Space, in brief

SpaceX has flown its Starship rocket thirteen times. Every one of those flights was suborbital: the ship went up, went most of the way round, and came back down. [1][2]

Flight 14 is different. It is meant to be Starship's first trip to orbit, and it is expected to leave real Starlink satellites there. [1]

On 28 August SpaceX fired all 33 engines of the Flight 14 booster at once, for the full duration, without leaving the ground. Mid-September is the target. [1]

The ship from Flight 13 is on a boat. It splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean in July and survived in one piece, which had never happened before. [3]

Every earlier ship either broke apart coming through the air or toppled over and exploded in the water. This one floated. [3]

So SpaceX towed it to Christmas Island, about 1,900 kilometres northwest of Broome, and engineers spent days inspecting it as it bobbed. They cut samples out of its heat shield. [3]

It is now strapped to a ship whose deck sinks under its load and then lifts it out. The trip back to Texas takes several months. [3][4]

SpaceX says what it learned from the metal is already changing the design of future ships. [3]

The company is spending ahead of the result. On 25 August it announced Starbase Louisiana with the state's governor: $100 billion, ten launch pads, five towers-and-pads pairs, on 125,000 acres of Gulf coast wetland in Vermilion Parish. [6][7]

It would be SpaceX's fourth launch site and its largest. The plan includes making rocket fuel on site, generating its own power, a deep-water port and probably an airport. Building starts next year. [6][7][8]

The Falcon 9 is being retired to make room. It has flown nearly 700 times since 2010 and only Russia's Soyuz has flown more, but SpaceX plans to wind it down once Starship works. [5]

The reason is dull and decisive: the next Starlink satellites are too big for a Falcon 9 and are built to fit Starship's bay. [5]

That handover has already started. Tuesday's launch from Cape Canaveral was the last Falcon 9 Starlink flight from Florida, after about 260 of them from the Cape in seven years. [2]

The same flight was the 100th Falcon 9 launch of 2026, on a booster making its 37th trip — a reuse record. [11][12]

Washington is pulling the same way. A national transport policy signed on 20 August sets a goal of more than 1,000 launches and returns a year by 2030. [10]

The Starlink work has moved west in the meantime. A Falcon 9 lifted 27 more satellites from California on 26 August, into a fleet of more than 11,000. [13][14]

Ars Technica's rocket newsletter put it plainly: a project this size would utterly transform coastal Louisiana. [9]

Why it matters. Watch whether Flight 14 flies with real Starlink satellites or with dummy weights, because a quiet swap to dummies is the first sign SpaceX is not ready. [1]

NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was set to lift off at 7:26am Eastern on a Falcon Heavy. It is heading for a spot about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth. It is built around a Hubble-sized mirror that a US spy agency handed over. In five years it will send back 2,500 terabytes; Hubble sent 172 in thirty. [15][17][18][19]

Why it matters. It survived two rounds of proposed White House cuts, and it goes up on the rocket SpaceX is now retiring. [16][5]

NASA and SpaceX pushed back the Crew-13 flight to the space station after finding a leak in the Dragon capsule's engine plumbing during routine checks before launch. No new date has been set. Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney were to fly with Joshua Kutryk of Canada and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia. [20]

Why it matters. It was caught on the ground, which is the point of the checks — but the station's crew handover now waits.

Europe and Japan's Mercury probe enters its arrival phase. On 3 September the module that has pushed it along for eight years separates and is thrown away. The two science orbiters then go into orbit around Mercury in November, and split apart in December. [21]

Why it matters. ESA calls arriving at Mercury harder than getting there, and this is the first of several steps that cannot be retried.

Beijing pulled Chang'e-7 hours before its window, saying only that the mission 'does not meet the conditions for launch' this year. A typhoon was sitting over the launch site. The mission — an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a small hopper — was to hunt for ice at the Moon's south pole, and may now slip to 2027. [22][23][24]

Why it matters. No reason was given for a delay of more than a year, which is a lot to hang on weather.

President Trump gave the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four astronauts who flew around the Moon in April, the first awards since 2023. The same day he signed an order to set up a US Space Academy, to be led by NASA. [25][26][27]

Why it matters. The crew flew 695,081 miles in total and went farther from Earth than anyone before them. [25]

ESA will burn up the last two of its Cluster spacecraft, Samba and Tango, on 31 August and 1 September over an empty stretch of the South Pacific. A plane will fly out from Tonga carrying 30 instruments to watch them break apart. [28]

Why it matters. Nobody can copy a real re-entry on the ground, and ESA wants to design satellites that burn up completely instead of dropping pieces.

