 on 1 October, Reuters reported. [27] Customers upload their own AI programs, which study a chosen area and send down only the answer, not the raw data. [27] It says 23 customers have signed, in farming, mining, supply chains and insurance. [27] Its last satellite, MOI-1, was lost when a rocket's third stage failed. [27]

   MOI-1Aunder 50 kg

   ↓→

   Power on boardabout 150 W

   ↓→

   What it can runsmall chips

   Why it matters — Downloading raw data costs customers money, so doing the sums in orbit can save them more than the extra they pay, says its founder, Ronak Samantray. [27] With about 150 watts of power, it runs small chips, not the data-centre chips SpaceX and Starcloud plan to fly. [27]

8. 09

   A test of beaming power between satellites

   Star Catcher, a start-up that wants to sell power to satellites by beaming light onto their solar panels, says its test craft Protostar is ready for SpaceX's Transporter-18. [26] In orbit it will release a small test satellite, track it and beam power onto its ordinary panels. [26] It would be the first time power has been beamed between two separate spacecraft, Payload reported. [26] Last November it sent more than 1.1 kilowatts to solar panels on the ground at the Kennedy Space Center. [26]

   Why it matters — It claims its beam could let a satellite make two to ten times more power with no new hardware. [26] It has 10 public deals to sell power, with satellite companies such as Starcloud and Loft Orbital. [26]

9. 10

   Smashed icy moons can keep their oceans

   Computer simulations led by Marc Neveu of the University of Maryland suggest a large icy moon smashed by a giant collision can pull itself back together and keep an ocean under its ice. [25] Moons smaller than about 1,000 km across were unlikely to keep an ocean after such a crash. [25] In bigger moons, the heat of the crash could even thicken the ocean for a couple of billion years. [25] A crash could not create an ocean where there was none. [25]

   Why it matters — Oceans under ice, like the one thought to lie inside Jupiter's moon Europa, are places where life might be possible. [25] Juice, which passed Earth on Monday, is going to study the hidden oceans of Jupiter's icy moons. [20]

10. 11

    Mars may have buried its carbon rocks

    A study led by Chang-Chin Wang of JAXA, Japan's space agency, suggests groundwater on early Mars carried carbonate minerals deep underground. [31] That could explain why orbiters and rovers find so few on the surface. [31] A planet with rivers, lakes and a thick carbon dioxide air should have made plenty of them. [31] In the team's computer models, groundwater dissolved carbonates near the surface and left them again deeper down. [31]

    Why it matters — If the carbonates lie underground, drilling into feldspar-rich ground, a very common kind of rock, could find a record of Mars' wetter past. [31] The same drills might reach water that sank underground as Mars dried out. [31]