Space, in brief

SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday 28 September, on its 14th test flight from Starbase in south Texas. [1][6]

On the way up, one of the six engines on Starship's upper stage, called the ship, shut down early. [3][4]

SpaceX's commentator Dan Huot first said the team would not try for orbit. Minutes later, the flight controllers changed their minds. [2][6]

They went ahead because the engine they needed to bring the ship back down was still working. [3][5]

One engine then fired for 19 seconds, about 25 minutes after liftoff, and put the ship in orbit about 276 km up. [3][6]

The ship let out 26 Starlink V3 internet satellites, one by one, over about half an hour. [1][3][6]

Each V3 weighs about 2 tonnes, twice an older Starlink, and is too big to fit inside SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. [3][7]

SpaceX says each V3 adds about 1 terabit per second of internet capacity, ten times as much as one of its older satellites. [3] Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder, wrote that all 26 were working normally. [2]

The flight was planned to last about ten hours. SpaceX cut it to about three after the engine problem, and the ship splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii. [2][4]

As expected, the ship tipped over and exploded when it hit the sea. SpaceX had not planned to recover it. [2][3]

The Super Heavy booster, Starship's lower stage, made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, after hard landings on the two flights before. Two of its 33 engines failed on the way. [2][3]

NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon with a version of Starship, and that needs fuel moved between ships in orbit, which no Starship has tried yet. [3][4][8]

Why it matters. Watch whether SpaceX tries to catch the ship with the launch tower's arms, a step it says may come on the next flight, which an FAA schedule suggests could fly in October. [3][8]

NASA and Boeing plan to fly Starliner, Boeing's crew capsule, to the space station with nobody aboard in December or January. [9][12] If that works, a crew led by astronaut Woody Hoburg would follow in mid-2028. [9] Starliner's only crewed flight, in June 2024, went wrong: leaking helium and failing thrusters kept its two astronauts on the station for 286 days. [9][13] NASA will pay Boeing $359 million to rebuild the thrusters and certify the Vulcan rocket, made by United Launch Alliance, for crews. [10] It also ordered two more flights, making six. [10]

Why it matters. SpaceX plans to retire its Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket, so NASA is paying to keep a second way for astronauts to reach orbit. [9][11] NASA says it will buy at least one crew flight to low orbit every six months into the 2030s, and would welcome a third capsule. [11]

Canadarm2, the 58-foot (about 18-metre) robot arm outside the International Space Station, stopped moving after a routine move, Ars Technica reported on Monday. [14] The rail cart that carries it along the station's main beam froze too. [14] On Sunday evening engineers were still checking whether the fault was in the software or the hardware. [14] The Canadian company MDA built the arm, which went up in 2001 on a design life of 15 years. [14]

Why it matters. Two cargo ships, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus and Japan's HTV-X, cannot dock by themselves and need the arm to catch them. [14] SpaceX's Dragon docks on its own, but SpaceX plans to retire it within four years. [14]

President Trump and the leaders of Denmark and Greenland signed a defence deal at the UN in New York on 22 September. [16][18] It lets the US expand Pituffik Space Base in the north-west, which supports missile warning, missile defence and watching space for the US and NATO. [16][17] It also allows new US sites at Narsarsuaq in the south and Mestersvig in the east. [16] The text names Golden Dome, Trump's planned missile-defence shield, as one way the US may help defend the region. [17]

Why it matters. The deal mentions Golden Dome only once and makes no concrete proposal, the BBC reported, and Denmark's prime minister said nothing about its details had been decided. [16][17] About 200 US soldiers are at Pituffik today, down from thousands of soldiers on 17 bases and sites in 1945. [17] Greenland stays part of Denmark, and no country outside NATO may put forces there. [16]

Britain's Royal Air Force is forming No. III Space Effects Squadron to disrupt, degrade and deny hostile activity against UK interests in space. [21] Its head, Air Chief Marshal Harvey Smyth, described it at a conference in London on 23 September. [21] He said Britain is building ways to fight in orbit, such as jamming signals and countering weapons that attack satellites, but gave no details. [21] He said five Russian military satellites had moved close enough to reach two Finnish commercial ones quickly. [21] It is one of six space squadrons Britain plans. [21]

