Space · Sunday, 4 October 2026

01 Briefing what happened

ESA's chief says Europe will be short of rockets around 2030, as its member countries back a push for European astronaut flights

Josef Aschbacher says Europe needs its own way to fly astronauts and more rockets of its own. Also today: Elon Musk joins a panel advising the US military, Apollo 13 flight director Milt Windler dies at 94, and black hole jets are caught stirring the gas around galaxies.

10bn vs 5bn

Aschbacher's rough cost of Europe's own astronaut system, against buying flights from the US

building it would take about ten years, he said [1]

760m euros

ESA's contract with The Exploration Company for cargo flights to the space station

310 million euros of it pays for the first Nyx test flight [1]

around 2030

when Europe's demand for launches peaks, by ESA's estimate

Aschbacher says Europe does not have enough rockets for it [1]

The lead story — what happened

The European Space Agency's member countries have endorsed a plan called A Call to Boost European Space Exploration, NASASpaceflight reported on 3 October. [1]
The plan asks ESA to build its own ways to reach low orbit, the Moon and Mars, including a craft that can carry astronauts. [1]
Josef Aschbacher, ESA's director general, said Europe was exposed this year when partners changed programmes Europe had put money into. [1]
He estimates that Europe's own astronaut system would take about ten years and cost about 10 billion. [1] Buying the same flights and station time from the United States would cost about five billion, he said. [1]
European astronauts fly on American craft today: ESA's Matthias Maurer went to orbit in SpaceX's Dragon capsule. [1] SpaceX plans to retire Crew Dragon around 2030. [2]
Two European companies already plan crew capsules. The Exploration Company wants a crewed version of its Nyx cargo capsule, and PLD Space is building one called LINCE. [1]
Nyx will first fly cargo to the International Space Station on an Ariane 64 rocket, under a 760 million euro ESA contract. No launch date has been announced. [1]
ESA is also studying a station of its own, with teams led by Airbus Defence and Space and OHB. [1] Aschbacher said it might have a crew only part of the time and be run by robots the rest. [1]
On rockets, Aschbacher said demand for launches peaks around 2030, and Europe does not have enough rockets to launch all its own satellites. [1]
He expects Ariane 6, Europe's main rocket, to fly until the mid or late 2030s. [1] Neither it nor the smaller Vega C can be reused, which he called a disadvantage. [1]
Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit on 5 September, the first rocket in ESA's European Launcher Challenge to do it. [1]
With the planned Gateway station near the Moon scrapped, ESA is renegotiating its part in NASA's Artemis Moon programme and aims to land European astronauts there. [1]

Build Europe's own astronaut system10 bn

Keep buying flights from the US5 bn

Josef Aschbacher's rough figures. Building Europe's own would take about ten years; he gave no currency in the interview.

Who is involved

Josef Aschbacher

director general of the European Space Agency; he set out the costs and the rocket shortfall
Matthias Maurer

an ESA astronaut who flew in SpaceX's Dragon; he wants a European capsule at least that good
The Exploration Company

a European start-up building the Nyx capsule; it wants a crewed version
PLD Space

a Spanish rocket company; it is designing the LINCE crew capsule

How it unfolded

June two European station studies begin, each lasting about nine months [1]
5 Sept Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reaches orbit on its second flight [1]
Sept ESA signs the Nyx cargo test flight to the space station [1]
3 Oct Aschbacher lays out the crew costs and the rocket shortfall [1]
Around 2030 launch demand peaks and the space station starts to be retired [1]

Where this points

Watch whether ESA's member countries put money behind a European crew craft; Aschbacher says the work would take about ten years from the start. [1]

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.

Companies close to the buyer Building↑

Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, whose companies sell to the US military, now co-direct a panel that advises it. [3] ESA may pay companies to build its crew craft, the way NASA paid SpaceX and Boeing. [1]

Robots working alone Steady↑

A student rover from Belfast must find its way, dig soil and build a wall entirely by itself. [8] ESA's chief says a European station could run as a robot station whenever no crew is aboard. [1]

Old telescope records reread Steady→

A young dead star beside a pulsar was found in Hubble pictures taken between 2006 and 2016. [6] A black hole study joined two existing sky surveys to see where jets hit gas. [5]

The rest of the day

6 more stories on this beat.

