BlueBird 6, built by Texas company AST SpaceMobile, lifted off atop an LVM3 rocket from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre Tuesday at 10:25 p.m. EST (0325 GMT and 8:55 a.m. India Standard Time on Dec. 24).

The LVM3 deployed BlueBird 6 about 324 miles (521 kilometers) above Earth 15.5 minutes after launch as planned.

AST SpaceMobile is building a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that beam broadband service directly to standard smartphones on the ground.

The company has now launched six operational satellites to orbit, five of them aboard a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in September 2024. Those previous spacecraft, BlueBirds 1 through 5, feature 693-square-foot (64.4 square meters) communication arrays — the largest ever unfurled in LEO.

BlueBird 6 will break that record, and by a healthy margin. It's the first of AST SpaceMobile's next-generation BlueBirds, whose arrays cover nearly 2,400 square feet (223 square meters) apiece.

Tuesday's liftoff was the ninth overall for the three-stage, 143-foot-tall (43.5 m) LVM3, which is India's most powerful rocket. It debuted in December 2014 and has a 100% success rate to date.

BlueBird 6, which tips the scales at about 13,450 pounds (6,100 kilograms), was the heaviest payload that the LVM3 has ever hauled to LEO, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11 p.m. ET on Dec. 23 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

All of this aerial weirdness involves unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP for short. Whatever they are, UAP continue to be seen, reported and even documented through various sensor technologies. However, despite years of whistleblowers testifying before Congress, there seems to have been a bottleneck in getting to the bottom of the UAP issue in 2025. Why so?

Key specialists appraising the issue UAP have yet to untangle the mystery, but do appear to agree on what needs to be done now to further resolve what UAP are and from where they might originate.

Plurality of minds

The UAP phenomenon benefits from having a plurality of minds engaged in disciplined debate, suggests Michael Cifone, founding executive director and President of the Society for UAP Studies, based in Los Angeles, California.

Today, there's a division emerging between classical Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), aka "flying saucer," incidents and studying UAP from the point of view of observational and experimental science. But engaging scientific methods and instruments turns out to be neither trivial nor cheap, Cifone said.

"Perhaps the holdup is reluctance to dump time, energy and money into what looks to some like a wild goose chase," said Cifone.

Cold cases

"Like any other scientific venture, both funding and institutional support is required," Cifone said. "Given the historical stigma associated with the topic that has been hard to achieve. But now with the emphasis no longer on chasing forensic cold cases, and relying on reports of UAP, serious scientists and student researchers are getting involved."

The upshot is to deploy scientific methodology to establish the observational framework with the proper instrumentation, Cifone added, "in order to generate the data on UAP from which more secure conclusions can be derived."

Cifone said that progress, like in any other science or research area, will be slow but hopefully steady, albeit incremental.

"What will likely happen is that there will be downstream benefits that aren't foreseeable exactly now. Maybe new sciences will break away. So it will be a win for the growth of knowledge and for science in particular," Cifone senses.

For Cifone, his view is to keep the eye on the ball and work out the observational framework design and required instruments and observational modalities before we can have the reliable datasets we need. "But science doesn't always go as planned. In any case, there's a lot of work to be done."

Cifone points to an increasing number of institutions that are studying UAPs. Indeed, work underway on UAP has blossomed into a world-wide field of research, he said.

All sky, all the time

To Cifone's point, there's the University of Würzburg in northern Bavaria, one of the oldest universities in Germany. An Interdisciplinary Research Center for Extraterrestrial Studies (IFEX) has been established.

One effort the university is developing is an "AllSkyCAM" able to capture UAP. An automated reporting system is currently under construction with the university cooperating with the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt, the national civil aviation authority of Germany, to research unusual phenomena in the country's airspace.

Then there's the Galileo Project led by astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University. They have designed and built an array of sensors to scan the sky for aerial phenomena and assess atmospheric anomalies that may not be of terrestrial origin.

This type of research can produce data on UAP, Cifone said, "then we need to experiment with the data and produce theories, or what you call explanations, and perhaps even understanding! We're only at the observational framework design and testing phase. Then we need to let the systems run, probably for many years."

Test a hypothesis

There's need to be able to scientifically test a hypothesis that some UAP are potentially extraterrestrial craft, said Robert Powell, executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU).

"I consider extreme acceleration to be the best characteristic that has the potential to eliminate a terrestrial explanation for a UAP," said Powell. But measurement of high accelerations of UAP, he said, requires high-precision scientific gear and data.

"The cost of putting out a network of calibrated and characterized equipment, maintaining it, obtaining placement rights on land, and analyzing the data will cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars," said Powell.

Military systems

One estimate by an engineer in SCU forecasts that given 300 "actual" UAP sightings per year — and assuming random distribution of sightings — that with 930 automated camera systems distributed across the U.S., one would have a 95% chance of detecting a UAP of 50 foot or larger size within a year.

"To date, the financial resources to achieve this are not available," said Powell. "The military has the capability with radar, satellite, and optical systems, but the scientific community does not have access to these systems." He thinks the work ahead could be done now via military systems, but only if there were no national security concerns.

"I think it will take many years to do it through privately-financed civilian systems but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue working at it," Powell concluded.

Ignore, rationalize away

Ryan Graves is chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Integration Committee. He is also director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, a military pilot group devoted to aerospace safety and national security, but focused on UAPs.

"Highly credible people and professional observers are seeing objects that appear to exhibit capabilities beyond the state of the art," Graves told Space.com. "In the data received, there seems to be this core anomalous aspect that we can't just ignore or rationalize away."

Graves speaks with UAP eye-witness authority as a former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot. He was the first active-duty pilot to publicly point to his own encounters and spotlights his military colleagues regarding their UAP sightings.

In July 2023, Graves testified about UAPs before the House Oversight Committee's National Security Subcommittee in Congress, a hearing centered on UAP and the implications for national security, public safety, and how best to attain government transparency on the issue.

Pay attention

"We need to pay attention to this and recognize the national security implications," Graves said. Objects are operating in sovereign air space, he said, potentially collecting intelligence and trying to break into or set the stage to counter our defenses and set the country up for strategic surprise.

In blunt talk, Graves said UAP are engaged in actions "that would be recognized as acts of war or at the minimum preparation for an attack."

For its part, the AIAA UAP Integration & Outreach Committee is a strictly agnostic, science-first committee inside the AIAA.

"Our remit is to bring aerospace rigor to an area with real safety-of-flight implications," Graves said. The committee has been convening experts across AIAA's technical committees, publishing peer-reviewed and conference papers, and producing policy guidance that standardizes how aviation professionals document and share safety-relevant observations, Graves added.

Retention of data

While AIAA provides technical expertise rather than lobbying, Graves said the work on UAP has helped clarify best-practice reporting standards as well as set standards for retention of data on what's being reported.

One early payoff is that AIAA's UAP effort parallels what Congress has been considering in the standalone bill "Safe Airspace for Americans Act," introduced in January 2024 and reintroduced in September of this year. "Our focus remains the same," said Graves, "and that is credible data, clear procedures, and aviation safety."

That bipartisan Act is championed by U.S. representatives Robert Garcia of California and Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, legislation crafted to support civilian UAP reporting.

"Transparency surrounding UAP is crucial for national security, public safety, and making sure people trust that our government is taking these reports seriously," Congressman Garcia said in a statement. "This bill creates a clear, protected pathway for pilots and other aviation professionals to report UAP incidents without having to fear stigma or worry about retaliation. This is a vital step forward to make sure our skies are safe and our government is responsive."

Closure on the topic?

Graves also points to the current leadership of the Department of Defense All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. It too is established to minimize technical and intelligence surprise by "synchronizing identification, attribution, and mitigation of UAP in the vicinity of national security areas," the AARO states.

"I'm optimistic. There is significant organizational change across the government that I think will bare fruit. There process is maturing to the point where they can start delivering on their expectations," said Graves.

Overall, Graves is heartened by current UAP interest and on-going activities.

"I don't know if there's been a better time to hope for closure on this topic. I don't think we've ever been in quite the situation we're in today," Graves said.

The hardware that will fly the astronauts moonward includes two 177-foot-tall (54 meters) twin boosters that are the backbone of the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket's launch power. Recently, the two boosters that will fly on the Artemis 2 mission had an "America 250" emblem painted on their sides, in honor of the upcoming. 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

What is it?

Artemis 2, scheduled to launch in early 2026, will be the first crewed mission of the program. Over a 10-day journey, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will travel around the moon and return to Earth. Their mission will test Artemis systems, procedures and spacecraft in preparation for future lunar landings.

Artemis 2 relies on two key vehicles: SLS, which is NASA's most powerful rocket to date, and the Orion spacecraft, designed to carry astronauts safely beyond low Earth orbit. Inside NASA's iconic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, these elements come together through a massive, carefully choreographed preparation effort.

Where is it?

The image was taken from inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC.

Why is it amazing?

For Artemis 2, the "America 250" represents NASA's celebration of the anniversary under the theme "Spirit of Innovation." Just as the U.S. was founded on bold ideas and transformative thinking, Artemis 2 embodies a new era of exploration that looks outward, to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Seeing the emblem on the boosters connects technological progress with national heritage, according to NASA. It serves as a reminder that spaceflight, for all its complexity, is also a cultural project, one that captures imagination, inspires generations and reflects shared aspirations.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the Artemis program and upcoming Artemis 2 launch.

On Wednesday (Dec. 17), this particular Starlink suffered an anomaly that caused a loss of communication with the ground and an unscheduled venting of its propulsion tank. The satellite is now tumbling and headed down toward Earth’s atmosphere, where it will be incinerated in a matter of weeks, according to SpaceX.

SpaceX asked Vantor (previously known as Maxar Intelligence) to image the stricken satellite, to get a better understanding of its condition. And Vantor delivered.

The company used its WorldView-3 Earth-observing satellite to image the Starlink spacecraft on Thursday (Dec. 18) from a distance of 150 miles (241 kilometers).

The photo, taken while the duo were flying over Alaska, features a resolution of 4.7 inches (12 centimeters), providing SpaceX with key information about the satellite.

"Our team took advantage of the advanced capabilities of our non-Earth imaging technology and recently expanded collection capacity to move quickly and provide SpaceX with confirmation that their satellite was mostly intact," Todd Surdey, Vantor’s executive vice president and general manager of enterprise and emerging products, said in a statement on Saturday (Dec. 20). "This rapid intelligence delivery enabled them to quickly assess possible damage to the spacecraft."

There is apparently some damage: Data suggests that the satellite released a small number of debris objects as a result of the anomaly. But those pieces, and the satellite itself, shouldn't a present a problem to other spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to SpaceX.

"We appreciate the rapid response by @vantortech to provide this imagery. Additional data suggest that there is a small number of trackable debris objects from the event, and we expect the satellite and debris to reenter and fully demise within weeks," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said in an X post on Saturday.

Starlink is by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled. It currently consists of about 9,300 active spacecraft — about 65% of all the operational satellites in Earth orbit.

The company launched its Hanbit-Nano rocket from the Alcantara Space Center in Brazil on Monday at 8:13 p.m. EST (10:13 p.m. local time in Brazil; 0113 GMT on Dec. 23).

It was the first-ever orbital launch attempt by a South Korean company. And, as often happens on debut liftoffs, something went wrong: The 57-foot-tall (17.3 meters) rocket came crashing back to Earth about a minute after liftoff, according to Space Orbit, which was following the launch.

It's unclear at this early stage what caused the failure. Innospace did not immediately provide an update on X, and the company cut off its webcast in the wake of the incident, shortly after announcing that an anomaly had occurred.

Hanbit-Nano is a two-stage rocket whose first stage burns liquid oxygen (LOX) and paraffin. The upper stage comes in two configurations; one burns LOX and paraffin while the other employs LOX and liquid methane.

The rocket is designed to deliver up to 198 pounds (90 kilograms) of payload into a sun-synchronous orbit from Brazil. On the debut launch, the Hanbit-Nano was carrying five small satellites for customers from Brazil and India, as well as three additional technology-demonstrating payloads.

Innospace was founded in 2017. The company, which currently employs about 260 people, has developed all of its launch technology in-house, company CEO Kim Soo-jong told Space.com in October at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney.

Innospace's vision doesn't end with getting Hanbit-Nano online. The company is also developing larger, more powerful rockets called Hanbit-Micro and Hanbit-Mini.

Monday's launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday (Dec. 17), but Innospace pushed it back several times, due to a technical issue and bad weather forecasts.

Rocket Lab launched its 21st and final mission of the year over the weekend, sending a private Japanese Earth-observing satellite to orbit.

An Electron rocket carrying the QPS-SAR-15 satellite, nicknamed Sukunami-I, lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Sunday (Dec. 21) at 1:36 a.m. EST (0636 GMT; 7:36 p.m. local time in New Zealand).

The launch, which the company called "The Wisdom God Guides," went well: Electron's "kick stage" deployed Sukunami-I into a circular orbit 357 miles (575 kilometers) above Earth as planned.

Once it's up and running, the satellite will join the Earth-observing constellation operated by Japanese company iQPS. Its spacecraft view our planet using synthetic aperture radar, meaning they can peer through clouds and get good looks at night as well as during the day.

