Space, in brief

Flying the same hardware again

Two heat-shield tiles recovered from July's Starship will fly again on 22 September. [2] Five SpaceX engineers who taught the Falcon 9 to land received the first Neil Armstrong Space Prize on 15 September. [6] The Falcon 9 booster due to carry a secret Space Force satellite this week was flying for the thirteenth time. [14]

Launches waiting on checks

NASA moved its next crew flight, Crew-13, to early October after engineers replaced a leaking valve in the Dragon capsule. [7] SpaceX called off the Space Force launch on 15 September before fuelling and gave no public reason. [14] Starship's 22 September date still depends on approval from regulators. [2][3]

Keeping the space station supplied

A Russian Progress 96 cargo ship launched on Wednesday with about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies. [8] Seven people are living on the station and waiting for the next crew. [7] NASA's rebuilt ground station on Guam has closed the gap where the station used to lose contact for up to 20 minutes an orbit. [13]

One result is not enough

The dark-matter experiment in South Dakota has three times as much data still to search after one unexplained particle. [12] Polar scientists say the slowdown in ice loss from 2020 to 2023 is a short-term swing, not a reversal. [9] A new simulation shows one way the early universe could build giant black holes, and astronomers still argue about what Webb's little red dots are. [10]

1. 1SpaceX will try to send Starship to orbit for the first time on 22 September, carrying 26 of its own satellites
2. 2Crew-13 moves to early October
3. 3A Russian cargo ship is on its way up
4. 4Fifty years of ice loss, counted
5. 5A simulation grows giant black holes fast

SpaceX said on Tuesday 15 September that it will try to launch Starship to orbit on 22 September, from its Starbase site in south Texas. [1][2]

Watch whether Starship lifts off in its 22 September window and lets all 26 satellites go, and whether those satellites then raise their own orbits under their own power. [2]

NASA said on 16 September that it and SpaceX are now aiming for early October to launch Crew-13, the next crew flight to the International Space Station. [7]

The flight was held up when a leak turned up in the propulsion system of its Dragon capsule during preparations. [7]

Engineers have since replaced the valve that controls the oxidiser, the chemical the engines burn the fuel with. [7]

The remaining time is for prelaunch work, readiness reviews and fitting the launch into the station's schedule. [7]

The four people who arrived on the last SpaceX crew flight have been aboard since 14 February, and they spoke to reporters from orbit on the day the new date was announced. [7]

Commander Jessica Meir has already cleared storage space for the crew that is meant to relieve them. [7]

A satellite lost in a failed test takes years to replace, so the first flights of an unproven rocket tend to carry the builder's own hardware.

If Starship fails on 22 September, the satellites lost are SpaceX's own, and no other company loses years of work.

the first upright landing, in December 2015, was tried only after the rocket had already delivered eleven Orbcomm satellites, so the risky part came when the customer's cargo was gone

the same rule at the other end - people are cargo nobody can afford to lose, so NASA holds the flight on the ground until a leaking valve is replaced and every review is finished

A rocket company without a satellite network has to find a customer willing to take the risk, or fly with concrete blocks and earn nothing.

The engineers will see every reading from the rocket that day. A company deciding later whether to book a satellite on Starship will see one thing: whether the flight worked.

The uncrewed Progress 96 freighter launched on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 9:33 in the morning, US eastern time, on Wednesday 16 September. [8]

Progress ships are Russia's routine supply run to the International Space Station, flown by its space agency Roscosmos. [8]

This one is carrying about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies for the seven people aboard. [8][7]

It is due to dock by itself to the station's Poisk module at 9:46 on Saturday morning. [8]

Nothing on the station is made there, so food and fuel arrive by ship.

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus freighter has been parked at the Unity module since 14 April and the crew is still unloading it. [7]

Polar scientists published the longest consistent record yet of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica, in the journal Scientific Data this month. [9]

The team, called IMBIE, combined 42 surveys drawn from 27 satellite missions, reaching back to 1972 for Greenland and 1979 for Antarctica. [9]

Between 1979 and 2023 the two ice sheets lost 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice, and pushed global sea level up by 3.14 centimetres. [9]

About 84% of that came from glaciers flowing faster into the sea, not from melting at the surface. [9]

Andrew Shepherd of Northumbria University in the UK, who founded the project, says just over three centimetres of sea-level rise puts another six to nine million people at risk of coastal flooding and erosion. [9]

Ice loss slowed between 2020 and 2023, after heavy snowfall in East Antarctica and mild summers in Greenland, and the team says that is a short-term swing rather than a change of direction. [9]

A study published in Nature on Wednesday shows how the early universe could have built very heavy black holes within a few hundred million years. [10][11]

Sunmyon Chon of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany ran the simulation. [10]

In it, strong light from young galaxies nearby stops stars forming in a dense cloud of gas, so the gas collapses straight into a heavy black-hole seed. [10][11]

The team says such a seed would look, from outside, like the little red dots the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding. [10]

Little red dots are tiny red objects from about a billion years after the Big Bang, each roughly one pixel wide in Webb's pictures, and astronomers have argued about them since 2023. [10]

A simulation shows that one route is possible. It does not show that the universe took it, and Webb's measurements are the test. [10]

The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment sits 1,500 metres underground in a former gold mine in South Dakota. [12]

It watches seven tonnes of liquid xenon for the moment a dark-matter particle knocks into an atom. [12]

On 16 June its detectors recorded one such knock, at an energy of 248 kiloelectron volts, that the team could not explain with any known background. [12]

New papers, including one from the experiment itself, now suggest a heavy particle called a Higgsino, about 200 times the mass of a proton. [12]

Dark matter is the name for the 85% of the universe's mass that gives off no light and has never been caught directly. [12]

The team has three times as much data still to sift, and says it should hold one to three more events like this if the signal is real. [12]

NASA held a ribbon-cutting on 10 September for the Guam Remote Station, its ground station on the Pacific island, three years after a typhoon wrecked it. [13]

Super Typhoon Mawar hit on 24 May 2023 with winds of 185 miles an hour, destroying two 16.5-metre dishes. [13]

The US Congress set aside disaster-relief money in early 2025 to rebuild and strengthen the site, and the central dish went back into service on 1 July. [13]

The station has since ridden out two stronger super typhoons with little damage. [13]

Guam is one of three stations that link NASA's relay satellites, 22,000 miles up, to the ground. [13]

Without it, the International Space Station loses contact with Earth for up to 20 minutes of every 90-minute orbit. [13]

SpaceX stopped the launch of USSF-259, a classified mission for the US Space Force, on the evening of 15 September. [14]

The countdown was halted before the Falcon 9 was fuelled, with no public explanation. [14] SpaceX reset the attempt for the next evening from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. [14]

It is the third flight in a month bought from SpaceX under the same Space Force contract, and public documents say the earlier two each carried 23 satellites. [14]

The Space Force will not confirm anything about what these satellites do, and the live broadcast stops shortly after the booster lands. [14][15]

A fourth mission under the same contract is scheduled for 27 September. [14]

Five SpaceX engineers received the first Neil Armstrong Space Prize at a ceremony in Washington on Tuesday 15 September. [6]

They stand for the much larger team that taught the Falcon 9 rocket to land. [6]

Purdue University, where Armstrong studied, created the yearly award and wants it to become a Nobel for space. [6]

The Falcon 9's first stage first landed upright on 21 December 2015, on the rocket's twentieth flight, after putting 11 Orbcomm satellites in orbit. [6]

Boosters have now landed more than 650 times, and one has flown 37 times. [6]

Reuse is why Falcon 9 flies so much: 165 missions in 2025, about half of all the orbital launches in the world. [6]