Space and Engineering news
Every Monday the team picks the most exciting thing that happened in space or engineering the week before. 107 weeks and counting. RSS feed.
NASA's Anil Menon and CSA's Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours 11 minutes installing the seventh of eight iROSA arrays on the ISS's 2A power channel. It was the 100th US spacewalk from the station and Kutryk's first.
SpaceX reported $14.6 billion in Q3 revenue, up 161%, and $4.4 billion in net income, its first profit as a public company. Its Super Intelligence segment's revenue passed Starlink's.
JAXA's MMX lifted off on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima on October 19 and separated on a Mars-bound trajectory. It aims to be the first spacecraft to land on Phobos and return samples to Earth in 2031.
The ship recovered from the Indian Ocean after Flight 13 arrived back at Starbase for inspection, the first time SpaceX has had a flown Starship on the ground to study.
Six months after the flight, early findings from the crew's lunar observations and radiation data arrived as Starship prepared for its first Florida launch.
Flight 14 put the ship into a full orbit and released its first real payloads, the milestone Artemis refueling and Starlink V3 have been waiting on.
Analysis of the OSIRIS-REx material points to a parent body with both water and heat, reshaping the picture of how carbon-rich asteroids formed.
Four launch vehicles from four sites flew in under two days, a cadence that shows how fast China's launch industry has scaled.
Space Force satellites manoeuvred against each other in orbit, the first exercise of its kind as the service openly describes weapons it operates there.
Seventeen months after its first Spectrum fell into the sea, the German startup completed the first orbital launch from continental Europe.
NASA's wide-field successor to Hubble lifted off from Kennedy to survey billions of galaxies and hunt for exoplanets from the Sun–Earth L2 point.
The executive order directs agencies to streamline licensing, environmental review and range operations so American launch cadence can grow several times over.
A Space Force mission and a Globalstar launch set a new record for the shortest gap between two orbital launches by one company.
The CEO said a valve failure during the May prelaunch test set off the fireball, and the company intends to fly New Glenn again before the end of the year.
The air-launched test vehicle reached double digits, giving the Pentagon a reusable way to fly hypersonic experiments at Mach 5 and above.
After a last-second abort a week earlier, the thirteenth flight went to plan and the ship made a soft landing at sea, where SpaceX later tried to recover it.
Skyroot Aerospace's debut flight succeeded on the first try, opening a commercial launch sector in India alongside ISRO.
A Chinese first stage flew back and touched down after sending its payload to orbit, ten years after SpaceX did it and a step toward the reusable rockets China needs for its mega-constellations.
The launch and spacecraft maker moved to own a global satellite network outright, the same day NASA launched a first-of-its-kind mission to save the falling Swift telescope.
The Electron flight set a record for responsive launch, the kind of call-up the military has been trying to prove possible for a decade.
NASA chose a commercial path for the 2028 telecommunications orbiter instead of building it in house, with the $700 million award going to Blue Origin in September.
The company listed its shares three days after NASA named the Artemis 3 crew, turning the dominant launch provider into a public company with quarterly earnings calls.
The quiet supersonic demonstrator broke the sound barrier over California, the start of flights to measure whether its 'thump' is gentle enough to allow supersonic travel over land.
The fireball at Cape Canaveral destroyed the vehicle and damaged the pad; Blue Origin later traced the blast to an oxygen valve and began rebuilding.
Flight 12 debuted the taller, more powerful Starship and the 33-engine V3 Super Heavy; the FAA opened a mishap investigation four days later, and China launched Shenzhou-23 the same day.
A new estimate for the space-based missile shield dwarfed the $175 billion announced a year earlier, as the Space Force pressed for interceptors in orbit by 2028.
The telescope resolved the surface of a hot, airless rocky world, a first that sets up the search for atmospheres on more temperate planets.
Russia's first new launch vehicle since Angara reached orbit from Baikonur on its first flight, a replacement for the Ukrainian-built Zenit.
NASA's next flagship observatory finished assembly and testing at Goddard ahead of shipment to Florida for a Falcon Heavy launch later in the year.
Blue Origin landed the booster again, yet the upper stage left AST SpaceMobile's giant BlueBird 7 satellite in the wrong orbit and the rocket was grounded days later.
Orion swung around the far side of the Moon, passed Apollo 13's distance record, and splashed down off California on April 11 to close a ten-day flight.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen lifted off from Kennedy on the SLS, the first people to leave low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The agency's Artemis update cancelled the orbiting outpost and redirected the money toward surface infrastructure and a 2028 landing.
The bigger, more powerful ship completed its first static fire at Starbase, the last major test before the V3 generation's debut flight.
With the SLS leak repaired in the Vehicle Assembly Building, NASA set an April 1 launch for the first crewed Moon flight in more than fifty years; Firefly's Alpha also returned to orbit that day.
New observations ruled out the 2032 lunar impact that had kept the 'city killer' asteroid in the news for a year.
