Space, in brief

Armies buying from space firms

Amazon showed the US Army its satellite internet at Aberdeen in Maryland, with downloads above 400 megabits a second. [4] The US Space Force set up a new unit to give special forces satellite links, navigation and intelligence. [5] CSG, a Czech arms maker, bought into MDA Space, which built the station's robot arm. [2]

Too few rockets to go round

SpaceX is reported to have almost no Falcon 9 rides left to sell before the rocket retires in 2028 or 2029. [15] A coming shortage of launches is helping drive record investment in space companies, SpaceNews reports. [16] Sateliot, a Spanish satellite company, still has to fly on SpaceX until a Spanish rocket is ready in late 2027. [6]

European money crossing the Atlantic

CSG, a Czech arms maker, bought 9.5% of MDA Space in Canada. [2] Avio, an Italian rocket maker, is spending over $500 million on motor factories in the US. [1] Sateliot, a Spanish satellite company, will keep launching on SpaceX rockets until late 2027. [6]

Old machines still at work

Perseverance was built to drive about 20 km on Mars and has now driven 45 km. [10] The ageing space station is getting its last two new solar wings, to add to its power. [26] Juno has circled Jupiter since 2016 and is still finding new things about its magnetic field. [19]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Space too.

• Money moving to armiesBuilding ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1Arms and space firms move closer: Czech arms group CSG buys 9.5% of MDA Space, and Italy's Avio will build rocket motors for Lockheed Martin's missiles
2. 2Amazon shows the US Army its satellite internet
3. 3US Space Force sets up a unit for special forces
4. 4EU weighs one fund for defence and space
5. 5Cargo ship with the station's last new solar wings launches

Watch whether CSG raises its stake in MDA above 9.5%, and whether Avio names a date for its first motors made in the US. [1][2]

Building a space business takes years of flights and trusted customers, so a company arriving with money often buys part of one that has them.

Each of them sees the part it paid for, and the astronauts and soldiers who use these machines see a different part.

Also seen in World and Finance.

Amazon Leo, Amazon's network of internet satellites, showed its service to the US Army at Aberdeen in Maryland, SpaceNews reports. [4] Downloads peaked above 400 megabits a second. [4]

Amazon has now built 1,000 of its satellites, and is entering a market that SpaceX's Starlink has led for five years. [27]

Airlines, shipping companies and governments are all watching its arrival closely, Ars Technica reports. [27]

It is a step into selling to armed forces, a market where Amazon must compete with SpaceX's Starlink. [4]

It was a demonstration, and the part of the report we could read names no order.

The US Space Force has set up a new unit that works for US Special Operations Command, the part of the US military that runs its elite forces, SpaceNews reports. [5]

The unit makes formal the Space Force's job of giving those forces satellite links, navigation and intelligence. [5]

A photo with the report shows a US Air Force gunship practising in 2024 while its GPS, the satellite navigation system, was being jammed. [5]

Special forces depend on satellite links and navigation that an enemy can jam, which is what that exercise practised. [5]

The part of the report we could read gives no size or budget for the unit.

The European Union's space programme, 14.8 billion euros for 2021 to 2027, ends next year with the EU's seven-year budget. [6]

It pays for Galileo, Europe's satellite navigation, and Copernicus, its Earth-watching satellites. [6]

The European Commission wants space paid for from 2028 by one new fund with 131 billion euros for defence and space together. [6]

EU leaders discuss the next budget on Thursday and Friday. [6]

In May the Commission also proposed one EU-wide licence for satellites that talk to phones, keeping part of the radio band for European firms. [6]

In one shared pot, satellite projects would compete with defence for the same money. [6] The radio band matters because the current rights run out in May 2027. [6]

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the CRS-35 cargo ship from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 10:33 UTC on Tuesday. [7]

Its booster, flying for the eighth time, landed back beside the pad. [9]

The Dragon capsule carries about 2,860 kg of supplies and the last two of the space station's new roll-out solar wings, each able to make over 20 kilowatts for more than ten years. [8][7]

It should reach the station on Thursday at about 15:00 UTC and stay about a month. [8][7]

The new wings will add power to the ageing station, and astronauts will fit them on later spacewalks. [26][9]

At dawn the rocket's lit exhaust spread into a glowing 'jellyfish' that people saw from Georgia to North Carolina. [8]

NASA's Perseverance rover passed 45.22 km of driving on Mars on 11 October, its 2,006th day there. [10][13]

That beat the 45.16 km of Opportunity, an older NASA rover that took 14 years to cover it. [10]

Perseverance, a car-sized rover, has been on Mars for five and a half years. [11]

It was designed to drive about 20 km, and its team says it could reach 100 km. [10]

It was expected to pass the record in August, but stopped for two months to study pale rocks that may be among the oldest ever examined on Mars. [14]

Its team now wants to drive south along the rim of Jezero, a crater that once held a lake, to study the many kinds of rock there. [10][13]

Its science instruments are still nearly all working, its deputy project scientist said. [10]

Varda Space Industries, a US company whose small capsules make medicines in orbit and bring them back, has two craft in orbit and a third due to launch this month. [15]

All three should land at the Koonibba test range in South Australia before Christmas. [15]

Varda plans seven more flights in 2027, and will hire 100 more people by then on top of its 286. [15] It says it has launches booked until 2029. [15]

Space.com reports an expected rocket shortage from about 2029, as SpaceX moves its work from Falcon 9 to Starship. [15]

SpaceNews reports that a coming launch shortage is helping drive record investment in space companies. [16]