"The Wisdom God Guides" was Rocket Lab's sixth launch in 2025 for iQPS and its seventh for the company overall. And the Japanese company has booked an additional five Electron launches in 2026, according to Rocket Lab.

Sunday's flight was the last of the year for Rocket Lab. It has now launched 21 missions in 2025, adding to the company's single-year record. The previous high, set last year, was 16.

All of this year's launches were successful. Eighteen were orbital launches with the 59-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) Electron. The other three involved HASTE, a modified, suborbital version of Electron designed to let customers test hypersonic technologies in the final frontier.

"Our new record of annual launches and the breadth of upcoming missions go to show how much of a global impact Electron continues to have on the space industry, and we're looking forward to another year of continued execution in 2026," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in an emailed statement on Sunday.

"In 2026, we're expanding Electron’s global reach with more multi-launch constellation deployments, dedicated missions for domestic civil space and international space agencies in Japan and Europe, and both suborbital and orbital launches with defense applications for hypersonic technology and national security," he added.

Qingzhou, meaning "Light Ship," is being developed by the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAMCAS) as a smaller, lighter and potentially lower-cost complement to China’s existing Tianzhou cargo spacecraft.

China completed its Tiangong space station in 2022 and aims to keep it permanently occupied with crew for at least a decade. With plans to expand the orbital outpost beyond its current three-module, T-shaped configuration, China also wants new, agile solutions to keep Tiangong supplied.

The Qingzhou spacecraft passed a design review in June and entered the initial manufacturing phase, according to a recent China Central Television (CCTV) report.

The prototype measures roughly 10.8 feet (3.3 meters) in diameter, has a launch mass of about 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilograms), and is capable of carrying up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg) of cargo to orbit. Its hybrid structure combines a pressurized module for crew supplies and sensitive instruments with an unpressurized aft section capable of carrying external payloads and space-exposure experiments.

"We have now conducted large-scale experiments and are currently loading and verifying the status of the remaining individual machines, as well as conducting final testing. The overall test results are quite good," Wu Huiying, deputy chief designer of the Qingzhou cargo spacecraft, told CCTV.

Full engineering model production is scheduled to begin in early 2026, with construction expected to be completed by the end of that year. Its debut flight will follow based on the operational needs of the Tiangong station, according to Wu.

The first prototype was initially stated to fly on the debut launch of commercial rocket startup CAS Space’s Kinetica-2. That plan now appears to have been altered, with CAS Space reported to be preparing for that very launch from Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert in the near future.

Qingzhou is one of a pair of new spacecraft commissioned by China’s human spaceflight agency as the country looks to upgrade its space transportation capabilities. The other, named Haolong, is a reusable shuttle concept being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute under the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China.

The image reveals the thermal footprint of a major Bitcoin-mining data center in Rockdale, Texas, which has been widely criticized for its electricity consumption and carbon footprint.

SatVu didn't disclose which specific facility is in the image, but Rockdale is home to the Riot Platforms Bitcoin mine. The facility, considered the largest in the U.S., has an energy consumption of 700 megawatts, requiring about as much electricity as 300,000 homes.

The satellite image reveals in a resolution of 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) where and how much heat leaks into the environment from the plant. SatVu thinks that the insights that could be gleaned from such images could help regulators and grid operators better understand the impact such facilities have on the environment and local power networks.

"Today's data center buildout is moving incredibly quickly, and the world needs better ways to understand what's actually happening on the ground," Thomas Cobti, SatVu's VP for Business Development, said in a statement. "Thermal data gives an objective view of operational activity as it occurs — not weeks later through reports or announcements."

Although the image was only released on Dec. 17, it was most likely captured already in 2023, before SatVu's HotSat-1 satellites failed in orbit in December that year. SatVu plans to launch its replacement HotSat-2 next year and is already building HotSat-3.

The thermal camera aboard these satellites is the best in class, providing an order of a magnitude better resolution than other temperature-measuring devices in orbit.

SatVu released the first HotSat-1 images in October 2023, capturing the heat trails behind locomotives and showing how heat spreads from large sun-drenched concrete parking lots in a city like Las Vegas.

With the newly released image, the company shows how satellites could keep an objective eye on a fast-growing and controversial sector.

"At a closer level, [the image] reveals which substations and cooling systems are under load — clear, physical indicators of real operational behavior," the company said in the statement. "Together, these layers provide a grounded, evidence-based view of how major data center sites are evolving in real time."

A closer inspection of the image shows "distinct thermal signatures across rooftop chillers, transformers and electrical yards, making clear which parts of the facility are active and which remain dormant," SatVu added.

According to the McKinsey consultancy, investment into computing data centers will continue to grow, reaching more than $7 billion by 2030. Global data centers are believed to contribute by about 0.5% to the global carbon dioxide emissions. Bitcoin mining is especially energy intensive, a recent study estimated that one Bitcoin transaction generates about as much carbon dioxide as a gasoline car generates in a 1,600-mile (2,500-kilometer) drive.

The seventh-ever mission of Japan's H3 rocket did not go according to plan.

The H3 launched from Tanegashima Space Center on Sunday (Dec. 21) at 8:51 p.m. EST (0151 GMT and 10:51 a.m. local Japan time on Dec. 22), carrying a navigation satellite known as Michibiki 5, or QZS-5, aloft.

"However, the second stage engine’s second ignition failed to start normally and shut down prematurely," officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement early Monay morning (Dec. 22). "As a result, QZS-5 could not be put into the planned orbit, and the launch failed."

The 10,580-pound (4,800 kilograms) Michibiki 5 was supposed to be part of Japan's homegrown Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a navigation network in geosynchronous orbit high above Earth.

"This system is compatible with GPS satellites and can be utilized with them in an integrated fashion," Japanese officials wrote in a description of the QZSS project.

"QZSW can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well," they added.

The first QZSS satellite, a pathfinder, launched in September 2010. The system currently consists of four operational spacecraft, but Japan wants it to grow, as Sunday's unsuccessful launch shows. Indeed, the network will eventually consist of 11 spacecraft, if all goes according to plan.

The two-stage H3 rocket was developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. It's the successor to the H-2A, a workhorse launcher that retired in June after a quarter-century of orbital service.

The H3 failed during its debut launch in March 2023 but bounced back with five consecutive successes — until Sunday night. JAXA has set up a task force headed by agency chief Hiroshi Yamakawa to help get to the bottom of the Michibiki 5 launch anomaly.

"We would like to express our deepest apology to many people and entities, particularly those related to the QZS-5, local organizations and the public, who had high expectations for this project," JAXA officials wrote in Monday morning's update.

Over the past 12 months, we saw multiple spaceflight records broken, the debut of a powerful new reusable rocket and the first-ever fully successful private moon landing.

Here's a rundown of the top 10 spaceflight stories of the year.

10. Astronauts fly over Earth's poles for the first time ever

On March 31, SpaceX launched the private Fram2 mission, which sent four private astronauts on a 3.5-day mission to Earth orbit aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. It was SpaceX's 17th crewed mission to date, but it still broke new ground: Fram2 circled our planet over the poles, which no astronaut flight had ever done before.

There are a number of reasons why human spaceflight planners have avoided this trajectory. Chief among them is that the most common astronaut destinations — these days, the International Space Station (ISS) and China's Tiangong outpost — don't take polar paths. Flying over the poles also exposes astronauts to higher levels of radiation and imposes communications challenges.

The Fram2 crew — led by billionaire commander and mission funder Chun Wang — performed a few dozen scientific experiments during their flight. They also got unprecedented views of our planet's icy extremes, some of which they shared with those of us stuck down here on terra firma.

9. India completes its first in-space docking

India notched a big milestone shortly after the calendar turned this year: On Jan. 15, the two spacecraft of the nation's Space Docking Experiment, or SpaDex for short, linked up in Earth orbit. The success made India just the fourth nation ever to pull off an in-space docking, after the USSR/Russia, the United States and China.

Those other countries are all space powers, a status that India seeks to attain as well. And SpaDex is a step along this path: Mastery of docking tech is necessary to achieve big things in the final frontier, like building a space station and returning samples from the moon.

8. European mission creates its first artificial solar eclipse

An "eclipse machine" came online in 2025. The European Space Agency's two-satellite Proba-3 mission launched to Earth orbit in December 2024, tasked with generating artificial solar eclipses via precise formation flying: One Proba-3 spacecraft blocks out the sun from the perspective of the other, which observes the phenomenon using an onboard telescope.

Proba-3 was designed to help scientists study the sun's wispy, superhot corona, or outer atmosphere, which is swamped by our star's overwhelming brightness — except during total solar eclipses. And Proba-3 delivered the goods for the first time on May 23, capturing an eclipse of its own creation.

7. Suni Williams breaks spacewalk record

Suni Williams' latest space stay lasted far longer than she or anyone else had expected — and the unplanned extension allowed her to break a spacewalk record.

Williams and fellow NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore launched toward the ISS on June 5, 2024, on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. Their mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so. But Starliner suffered thruster problems and helium leaks on the way up, so NASA delayed the vehicle's return to study the issues. The agency eventually decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened without incident on Sept. 7, 2024, and kept Williams and Wilmore on the ISS until March of this year, when they returned to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

NASA integrated Williams and Wilmore into the ISS' full-time crew, and the duo used their extra time well. Williams, for example, performed two spacewalks: one on Jan. 16 and the other on Jan. 30. That second excursion brought her career spacewalking time (accrued over nine extravehicular activities) to 62 hours, 6 minutes. That set a new record for female spaceflyers, besting NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson's total time by 1 hour, 45 minutes. The overall record is 82 hours, 22 minutes, held by cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev.

Whitson still holds the American and female-astronaut records for the most total time spent in space, at 675 days. Williams has been off Earth for a total of 608 days.

6. China launches a mission to sample a "quasi-moon" of Earth

China continued its bold advance into the final frontier this year, launching its first-ever asteroid sample-return mission. That project, called Tianwen 2, isn't targeting any old asteroid — it's on the way to Kamo'oalewa (also known as 2016 HO3), which may be a piece of the moon blasted into space by a giant impact. Kamo'oalewa is weird in another way as well: It's one of Earth's seven known "quasi-moons," objects that don't circle our planet but orbit the sun in lockstep with it.

Tianwen 2 launched on May 28. If all goes according to plan, it will return samples of Kamo'oalewa to Earth in 2027, giving scientists their first up-close look at an intriguing and mysterious object.

5. SpaceX breaks its launch record — again

No surprises here: SpaceX broke its single-year launch record in 2025. Elon Musk's company has launched 170 times so far this year — 165 flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and five suborbital test missions of Starship, the giant, fully reusable vehicle designed to help humanity settle Mars and the moon. More than 70% of the Falcon 9 launches have been devoted to building out SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation, which consists of more than 9,000 operational satellites (and counting).

It was the sixth year in a row that SpaceX has set a new launch record. That mark has increased from 25 in 2020 to 31 (2021) to 61 (2022) to 98 (2023) to 138 (2024) and, now, to 170. And SpaceX is planning to launch two more Falcon 9 missions before the calendar turns, so that number should reach 172.

4. China launches its first reusable rocket

The Chinese company Landspace has developed its own version of the Falcon 9. The rocket, called Zhuque-3, features a reusable first stage powered by nine engines. Zhuque-3 took flight for the first time on Dec. 3, successfully reaching orbit and nearly pulling off a booster landing as well. Zhuque-3's first stage crashed and burned near its touchdown zone, however, apparently after suffering an engine loss during the descent.

Zhuque-3 may well pull off China's first-ever orbital rocket landing on its next flight. Or another vehicle may claim that mantle — Space Pioneer's Tianlong-3, perhaps, or the Long March 12A, which was developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Both of those rockets feature reusable first stages and are scheduled to make their debut flights soon.

3. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket comes online

An even more powerful, partially reusable rocket earned its wings this year: New Glenn, the heavy lifter developed by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' aerospace company.

New Glenn debuted Jan. 16, successfully reaching orbit with a dummy version of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft platform on board. The company tried to land the rocket's reusable first stage on a ship at sea during the flight, but that didn't work out. The second try was the charm, however: New Glenn's booster aced its ocean landing during flight number two, which occurred Nov. 13. The rocket succeeded in its primary mission that day as well, sending the twin ESCAPADE Mars probes into the final frontier for NASA.

Each New Glenn first stage is designed to fly at least 25 times, according to Blue Origin. If the company can attain such SpaceX-levels of reuse, it could achieve some very big things down the road.

2. SpaceX's Starship aces two straight test flights

Speaking of reuse: SpaceX's fully reusable vehicle, the Starship megarocket, flew five test flights in 2025. The first three were checkered affairs, featuring the loss of at least one of Starship's two stages. But the final two, which lifted off in August and October, were unqualified successes.

On both missions, Starship's Super Heavy booster came back to Earth for a pinpoint touchdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The vehicle's upper stage reached space, deployed dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, and splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, still has to check off some pretty big boxes before it's up and running. It needs to reach orbit, for example, and demonstrate in-space refueling of the upper stage, which will be needed on all missions to the moon and Mars. But Starship enters 2026 with some serious momentum.

