Space, in brief

NASA, the US space agency, set out on Friday how Artemis III will fly: four astronauts in its Orion capsule, staying in orbit around Earth for 14 days, or up to 17. [1][3]

Three rockets will launch from Florida for it: Blue Origin's New Glenn with a Blue Moon test lander, then NASA's SLS with the crew, then SpaceX's Starship around day 6. [1][5]

Orion is to dock with Blue Moon on day 3, about 439 km up, and the crew will go inside it to test its air supply, life support and emergency drills. [1][3]

On day 8 Orion docks with Starship for about two hours, and the crew will not go inside it. [1][3]

The crew are NASA's Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency. [1]

NASA is aiming for summer 2027, but last month Jared Isaacman, NASA's head, told staff the mission was about 90 days behind schedule. [1][3]

Artemis IV, the first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, is still set for 2028, and NASA has not chosen which company's lander will fly it. [1][6]

Isaacman said NASA will not give up either lander before the data and the schedule force it to. [1] Parsons said both companies plan Moon landings in 2028 either way. [1]

Orion's own engine cannot reach a low orbit around the Moon and get home. [4] So NASA is having United Launch Alliance stretch its Centaur V rocket stage to push Orion there. [4][2] [4][2]

In SpaceX's plan, a Starship lander is refuelled in low Earth orbit and meets Orion higher up before the trip; NASA would not say how many tanker launches that takes. [4]

Blue Origin's plan needs four New Glenn launches and no fuel passed between craft: three pusher stages go up first, then the crewed Blue Moon lander. [4][2]

The first moonwalkers will wear a lighter 'sortie' suit from Axiom Space, made for trips of at least two hours outside but not for the Moon's darkest craters. [2][6]

Why it matters. The next thing that would show whether summer 2027 holds is New Glenn flying again, which Parsons says Blue Origin expects in November; NASA has no other rocket lined up for Blue Moon. [5]

The US Space Force tried to book rides for three satellite missions, and SpaceX declined, Politico reported. [7] No other rocket company bid for them either. [7] Two belong to the Space Development Agency, the part of the Space Force building hundreds of military satellites in low orbit for data and missile warning. [7] United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin, the other big US launchers, are both fixing problems with their rockets. [7] SpaceX has been declining new Falcon 9 contracts from all kinds of customers. [7][8]

Why it matters. US military satellites are now waiting on companies that are either busy or not yet flying. [7] Brigadier General Eric Zarybnisky, who buys Space Force launches, called it a temporary problem until new rockets fly. [7]

Lieutenant General Philip Garrant, who runs Space Systems Command, the Space Force office that buys its launches, said the service needs a new site for heavy rockets by 2030. [9] Nearly all big US launches leave from Cape Canaveral in Florida or Vandenberg in California, which made 175 orbital launch attempts last year. [9] The Space Force expects US launch sites to need 700 launches a year by 2036. [9] It has not picked a place, or whether to use federal, state or company land. [9]

Why it matters. A third site would mean a storm or an attack on one coast could not stop every big launch at once. [9] Garrant said a spaceport is much like an airport, only louder, for the people living near it. [9]

Arianespace, which sells launches on Europe's Ariane 6 rocket, says the next flight will be no earlier than 23 November. [7] An engine test before the summer had found a fault in a turbopump, the fast-spinning pump that feeds liquid hydrogen into the engine. [7] La Tribune, a French newspaper, reported that the fault was fixed; ArianeGroup, which builds the rocket, only pointed to the new date. [7] The flight will carry 36 Amazon Leo internet satellites. [7]

Why it matters. It would be the fifth Ariane 6 flight of 2026 and the tenth since its first in July 2024. [7] Amazon Leo is a satellite internet network that competes with SpaceX's Starlink, which has itself launched some of Amazon's satellites. [8]

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched 27 Starlink internet satellites from Vandenberg in California on 23 October. [10] Its first stage, booster B1063, landed on a ship at sea after its 36th flight. [10] At their peak these launches flew every two to three days; the one before was 11 days earlier. [10] SpaceX has flown its last Falcon 9 Starlink mission from Florida as it shifts to Starship, which can carry newer Starlink satellites too big for Falcon 9. [10]

