Space, in brief

NASA, the US space agency, picked Blue Origin on 1 September to build a $700 million spacecraft for Mars. [1]

The craft carries no science instruments. Its only job is to relay data and commands between spacecraft at Mars and controllers on Earth. [1]

For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA has no firm plan to send a new lander or rover to the Martian surface. [2]

Two rovers are already there. Perseverance landed in 2021 [2], and Curiosity is 14 years into its own mission [3].

Their data comes home through two NASA orbiters launched in 2001 and 2005, with two European orbiters helping. All four also do science of their own. [1]

The new craft is due to NASA by the end of December 2028 and is expected to be working at Mars by 2030. [1]

NASA cancelled its plan to fly Mars rocks back to Earth after one outside estimate put the cost at $11 billion. [2]

Perseverance has cost about $3 billion so far, and the rock samples it sealed in tubes are still sitting on Mars. [2]

What NASA is still sending is small: three helicopters called SkyFall, riding a nuclear-propulsion test craft in late 2028. [2]

Blue Origin will build the relay on Blue Ring, a spacecraft platform that has never flown a mission of its own. [1]

NASA's budget for planetary science has fallen for several years, and the Trump administration wants it cut further. [2]

Why it matters. Watch whether anything is booked for the Martian surface before the relay arrives, because three small helicopters in late 2028 are currently all NASA has headed there.

NASA told staff this week it will have Axiom Space build a lighter, simpler 'Sortie Suit' for the first Moon landings, aiming for a landing as early as 2028. The original rules asked for six spacewalks in 6.5 days and 210 days of dormant storage, which NASA's own inspector general later called over-burdensome. [4]

Why it matters. The date is being protected by asking the suit to do less, and Axiom has been the only supplier since Collins Aerospace quit in 2024. [4]

The astronauts on Artemis IV will have no more than 32 hours outside on the lunar surface in total, and a geology team led by Brett Denevi of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is planning every minute of it. [5]

Why it matters. It is the budget the suit fight is really about: a day and a half of walking, for decades of questions.

Galactic Energy, a Beijing company, flew its Pallas-1 rocket for the first time on 31 August from the Jiuquan launch centre and reached the orbit it was aiming for. The 52-metre rocket can lift 7,000kg and its first stage is designed to be reused 25 times. There was no landing attempt; the company is aiming at the second half of 2027 for that. [6]

Why it matters. It is a third Chinese route to reusable rockets, after a state-built Long March landing in July and a private one in August. [6]

Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, said on 2 September that ESA is assessing whether to fly its Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets more often. Demand is expected to peak around 2030 and already exceeds planned capacity: Arianespace projects nine or ten Ariane 6 flights a year from 2027, and Amazon alone has commissioned 18 launches. [7]

Why it matters. He also signalled ESA would use its buying power, about 60% of Europe's public satellite spending, to keep competition alive through the Airbus-Thales-Leonardo satellite merger. [7]

None of the 32 Rassvet satellites Russia launched in March and July has reached the 800km orbit it was designed for, and the highest any has climbed is a little over 500km. One re-entered the atmosphere in June and several others have stopped manoeuvring. [8]

Why it matters. Russia wants about 300 of them in orbit by the end of next year, so the first 10% is running years behind the plan. [8]

The European Space Agency signed ispace-Europe to build MAGPIE, its first lunar rover, which will drill and scan for water ice at the Moon's south pole for about 10 Earth days. It is due to launch in 2029 aboard a lander from the Japanese company ispace. [9]

Why it matters. Europe has never operated anything on the lunar surface, and this is the first mission of an ESA programme deliberately built to be cheaper and faster. [9]

Astroscale Japan picked the German company Isar Aerospace to launch ADRAS-J2, which aims to be the first spacecraft to capture and remove a large piece of orbital debris. The target is a 3-tonne, 11-metre Japanese rocket stage left in orbit since 2009. [10]

Why it matters. Isar's rocket has never reached orbit; its first test flight was lost 30 seconds after liftoff in March 2025. [10]

Hubble, the space telescope launched in 1990, has found a giant 10-sided wave circling Saturn's south pole, published on 2 September in Science Advances. Saturn's north pole has had a six-sided version for more than 40 years. [11]

