Space, in brief

Small satellites stopped being experiments. Over the past three years they became national-security systems and revenue-earning businesses, and rival governments noticed. [1]

The old worry was that one expensive satellite made one target. The answer was numbers: thousands of cheap satellites, so no single shot could matter. [1]

A panel at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City on 25 August said the sum may have flipped. Brandon Cesul of the radar-satellite firm Umbra put it plainly: by going to huge fleets, 'we may have made the job for the adversary easier'. [1]

The reason is geometry. An attacker no longer needs to track and hit one satellite. They can find the height at which a fleet flies and build something that affects everything passing through that band. [1]

The software is shared too. 'You can upload software or a patch, and it can propagate something across your whole constellation,' said Catherine Venturini of Aerospace Corp, a US non-profit that advises on space programmes. [1]

Erin Miller, who runs the Space ISAC, a non-profit that circulates warnings about attacks on satellites, said dense fleets concentrate capability as well as risk. [1]

Every satellite is also a way in. Shawn Cozzolino of Deloitte said each one is a point an intruder can attack, and told builders to check where their most important parts are made. [1]

The things the fleets lean on are shared as well: GPS, ground communications, and freely reused open-source code all sit under many operators at once. [1]

The money is still going into numbers. Private funding for small satellites reached about $11.5 billion in 2025, and roughly 16,900 satellites under 500 kilograms are expected to launch over the coming decade. [2]

And the fleets are concentrated in one pair of hands. SpaceX says it has launched more than 80% of the world's mass to orbit each year since 2023, and that Starlink now runs about three quarters of all working satellites that can move themselves. [3]

Nobody has a full picture of what is up there. SpaceX's own tracking system follows about 16,500 objects, roughly 48% of the public list kept by the US Space Force; the tracking company LeoLabs follows more than 26,000. [4][7]

The remedy the panel offered was not fewer satellites. It was faster warnings between operators, so that the first company hit becomes, as Cesul put it, 'a canary in a coal mine' for everybody else. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether buyers start asking for satellites at different heights, from different makers, running different software. Otherwise the argument gets settled by the first attack that clears a whole band of sky.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off at 7:26am Eastern on Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. It is on a three-month cruise to a gravitational parking spot about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. [15][16][17]

Why it matters. It is the biggest new eye on the sky since the James Webb telescope, and it launched about nine months earlier than the date NASA had promised.

Roman's mirrors were ground for the next generation of US spy satellites. When that project was cancelled the hardware was offered to NASA, which built an observatory around it. The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters flew themselves back to landings on the Florida coast. [18]

Why it matters. A Hubble-sized mirror that arrived free is a large part of why the telescope cost what it did.

Half an hour into NASA's press conference on Sunday, administrator Jared Isaacman took a call and held up his phone. US President Donald Trump congratulated the room: 'Boy, it looked beautiful on television.' [21][22]

Why it matters. Presidents do not normally call NASA briefings, and Trump's own budget proposals had twice sought to cut this telescope. [22][19][20]

Roman's 300-megapixel camera matches Hubble's sharpness but photographs at least 100 times more sky at once. It will send back about 2,500 terabytes over five years, against Hubble's 172 terabytes in 30 years. [19][24][25]

Why it matters. It is built to survey rather than to stare, so most of its discoveries will be made later, by people reading the archive.

Roman will spend more than a quarter of its observing time watching the crowded centre of the Milky Way, looking for small rocky planets by the way their gravity briefly brightens a star behind them. [23]

Why it matters. That technique finds planets far from their stars, which the transit method used by other telescopes largely misses.

Mars's northern half is smooth lowland and its southern half stands kilometres higher, with crusts differing by about 25 kilometres. A Nature study led by Alexander Berne finds the mantle under the south is 200 to 400 degrees Celsius hotter than under the north. [37]

Why it matters. If the split reaches the interior it is original, not the scar of one giant impact, which changes where ancient Mars could have held water.

NASA's safety office is recruiting outside scientists and engineers for a group called M-FORCE, to revise the thresholds for how much Earth life a spacecraft may carry to Mars. Its report will be published. [38]

Why it matters. Those numbers decide which places on Mars a lander is allowed to touch, and they were written before commercial Mars plans existed.

Cloud 9, about 14 million light-years away, holds around a million suns' worth of hydrogen and roughly five million suns' worth of dark matter. The deepest images yet show virtually no starlight at all. Team leader Ignacio Trujillo called the emptiness the most compelling result they could have obtained. [39]

Why it matters. If confirmed it is the first galaxy that never managed to make a single star, which tests what dark matter alone can hold together.

Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot will step outside the International Space Station at 7:30am Eastern on 1 September. It follows three spacewalks in August, the last of which installed a replacement high-speed antenna over six and a half hours. [26][27]

Why it matters. Four spacewalks in five weeks is a heavy repair load for a station already past its planned life.

NASA and SpaceX pushed back Crew-13 after finding an oxidiser leak in the Dragon capsule's engine plumbing during routine pre-launch checks. No new launch date has been announced. [28]

Why it matters. The crew includes astronauts from the US, Canada and Russia, and the station's handover schedule moves with them.

NASA's Starling mission, four small satellites in low orbit, worked out where it was by using other satellites as moving landmarks, with no GPS signal. The experiment has been extended to at least 2028. [45]

Why it matters. GPS is jammed routinely on Earth and does not reach the Moon, so spacecraft need another way to know where they are.

SpaceX opened a free platform for other satellite operators, built on star cameras aboard Starlink craft. It screens more than 500,000 orbit files a day; the US Space Force's public service checks three times a day. [4]

Why it matters. The company that owns most of the traffic is becoming the fastest source of warnings about it.

LeoLabs won a $20.68 million agreement from the US Space Force for a transportable version of its Scout radar, for a defence mission the company said it could not name. Its network already tracks over 26,000 objects. [7][8]

Why it matters. It moves a commercial tracking firm into selling military hardware, not just data.

The US Space Force awarded SpaceX a fleet-wide Starshield service order for military aircraft, promising at least 500 megabits per second down. The value was redacted. About $51.9 million has already gone on qualifying the terminals. [5]

Why it matters. Officials cited that spending as a reason switching to a rival would cost too much, which is how a supplier stops being replaceable.

A US government audit published on 27 August found the Space Force spent $123.9 million through its commercial data marketplace between January 2023 and September 2025, across 1,315 purchases. One cell in Colorado made 590 of them. [6]

Why it matters. The same audit found the military still cannot see what other parts of itself have already bought.

At the Small Satellite Conference, builders had money and hardware but no confidence in rides. Two integrators, Exolaunch and SEOPS, have bought whole Falcon 9 rockets to resell seats, and a French broker signed for capacity on up to six MaiaSpace flights from 2028. [9]

Why it matters. Everything in the lead story depends on getting the copies up, and that is the one part nobody has spare.

Lux Aeterna, founded by a former Starlink engineer, is pitching the US military on satellites that return from orbit and fly again. Its Delphi demonstrator is due to launch in 2027. [10]

Why it matters. It is the opposite bet to disposable fleets: fewer craft, brought back and reused.

Canada's government has put a $2.3 billion, 15-year contract behind Telesat's Lightspeed satellites for secure military communications across the Arctic. No Lightspeed satellite is in orbit, and full readiness is not expected until well beyond 2035. [11]

Why it matters. It is a country paying to own its own communications rather than rent someone else's.

The EU's General Court annulled the European Defence Agency's award of a 250 million euro satellite communications contract to Telespazio France, finding its bid should have been rejected. The signed framework stays in force. Airbus and Marlink get 4.32 million euros in damages. [14]

Why it matters. Winning the argument returned about 2% of the contract's value, and none of the work.

Singapore's Astrum Space agreed to merge with Black Spade Acquisition III, a listed shell company holding about $172.5 million in cash, valuing Astrum at roughly $1 billion. Its founder separately committed up to $168 million. [13]

Why it matters. Its first satellite, Neastar-1, is meant to connect ordinary phones directly across Asia.

Star Catcher agreed to beam concentrated sunlight to spacecraft run by Aethero, which plans to host data centres in orbit. Neither the amount of power nor the price was disclosed. [12]

Why it matters. Star Catcher's chief executive Andrew Rush said power, not computing, was the wall the two space-manufacturing companies he ran before kept hitting. [12]

An Ariane 6 launched the 3,800-kilogram MTG-I2 weather satellite from Kourou in French Guiana on 27 August. It completes a three-satellite set in geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres up, watching Europe and North Africa for fast-forming storms. [35]

Why it matters. Those are the pictures behind severe-weather warnings on two continents.

