Space, in brief

Rocket Lab said on Wednesday 14 October that Neutron, its new reusable rocket, will not make its first flight until 2027. [1]

Rocket Lab is the company behind Electron, a small rocket that has flown 97 times, the last 56 of them without a failure. [1]

Neutron is much bigger: 7 metres across against Electron's 1.2 metres, and built to lift about 13,000 kg to low orbit. [1]

Both rockets are made of carbon fibre, thin sheets of fibre laid in layers and set hard with glue-like resin. [1][2]

Kilo for kilo, carbon fibre is stronger than steel or aluminium, so a lighter rocket body leaves more room for cargo. [2]

Inspectors found tiny air pockets, called voids, between the layers of a newly made dome at the end of a first-stage fuel tank. [1][2]

The voids sat in sections Rocket Lab had made thicker after a test tank burst on 21 January while being filled with water under pressure. [1][2]

Thick layers are harder to set cleanly, because heat and pressure must push the resin through and squeeze the air out. [2]

Founder Peter Beck said the voids do not necessarily mean a dome would fail in flight, but Rocket Lab only flies with safety margins it trusts. [1]

An end dome made with a changed process has passed inspection, and Beck said: 'We've solved the problem.' [1]

Next, Rocket Lab builds a new front dome and a new tank, and tests it the way the burst tank was tested, in early 2027. [2]

SpaceX once planned Starship in carbon fibre and switched to steel, which is cheaper, easier to repair and stronger when very cold. [2]

Why it matters. The next test is the new first-stage tank in early 2027: Rocket Lab says more detail on the launch date will come only after that tank passes the test January's tank failed. [2]

SpaceX has asked the US aviation regulator, the FAA, to let it launch Starship up to 456 times a year from Starbase, its site in south Texas. [3] It is allowed 25 now. [3] Starship is the largest rocket ever built, and it reached orbit for the first time on 28 September. [3] The FAA said on 14 October it will write a full study of the effects on the area and hold five public meetings in November. [3]

Why it matters. Every launch also brings two landings, so the request covers 912 landings a year, and the first phase would allow 100 launches on any day, at any hour. [3] Four of the five meetings are in person near Starbase, which sits beside Brownsville, a Texas border city. [3]

The UK Space Agency has picked ClearSpace, a company that services satellites in orbit, to lead Britain's first mission to remove space junk. [4] The contract is worth about £61 million. [4] ClearSpace will try to grab two dead British satellites in low orbit with robot claws, launching no earlier than 2029. [4] The firm must first show it can inspect, approach and catch objects never built to be caught. [4]

Why it matters. Nobody has yet removed a piece of junk from orbit, and every new satellite adds to the crowd. [4] The UK also hopes the same skills will sell as servicing work on satellites that still work. [4]

Scientists and officials voted at a meeting in Versailles, France, to stop adding leap seconds to the world's standard time. [5] A leap second has been added 27 times since 1972, to keep atomic-clock time in step with Earth's slightly uneven spin. [5] From 20 May 2027 the clock will run without them. [5] The two times may now drift up to an hour apart, and a leap hour is not expected for over 1,000 years. [5]

Why it matters. Phones, planes, satellites and GPS all run on this time, and a sudden jump can crash computer systems. [5] Earth's spin has sped up since the mid-2010s, so a second taken away could have been needed as early as 2029, which engineers compared to a 'mini Y2K'. [5]

Nujoud Merancy, chief architect of NASA's Moon base, described its three phases at a meeting in Atlanta on 14 October. [9] Phase 1, until 2029, makes sure crews and cargo can reach the Moon's south pole and come back. [9] Phase 2, from 2029 to 2032, adds power, radio links and a pressurised rover from JAXA, Japan's space agency. [9] Phase 3, from 2032, adds real living quarters and starts mining the Moon. [9]

Why it matters. Merancy said the scarcest thing on the Moon is crew time, not water or sunlight, so NASA wants robots doing the upkeep. [9] She called the whole base a project of a decade or more, which has to survive changes of US government. [9]

A Falcon 9 rocket launched a classified mission called USSF-481 for the US Space Force from California at 00:01 GMT on 16 October. [6][7] Warning notices suggest it went to a low orbit tilted about 80 degrees from the equator. [7] Its booster was flying for the 28th time and landed on a ship in the Pacific. [6][7] It is the second mission called TH, after USSF-259 in September. [7]

