Space, in brief

A rocket company in China cannot sell shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange until it has put a payload into orbit on a medium-to-large rocket with a reusable first stage. [1]

The exchange issued that rule last December. It sits inside a pathway China built so companies that are not yet making a profit can still list. [1]

The wider reform came in June 2025, when Chinese regulators widened the STAR Market's listing standards for loss-making technology firms, commercial space among them. Instead of a revenue or profit floor they ask for state authorisation, a large market and staged results. [1]

The STAR Market is China's stock market for domestic technology companies, set up as an answer to Nasdaq in the United States. [1]

So a launch now does two jobs at once. CAS Space, a company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reached orbit with its Kinetica-2 rocket in March, and the exchange accepted its listing application the next day. [1]

Space Pioneer's Tianlong-3 rocket failed on its first flight in April. The company entered listing preparation in 2025 and is still sitting there. [1]

None of these firms makes money. LandSpace is asking share buyers for about $1.1bn against $7.7m of sales in 2025 and a loss of $253m, and does not expect a profit before 2029. [1]

CAS Space is seeking about $607m. It lost $105m on $34m of sales in 2024. [1]

Six new Chinese rockets have flown for the first time this year, and five of them have a first stage built to be recovered. The listing rule asks for exactly that kind of rocket. [4]

Galactic Energy flew its Pallas-1 rocket for the first time on 31 August from the Jiuquan launch centre in north-west China, and says it reached the orbit it was aiming for. Pallas-1 can lift about 7,000 kilograms to low orbit, a few hundred kilometres up. [2][3]

Galactic Energy began listing preparation in October 2025 and has not yet filed an application. It wants to try landing a first stage late this year. [1]

The US Space Force had not added Pallas-1's upper stage or any payload to its catalogue of objects in orbit as of late Thursday, which is unusual after a launch that worked. Jonathan McDowell, who keeps a widely followed record of spaceflight activity, wrote that he could not regard the launch as confirmed. [4]

Why it matters. Watch whether the US Space Force logs Pallas-1's upper stage, or Galactic Energy publishes the orbit it reached, because either would settle whether the flight that counts toward a listing went as described. [4]

The upper stage of a Chinese Long March 6C rocket has fragmented in orbit, less than two days after it delivered seven satellites on 24 August. The tracking company LeoLabs spotted the break-up and estimated tens to hundreds of pieces. The Long March 6 family has done this before. The US Space Force catalogued more than 1,200 pieces from two Long March 6A upper stages that came apart in 2022 and 2024. Both rockets use the same engine, the YF-115, burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. [4]

Why it matters. The stage sits low enough that the pieces should burn up in the atmosphere within a few years. Until they do, every satellite crossing that height has more to dodge. [4]

NASA is folding almost all of its launch buying into one new office, called Commercial Access to Space, and is weighing orders in bulk. Pete Wilczynski, the official there responsible for science missions, said the agency may buy five, ten, fifteen or twenty rockets in a single purchase. Until now it has bought rides mission by mission. The US Space Force already works this way, promising SpaceX and United Launch Alliance a set number of launches over several years. [4]

Why it matters. Supporters say a guaranteed order book brings the price down and gives launch companies assured business, which matters most to new entrants. [4] It also means NASA commits the money long before the flights.

India's GSLV Mark II rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on 3 September and released the EOS-05 satellite about 18 minutes later. The 2,367-kilogram spacecraft is on its way to geosynchronous orbit, 35,786 kilometres up, where a satellite circles at the same rate the Earth turns and so stays above one spot. It is India's first imaging satellite sent to that height, and its telescope resolves detail down to about 42 metres. [5][4]

Why it matters. India lost the satellite EOS-05 replaces when the same rocket's third stage failed in 2021. From that height it can watch the subcontinent and its borders continuously instead of waiting to pass overhead. [5][4]

The US president's budget request for 2027 would cut NASA's science spending by 46%. The Planetary Society, a space advocacy group campaigning against it, says up to 53 missions would end, close to half of NASA's science fleet. Nothing is settled. On 1 September the US House of Representatives voted 370 to 38 for a stopgap bill that funds US federal agencies to 11 December at flat rates. Congress is unlikely to take up the 2027 budget before the November elections. [7]

Why it matters. The Planetary Society expects no substantial action on the 2027 budget for the rest of this Congress. [7] Until that is settled, every NASA mission in today's edition is waiting on it.

New Horizons, the NASA probe that flew past Pluto in 2015 and is now in the Kuiper Belt beyond it, may lose one of its two science programmes in October. Two instruments, SWAP and PEPSSI, have measured the solar wind without a break since 2006. That side of the mission needs about $2 million a year for staff and for bringing the data down, and has not had it since 2024. Alan Stern, who leads the mission, says the probe reaches the shock front where the solar wind slows within a couple of years, and the outer edge of the Sun's bubble within about ten. [8]

Why it matters. Stern says these two instruments are the only chance anyone will have to measure those boundaries and then study interstellar space after the Voyagers, which carry older instruments. [8]

