Space, in brief

SpaceX has told NASA it intends to retire its Crew Dragon capsule by 2030, and possibly sooner. [1]

Crew Dragon is the only working spacecraft NASA has for routine astronaut flights to the space station. [1]

NASA is in talks with Boeing about Starliner, the rival capsule, taking ten or more flights in the years ahead. [2]

NASA will help pay Boeing to fix the thruster problems that nearly lost two astronauts in 2024. [1]

It will also help pay to certify Starliner on a second rocket, because its current one is almost gone. [1]

Six Atlas V rockets are left, and the Atlas V is near retirement because its main engine is Russian. [1]

The replacement will most likely be ULA's Vulcan or Blue Origin's New Glenn, after a competition. [1]

Since 2010 NASA has paid SpaceX about $3.1bn and Boeing about $5.1bn to build these two capsules. [1]

On 18 September NASA bought three more Crew Dragon flights for $946m, taking SpaceX to 17 missions in all. [3][4]

SpaceX has already met everything its contract required, so nothing obliges it to keep Dragon flying. [1]

Companies building private space stations say neither SpaceX nor Boeing would quote them a price to carry crew. [1]

Why it matters. Watch which rocket is chosen to carry Starliner once the Atlas V runs out: picking Blue Origin's New Glenn would hand that company a rocket certified for people without it paying for the certification.

SpaceX has moved the first orbital flight of Starship from 22 September to 28 September, and gave no reason. [5] Starship is the tallest rocket ever built, and all thirteen of its previous test flights stopped short of orbit. [5][8] Flight 14 is meant to carry 26 of SpaceX's own Starlink internet satellites to a height of 275 km and circle the Earth six times over about ten hours. [8] The booster was moved onto the pad in Texas on Monday, and the flight still needs final approval from the US aviation regulator. [6][7]

Why it matters. Starship is where SpaceX wants its engineers and its customers, which is why the company is winding down work it already does well. [9]

NASA will switch off two instruments aboard New Horizons on 1 October, the probe that flew past Pluto in 2015 and is now in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. [10] The two, called SWAP and PEPSSI, measure the solar wind, the stream of charged particles the Sun blows out past the planets. [10] The spacecraft itself is healthy and has power and fuel to keep working until around 2050. [10] The Planetary Society, a space advocacy group, is running a petition to keep them on and says they can be switched back on if the money is found. [10][11]

Why it matters. No other spacecraft is measuring that region with these instruments, so the years that go unmeasured cannot be filled in later. [10]

United Launch Alliance, the rocket company jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, could return its Vulcan rocket to flight by the end of September, carrying Amazon internet satellites. [9] Vulcan has been dogged by problems with the solid boosters strapped to its sides. [9] The company dominated American launch twenty years ago and now flies a rocket thrown away after every flight, against rivals that land theirs. [9] Its finances are worsening and it has been seeking to raise money. [9]

Why it matters. Vulcan is one of the two rockets NASA may pay to certify for carrying astronauts in Starliner, so a company in difficulty sits on the path to the agency's backup ride. [1][9]

Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, has expanded a joint agreement with the US Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base to develop rocket engines. [9] The laboratory did early work on two ways of burning rocket fuel that waste less of it. [9] The two will also keep testing BE-7, the engine meant for Blue Origin's Moon lander, at a site that mimics the thin air at high altitude. [9]

Why it matters. Blue Origin's New Glenn is the other rocket that could be certified to launch Starliner, and a company whose rocket is certified for people does not have to pay for that itself. [1][9]

Mercury, the smallest planet and the closest to the Sun, has been contracting as its interior cools, and its surface is creased with the ridges that proves. [12] A team at the German Aerospace Centre's Institute of Space Research now measures that shortening as 10% to 30% greater than earlier estimates, up to 23 km more. [12] The work appeared in Geophysical Research Letters and rests on ridge maps built from the Mariner 10, MESSENGER and BepiColombo missions. [12] How fast a rocky planet shrinks is how its cooling history is read. [12]

Why it matters. The answer needed three missions flown across fifty years, the newest of which has not yet started its main job at Mercury. [12][13]

BepiColombo, the joint European and Japanese mission to Mercury, flew past the planet for the fourth time in September 2024 and caught a burst of particles thrown out by the Sun. [13] An instrument called SIXS recorded how those charged particles pushed through Mercury's weak magnetic field and struck the ground. [13] A team led from the University of Helsinki published the result in Nature Astronomy. [13] Mercury has almost no atmosphere, so the Sun's particles reach its surface directly. [13]

Why it matters. The spacecraft has not begun its real mission yet, and its two orbiters only enter orbit around Mercury in November. [13]

When a massive star runs out of fuel its core collapses, and the rebound normally blows the star apart as a supernova. [14] Astronomers see fewer of these explosions than the standard picture predicts, and some collapsing stars may fall straight into a black hole. [14] Mariam Gogilashvili and Irene Tamborra of the University of Copenhagen offer an answer in Physical Review D. [14] Neutrinos, almost weightless particles pouring out of the core, switch between their three types on the way. [14] That changes how much energy they carry away, which can decide whether the star explodes. [14]

Why it matters. A question about the largest objects in the sky turns out to hang on the behaviour of the lightest particles known. [14]

Theory says a black hole is described by only three numbers: its mass, its spin and its electric charge. [15] Everything else about whatever fell in is lost, a rule physicists nickname the no-hair theorem. [15] A new study finds that if real black holes break it, the difference would show up in the ringdown, the fading wobble of space and time left after two black holes merge. [15] Detectors on Earth already record those mergers. [15]

