Space, in brief

Losers fighting the decision

Rocket Lab asked a US watchdog on 11 September to reopen NASA's 700 million dollar Mars award. [1] SpaceX sued the US Air Force in 2014 for the right to bid against United Launch Alliance, and won that right the following year. [8]

Europe buying its own rides

The European Space Agency signed a 760 million euro contract for a European cargo capsule called Nyx. [3] Eutelsat, a French satellite operator, handed 2.4 billion euros of satellite building to the Belgian firm Aerospacelab. [4] ESA also signed a letter with Starlab, an American company building a space station, about using it after the International Space Station retires. [5]

Money years ahead of the hardware

NASA put Relativity Space's Terran R rocket on its approved list before the rocket has flown once. [6] The US defence department gave the startup Antares 161 million dollars towards a nuclear reactor for spacecraft, a thing the United States last flew in 1965. [7] Firefly Aerospace booked two launches from a Swedish site for 2028. [2]

New telescopes returning results

The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile released the first science image from its survey camera. [13] Astronomers using a telescope on La Palma worked out that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS formed below minus 240 Celsius. [16] NASA's Parker Solar Probe turned its camera on the Sun's north pole during its 29th close pass on 4 September. [12]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Space too.

• Taking it to a courtBuilding ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1Rocket Lab asks a US watchdog to reopen NASA's $700m Mars radio contract
2. 2Europe orders its own cargo capsule
3. 3ESA signs a letter with an American station
4. 4A rocket that has never flown joins NASA's list
5. 5A reactor for spacecraft wins $161m

Watch what the US Government Accountability Office decides, because if it agrees with Rocket Lab then NASA has to judge the bids again, and the 2028 handover is the first date that would move.

A review adds time before any of it starts. [1]

Also seen in Food, Sports and Gaming.

The European Space Agency signed a 760 million euro contract with The Exploration Company, a French firm founded in 2021, for a capsule called Nyx. [3]

Nyx is meant to carry cargo up to a space station and bring it back down, which Europe has never been able to do on its own. [3]

The deal pays 310 million euros for one demonstration flight to the International Space Station, plus 450 million euros for two later missions that are still to be confirmed. [3]

Arianespace will launch the demonstration on an Ariane 6 rocket, aiming for late 2028. [2]

Until now Europe has had to buy a ride home from an American company. This is the largest transport contract ESA has ever given a European firm. [3]

Rocket Lab lost a 700 million dollar NASA contract and asked a watchdog to reopen it, because in this business losing once does not put a company out.

Blue Origin lost its protest over the Moon lander, then lost in court, and then NASA decided to buy a second lander, which Blue Origin won two years later.

the same step, earlier and cheaper: NASA spends paperwork rather than money to keep a rocket that has never flown eligible to bid

the owners pay to keep the US government's second military rocket company alive through six months of not flying

ESA pays a five-year-old French firm to build a capsule that already exists in American hands, so that a second one exists in European hands

the money buys launchpads at a site that has never reached orbit, so British satellites have somewhere to go besides other countries' pads

From inside NASA, inside Rocket Lab and inside a European ministry, every one of these moves looks like the only sensible one available.

ESA and Starlab signed a letter of intent on 12 September about ESA using Starlab's planned space station once the International Space Station retires. [5]

Starlab is an American company building a commercial station to replace the one that has been flying since 1998. [5] The letter is not a contract.

It sets out terms ESA might use later, including booking laboratory space in blocks of 30, 60, 90 or 180 days, and use of European cargo and crew vehicles. [5]

Europe has no station of its own and no way to send astronauts to one.

ESA's director general Josef Aschbacher said any next step is for ESA's member countries to decide. [5]

NASA added Relativity Space's Terran R rocket to a contract called Launch Services II, which is the list of rockets NASA is allowed to buy flights on. [6]

Terran R has not flown once. [2]

The contract has a clause letting new providers join once a year, and NASA says it still wants to see a new rocket succeed in flight before handing it a mission. [6][2]

The ordering period runs to June 2030. [6]

Being on the list is not a contract. It is permission to compete for one, and Relativity now has it before its rocket has left the ground.

