Space, in brief

A panel of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has named four places away from the Moon's south pole where astronauts should go. [1][2]

The four are Bhabha Crater, Mons Hadley, the Orientale Basin and the Aristarchus Plateau. [1] NASA paid for the report. [1]

NASA's own plan points at the south pole, where ice under the ground could support people and be turned into rocket fuel. [3]

Bhabha Crater is on the Moon's far side, which always faces away from Earth. [1] Telescopes there would be shielded from Earth's radio noise, and crews could reach rock from the Moon's oldest known preserved impact basin. [1]

Mons Hadley, part of which Apollo 15's crew explored, could hold a station watching the Sun's weather. [1] Crews could also test whether piled-up Moon soil keeps out harmful radiation. [1]

The Orientale Basin is one of the largest and best-kept ringed craters in the solar system, and samples from it could show how it formed. [1] The Aristarchus Plateau is old volcanic ground. [1]

The panel also calls the Moon a practice ground for keeping Earth's germs off other worlds, and any life from them away from Earth, before people go to Mars. [1]

Clive Neal, a panel member, says the report is meant to help NASA's Moon programme, not distract it, and backs a base spread over several linked sites. [1]

NASA's Moon Base runs in three phases: getting crews there reliably until 2029, then power including nuclear, then homes and mining from 2032. [3]

NASA's Nujoud Merancy says the scarcest thing on the Moon is not water or sunlight but astronauts' time, because getting crews there is so hard. [3]

Artemis III, due between July and September 2027, will test both companies' landers in orbit near Earth, and Artemis IV aims to land people in 2028. [4] China aims to land people by 2030. [1]

The US Congress has not yet funded the Moon base as a programme of its own, though NASA puts its cost at about $20bn over seven years. [5]

Why it matters. Watch whether NASA adds any of the four sites to its Moon Base plans, and whether the US Congress funds the base after the US elections on 3 November. [1][5]

China expects the first stage of a Long March 10B rocket, caught in a net on a ship on 10 July, to become its first big booster to fly twice, NASASpaceflight reports. [6] The first stage is the large bottom part of a rocket. A Long March 12A will try to land its own first stage no earlier than 3 November, after one engine failed to restart last time. [6] Two cheaper cargo ships for China's Tiangong space station are also coming: Qingzhou from January 2027, and Haolong, a winged craft built to land on a runway. [6]

Why it matters. A booster that flies again only has to be built once, so each extra flight costs less than a new rocket. [6] An engineer at Haolong's maker said it could fly ten times, as an example of how its building cost would be shared out. [6]

China's two big satellite internet networks are getting close to selling service at home, NASASpaceflight reports. [6] Guowang, backed by the Chinese state, had 222 satellites in orbit after a launch on 9 October. [6] Shanghai Spacesail, which runs Qianfan, plans to start service in China by the end of the year and has ground stations in Brazil and Malaysia. [6] Both networks are planned at about 13,000 satellites or more. [6] BeiDou, China's version of GPS, also finished a 140-day upgrade in orbit without stopping service. [6]

Why it matters. These networks would give China its own rivals to SpaceX's Starlink, which has launched about 13,000 satellites. [6] A Starlink engineer asked Chinese operators to share more data on where their satellites are, so others can steer clear. [6]

Elon Musk, who runs both Tesla and SpaceX, said on Tuesday that committees at the two companies are studying a merger. [9] On Wednesday's Tesla call he said he had nothing to add. [8] Reuters reported on Thursday that regulators in the US and in China would likely both look hard at any deal. [7] SpaceX builds military and spy satellites for the US Defense Department, while Tesla's factory in Shanghai makes more than half of Tesla's cars. [7] China also makes Tesla keep data from Chinese drivers inside China. [7]

Why it matters. Experts told Reuters the joined company might need a strict wall between Tesla's China arm and the rest, or might sell or spin off that arm. [7] At least half of Tesla's shareholders would have to approve any deal. [9]

The Planetary Society, a group that campaigns for space science, says the US Congress is likely to leave three NASA questions open before the US midterm elections on 3 November. [5] They are a new law setting NASA's direction, a full-year budget, and a proposed overhaul of science grants. [5] The US government is funded only until 11 December, which holds NASA at $24.4bn, well above the $18.8bn the Trump administration asked for. [5] About 20 working days are left this year. [5]

Why it matters. A House bill would cut NASA science from $7.3bn to $6bn while adding to human spaceflight. [5] At least 90 new members join the US Congress in January, so much of the work may have to start again. [5]

Brian Stone, acting head of the US National Science Foundation, will retire on 31 December, according to a staff memo reported by Scientific American. [10] The foundation hands out about $9bn a year for research. [10] President Trump's pick to lead it, James O'Neill, has not yet had a hearing in the US Senate. [10] Stone took over in April 2025, and in April this year the Trump administration fired all 22 members of the foundation's science advisory board. [10]

Why it matters. No new advisers have been named, so the foundation may enter 2027 with neither a confirmed head nor the board that helps decide its grants. [10] A spokesperson appeared to confirm that Stone is retiring but not the date. [10]

