Space, in brief

The FCC, the US agency that licenses radio airwaves and satellites, has approved SpaceX's plan for 15,000 Starlink satellites that connect straight to ordinary phones. [3][4]

The service is called direct-to-device: a normal smartphone talks to a satellite overhead, with no phone mast in between. [1] FCC chair Brendan Carr says it can end the dead zones where phones get no signal. [1]

The new satellites would fly about 330 km up, close enough for a phone's small antenna to reach them. [4]

The FCC also waived a rule that made a satellite firm lease airwaves through a ground phone company, so SpaceX can use its own. [3]

Those airwaves are 65 MHz that SpaceX bought from EchoStar, a US satellite TV and mobile company, for $19.6 billion in two deals announced last year. [1][2]

On 7 October the FCC said it will vote on 29 October on auctioning another 25 MHz of airwaves for phone service from space. [2][1]

The same meeting will ask for views on opening a further 482 MHz for coverage from space. [2] It will also vote on final rules letting drones use the 800 MHz mobile band. [1][4]

Carr said last month that airwave auctions over the next couple of years could raise more than $100 billion. [1]

Amazon is building a rival service. In July it asked to launch up to 5,105 satellites for phone service, and in August it agreed to buy Globalstar, a satellite phone company, for over $11.5 billion. [2]

AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, the three big US phone companies, named Paul Roth last week as interim chief of their new joint venture for coverage by satellite. [1]

Verizon's chief, Dan Schulman, said last month that satellite firms, Starlink included, had made no visible dent in Verizon's broadband growth. [3]

SpaceX already has 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, serving people in over 170 countries, and it has asked to fly 100,000. [5][6]

Why it matters. Watch the FCC's 29 October vote on the 25 MHz auction, and whether Amazon or the US phone companies' satellite venture bid for those airwaves. [2][1]

Elon Musk said on 7 October that unnamed 'oligarchs' are blocking Starlink from launching in India. [5] India's phone and internet market is dominated by two companies, Jio and Airtel, which hold over 80% of it between them. [5] SpaceX signed deals with both last year to sell Starlink there, but the service has still not started. [5] In June Jio announced its own plan for internet from low-orbit satellites. [5] Musk named nobody, and CNBC asked both firms for comment. [5]

Why it matters. Bloomberg reported in June that Indian regulators had frozen approvals for Starlink, fearing its dishes could be used before it had a licence. [5] Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research, a market research firm, expects approval around the time Indian companies have their own satellite services ready. [5]

SpaceX is in early talks to borrow $40 billion to buy chips from Nvidia, the company whose chips most AI runs on. [9] The Financial Times first reported it and CNBC confirmed it. [9] Apollo Global Management, an investment firm, and a group of banks may lend the money, possibly $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in bonds. [9] SpaceX already borrowed $25 billion in June, less than two weeks after it first sold shares to the public. [9]

Why it matters. SpaceX rents computing power to customers including Anthropic and Google. [9] Semafor reports that compared with its profits, SpaceX owes five times as much as Alphabet, Google's owner, and borrows because its AI spending is bigger than what its other businesses bring in. [8]

SpaceX and other space companies have asked the FCC to abolish the Aerospace and Flight Test Radio Coordinating Council. [7] The council books radio channels for rocket launches and aircraft test flights so their signals do not clash, and users now reserve them weeks ahead. [7] SpaceX wants users to sort it out among themselves. [7] It calls the objectors 'legacy contractors' trying to keep a veto over newer rivals. [7] Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX and GE Healthcare have all objected. [7]

Why it matters. GE Healthcare says the same channels carry wireless sensors that watch patients in hospital, and Boeing says much of what it tests cannot be described in public. [7] In Europe, the European Commission plans to keep two-thirds of its 2 GHz satellite band for European firms, leaving Starlink and Amazon the rest. [7]

