Space, in brief

Drug companies are already making things aboard the International Space Station, and are now planning for it to be gone. [1]

LambdaVision has flown nine missions to the station since 2018, building an artificial retina by laying proteins and polymers onto a scaffold one layer at a time. [1]

Auxilium Biotechnologies has used a 3D printer on the station to make structures containing human liver, kidney and cartilage cells. [1]

Merck worked on station research that fed into a version of its cancer drug Keytruda given as an injection under the skin instead of a slow drip. [1]

The station was never built as a factory. The chief scientist of the body that rents out its American half calls it a test kitchen. [1]

Laboratory space, crew time and rides home are all scarce up there, so repeating one experiment can take months or years. [1]

NASA plans to retire the station by the end of the decade, and Starlab, Vast and Axiom Space are each building a private one to take the work. [1]

Executives say getting results back down is now a tighter squeeze than getting them up, because you cannot design the next experiment until the last one lands. [1]

Space Cargo Unlimited, a Luxembourg firm, has already sold a third of the 1,000kg a SpaceX return capsule will carry, and that capsule is not due to fly until 2028. [2]

No medicines regulator anywhere has set out how something made in orbit gets approved. Britain's agency said in March it would publish a plan this year. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether Britain's medicines agency publishes its promised guidance this year, which would be the first written route from a factory in orbit to an approved medicine.

On 10 September the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced the Space Catalyst Partnership on a visit to Peru. [3] It is the first time the US State Department has openly steered foreign-aid money towards selling American space services abroad. Only countries that have signed the Artemis Accords, a US-written set of rules for how to behave in space, may take part, and Peru signed in 2024. The first project is a two-year, $6.5m scheme to bring satellite internet to villages in southern Peru. [3]

Why it matters. China has spent years building space links across Latin America, including a deep-space tracking station in Argentina. A US official would not bar aid recipients from also buying Chinese equipment, and said American standards should win on their own. [3]

Rocket Lab's finance chief, Adam Spice, spoke at an industry conference in Paris on 14 September. [4] He said the company is on track to complete its $8bn purchase of Iridium by the second quarter of next year. [4] Iridium runs a satellite network that carries phone calls and data for ships, aircraft and places with no mast in reach. Rocket Lab builds rockets and satellites and sells launches, which is one-off money. [4]

Why it matters. Rocket Lab is paid when somebody buys a launch. Iridium's customers pay every month, whether anything launches or not.

The US Defense Department's Defense Innovation Unit and the Space Force's Space Systems Command announced a joint effort called GHOST-R on Friday. [5] It is meant to put low-cost cameras into the high orbit about 36,000km up, where the big communications satellites sit. True Anomaly and Northrop Grumman each won a contract to build a prototype vehicle, due to launch in 2028. The job is to look at other spacecraft up there, say what they are, and tell whether one has been damaged. Today a handful of expensive satellites do that work. [5]

Why it matters. Colonel Bryon McClain said prototypes that work will transition directly into the programme of record, the budget line that buys satellites in numbers. [5] That is the step a demonstration usually has to fight for.

NASA set out the first details of a US Space Academy in a request for information on 10 September, and states have begun competing to host it. [6] President Trump ordered the school by executive order on 28 August, as a civilian answer to the military service academies. NASA wants a site of at least 300 acres with room for 1,200 undergraduates, able to grow to 4,000. The plan is to break ground in 2027, seat an interim group of 300 students at existing colleges in 2028, and open a permanent campus in 2031. [6]

Why it matters. Every state was invited to bid through its governor, and each proposal must include cost estimates. The last state contest President Trump launched, for Space Command's headquarters, took five years to settle. [6]

Satrec Initiative, a South Korean satellite maker, will build four satellites able to pick out things about ten centimetres across on the ground, an executive told SpaceNews at the Paris conference. [7] They are to join a 64-satellite radar fleet Hanwha is building, which is meant to revisit any point every thirty minutes by 2031. To see that finely the satellites must fly below 400km, where thin air still drags on a spacecraft and wears it out. Hanwha said in July it will start with a test satellite near 500km and lower it in steps. [7]

Why it matters. The sharpest satellite pictures on sale today resolve about 25 centimetres, and Airbus and Vantor are both aiming at 20 centimetres from 2028. [7]

L3Harris is building the first fourteen satellites of an Earth-watching fleet for a company called Xoople, with the first due to launch in 2028. [8] The two announced their partnership in April after several years of quiet work, and said at the Paris conference that parts are now being made. Xoople's chief executive, Fabrizio Pirondini, said the design is not aimed at human analysts at all, but at feeding computer models. Everything the satellites gather will be sent down raw and processed in data centres on the ground. [8]

