Space, in brief

Scientific American published an investigation on 22 September into NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the centre that designed and built most of the Roman Space Telescope. [1]

Roman is a $4.3bn telescope. It launched on 30 August and is travelling to a spot about 1.6 million km from Earth. [1][2]

Current and former Goddard workers told the magazine that NASA could not build another telescope like Roman today. They say too many people and too much equipment are gone. [1]

Goddard shrank from about 10,000 staff and contractors to 6,000, a drop of 40%, over a period that included the 2025 layoffs and early retirements. Managers have since hired back 600. [1]

In November 2025 NASA shut the Goddard lab that built Roman's fuel tanks, valves and thrusters. The team that did that work fell from 30 people to seven. [1]

A Goddard spokesperson said that kind of hardware is now readily available from private companies, and more efficiently. The spokesperson said building big missions is still a core Goddard skill. [1]

A survey for a group of Goddard retirees found the safety team had lost half its staff by July 2026. NASA says safety has not suffered. [1]

Goddard's director, Jamie Dunn, managed Roman from 2018 and delivered it under budget and early. He told an outside panel in August that people could see an upswing starting. [1]

Roman itself is doing better than planned. NASA said this month it has fuel for at least 22 years of work, against the 10 years it was built for. [2][3]

Its first course correction used less than 10% of the fuel set aside for it. The telescope also came out lighter than budgeted, so its tanks were filled right to the top. [2]

Roman's main camera is switched on and working. First pictures are expected around the end of the year, and science work is due to start in January 2027. [4]

The US Congress has asked the National Academies, the country's senior science advisers, to report by December on whether Goddard can still build missions like Roman. [1]

Why it matters. The next test is the National Academies report due in December, the first outside judgement on whether Goddard can still build a telescope like Roman. [1]

SpaceX lifted Ship 41 onto Booster 21 at its Starbase site in Texas overnight on 23 September, putting the whole Starship rocket together for Flight 14. [5] A fuelling test called a wet dress rehearsal was expected on 24 September. [5][6] Starship is SpaceX's giant rocket, and its 13 earlier flights all stopped short of orbit by design. [5] Flight 14 aims to circle the Earth about six times on 28 September. The US Federal Aviation Administration has not yet approved it. [5][6]

Why it matters. If it reaches orbit, its 26 new Starlink internet satellites add as much capacity as ten Falcon 9 flights of the older kind. [7] NASA is also counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the Moon. [5]

NASA announced on 22 September that Crew-13, the next SpaceX flight taking astronauts to the International Space Station, will launch on 1 October from Florida. [8] It had been due on 12 September until NASA said on 29 August that a leak of oxidiser, the chemical the capsule's thrusters burn fuel with, had been found. [8] The crew are NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canada's Josh Kutryk and Russia's Sergey Teteryatnikov. They will stay about seven months. [8]

Why it matters. The four Crew-12 astronauts they replace have been on the station since February and can only leave after a few days of overlap. [8][9] One of them, NASA's Jessica Meir, made four spacewalks on this trip. [9]

Exolaunch, a German company that finds room for small satellites on rockets, has signed up to fill a SpaceX Starfall flight planned for 2029 at the earliest. [10] Starfall is a SpaceX service that carries experiments into orbit on a Starship and brings them back to Earth, and one flight holds 1,000 kg. [10] Exolaunch will find customers in drug research and space manufacturing, and help them with the paperwork and hardware. [10] Redwire and Space Cargo Unlimited have already booked Starfall flights for 2028. [10]

Why it matters. It is Exolaunch's first booking on Starship and its first mission that brings anything home. [10] Customers are now committing to flights two to three years away. [10]

Vast, a company building a private space station called Haven, has set up a division to build equipment for NASA's planned base on the Moon. [12] It plans a power station, an airlock designed to keep Moon dust out, and a habitat of several modules for long stays. [12] It also proposes a group of satellites to pass messages and give positions around the Moon's south pole. [12] Vast says much of what it built for Haven can be scaled up for the Moon. [12]

Why it matters. NASA's Moon base is pulling in companies that had worked only in orbit around the Earth. [12] The announcement names no NASA contract for any of this work. [12]

Astrolab, a US company building Moon rovers, will get help from Interstellar Mapping to choose where its FLIP rover looks for water at the Moon's south pole. [11] Interstellar Mapping's chief executive says knowing how warm the ground is underneath shows where ice is most likely to have lasted. [11] FLIP is due to launch in November on Griffin-1, a lander Astrobotic built for a NASA programme that pays companies to carry cargo to the Moon. [11] It also carries NASA instruments, including a camera looking for helium-3. [11]

Why it matters. Ice at the south pole could one day be turned into rocket fuel for trips further out. [11] FLIP's search is part of NASA's plan to build a base on the Moon. [11]

AstroForge, a California company that wants to mine metals from asteroids, plans a spacecraft that flies its whole mission without a single command from the ground. [13] Autonomy-1 will be run by Solo, AstroForge's own software for making decisions in flight, and data will only flow down to Earth. [13] It is booked on the first flight of Stoke Space's Nova rocket in early 2027. [13] Solo first flies later this year in shadow mode, making decisions that are not carried out. [13]

Why it matters. A company planning a fleet of asteroid probes cannot pay a team to steer each one by hand. [13] AstroForge lost its last deep-space probe, Odin, in 2025 after it could not keep contact with it. [13]

Astronomers at the University of Geneva found that GJ 3090 b, a planet about 73 light years away, circles its star in the opposite direction to the star's spin. [14] Planets form in a spinning disc of gas and dust, so they normally travel the same way their star turns. [14] This planet's orbit is tilted 136 degrees from its star's equator. Earth's is tilted 7 degrees. [14] The study came out on 21 September in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. [14]

Why it matters. Only five planetary systems have been seen tilted more than 70 degrees, and the other four have a heavy neighbour that could have pushed them over. [14] This one has none, so the team suggests its star once pulled in a second disc turning the other way. [14]

The European Space Agency has teamed up with The Pokemon Company for World Space Week, which runs from 4 to 10 October. [15] A Pikachu toy spent 67 days on the International Space Station this year, from 11 April to 17 June, while ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot was aboard. [15] Exhibitions about Europe's space work, with Pokemon characters, opened at ESA's Paris headquarters on 19 September. They then move to other ESA sites and museums until April 2027. [15]

Why it matters. ESA's director general, Josef Aschbacher, says the aim is to reach people outside the usual places where space is shown. [15] A Pokemon GO event at science museums starts on 4 October. [15]