Space, in brief

US Space Command says it has finished its first exercise built around moving military satellites more freely in orbit. [2]

It used actual spacecraft across low, medium and geosynchronous orbits, not a computer model. [2]

Geosynchronous orbit is the high ring about 36,000 km up, where a satellite circles once a day and so appears to hang over one spot on Earth. [2]

The exercise was called Apollo Maneuvers 2026, and international partners took part, according to a Space Command statement. [1]

Space Command has not said which satellites flew in it, or how many. [1]

General Stephen Whiting, who commands it, told reporters last month the aim was to move for advantage, not only to move when an orbit has to be corrected. [1]

Whiting also said the side that can keep manoeuvring, again and again and at scale, will set the pace of events in orbit. [1]

The US Space Force's second-ranking officer, General Michael Guetlein, has described spacecraft circling in and out and around each other under control as dogfighting in space. [1]

He used the phrase in 2025, about Chinese satellite movements watched in 2024. [1]

A satellite carries every drop of its manoeuvring fuel from the launch pad, and nothing in orbit tops it up.

Space.com reports that US Space Force leaders say they still lack much of the hardware a real fight in orbit would need, including what Whiting calls orbital interceptors. [1]

In June a Rocket Lab Puma satellite met a True Anomaly Jackal in orbit, and the two flew close together to rehearse an encounter for the Space Force. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether the US Space Force turns the exercise into a funded order for spacecraft built to manoeuvre hard, which is what would take this past a drill.

NASA said on Wednesday that Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover are moving to emeritus status this month, so neither is an active astronaut any more. [8][7] The two flew Artemis II in April, a ten-day loop around the Moon with Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen, and the first flight to test the Orion capsule's air and water systems with people aboard. [9] Hansen retired from the Canadian Space Agency in July, leaving Koch as the only one of the four still on the active list. [7] Glover started a leadership job at California Polytechnic State University on 1 September, the day he retired from the US Navy. [7]

Why it matters. Four people flew around the Moon five months ago and three of them are now out of the rotation, so the agency's next lunar crews will be flown largely by people who have not been. The crew visited NASA's Marshall centre in Alabama on 1 September to pass on what the flight was like. [10]

A Falcon 9 rocket is due to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California in a three-hour window opening at 11:37 a.m. New York time on Thursday, carrying a mission called USSF-153. [3] The payload is classified, so what it is and where it is going have not been published, and the webcast is expected to cut off once the booster is down. [3] The first stage will land on a drone ship in the Pacific about eight and a half minutes after lift-off. [3]

Why it matters. It lands on the same day the military is talking openly about manoeuvring in orbit: the exercise is described in detail and the actual hardware going up is not described at all.

The US Space Force is backing a startup with $50 million to develop an unusual way of sending small spacecraft out from a larger vehicle already in orbit, SpaceNews reported on Sunday. [4] Today most small satellites either ride to their final position on the rocket that launched them or spend their own limited fuel getting there. [4] SpaceNews does not name the company in the part of its report that is open to read.

Why it matters. It is money aimed at the same problem as the exercise above: getting a spacecraft where you want it, without burning through the fuel it needs to stay useful.

General Douglas Schiess became the US Space Force's most senior officer on 3 September, succeeding General Chance Saltzman, and told the ceremony in Maryland that the purpose is deterrence rather than confrontation. [6] A wider change of leadership has followed across the American national security space organisations, while the US government pours billions into new capabilities. [5] A report published last week by RAND, an American research institute, said the United States does not have the workforce to rebuild military satellites quickly if they are destroyed. [6]

Why it matters. The exercise above practises what to do in a fight in orbit. The report is about the morning after one, and says the people who would have to rebuild are not there.

Adrianos Golemis will become the first Greek astronaut to reach orbit, flying to the International Space Station in 2027 on a private mission run by the American company Vast, SpaceNews reported on Thursday. [11] The announcement was made at the International Space Summit with the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the French president Emmanuel Macron watching, alongside the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. [11] It lands while Europe is still arguing about whether to build a crew spacecraft of its own. [11]

Why it matters. A European country that wants a citizen in orbit is buying the seat from an American company, because Europe has no way of launching people itself.

NASA has added Relativity Space's Terran R rocket to its NLS II launch contract, the standing arrangement it uses to buy rides for science and exploration missions. [12] The contract lets new rocket makers join once a year through what NASA calls an on-ramp, and it runs for orders until June 2030 and for flights until December 2032. [12] Being on the list is not an order for a launch; it means Relativity may now bid when NASA has a mission to fly. [12] NASA can also buy launches for other American agencies under it. [12]

Why it matters. It widens the field NASA can pick from, which matters on a beat where most missions currently go up on the same company's rockets.

Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope were pointed at the same patch of sky and together picked out 27 newly discovered icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune, in two papers published on Tuesday in The Astronomical Journal. [13] The smallest is about 5 km across, five times smaller than the best ground telescopes can detect. [13] The teams expected these small bodies to look battered and chemically altered by collisions. They do not: their colours match their much larger relatives, as if the surfaces have barely changed since the solar system formed. [13]

Why it matters. These objects are leftovers from the stage when dust and pebbles first clumped into city-sized lumps and then stopped, so their surfaces are a record of how planets started. There are also fewer small ones than the formation models predicted. [13]

NASA opened a call on Tuesday for industry proposals to develop the equipment a Moon base would need at the lunar south pole, naming power generation, pulling oxygen out of the ground and making building materials on site. [14] The solicitation is called NextSTEP-3 Appendix A, and it is open to American companies, universities and non-profits, with foreign partners allowed inside US-led teams. [14] Greg Stover, who runs NASA's advanced research and technology division, said partnering with industry strengthens the American supplier base. [14]

Why it matters. Everything a Moon base uses has to be either launched from Earth or made on the spot, and launching it is the expensive half. NASA is asking companies to work out the second option.

Eclipse Space, founded by former SpaceX engineers, revealed three satellite designs on Tuesday: CitraSat for connecting ordinary mobile phones, SliceSat for high-speed broadband, and SurgeSat, built to run computing in orbit. [15] All three fold flat, so more of them fit inside a rocket's nose cone on each launch. [15] SurgeSat's solar wings would make up to 100 kilowatts, and it carries a 400 square metre radiator to throw the waste heat away. [15] The company also announced a power system partnership with the French firm Gama, and its first demonstration flight has slipped from 2027 to 2028. [15]

Why it matters. Chief executive Derek Huerta told Payload that customers ask for a Starlink without realising Starlink is a whole system, so Eclipse is selling the system rather than the spacecraft. Unlike most space startups it says it is steering clear of US government work. [15]

The Expedition 75 crew spent Wednesday on medicine and physics aboard the International Space Station. [17] Jessica Meir scanned the veins of Anil Menon and the Russian cosmonauts Anna Kikina and Pyotr Dubrov with an ultrasound device, while doctors on the ground guided her by voice, to see how weightlessness changes blood flow. [17] Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency cleaned the Electrostatic Levitation Furnace in Kibo, the Japanese laboratory, which holds a sample in mid-air with electric fields and heats it past 2,000C with lasers. [17]

Why it matters. Because the sample floats, nothing touches it, so a molten metal can be measured without a container changing the answer. The health work feeds straight into planning longer flights to the Moon and Mars. [17]

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched at the end of August on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. [20] It is heading for a point about 1.5 million km from Earth, where the pull of the Sun and Earth lets a spacecraft sit in step with our planet. [20] Its main job is dark matter, dark energy and planets around other stars. [20] The Planetary Society notes it should also turn up roughly 1,000 unknown moons of Jupiter, 200 of Saturn, 100 of Uranus and 5 of Neptune along the way. [20]

Why it matters. A survey telescope sweeps wide fields rather than staring at one target, so small nearby objects fall into the pictures whether or not anyone was looking for them.

NASA's science directorate has funded ten researchers under PICASSO, a programme for planetary instrument concepts so early that nothing has been built yet. [16] One will develop a compact chemical sniffer light enough for a drone, to hunt for organic molecules in Martian caves and lava tubes. [16] Another will build a small nuclear power source using curium-244, an isotope chosen because it excites the elements in surface soil without contaminating the sample it is reading. [16] The awards cover targets from the hot surface of Mercury to the icy worlds at the edge of the solar system. [16]

Why it matters. Instruments take a decade or more to get from an idea onto a spacecraft, so what is funded now decides what missions in the late 2030s can look for.

Sophie Adenot took a small golden Starfleet badge from the series Strange New Worlds up to the International Space Station. [19] She wore it for a video the European Space Agency posted to mark 60 years of Star Trek. [19] The agency also photographed the badge floating in front of the Cupola, the station's seven-window dome that looks down at Earth. [19] Adenot launched on a SpaceX Dragon capsule on NASA's Crew-12 mission on 13 February and is a flight engineer on Expedition 75. [19]

Why it matters. Star Trek's crews were written in the 1960s, when only a handful of people had ever left the ground. The badge went up with a working flight engineer, on a station that has been lived in without a break for twenty-five years.