Artemis 3 becomes a test of the landers in Earth orbit instead, with the first crewed landing moved to a later mission, as the agency rebuilds its lunar plan.
The agency said the 2024 flight came close to a very bad day, a finding that led to a leadership shake-up in human spaceflight a week later.
The four-booster Ariane 6 carried 32 Amazon Leo internet satellites on its debut, the day before SpaceX launched Crew-12 to the short-staffed station.
The first full fueling test of the SLS rocket leaked hydrogen at a familiar spot, and NASA gave up the February launch window.
New Shepard passenger flights stop so the company can put its people on Blue Moon landers and New Glenn, a bet on Artemis over joyrides.
A fast solar proton event pushed radiation levels up at high latitudes and on polar flight routes, the strongest storm of its kind since 2003.
NASA cut the mission short to bring an ill astronaut back on their Dragon, leaving a skeleton crew aboard; two days later the Artemis II rocket rolled to its pad.
The small satellite rode a Falcon 9 rideshare to begin a year of studying how starlight contaminates measurements of exoplanet atmospheres.
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship flew 165 orbital missions in one year, about 85 percent of all U.S. launches and more than any organisation has ever managed.
China's state-built reusable rocket put its payload into orbit on the first try; the first stage was lost on its landing attempt.
Seven months after his first nomination was pulled, the Senate voted 67–30 to put the Polaris Dawn commander in charge of NASA.
The crew photographed the cracked window on Shenzhou-20 from outside Tiangong so engineers could trace the debris strike that stranded the previous crew.
LandSpace's methane-fuelled rocket made China's first attempt to recover a booster from an orbital launch; the stage exploded in its landing burn after the upper stage reached orbit.
The replacement capsule flew just 20 days after the damage was found, the first emergency rescue launch in the history of human spaceflight.
Booster 18 failed during its first cryogenic proof test at Starbase, costing SpaceX its lead V3 booster weeks before the planned debut of the bigger Starship.
On only its second flight Blue Origin's rocket launched NASA's twin Mars probes and brought the first stage down on the ship Jacklyn, the first propulsive booster landing by anyone but SpaceX.
China postponed the crew's return after finding cracks in their capsule's window, the first time a crew has been held in orbit by damage to their ride home.
The crew docked in a Chinese-record 3.5 hours; 32-year-old Wu Fei became the youngest taikonaut to fly.
An H3 rocket sent JAXA's successor to the HTV on its first flight, carrying tonnes of supplies and able to host experiments after it leaves the station.
The last V2 Starship deployed satellite simulators, tested a steeper reentry and landed on target, while the reused booster flew a new landing-burn profile.
The probe's extended mission formally ran out at the end of September; with NASA's communications staff furloughed, its fate stayed unconfirmed for weeks.
NASA kept only excepted staff on the job as the federal shutdown began, pausing most contract work while Artemis II and station operations continued.
Mission managers said the first crewed flight around the Moon since 1972 could launch as soon as February 5, with the SLS rocket stacked and Orion nearly ready.
Cancelled in 2024 after $450 million was spent, the ice-prospecting rover will now ride a Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole in 2027 under a $190 million task order.
Perseverance's Cheyava Falls sample, now described in Nature, carries mineral patterns that on Earth are usually made by microbes; NASA called it the clearest sign of possible past life yet.
The 82-minute eclipse on September 7 was visible across Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia, the longest since 2022 and the most widely watched of the year.
After three losses in a row, Starship deployed eight Starlink simulators, relit a Raptor in space and splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean while the booster tested an engine-out landing in the Gulf.
A Falcon 9 launched the Space Force's reusable orbital test vehicle from Kennedy with a quantum inertial sensor and laser communications experiments aboard.
ULA's Vulcan Centaur, with four solid boosters for the first time, carried the Space Force's USSF-106 payloads including the NTS-3 navigation testbed straight to geosynchronous orbit.
Acting administrator Sean Duffy directed the agency to seek industry proposals for a 100-kilowatt fission reactor to power a lunar base before China gets there.
A GSLV put the $1.5 billion L- and S-band radar mission into orbit to map ground movement, ice and vegetation across the whole planet every 12 days.
A failure in core network software knocked out service for millions of users across every continent, the longest outage in the constellation's history.
Shubhanshu Shukla, Peggy Whitson, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Tibor Kapu landed off California after 18 days on the station, the first Indian, Polish and Hungarian station visitors.
The White House handed NASA to Duffy on an interim basis six weeks after pulling Jared Isaacman's nomination, as the agency faced a proposed 24 percent budget cut.
The ATLAS survey in Chile spotted a comet on a hyperbolic path from outside the solar system, giving telescopes months to study it on the way past the Sun.
The 3,200-megapixel camera in Chile captured millions of galaxies and more than 2,000 new asteroids in its first ten hours, ahead of a ten-year movie of the southern sky.
