Space, in brief

Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, said on Friday 16 October it will build two more launch pads for New Glenn at Cape Canaveral in Florida. [2][1]

That makes four New Glenn pads there, counting the two already being built. [2]

The new pads will copy the design of LC-36B, a pad Blue Origin is building now, so they can go up fast. [2]

New Glenn is Blue Origin's big rocket, and it has reached orbit only twice. [2]

The company says its Florida sites are meant to handle several flights a week by the end of the decade, which Ars Technica puts at more than 100 a year. [1][2]

It is spending $330 million to grow its Rocket Park factory so it can build up to 150 upper stages a year. [1][3]

The upper stage is the top part of the rocket, which carries the cargo the last stretch into orbit. The factory should be finished in summer 2027. [1]

Blue Origin will add two more ships that catch the rocket's first stage at sea, on top of the one it has, called Jacklyn. [2]

It is also building a hall with four bays to prepare satellites before launch, together with the US Space Force. [2]

It has asked the FAA, the US aviation regulator, to allow 50 launches a year from its rebuilt pad instead of 12. Public comments close on 30 October. [1][3]

That pad, LC-36A, was destroyed in May when a fault in one of New Glenn's BE-4 engines blew up the rocket during a test firing. [2][1]

The bet is on a gap: SpaceX is pulling back from selling Falcon 9 flights to other companies, and customers struggle to book one after 2028. [2]

Rocket Lab's mid-sized Neutron rocket, another possible answer, has slipped to 2027. [22]

Why it matters. The next test is New Glenn itself: Bezos says it is still aiming to fly again this year, while Ars Technica expects the first months of 2027. [1][2]

A group of US senators from both main parties asked the US defence department's inspector general, its internal watchdog, to investigate this week's limits on Starshield in Ukraine. [5] They want to know whether the department or its contractors caused them. [5] Starshield is the military version of Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet, and the US government controls it. [8] Reuters reported, citing two US officials and a Western official, that the order came from inside the White House. [6] President Trump said it was not him and, he thought, not Elon Musk. [6]

Why it matters. Ukraine uses the network to steer drones that shoot down Russian attack drones, so it needs to know who can switch it. [5] The senators also say US diplomats and soldiers in Ukraine could not reach bunkers during Russian air raids after glitches in threat warnings. [5]

The limit cuts the link whenever a terminal moves faster than 160 km/h, a speed Ukraine's drones often fly at. [9] Russia's jet-powered Shahed attack drones fly at over 400 km/h, so Ukraine's chasing drones need that speed. [9] Wes Streeting, Britain's defence secretary, said on Thursday that his US counterpart told him service was back. [7] On Friday Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, said speeds were returning but not yet normal. [8] His adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said Ukraine is in talks with SpaceX and the US defence department to lift the cap. [9]

Why it matters. Near Lyman, in eastern Ukraine, commanders watch live drone video to spot Russian drones, and Starshield gives them internet across the battlefield. [10] Russian attacks on Friday killed at least eight people across Ukraine. [8]

Members of the European Parliament urged the European Commission, the EU's executive, to give Ukraine fast access to Govsatcom. [11] Govsatcom is an EU scheme that pools secure satellite links for governments. [11] Talks with Ukraine have run since March without a deal, while Norway and Iceland joined this year. [11] A Commission spokesman, Thomas Regnier, said it is in talks to bring Ukraine fully in. [11] IRIS2, the EU's own planned network to rival Starlink, is not due until 2030. [11]

Why it matters. Christophe Grudler, a French member of the European Parliament, said Ukraine's defence, and so Europe's security, must not depend on one American billionaire or on Trump's decisions. [11] An analyst at ING, a Dutch bank, told Reuters that European operators can add links next to Starlink but cannot match it soon. [12]

Shares in Eutelsat, a French satellite company, rose 20% on Friday, taking their gain over the week to 31%. [12] Eutelsat runs OneWeb, about 600 satellites close to Earth that sell internet to governments, airlines and phone companies. [12] OneWeb is backed by the French and British governments. [12] SES, another European satellite company, rose 7.1% on Friday. [12]

Why it matters. An analyst at Oddo BHF, a French bank, said investors now believe Europe's satellite firms will not be wiped out by Starlink. [12] Eutelsat's chief said in March it had already sold all its capacity in Ukraine. [12]

Reliance, the Indian giant controlled by Mukesh Ambani, said on Friday it welcomes competition from Starlink. [13] Its phone company Jio runs a satellite service that is also waiting for clearance, it said. [13] Elon Musk has accused Ambani and India's government of stalling Starlink, and India denies any bias. [13] India has licensed Starlink, Jio's service and Eutelsat OneWeb, but none has the security clearance to start. [13] On Tuesday the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an economic wing of the RSS, the Hindu nationalist parent of India's ruling party, urged a Starlink ban. [14]

Why it matters. Jio, with over 530 million customers, is days from India's largest share sale, seeking a $108 billion valuation. [13] Satellite internet could reach hundreds of millions of Indians still offline, mostly in the countryside. [13]

SpaceX's plan to sell mobile phone service will use antennas on towers and rooftops as well as satellites, a filing made public last week shows. [15] It recently bought 800 MHz airwaves from Grain, a firm that owns telecoms assets, for nearly $8 billion, a source told Reuters. [15] TD Cowen, an investment bank, puts the cost of building a full network at more than $80 billion. [15] MoffettNathanson, a research firm, says the three big US phone companies spent about $650 billion on their networks in the decade to 2023. [15]

Why it matters. Phones have small antennas and weak transmitters, which makes a link to a satellite hundreds of kilometres up hard to keep. [15] Starlink made its money in the countryside, where it faced little competition, and cities are the hard part. [15]