SpaceX has asked other satellite operators to share their ephemeris, the data saying where a satellite is and where it will go next. [6] It says Starlink met about 650 other satellites that can steer this year, and only about half shared that data. [6] Over six months it counted about 164,000 close passes within four hours of another craft moving without warning. [6] In August one Starlink satellite saw a risk too late to move, turned edge-on, and passed 134 metres from the other craft. [6]

Why it matters. Some operators keep their plans secret to protect business information, and some are not allowed to share by their governments, SpaceX says. [6] Chiara Manfletti, head of the space-traffic firm Neuraspace, says safety in orbit cannot depend on every operator joining one company's system. [6]

Margaret Hamilton, who led the team that wrote the on-board software for NASA's Apollo Moon flights, died on 30 September aged 90. [10][11] MIT, the US university where she worked from 1959, announced it on 7 October. [11][10] Her team helped give the job its name, software engineering. [10] Minutes before Apollo 11 landed in 1969, the computer raised an alarm because it was overloaded. [11][10] Her software shut down less important jobs and kept the landing going. [10]

Why it matters. She was the first programmer to join the Apollo software project and the first woman it hired, she told the Guardian in 2019. [11] Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. [10][11]

On 7 October NASA released more than 800 gigabytes of images, audio, written notes and other data from Artemis II. [12] That flight carried four astronauts around the Moon and back from 1 to 10 April, reaching 400,171 km from Earth, the farthest any humans have travelled. [12] A report with the data lists what the crew saw, such as the Moon's colours and flashes of light from tiny rocks hitting it. [12] Astronaut Christina Koch compared one shade to mould on bread. [12]

Why it matters. The report says the crew's view of the ground changed as the light changed, and at times sunlight overwhelmed their eyes. [12] That matters for astronauts who must spot craters and boulders near the Moon's poles, where the light is low. [12]

South Korea's Nuri rocket lifted off from the Naro Space Center on 7 October, Korean time, on its fifth flight. [13][14] It carried 15 satellites, and 14 reached orbit. [13] One small cubesat, PERSAT02 from the company Quaternion, did not separate. [13] Five were NEONSATs, camera satellites under 100 kg that watch the Korean Peninsula for security and disasters. [13] Nuri failed on its first flight in 2021 and has now worked four times in a row. [13]

Why it matters. One cubesat carries a module from the start-up ArbaLabs that checks whether an AI program on board did what it was meant to do. [14] Five more NEONSATs are due on a Nuri next year to finish the network. [13]

NASA has selected GIMLI, a mission led by the Planetary Science Institute, a US research group, to study the Marius Hills pit on the Moon. [15] The pit is a 'skylight', a hole that may open into a lava tube, a tunnel left by flowing lava billions of years ago. [15] GIMLI will use radar that sees underground, seismic sensors, a gravity meter and cameras to find out whether a cave runs from it, and how big. [15]

Why it matters. A cave could one day give astronauts shelter from the surface. [15] Norway's space agency and Honeybee Robotics are partners, NASA provides the lander and rover, and lead scientist Than Putzig says surveys like this have barely been done since Apollo. [15]

Xona Space Systems, a US start-up building a navigation service like GPS, has six Pulsar satellites ready for SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 flight this month. [16] It already has FCC approval, and service should begin in early 2027. [16] It now plans to build the next 250 satellites, and hired Patrick Cadariu, who spent nearly ten years running operations at the self-driving car firm Waymo. [16] It is also adding 35,000 square feet of space in Montreal, Canada. [16]

Why it matters. Its next four satellites are about 10% lighter, and it aims to build several a week by the end of 2027. [16] Cadariu says a navigation service cannot grow at the cost of being reliable. [16]

SpaceX says its Starship launch tower at Pad 39A in Florida is nearly complete and moving into testing. [17] Pad 39A is the NASA pad that launched Apollo 11 in 1969. [17] All 14 Starship flights so far have launched from Texas, including the first to reach orbit on 28 September. [17] SpaceX plans at least one more flight from Texas first. [17] Planning papers name 19 and 30 October as the earliest dates for Flights 15 and 16. [17]