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

02
Musk joins a US military panel on war

Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, named a panel this week to study the future of warfare. [3] Elon Musk is one of its two co-directors. [3] Musk founded SpaceX, the rocket company that holds billions of dollars in US military contracts. [3] The other co-director is Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, which makes fighter jets that partly fly themselves. [3] Older arms makers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are largely absent. [3]

Why it matters — The panel advises the department that pays both men's companies. [3] Max Stier, who runs the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan group, said Musk's own money is directly at stake in the job. [3]
03
Apollo 13 flight director dies at 94

Milt Windler, a NASA flight director, died on Thursday at the age of 94. [4] A flight director leads one shift of the controllers on the ground who run a crewed flight. [4] Windler was lead flight director for Apollo 13 in 1970, when an explosion vented the crew's oxygen into space on the way to the Moon. [4] He and fellow flight director Gerry Griffin polled the controllers in the room. From their answers they drew up three ways to fire the lunar module's engine to head home. [4]

Why it matters — He also led shifts on Apollo 8, the first crewed flight around the Moon, and on all three crewed Skylab missions. [4] Looking back in 2006, he said the missions came so fast there was no time to think about them. [4]
04
Black hole jets stir the gas around galaxies

Astronomers led by Sanchayeeta Borthakur of Arizona State University and Namrata Roy of the Raman Research Institute studied hundreds of galaxies whose central black holes fire jets. [5] They put a survey of glowing gas from DESI, a sky-mapping instrument, beside radio measurements of the jets from LOFAR, a network of radio antennas. [5] The gas lit up where the jets struck it, most strongly at a galaxy's outer edge and at the far edge of the gas cloud around it. [5] That cloud is the raw material for new stars. [5]

Why it matters — It points to one reason big galaxies stop making stars: the jets disturb the gas before it can cool and clump. [5] A black hole tiny next to its galaxy can reach hundreds of thousands of light years out, Roy said. [5]
05
A young dead star found beside a pulsar

A team led by Greta Ettorre of the University of Bologna found the youngest white dwarf yet seen paired with a millisecond pulsar. [6] A white dwarf is the dense core a star like the Sun leaves when it dies. [6] A millisecond pulsar is a collapsed star spinning hundreds of times a second, sweeping beams of radio waves across space. [6] MeerKAT, a radio telescope in South Africa, found the pulsar, and the white dwarf turned up in Hubble pictures taken between 2006 and 2016. [6]

Hubble pictures2006-2016
MeerKAT radio dishesthe pulsar
Old Hubble pictures held the white dwarf, and South Africa's radio dishes found the pulsar. The pair's history came from putting both together.

Why it matters — The white dwarf stopped feeding gas to the pulsar about 600 million years ago and still seems wrapped in what it lost. [6] Pulsars keep such steady time that astronomers use them as clocks to test gravity, so how they form matters. [6]
06
One satellite to find several jammers

Engineers at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China published a way to locate several sources of radio interference at once from one satellite in low orbit. [7] Interference comes from faulty equipment and from deliberate jamming, and it threatens satellite navigation, timing and communications. [7] Locating it from space usually needs several satellites with matched clocks that all see the source at once. [7] The new method finds the strongest source, removes its signal, and repeats. [7]

Why it matters — The authors say the big new satellite fleets in low orbit are raising the risk of interference. [7] A method that needs one satellite instead of several would make it cheaper for regulators and armed forces to find jammers. [7]
07
Belfast students take a Moon robot to NASA

Ten students from Queen's University Belfast are going to Florida later this month for Lunabotics, a NASA contest for university teams. [8] Each team designs, builds and runs a robot that could work on the Moon. [8] The rover must find its own way around a room of fake Moon soil, dig some up, cross obstacles and use the soil to build a wall. [8] The team's 52 kg aluminium rover won the UK round in Milton Keynes. [8]

Why it matters — They will face university teams from Australia, India and the US at the University of Central Florida, as the only European team. [8] The contest practises robots that could prepare places on the Moon before people live there. [8]

02 Lesson why it matters

Why Mission Control asks every desk before it decides

No single controller on Apollo 13 could see the whole broken spacecraft, so the flight directors asked the room and built the plan from the answers.

The twist

On Apollo 13 the flight directors' job was not to know the answer. Their job was to ask every controller, so the answer could be built from all of them.

