Space, in brief

Companies are planning tens of thousands of new satellites in low orbit. Amazon wants more than 5,000, Blue Origin has proposed 5,400, and Elon Musk has talked of one million. [1]

About 19,000 satellites circle Earth in low orbit now, and some estimates add 70,000 more in the next few years. [1]

A report by the Aerospace Industries Association, a US trade group, and the audit firm PwC named nine parts that suppliers cannot make fast enough. They range from valves to transformers, the boxes that change the voltage of electricity. [1]

AI data centres need many of the same electrical parts, and they buy them by the thousand. The report found this has created waiting lists years long for transformers and switchgear, the big switches that control power. [1]

Steve Jordan Tomasweski of the trade group put it as a space company asking for 10 of a part while a data-centre company asks for 10,000. [1]

Some suppliers have walked away. One long-time maker of high-pressure gas tanks for spacecraft did not bid again, because the job would take about a third of its engineers' time for very little money. [1]

Gallium nitride and germanium, two materials in the best solar cells, are a second worry. China makes about 98% of the gallium nitride, and space is only a few percent of the demand for it. [1]

Shipping trouble in the Strait of Hormuz, caused by the conflict between the US and Iran, has also made aluminium and helium scarcer and dearer. [1]

Some satellite makers are willing to wait a year for a valve, or to use parts not built for space. The US Space Development Agency says its suppliers struggle to make laser radios and camera sensor chips in large numbers. [1]

Doug Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, expects some of the networks filed with regulators never to be built, as happened with filings ten years ago. [1]

Other countries keep building their own networks. China's Guowang is planned at about 13,000 satellites, and Russia has launched 16 of the 900 it plans for Rassvet, its own version of Starlink. [3][6]

SpaceX is moving its own Starlink launches to its giant Starship rocket. No more Falcon 9 Starlink flights are planned from Florida, and Falcon 9 shared rides for other companies will likely end within a couple of years. [2][4]

Why it matters. Watch whether the US government lets space companies go ahead of data centres in the queue for scarce parts, as the trade group proposes. Until then, the squeeze shows up as satellite networks that slip or shrink. [1]

SpaceX stopped the launch of 21 data-relay satellites for the US Space Development Agency in the last minute of the countdown on 5 October. [5] The agency is building a network of small military satellites in low orbit that track missiles and pass messages between forces. [5] Northrop Grumman built this batch, and it is the fourth batch of working satellites the agency has sent up. [2][5] SpaceX gave no reason, said the rocket and satellites were healthy, and set a new try for 08:17 GMT on 6 October from California. [2][5]

Why it matters. The agency's director told an industry meeting in September that suppliers struggle to build its hardware fast and well enough. [1] Each batch that reaches orbit adds to a network meant to serve US forces and their allies worldwide. [5]

South Korea plans to launch its Nuri rocket, also called KSLV-2, from the Naro Space Center on its south coast at 03:23 GMT on 7 October. [2] It will carry 15 satellites, a record for the rocket. [2] Five are NeonSats, 100kg satellites that watch for disasters around the Korean Peninsula; ten are cubesats, tiny satellites built from 10cm boxes, for universities, companies and local governments. [2][10] Nuri is a three-stage rocket over 47 metres tall, and this is its fifth flight and its only one this year. [2]

Why it matters. Each NeonSat can see details down to one metre, so South Korea's own satellites can watch for disasters on land and at sea around it. [2] The next Nuri flight, carrying five more NeonSats, is not due before 2027. [2]

SpaceX shares rose almost 8% on 5 October to $171.09, their highest since mid-June, just after the company first sold shares to the public. [7] The rise followed a note from the bank Morgan Stanley that called the shares cheap. [7] SpaceX rents computing power to Google and Anthropic through the AI business it gained by buying xAI, Musk's AI company. [7] Musk also said the AI division, SpaceXAI, will be renamed SpaceXSI, after US President Donald Trump told federal agencies to say super intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. [8]

Why it matters. SpaceX now earns money from AI customers as well as from rockets and Starlink, and its share price moves with both. [7] Morgan Stanley's note named the next Starship test flight and SpaceX's results, due in late October, as the next events for the shares. [7]

On 1 October more than 600 US Army soldiers moved into a new job, Tactical Space Operations Specialist, known as 40D. [9] Nearly 3,000 soldiers applied. [9] Until now the Army borrowed soldiers from other jobs for space work, and their skills left with them when they went back. [9] The new specialists train in Colorado Springs to block an enemy's satellite communications and navigation signals, among other tasks. [9] The Army plans about 1,000 of them at first and up to 1,500 by 2032. [9]

Why it matters. Army units from the 1st Space Brigade to commands in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Europe will have their own space soldiers. [9] Army space officers have existed since 1999, and now they have a permanent team of enlisted soldiers under them. [9]

Glasgow builds more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe, the Scottish government says. [10] Scotland's space industry earned £335m in 2022-23, up 69% in five years. [10] It grew from firms such as Clyde Space, founded in 2005, working with engineers from the University of Strathclyde. [10] Now Germany's defence ministry plans about €35bn for military space, while UK public space funding is well behind France's and Germany's. [10] Alba Orbital has moved its headquarters to the US, and Spire, a US satellite company, has expanded into Munich. [10]

