Space

The US military's relay network has 84 satellites in orbit, but joining them up is slow because each builder made its controls differently →

The US Space Development Agency launched its first batch of Northrop Grumman relay satellites on 10 October, taking it to 84 in orbit, but handing them to government operators is going slowly, and the agency expects the network to work as one only from 2027.

Blue Origin plans two more New Glenn launch pads in Florida and a factory for 150 upper stages a year, aiming for more than 100 launches a year →

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's rocket company, said on Friday it will build more pads, landing ships and a bigger factory for New Glenn, a rocket that has reached orbit twice. It is betting on customers who struggle to book SpaceX's Falcon 9 after 2028.

Rocket Lab delays its Neutron rocket to 2027 after air pockets turn up in the carbon-fibre domes of its fuel tanks →

Rocket Lab says its new mid-size Neutron rocket will not fly before 2027, after inspectors found air pockets inside a fuel-tank dome. In the same week SpaceX asked to fly Starship up to 456 times a year from Texas, and the UK picked ClearSpace to pull two dead satellites out of orbit.

SpaceX's military satellite service stopped working on Ukraine's fast drones overnight, and Musk says the US government decides its limits →

Starshield links dropped on anything moving faster than 100 mph, which grounded Ukraine's drone interceptors on a night of heavy Russian strikes. NASA's two Venus missions are back on track, and the Artemis III rocket is nearly stacked.

Arms and space firms move closer: Czech arms group CSG buys 9.5% of MDA Space, and Italy's Avio will build rocket motors for Lockheed Martin's missiles →

Two deals on Tuesday tied weapons makers to space companies, the US Army tested Amazon's satellite internet, and the EU weighed paying for space from the same fund as defence. Perseverance became the longest-driving rover on any other world.

SpaceX is due to launch the space station's last two new solar arrays today, to give more power to a station whose first solar wings are wearing out →

A robot Dragon cargo ship leaves Florida at 10:33 UTC with the final iROSA arrays, 593 kg of experiments and a case to bring a broken robot-arm joint home. On the rest of a quiet day, NASA offers $150,000 for ideas to stop static shocks on the Moon, and two studies test water and rock in Moon-strength gravity.

Blue Origin confirms it is building a crew spacecraft, and aims to fly New Glenn again in December from a rebuilt pad →

Blue Origin's chief says it has invested in flying people, while NASA will not pay to bring in a new crew ship. Its Florida pad, wrecked in May, is being rebuilt for a December flight.

Three clouds of charged gas from the Sun put the northern lights over southern England, and the Met Office says they may return until Tuesday →

One group of sunspots threw three clouds of charged gas at Earth in three days. The northern lights reached Devon, Hampshire and Kent on Friday and Saturday, and nobody could say in advance how far south they would get.

NASA asks companies to build the space stations that replace the ISS, and offers to arrange their first crew flights →

NASA's 360-page request sets 8 December for bids and puts a price on the rides to orbit, because SpaceX plans to retire the only US crew capsule flying today.

Amazon has built 1,000 satellites for its Leo internet network and plans to start selling service this year, but only 396 are in orbit because its rockets are late →

Amazon now builds 27 internet satellites a week, the first real rival to SpaceX's Starlink, but late rockets left it with 396 in orbit and cost it first claim on its airwaves.

The US regulator lets SpaceX fly 15,000 Starlink satellites that connect straight to ordinary phones, and sets a 29 October vote on more airwaves for them →

The FCC approved SpaceX's plan for satellites that talk to normal smartphones and waived a rule that made it go through a phone company. Musk blames India's phone giants for blocking Starlink, SpaceX seeks $40bn for AI chips, Apollo software pioneer Margaret Hamilton dies at 90, and South Korea's Nuri rocket flies 15 satellites.

Francis Halzen wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for IceCube, a cubic kilometre of South Pole ice that catches ghost particles from distant galaxies →

Halzen, 82, proposed turning Antarctic ice into a neutrino detector in 1988, and the prize lands while a US budget plan would halve IceCube's money. NASA is moving 7,500 contract jobs inside the agency, Crew-12 leaves the space station, 21 countries sign Turkey's space peace pledge, and a buried volcano shows the Moon once had a magnetic field.

Satellite makers are running short of parts as AI data centres buy the same equipment in far bigger orders →

Companies plan tens of thousands of new satellites, but valves, transformers and solar-cell metals are scarce. AI data centres order the same electrical parts by the thousand, so suppliers fill those orders first and some satellite plans may never be built.

Blue Origin shows a 20-metre solar mast for a Moon base, and a Munich team designs a reactor for the two-week lunar night →

A base at the Moon's south pole needs power through nights that last about 14 days. Blue Origin showed a tall solar mast, and German researchers posted a small reactor design that also makes the heat needed to pull oxygen out of moon dust. Neither has flown.

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.

Britain's rocket start-ups slow down. Skyrora now aims for orbit in 2030, and bankrupt Orbex is sold to a Portuguese parts maker →

Skyrora pushed its first orbital launch back to 2030 and says it is spending slowly on purpose. Orbex's Scottish factory went to Portugal's Omnidea, a German rival got a UK launch licence, and Blue Origin asked to fly New Glenn 50 times a year.

Google sends its AI chips into orbit for the first time, to test running AI on sunlight in space →

A SpaceX flight carried Google's first test satellite for data centres in space, with 129 other payloads. Crew-13 reached the space station in record time, and NATO will ask its members for space forces.