How it works

Each person in the room knows one part well
Nobody can hold every part in their head at once
So the leader asks each one in turn
Their answers become a short list of options
One person chooses from that list

The same force, elsewhere today

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

Apollo 13 flight director dies at 94

Windler and Gerry Griffin polled the controllers in the room, then turned the answers into three ways to fire the engine home.
A young dead star found beside a pulsar

A radio telescope found the pulsar and old Hubble pictures held the white dwarf; only the two records together gave the pair's history.
Black hole jets stir the gas around galaxies

One survey saw the glowing gas and a radio survey saw the jets; side by side they showed where the jets hit.
Belfast students take a Moon robot to NASA

The team split into software, electronics and mechanical groups, each answering for one part of the same rover.

Where you've seen this

Hospital ward rounds

the doctor hears from the nurse and the pharmacist before changing a patient's treatment

Juries

twelve people each noticed different things in the same trial, and they talk before they vote

School reports

each teacher sees one subject, and the whole child shows only when the reports are read together

The catch

Asking every desk only works when every desk is in the room. The US defence department's new panel includes the founders of SpaceX and Anduril, while older arms makers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are largely absent.

And the whole of it

Every controller in that room in 1970 saw one part of a broken spaceship, and none saw all of it. Most of us sit at one desk in the systems we live in, from a school to a hospital, and see the rest only when someone asks the others.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The European Space Agency is asking its member countries to pay for European rockets and a European astronaut craft, because its chief Josef Aschbacher says partners changed programmes Europe had put money into. [1] In the US, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, whose companies sell to the military, now co-direct a panel that advises it. [3]

Why it works on us — A round pair of numbers, about 10 billion to build against about 5 billion to buy, makes the choice sound like a simple price, but both are one man's rough estimates in an interview. [1]

Who gains

The Exploration Company and PLD Space — Both are already designing crew capsules, and ESA may pay companies to build one the way NASA paid SpaceX and Boeing. [1]
Airbus Defence and Space and OHB — They lead the two studies of whether Europe could build and run its own station, which Aschbacher says European industry would build. [1]
SpaceX and Anduril — Their founders now co-direct a panel advising the US defence department, which already pays both companies. [3]
Regulators and armed forces hunting jammers — A method needing one satellite instead of several, with no matched clocks, would make finding interference cheaper. [7]

Who pays

European governments that fund ESA — Aschbacher's estimate is about 10 billion over about ten years, against about 5 billion to keep buying flights from the US. [1]
Owners of European satellites — If Europe has too few rockets around 2030, ESA's, the European Commission's and national satellites compete for the same launches. [1]
Older US arms makers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — They are largely absent from the panel that will advise one of their customers, the US defence department, on future war. [3]

What nobody knows yet

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

01

Whether ESA's member countries will pay for a European crew craft, and when.

They have endorsed the plan, but the report names no budget, no schedule and no chosen company. [1]
02

What the US defence department's new panel can decide, and what rules keep Musk away from decisions about SpaceX.

The part of the New York Times report we could read names its co-directors and the worries about them, and stops before any rules are described. [3]
03

How short of rockets Europe will be around 2030.

Aschbacher said demand will outrun Europe's rockets but gave no count of launches needed or missing. [1]
04

When the Nyx capsule first flies.

No launch date has been announced; in 2025 The Exploration Company was aiming for 2028. [1]
05

Whether black hole jets explain most galaxies that stop making stars.

The study shows where jets hit gas in hundreds of galaxies, and the team calls it a new way to test the idea, not a final count. [5]
06

What is wrapped around the young white dwarf beside the pulsar.

Its ultraviolet light is dimmer than expected, which the team says could mean leftover material; radio signals might confirm it. [6]
07

Whether the one-satellite jammer method works in orbit.

The paper reports computer and experimental tests and gives no date for use on a working satellite. [7]

04 Hope carry this

Ten students from Queen's University Belfast built a 52 kg rover that finds its own way, digs soil and builds a wall, and this month they take it to NASA's Lunabotics contest in Florida as the only European team.

Also true today

In 1970 Milt Windler and Gerry Griffin polled the controllers in Mission Control and drew up three ways to fire Apollo 13's engine home. Windler lived to 94.
Astronomers found the youngest white dwarf yet seen beside a millisecond pulsar, in Hubble pictures taken between 2006 and 2016.