1. A private company lands on the moon

On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's robotic Blue Ghost lander touched down successfully on the moon. It remained operational for about two weeks thereafter, allowing the science instruments it carried to do their planned work.

This was an unprecedented achievement for private industry and spaceflight in general. Another company, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, put its Odysseus lunar lander down in February 2024, but that vehicle soon toppled over, shortening its mission and those of some of its payloads. Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander, Athena, suffered a similar fate shortly after its touchdown on March 6 of this year.

Blue Ghost's success was also a victory for NASA, which booked the mission (and those of Odysseus and Athena) via its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. More CLPS missions — by Firefly, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic and other companies — are scheduled to launch soon, potentially opening up the moon to more research and human exploration activities — and perhaps even settlement down the road.

Space insurance underwriters typically offer premiums that are mission-wide and include possible satellite replacement and can therefore be very expensive. California on-orbit services startup Arkisys is now teaming up with London-based Odin Space to offer its customers specific collision insurance, based on verified debris impact data from Odin Space's sensors.

Arkisys's upcoming Cutter mission will carry sensors from Odin Space, which is developing advanced space debris detection. Odin Space's Nano Sensors are designed to act as a "black box" for spacecraft, being able to pinpoint the exact moment of an impact to a spacecraft and its location. Forensic on-orbit data collected by the sensors can then be used to verify that a damaged spacecraft experienced an on-orbit impact event consistent with debris or micrometeoroid strikes.

Cutter is designed to host payloads or provide "last mile" transportation after launch, such as delivery to Arkisys Port modules in orbit. The new move aims to provide assurance to customers in an evolving and innovative space ecosystem amid the growing threat of space debris, without being prohibitively expensive.

"By enabling insurance for the Arkisys Port Architecture flight elements (Cutter and Port Modules) in orbit, this partnership offers customers not just a new on-orbit commercial logistics domain but a proven method to safeguard their business investments and operations," David Barnhart, CEO and co-founder of Arkisys, said in a statement.

"We see this partnership as one of the key enablers for the new in-space circular economy to enable thousands of new customers to develop new commercial innovations in space," he added. "We are proud to host Odin's unique new technology that enables this next step in space commercialization."

Odin Space is working to predict and monitor dangerous sub-centimeter orbital debris, which can't be tracked from the ground. Even such tiny pieces can do serious damage: Space debris travels at orbital speeds of roughly 4.5 to 5 miles per second (7 to 8 kilometers per second), with relative collision velocities of up to 9.3 miles per second (15 km per second), meaning any impact with a spacecraft will be highly energetic and potentially mission-ending. Earlier this month. the company secured seed funding of $3 million from investors, boosting its plans to track and map debris threats with its Nano Sensors and Scout Satellites.

"Our partnership with Arkisys marks a pivotal shift in how the industry tackles the rising threat of lethal, non-trackable debris," James New, CEO and Co-founder of Odin Space, said in the same statement. "Equipping Arkisys spacecraft with Odin's Nano Sensors is the first move in a new era of safer, smarter, more sustainable space activity."

Odin Space carried out its first orbital space junk tracking system test in 2023, hitching a ride on SpaceX's Transporter 8 mission.

Nearly five years into its mission on the Red Planet, the car-sized rover still has enough remaining capability to drive more than twice the distance it has already logged, mission scientists said Wednesday (Dec. 17) at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Louisiana. If all goes according to plan and nothing breaks, Perseverance could drive as much as 62 miles (100 kilometers) by the time its mission is over.

That estimate puts the six-wheeled robot on track to surpass the current distance record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers), set by NASA's Opportunity rover after more than 14 years of exploration on Mars before a monster dust storm ended its mission in 2018. Perseverance is "in excellent shape," Steve Lee, the rover's deputy project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told reporters at the conference.

Lee said engineering tests completed over the summer certified that the rotary actuators used to steer Perseverance's wheels can operate optimally for at least another 37 miles (60 kilometers). Since touching down inside Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, the rover has already traveled about 25 miles (40 kilometers), according to NASA. "It just turned out to add up to a nice even 100 kilometers," Lee said.

Perseverance was originally tested and certified to drive a total of just 12 miles (20 kilometers). Its extended durability reflects lessons learned from Curiosity, its predecessor, whose wheels accumulated an increasing number of dings and punctures after encountering terrain sharper and more rugged than anticipated. That led engineers to design Perseverance's wheels for even tougher conditions, making them larger in diameter and giving them twice as many treads as Curiosity's, Lee said.

"That is proving to play out very well," Lee added. The rover's wheels, he said, "are in fantastic shape" with no known punctures or tears.

Since its wheels-down landing in Jezero Crater — the remnant of a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago that was later home to a large lake and river delta — Perseverance has drilled and cached rock samples in its search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover has since climbed more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) up the crater's inner wall and onto the rim, exploring new terrain.

Along the way, Perseverance found one of its most intriguing targets yet — an arrowhead-shaped rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls that contains chemical signatures and structures scientists say could have formed through processes associated with microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter than it is today.

In a paper published Dec. 17 in the journal Science, scientists report results from the crater's "Margin Unit," where Perseverance collected samples rich in the mineral olivine. This olivine likely formed at high temperatures deep within the Red Planet until being later exposed at the surface, where it interacted with water from Jezero's long-gone lake and with carbon dioxide in Mars' early atmosphere.

Those interactions produced carbonate minerals, which can preserve chemical signatures of past environments and potentially of biological activity, scientists say.

"This combination of olivine and carbonate was a major factor in the choice to land at Jezero Crater," study lead author Ken Williford of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Washington said in NASA's statement. "These minerals are powerful recorders of planetary evolution and the potential for life."

As Perseverance moves beyond the crater's rim, scientists hope to collect additional olivine-rich samples and compare them with those gathered from the Margin Unit.

The rover currently carries six unused sample tubes, and at least two tubes contain samples that have been collected but not yet sealed, meaning they could be replaced if more compelling targets emerge, Lee said.

That flexibility may prove important as the rover pushes into new terrain. This week, the rover is expected to reach a site nicknamed Lac de Charmes, just beyond the rim of Jezero Crater, where ancient rocks appear to be more intact — and potentially more revealing of early Martian geological processes — than those closer to the crater, Briony Horgan of Purdue University in Indiana who co-authored the new Science paper, told reporters on Wednesday.

Perseverance captured this panoramic view that includes Lac de Charmes, where it will look to collect additional samples next year. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Scientists are eager to bring Perseverance's haul — the 10 sample tubes dropped onto the crater floor in 2023 — back to laboratories on Earth, but their return remains uncertain as NASA's troubled Mars Sample Return program languishes in limbo.

That uncertainty has not altered Perseverance's near-term science plans, Lee said. The mission team is working with NASA headquarters to finalize the rover's next 2.5 years of exploration, extending through most of 2028, he said, with no current plans to deposit additional sample tubes beyond those already awaiting potential pickup.

The team is also beginning to explore how artificial intelligence might assist mission operations and data analysis. Lee described AI as "an exciting emerging capability," particularly for identifying long-term trends in the rover's growing data archive, and potentially helping develop short-term activity plans.

"We still are at that stage where we want to make sure to do that very carefully," Lee said.

Any AI-assisted plans would still undergo the same rigorous simulations and human oversight as traditional command sequences, he said, "to make sure any plans that are developed are going to make sense and are safe."

When asked how long Perseverance may last on Mars, Lee said the rover carries no consumables, such as propellant, that would impose a hard end to the mission. A NASA assessment of the rover's subsystems predicts that Perseverance could continue operating through at least 2031.

The primary life-limiting factor for the rover is its radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which generates electricity from the heat released by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 and gradually produces less power over time. That will require more conservative operations, Lee said, likening it to a phone charging more slowly on a weaker power source.

"We'll start seeing that and have to adjust our appetites in operations," Lee said. In the meantime, "there is a lot to keep us busy."

Update for 5 p.m. ET on Dec. 22: Innospace is aiming to launch the Spaceward mission today (Dec. 22) at 8 p.m. ET (0100 GMT on Dec. 23) after delays caused by a technical issue and bad weather.

South Korean startup Innospace is set to attempt its first orbital launch today (Dec. 22), and you can watch the action live.

Liftoff is currently scheduled for 8 p.m. EST (10 p.m. local time and 0100 GMT on Dec. 23) from the Alcantara Space Center in Brazil. Innospace's Hanbit-Nano rocket will aim to insert five small satellites for customers from Brazil and India into a 186-mile-high (300 kilometers) orbit and mark a first for a private Korean company.

Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of Innospace, or directly via the company. Coverage will begin at 7 p.m. EST (0000 GMT).

"Hanbit-Nano has been successfully rolled out from the integration facility and transported to the launch pad ahead of liftoff. Preparations for the Spaceward mission are right on track," Innospace said Wednesday (Dec. 16) in a post on the social media platform X.

The 57-foot-tall (17.3 meters) rocket is designed to be able to launch 198 pounds (90 kilograms) into a sun-synchronous orbit from Brazil. The rocket's first-stage hybrid engine burns paraffin and liquid oxygen while the upper stage uses methane and liquid oxygen or paraffin and liquid oxygen, depending on its configuration.

Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong told Space.com at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, Australia, in October that the company was established in 2017 and employs 260 people.

"All of our technology is developed by ourselves. The engineers are Korean, and the development is fully indigenous," Kim said. "Korea has built an ecosystem to develop a launch vehicle. We work with more than 100 supply-chain companies in South Korea," he added.

Kim said Innospace is very focused on the global market. "We already have around 14 contracts with global satellite companies."

A lot is riding on this first launch. Kim said that Hanbit-Micro, an advanced model of Hanbit-Nano that can carry 375 pounds (170 kg) to orbit, is set to begin commercial flights early next year, should all go according to plan.

Today's launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday (Dec. 17), but Innospace pushed it back two days to replace a part in the cooling system of the rocket's first stage. Bad weather forced an additional delay.

On Thursday (Dec. 18), President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled "Ensuring American Space Superiority." Dominance off Earth is vital to the nation's security and prosperity, according to the document.

"The United States must therefore pursue a space policy that will extend the reach of human discovery, secure the Nation's vital economic and security interests, unleash commercial development and lay the foundation for a new space age," the executive order states. You can find the full text of the order here.

The document gets into some specifics about how to make this happen. For example, it calls for the nation to return astronauts to the moon by 2028, and to start construction of a permanent lunar base by 2030 "to ensure a sustained American presence in space and enable the next steps in Mars exploration."

Nuclear power in space is part of this vision. "Ensuring American Space Superiority" lists as a priority the deployment of nuclear reactors in Earth orbit and on the moon, and states that one such facility should be ready to launch toward the lunar surface by 2030.

These goals aren't terribly surprising. For example, NASA is already working toward a 2028 crewed moon landing via its Artemis program, which also aims to set up one or more bases near the lunar south pole over the ensuing years.

The agency has also been developing a potential fission reactor for use on the moon for several years now, with the goal of deploying it in the early 2030s. And a few months ago, we got wind of the more aggressive 2030 timeline for this power source, via a directive from then-NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy.

Duffy no longer leads NASA, by the way: Billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman officially took the reins, in a full rather than acting capacity, on Thursday.

The executive order also stresses the need to strengthen the United States' defensive capabilities in space.

For example, it calls for the development and testing of "prototype next-generation missile defense technologies by 2028 to progressively and materially enhance America's air and missile defenses pursuant to Executive Order 14186 of January 27, 2025 (The Iron Dome for America)." Trump has billed his vision for such a missile defense shield as a Golden Dome for the country.

Growing the space economy is a priority as well. Trump calls for the attraction of "at least $50 billion of additional investment in American space markets by 2028," and he wants to boost the cadence of rocket launches and landings, which are already at an all-time high (thanks in large part to SpaceX's incredible productivity).

The document also reinforces the plan to have one or more private outposts up and running in Earth orbit by the time the International Space Station retires in 2030.

The executive order gets the ball rolling on implementation as well. For instance, it directs NASA to submit within 90 days a plan explaining how it will achieve the "the policy objectives in this order regarding leading the world in space exploration and expanding human reach and American presence in space."

Also within 90 days, Isaacman (along with the Secretary of Commerce) must identify any "acquisition programs" that are 30% behind schedule, 30% over budget, underperforming and/or "unaligned with the priorities in this order, along with a description of their planned mitigation or remediation efforts."

"Ensuring American Space Superiority" also revokes Executive Order 14056, which was issued by then-President Joe Biden on Dec. 1, 2021. Biden's order officially renewed the National Space Council (NSC), which Trump revived from a nearly quarter-century hiatus in 2017, during his first term as president. The new order may spell the end for the NSC, which is chaired by the vice president and helps steer the nation's space policy.

The mishap led to a loss of communication with the Starlink spacecraft, which was orbiting at an altitude of 260 miles (418 kilometers), according to the company.

In addition, "the anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km [2.5 miles], and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects," representatives of Starlink, a company that's owned by SpaceX, said in an X post on Thursday morning (Dec. 18). That description suggests that the Starlink satellite's propulsion tank may have ruptured or suffered some other type of damage.

