SpaceX told companies building NASA's small Moon cargo landers it will no longer sell rides there. [1] At least 2 of those companies had launch deals or price estimates with SpaceX. [1] Ars Technica, a technology news site, reported it on Thursday, citing three sources. [1] The landers are meant to carry parts of NASA's planned Moon base later this decade. [1]

SpaceX has also stopped selling Falcon 9 rides to companies for missions after 2028. [1] Falcon 9 is SpaceX's workhorse rocket, with 165 launches in 2025, its busiest year. [3] SpaceX has told NASA it will stop flying Crew Dragon, its astronaut capsule, by 2030. [1] A NASA adviser says the station's removal craft may need another rocket if launched after 2030. [1]

SpaceX now sees most of its future money coming from artificial intelligence, Ars reports. [1] Its third-quarter filing says: "We allocate a significant amount of launch capacity to our Connectivity segment." [1] Ars says that means rockets kept for Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet, and its AI satellites. [1] Starmind, SpaceX's planned network of AI computer satellites, could reach one million craft. [4] A Starship launch of Starlink satellites carries the internet capacity of 10 Falcon 9 launches. [1]

In 2008 NASA gave SpaceX $1.6 billion for a dozen cargo flights to the space station. [1] Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell say that deal probably saved SpaceX from bankruptcy. [1] Over two decades NASA has given SpaceX contracts worth about $20 billion. [1] Experts quoted by The Verge say SpaceX has a near-monopoly on launches and satellite internet. [2] Musk says SpaceX now carries almost 90% of all the mass sent into orbit. [1]

In 2021 SpaceX won a $2.89 billion NASA deal to build a Starship Moon lander. [1] A first uncrewed landing test may take about 20 Starship launches to refuel it, Ars says. [1] At an assumed $100 million each, those launches alone would cost about $2 billion. [1] NASA's Artemis manager Jeremy Parsons says SpaceX's leaders are "definitely committed to the lunar missions." [1]

The lander makers hope Blue Origin's New Glenn or Relativity Space's Terran R can carry them. [1] Blue Origin is the space company of billionaire Jeff Bezos. [1] New Glenn exploded on its launch pad earlier this year. [1] Blue Origin has flown only 3 orbital missions in its history. [1]

Why it matters. NASA plans its first crewed Moon landing since 1972 for 2028, on Artemis IV. [14] China is on course to land people on the Moon by 2030, Ars notes. [1] SpaceX's next step toward a Moon landing is refuelling in orbit, aimed at early 2027. [1]

The US Defense Department's own watchdog has refused to investigate the Starshield slowdown in Ukraine. [7] Starshield is the military version of Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service. [6] Ukraine said this month its drones lost satellite links when flying above 161 km an hour. [6] Musk later said SpaceX had slowed Starlink, saying Ukraine's military broke its terms of service. [8] 5 Democratic and 4 Republican senators asked for the inquiry on 15 October. [6] The watchdog said the US Air Force and Space Force should answer instead. [6]

Why it matters. Musk says the US government controls any changes to Starshield. [7] Trump says he did not order any restrictions. [7] Senator Richard Blumenthal had already announced his own inquiry into the slowdown. [23] Senator Jeanne Shaheen says "there must be an independent accounting and review." [7]

Two astronauts fitted a new solar panel to the International Space Station on Thursday. [9] They were NASA's Anil Menon and Canada's Joshua Kutryk, on his first spacewalk. [10] It was the 100th US spacewalk from the station without a space shuttle docked. [9] The walk lasted 7 hours and 11 minutes, about an hour ahead of plan. [10] The panel unrolled to 19 metres with no motor, using energy stored in its carbon booms. [9] Each of these new panels makes about 8 kilowatts of power. [10] The station's original panels have passed their 15-year design life and give less power. [9]

Why it matters. The extra power must keep the station running until it is brought down in 2030. [9] The same pair go out again on 5 November to fit the last panel. [10]

Scientists say a meteorite found in the Sahara is the oldest known rock from Mars. [11] It was blasted off Mars by a giant impact and later fell to Earth. [11] Nomadic meteorite hunters found the stone, called Teghaza 001, in 2022. [11] A paper in the journal Science on Thursday dates it to at least 4.1 billion years. [11] The team dated tiny crystals called zircons, which hold radioactive atoms used for dating. [11] Lead author Yang Liu, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says no Earth rock is older. [11] Most Mars meteorites record only the last 600 million years or so. [11]

