Space

Europe ordered 18 satellites to cut its reliance on Starlink. The operator in charge learned the job on American-built ones. →

A German maker won nearly a billion euros to build the first hardware for IRIS2, the European Union's own satellite internet system. It does not start work until 2030.

Thousands of cheap satellites were meant to be too many to shoot at. They all fly at the same few heights. →

The answer to satellites being attacked was to launch thousands of cheap ones instead of a few costly ones. At a conference in Utah this week, security researchers said the copies share an altitude, a supplier and a software update, and a weapon aimed at what they share reaches all of them at once.

SpaceX's biggest rocket has flown thirteen times and never reached orbit. The fourteenth will try. →

Every Starship test so far has come back down on its own. Flight 14 gives that up — and a $100 billion spaceport, the end of the Falcon 9 and the next Starlink fleet are all waiting on it.

NASA's new $4.3 billion telescope launches Sunday. Its boldest camera cannot yet do the job it exists for. →

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifts off on Sunday morning. It is built around a mirror a spy agency gave away. It carries a starlight-blocking camera that is deliberately not good enough to photograph another Earth. Plus 37 more stories from the day.

Europe put 543.6 million euros on three rockets. None of them has ever reached orbit. →

The European Space Agency signed its first Launcher Challenge contracts on 27 August, with three companies that have yet to complete an orbital launch. Each is paid mainly by its own country.

Seventeen spacecraft tracked one solar eruption. The half aimed at Earth was the half nobody saw. →

A cloud of magnetised gas left the Sun in two lopsided lobes. The telescope that watches the Sun full-time saw only the slow one, because the fast one was coming straight at us.

Half a billion dollars went into data centres in orbit. The rides are sold out to 2029. →

Two space startups raised $250m each in one week to put AI computers in orbit, with Nvidia and Cisco joining in. At the same time SpaceX confirmed it will retire the Falcon 9, and its shared-ride slots are gone past 2028 - so buyers have started purchasing whole rockets and building their own engines.

LandSpace landed a rocket in the Gobi Desert. The fix after December's crash was fewer engines, not more. →

China's second rocket recovery in six weeks, and its first on land, came from a startup that made its booster ask less of itself. It arrives as Western satellite firms run out of rides.

China's ice hunter launches Sunday. No one was tracking the rocket that hit the Moon. →

Chang'e-7 lifts off late Sunday to drill for water ice in craters that have not seen sunlight in billions of years. Two weeks ago a dead Falcon 9 stage hit the Moon at 8,690 km/h, and nobody was watching it go.

A star found by staring may finally measure how fast our black hole spins →

Astronomers have watched one speck of the Milky Way's centre since 2017. Out of that pile of six-minute exposures came a star faint enough to have hidden there all along. Its orbit is tight enough to feel the black hole turn.

The rescue craft could not hold still, so NASA let its telescope go →

A refrigerator-sized robot flew up to save a NASA observatory and lost the ability to point itself. Two of its three steering wheels stopped turning, and the mission it was sent to rescue will now burn up.

A vest flown around the Moon cut a solar-storm dose by 60% →

Three findings this week were about the environment itself. A first flight test of wearable radiation shielding. A re-reading of storm data that removes the ceiling we thought protected us. And a defence programme quietly buying up firms whose chips survive being hit. Meanwhile two rockets came home: a Chinese booster landed on its legs in the Gobi, and SpaceX towed a Starship into port after 24 days at sea.

Rockets have never flown more often. Satellite firms still cannot get a ride. →

An average of 270 orbital launches a year, prices at record lows, and an industry that says it is in panic. Almost all the growth came from one company, and that company is leaving the commercial market.

The Pentagon spent a week telling the space industry what to build →

At a defence symposium in Alabama, and in a run of contracts around it, the US military set out what it wants in orbit. Companies built for other customers are already redrawing their satellites to match.

The reddest dot in Webb's archive turned out to be a new kind of object →

Astronomers say a spot in the James Webb Space Telescope's image library is a black hole wrapped in gas so thick it glows like a star. Nothing in the picture gave it away. The spectrum did - and this week the same trick found water beside our galaxy's black hole, weighed dark matter 115 million light-years off, and ran into a hard wall at the one target everyone wants.

The week astronomy got sharper, and the fight over the view began →

The Sun's surface was imaged more finely than ever before, Webb pulled three growing black holes out of one ancient galaxy, and two enormous sky catalogues landed. At the same time, US regulators cleared a mirror satellite that astronomers say will spoil the sky.