Why it matters. It was the 114th Falcon 9 launch of the year, and more than 70% of them carried SpaceX's own Starlink satellites. [6] Spaceflight Now asked the US Air Force what it carries and had no answer at launch. [7]

A SpaceX Cargo Dragon docked at the International Space Station at 14:27 GMT on 15 October with more than 2,860 kg of food, tools and experiments. [8] In its open back section are the fourth and final pair of new roll-out solar wings. [8][18] Each is built to give more than 20 kW for over ten years. [18] NASA has been preparing spacewalks to fit them. [18]

Why it matters. The wings add power to the station, which runs every experiment on board. [8][18] Dragon stays about a month and then brings research and waste back to Earth. [8]

NASA is hurrying three helicopters called SkyFall, due to launch to Mars in 2028 on a nuclear-powered spacecraft. [13] They build on Ingenuity, the first Mars helicopter, which flew 72 times after being designed for five. [13] SkyFall will be dropped straight into the Martian air and land on its own, with no rover. [13] Workshops to choose landing sites start early next year. [13]

Why it matters. Each helicopter carries a radar that can find ice just under the ground, which future crews could use. [13] Each can fly every other Martian day, so flights covering 200 to 300 km in all are possible. [13]

BlackSky, a US company that photographs Earth from small satellites, extended a seven-figure deal with HEO, an Australian firm, for another year. [11] HEO uses other companies' cameras in orbit to take close-up pictures of spacecraft. [11] It now gets BlackSky's newest cameras, which see details 35 cm across instead of one metre. [11] It takes the pictures when the cameras would sit idle, over oceans or Earth's night side. [11]

Why it matters. Radar on the ground can say where a satellite is, but not what is broken on it. [11] Militaries and satellite firms buy these pictures to spot damage and changes. [11]

JAXA, Japan's space agency, gave ArkEdge Space, a Japanese start-up, two jobs to help people find their way on the Moon. [10] The first is a study of fitting a navigation receiver, a kind of Moon GPS, to the crew rover Japan is building for NASA's Artemis programme. [10] The second builds a receiver for signals from Japan's test navigation satellite. [10] Neither price was given. [10]

Why it matters. There is no GPS at the Moon, so crews and rovers need their own signals to know where they are. [10] ArkEdge is building its test receiver to pick up NASA and European signals too. [10]

Seraphim Space Investment Trust, a British fund that buys stakes in space companies, published yearly accounts valuing it at £605.5 million. [12] That is more than double its value in June 2025. [12] Over half sits in ICEYE, a Finnish firm whose satellites take pictures with radar. [12] ICEYE won a €1.7 billion contract with Germany's armed forces in December. [12]

Why it matters. Its biggest holding grew on military orders, as governments spend more on space. [12] Seraphim says it avoids rocket makers and backs firms that sell data and services from orbit. [12]

A team led by Zafar Rustamkulov at Caltech used SPHEREx, a NASA telescope that maps the whole sky in 102 colours of infrared light, to study 33 brown dwarfs. [17] Brown dwarfs are too big to be planets and too small to burn like stars. [17] The team tested five leading computer models of their air, and none matched well. [17] Some models got the objects' sizes wrong by 20 to 50%. [17]

Why it matters. One model did match one change: below about 1,000 kelvin, carbon monoxide gives way to methane. [17] Until the models improve, it will be hard to use them on planets around other stars. [17] SPHEREx is now listing thousands more brown dwarfs. [17]

ALMA, a set of radio dishes in Chile, studied 11 young stars like the Sun, and found an unusual methanol around one, IRAS 4A2, 1,000 light years away. [15][16] In this methanol, every hydrogen atom is the heavier kind, called deuterium. [16] It is about 100 times more common than chemistry models predict. [16] The team also found natural microwave lasers, called masers, around over half of the 11 stars. [15]

Why it matters. Methanol is a building block for the larger molecules that form planets and perhaps life, so the gap points to a process the models miss. [15][16] The results fill seven papers, and the full analysis will take years. [15]

Astronomers at the University of Warwick worked out the real colours of white dwarfs, the dense cores left when stars like the Sun die. [14] Most are white. [14] But one, WD J1330+6435, 326 light years away, has pulled in rock from its planets, and sodium in its air takes out orange light. [14] The team's model says that leaves it green, making it the first known green star. [14]

Why it matters. A star's colour usually tells its temperature, and these results show a dead star's colour can also show what it ate. [14] Only five of the 151 white dwarfs near Earth have unusual colours. [14]