The US defence department gave Antares, a nuclear microreactor startup, a 161 million dollar award to develop nuclear power for spacecraft. [7]

The United States has flown exactly one reactor in space, called SNAP-10A, in 1965. [7]

Antares says it is the largest US defence space nuclear award so far, and it follows the company bringing a small reactor to a self-sustaining chain reaction in June. [7]

It plans to run an electricity-producing reactor for more than six months in 2027. [7]

Solar panels cannot keep a power-hungry satellite running in shadow or far from the Sun. A reactor would let a spacecraft manoeuvre and compute without rationing every watt. [7]

Boeing and Lockheed Martin each guaranteed 500 million dollars of loans to United Launch Alliance, the rocket company they jointly own, while its Vulcan rocket is grounded. [8]

Vulcan has not flown for more than six months since a booster nozzle failed in February, the second time that part has broken. [8]

The company forecast 18 to 22 launches this year and has flown five. [8] Its price per Vulcan flight has gone from 112 million dollars to more than 200 million. [8]

United Launch Alliance exists because the US government wanted two separate rocket types available for military launches.

It is now the weaker of the two, and its owners have spent years trying to sell it. [8]

The UK government published a national space strategy this week and attached 7.8 billion pounds of spending through 2030. [2]

About 40 percent goes to connectivity, including Skynet, the satellite network that carries British military communications. [2]

Thirty million pounds goes to SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland, the islands north of Scotland, whose main tenant is the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg. [2]

No rocket has ever reached orbit from the United Kingdom. [2]

The stated aim is to launch British satellites without relying on launch sites in other countries. The money is a bet that a first British orbital launch is close.

Firefly Aerospace, an American launch company, agreed with SSC Space to fly two of its Alpha rockets from Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden, no earlier than 2028. [2][4]

SSC has taken the full payload capacity of both flights and will decide who fills it, including Sweden's national security customers. [2]

Firefly's chief executive Jason Kim said more Alpha flights would follow under a long-term partnership. [2]

Esrange has fired research rockets into the sky for decades and has never put anything into orbit. Sweden is trying to turn it into a working spaceport.

Avio, the Italian company that builds Europe's smaller Vega-C rocket, said it is working towards six flights a year, roughly double its current rate, and possibly nine after that. [2]

Its chief executive Giulio Ranzo said so at the International Space Summit in Paris on Wednesday. [2]

The block is the solid-fuel motors, which are the same ones strapped to the larger Ariane 6, so both rockets pull on one production line. [2]

European institutions are the main buyers of Vega-C flights and their demand is rising. Every extra Ariane 6 booster built is a Vega-C motor that is not. [2]

Aevum, an American company that has promised an uncrewed aircraft called Ravn X since 2020, showed signs of life this week. [2]

Aviation photographers spotted a large sleek aircraft silhouette at Long Beach Airport in California, which turned out to be a Ravn X mockup. [2]

Founder Jay Skylus then said the vehicle had completed its first fully autonomous taxi, about 37 minutes of it, and that the team was reviewing the data. [2]

Aevum's original target was an orbital flight in 2021. [2]

Ravn X is meant to carry a small rocket under its wing and release it in the air. Nothing has flown and there is no launch date.

Rocket Lab launched an Electron rocket from New Zealand on 10 September on a mission it called Happily Ever Faster, carrying one Earth-observation satellite to a 500km orbit. [9]

The company did not livestream the flight and did not say who paid for it. [9]

Outside observers think the payload was a Gen-3 satellite for BlackSky, a company selling satellite pictures sharp enough to pick out things 35 centimetres across. [9]

It was Rocket Lab's 16th launch of 2026, and all 16 worked. [9]

Governments that buy satellite pictures increasingly prefer not to be named as customers. Rocket Lab now flies often enough that a silent launch barely registers.

China's Tianwen-3 mission is meant to launch around 2028 on two Long March 5 rockets from Wenchang on Hainan island, and bring about 500 grams of Mars rock back to Earth in 2031. [10]

The mission's chief scientist Hou Zengqian told the state broadcaster CCTV that the hardware has entered prototype development. [10]

He said on 3 September that the main scientific goal is to look for traces of past microbial life. [10]

NASA's own plan for bringing Mars samples home has no settled path. [10]

Scott Hubbard, who once ran NASA's Mars programme, said that if the schedule is accurate it is a Sputnik moment.