SpaceX is working with NASA and the U.S. Space Force to keep tabs on the newly liberated pieces of space debris, the post continued, stressing that there's not much to worry about.

"The satellite is largely intact, tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks. The satellite's current trajectory will place it below the @Space_Station, posing no risk to the orbiting lab or its crew," Starlink representatives wrote.

"As the world’s largest satellite constellation operator, we are deeply committed to space safety," they added. "We take these events seriously. Our engineers are rapidly working to root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event."

The Starlink megaconstellation is by far the largest ever assembled. It currently consists of nearly 9,300 active satellites, meaning that SpaceX operates about 65% of all the functional spacecraft zipping around our planet.

And that number is growing all the time. SpaceX has launched 122 Starlink missions this year alone, sending more than 3,000 of the satellites to low Earth orbit.

Starlink satellites have a design lifetime of about five years, and SpaceX deorbits each one intentionally before it conks out in orbit.

The company has taken other steps to mitigate the space-junk threat posed by the megaconstellation as well. For example, Starlink spacecraft avoid potential collisions autonomously, an ability they put into practice quite often: In the first six months of 2025, Starlink satellites conducted about 145,000 evasive actions — an average of about four per spacecraft per month.

There's no guarantee that every satellite operator is quite so responsible, however. Last week, for example, a satellite recently deployed by a Chinese rocket gave a Starlink spacecraft a close shave, apparently without providing the proper warning ahead of time.

"As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200-meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude. Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said via X on Dec. 12.

A new study finds that, with the immense quantity of satellites that hurtle in Earth's orbit today, the first smashup would occur in less than three days, potentially triggering a dangerous collision cascade that could quickly make space around the planet unusable.

The study, published on the online preprint repository arXiv, has not yet been peer-reviewed, the authors caution, but it raises questions about the sustainability of humanity's use of space. The researchers call this expected time-to-collision value the Crash Clock and calculated it by running a model of all known objects in space and determining an average collision rate for various orbital regions in the absence of avoidance maneuvers.

They found that regions in low Earth orbit (LEO) at altitudes around 300 miles (500 kilometers), where most satellites of megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink reside, could see a collision in as little as 2.8 days. For comparison, the team ran an identical simulation with numbers of satellites and space debris in orbit from 2018. At that time, it would have taken 128 days for the first collision to occur, Samantha Lawler, an associate professor in astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada and one of the paper's authors, told Space.com.

"It's been a big change since 2018," Lawler said.

The idea that satellites in orbit could suddenly lose their ability to avoid collisions is not science fiction. Every time the sun unleashes a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a burst of magnetized plasma — toward Earth, the planet's tenuous upper atmosphere thickens. Satellites in LEO then experience more drag and slow down, meaning their trajectories become impossible to predict.

In 2003, for example, after the Halloween storm — one of the most intense space weather events of the last three decades — satellite operators lost track of positions of their spacecraft for days. At that time, a few hundred operational satellites orbited the planet, and no collision occurred. And the Halloween storm was only a fraction of what the sun is capable of. A stronger solar storm, perhaps as potent as the Carrington Event of 1859 — the most intense recorded solar storm in human history — would take a week or more to fully subside.

"At the beginning of a solar storm, there's a huge increase in atmospheric density and things start to get pulled down," Sarah Thiele, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, and corresponding author of the paper, told Space.com. "Before things start getting back to normal, you have uncertainties of several kilometers in the positions of satellites, and it becomes impossible to estimate where objects are going to be in the future — and therefore it becomes impossible to predict collisions and conduct avoidance maneuvers."

The Crash Clock data suggests that, in 2018, near-Earth space would most likely have had enough time to recover from the most extreme solar storm before the first collision occurred. In 2025, however, an orbital smashup would be almost certain. Such a collision would create thousands of fragments that would threaten everything in their path, potentially triggering an unstoppable chain of events. With every subsequent crash, the affected orbital region would become more unsafe — a nightmare scenario known as the Kessler syndrome.

"2.8 days is the average expectation value for time to the first collision," Thiele said. "It's a probabilistic estimate. We're not saying that for sure this is going to happen in exactly that time. It's what you might expect."

Currently, some 13,000 functioning satellites orbit the planet, according to the European Space Agency, together with more than 43,500 pieces of space debris — defunct satellites, rocket stages and collision fragments — that are large enough to be tracked. These objects circle the planet at speeds of about 7.8 kilometers (4.8 miles) per second, and their paths frequently intersect. Space situational awareness companies, the U.S. Space Command and other agencies predict satellite trajectories and alert operators to perform collision-avoidance maneuvers in case of close approaches. Starlink, by far the currently largest constellation in orbit, encompassing around 9,000 functioning satellites, performed 145,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the six months prior to July 2025, equivalent to around four maneuvers per Starlink satellite every month.

The global space industry, however, is far from done with satellite constellation deployments. Analysts estimate that by 2035, tens of thousands more satellites might be added to Earth orbit. Things might therefore become much more treacherous in the not-so-distant future.

Lawler and Thiele declined to estimate how short the Crash Clock could be if there were perhaps six or 10 times as many satellites in Earth's orbit as there are today.

They say the satellite operators can, to a degree, improve their chances to survive solar mayhem by quickly de-orbiting old satellites and carefully considering how many spacecraft to launch to certain altitudes.

"The part that satellite operators can control is the number of satellites and the density of satellites," said Lawler.

Thiele added that the study highlights how fragile the space environment has become in a few short years.

"The Crash Clock demonstrates how reliant we are on errorless operations," she said. "If everything works as it's supposed to all the time, then we're okay."

Sooner or later, however, another Carrington-size solar storm will hit. Whether satellite operators will be ready for it remains a question. In 2025, the number of global space launches exceeded 300 for the first time in history, and the industry shows no signs of slowing down.

The U.S. Senate voted today (Dec. 17) 67-30 to confirm billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman as the new NASA administrator, ending more than a year of uncertainty as the space agency has followed marching orders from temporary chiefs

Isaacman, 42, is the billionaire founder of the payment-processing company Shift4. He's also an astronaut and sponsor of Polaris, a privately funded spaceflight program chartering SpaceX launches to orbit. Two of those missions have launched to date with Isaacman in the commander's seat, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, which made history as the first private astronaut mission to Earth orbit and the first flight to feature a civilian spacewalk, respectively.

Though some members of Congress have expressed concerns about Isaacman's relationship with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, citing the potential for bias or favoritism, Isaacman's nomination has been favorably received by much of the space community.

Or nominations, rather, for there have been two of them. Donald Trump first tapped Isaacman for the top NASA job in December 2024, when he was still president-elect. Isaacman sat for a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in April, which advanced his nomination to the full Senate, but lawmakers didn't get the chance to vote. Trump abruptly withdrew Isaacman's nomination in late May, halting the confirmation process and leaving NASA with an indefinite acting administrator.

At the time, that position was held by Kennedy Space Center Director Janet Petro. In July, however, with no prospects for a new NASA administrator nomination on the horizon, Trump handed the role to Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has remained in the acting administrator position ever since.

Trump's reversal on Isaacman came amidst a public falling out between the president and Musk, with Trump posting on his social media site Truth Social that he hadn't realized Isaacman was "a blue-blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before."

Isaacman came back into the spotlight again in early November, when a Politico report exposed a 62-page document, known as "Project Athena," that outlines Isaacman's vision for NASA. After it was made public, Isaacman called the document a tentative list of "ideas, thoughts on the direction of the agency" and how it might operate in a leaner, more efficient way. Trump renominated Isaacman for NASA chief on Nov. 4 (a day after the Politico report published), which paved the way for his official appointment today.

President Trump's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal slashed NASA's budget by nearly 25% and cut the agency's science funding by 47%. When pressed during his two Senate nomination hearings this year, Isaacman voiced support for much of the administration's space agenda, including landing astronauts back on the moon before China does so and sending humans to Mars. Isaacman also indicated his commitment to spend NASA's funds as directed. It's still unclear what that budget will be; Congress aims to restore NASA funding to previous years' levels, though a final appropriations bill has yet to be passed.

"Mr. Isaacman emphasized the importance of developing a pipeline of future scientists, engineers, researchers, astronauts, to support the science and technology development and align with NASA's objectives," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said before lawmakers began their roll call vote this afternoon, in a statement that announced her support for his confirmation. "I look forward to working with administrator Isaacman on the future STEM talent with both NASA and more broadly, with the aerospace and innovation sector."

Aerospace engineer Michi Benthaus made spaceflight history on Saturday morning (Dec. 20).

Blue Origin launched Benthaus and her five crewmates on a suborbital spaceflight from the company's West Texas launch site on Saturday, lifting off at 9:15 a.m. EST (1415 GMT; 8:15 a.m. local Texas time).

Benthaus became the first wheelchair user ever to reach the final frontier.

The launch was originally scheduled to occur on Thursday, but that attempt was called off due to an "issue with built-in checks prior to flight," Blue Origin commentators said during the livestream that day.

Benthaus, who works at the European Space Agency, has used a wheelchair since suffering a mountain-biking accident in 2018. Joining her on the Saturday's flight are investors Joey Hyde and Adonis Pouroulis, aerospace engineer Hans Koenigsmann, entrepreneur Neal Milch and self-proclaimed "space nerd" Jason Stansell.

Koenigsmann's name and face are familiar to many space fans, for he worked at SpaceX from 2002 to 2021. He served as the company's vice president of build and flight reliability for the final 10 years of that tenure and participated in many post-launch press conferences in that capacity.

Blue Origin designated the mission NS-37, because it was the 37th liftoff of New Shepard, an autonomous, fully reusable rocket-capsule combo.

New Shepard flights are suborbital and brief, lasting just 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown. Passengers get to see Earth against the blackness of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

They also get astronaut wings. New Shepard gets above the 62-mile-high (100 kilometers) Kármán line, the widely recognized boundary where outer space begins.

As of Saturday, 16 of New Shepard's 37 flights have carried passengers; the other 20 have been uncrewed research missions. The 16 crewed flights have lofted a total of 92 people, though just 86 individuals — six passengers have been repeat customers.

Blue Origin has not disclosed how much it charges for a seat aboard New Shepard.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:45 p.m. ET on Dec. 22 to correct an error: New Shepard has now launched 16 crewed missions to date, not 17.

An Electron rocket carrying four "DiskSats" lifted off from Rocket Lab's pad on Wallops Island, Virginia on Thursday at 12:03 a.m. EST (0503 GMT).

The launch, which Rocket Lab called "Don't Be Such a Square," kicked off the Space Test Program (STP)-S30 mission for the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command.

STP-30 will operate the first-ever DiskSats, a new type of spacecraft developed by The Aerospace Corporation with funding help from NASA. At 40 inches wide by just 1 inch thick (102 by 2.5 centimeters), each DiskSat has the approximate dimensions of a manhole cover.

That odd shape could lead to greater performance in the final frontier for small satellites, which have traditionally employed the boxy "cubesat" form factor.

DiskSats "could offer more power and surface area for instruments, providing more opportunities for NASA to expand upon target mission objectives for small spacecraft," agency officials wrote in a description of the new tech.

"With its ability to fly continuously with one face pointing at the Earth, the DiskSat can also have a very low drag, making them capable of very-low-altitude missions (less than 300 kilometers or 185 miles) such as those necessary for some Earth-observation missions," NASA added.

The DiskSats won't be flying so low on their inaugural mission, however. The Electron deployed the quartet at an altitude of 342 miles (550 km) about 55.5 minutes after launch as planned, according to Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab initially planned to launch "Don't Be Such a Square" in April 2026 but expedited it at the Space Force's request, the company said in an emailed statement.

The mission was Rocket Lab's 20th of 2025, extending the company's single-year launch record. The previous high was 16, set in 2024. Most of these have been orbital flights of the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to Earth orbit. But three were suborbital missions conducted by HASTE, a modified version of Electron that lets customers test hypersonic technologies in the space environment.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:18 a.m. ET on Dec. 18 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

SpaceX launched two more batches of Starlink satellites today (Dec. 17), in a pair of launches from both U.S. coasts.

First up was a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 29 of the broadband internet relay units (Group 6-99) into low Earth orbit from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The satellites were successfully deployed about an hour and five minutes after the 8:42 a.m. EST (1342 GMT) liftoff on Wednesday.

"Deployment of 29 Starlink satellites confirmed," SpaceX reported on social media.

The Florida flight's first stage booster (B1094) completed its sixth flight, landing on the "Just Read the Instructions" droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

Then came 27 more Starlink satellites (Group 15-13), riding atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Lifting off at 10:27 a.m. EST (1527 GMT or 7:27 a.m. PST local time), the mission was on track to deploy its payload about an hour after leaving the ground.

The California flight's first stage booster (B1063) performed its 30th propulsive landing, touching down on the droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Pacific Ocean.

The California flight's first stage booster (B1063) performed its 30th propulsive landing, touching down on the droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Pacific Ocean.

The 56 (in total) Starlink satellites launched on Wednesday add to SpaceX's megaconstellation, which now numbers more than 9,400 units in orbit. The network provides access to the internet to areas around the globe where other options for connectivity is sparse, as well as enables in-flight wifi and cell-to-satellite service on select carries.