Why it matters. Gabriele Piazza, an economist at the London School of Economics, says firms with a large customer at home gain an advantage that lasts. [10] Simera Sense, a satellite camera maker, is opening a Glasgow site with 20 skilled jobs. [10]

Nebex, a New York start-up founded in 2025 by two former Axiom Space executives, says it will help arrange $700m for Mexico's government space programmes. [11] It is working with Thrusters Unlimited, a Mexican maker of satellites and equipment that photographs the Earth. [11] Nebex passes money between a government buyer and its suppliers, insures that the payments arrive, and earns fees on the deals. [11] In August it set up a similar €100m scheme in France. [11]

Why it matters. The money is meant for Earth-watching satellites, telecoms and other systems for Mexico's own government programmes. [11] Payload, a space industry newsletter, reports that many space deals fall through over the difficulty of moving money between buyers and suppliers, not over the hardware. [11]

Two studies published on 5 October in Nature Astronomy describe small stars eating the objects that circle them. [12] In one, a white dwarf, the dead core of a burnt-out star, shows zinc, copper and niobium and dims at regular intervals. [12] Jamie Williams of the University of Warwick says a planet formed after the star died, and its air is now falling onto the star. [12] In the other, an MIT team saw a red dwarf slowly pulling gas from a brown dwarf, a failed star, which could go on for millions of years. [12]

Why it matters. Williams says the first system shows planets can form a second time after their star dies. [12] Aaron Householder, who led the second study, says the Sun may one day slowly strip away Earth's air rather than swallow Earth in one go. [12]

Researchers at Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas Health Science Center fired iron nuclei, the most damaging part of cosmic radiation in deep space, at human blood-vessel cells. [13] On a three-year Mars trip, only about 3% of an astronaut's cells would take a direct hit like this. [13] But the hit cells sent out an inflammation signal called TNF-alpha, and nearby cells that were never hit suffered breaks in their DNA. [13] Those untouched cells grew tumours when placed in mice. [13]

Why it matters. Blood from the private Inspiration4 crew, who flew in 2021, showed raised levels of the same signal. [13] Blocking the signal's receptor stopped the chain in the lab, which the researchers say gives a way to protect crews besides thicker walls. [13]

Researchers used the Advanced Light Source, an X-ray machine at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, to film heat-shield material breaking down at up to 900 degrees Celsius. [14] A heat shield protects a capsule coming back through the air by slowly burning away, which carries the heat off with it. [14] Until now engineers mostly saw only before and after pictures. [14] An AI program turned fast, lower-detail X-ray scans into sharp 3D images, showing cork in one NASA material leaving holes and another forming branching channels. [14]

Why it matters. NASA's uncrewed Artemis I capsule came back with charring that computer models had not predicted. [14] The team has not yet fed its results into the models engineers use to design heat shields. [14]

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory released a new picture of Sagittarius A East, the remains of a star that exploded about 10,000 years ago near the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. [15] A team led by Mayura Balakrishnan of McGill University in Canada separated its X-rays from the other sources crowded around it. [15] They mapped iron, sulphur, argon and calcium thrown out by the explosion. [15] They also found its blast has pushed into and heated the surrounding gas. [15]

Why it matters. Chandra launched in 1999 and could work into the 2030s, but the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts have put its future in doubt. [15] The US Congress kept NASA's budget flat on 1 September and must act again by 11 December. [15]

A new paper on arXiv, a site where scientists post work before review, asks whether astronomers could spot the Penrose process near Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the Milky Way's centre. [16] The process, proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969, takes energy from a spinning black hole, which then loses mass. [16] The authors calculate that a neutron breaking apart close to the black hole could fling out a proton with about a thousand times the energy of the strongest protons in the Large Hadron Collider. [16]

Why it matters. Those protons would leave gamma rays and tiny particles called neutrinos as a sign. [16] Today's instruments cannot see the signal, but upgrades to the HAWC gamma-ray observatory and the IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica should. [16]

Saturn reached opposition on 4 October, when Earth passes almost directly between it and the Sun. [17] That puts it at about its closest for the year and up all night, a steady creamy-white light below the Great Square of Pegasus. [17] Early on 6 October, a thin crescent Moon is due to pass in front of Jupiter and hide it for up to about an hour, seen before dawn from much of the eastern and central US, Canada and the Caribbean. [18] Parts of Africa get the same event in daylight. [18]

Why it matters. Neither needs a telescope, though Saturn's rings need a small one. [17][18] The next time the Moon hides Jupiter for viewers in North America is 27 November 2037. [18]

A plaque was unveiled at the M Shed museum in Bristol on 5 October for Colin Pillinger, the Bristol-born scientist who led Beagle 2. [19] Beagle 2 was the first British and European craft to land on another planet, reaching Mars on Christmas Day 2003, but it never called home. [19] Pillinger died in 2014, before pictures of the landing site showed it had not crashed. [19] Twelve more plaques are planned at places linked to the mission. [19]

Why it matters. Mark Sims, who managed Beagle 2, says it started the UK on planetary missions. [19] The next is Rosalind Franklin, a European rover built in Stevenage, due to launch in 2028 and land on Mars around 2030. [19]