Space

The Federal Communications Commission moved on two fronts July 22, clearing more C-band spectrum for terrestrial 5G while simultaneously rewriting the rules for how satellite operators get licensed. The upper C-band auction will release 160 MHz in the 3.98 to 4.14 GHz range, scheduled for July 2027. Combined with the 280 MHz of lower C-band […]

A classified Chinese satellite is rewriting the playbook for orbital surveillance, using an orbit pattern that space trackers say they have never seen before. Shijian-31, launched June 16 aboard a Long March 3B from Xichang, has settled into a highly elliptical orbit with an inclination of 63.46 degrees. That angle is a classic Molniya orbit […]

The outgoing head of the U.S. Space Force delivered a stark warning in his final public address: if conflict reaches orbit, no country will be able to stay out of the crossfire. Gen. Chance Saltzman, speaking at the Global Air and Space Chiefs Conference on July 15, made the case that space is fundamentally different […]

The early universe had a problem. The first generations of stars, composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, produced heavier elements through nuclear fusion. When those stars exploded as supernovae, they seeded the surrounding gas with metals, carbon, oxygen, silicon, that would eventually coalesce into planets and new stars. But between the explosion and the […]

When NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars in 2018, its primary job was to listen. The seismometer, borrowed from the French space agency CNES, was sensitive enough to detect ground motion smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. Over four years of operation, it recorded hundreds of marsquakes and a steady drumbeat of […]

Most massive stars in the universe are born in pairs or triples. They orbit each other, exchange material, and eventually explode. Logically, binary supernovae should be common. And yet, until now, no one had ever found a pair of sibling stars that both detonated as supernovae. The reason is simple: the first explosion is so […]

The stars that make up the Milky Way’s halo, a diffuse spherical cloud surrounding the galaxy’s disk, move at a puzzlingly slow speed. At about 25 kilometers per second relative to the galactic center, they crawl compared to the Sun’s 220-kilometer-per-second orbit. Standard models of galaxy formation predicted the halo should rotate at 50 to […]

In August 2025, the Goldstone Deep Space Complex in California pointed its 70-meter antenna at a near-Earth object called 1998 SH2. The radar saw nothing. The asteroid, estimated at 380 meters across, should have been easy to detect. The fact that Goldstone’s DSS-14 – the most powerful planetary radar antenna in the world – drew […]

Communication with a spacecraft beyond low Earth orbit is like shouting through a narrow pipe. The radio frequencies that NASA’s Deep Space Network uses can carry navigation data, telemetry, and voice, but high-definition video has always been too data-heavy. The iconic grainy footage from Apollo and the choppy feeds from the International Space Station were […]

For decades, the most valuable real estate in space has operated under a simple rule: when your fuel runs out, you retire. There is no gas station at 35,786 kilometers up, no roadside assistance for a multimillion-dollar communications satellite that still has working transponders but no propellant left to hold its position. That rule changed […]