Wednesday's dual launches were SpaceX's 164th and 165th Falcon 9 flight of the year.

Titan is the largest of the 274 known moons orbiting Saturn. In fact, Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury.

"I love Titan — I think it's one of the most interesting worlds in the solar system," study lead author Flavio Petricca, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told Space.com. "It's the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere, and it's the only body with liquid on its surface other than Earth."

Scientists have long suspected that seas might also lurk under Titan's icy shell. For instance, the way Titan flexes under Saturn's gravity suggests that the moon is home to a vast underground ocean.

In the new study, Petricca and his colleagues wanted to reexamine Titan using new, improved methods to analyze radio tracking data. These new techniques greatly reduced uncertainties regarding data gathered by NASA's Cassini mission of Titan's interior.

Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that Titan's interior is resisting distortion from Saturn's gravitational pull to a much greater degree than previously thought. This suggests Titan likely does not have a hidden ocean, but instead a layer of ice close to its melting point that is kept from liquefying by high pressure. This slushy icy likely hosts pockets of liquid water, the researchers added.

Titan may once have had an underground ocean near the beginning of its history, Petricca said. There may not have been enough heat from radioactive elements in its core to keep this ocean from freezing, he noted. "It may be going through a phase again where heating is increasing again," Petricca added.

All in all, ocean worlds may be less common than recently thought, the scientists noted. "We're not certain if having widespread liquid pockets instead of a global ocean makes Titan more or less habitable," Petricca said. "It will be interesting to find out."

NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan can help scan the moon to better understand its geology. "We'll better understand the conditions for habitability there," Petricca said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Dec. 17 in the journal Nature.

Though the liftoff was successful, there was a downside: During the launch, Baikonur's Pad 31/6 — the only pad that hosts Russian crew and cargo launches to the ISS — sustained serious damage, and it's unclear when it will be repaired.

What is it?

The Soyuz (Russian for "unison") program began during the height of the space race in the 1960s as the Soviet Union's third human spaceflight program, following Vostok and Voskhod. Soyuz was originally conceived as part of a lunar landing project. Soyuz never made it to the moon, but it's still going strong decades later.

Aboard Soyuz MS-28 were three long-duration crew members: NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Mikaev and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The three men will participate in an eight-month mission as part of the ISS' Expedition 73.

Where is it?

This image was taken in low Earth orbit, around 263 miles (432 kilometers) above the Mediterranean Sea near Barcelona.

Why is it amazing?

While the Soyuz program itself is historic, the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft helped made some history of its own. With Soyuz MS-28 docked at the International Space Station, all eight of the ISS' visiting vehicle docking ports were occupied at the same time, a first in the orbital outpost's 25-year history.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the International Space Station and the Soyuz program.

The California-based startup is soliciting proposals for ground-based and space-based experiments to fly aboard Haven-1 as well as for potential private crewed missions to the International Space Station (ISS), although the latter are contingent on awards by NASA.

Vast says Haven-1 will be the world's first crewed commercial space-based research and manufacturing facility when it reaches low Earth orbit, with the lab due to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as soon as the second quarter of 2026. The 31,000-pound (14,000 kilograms) space lab is designed to accommodate crewed visits totalling up to 160 astronaut days on board during its planned three-year lifespan.

The company, which has moved fast since its founding in 2021, says Haven-1 is well kitted out to host experiments in a diverse range of areas, including on-orbit pharmaceutical development, stem cell research, plant growth and human research and tech demos.

"The opportunity to expand access to microgravity research upon the world's first commercial space station is historic," Vast Principal Scientist Meghan Everett said in a statement. "We need to build on the heritage of the ISS National Lab and help scientists and industry continue world-changing research breakthroughs that are only possible in the novel environment of microgravity."

Vast adds that it is keen on research that could assist human exploration of the moon and Mars and breakthroughs that can benefit humans on Earth, such as studies of bone, muscle and cardiac health, medical tech and stem cell research and regenerative medicine. Vast has already secured partners for Haven-1 including Redwire, Yuri, Japan Manned Space Systems Corporation (JAMSS), Interstellar Lab and Exobiosphere.

In early November, Vast's Haven Demo launched on a Falcon 9 aiming to test critical systems for Haven-1 in orbit. Haven-1 itself is planned to be a stepping stone to a larger and more permanent presence in space, according to Vast, with the company aiming to secure support for the planned Haven-2 habitat through NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations program.

MAVEN (short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution") has been silent since Dec. 4, despite repeated efforts to hail the spacecraft, NASA announced in an update on Monday (Dec. 15). And a fragment of tracking data recovered on Dec. 6 delivered a bit of additional bad news.

"Analysis of that signal suggests that the MAVEN spacecraft was rotating in an unexpected manner when it emerged from behind Mars," NASA officials wrote in the update. "Further, the frequency of the tracking signal suggests MAVEN's orbit trajectory may have changed."

MAVEN launched in November 2013 and arrived in Mars orbit 10 months later, tasked with studying Mars' atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun.

MAVEN's prime mission lasted one Earth year, and the spacecraft delivered in that time. Its data helped scientists understand how (and when) the Red Planet lost its once-thick atmosphere, which allowed liquid water to flow on Mars billions of years ago.

The orbiter just kept going after that, gathering loads of information about the Red Planet — for example, its dust storms, winds and auroras, for example.

MAVEN also serves as a communications link between mission control and NASA robots on the Martian surface — at the moment, the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.

But MAVEN isn't the only orbiter that plays this relay role; NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey do as well, along with the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. And those four other spacecraft are still going strong.

"For the next two weeks of scheduled surface operations, NASA is arranging additional passes from the remaining orbiters, and the Perseverance and Curiosity teams have adjusted their daily planning activities to continue their science missions," NASA officials wrote in the update.

Europe's towering Ariane 6 rocket is gaining momentum in the heavy-lift launch market.

The first pair of Galileo navigation satellites to launch on an Ariane 6 lifted off from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on Wednesday (Dec. 17) at 12:01 a.m. EST (0501 GMT; 2:01 a.m. local time in Kourou).

Galileo Launch 14 (L14) is sending the spacecraft pair to join 26 other active satellites in the constellation, which is Europe's equivalent to the Global Positioning System (GPS) used by the United States

The L14 satellites are scheduled to deploy about 3 hours and 20 minutes after liftoff and will then spend three days unfolding their solar arrays and running checks on critical systems. The two satellites will then enter a four-month drift and positioning phase before settling into their final orbital position to begin operation.

The Galileo constellation circles Earth at an altitude of 14,429 miles (23,222 kilometers). To date, most of the 1,610-pound (730 kilograms) spacecraft have been launched aboard Europe's Ariane 5, which retired in 2023, or the Russian-built Soyuz rocket, an arrangement that Europe ended following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Europe tapped SpaceX's Falcon 9 to fly Galileo satellites after the invasion, but now that Ariane 6 is operational, the continent can loft those missions without depending on outside launch providers.

This was the fifth-ever launch of the Ariane 6, which completed four successful flights over the past year, with its most recent lifting off just over a month ago.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:14 a.m. ET on Dec. 17 with news of successful liftoff.

Japan will launch a new navigation satellite to orbit tonight (Dec. 16), and you can watch the action live.

An H3 rocket is scheduled to launch the Michibiki 5 spacecraft from Tanegashima Space Center today at 9:10 p.m. EST (0210 GMT and 11:10 a.m. local Japan time on Dec. 17).

You can watch it here at Space.com, courtesy of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 8:15 p.m. EST (0115 GMT).

The 10,580-pound (4,800-kilogram) Michibiki 5 will be part of the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), Japan's homegrown navigation network in geosynchronous orbit.

"This system is compatible with GPS satellites and can be utilized with them in an integrated fashion," Japanese officials wrote in a description of the QZSS project.

"QZSW can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well," they added.

Five QZSS satellites have reached orbit to date, starting with a pathfinder that launched in September 2010. That spacecraft, called Michibiki 1, was replaced by Michibiki 1R, which flew in October 2021.

Michibiki 5 will make QZSS a five-satellite system. But the launches won't end there: The constellation will eventually consist of 11 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

Tonight's launch will be the seventh to date for the two-stage H3, the successor to Japan's workhorse H-2A, which retired this past June after 24 years of service.

The H3 failed during its debut launch in March 2023, resulting in the loss of the ALOS-3 Earth-observing satellite. But the medium-lift rocket bounced back strong, acing its next five missions, including a February 2025 launch that sent another Michibiki satellite to orbit.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:05 p.m. ET on Dec. 16 with news of the launch scrub.

What is it?

Northern Ethiopia's Danakil (Afar) Depression, near where the Hayli Gubbi volcano is located, is considered one of the most volcanically active and geologically dynamic places on Earth. Here, the African and Arabian tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart, thinning Earth's crust and allowing magma to rise close to the surface. The region hosts a chain of shield volcanoes, broad mountains built by fluid magma, which includes Hayli Gubbi.

Because of its remoteness, volcanic activity in the Danakil region often goes undocumented. Estimates suggest its last major activity could have occurred thousands of years ago — or perhaps only centuries, a sign of how little this environment has been studied directly.

Where is it?

This image was taken in low Earth orbit above the Danakil region of Ethiopia.

Why is it amazing?

Because of its understudied status, Hayli Gubbi has no recorded eruptive history in the modern era. NASA's new satellite imagery now provides the first observational record of its activity, establishing a baseline for future monitoring and scientific analysis. Given the tectonic activity of the area, scientists can use Earth-observing satellites like Aqua to further study how plate tectonics affects Earth's volcanic activity, providing insights about these hard-to-reach areas.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about satellites and volcanoes.

At the 3rd Annual Spacepower Conference, held in Orlando, Florida from Dec. 10 to Dec. 12, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told attendees that Space Force is adopting new naming schemes for each of its different mission areas that will "cement the identities of space weapon systems" much like the names of iconic aircraft, such as the A-10 Thunderbolt II or F-22 Raptor, have done for the U.S. Air Force.

But while symbols for some of Space Force's mission areas will be similarly borrowed from real-life animals, others are more mythological in nature, Saltzman said. "These include Norse Pantheon, representing the power and dominance of orbital warfare; mythological creatures, conjuring the cunning and adaptability of cyber warfare systems; constellations, reflecting the reach and enduring connection of satellite communications; and ghosts, evoking the silent presence of space domain awareness, just to name a few," Saltzman said at the conference.

Seven different naming categories were chosen, one for each of Space Force's mission areas:

• Orbital warfare: Norse pantheon
• Electromagnetic warfare: Snakes
• Cyber warfare: Mythological creatures
• Navigation warfare: Sharks
• Satellite communications: Constellations
• Missile warning: Sentinels
• Space domain awareness: Ghosts

After announcing the new naming scheme, Saltzman explained two specific names that had been chosen for specific spacecraft. The first, a communications satellite in geostationary orbit previously known as the Ultra-High Frequency Follow-On system, will now be known as as Ursa Major.

"The Big Dipper — as you all know, part of the Ursa Major constellation — famously points to Polaris, our north star, always linking us to our most important missions," Saltzman said.

Another spacecraft operated by Space Force's 1st Space Operations Squadron (1 SOPS) used to track satellites in high orbits will now be taking a name from Norse mythology: Bifrost.

"Bifrost is a bridge between Earth and the realm of the gods," Saltzman explained, "just as the Bifrost system in low Earth orbit bridges the divide between the Earth and the higher geostationary orbit of the other 1 SOPS systems."

Saltzman stressed that the new naming scheme will help the newest branch of the U.S. military establish its own identity. "These symbols conjure the character of the systems, the importance of their mission, and the identity of the Guardians who employ them," Saltzman said. The new names will serve as "a way to own the identity of our space systems as they enter the joint fight," he added.

Unlike the U.S. Air Force's iconic aircraft or the U.S. Army's ground vehicles such as tanks, the public rarely gets a glimpse at Space Force's assets in orbit. This is partly by design; many of Space Force's spacecraft are highly classified, which can make it difficult for the service to communicate its missions and capabilities both to the public and throughout the U.S. armed services.

The milestone came on a mission called Remora, a newly revealed collaboration between the companies Starfish Space and Impulse Space. One of Impulse Space's dishwasher-sized Mira orbital transfer vehicles used Starfish software to get within a mere 4,100 feet (1,250 meters) of another Mira, in a key demonstration of autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) tech.

"Together with our partners at Starfish, we brought this mission from concept to execution in less than a year," Impulse Space President and Chief Operating Officer Eric Romo said in a statement today (Dec. 15). "Our team is ready and able to execute quickly and deliver versatile, complex operations where success is paramount. We’re looking forward to more RPO missions across more orbits in the future."

That statement announced the existence of Remora and gave some key details about the mission, which Impulse and Starfish developed in just nine months.

It involved outfitting a Mira with a single, lightweight camera and Starfish's core guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software suite —two programs called Cetacean and Cephalopod, which ran on a peripheral flight computer.

The modified Mira launched in January 2025 on SpaceX's Transporter 12 rideshare mission, which hauled 131 payloads to low Earth orbit (LEO). This was the second Mira to reach orbit, as indicated by the name Impulse Space chose for its mission: LEO Express 2.