Why it matters. Falcon 9 is on course for just under 150 launches this year, against a record 165 in 2025. [10] The same switch to Starship is why SpaceX is turning down new Falcon customers. [10][8]

Rocket Lab's Electron rocket launched three Hawk satellites for HawkEye 360 from New Zealand on 23 October. [11] HawkEye 360 is a US company whose satellites pick up radio signals on Earth, to track ships, spot jamming of navigation signals and map communications. [11] It sells that data to the US government and its allies. [11] It has now sent nearly 50 satellites to orbit, three of them two days earlier on a SpaceX shared ride. [11]

Why it matters. It was Rocket Lab's 98th launch and its 19th this year. [11] Governments use this kind of data to follow ships at sea and to find where satellite navigation is being jammed. [11]

Orbital Operations, a start-up in Long Beach, California, has won up to $35m from the US Defense Department to fly Astraeus, a craft for moving things around in orbit. [12] It burns liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which boil away unless kept very cold. [12] A fridge on board is meant to keep them liquid for years, against the week or so a normal rocket stage lasts. [12] It would carry cargo to higher orbits, then return to low orbit to refuel. [12]

Why it matters. The company aims to move within a few hours of an order; its chief says military operators want it inside 48 hours. [12] He said demand was high even before Russia's Kosmos 2612 shadowed a radar satellite believed to supply pictures to Ukraine last week. [12]

Starburst-1, a small spacecraft built to move around in orbit by Portal Space Systems of Bothell, Washington, reached orbit on Tuesday on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 shared ride. [13] It opened its solar panels, called home and was found where the team expected. [13] Chief executive Jeff Thornburg calls it 80% successful; the rest depends on firing its ammonia thrusters for the first time in the next few days. [13] It also carries Space Armor, tiles from Atomic-6 meant to stop debris. [13]

Why it matters. Many first spacecraft fail because of power, radio or simply not being found, so getting this far counts. [13] Portal says three customers are close to buying, and its new factory is built to make 28 craft a year. [13]

SpaceX plans to use at least 80,000 mobile phone tower sites in the US, Bloomberg reported, to compete with Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. [14] It is in talks with Crown Castle, one of the biggest US tower owners. [14] That would be about half the 158,500 towers in use in the US, by Reuters' count. [14] SpaceX would pair the towers with its satellites that talk straight to ordinary phones; it bought radio airwaves from EchoStar for $17bn last year. [14]

Why it matters. A deal would give SpaceX its own ground network next to its satellites, against the three big US phone companies. [14] Crown Castle's chief would not name customers, saying only that the company is talking to all parties. [14]

NASA will not ask for 2026 proposals under ROSES, its main yearly call for space and Earth science research, The Planetary Society reports. [15] ROSES usually pays for hundreds of millions of dollars of work at US universities and research institutes. [15] NASA says it will publish a 2027 call by January. [15] It is also changing how it picks science missions, to choose faster, and will take questions at an online meeting on 26 October. [15]

Why it matters. Scientists who apply to ROSES have no new call to apply to until the 2027 one. [15] The Planetary Society, a group that campaigns for space science, says new members of the US Congress will need to learn quickly why steady funding matters. [15]

Griffin-1, a robot lander, has passed shaking, heat, cold and noise tests at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which copy the ride from launch to landing. [16] It is due to launch later this year under CLPS, NASA's programme that pays companies to deliver cargo to the Moon. [16] It will carry more than 455 kg of cargo to the Moon's south pole, including the FLIP rover. [16] AP says the first launch for NASA's planned Moon base is due by the end of the year, from a Pittsburgh company whose first Moon landing failed in 2024. [6]

Why it matters. NASA wants a base near the south pole. [6] It plans so many cargo landers, rovers and orbiters that a Moon car should be waiting when the first astronauts arrive. [6]

The US Defense Department released its seventh batch of records since May on UAP, its name for unexplained objects in the sky. [17] This batch has no pictures or video, only memos and witness reports. [17] The longest, from this year, describes federal agents watching a flat black triangle about 4 metres across climb, hover, then fly off fast with no sound. [17] Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor who leads the US government's advisory council on UAP, wants new sensors placed there. [17]

