As I write this, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is bolted to the top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy at Launch Complex 39A in Florida, and the countdown is running. Liftoff is set for 07:26 EDT: 11:26 UTC, or 14:26 here in Nicosia. NASA’s live coverage starts at 10:20 UTC on NASA+ and YouTube. If weather or a last-minute hold gets in the way, the backup window opens tomorrow morning at 11:22 UTC. ...
This weekend China sends its most complicated Moon mission yet toward the one patch of lunar ground everyone now wants. The launch window for Chang’e 7 opens on the morning of August 24 Beijing time (late Sunday, August 23, in the Americas) on a Long March 5 out of Wenchang. Sitting on top isn’t one spacecraft but four: an orbiter, a lander, a rover, and a six-legged robot built to jump into craters that haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years and drill for ice. ...
On July 31, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first science data taken with the LSST Camera: a deep image of the COSMOS field holding more than half a million galaxies and over 50,000 stars in a single frame. That’s the headline. The part that took me a minute to work out, as someone who spent years pulling training data out of pipelines like this one, is what a person outside the collaboration can actually touch. Some of it you can explore tonight from your couch. Most of the catalog is locked for two years. ...
A Chinese spacecraft is now station-keeping about 20 km from a rock the size of an office block that has been shadowing Earth for at least a century. On July 6, the China National Space Administration released the first close-up image of asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, confirming that Tianwen-2 had caught its target after a 13-month, roughly one-billion-kilometre chase. The image showed a small, elongated body, the shape you get from a loose pile of rubble rather than a solid boulder. ...
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope reached Kennedy Space Center on June 21, arriving by barge at the Launch Complex 39 turn basin, the same channel that once floated Saturn V and Shuttle hardware to the pad. It’s now in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility being prepped for a Falcon Heavy launch no earlier than August 30, roughly eight months ahead of its original schedule. That last detail is rare enough for a flagship NASA mission to deserve its own headline. ...
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has spent nearly 22 years detecting gamma-ray bursts, X-ray transients, and ultraviolet afterglows from low Earth orbit. It’s one of the most productive space telescopes ever launched — over 1,600 gamma-ray bursts catalogued, thousands of follow-up observations forwarded to ground-based telescopes within seconds. And it’s falling. No later than Tuesday, a refrigerator-sized spacecraft built by a startup in nine months will ride the last Pegasus XL rocket ever launched in an attempt to grab Swift, lock onto its structure with three robotic arms, and push it back up. If it works, it’ll be the first time anyone has docked with a satellite that was never designed for servicing. ...
On June 12, SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest initial public offering in history. The company listed on the Nasdaq at $135 per share, valuing the business at approximately $1.77 trillion — putting it among the ten most valuable public companies on Earth. Within hours of the listing, a Falcon 9 carrying 29 Starlink satellites lifted off from Cape Canaveral. The symbolism wasn’t accidental. The reason SpaceX commands that valuation isn’t Starship, and it isn’t the Artemis HLS contract. It’s 10,400 satellites already in orbit, beaming internet to paying subscribers in 75+ countries. Starlink generates an estimated 58% of SpaceX’s total revenue. When public investors bought SpaceX stock this week, they bought a satellite internet company that also happens to build rockets. ...
On May 26, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at agency headquarters in Washington and gave the lunar program something it hasn’t had before: a name with “base” in it. The program is called Moon Base. Three uncrewed landers are targeting the lunar south pole before the end of 2026. Behind them, $440 million in contracts for two crewed rovers. Behind that, a phased timeline stretching into the 2030s for power grids, hopping drones, and eventually semi-permanent crew presence. ...
At 03:52 UTC this morning, a Vega-C rocket lifted off from Kourou carrying SMILE — the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer — into a 707 km circular parking orbit. ESA’s New Norcia ground station in Western Australia picked up the spacecraft’s first signal at 04:48 UTC. Solar panels deployed one minute later. The first mission designed to X-ray Earth’s entire magnetosphere in real time is alive and drawing power. I covered the science in detail two weeks ago, before the launch window opened. Now that the spacecraft is actually flying, here’s what happens between today and the first X-ray image of Earth’s magnetic shield — and when the data starts mattering for aurora forecasts. ...
In twelve days, a Vega-C rocket lifts off from Kourou carrying the first spacecraft designed to image Earth’s entire magnetosphere in soft X-rays while simultaneously filming the aurora in ultraviolet. ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ SMILE mission (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) will watch, in real time, how Earth’s magnetic shield deforms under solar wind pressure and trace that energy all the way down to the auroral oval. ...