Mira conducted a number of operations on LEO Express 2; it deployed two cubesats, for example, and performed several precision engine burns to showcase the abilities of its propulsion system. And then, unbeknownst to the rest of us, it embarked on the Remora mission.

Using Cetacean and Cephalopod, the spacecraft rendezvoused autonomously with the first space-flown Mira, which launched on SpaceX's Transporter 9 flight in November 2023 and performed the LEO Express 1 mission.

The close approach occurred in late October over a period of several hours. Mira chronicled the operation with its onboard camera, and we get to see a few snapshots of the progress: Impulse and Starfish released photos showing the target Mira from a distance of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), 4 miles (6.5 km), 1.2 miles (2 km) and 4,100 feet (1,250 m).

"With Remora, we set out to validate our unique approach to autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations in orbit," Starfish Space Co-Founder Trevor Bennett said in the same statement.

"Proving this capability is a major milestone for Starfish, and gives us tremendous confidence as we move toward our first Otter launches next year," he added.

Otter is a small, versatile vehicle that Starfish is developing to provide a variety of satellite-servicing functions, from inspection, refueling and repair to the de-orbiting of dead or dying craft.

Remora wasn't the first demonstration of Otter's planned capabilities. A trailblazer called Otter Pup 1 launched on SpaceX's Transporter 8 mission in June 2023.

Otter Pup 1 was supposed to rendezvous with the space tug that deployed it into orbit, but that parent vehicle experienced an anomaly that scuttled that plan. Starfish came up with a new idea, however, successfully maneuvering Otter Pup 1 within 0.6 miles (1 km) of a different space tug in April 2024.

And Otter Pup 2 launched this past June on SpaceX's Transporter 14, tasked with conducting the first-ever private satellite docking in LEO. So there may be some more news coming from Starfish in the not-too-distant future...

SpaceX launched 29 Starlink satellites from Florida early Monday morning, marking the 100th Falcon 9 flight from

The rocket lifted off at 12:25 a.m. EST (0525 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The two-stage SpaceX launch vehicle reached space about 8 minutes and 40 seconds after leaving the ground.

The Falcon 9's upper stage then deployed the 29 Starlink broadband internet relay satellites (Group 6-82) after about an hour, following a coast period and a second firing of its single Merlin engine.

"Falcon 9 lifts off from Florida for the 100th time in 2025," SpaceX wrote on social media. "Deployment of 29 Starlink satellites confirmed."

Meanwhile, the rocket's first stage completed it use, separated and used its engines to fly back to the Atlantic Ocean and the autonomous drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." The landing on four deployable legs completed the booster's (B1092) ninth flight.

Monday's launch from Florida followed another successful Starlink deployment flown from California the day before. The east coast mission was SpaceX's 163rd Falcon 9 flight in 2025, with another scheduled for Tuesday (Dec. 16) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Dec. 15 to note the number of Falcon 9 flights from Florida in 2025.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) sent another batch of Amazon's internet satellites to orbit on Tuesday morning (Dec. 16).

A ULA Atlas V rocket carrying 27 Amazon Leo spacecraft lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday at 3:28 a.m. EST (0828 GMT).

Amazon Leo, previously known as Project Kuiper, is Amazon's planned satellite-internet megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (LEO).

The network will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites, which will reach orbit on more than 80 launches performed by a variety of rockets. Six of those missions had been completed before Tuesday, lofting 153 Project Leo satellites to the final frontier. (Those numbers don't count a test mission that carried two prototype satellites to LEO in October 2023.)

Tuesday's launch was the fourth Project Leo mission for the Atlas V, a venerable and highly dependable rocket that debuted in August 2002. ULA is phasing out the Atlas V in favor of a new vehicle called Vulcan Centaur, which has three missions under its belt to date.

All went according to plan on Tuesday: the 27 Amazon Leo satellites were deployed on schedule, during a 15-minute stretch beginning about 20 minutes after liftoff. We didn't get to see that milestone, however; ULA cut off its webcast about five minutes into the flight.

When it's up and running, Project Leo will beam internet connectitvity down to people around the globe. It will compete with SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation, which already provides service to customers using more than 9,000 satellites in LEO. And that number is growing all the time; SpaceX has launched more than 3,000 Starlink satellites so far in 2025 alone.

Interestingly, SpaceX is helping to build out the Project Leo network; its Falcon 9 is among the rockets that Amazon has tapped to launch the megaconstellation, along with Arianespace's Ariane 6, Blue Origin's New Glenn and ULA's Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur.

Editor's note: This article was updated Dec. 15, at 9:45 a.m. EST (1445 GMT) to reflect the most recent launch window availability, then again at 3:37 a.m. EST on Dec. 16 with news of successful liftoff, then again at 11:40 a.m. EST with news of satellite deployment.

"Fiddler on the Moon: Judaism in Space" investigates how the religion would adapt to spaceflight and environments where celestial indicators like sunset or the phase of the moon, around which many Jewish traditions are centered, become inaccessible or inapplicable for life off Earth.

The film seeks the expertise of Jewish astronauts and scientists researching the dynamics of living on the moon and Mars, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and a trio of rabbis who, despite the adage, come to a general consensus rather than four separate opinions on the matter. Their conclusion is one woven through Jewish history since before humanity took to the sky, and a quandary faced by every generation: How do you hold on to tradition in the face of modernity? And, just as Jews have done for thousands of years, their answer is simple: Adapt. (cue "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof.)

The filmmakers behind "Fiddler on the Moon" say the themes of the documentary are as old as religion itself. "Everyone sort of thinks that faith and science don't intersect," Miller told Space.com. "This film helps show that they are working in concert, that they always have been and continue to advance one another."

Much of the documentary focuses on Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, and how he addressed this question during his STS-107 mission aboard space shuttle Columbia, which tragically ended in the loss of the spacecraft and crew during their reentry on Feb. 3, 2003.

Before his flight, Ramon consulted Rabbi Zvi Konikov, from Chabad of the Space and Treasure Coasts, located down the road from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. "He asked me for a favor," Konikov says of Ramon in the documentary. "'How do I mark the Sabbath in space?'"

Jewish holidays begin and end at sunset, and are followed according to a lunar calendar  — an easy system to follow on Earth, but exponentially more complicated if you're in orbit experiencing 16 sunsets a day, and even more so if you happen to be on the moon.

"All of our reckoning of time owes its foundations to astronomical observations that are Earth-centered," Tyson said in the film. "One should not be surprised at the challenge attempting to maintain religious observance traditions in places other than Earth."

Ramon's conundrum had precedent, the film shows, in rabbinical decisions from World War II, when Jewish soldiers stationed near the North Pole sought a solution for observing Shabbat in a region where the sun rarely sets. The rabbis' guidance then was to follow the time of the closest habitable city. In the soldiers' case, this worked out to be Anchorage, Alaska. For Ramon, Rabbi Konikov suggested following the clock in mission control, based in Houston, Texas.

The question of how Jews adhere to religious observances in space, however, is one that far predates Ramon's spaceflight. "We thought it was a silly idea at first, Jews in space," Miller said of the film's inception. "But then, as we sort of started researching, we realized that Talmudic scholars, academics, rabbis — they've been discussing that idea forever … It was with the 1969 moon landing when it really came to the fore."

Now, more than 50 years since humanity first stepped foot on the moon, serious momentum to return us to our nearest celestial neighbor and beyond are eliciting new questions like if and how one might follow the Jewish lunar calendar on a planet like Mars, where the moons are just tiny points of light in the sky and the day/night cycle is about 40 minutes longer than Earth's 24-hour rotation.

"It is so close to Earth and yet just slightly off enough so that sooner or later, you're going to go out of sync with the Jewish community on Earth," said "Sci-fi" Rabbi Josh Breindel in the film.

"No matter what your traditions are, someone is going to break them," Tyson said. He was recalling the impression left on him after seeing the famous musical from which "Fiddler on the Moon" draws inspiration for its name, but the quote extends beyond just Judaism.

Tyson pointed to other religions' customs, like the Muslim practice of praying five times a day or Catholics attending mass, as significant contributory components to communities here on Earth. "It kind of matters that everybody's doing the same thing at the same time," he said. "There's a unifying force that that represents. That seems to matter. And if that's the case, why not let it continue to matter?"

Questions of how to practice religion in space may feel like far future concepts, but from Ramon marking Shabbat in space, to Jewish NASA astronaut Jessica Meir's viral Chanukah socks photo taken aboard the International Space Station (ISS), answers for these otherworldly inquiries are needed sooner rather than later.

During the same mission Meir snapped those Chanukah socks in 2019, she also conducted the first ever all-woman spacewalk in history. She did so with fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who is currently scheduled to launch around the moon as early as February 2026 as a part of the Artemis 2 mission. NASA is planning another moon mission, Artemis 3, in 2028, which will land astronauts on the lunar surface, and is developing the architecture for an eventual permanent human presence there.

And it may be that history has prepared the Jewish people for that milestone. "Fiddler on the Moon" argues that not only is the Jewish religion equipped for the future of space travel, but that such a transition would not be too dissimilar to other mass migrations forced on the Jewish people in the past.

"Jews have a genius for adapting under the harshest conditions, whether it's imposed by people, or whether it's imposed by nature," Rabbi Ben-Tzion Spitz, creator of the Mars Jewish calendar, said in the documentary. And, indeed, Jewish history is fraught with stretches of harsh conditions, including persecution, exile and extermination.

"Jews are always confronted by forces that threaten them when they stay," the film's directors said in a statement. It's a history that has led many Jews to immigrate to Israel/Palestine, where the emergence of Kibbutzim — small, agricultural, socialist communities focused on self-sustainment and shared labor — took root in the early 20th century as safe havens from anti Semitism, and still exist today.

In the film, Meir talks about her own family's journey of escaping religious discrimination. "My father was born in Baghdad in 1925 when a lot of the anti-Semitism was kind of starting in the region," she explained. "They all left for Israel. That's really where my father grew up."

"When you get to space, you're going to want to share as many things as possible," Kelly Weinsersmith, co-author of "A City on Mars," points out in the film. "It sort of makes sense to start this off as a communal movement. Kibbutzim will be important for learning how to do that."

"Fiddler on the Moon" leaves viewers wondering if the Jews' history and hardships will follow them into the space age, or if humanity will be able to evolve alongside our furthering reach into the solar system.

"Once we start settling other planets, maybe the Jewish experience will change. Hopefully we can evolve beyond this history of persecution, of people being singled out for being different," Meir said.

The world premiere of "Fiddler on the Moon" took place at the Boca International Jewish Film Festival, in Florida, in February, and has since been nominated for the 2025 Critics Choice Documentary Awards, and won multiple awards for best documentary short.

"We have found, in general, that people have really been kind of excited about the movie," Miller said. "It's not only at Jewish festivals, but it's at science festivals, faith festivals, mainstream festivals, and it's really been kind of sparking a fire."

The film is currently touring the U.S., with appearances from coast to coast scheduled through April 2026.

Almost 10 years to the day since it successfully landed its first rocket stage, SpaceX today (Dec. 14) recovered its 550th Falcon 9 booster.

The touchdown came after the rocket's first stage had lofted 27 Starlink satellites into space, lifting off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday at 12:49 a.m. EST (0549 GMT or 9:49 p.m. PST local time on Dec. 13).

The Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage was on track to deploy the satellites into low Earth orbit about an hour after they left the ground.

Unlike the first Falcon 9 first stage landing in on Dec. 21, 2015, which arrived back on land, Sunday's booster (B1093) fired one of its nine Merlin engines and deployed its four landing legs to come to rest atop the autonomous drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

The flight marked the stage's ninth trip to space and back.

With the addition of the 27 satellites (Group 15-12), the Starlink megaconstellation now has over 9,300 active units out of the more than 10,000 that have been launched since 2019. The Starlink network provides broadband internet access to regions around the world, as well as enables wifi on airlines and cell-to-satellite access on select providers.

Sunday's launch was SpaceX's 162nd Falcon 9 flight in 2025, and 580th overall.

That bullet was one of the nine spacecraft that launched atop a Chinese Kinetica 1 rocket on Tuesday (Dec. 9) from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. It zoomed dangerously close to a Starlink satellite, according to SpaceX, which was none too pleased with the close shave.

"As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200-meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude. Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said via X on Friday evening (Dec. 12).

Kinetica 1 is a 100-foot-tall (30 meters) solid-fuel rocket operated by CAS Space. The company, which is based in Guangzhou, responded to Nicolls' post, saying that it did its due diligence as the launch services provider (LSP) but is looking into the incident nonetheless.

"Our team is currently in contact for more details. All CAS Space launches select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris. This is a mandatory procedure. We will work on identifying the exact details and provide assistance as the LSP," CAS Space said via X on Friday night.

"If confirmed, this incident occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, by which time the launch mission had long concluded. CAS Space will coordinate with satellite operators to proceed. This calls for re-establishing collaborations between the two New Space ecosystems," the company added in another X post a few hours later.

Tuesday's Kinetica 1 launch lofted "six Chinese multifunctional satellites, an Earth-observation satellite for the UAE [United Arab Emirates}, a scientific satellite for Egypt and an educational satellite for Nepal," according to China Daily. Nicolls' post did not specify which of these spacecraft zoomed close to the Starlink satellite.