SpaceX flew a Falcon 9 first stage for a record 37th time on 25 August, the 100th Falcon 9 flight of 2026. The rocket flew 165 missions in 2025, more than every other orbital rocket combined, all successful. [36]

Why it matters. Two Chinese rockets landed boosters in the past six weeks; neither has flown one a second time. [36]

Technicians at Kennedy Space Center began fitting four RS-25 engines into the core of the rocket meant to carry the Artemis III crew next year. Each weighs about 3,500 kilograms and burns propellant at roughly 1,500 gallons a second. [32]

Why it matters. It is the first hardware milestone for the mission meant to put people back on the Moon.

Inside an 18-metre steel sphere at NASA Langley, engineers began the most complex test yet of what a lander's exhaust throws up off lunar soil, using an ethane jet against simulated regolith. [33]

Why it matters. Blown grit from a landing can damage the lander itself and anything else already on the surface.

NASA and the Colorado company Advanced Space passed the design review for CAPSTONE 02, two small spacecraft due to launch in late 2027 to practise finding and approaching each other in lunar orbit. [34]

Why it matters. Rendezvous near the Moon is harder than near Earth, because both bodies pull on the path at once.

NASA's Curiosity rover has gained one kilometre of height since it started up Mount Sharp in 2014, a 5-kilometre mountain inside Gale Crater. It marked it with a 323-image panorama of a valley called Valle Grande. [47]

Why it matters. Each hundred metres of climb reaches rock laid down in a different, wetter chapter of Mars's past.

Perseverance filmed Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, crossing the Sun. Phobos is spiralling closer to Mars, but tides are expected to tear it apart before it grows large enough in the sky to cover the Sun completely. [48]

Why it matters. Mars will never have a total solar eclipse, however long anyone waits there. [48]

Astronomers led from Bologna used Hubble data to confirm that a dwarf galaxy merged with the Milky Way during its earliest years. The galaxy now spans about 200,000 light-years and holds some 200 billion stars. [40]

Why it matters. Big galaxies are largely made of smaller ones they absorbed, and this dates the first course.

A simulation led from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam found that the dense star cluster at a galaxy's centre and the disc of stars around it are not separate processes, as had been assumed. [41]

Why it matters. It links how a galaxy's heart forms to how its supermassive black hole is fed.

NASA released 16 images combining decades of X-ray data from the Chandra observatory, launched in 1999, with pictures from other telescopes. They include the edge-on spiral NGC 4631, nicknamed the Whale. [42]

Why it matters. X-rays show the hot gas and dead stars that visible-light pictures leave out.

Astronomers used the James Webb telescope to watch 72 young Sun-like stars and track how the gas around each one leaks away. Gas giants must finish gathering their atmospheres before the supply blows off. [43]

Why it matters. It explains why big gassy planets are rarer than small rocky ones.

David Hendel, a former astronomer, was scrolling an astronomy paper on a New York commuter train in 2023. In an old Hubble image he spotted a faint ribbon of stars trailing a dim galaxy 115 million light-years away. [44]

Why it matters. The shape of such ribbons is one of the few ways to read how dark matter is arranged.

Researchers in Australia, Germany and New Zealand measured 115 NASA photographs of 13 astronauts and found the lower eyelid rises in microgravity, sometimes far enough to cover part of the cornea. [29]

Why it matters. Eyesight is already one of the clearest things long spaceflight changes, and this is a new piece of it.

NASA's ECOSTRESS heat sensor on the International Space Station mapped a worldwide midday dip in the water plants release. Drought and heat shift each day's peak earlier, typically by half an hour to an hour and a half. [46]

Why it matters. Coarser satellite and weather datasets miss the dip entirely, so anything built on them overstates how much water plants move at noon.

Earth's shadow darkened 96% of the full Moon overnight on 27-28 August. Every phase happened at the same moment for everyone on the night side of the planet. [49]

Why it matters. Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar one needs no narrow path: half the world sees the identical event.

The Artemis II crew received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on 28 August, the first awards since 2023, for a flight that took them 406,800 kilometres from Earth. The same day an executive order started work on a US Space Academy, with no site chosen and a report due within 120 days. [50][31][30]

Why it matters. The awards are for a flight already completed; the school is a plan for a workforce shortage that is here now. [2]

The European Space Agency signed the first three European Launcher Challenge contracts on 27 August, worth 543.6 million euros between Isar Aerospace, PLD Space and Rocket Factory Augsburg. None of the three rockets has reached orbit. [51]

Why it matters. Europe is paying to have more than one way off the ground before it needs one.