Why it matters. Most Earth-watching companies are putting the computer on the satellite, to cut how much they have to send down. Xoople is doing the opposite and keeping all of it. [8]

Maverick, a company that packs other people's satellites onto rockets, has booked ten spacecraft for Kepler Communications onto a Falcon 9 that Portal Space Systems bought outright. [9] Portal paid for the whole rocket last month for a mission it calls Motus Via Sol, then hired Maverick to sell the room it did not need. The Kepler booking takes most of what was left. Maverick has run without outside investment since 2019, so it fills other people's rockets rather than buying its own. [9]

Why it matters. SpaceX is reported to be pausing its cheap shared-ride flights from late 2028. Companies that assemble those rides are buying or filling whole rockets to cover the gap. [9]

Kuva Space, a Finnish satellite operator, published results from a trial that searched for opium poppy in Afghanistan's Helmand province. [10] Its Hyperfield satellites read the ground in hundreds of narrow colour bands instead of three, so different plants leave different patterns in the light. Combining 363 of its own images with free European ones, it flagged 8,835 possible poppy plots out of about 250,000 farm plots surveyed. It got the answer right 75% of the time, against 71% using the free images alone. [10]

Why it matters. The real gain was fewer false alarms, which matters because poppy is often grown in among legal crops. Kuva says the method can be trained on coca and cannabis too, which opens a new kind of buyer: law-enforcement bodies. [10]

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 9:07pm eastern time on 16 September, carrying a classified US Space Force payload called USSF-259. [11] It was the second classified Space Force launch in six days. The webcast ended shortly after the first stage landed on a ship in the Pacific, about eight and a half minutes in, and said nothing about the satellite itself. [11]

Why it matters. Nobody outside the programme knows what went up. The same booster, number 1097, had now landed thirteen times, and made SpaceX's 600th landing of an orbital rocket in April. [11]

Russia launched the uncrewed Progress 96 freighter on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on 16 September, carrying about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies to the International Space Station. [12] It was due to dock two days later. The freighter it replaces, Progress 94, left the station on 7 September and burned up. Progress 96 will stay attached about five months, then be loaded with rubbish and sent down over the Pacific. Seven people are living aboard. [12]

Why it matters. Four different craft carry cargo to the station, and only SpaceX's Dragon survives the trip home. [12] Everything else that goes up as supplies comes down as ash, which is the squeeze the lead story runs into.

The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, named the winners of the 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. [13] The overall winner, called The Quiet Predator, was taken by Ali Alobaidly in Kuwait. It shows the Shark nebula, a dense cloud of dust about 650 light years away in the constellation Cepheus, lit blue by a few stars sitting inside it. The cloud is so dark that Alobaidly needed more than 28 hours of observing to build the picture. [13]

Why it matters. Every one of these was taken from the ground on Earth, not from a space telescope. The runner-up, by Kfir Simon in Israel, shows far-off galaxies shining through the gas of the Helix nebula. [13]

A team led by Alessandro Trinca at the University of Edinburgh published work in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on where the universe's earliest giant black holes could have formed. [14] The James Webb Space Telescope has found such objects less than a billion years after the Big Bang. [14] That is too early for them to have grown the usual way, from dying stars collapsing and slowly merging. The team modelled a different route: a huge cloud of cold gas falling straight in on itself. [14]

Why it matters. The work is about which neighbourhoods allow that to happen, not about whether it did. It points telescopes at crowded regions where dark matter was merging. [14]

Jupiter's four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, have entered a season in which they pass in front of one another and cast shadows on each other as seen from Earth. [15] Their orbits are tilted by less than a degree from Jupiter's equator, so the line-up with our view only comes round about every six years. This season runs into early 2027, and the middle of it falls around mid-October. Jupiter is now visible before dawn. [15]

Why it matters. These events can be watched through a modest telescope, and the season's dates are published well in advance. [15]

Sedaro, a US space software company, will receive up to $45m in government money. [16] It expands a platform that lets the US Space Force work out how different satellites, sensors and other equipment perform together. [16] The tool models a whole set of spacecraft rather than one, so planners can see what changing one part does to the rest. [16]

Why it matters. The money buys no hardware. It pays for the tool that checks whether satellites bought from different suppliers work as one set.

Iceye, a Finnish company that builds and flies radar satellites, is exploring with Arianespace whether Europe's Ariane 6 rocket could launch its missions for European government customers. [17] It also set up Iceye Korea in August under Eric Rhee, signed an agreement with Seoul National University, and formed a partnership with the South Korean operator KT Sat. Radar satellites see through cloud and at night. The moves follow a funding round of more than $1bn. [17]

Why it matters. Governments increasingly want satellites of their own rather than pictures bought from abroad. Iceye is answering that by putting engineers and factories inside each country, not just sales staff. [17]