Why it matters. It turns a claim that sounded impossible to check into a measurement instruments already running could make. [15]

Astronomers have assembled 27 years of radio observations of a blazar into a single moving picture. [16] A blazar is a giant black hole at the centre of a galaxy firing a jet of plasma almost straight at Earth. [16] Earlier work had only separate snapshots, which cannot show how material inside the jet flows. [16] The team used very long baseline interferometry, the technique that links radio dishes across the world and produced the first image of a black hole. [16]

Why it matters. The jets travel at close to the speed of light, so a record this long is the only way to watch one change. [16]

SIMP 0136 is a brown dwarf about 20 light years away, an object too heavy to be a planet and too light to burn hydrogen like a star. [17] Using James Webb Space Telescope data, researchers traced most of the changes in its brightness to two causes: differences in temperature, and shifts in the height of its clouds. [17] Brown dwarfs can be seen directly, unlike planets orbiting other stars, which makes them practice cases for reading distant atmospheres. [17]

Why it matters. The same method is how astronomers hope to describe the weather on planets around other stars, which are far harder to see. [17]

Since 2022 the James Webb Space Telescope has kept finding tiny red objects in the early universe. [18] They disappear before the universe is two billion years old, and astronomers do not agree what they are. [18] A team looked at 217 of them and studied the faint light around each one rather than the object itself. [18] They found that light comes from dense galaxies busy making stars. [18] Jorge Zavala of the University of Massachusetts Amherst says it may be a phase galaxies pass through, but that the team cannot yet tell. [18]

Why it matters. After four years of argument about what these objects are, the new evidence came from looking at what surrounds them. [18]

Astronomers studied nine nearby galaxies whose centres are active, meaning a giant black hole there is feeding on gas and dust and shining brightly. [19] Energy pouring out of those centres slams into the surrounding gas and drives fast shockwaves through it. [19] The team measured how those shocks change where new stars form and how quickly. [19] The process is called feedback, and it is how a black hole can set the terms for a whole galaxy around it. [19]

Why it matters. A black hole is a tiny part of a galaxy by size, and this is the mechanism by which it still governs the rest. [19]

Bradford Council in northern England has approved 4.5 million pounds of public regeneration money towards a 9 million pound space testing centre in Keighley. [20] The rest is being put up by BSC Filters, a company registered in York and part of Dover Corporation, a US group that reported about $8.1bn of revenue in 2025. [20] The project is expected to create 50 jobs. [20] Councillors from three opposition parties asked why half the cost was public money. [20]

Why it matters. Space testing sites are being built in towns with no space industry, and this is what the bill looks like to the people who live in one. [20]

Icarus Robotics, a startup building robots to work inside crewed space stations, has finished a four-flight test campaign of its free-flying robot, named JOY. [21] The flights make weightlessness by flying an aircraft on a steep arc, and the campaign gave 66 weightless periods adding up to 22 minutes of testing. [21] The company had to fly to Canada, because the aircraft that used to do this in the United States was badly damaged in 2025 and has not returned. [21] JOY is due at the International Space Station in 2027. [21]

Why it matters. Astronaut time is the scarcest thing aboard a space station, and a robot that can do routine checks is aimed straight at it. [21]

The first Neil Armstrong Space Prize was handed over on 15 September at a ceremony in Washington, DC. [22] It went to the team at SpaceX that worked out how to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket back on Earth and fly it again. [22] The award was created by Purdue University, where Armstrong studied, and the winners were announced back in April. [22] Thirty Purdue graduates have flown in space or been picked as NASA astronaut candidates. [22]

Why it matters. Reusing the first stage is the change that made launch cheap enough for most of the other stories on this page. [22]

The Planetary Society, which is paid for by its members, has announced three research grants worth about $130,000 in total. [23] One pays a graduate student at Northern Arizona University to build a cheap instrument that measures how reflective an asteroid is, which is how you tell a 10-metre rock from a 100-metre one. [23] A second funds a public database of asteroid measurements run from the Canary Islands. [23] A third builds a shared archive for watching small distant worlds pass in front of stars. [23]

Why it matters. More than a million asteroids have been found, and many of their sizes are estimated from how bright they look. [23]

An 1871 note in the journal Nature described a train leaving Exeter, in south-west England, held for 16 minutes when a solar storm flooded the telegraph wires running the railway signals with current. [24] It has been cited ever since as the first time space weather disrupted a technology. [24] Space-weather researchers have now gone back through the records and found the delay happened in 1855, seven years later than the date the story carried. [24] Jim Wild of Lancaster University says the episode sits where new technology first met the space environment. [24]

Why it matters. Every account of how long people have been exposed to the Sun's storms starts from this one case, so its date is where the record begins. [24]

SpaceX has told a number of commercial customers that it is no longer taking new orders for Falcon 9 launches. [9] Avio, the Italian company that builds Europe's Vega-C rocket, says those customers are now calling it, and its chief executive Giulio Ranzo said so on a call with investors on 10 September. [9] Some of them used the International Space Summit in Paris last week to ask European institutions for money to cover the higher cost of a European rocket. [9] A Vega-C launch is thought to cost around $60m. [9]

Why it matters. One company stepping back from a market has turned into a request for public subsidy on another continent within weeks. [9]