Why it matters. Bleddyn Bowen, a Durham University expert, said it probably resembles a US jammer that blocks a satellite's signals without damaging it, and whose effects can be switched off. [21] The RAF is moving from only watching space to trying to control it. [21]

Juice, the European Space Agency's probe to Jupiter's icy moons, passed 8,640 km above the Indian Ocean on Monday 28 September. [19] The pass was planned to bend its path by about 20 degrees and add about 3.5 km per second to its speed. [19] It launched in April 2023 and swung past the Moon and Earth in 2024 and Venus in 2025. [19] One more pass of Earth, in January 2029, is left before it reaches Jupiter in 2031. [19][20]

Why it matters. Borrowing speed from planets saves the fuel Juice needs to slow down at Jupiter, and later at its moon Ganymede in 2034. [19] On the way past, it was also set to take pictures of Earth and measure its magnetic field. [20]

Meridian Space has split from SpinLaunch, a California start-up building a machine to fling payloads toward space, Payload reported on 28 September. [22] Meridian takes the satellite-internet business, and SpinLaunch keeps the launch work. [22] Meridian's antenna, called a reflect-array, uses less power, so its satellites can be smaller and lighter. [22] Its long-term plan is flat satellites, so that a whole network of more than 250 can go up on one dedicated launch. [22]

Why it matters. Its first test satellite flies on SpaceX's Transporter-18 shared launch, due no earlier than 1 October. [22] It is aimed at governments and regional firms that want their own network instead of renting SpaceX's Starlink or Amazon's Leo, and says it can build one for under $1 billion. [22]

TakeMe2Space, an Indian start-up, plans to launch MOI-1A, a satellite under 50 kg carrying Nvidia computer chips, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 on 1 October, Reuters reported. [27] Customers upload their own AI programs, which study a chosen area and send down only the answer, not the raw data. [27] It says 23 customers have signed, in farming, mining, supply chains and insurance. [27] Its last satellite, MOI-1, was lost when a rocket's third stage failed. [27]

Why it matters. Downloading raw data costs customers money, so doing the sums in orbit can save them more than the extra they pay, says its founder, Ronak Samantray. [27] With about 150 watts of power, it runs small chips, not the data-centre chips SpaceX and Starcloud plan to fly. [27]

Star Catcher, a start-up that wants to sell power to satellites by beaming light onto their solar panels, says its test craft Protostar is ready for SpaceX's Transporter-18. [26] In orbit it will release a small test satellite, track it and beam power onto its ordinary panels. [26] It would be the first time power has been beamed between two separate spacecraft, Payload reported. [26] Last November it sent more than 1.1 kilowatts to solar panels on the ground at the Kennedy Space Center. [26]

Why it matters. It claims its beam could let a satellite make two to ten times more power with no new hardware. [26] It has 10 public deals to sell power, with satellite companies such as Starcloud and Loft Orbital. [26]

Computer simulations led by Marc Neveu of the University of Maryland suggest a large icy moon smashed by a giant collision can pull itself back together and keep an ocean under its ice. [25] Moons smaller than about 1,000 km across were unlikely to keep an ocean after such a crash. [25] In bigger moons, the heat of the crash could even thicken the ocean for a couple of billion years. [25] A crash could not create an ocean where there was none. [25]

Why it matters. Oceans under ice, like the one thought to lie inside Jupiter's moon Europa, are places where life might be possible. [25] Juice, which passed Earth on Monday, is going to study the hidden oceans of Jupiter's icy moons. [20]

A study led by Chang-Chin Wang of JAXA, Japan's space agency, suggests groundwater on early Mars carried carbonate minerals deep underground. [31] That could explain why orbiters and rovers find so few on the surface. [31] A planet with rivers, lakes and a thick carbon dioxide air should have made plenty of them. [31] In the team's computer models, groundwater dissolved carbonates near the surface and left them again deeper down. [31]

Why it matters. If the carbonates lie underground, drilling into feldspar-rich ground, a very common kind of rock, could find a record of Mars' wetter past. [31] The same drills might reach water that sank underground as Mars dried out. [31]