Why it matters. Researchers met earlier batches with doubt, saying much of it had been seen before or lacked context. [17] With only written accounts this time, nobody outside can check what the agents saw. [17]

Physicists at the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany and NYU Abu Dhabi tested whether dark matter could be black holes heavier than 100 billion Suns. [18] Dark matter is unseen stuff thought to make up about five-sixths of all matter, inferred because galaxies spin too fast to hold together otherwise. [18] If it were packed into a few giant objects, the oldest light in the universe would look grainy. [18] It does not, so they cannot be a big share. [18]

Why it matters. The study, due in Physical Review Letters on 26 October, removes one candidate, though such black holes may still exist in small numbers. [18] The team is now testing much smaller black holes, about the size of asteroids. [18]

Scientists at Imperial College London and Columbia University traced a marsquake, recorded by NASA's InSight lander on 25 August 2021, to a fault 20 to 40 km under Valles Marineris. [19] The canyon is about 3,900 km long and more than 9 km deep; Earth's biggest, the Yarlung Tsangpo, is about 505 km long. [19] Satellite pictures showed no crater or landslide, so the best fit was blocks of rock sliding sideways past each other. [19]

Why it matters. Mars has a single solid shell instead of moving plates like Earth's, and was long thought to be quiet inside. [19] The study, in Nature Communications, shows faults formed billions of years ago can still break. [19]

Lazuli, a private space telescope backed by Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive, now has a first list of 27 planets to photograph. [20] It will have a 3-metre mirror, wider than Hubble's 2.4 metres, and is due to launch by 2029. [20] Two astronomers, at the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona, picked giant planets whose orbits are well known. [20] Each picture could take tens to hundreds of hours. [20]

Why it matters. It would be the first privately owned space telescope, and it will see planets by the starlight they reflect. [20] That lets it study old, cool planets that no longer glow with their own heat. [20]

The SETI Institute, a US non-profit that searches for signals from other civilizations, has two LaserSETI detectors working at AlUla Manara in north-west Saudi Arabia. [21] They were installed on 19 August and are now fully working, the network's first site in Asia after California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Arizona. [21] Each camera watches about 75 degrees of sky all the time, for flashes of one exact colour, as a laser makes. [21]

Why it matters. Saudi Arabia is building its first big observatory at AlUla, with plans for a 4-metre telescope. [21] Each new site lets the network watch more of the sky at once and compare odd flashes from different places. [21]

Geologists led by Min Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied rocks in South China laid down over 3.75 million years, about 260 million years ago. [22] Earth's magnetic poles flipped about 11 times per million years then, one of the fastest rates on record. [22] By comparison there have been 183 flips in the last 83 million years. [22] The fast flipping lines up with an extinction about 261 million years ago, but the authors say that does not prove a cause. [22]

Why it matters. A weak magnetic field during flips might let in more radiation from space, though most scientists doubt it did harm. [22] Huge volcanic eruptions were also changing the air at the same time. [22]

October's full Moon, called the Hunter's Moon, is exactly full at 04:11 GMT on Monday 26 October, and looks full on both Sunday and Monday nights. [23] It is the 11th of 13 full Moons this year, and the last before four supermoons in a row, when the full Moon is closer to Earth than usual. [23] The next is on 24 November. [23] The run of supermoons goes on into January and February 2027. [23]

Why it matters. A Moon low in the sky can look orange because the air scatters away its blue light. [23] It can also look bigger near the horizon, because the brain compares it with trees and buildings. [23]

Ukrainian drone units tested Starshield, the military version of SpaceX's Starlink, on Friday morning and still lost the link above about 160 km/h, officials told Politico. [25] Ukraine uses these fast drones to shoot down Russian attack drones. [25] On Thursday Donald Trump, the US president, had said Elon Musk 'put it back'. [25] On Friday Trump said he had not spoken to Musk, and would if the problem was still there. [24]

Why it matters. Three California Democrats in the US House, led by Sam Liccardo, Ro Khanna and Jimmy Panetta, wrote to the White House asking who ordered the limit. [26] Their letter says it will be a top thing to investigate if Democrats win the House on 3 November. [26]