Why it matters. Starship's upper stage is NASA's planned Moon lander. [17] Its first Artemis flight, a 2027 docking test in Earth orbit, will launch from 39A, and SpaceX also plans a 12-pad launch site in Louisiana. [17]

A meeting in Pisa, Italy, on 14 September of a committee on aerospace heritage looked at how to protect historic sites on the Moon. [18] The committee belongs to ICOMOS, a group that works to protect monuments and historic places. [18] Australian archaeologist Alice Gorman counts 51 craft that have hit the Moon hard, including nine rocket stages and 19 orbiters. [18] As Moon traffic grows, crashing a spacecraft into the Moon is becoming an attractive way to end its mission. [18]

Why it matters. On the airless Moon any movement throws up dust that wears away human-made things, such as the Apollo 11 landing stage, Gorman says. [18] The group plans to put its guidelines to the United Nations' space committee in 2027. [18]

NASA says it will keep its part in LISA, a European-led observatory meant to detect gravitational waves, ripples in space made when black holes collide. [19] LISA is three spacecraft flying 2.5 million km apart, due to launch around 2035. [19] NASA supplies the telescopes and transmitters for its lasers, while Europe builds, launches and runs the spacecraft. [19] NASA scientist Ira Thorpe says the US pays roughly a third and gets all of the data. [19]

Why it matters. The Trump administration has twice proposed ending NASA's part, and the US Congress put the money back for 2026. [19] Shawn Domagal-Goldman, who runs NASA's astrophysics missions, says NASA will keep its commitment while its money stays at current levels. [19]

A cloud up to 1,800 km long forms above Arsia Mons, a 20 km-high dead volcano on Mars, almost every morning in spring and summer, and is gone within hours. [20] Mars Express, a European orbiter, first saw it in 2018. [20] A study in Nature Geoscience on 7 October could only recreate it by adding physics that textbooks treat as theory and that is not usually seen in nature. [20] On Earth, clouds form when water freezes onto specks of dust or salt. [20]

Why it matters. Mars has almost no water vapour in its air, so a cloud this big is rare. [20] Lead author Jorge Hernandez-Bernal says the cloud appeared in the model only once that physics was added. [20]

A team at the University of Copenhagen says Earth and Mars formed in different ways. [21] They compared the amounts of sodium, zinc and potassium in each planet's rock, elements that boil off when heated. [21] Their models suggest Mars grew mainly from big rocks smashing together. [21] Earth began mostly as two young planets that grew by gathering small pebbles, and at least 75% of its mass seems to come from them. [21]

Why it matters. Two planets formed side by side were expected to share a history, says lead author Haiyang Wang. [21] The study, in Nature Astronomy, could help explain how rocky planets around other stars form. [21]

Our galaxy should hold hundreds of millions of black holes, but only about 70 have been found. [22] Black Hole Hunters, a project run from the University of Southampton, has tens of thousands of volunteers looking for them in data from TESS, a NASA space telescope. [22] A black hole circling a star bends the star's light and makes it brighten again and again, an effect called self-lensing. [22] An AI program sorts the star records first, and people check the interesting ones. [22]

Why it matters. A black hole that is not eating anything gives off no light, so bent starlight is one of the few ways to find it. [22] The project began in 2021 and has restarted with space telescope data in place of noisier ground data. [22]

NYU Abu Dhabi, a university in the United Arab Emirates, starts an 18-month project with the US State Department in November. [23] It brings 15 graduate students from the UAE and 15 from the US together to design and build small Moon rovers. [23] They will test them against Moon dust, which is fine, scratchy and clings to machines. [23] The lab made its own fake Moon soil from UAE rock, matched to soil near the Moon's south pole. [23]

Why it matters. The south pole is where NASA's Artemis missions and the UAE's future missions are headed. [23] The lab made its own soil because buying it from abroad was expensive, its writer says. [23]