The coordination that Nicolls cited is becoming more and more important, for Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded. In 2020, for example, fewer than 3,400 functional satellites were whizzing around our planet. Just five years later, that number has soared to about 13,000, and more spacecraft are going up all the time.

Most of them belong to SpaceX. The company currently operates nearly 9,300 Starlink satellites, more than 3,000 of which have launched this year alone.

Starlink satellites avoid potential collisions autonomously, maneuvering themselves away from conjunctions predicted by available tracking data. And this sort of evasive action is quite common: Starlink spacecraft performed about 145,000 avoidance maneuvers in the first six months of 2025, which works out to around four maneuvers per satellite per month.

That's an impressive record. But many other spacecraft aren't quite so capable, and even Starlink satellites can be blindsided by spacecraft whose operators don't share their trajectory data, as Nicolls noted.

And even a single collision — between two satellites, or involving pieces of space junk, which are plentiful in Earth orbit as well — could spawn a huge cloud of debris, which could cause further collisions. Indeed, the nightmare scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, is a debris cascade that makes it difficult or impossible to operate satellites in parts of the final frontier.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:05 a.m. ET on Dec. 13 to include another X post by CAS Space.

Orbital observation

It is a "wonderful world" indeed.

"Thinking, 'I'm sure everyone would want to see a photo of Earth,' I took a few shots right before going to bed. I think the amazing thing about the ISS is that you can see views like this without even trying,'" JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui, an Expedition 74 flight engineer, wrote on social media on Thursday (Dec. 11).

Yui's photo nicely captures the "skies of blue and clouds of white" as sung by the iconic Louis Armstrong.

Science status

Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 74 crew aboard the space station this week was:

StemCellEx-IP1 — In an effort that may someday lead to ways to repair damaged organs and tissue, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman studied stem cells under a microscope, observing their production in microgravity as compared to on Earth.

Virtual — In a Roscosmos experiment that looks at how the vestibular system adapts to microgravity, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev traded off wearing a different set of VR (virtual reality) goggles to track their vision. The study could lead to developing additional countermeasures when readjusting to gravity.

Station keeping

The Expedition 74 crew also devoted time to maintaining the space station's systems, including:

JEM DRCS — In a demo that has applications to future Artemis missions to the moon and ultimately to Mars, JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui installed and soundproofed the JEM Demonstration of CO2 Removal System in the station's Kibo module. The experimental device traps carbon dioxide from the air and vents it overboard.

JAXA’s HTV-X1 — NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Mike Fincke, together with some help from Zena Cardman and JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui, continued preparing the cargo ship for its departure in January. Williams worked on loading refuse and no-longer-needed equipment, while Fincke focused on preparing a science rack for its transfer from the space station to inside the HTV-X.

Waste and Hygiene Compartment — Fincke also spent some of his time this week servicing one of the space station's restrooms, replacing orbital plumbing components in the Tranquility node.

Astronaut activity

NASA astronaut Chris Williams is living out his boyhood dream as an Expedition 74 flight engineer.

"For as far back as I can remember, so when I was a little kid, I was always fascinated by exploration and in particular, space," said Williams. "I think it is one of those things that a lot of kids have a fascination with, and I just never grew out of it. It is something that has always been a point of curiosity for me, and being an astronaut felt like the best way to explore space."

Williams discussed his path to flying in space and serving aboard the International Space Station during an in-flight interview on Thursday (Dec. 11), with The Washington Post. You can watch the full discussion in the video above.

By the numbers

As of Friday (Dec. 12), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 74 commander Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman and Chris Williams of NASA; JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui; Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev of Roscosmos, all flight engineers.

There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX's Dragon "Endeavour" attached to the space-facing port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos' Soyuz MS-28 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Rassvet module.

There are four cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos' Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module, Progress MS-32 (93P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL, the S.S. William C. "Willie" McCool, berthed to the Earth-facing common berthing mechanism (CBM) on the Unity node and Japan's HTV-X1 attached to the Earth-facing CBM on the Harmony node.

As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 25 years, 1 month and 10 days.

Roughly 15,000 satellites currently circle the planet in vast internet-providing fleets, more than half of them belonging to SpaceX's Starlink network, which has more than 9,000 spacecraft in orbit. In 2023, astronomers reported that some of these satellites were already photobombing images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, as sunlight glinted off their surfaces leaving bright trails that erase, obscure or mimic genuine cosmic signals.

If every constellation currently filed with regulators were approved and launched, Earth will be encircled by half a million satellites by the end of the 2030s.

"The natural question that comes up is: how many more space telescopes will be affected when all these constellations are launched?" study co-author Alejandro Borlaff, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Space.com. "This work is the first careful quantification of a potential problem."

Borlaff and his team modeled how future satellite megaconstellations would appear to four space telescopes: Two already operating ones — Hubble and NASA's SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), launched in March — and two planned observatories, China's Xuntian telescope, scheduled for a 2026 liftoff, and the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS mission, expected to launch next decade.

Using orbital data for every registered constellation from the Planet4589 database maintained by astronomer Jonathan McDowell, the researchers simulated roughly 18 months of telescope operations under varying scenarios that ranged from 100 satellites to one million.

If the 560,000 satellites currently planned are deployed, the team found that one in every three Hubble images would contain at least one satellite trail. For SPHEREx, ARRAKIHS, and Xuntian, more than 96% of exposures would be affected. At the million-satellite level, roughly the number of proposals currently pending, contamination rates roughly double, the study reports.

These findings are "truly frightening," Patrick Seitzer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the new study, told Nature. "This is a very important study for the future of space-based astronomy."

Until 2019, the largest commercial constellation, Iridium, operated just 75 satellites in low Earth orbit. Since then, a dramatic reduction in launch costs and the rise of rideshare missions have driven an exponential surge in deployment. The arrival of super-heavy rockets such as SpaceX's Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn and China's Long March 9 is likely to make large-scale launches even easier, the study notes.

Crucially, image processing cannot fully recover the science lost to satellite contamination, the researchers emphasize. Techniques such as masking can hide a streak, but the cosmic signal underneath cannot be reconstructed.

"That part of the image will be forever lost," Borlaff told Space.com. Photon noise from reflected sunlight wipes out the original data, and no software, AI included, can reconstruct that data, he said, "simply because the information that came from space to the telescope detector is no longer there."

Not everyone agrees with every aspect of the team's modeling. Rafael Guzmán, consortium lead for ARRAKIHS, told Science that while his group shares the serious concern most astronomers have regarding the effects of megaconstellations, the study assumes ARRAKIHS will survey the entire sky, when it will mostly point away from Earth, where satellites are least visible. His team similarly concludes that around 96% of images would bear satellite trails, but a smaller portion of each image would be contaminated, according to the Science story.

One mitigation strategy proposed in the study is placing large satellite constellations below the altitude of space telescopes, where spacecraft spend more time in Earth's shadow and therefore appear dimmer. But Borlaff acknowledges this could increase satellites in lower orbits burn up more frequently due to atmospheric drag, and recent research suggests that materials released during reentry may harm the ozone layer. Lower orbits also make satellites appear brighter to ground-based observatories, potentially shifting the problem rather than solving it.

"This should be discussed from a multi-disciplinary perspective, not just from astronomy," said Borlaff. "We need to carefully evaluate the resources that we have so we can maintain an orbital environment that is useful for both science and industry."

The study notes that efforts to measure the environmental and scientific impacts of megaconstellations are already struggling to keep pace with launch activity, a dynamic reminiscent of the early days of ozone-layer research, when scientists' warnings about chlorofluorocarbons raced against industrial expansion until the historic Montreal Protocol imposed global limits.

When asked whether he is optimistic that meaningful mitigation is possible, Borlaff described himself as an "optimistic pessimist."

"Our results show what will happen if no action is taken, but I am positive that won't be the case," he said.

Blue Origin announced today (Dec. 11) that it's targeting Dec. 18 for its NS-37 mission, which will send six people on a brief trip to suborbital space and back.

One of the passengers is Michaela (Michi) Benthaus, an aerospace engineer at the European Space Agency who has used a wheelchair since suffering a spinal cord injury in a 2018 mountain-biking accident. She is poised to break new ground for access and inclusion in human spaceflight.

NS-37 will lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas site on Dec. 18 during a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local time). The company will stream the action live, beginning about 40 minutes before launch.

As its name suggests, NS-37 will be the 37th overall flight of Blue Origin's autonomous New Shepard vehicle, which consists of a crew capsule and a rocket, both of which are reusable.

New Shepard flights last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown. Passengers feel a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space.

The five folks who will get this experience on NS-37 along with Benthaus are investor Joey Hyde, aerospace engineer Hans Koenigsmann, entrepreneur Neal Milch, investor Adonis Pouroulis, and self-proclaimed "space nerd" Jason Stansell.

Other space nerds may recognize Koenigsmann's name: He was one of the first employees at SpaceX, working there from 2002 to 2021. For roughly half of that time, he served as the company's vice president of build and flight reliability and was a frequent participant in launch webcasts and press conferences.

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, also released the NS-37 mission patch today, along with an explanation of what some of its symbols mean. Here's that explanation, verbatim from the company:

• The DNA symbolizes the importance and impact of science to Neal Milch. 
• The hippo represents Michaela (Michi) Benthaus' favorite animal. Her plush hippo, which comforted her in the hospital after her accident, will join her in space. The tennis ball symbolizes another of Michi's competitive passions. 
• A baobab tree, iconic to South Africa, represents Adonis Pouroulis' roots. 
• A spiral galaxy symbolizes Joey Hyde's astrophysics research. 
• A dog-bone shape, stars in the crew capsule windows represent the number 201, and "K" are in memoriam of Jason Stansell's brother. 
• The shards represent Blue Origin's commitment to breaking down the barriers to accessing space, including cost, nationality, and ability.  

For the 300th time this year, a rocket has lifted off for Earth orbit.

SpaceX on Thursday (Dec. 11) launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 29 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The broadband internet relay spacecraft entered Earth orbit about eight and a half minutes after leaving the ground at 5:01 p.m. EST (2201 GMT).

The Starlink satellites (Group 6-90) were on track to be deployed into the SpaceX megaconstellation about an hour into the flight.

The Falcon 9's first stage (Booster 1083) completed its 16th mission, landing back on the autonomous droneship "Just Read the Instructions," stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Starlink network now numbers more than 10,000 satellites, with more than 9,100 active and in use. The commercial service provides internet access to underserved areas around the world, as well as enables cell-to-satellite and airline WiFi for select carriers.

Thursday's launch was SpaceX's 161st Falcon 9 flight of the year, 606th mission overall and marked the 300th orbital launch attempt worldwide, according to the website Next Spaceflight.

Elon Musk's company has been private since its founding in March 2002. Over the past six days, however, speculation has swirled that SpaceX will hold an initial public offering (IPO) next year, offering investors the chance to buy shares for the first time.

The Wall Street Journal and The Information first reported this plan last Friday (Dec. 5), and other outlets soon followed up. For example, a Bloomberg story on Tuesday (Dec. 9) suggested that SpaceX will seek a valuation of $1.5 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world. The IPO, which is apparently targeted for mid- to late 2026, could raise a record $30 billion or more.

On Wednesday (Dec. 10), Ars Technica's Eric Berger posted a story confirming the IPO rumors and offering an explanation for the move: SpaceX wants to raise money to pay for the buildout of data centers in space, which Musk and a growing number of people believe will be a key enabler of the coming AI revolution.

"Foremost among Musk's goals right now is to 'win' the battle for artificial intelligence. He is already attacking the problem at xAI and Tesla, and he now seeks to throw SpaceX into the fray as well," Berger wrote. "Taking SpaceX public and using it to marshal an incredible amount of resources shows he is playing to win."

SpaceX's initial off-Earth data centers will be modified versions of the company's Starlink broadband satellites, according to Berger, who has written two books about SpaceX. But the company's long-term vision involves setting up AI-satellite factories on the moon and launching them into space using railguns, he added, citing a Dec. 7 X post by Musk.

Berger's sources are apparently reliable, for Musk backed the piece in a Wednesday X post. "As usual, Eric is accurate," the billionaire wrote.

The IPO news has stirred concern among some space fans, who worry that a publicly traded SpaceX won't be as free to pursue its Mars-settlement plans, which hinge on the development and operation of the company's giant, fully reusable Starship rocket. After all, establishing a city on Mars will be extremely expensive, with little financial return in the short term — not exactly the mission profile that most investors are keen to support.

However, Berger thinks Musk views the IPO as a way to help fund Mars settlement, which the billionaire has long stressed is his overarching goal and the reason he founded SpaceX in the first place.

"Musk has frequently expressed a concern that there may be a limited window for settling Mars," Berger wrote. "Perhaps financial markets collapse. Perhaps there’s a worse pandemic. Perhaps a large asteroid hits the planet. Taking SpaceX public now is a bet that he can marshal the resources now, during his lifetime, to make Mars City One a reality. He is 54 years old."

Now, however, Stanford researchers have used artificial intelligence to steer a free-flying robot aboard the International Space Station (ISS), potentially paving the way for more autonomous space missions in the future.