Why it matters. Earlier work by the team found signs that liquid water once seeped through it. [11] Another scientist says it shows why rocks must be brought back from Mars itself. [11]

SpaceX test-fired Ship 42, its next Starship upper stage, on Monday and Tuesday. [4] Starship is SpaceX's giant rocket, built so that both halves can fly again. [4] The ship ran all 6 engines for a full-length test while held to the ground. [4] One engine also fired alone, copying the burn that brings a ship down from orbit. [4] The booster for the flight, the bottom half, already fired all 33 of its engines. [4] Musk says Flight 15 is aimed at November. [4]

Why it matters. SpaceX will try to catch both halves with its tower's arms, if regulators allow it. [4] It has caught the booster 3 times but never the ship. [4] Catching both would get them ready to fly again faster, SpaceX says. [4]

Blue Origin has rebuilt the tower at its Florida pad, damaged in a test in May. [5] Its chief, Dave Limp, said on 24 October all 9 tower sections are back in place. [5] Next door, crews poured 4,500 cubic yards of concrete for a second pad. [5] About 450 trucks lined up nearly 3 miles along the coast to deliver it. [5] The company aims to fly its New Glenn rocket again by the end of 2026. [5]

Why it matters. New Glenn must launch Blue Origin's test Moon lander for NASA's Artemis III flight. [5] NASA will choose the Artemis IV lander by how both landers do on that flight. [5]

NASA says UVEX, a new space telescope, will launch in 2031. [12] It will map the whole sky in ultraviolet, light our eyes cannot see. [12] Flares on stars and exploding stars show up fully only in ultraviolet. [12] Caltech, a university in California, will lead the mission. [12] It will be up to 100 times more sensitive than GALEX, NASA's last ultraviolet survey telescope. [12] GALEX's mission ended in 2013. [12]

Why it matters. Its maps will sit beside surveys by the Rubin Observatory and Europe's Euclid telescope. [12] Together they will show the same sky in several kinds of light. [12]

Reid Wiseman, who commanded NASA's flight around the Moon in April, has a new job. [13] He becomes deputy director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, on 30 November. [13] JPL builds and flies NASA's robot explorers, including the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers. [13] Caltech, a California university, runs JPL for NASA. [13] All 4 Artemis II astronauts have now stepped away from spaceflight. [13] Pilot Victor Glover now advises the president of Cal Poly, his old university. [13] Christina Koch becomes NASA's acting deputy chief engineer on 1 November. [13]

Why it matters. NASA chief Jared Isaacman praised Wiseman's technical judgement in JPL's announcement. [13]

The four Artemis III astronauts met US President Donald Trump this week. [14] They are NASA's Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, and Europe's Luca Parmitano. [14] Artemis III is due to launch to Earth orbit, not the Moon, in summer 2027. [14] NASA's Orion capsule will practise docking with one or both private Moon landers. [14]

Why it matters. The roughly two-week flight is practice for the first landing, on Artemis IV in 2028. [14] NASA has not yet said which lander will fly on either mission. [14]

Argotec, an Italian maker of small satellites, has raised 50 million euros. [15] That is about $55.8 million. [15] NUO Space, the space arm of a Milan investment firm, led the funding. [15] Argotec builds satellites of up to 350 kg. [15] Two of its small satellites flew with NASA's DART and Artemis I missions. [15] The money should lift output from 52 satellites a year to 80. [15] It will also speed up work at its Florida factory, opened this year. [15]

Why it matters. Its satellites will serve Italy's own Earth-imaging fleet and a Japan-India mission to find Moon water. [15] Argotec says a much larger fundraising round is already under way. [15]

Earth may have made much of its own water as it grew, a new study says. [16] Many scientists have thought comets and asteroids brought Earth's water. [16] The study, led from the University of New Mexico, is in the journal Nature Geoscience. [16] Young planets gather a thick layer of hydrogen gas from the cloud around their star. [16] Molten pebbles fell through that hot hydrogen onto the growing Earth. [16] The hydrogen pulled oxygen out of iron in the pebbles, and that made water. [16] In lab tests, rock heated in hydrogen lost almost 80% of its iron oxide. [16]

Why it matters. The team says this could have made hundreds of oceans' worth of water. [16] If so, almost any Earth-sized planet should have water, co-author Zachary Sharp says. [16]