Varda raises $250m to make medicines in orbit, and flies two capsules at once for the first time →

Varda Space Industries raised about $250m at a $1.6bn value and sends two of its return capsules up together today. Governments are still seven in ten of its customers.

Two studies say a probe flying through the spray of Saturn's moon Enceladus could spot signs of life, and Earth microbes grew in a lab copy of its ocean →

Scientists in Berlin and Munich found that the icy spray from Enceladus sorts its ocean's salt and carbon chemicals into separate grains, and a microbe from Earth's sea-floor vents grew in water built to match that ocean. The rest of the day: private space stations told they cannot book SpaceX's Dragon, a cool lava planet that kept its air, and a new heat record for complex life.

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 →

SpaceX's Starship circled Earth on its 14th flight on Monday and let out 26 of its biggest internet satellites, then came down early north of Hawaii. The rest of the day: NASA's $359m plan to fly Boeing's Starliner again, the space station's robot arm stuck, and a deal letting the US grow its space base in Greenland.

Starship is cleared for its first try at orbit on Monday. It goes into orbit only if controllers are sure it can come back down →

The FAA licensed Starship's Flight 14 on 26 September, and SpaceX will fire it into orbit only once it is sure the ship can get back down. The rest of the day: Pakistan's first astronaut will fly with China, a US vote on environmental reviews for satellites, and Starlink dodging once every 75 seconds.

The robot sent to rescue NASA's Swift telescope has fallen back to Earth. Swift itself is due to come down in early November →

Katalyst's Link fell back into the atmosphere on 25 September after a $30m try to lift Swift failed, and NASA has not said what will do Swift's job. Much of the rest of the day was dates moving, from Crew-13's launch after a leak was fixed to Ariane 6 falling behind.

NASA picks PRIMA, a far-infrared telescope, as the first of a new class of billion-dollar missions. It launches in 2033. →

NASA chose PRIMA to see the faint far-infrared light between what radio and infrared telescopes catch, with a $1.2bn cap and a 2033 launch. The rest of the day was buyers ordering the next round of things they already have.

An observatory counted cosmic rays far across the galaxy by the gamma-ray glow of five gas clouds →

The LHAASO team caught gamma rays from five nearby giant gas clouds and showed the glow matches cosmic rays striking the gas, turning each cloud into a measuring station. SpaceX finished Starship's fuelling rehearsal before Monday's first orbit try, and a Russian cargo ship reached the space station a week late.

NASA's Goddard centre built the new Roman telescope while losing 40% of its people. Workers say it could not build another one today. →

Roman launched in August and now has fuel for at least 22 years. Scientific American reports that the NASA centre which built it has shrunk from about 10,000 people to 6,000 and closed the lab that made its fuel system.

NASA's chief says China is heading for the same few landing spots on the Moon. Partners now have to bring something NASA needs, in time. →

Jared Isaacman told a US defence conference that the best Moon base sites near the south pole are few, China is going there, and NASA will take only good deals; a European lander offer for the mid-2030s was waved away.

SpaceX plans to retire the only capsule NASA can fly crews on. The agency is going back to Boeing. →

SpaceX has told NASA it means to stop flying Crew Dragon by 2030. NASA is now in talks with Boeing about ten or more Starliner flights, and will help pay to fix the capsule and certify it on a new rocket.

Companies are making medicine in orbit. No regulator has written down how to approve it. →

Drug companies are already building an artificial retina and printing human tissue on the space station. It is due to be switched off by 2030, and no medicines regulator anywhere has set out how to approve anything made up there.

Satellogic is switching from selling satellite pictures to watching places and reporting what changed →

The Barcelona company that photographs the Earth has expanded its contract with the US Navy's research office, and is moving from selling a picture when you ask to watching a list of sites and saying what is different.

Three European space start-ups raised about $1bn in two weeks, and Impulse Space added $308m in the US →

Open Cosmos, The Exploration Company and EnduroSat raised about $1bn between them, and Impulse Space's round grew to $808m. Investors put much of the rush down to SpaceX's $86bn share sale in June.

NASA's Moon orbiter found the largest new crater ever seen. A rock hit the Moon in 2024, and nobody noticed for more than a year. →

A space rock dug a crater 222 metres wide on the Moon in spring 2024. No telescope saw it, and a NASA scientist found it in routine pictures more than a year later.

SpaceX will try to send Starship to orbit for the first time on 22 September, carrying 26 of its own satellites →

SpaceX set 22 September for the fourteenth test flight of Starship, its giant new rocket, and the first meant to reach orbit. The cargo is 26 of the company's own Starlink internet satellites, so if the rocket fails, no outside customer loses anything.

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.

Europe's Vega-C rocket launched two satellites together. One reads the faint glow of plants, and the other measures the air above them. →

ESA's FLEX and the European Union's Sentinel-3C reached orbit from French Guiana on 15 September. The same week, new studies on dark energy and on a giant black-hole merger turned on what lies between a signal and the instrument that catches it.

SpaceX flew its 700th Falcon mission. It finished a satellite network that needed two extra satellites after a fault. →

A Falcon 9 carried the last three of SES's 13 O3b mPOWER internet satellites on Sunday. Two of the 13 were added after an electrical fault, and the new three are not due to start work until mid-2027.

Astronomers found 84 objects of a new kind in old Chandra pictures. They were hiding in the light X-ray telescopes see worst. →

A University of Alabama team searched Chandra's public archive for dots that vanish in high-energy X-ray images and found 84 objects of a kind never catalogued, in six galaxies.