Why it matters. A researcher and two amateur astronomers spotted the first hint in ground-based images in 2024, and it appears to be strengthening, so scientists can watch a planet-sized pattern form. [11]

A new computer model can separate the dust from exploding stars out of the churned-up lunar soil it is mixed into. The Moon has no wind, rain or moving plates, so it should hold a record going back 80 to 100 million years, against about 10 million on Earth. [12]

Why it matters. Earlier readings of deep-sea mud and Apollo soil pointed to two bursts of nearby supernovas, 2.3 and 7.3 million years ago. [12]

A team led by Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames traced 75 meteorite falls and split the journey into seven stages. A rock can lose up to 40% of its mass to melting before it starts breaking apart. [13][14]

Why it matters. The old assumption was that the heat vaporised the rock; the finding is that melting first, then splitting, does most of the work. [13]

The space-weather firm Mission Space puts the cost of solar storms at $20.65bn in 2026 and $44.27bn a year by 2035. Power grids are the biggest single exposure, at $12.88bn this year. [15]

Why it matters. The Sun is not getting more violent; there is simply far more in orbit and on the ground for a storm to damage. [15]

Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and Jessica Meir of NASA spent six hours and 49 minutes outside the International Space Station on 1 September, finishing four spacewalks in a month. They installed a navigation aid and swabbed the station's outside for microbes. [16]

Why it matters. The other three replaced a failed antenna and prepared the truss for a new roll-out solar array. [16]

NASA picked SpaceX to put two Starlink mini laser terminals on the Orion capsule for Artemis III, the mission due next year in which four astronauts practise docking with test versions of the commercial Moon landers. [17]

Why it matters. It adds bandwidth to Orion's own radio, and makes a commercial satellite network part of a government Moon mission. [17]

York Space Systems unveiled the LX/V-Class, a satellite designed to hold an altitude as low as 200km for three years or more, carrying about 300kg. It uses a stronger electric engine built by York's own subsidiary Orbion. [18]

Why it matters. York is betting speed beats going lower still: its boss says a 300km floor is low enough for what government buyers need now. [18]

Sierra Space said it has signed national security and commercial customers to carry payloads on the first orbital flight of its Dream Chaser spaceplane, which is due to fly later this year after long delays. [19]

Why it matters. Dream Chaser has been in development for more than a decade and has still not flown. [19]

All.Space signed an agreement with the Defense Innovation Unit, the US Defense Department's commercial technology arm, to show that its satellite communication terminals can be built at high volume. [20]

Why it matters. For the US military the bottleneck is increasingly the ground equipment, not the satellites.

NASA's new $4bn Roman Space Telescope was placed so accurately by its rocket that it will need fewer course corrections than planned, so its fuel could stretch a five-year mission to about ten. It is on a three-month trip to a parking spot 750,000 miles, or 1.2 million km, beyond the Moon. [24]

Why it matters. Fuel, not optics, is what usually ends a space telescope's life. [24]

The European Space Agency announced on 2 September that Hubble has confirmed Cloud-9, a cloud of gas and dark matter 14 million light-years away with no stars in it at all. Astronomers had predicted such objects from theory and never confirmed one. [25]

Why it matters. Seeing nothing is the result: ground telescopes were not sensitive enough to rule out faint stars, and Hubble was. [25]

A Reuters review of patents, procurement notices and tracking data found Chinese military researchers developing satellites designed to pursue and capture other spacecraft, and refuel while doing it. In June a Chinese uncrewed spaceplane released a small satellite that looped around another Chinese satellite and came back. [22]

Why it matters. The US flies a similar uncrewed spaceplane, the X-37B, and ran its first joint space operation with Britain near a suspected Chinese spy satellite. [22]

TraCSS, the US civil system meant to warn satellite operators about collisions, now has more than 70 operators and 10 national governments using it, but its acting manager says there is no timeline for leaving its trial phase. [23]

Why it matters. Two Trump administration budget requests proposed ending its funding, so users are told the warnings are for evaluation only. [23]

NASA's September sky guide points to Venus at peak brightness low in the west after sunset on 18 September, the Moon passing the red star Antares from 14 to 20 September, and the equinox on 22 September. [21]

Why it matters. The steam from the Teapot shape in Sagittarius points at the centre of our own galaxy. [21]