Physicists led by Gerald Gabrielse at Northwestern University, in the US, kept a single positron in a trap for a month, they reported on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters. [11] A positron is the antimatter twin of the electron, and when it touches ordinary matter the two destroy each other. [11] The team slowed positrons in cold tungsten, then held one in a vacuum near absolute zero using electric and magnetic fields. [11] Next they will measure its magnetism. [11]

Why it matters. Physics predicts a positron's magnetism is the exact opposite of an electron's. [11] A difference could help explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. [11]

Scientists led by Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas squeezed water ice to more than 222 gigapascals, over two million times the air pressure at Earth's surface, Universe Today reports. [12] They used a diamond anvil cell, a device that presses tiny samples to extreme pressures. [12] Ice usually gets more orderly as it is squeezed. Above that point it became less symmetrical, a new form. [12] The study is in Communications Chemistry. [12]

Why it matters. Pressures like this exist inside Uranus and Neptune, where the icy layer may reach 700 gigapascals. [12] So the water inside those planets may not behave the way models assume. [12]

A study in Nature Astronomy traced a switchback, a sharp kink in the Sun's magnetic field carried along by the solar wind, back to where it began. [13] The Solar Orbiter spacecraft flew through one for about an hour and a half on 2 March 2022. [13] It was about 2.75 million km long. [13] Its carbon and oxygen had been heated above a million degrees, which points to the corona, the Sun's hot outer layer. [13]

Why it matters. The solar wind is the stream of charged particles from the Sun that reaches Earth. Knowing where switchbacks start helps explain how that wind is pushed out into space. [13]

Astronomers led by David Mirabal at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias dated stars using data from Gaia, a star-mapping spacecraft, Universe Today reports. [14] They found the Milky Way's disk of stars flattened fast at first, from about 4,100 to 1,600 light-years thick in about 2 billion years. [14] After a break about 10.8 billion years ago, it thinned slowly, to about 400 light-years. [14] The study is in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. [14]

Why it matters. It means the oldest stars in the galaxy's thick outer layer were born there, not pushed there later. [14] Mirabal calls it the first clear evidence for one of two rival ideas. [14]

DARPA, the US military's research agency, has given Space Nuclear Power Corporation, or SpaceNukes, an agreement to ground-test a small reactor that runs itself, the company said on 21 October. [15] Its team ran KRUSTY in 2018, the only full-power ground test of a new US space reactor in five decades. [15] The new test, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, adds control rods that move to change the power, a step beyond the 2018 design. [15]

Why it matters. A reactor gives steady power where sunlight is weak or absent. NASA plans nuclear power for its Moon base from 2029. [3]

Solstar Space, a US start-up, said on 20 October that its Wi-Fi link joined a small NASA satellite with Momentus's Vigoride-7 spacecraft while the two flew close together. [16] In about 30 minutes it sent more than 2,300 files of camera, infrared and laser-ranging data. [16] The files reached NASA's Johnson Space Center through Iridium, a satellite phone network. [16] Momentus is a US company that flies spacecraft to move and service others. [16]

Why it matters. Spacecraft that repair or refuel others will need to talk to each other up close. NASA also wants the data to train software to fly such missions on its own. [16]

Novaspace, a European space consulting firm, forecasts that income from satellite services will grow 44% to $145bn by 2035. [17] Data, such as internet from space, would rise from 26% of that income to 68%. [17] TV is the biggest earner today, but by 2035 it would be 3% of what satellite operators earn from selling capacity. [17] Orders for big satellites in high, fixed orbits went from six in 2024 to 10 in 2025, and 14 by mid-September 2026. [17]

Why it matters. Military satellite links are among the fastest-growing parts, adding about $19.2bn. [17] It is a forecast, not a count of money already spent.

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he was not involved in last week's slowdown of SpaceX's satellite internet for Ukraine's forces, and did not know who ordered it. [18] Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the same day that Ukraine's access is up to SpaceX and Elon Musk, under a private commercial contract. [19] The Wall Street Journal had reported on Tuesday that Musk ordered the slowdown of Starshield, the military version of Starlink. [18][19] Musk has said the US military and president set those limits. [19]

Why it matters. Ukraine uses the link to steer drones that shoot down Russian drones, and a speed cap of 160 km/h disrupted a number of missions. [19] Zelensky said he had discussed new satellite links for Ukraine's troops with Norway's defence minister. [18]

SpaceX shares rose 7.8% on Wednesday, the day after its results, adding $155bn to the company's value, Fortune reports. [21] CNBC put the rise at 10% during the day. [20] SpaceX had reported $14.6bn in revenue for July to September, 161% more than a year earlier. [20] It forecast $33bn to $37bn for the first three months of 2027. [20] Shares in Rocket Lab, a rocket maker, and in Intuitive Machines and AST SpaceMobile, two other space companies, also rose. [20]

Why it matters. Fortune warns that a Tesla merger could cost SpaceX shareholders, because paying a usual 30% premium for Tesla would mean issuing new shares equal to about 92% of those SpaceX has now. [21] Tesla shares rose 3.4% the same day. [21]