Webb's newest image is a portrait of the machine that beat the heat →

A striking new Webb picture of the Lion Nebula lands the same week a Chinese rocket explodes, a daring orbital rescue steadies itself, and Europe gets its first total eclipse in 27 years.

Mars gives NASA's Psyche a free 1,000-mph shove toward a metal world →

On its way to a metal asteroid, NASA's Psyche stole a bit of Mars's motion to speed up and turn - burning no fuel. A gravity assist, and a quiet fix for the fuel problem that limits every deep-space mission.

NASA's Roman telescope heads for a parking spot 1.5 million km out →

The Roman Space Telescope is packed and bound for a late-August launch to Sun-Earth L2, a balance point in space where it will hold station beside JWST and map billions of galaxies.

Pluto's thin air is freezing onto the ground as it drifts from the Sun →

Astronomers report Pluto's nitrogen atmosphere is beginning to freeze back onto the surface as the dwarf planet moves farther from a Sun it barely feels. It is a plain lesson in how sunlight, warmth, and even radio signals fade with the square of distance across the dark outer solar system.

Fast or thrifty: a wave of money is reshaping how satellites move →

Military demand and a run of deals are reshaping the small engines that let satellites move in orbit, and the whole market is organised around one physics tradeoff: shove hard and burn fuel fast, or push gently and stretch it for years.

Europa may hide an ocean of life. The hard part is getting there. →

A buried sea on Jupiter's moon could hold life - but reaching it is gated by the sky lining up, not by engine power. This week's fleet, from a 48-year-old probe to fresh liquid found on Pluto, shows what it takes to arrive.

A discarded SpaceX rocket slams into the Moon →

A four-tonne Falcon 9 upper stage left over from a 2025 lunar launch hit the Moon this week at about 2.4 kilometres a second, gouging a fresh crater near Einstein crater. Astronomers spotted the collision course in advance from public tracking data, and scientists now get a rare gift: an impact of known mass, speed and time to study.

SpaceX bets its future on a rocket that flies twice and lands both halves →

SpaceX will attempt Starship's first orbital flight this month, catching the returning ship on land for the first time, as Blue Origin traces its own rocket's explosion to a single valve.

SpaceX's debut earnings show the real engine: sheer volume →

SpaceX's first public results and a satellite-factory boom point to one thing - in space, whoever builds the most of the same thing wins on cost.

SpaceX keeps its old crew ship alive while its new one is still learning to land →

SpaceX is stretching the life of its proven Crew Dragon fleet rather than commit to a Starship handover - a deliberate hedge while the new ship is still test-flying.

A startup wins the right to broadcast right next to GPS →

Xona gets cleared to slot a navigation signal beside GPS the same week a satellite-internet pioneer goes bankrupt - two edges of what it means to be first.

The sky is filling up, and no one owns it →

A satellite gold rush is crowding low-Earth orbit and the radio spectrum - shared spaces with no owner - as debris mounts and the fixes lag behind.

The Space Force's biggest launch order yet goes to the rocket it already trusts →

SpaceX won $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions for the US military, while newer rivals wait - the proven rocket keeps winning the highest-stakes work.

A Moon lander that flew twice on SpaceX will switch to Japan's own rocket →

Japan's ispace signed with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to launch its next lunar lander on the H3 rocket in 2028 - a lander built to ride more than one rocket. Around it, a busy week: a $1.6 billion military launch order, an ISS crew home after 241 days, and a NASA flagship telescope running months ahead of schedule.

Boeing's Starliner aims to fly again - the backup ride NASA can't afford to lose →

Two years after its only crewed flight failed, Boeing says its Starliner capsule is close to flying again - as a cargo test, not with crew. It is the second way to the space station that NASA deliberately paid for, and never gave up on.

A spacecraft borrows its way to Jupiter, and astronomers pick its next target →

Astronomers pinned down a tiny Jovian moon for Europe's JUICE probe to swing past in 2031 - a mission that reaches Jupiter not on its own fuel, but by stealing speed from planet after planet. Plus a new telescope fuels up, a crew comes home after 241 days, and the launch business keeps booking.

Amazon files to beam phone service from space, taking on Starlink in a market that tends to crown one winner →

Amazon asked US regulators for a 5,105-satellite network to reach phones directly, joining a race that has cost three companies about $36 billion in a single year just to get in.

NASA's science fleet faces its deepest cut in a generation as the staff drain begins to bite →

A watchdog report finds a fifth of NASA's workforce gone and 25 major projects already feeling it, while a budget plan would cancel nearly half the agency's science missions.