BepiColombo, a joint European and Japanese mission to Mercury, has separated from the module that carried and powered it since 2018. Europe's MPO orbiter and Japan's Mio orbiter are now on their own for a six-month approach. They enter orbit around Mercury on 21 November, then run 16 manoeuvres to lower and reshape it, and begin science on 6 April 2027. Getting there took one flyby of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury. [6]

Why it matters. A spacecraft falling towards the Sun keeps speeding up, so most of a trip to Mercury is spent shedding speed rather than gaining it. That is why the arrival takes six months. [6]

Isar Aerospace, a German company, has a week-long window to launch its Spectrum rocket from Andoya in northern Norway, opening on Friday. The first Spectrum flew for about 30 seconds in 2025 before failing. This one carries several CubeSats, small satellites built to a standard box size. Norway is in national mourning for King Harald V, and Norway's government said the flight may go ahead before his funeral on 9 September. Isar won a 200 million euro contract from the European Space Agency last month. [4]

Why it matters. None of Europe's launch startups has reached orbit. Isar, Spain's PLD Space and Rocket Factory Augsburg all won agency contracts this year, and Isar is the one now standing on a pad. [4]

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's rocket company, broke ground on a satellite processing building at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The 120,000-square-foot hangar was ordered by the US Space Force under a $78 million contract awarded last year and is due in 2028. It will hold four bays for preparing satellites and two for sealing them inside a rocket, and any company flying military payloads can use it. Blue Origin's own New Glenn rocket has not flown since its launch pad exploded in May. [4]

Why it matters. A launch site's buildings get used by everyone who flies from it. This one is paid for by the US Space Force and will serve Blue Origin's rivals as well as Blue Origin. [4]

Airbus, Thales and Leonardo want to combine their satellite-making arms into one company, a deal codenamed Project Bromo that is waiting on competition regulators. Josef Aschbacher, who runs the European Space Agency, would not say whether he supports it. He did say the agency accounts for about 60% of public spending on satellites in Europe and can use industrial policy to keep the industry healthy. Germany's OHB, the biggest European satellite maker left outside the deal, says it could weaken its suppliers. [9]

Why it matters. Aschbacher is describing a buyer's power, not a regulator's. The agency does not approve the merger, and it decides who gets the orders afterwards. [9]

NASA is looking again at the sextant, a hand-held instrument about 300 years old that measures the angle between two things in the sky so a navigator can work out where they are. Greg Holt, who manages navigation for the Orion capsule, told the BBC that the further a crew travels, the less they can lean on Earth-based systems. In 2018 two astronauts on the space station, Serena Aunon-Chancellor and Alexander Gerst, tested a hand-held sextant in orbit. [11]

Why it matters. A crew far from Earth that loses radio contact also loses the radio ranging that tells the ground where they are. The stars are the one reference still available to them. [11]

Two of the three instruments on NASA's Swift observatory started working again on 26 August, after seven months switched off to slow the spacecraft's fall through the thin upper air. The third, the Burst Alert Telescope, remains off; it was stopped in April to save power. NASA says the team hopes to restart it within weeks. Swift launched in 2004, and a mission to grab it and raise its orbit was abandoned in August after the rescue craft lost attitude control. [13]

Why it matters. The Burst Alert Telescope is the instrument that catches sudden explosions in the sky and tells other telescopes where to look. Until it is back, Swift cannot do that job. [13]

NASA launched its High-Altitude Student Platform on a scientific balloon from Fort Sumner in New Mexico at 8:05 a.m. local time. The balloon carried student-built experiments to about 122,000 feet and stayed up for 6 hours and 45 minutes. It was the twentieth flight of the programme. Over two decades more than 1,900 students from about 25 institutions in the United States have flown an experiment on it. It is run with the Louisiana Space Grant Consortium. [10]

Why it matters. The programme is run with the Louisiana Space Grant Consortium and NASA's balloon office in Texas. [10] At that height the air is thin enough for some instruments to behave much as they would in space, for a tiny fraction of what a launch costs.

NASA's X-59 experimental aircraft has now flown 25 test flights and is meeting the marks its team set. Later this year it moves to a new phase in which NASA measures the sonic thumps it is designed to make when flying faster than sound. [10] The aircraft is shaped so the shock waves spread out instead of arriving together, which is what turns a bang into a thump.

Why it matters. Airliners are barred from flying faster than sound over land in many countries because of the bang. Any new rule would have to be written around measurements like these. [10]

Liu Jiyuan, a pioneer of China's aerospace programme, died in Beijing at 93 after an illness, the country's main space contractor said on Wednesday. Reuters carried the announcement the same day. He belonged to the generation that built China's state rocket and satellite programme, the one the country's launch industry grew out of. [12]

Why it matters. The firms now queuing to sell shares came from that programme. CAS Space, one of them, is a spin-off of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. [1][12]

The European Space Agency has put the first chapter of Elevation online. It is a 144-page book handed to European ministers and delegates at the agency's ministerial council in Bremen, Germany, and it sets out the agency's work through Strategy 2040, the plan written by its director general Josef Aschbacher. The remaining chapters follow over the coming weeks. A ministerial council is where member governments agree what the agency will do and what they will pay for. [14]

Why it matters. A ministerial council is where ESA's member governments agree what the agency will do and what each of them will pay for. [14] The book is the case being made to the people in that room.