Whoever gets the rock back first gets to answer the question first. [10]

Sierra Space ran two drop tests of Ghost, a small capsule meant to bring cargo down from orbit, releasing it from high-altitude balloons at 35,000 and 68,500 feet. [11]

The load was a software-defined radio and a bottle of whiskey, chosen to prove the capsule can carry delicate electronics and liquid without breaking either. [11]

The drops were part of a US Space Command exercise called Apollo Nexus, held at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in May. [11]

Sierra Space built the vehicle from scratch in under four months. [11]

The pitch is delivering supplies to soldiers in places a cargo plane cannot reach, within 90 minutes. These were the first Ghost drops in nearly two years. [11]

Eutelsat, a French satellite operator, handed out the contracts to build IRIS2, the European Union's planned network of 330 secure communications satellites. [4]

Aerospacelab, a Belgian firm, takes 2.4 billion euros as prime contractor for 264 of them. [4]

Airbus Defence and Space builds the remaining 66, and Thales Alenia Space gets 500 million euros to build the payloads for all 330. [4]

The awards were announced at the summit in Paris this week. [4]

IRIS2 is the European Union's answer to depending on SpaceX's Starlink. Aerospacelab, Airbus and Thales Alenia Space now have to build and fit out all 330 satellites. [4]

Loft Orbital, a satellite operator, and Marlan Space said they will put 1 billion dollars into a 50-satellite network that runs artificial-intelligence work in orbit. [4]

The satellites will be assembled and tested by their joint venture OrbitWorks in the United Arab Emirates, and the money is expected to spread through European suppliers. [4]

Loft's chief executive Pierre-Damien Vaujour said some satellites will be built in-house and others bought from partners. [4]

Doing the computing in orbit saves sending raw pictures down to Earth before anyone looks at them. It is the same argument behind several networks announced this year.

Eutelsat also said it will work with Skynopy, a French startup that rents out ground stations, on a network of more than 100 antennas serving satellites in low orbit. [4]

It picked OroraTech, a German company, to supply at least 48 thermal-infrared cameras for the next batch of its OneWeb satellites. [4]

Thermal-infrared cameras read heat rather than visible light, which is how wildfires get spotted from orbit at night. [4]

Antennas on the ground are the part of a satellite network nobody photographs. Without enough of them the pictures stay in orbit.

Arianespace signed seven agreements over the two days of the Paris summit, which the company says is the biggest order intake for Ariane 6 since the rocket entered service. [4]

Amazon added six flights, Eutelsat ordered two for its OneWeb network, and The Exploration Company booked the Nyx demonstration. [4]

The American satellite maker AscendArc booked an Ariane 6 flight carrying KT SAT's Koreasat 9 telecom satellite. [4] Arianespace also signed looser agreements with ICEYE, EnduroSat and AgenaSpace. [4]

Several of the seven customers are private companies rather than European public bodies.

Arianespace's chief executive David Cavailloles said Europe's own access to orbit and its commercial sales strengthen each other. [4]

MaiaSpace, a French launch startup owned by ArianeGroup, signed a multi-launch agreement with iQPS, a Japanese company that flies radar satellites, for missions starting in 2029. [4] RIDE!

Space, an Italian broker that resells room on other people's rockets, signed a contract with TakeMe2Space, an Indian startup putting computers in orbit, to launch two of its satellites in 2028. [4]

Both deals were announced at the Paris summit. [4]

Customers are booking capacity three years out because the slots on rockets already flying are full. That is what lets an unflown European rocket sign a Japanese customer.

Josef Aschbacher, the director general of the European Space Agency, called for 10 billion euros of investment over the next ten years so that Europe can work in space without depending on others. [4]

He also urged Europe to build its own way of carrying astronauts to orbit, which would cut its reliance on NASA. [4]

He asked satellite operators to coordinate their plans rather than each building alone. [4]

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told the summit that Europe starts from strength, and that strength today guarantees nothing tomorrow. [4]

SpaceX and Blue Origin stayed away from the summit after pressure from the US government.