The carmaker's experimental booster flew for 57 seconds in Hokkaido and set down 37 centimetres from its target, a surprise entry into reusable launch.
After tilting its orbit 17 degrees out of the ecliptic, the ESA spacecraft showed a tangled magnetic field at the pole as the Sun passes solar maximum.
The Japanese lander's laser rangefinder returned bad altitude data in the final descent and it hit Mare Frigoris at speed, two years after the company's first attempt failed.
Flight 9 was the first with a flight-proven booster; the ship reached space but lost attitude control and broke up over the Indian Ocean, and the booster was lost on its landing burn.
The plan calls for space-based sensors and interceptors on a three-year timeline, with Space Force general Michael Guetlein in charge.
The Three-Body Computing Constellation is meant to process data in orbit with laser links between satellites, the start of a planned 2,800-satellite network.
Kosmos 482, built in 1972 to survive Venus, re-entered over the Indian Ocean after its booster stranded it in Earth orbit, with no damage reported.
A ULA Atlas V opened Amazon's broadband constellation, the start of a 3,200-satellite build-out meant to compete with Starlink.
Three astronauts launched from Jiuquan to relieve the Shenzhou-19 crew on Tiangong, as China kept its pace of two crewed flights a year toward a 2030 Moon landing.
Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen and Kerianne Flynn crossed the Kármán line on New Shepard's NS-31 for an 11-minute flight.
At his confirmation hearing the nominee said he would prioritise crewed Mars missions while keeping Artemis on track, and would not cut science.
Four private astronauts led by Chun Wang rode a Crew Dragon into a 90-degree orbit, ran medical and X-ray experiments, and splashed down off California after 3.5 days.
Isar Aerospace's Spectrum lifted off from Andøya, Norway, then tumbled and fell back into the sea; the company called it a successful first test of the pad and vehicle.
The Starliner test pilots came home on a SpaceX Dragon off the Florida coast, greeted by dolphins, 286 days after launching on what was planned as an eight-day flight.
A Falcon 9 carried four astronauts to the station after a ground-equipment scrub, the handover that let Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams leave after nine months.
IM-2 reached Mons Mouton, the closest any lander has come to the pole, but tipped into a crater and lost power within a day; Starship's eighth flight and Ariane 6's first commercial launch flew the same day.
Firefly's lander touched down upright in Mare Crisium and went on to run all ten NASA payloads through a full lunar day.
The 'city killer' briefly carried the highest impact probability ever recorded for an asteroid of its size before new observations drove the 2032 risk toward zero.
The commercial lander fired its engine for four minutes to be captured by the Moon, setting up a March landing attempt in Mare Crisium with ten NASA payloads aboard.
Blue Origin's NS-29 capsule rotated 11 times a minute to give 29 experiments two minutes of one-sixth gravity, a first for the vehicle.
On a 5.5-hour spacewalk with Butch Wilmore, Williams passed 62 hours of career EVA time; the pair, launched on Starliner, had been aboard the station nearly eight months.
The new president promised American astronauts on Mars and said nothing about the Moon, setting off a month of debate over Artemis and the Moon-first roadmap.
Blue Origin's 320-foot rocket put its upper stage into orbit on the first try; the booster missed its ocean-platform landing. The same day Starship's seventh flight lost its ship and India's SpaDeX satellites docked.
Outgoing administrator Bill Nelson said a sky-crane lander or a commercial heavy lander could cut Mars Sample Return to $6–7 billion, leaving the choice to the incoming administration.
A PSLV put two 220 kg satellites into orbit to attempt India's first autonomous docking, a skill its crewed and lunar sample programs will depend on.
On Christmas Eve the probe flew 3.8 million miles from the solar surface at 430,000 mph, the closest and fastest any spacecraft has ever gone, and called home two days later.
Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong spent 9 hours 6 minutes outside Tiangong installing debris shielding, beating a NASA record that had stood since 2001.
NASA's asteroid explorer used its second Earth gravity assist to line up an April 2025 flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson before heading to the Trojan swarms.
ESA's two spacecraft will fly 150 metres apart with millimetre precision so one can block the Sun for the other's coronagraph, giving hours-long views of the corona.
The new two-stage rocket flew for the first time from Hainan, opening a $553 million launch site built for China's commercial satellite constellations.
The ship restarted a Raptor in orbit and splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean, while the booster skipped the tower catch and landed in the Gulf with the president-elect watching from Starbase.
The carrier-capable fifth-generation jet flew for the crowd at the Zhuhai Airshow, making China the second country to field two stealth fighter types.
The seventh and last Venus gravity assist bent Parker's orbit toward a record December perihelion just 3.8 million miles from the Sun.
Three astronauts lifted off from Jiuquan on a Long March 2F for a six-month stay, including the youngest crew members China has flown.
NASA's Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin returned off Pensacola after hurricane delays, closing out the eighth operational SpaceX crew rotation.
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