Space

For decades, astrophysicists believed the universe’s first stars were cosmic giants: massive, uniformly enormous objects hundreds of times heavier than the Sun, born in calm, quiescent environments. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal turns that picture upside down. The first stars — known as Population III stars — were shaped by violent supersonic turbulence […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected complex organic carbon molecules in Martian mudstone rocks within an ancient riverbed, delivering the most robust organic detection yet in Jezero Crater and adding significant weight to the possibility that microbial life once existed on the Red Planet. The findings, published June 24 in the journal Science Advances, confirm the […]

For years, small satellite manufacturers built their business plans around a single reliable premise: SpaceX could get their payloads to orbit. Through Falcon 9 Transporter and Bandwagon rideshare missions, the company offered frequent, low-cost access to space at roughly $7,000 per kilogram. But that pipeline is narrowing, and the industry is confronting a bottleneck that […]

A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is on course to crash into the moon on Aug. 5, 2026, but experts say the impact likely will not be visible from Earth with backyard telescopes. The discarded rocket stage — catalogued as object 2025-010D — is the upper section of the Falcon 9 that launched Firefly […]

On June 23, 2026, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a payload that SpaceX had kept almost entirely secret until the moment of launch. The mission, designated Starfall Demo, deployed a disk-shaped capsule about 3.1 meters (10.2 feet) wide and just 0.75 meters (2.5 feet) tall the company says will enable […]

China is preparing for the debut orbital flight of its Long March 10B (CZ-10B) rocket, with a launch window opening July 10-13, 2026, and an ambitious attempt to recover the first stage at sea using a net-equipped barge. The mission, launching from Commercial Launch Pad 2 at the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site on Hainan […]

A European-Japanese satellite has achieved a milestone that weather forecasters have pursued for decades: the operational use of spaceborne cloud radar data in global weather prediction models. The EarthCARE mission, a joint venture between ESA and JAXA, is now providing daily data that directly sharpens forecasts of storms, heavy rainfall, and extreme weather events. On […]

ESA’s dark universe detective has taken a break from mapping distant galaxies to produce the sharpest, largest visible-light image ever made of the heart of our own Milky Way. The result is a stunning mosaic of more than 60 million stars and at least 51 known exoplanet systems, captured in just 26 hours of observing […]

Elon Musk’s Starlink has long dominated the satellite broadband market, with more than 10,400 satellites in orbit, 12 million subscribers across 160 countries, and a freshly minted $85.7 billion IPO from June 2026. But China is now pushing a homegrown competitor: SpaceSail, also known as the Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation. With 200 satellites in orbit […]

On June 15, 2026, at 15:24 CEST, a faint blue glow in space was switched off for the last time. After nearly eight years of nearly continuous firing, ESA and JAXA’s BepiColombo mission permanently shut down its solar electric propulsion (SEP) system, marking the end of its long interplanetary cruise and the beginning of the […]