Satellogic, a company that photographs the Earth from small satellites, and HEO, an Australian company that takes pictures of objects in space, released images of Satellogic's new Merlin.01 satellite on 13 October. [17]

The pictures were taken in orbit a few days after Merlin.01 launched, by a camera on another Satellogic satellite. [17]

HEO's business is pictures of things in space rather than of the ground. [17]

Here a company used a camera it already had in orbit to look at its own newest satellite. [17]

CHIME, a radio telescope in Canada built to study dark energy, has picked up the faint radio glow of hydrogen gas from when the universe was 5 billion years old. [18]

Dark energy is the unknown push that is making the universe grow faster. [18]

Until now CHIME could only find this glow by matching its maps with expensive galaxy surveys from other telescopes. [18]

The team used just 94 nights of data from 2019, and has seven years of data still to search. [18]

Mapping where hydrogen sits shows how matter is spread across space, which is one way to measure the push of dark energy. [18]

Galaxy surveys only reach parts of space crowded enough to form stars, so CHIME's own maps can cover more, faster and for less money. [18]

Jupiter is wrapped in a flat disc of charged gas held by its magnetic field, fed by volcanoes on its moon Io. [19]

Scientists pictured it as a smooth disc that tilts up and down as Jupiter spins every 9.9 hours. [19]

A team led by Shandong University in China studied readings from NASA's Juno probe and found the disc crumples into waves during active spells. [19]

Juno crossed the disc again and again, instead of twice per turn. [19]

The ripples come from many small spots where magnetic field lines snap and rejoin, across about 100 degrees of the planet. [19]

They may change how Io's volcanic material is carried around Jupiter. [19]

Astronomers now know more than 1,000 stars with several planets each. [20] A team writing in Nature Astronomy compared their total planet mass and found two separate groups. [20]

Light systems, mostly around stars the size of the Sun or smaller, have tightly packed planets of similar size on calm orbits, much like our own. [20]

Heavy systems, around Sun-like and bigger stars rich in heavy elements, have orbits ten times more stirred up. [20]

Stirred-up orbits point to violent pasts, where planets threw each other around. [20] It suggests the star a system forms around helps decide which kind of family it becomes. [20]

The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is a small galaxy being pulled apart by the Milky Way, leaving long streams of stars. [21]

A team writing in Nature Astronomy ran computer models of how those streams formed. [21]

The models match the heavy elements in the streams only if the dwarf galaxy once had a disc with an unusual pattern of those elements. [21]

The same pattern turns up in just 3 of 217 other small galaxies surveyed. [21]

Stars in a stream keep a record of the galaxy they came from, so the shape of a galaxy that is being torn apart can be rebuilt. [21]

The Milky Way has a similar pattern, which raises the question of whether the two grew up together. [21]

Hera, a European Space Agency probe launched in October 2024, reaches the asteroid pair Didymos and Dimorphos next month. [22]

In 2022 NASA's DART spacecraft crashed into Dimorphos, the 151-metre moonlet, on purpose. [22] The hit shortened its 11-hour-55-minute orbit around Didymos by about 32 minutes. [22]

Hera will look at the crater and release two small satellites, Juventas and Milani, and Juventas may land on Dimorphos. [22]

DART tested whether hitting an asteroid can change its path, and it did. [22]

Knowing exactly what the crash did could help if people ever need to move an asteroid heading for Earth. [22]

Life on Earth uses amino acids of one 'handedness', while chemistry without life makes left and right forms in equal amounts. [24]

A team at Osaka University in Japan built a sensor from two gold wires less than a nanometre apart. [24]

When an amino acid passes between them, the electric current changes, and software named the handedness of one amino acid correctly about 87.6% of the time. [24]

It was tested on soil from Chile's Atacama desert and on the Murchison meteorite. [24]

Finding much more of one hand than the other on another world would hint at life, and today's test machines are heavy to fly. [24]

Dirt in real samples still fouled the tiny gap, so it is not yet as accurate as lab equipment. [24]

Sophie Adenot, a French astronaut of the European Space Agency, spoke in Cologne on Tuesday after eight months on the space station. [25]

She said a crewed trip to Mars with today's technology would be a disaster. [25]

About half of astronauts feel weak and sick on returning, she said, and a Mars ship would have less room to exercise than the station. [25]

She said travel must get much faster, or craft must spin to make their own gravity. [25]

Her stay was about as long as a trip to Mars would take with today's rockets. [25]

Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, has talked for years of sending people to Mars, and she said it is too early. [25]

Velos, a US firm, has published a tracker of how the US elections on 3 November could change who oversees space in the US Congress. [23]

The House committee for space science loses three members who are retiring. [23] Close races include the districts holding SpaceX's Starbase in Texas and NASA's Wallops launch site in Virginia. [23]

Velos predicts the Democrats will win back the House, and calls the US Senate too close to call. [23]

These committees write the rules and set the money for NASA and for military space each year. [23]

Who leads each one also depends on which party wins each house of the US Congress. [23]

Longshot Space Technology, a start-up in Alameda, California, is building giant gas guns to throw payloads towards space, TechCrunch reports. [28]

Tanks along a steel barrel fire one after another to push a projectile faster, and its 70-foot test gun has reached four times the speed of sound. [28]

It has raised about $20 million and plans guns of 140 and 328 feet next. [28]

The US military has given it several contracts to test very fast flight with its guns. [28]

Reaching orbit this way would need a gun about 10 km long, and the company says finding a place to build one is the hard part. [28]

Its hoped-for price of $50 per kilogram is the company's own goal, not something it has shown. [28]