Anil Menon of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA finished installing a replacement high-speed antenna on 25 August. An earlier six-and-a-half hour walk on 18 August had run out of time on stiff bolts and cables. The next walk is on 1 September. [29][30][31]

Why it matters. That antenna is the fast link between the station and mission control in Houston.

Europe's biggest rocket put the 3,800-kilogram MTG-I2 weather satellite on its way on 27 August. It is the third and last of a set that sits 35,786 kilometres up and watches storms build. It was the Ariane 6's ninth flight. [32]

Why it matters. The set is meant to give earlier warning of flash floods and fast-forming storms.

NASA's Mars rover has now gained one kilometre of height since it left the floor of Gale Crater, on a 5-kilometre mountain it has been climbing since 2014. It marked it with a 323-image panorama looking back down its own tracks. [33][34]

Why it matters. Each metre up the slope is a younger layer of rock, so the climb is a walk forward through Martian time.

Astronomers pointed the world's largest optical telescope at an object called Cloud 9. Their images went about ten times deeper than any before, and found no starlight at all. There is gas there weighing about a million Suns. It is the strongest candidate yet for a galaxy that never lit up. [35]

Why it matters. If it holds, it is a galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter, which theory has predicted for decades and nobody has caught.

The James Webb telescope watched 72 young Sun-like stars and tracked how the gas around each one leaks away. Big gassy planets have to finish forming before their supply blows off into space, and the window closes sooner for some than others. [36]

Why it matters. It puts a clock on how our own solar system had to assemble itself, 4.6 billion years ago.

In 2023 a former astronomer was scrolling a paper on a New York commuter train. In an old Hubble image he spotted a thin ribbon of stars trailing off a faint galaxy 115 million light years away. Nobody had recorded it. It has now been confirmed as a stream torn from a star cluster. [37]

Why it matters. Streams like it get bent by dark matter, and this one sits outside our own galaxy, where less gets in the way of the measurement.

Inside an 18-metre steel sphere at NASA Langley, engineers are firing a jet into a bin of jagged fake Moon soil. The jet pushes about as hard as it takes to lift a person. They want to know what a lander's engine throws at everything nearby. [38]

Why it matters. Artemis IV is meant to reach the surface in 2028, and nobody yet has good numbers for where the blasted grit goes.

Blue Origin's first Blue Moon cargo lander, named Endurance, finished its hot-and-cold vacuum testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center and passed its radio checks. Separately, NASA and Advanced Space cleared the design of CAPSTONE 02, a pair of small craft that will practise meeting each other in lunar orbit in late 2027. [39][40]

Why it matters. Both are rehearsals for the traffic a Moon base would need.

Singapore's Astrum Space agreed to merge with a listed shell company, valuing it at about $1 billion. The shell holds $172.5 million in cash, and Astrum's founder has separately committed up to $168 million. [41]

Why it matters. It is a way to reach the stock market without a normal listing, and it is coming back into fashion in space.

Norway's Kongsberg will double its ship-watching fleet with three more satellites early next year, after the first three convinced its armed forces. Finland's ICEYE opened offices in the Netherlands, Korea and India in a single week. [42][43]

Why it matters. Governments are moving from buying pictures to owning the satellites that take them.

In the Atacama desert, the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope is going up: a 39-metre mirror made of 798 segments, inside an 80-metre dome. The outer structure is due in 2027 and first observations around 2030. [44]

Why it matters. A mirror that wide is what it takes to see the air around a rocky planet at another star.

French startup Miratlas is trying to raise 20 million euros to grow its network of sky sensors from about 60 sites to more than 150. Each measures cloud and air turbulence, the two things that ruin a laser beam between a satellite and the ground. [45]

Why it matters. Laser links carry far more data than radio, and they only work where the sky cooperates.

Astronomers dated the dense old star clusters at our galaxy's centre and found a group that belongs to neither of the known origins. They trace it to a galaxy the Milky Way swallowed about 12 billion years ago — 1.8 billion years earlier than the oldest merger previously known. [46]

Why it matters. Our galaxy grew by eating others, and this is the earliest mouthful anyone has identified.