Their absence turned the event into an argument about how much Europe should spend on itself. [4]

NASA's Parker Solar Probe made its 29th close pass of the Sun on 4 September, again matching its record distance of 3.8 million miles from the surface. [12]

This time it pointed its camera at structures and activity near the Sun's north pole. [12] The spacecraft sent back a beacon tone showing its systems were working normally. [12]

Its previous pass, the 28th, was on 8 June at the same distance. [12]

Earth orbits around the Sun's middle, so nobody on the ground gets a good look at its poles. The probe measures the solar wind where it starts. [12]

The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile released the deepest image yet of the COSMOS field, a well-studied patch of sky in the constellation Sextans holding hundreds of thousands of galaxies. [13]

It is the first image and catalogue the observatory's LSST Camera has produced for scientific use rather than for testing. [13]

Hubble photographed the same patch in segments between 2003 and 2005. [13] Phil Marshall, Rubin's deputy director, called the field a testing ground for scientists preparing for the full survey. [13]

Astronomers chose this patch decades ago so new instruments could be compared against old ones. Rubin adds repeated pictures of it, which is how changes get spotted. [13]

Astronomers say AT 2016blu, a star about 29 million light years away and around 33 times the mass of the Sun, is not about to explode after all. [14]

It has flared 27 times since 2012, roughly every 113 days, which looked like the warning outbursts that often come before a supernova. [14]

New X-ray observations, led by Mojgan Aghakhanloo at the University of Virginia, point instead to a companion object pulling material off the star each time it swings close. [14]

The work is due in The Astrophysical Journal. [14]

The star already carried the nickname supernova impostor. Knowing which stars are about to explode is how telescopes get pointed at one in time. [14]

A team led by Riku Kuze at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Japan says the 'little red dots' found by the James Webb Space Telescope could be making high-energy neutrinos that reach Earth today. [15]

The little red dots are 341 small red galaxies that existed between 0.6 and 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang, thought to hold growing giant black holes wrapped in thick gas. [15]

Neutrinos are tiny particles that barely interact with anything, so they escape that gas and travel almost undisturbed. [15] The trip would have taken about 13 billion years. [15]

Detectors on Earth already catch high-energy neutrinos without knowing where most of them came from. This gives them a place to check. [15]

Astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma measured five kinds of ion streaming off 3I/ATLAS, the third object ever confirmed to have come from another star system. [16]

By comparing the amount of nitrogen gas with carbon monoxide, they worked out that the comet formed below minus 240 Celsius. [16]

That places its birth far from its own star, in the cold outer edge where our own Kuiper Belt sits. [16]

The work, led by Lea Ferellec at the University of Northumbria, is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. [16]

The comet is already leaving the solar system. The measurement had to be taken while it was still shedding gas after rounding the Sun. [16]

There have been 203 successful orbital launches worldwide so far in 2026, continuing five years of rising records. [17]

The rate is high enough that the glowing plume a rocket leaves in a twilight sky, nicknamed a space jellyfish, has become an ordinary sight on both US coasts. [17]

It appears when exhaust high above the ground catches sunlight while the person watching is already in darkness. [17]

SpaceX may attempt the first orbital flight of its Starship rocket on 15 September. [17]

Starlink launches have moved off Florida and are heading for Texas and Louisiana. Where the rockets fly decides who gets to see them. [17]

NASA published work using Landsat satellites to separate winter cover crops from winter wheat on Maryland's Eastern Shore. [18] In a November picture the two look identical because both are green. [18]

By May the cover crops have been killed off and the wheat is still growing, so the same fields look different. [18]

Cover crops are planted to hold nitrogen and soil in place over winter rather than to be sold. [18]

Maryland pays farmers to plant cover crops, and a state that pays for them needs to know they went in. Checking from the ground means visiting every field. [18]

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is heading for L2, a point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth on the side away from the Sun, where it can observe almost all the time. [19]

Its main camera holds 300 million pixels and sees a patch of sky about 100 times larger than Hubble's. [19]

That makes it roughly 1,000 times faster than Hubble at surveying the sky, though its mirror is the same 2.4 metres across. [19]

It also carries an instrument built to block a star's light so planets can be photographed. [19]

Jason Rhodes, its project scientist for eleven years, wrote the account. The telescope is named after NASA's first chief of astronomy, who argued for space telescopes from 1959. [19]