Hubble has now seen the Cat's Tail, a long dust trail beside the star Beta Pictoris. [17] Beta Pictoris is a young star about 63 light years away, ringed by dust. [17] The tail stretches about 1,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. [17] Before, only the Webb telescope, which sees infrared light, had spotted it. [17] Its dark carbon-rich dust soaks up visible light, lead author Arin Avsar says. [17] The team thinks two dwarf planets the size of Pluto's moon Charon smashed together. [17]

Why it matters. Beta Pictoris is only about 23 million years old. [17] It shows what our own solar system may have looked like when crashes were common. [17]

Scientists squeezed a crystal with lasers to copy the conditions deep inside planets. [18] The crystal was magnesium oxide, built from one of the commonest elements inside rocky planets. [18] The team came from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University in the US. [18] It melted at 572 gigapascals of pressure and 13,000 kelvin, about 12,900 degrees Celsius. [18] Earth's centre is at about 360 gigapascals and 6,000 kelvin. [18] That set a new record for pressure and heat in a lab experiment. [18] The crystal also behaved differently depending on which way it was squeezed. [18]

Why it matters. Whether it stays solid matters for how planets move heat, co-author June Wicks says. [18] On big rocky planets, liquid magnesium oxide could make magnetic fields stronger than Earth's. [18]

The Sun's spinning jets of hot gas may really be folded curtains seen from the side. [19] These jets, called spicules, rise at tens of kilometres a second, then fall back. [19] There may be millions of them across the Sun at any time. [19] Teams from Newcastle, Sheffield and the Indian Institute for Astrophysics built a computer model. [19] Seen from the side, the folds of one rippling sheet look like separate jets. [19] Old data from the Hinode and IRIS satellites matched the model. [19]

Why it matters. The model also found giant swirls that may lift gas and heat into the corona. [19] Why the corona, the Sun's outer layer, is hotter than its surface is still unsolved. [19]

Newly released photos of the 12 August solar eclipse show the Sun's outer layer in detail. [20] That outer layer, the corona, is a million times dimmer than the Sun's surface. [20] The team, Solar Wind Sherpas, is coordinated by the University of Hawaii. [20] They took the photos from Pico Trigaza, a mountain in Spain. [20] The photos show twisted rings in the solar wind, first seen in eclipse photos in 2008. [20] The team now says temperature differences in the Sun's gas make them. [20] The photos also show a giant coronal hole, an opening in the Sun's magnetic field. [20]

Why it matters. Solar wind can stream out of such holes at up to 800 km a second. [20] Coronal holes are cooler, so they look dark in ultraviolet and X-ray pictures. [20]

Two space telescopes have studied a ghostly cloud in the Carina Nebula. [21] A nebula is a huge cloud of gas and dust in space. [21] The Carina Nebula is more than 7,500 light years away. [21] NASA's Chandra telescope sees X-rays and the Webb telescope sees infrared light. [21] Despite its ghostly look, the cloud is making batches of hot, young stars. [21] Light from nearby hot stars is eating the cloud away. [21] That has carved comet-shaped knots of gas, called cometary globules. [21]

Why it matters. Nearby, the Trumpler 14 cluster holds more than 2,000 big young stars, very bright in ultraviolet. [21] Such stars live short lives, so the region will one day be full of dead stars. [21]

Hubble and Webb have photographed the Cat's Head, a pillar of dust in the Carina Nebula. [22] It is named for its shape: a cat facing away, with a star as its eye. [22] Hubble saw it in visible light, where filters pick out sulphur, oxygen and hydrogen. [22] Webb's near-infrared view shows more stars, because less of their light is blocked by dust. [22] In mid-infrared, carbon molecules and warm dust glow instead. [22] Light from big nearby stars is driving gas off the pillar's edge. [22]

Why it matters. Astronomers use such pictures to study how big stars both help and stop new stars forming. [22]

Anthropic, an AI company, is SpaceX's biggest customer, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing a source. [24] A SpaceX filing said one customer, called only Customer B, paid 34.5% of its quarterly revenue. [24] That makes Anthropic a bigger customer than the US government, long SpaceX's main source of income. [24] Anthropic rents computer power at SpaceX's data centres in Memphis, Tennessee. [24] SpaceX's AI unit, now called Super Intelligence, made a profit for the first time last quarter. [24] Anthropic could spend up to $3.1 billion a month there from December, under deals to 2029. [24] Google, another customer, pays SpaceX about $920 million a month. [24]

Why it matters. Anthropic can cancel with 90 days' notice after early 2027. [24] That leaves SpaceX heavily exposed to one client. [24] SpaceX is also turning down new US government launch work, Ars Technica reported this week. [1]