NASA has begun replacing 'artificial intelligence' with 'super intelligence' on its websites, job titles and computer systems, an internal plan seen by Space.com shows. [16] It follows an order President Trump signed on 29 September, which also tells agencies not to say that the wording changed. [16] The plan runs in four phases until 23 December. [16] One step renames the web address of a tool used across the US government, which the plan calls a breaking change for linked software. [16]

Why it matters. The order keeps the old legal meaning, so any software that counted as AI now counts as super intelligence with nothing new added. [16] NASA staff told Space.com they expect confusion among scientists, and one said the pressure came from Jared Isaacman, NASA's chief. [16]

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope, the big infrared telescope run by NASA, to map the air around WASP-17b, a planet 1,300 light-years away. [17] It weighs about 0.8 times as much as Jupiter but is twice as wide, and it circles its star in under four days. [17] A new method read starlight passing through the planet's edge at many points around it, instead of taking one average. [17] It found the air swelling where hot winds reach the planet's cooler night side. [17] The study came out in Nature Astronomy on 14 October. [17]

Why it matters. Older readings treated a planet's air as the same all the way round. [17] The method can now be tried on others of the more than 6,000 planets known around other stars. [17]

Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope and the German eROSITA telescope to explain the Treble Clef, a cloud giving off radio waves in the shape of the musical sign. [18][19] It lies behind the Milky Way, in a fifth of the sky that ordinary light cannot get through. [19] It was once thought to be a pulsar, a spinning dead star. [19] The team says a giant black hole blew out charged particles, and a crash between two galaxy clusters later made them glow again. [19][18]

Why it matters. It is the first time galaxy clusters have been shown to be part of the Treble Clef. [19] The two clusters first met several hundred million years ago and are now moving apart. [19]

A team led by Yiting Li of the University of Michigan found no Jupiter-sized planets close to 70 Ophiuchi, a pair of stars about 17 light-years away. [20] It combined more than a century of measurements of how the two stars wobble. [20] The wobbles came from activity on the stars themselves, not from planets pulling on them. [20] Planets the size of Saturn or smaller could still be there, the study in The Astrophysical Journal says. [20]

Why it matters. 70 Ophiuchi is one of the best nearby places to look for an Earth-like planet with two suns, and future telescopes will aim at it. [20] The result tells those searches where not to look. [20]

RATLOG, a rocket start-up founded by former students in Dresden, Germany, has joined Y Combinator, a US programme that funds young companies. [21] Its engine has no turbopump, the fast spinning pump that feeds fuel into most big rocket engines; the whole engine spins instead. [21] Its chief, Charlie Weise, says that cuts about 90% of the parts, and that turbopumps cause many rocket failures. [21] It wants a flight-ready engine in 2027 and a first launch in 2029 or 2030. [21]

Why it matters. Spinning the whole engine puts new strain on its bearings, the company admits. [21] Isar Aerospace, another German firm, took from 2018 to 2025 to fly its first, smaller rocket. [21]

Stoke Space, a US rocket company, has shipped the upper stage of its Nova rocket from its factory in Kent, Washington, to its test site at Moses Lake. [4] There it will be filled with super-cold fuel and fired with Andromeda, a ring of 24 small engines. [4] The upper stage has a heat shield cooled by its own fuel so that it can come back and fly again. [4] Stoke wants to launch Nova next year from Cape Canaveral in Florida. [4]

Why it matters. Nova is the only Western rocket other than SpaceX's Starship built so far for both stages to fly again, Ars Technica says. [4] A mid-sized rocket next year would arrive as SpaceX sells fewer Falcon 9 flights to others. [2]

LEAP, a rocket start-up in Colorado, aims to fly its Bighorn rocket to orbit for the first time in 2028. [4] Bighorn is designed to carry 145 kilograms into low orbit around Earth. [4] LEAP's new factory near Denver will build six a year at first, rising to two a month. [4] The company flew a smaller rocket, Bullfrog, to about 40 kilometres up in May. [4]

Why it matters. Bighorn is sized to carry a single small satellite on its own flight, instead of sharing a big rocket. [4] Its chief, Chris Beckman, says the hard part is building enough rockets fast enough. [4]

Guillaume Faury, chief executive of Airbus, Europe's aircraft and space maker, has written to Andy Burnham, the UK prime minister, about Skynet 6, a contract worth 2.4 billion pounds. [23] Skynet 6 satellites will carry the British armed forces' most sensitive messages until 2042, replacing the Skynet 5 system Airbus runs. [23] Faury warned that choosing its US rival Lockheed Martin could cost Britain a key role in Europe's space industry, the Guardian reports. [23] Some sources believe the Ministry of Defence prefers Lockheed's bid, which includes a new factory in Durham, but no decision is final. [23]

Why it matters. Industry figures say Airbus's British satellite sites at Stevenage and Portsmouth, with 3,000 workers, may not survive without the contract. [23] Lockheed says its UK arm would fully control the satellites, a question that sharpened after Ukraine's Starlink link was limited, apparently at the US government's request. [23]

The US Army plans more tests of high-altitude balloons over the coming year, its space officers said at this week's Association of the United States Army conference in Washington. [24] The balloons float 60,000 to 100,000 feet up, about 18 to 30 kilometres, above airliners and far below satellites. [24] Lt Gen John Rafferty, who heads the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command, said he became a huge believer after watching them hold position in an exercise. [24] Unlike satellites on fixed paths, they ride different winds to stay over one area. [24]

Why it matters. They can carry sensors, radios or equipment that supports long-range strikes, giving soldiers satellite-like coverage closer to the fighting. [24] The Army has already tried them in Europe and the Pacific, and alongside combat in the Middle East. [24]