Science

Isaacman: 'We can never accept a gap in our capabilities again'

The US must return astronauts to the Moon before China mounts its first crewed landing there, NASA administrator nominee Jared Isaacman predicted on Wednesday. He also vowed that the country will not endure another gap in its human-spaceflight capabilities as the International Space Station approaches retirement.…

An ‘anomaly’ meant a fireball arrived at the recovery zone instead of a spent first stage

There's good news and bad news for the Chinese commercial launch industry. The good news is that LandSpace's ZhuQue-3 launched successfully on its maiden flight. The bad news is that a hoped-for recovery of the first stage ended in a fireball.…

LEO communications satellites are proliferating like rabbits

Nearly all images from some space telescopes in low Earth orbit could be affected by light from man-made satellites as the number of communication spacecraft surges, new research led by NASA has found.…

Russian vehicles will depart soon, but Baikonur launchpad damage clouds future arrivals

NASA confirmed this week that for the first time, all eight of the International Space Station's docking ports are currently occupied – four by Russian vehicles.…

Brit astro Tim Peake's much-vaunted mission to the ISS a distant memory

Nearly ten years after Brit astronaut Tim Peake visited the International Space Station (ISS), the UK has slipped behind Spain in European Space Agency funding rankings.…

PLUS: India wants to build big airliners; Half of South Koreans caught in data leak; Minimum wage for gig workers in Oz; And more!

Asia in Brief  Singapore’s government last week told Google and Apple to prevent fake government messages.…

Roscosmos confirms structural damage as images suggest repairs could stretch into 2027

The pad used by Russia to send Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) sustained damange during yesterday's crew launch, according to Roscosmos.…

ExoMars project may actually get to the red planet one day

The European Space Agency's long-delayed Rosalind Franklin rover has received a boost with confirmation that NASA is staying in the project.…

Capsule might only manage three crewed missions to the ISS

NASA has modified its Commercial Crew contract with Boeing, dropping the order from six to four missions, of which one will be uncrewed.…

Uncrewed Shenzhou also delivered supplies and window fixing kit

China's uncrewed Shenzhou-22 spacecraft has successfully docked with the Tiangong space station, providing relief to the crew who were relying on a damaged capsule with a cracked window as their only ride home.…

Start-up claims to have booked orders for 144 miniaturized reactors totaling 11GW across US and UK

Amazon-backed nuclear energy startup X-energy says it has booked orders for 144 small modular reactors (SMRs) which will eventually deliver over 11 gigawatts of power, assuming that they actually get built. And investors continue to support this vision.…

Japanese team finds 80% of the tiny plant cells remained viable after 283 days in orbit

Moss has been shown to survive one of the harshest environments imaginable: the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS).…

Redesigned booster ruptures during early checks, delaying latest Starship iteration

SpaceX has responded to Blue Origin's announcement of a heftier version of its New Glenn rocket in the only way it knows how – by accidentally destroying a Starship booster.…

Air-launched antique picked for tricky low-inclination orbit job

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, facing the risk of an uncontrolled dive back to Earth, is set for a rescue ride on a Pegasus XL, the air-dropped rocket that hasn't flown since 2021.…

Skim the atmosphere and air-breathing VLEO sats can theoretically maintain orbit

DARPA is on the verge of reaching a new low - an orbital one - as the Defense Department's research arm moves its Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) Otter satellite program into the production phase. …

Massive jump in spending shows the Great White North isn’t betting everything on NASA

Canada will boost its investment in European Space Agency (ESA) programs by CA$528.5 million ($376 million USD), a tenfold increase, according to the Canadian Space Agency.…

Stuck on the Tiangong station with a cracked capsule for company

China is preparing for an early launch of the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft to rescue the crew of Shenzou-21, who were left stranded aboard the Tiangong space station after their emergency rescue of the Shenzou-20 crew earlier this month.…

Chang'e 6's soil sample turns up iron oxides where none were supposed to exist

A Chinese-led team of boffins has uncovered tiny grains of hematite and maghemite in materials scooped from the Moon's far-side South Pole-Aitken Basin by the Chang'e 6 probe – iron oxides more at home on rusty tools on Earth than on our bone-dry satellite.…

€544M Alice Recoque system aims to lift Europe's research horsepower

SC25  France will get its first exascale supercomputer — Europe's second — when Atos subsidiary Eviden builds Alice Recoque using AMD chips.…

Researchers think SpaceX needs to revisit its resilience regime

Researchers have found Starlink’s efforts to mitigate the effects of solar storms can create degraded performance that persists for a day or more after geomagnetic conditions ease.…