Working with NASA's cube-shaped Astrobee robot, the Stanford research team demonstrated how a machine-learning system can plan safe routes through the ISS' crowded modules significantly faster than existing methods. The advances address a long-standing hurdle for space robotics — namely, how to move quickly and safely with limited computing power and minimal human input in one of the most extreme engineering environments possible.

Lead researcher Somrita Banerjee, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, said that the station's maze of equipment and experiments makes motion planning especially challenging, as algorithms that work well for robots on Earth often bog down when run on the older, radiation-hardened computers certified for spaceflight.

To get around those constraints, Banerjee and her colleagues started with a standard optimization approach, described in a new paper presented earlier this month at the International Conference on Space Robotics, which breaks a complex motion-planning problem into many smaller steps. They then trained an AI model on thousands of previously computed paths, so the system could begin each new plan with an informed "warm start" instead of calculating from scratch.

"Using a warm start is like planning a road trip by starting with a route that real people have driven before, rather than drawing a straight line across the map," Banerjee said in a Stanford University statement. "You start with something informed by experience and then optimize from there."

This approach allows for strict safety checks before runs, while cutting actual computation time. In tests on the station, routes generated with the AI warm start were roughly 50% to 60% faster to compute than conventional plans, according to the researchers.

"This is the first time AI has been used to help control a robot on the ISS," Banerjee said. "It shows that robots can move faster and more efficiently without sacrificing safety, which is essential for future missions where humans won't always be able to guide them."

Setting the stage for AI robots on the ISS and beyond

Before the in-orbit trial, the system was first validated at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley using a granite table testbed with a compressed air cushion that allows a robot to glide over it like an air hockey puck, mimicking the microgravity found on the ISS. In orbit, astronauts performed a brief setup and then left Astrobee to be commanded from the ground in what NASA calls a "crew-minimal" experiment.

Over a four-hour session, mission controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston directed Astrobee to fly 18 trajectories, each run twice with and without the AI-generated warm start. Additional safeguards, including virtual obstacles and the ability to halt a run, were used to avoid collisions.

The team says that similar AI-guided planning could eventually allow robots to handle inspections, logistics and science tasks on future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond, freeing astronauts to focus on higher-priority work.

"As robots travel farther from Earth and as missions become more frequent and lower-cost, we won't always be able to teleoperate them from the ground," Banerjee said. "Autonomy with built-in guarantees isn't just helpful; it's essential for the future of space robotics."

The "Hungry Hippo"-style fairing opens and closes like a clamshell (or the jaws of the colorful game pieces in the "Hungry Hungry Hippos" children's boardgame) and is a novel approach to launch vehicle reusability. While Rocket Lab's workhorse (but expendable) Electron rocket has quickly gained momentum in the small launch market, Neutron is built to compete with SpaceX's heftier Falcon 9 — the only orbital launch vehicle with a proven track record of reusability.

SpaceX, too, has implemented its own recovery and refurbishment plans for Falcon 9 fairings, but the two halves of the shell protecting the rocket's payload on its way to orbit are still designed to split apart and fall back to Earth independently of each other, and of Falcon 9's first stage. Neutron's first stage, by contrast, will open its top like a giant mouth to spit out the vehicle's entire second stage and payload, and will then close the two halves back together before descending back through Earth's atmosphere to land and fly again.

With qualification tests now complete, Neutron's fairing section has been shipped to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia, where it will be mated to the rocket ahead the vehicle's debut launch.

“A rocket like Neutron has never been built before, and we’re doing it at a pace and price point that’s going to bring the innovation and competition needed in today’s industry,“ Rocket Lab Vice President for Neutron Shaun D’Mello said in a Dec. 8 statement.

The company hails Neutron as “the world’s largest carbon composite launch vehicle,“ and said the new rocket's fairing underwent extensive tests before it was finally deemed ready for flight.

Before departing Rocket Lab's California-based test facility, the fairing was exposed to 275,000 pounds of external force to simulate dynamic pressures during launch, rapid cycling of the open and close mechanisms to ensure faster-than-necessary operations, software integration and load forces exceeding 125% design requirements.

Once the fairing is incorporated with Neutron's first stage, Rocket Lab will perform a series of prelaunch tests, including a static hotfire of the nine Archimedes engines that power the reusable booster. Neutron will stand 141 feet (43 meters) tall with a 23-foot (7 m) diameter, and is expected to deliver up to 28,700 pounds (13,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit.

An Electron rocket was scheduled to launch the "Bridging the Swarm" mission from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site tonight at 7:55 p.m. EST (0055 GMT and 1:55 p.m. local New Zealand time on Dec. 16).

But when the time came, the Electron's first-stage engines failed to fire up as planned. After the abort, the company declined to recycle for another attempt, citing a short launch window.

"We're standing down from today's launch attempt after an abort on ignition. As usual, we have back up opportunities in the coming days though so we'll be back with a new T-0 date shortly," Rocket Lab said via X this evening.

Tonight's abort further delays the "Bridging the Swarm" launch. It was originally supposed to fly last Wednesday (Dec. 10), but Rocket Lab delayed things to perform further checkouts.

"Bridging the Swarm" will launch a single satellite for the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) — NEONSAT-1A, an advanced Earth-observation spacecraft designed to monitor natural disasters throughout the Korean Peninsula.

KAIST already operates one such satellite — NEONSAT-1, which flew to orbit on an Electron in April 2024. But the goal is to build that fleet out over the next few years, and NEONSAT-1A is part of that vision.

The new spacecraft "will be deployed to validate KAIST’s advanced satellite's capability, boost operational utility and pave the way for the single NEONSAT satellite to become a constellation — thus fulfilling the mission's name, 'Bridging the Swarm,'" Rocket Lab wrote in an emailed statement on Dec. 9.

If all goes to plan on "Bridging the Swarm," the Electron will deploy NEONSAT-1A into low Earth orbit, 336 miles (540 kilometers) above our planet, about 54 minutes after launch.

Rocket Lab expedited the "Bridging the Swarm" launch, deciding to conduct the mission on a fast timeline, the company announced in the Dec. 9 statement.

"This launch rescheduling is a demonstration of Rocket Lab's operational efficiency, responsiveness, and flexibility to meet the ever-evolving needs of its customers, while continuing to launch more missions every year to support a growing manifest," Rocket Lab wrote.

Thanks to the sensor issue and launch abort, however, "Bridging the Swarm" has had to spend a few more days on Earth than Rocket Lab had originally planned.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 8:20 p.m. ET on Dec. 10, then again at 11 p.m. ET, with news of the scrub and the reason for it. It was updated again at 4 p.m. ET on Dec. 15 with news of the new launch date of Dec. 15, then again at 8 p.m. ET on Dec. 15 with news of the launch abort.

MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) is one of only three NASA missions currently in operation around Mars, and one of five spacecraft serving as a communications relay for the space agency's rover missions on the Martian surface.

During routine operations on Dec. 6, NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) lost communications with MAVEN as it orbited behind the planet. This type of loss of signal (LOS) is anticipated by NASA's tracking systems, which usually reestablish connections with distant spacecraft after they are temporarily blocked by planetary bodies. As MAVEN was expected to emerge from Mars' far side, however, DSN failed to reacquire a signal, according to a Dec. 9 NASA update. "The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation," NASA wrote in the statement.

MAVEN launched on a ULA Atlas V rocket in Nov. 2013, equipped with instruments to measure the evolution of Mars' atmosphere and its interaction with solar winds. The orbiter arrived 10 months later, and has remained operational in Martian orbit for the last decade.

In addition to its scientific mission, MAVEN also serves as a critical link to the small handful of missions on the Martian surface. MAVEN works in tandem with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Odyssey, as well as the European Space Agency's Mars Express (MEX) and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) to provide planet-wide communications relay coverage for missions like the NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.

Data from MAVEN indicated a nominal trajectory and normal operating status for the spacecraft's systems prior to its disappearance behind the Red Planet, according to NASA. Assuming the satellite's orbit remained unaffected by whatever caused the communications anomaly, NASA and DSN operators can continue attempts to ping the spacecraft along its predicted orbit as they work to determine a cause and subsequent solution.

NASA's statement indicated more information would be shared on MAVEN's status as it becomes available.

The launch of a new batch of SpaceX Starlink satellites lit up the predawn sky in southern California today (Dec. 10) as the company marked its 160th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket this year.

Lifting off at 6:40 a.m. EST (1140 GMT or 3:40 a.m. PST local time) Wednesday from Vandenberg Space Force Base's Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E), the 27 broadband internet satellites (Group 15-11) were deployed into low Earth orbit just over an hour into the flight.

"Deployment of 27 Starlink satellites confirmed," SpaceX officials posted to social media.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket completed its 18th flight, landing back on the autonomous droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" positioned in the Pacific Ocean.

The Starlink megaconstellation now numbers more than 9,000 operational satellites, including the more than 3,000 launched just this year. The network provides access to the internet to areas around the world where there was no or sparse coverage, as well as enables WiFi access on commercial airliners and cell-to-satellite service on select providers.

Wednesday's launch was SpaceX's 165th overall launch of 2025 (including Starship test flights) and the 605th mission in the company's history.

China continues to make big advances in the final frontier.

The nation just launched three Long March rockets in less than 19 hours, setting a new national mark for liftoff cadence.

In addition, the trio pushed China's orbital-launch tally for 2025 to 83, extending another record. The previous yearly high for the country, set last year, was 68. (Eighty-three is not a global record, however; SpaceX has launched 159 orbital missions in 2025 so far by itself.)

The flurry began Monday (Dec. 8) at 5:11 p.m. EST (2211 GMT), when a Long March 6A rocket lifted off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern China. That mission successfully sent a batch of broadband satellites to low Earth orbit for the Guowang ("national network") megaconstellation.

Then, at 10:41 p.m. EST on Monday (0341 GMT on Tuesday, Dec. 9), the mysterious Yaogan 47 spacecraft took flight atop a Long March 4B from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Yaogan 47 is a classified satellite that will be used by the Chinese military.

The tripleheader wrapped up on Tuesday at 10:08 a.m. EST (1508 GMT) with the launch of another classified satellite, known as TJSW-22, on a Long March 3B from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in western China.

All three of these launches took place on Tuesday Beijing time, as noted by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the state-owned entity that operates the Long March family of rockets.

"This was the third successful launch of China's Long March rockets today, setting a new record of three launches in one day," CASC officials said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to the TJSW-22 liftoff (in Mandarin; translation by Google).

A total of five orbital launches have now occurred in the 24-hour stretch beginning with Monday's Guowang liftoff. The other two were SpaceX Falcon 9 missions — a Monday evening flight lofted a batch of the company's Starlink satellites and the NROL-77 launch for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office happened on Tuesday afternoon.

That's not a 24-hour record, however: Between April 28-29 of this year, six different rockets launched toward orbit in a span of just 18 hours — a Long March 5B, two Falcon 9s, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V, an Arianespace Vega C and Alpha, a vehicle built and operated by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace. All but Alpha were successful.

Chinese astronauts just got an up-close look at the damage that space junk can cause.

Two astronauts of the three-person Shenzhou 21 mission conducted an extravehicular activity (EVA) outside China's Tiangong space station on Tuesday (Dec. 9). They were very busy on the eight-hour spacewalk, which wrapped up around 5:45 a.m. EST (1045 GMT; 6:45 p.m. Beijing time).

The duo "fully utilized their active role as first responders outside the spacecraft, successfully completing tasks including inspecting and photographing the Shenzhou 20 return capsule's windows, installing the space station's space debris protection system, and replacing the multi-layered cover of the temperature control adapter," officials with the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement on Tuesday (in Mandarin; translation by Google).

The Shenzhou 20 vehicle arrived at Tiangong in late April, carrying three astronauts for a regular six-month rotation aboard the station. That trio was supposed to head back to Earth on Nov. 5, but inspections revealed cracks in Shenzhou 20's windows — the apparent result of a space junk strike, Chinese space officials said.

After some deliberation, the Shenzhou 20 capsule was deemed unsafe to carry astronauts down through Earth's atmosphere. So the mission's three crewmembers ended up returning home on Nov. 14 aboard the Shenzhou 21 vehicle, which had just arrived at Tiangong on Halloween night.

On Nov. 24, China launched the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft with nobody on board, to give the Shenzhou 21 taikonauts a safe ride back to Earth when their mission is over.

Chinese space officials have said that they plan to bring the Shenzhou 20 vehicle home, crewless, at some point in the future. And they likely now have a better understanding of its condition, thanks to Tuesday's spacewalk.

The EVA was the first for the Shenzhou 21 mission, which consists of commander Zhang Lu, 48, who also flew on the Shenzhou 15 flight in 2022; rookie Wu Fei, 32, and rookie Zhang Hongzhang, 39.

Wu Fei is the youngest member of China's astronaut corps, and on Tuesday he became the youngest person from his country ever to perform a spacewalk. Zhang Lu also ventured outside the three-module Tiangong, while Zhang Hongzhang assisted from inside the station.

Tuesday's EVA was not the first to beef up Tiangong's debris shielding; a number of previous spacewalks have done so recently as well. And that appears to be a wise move, considering what happened to Shenzhou 20.

Founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos in 2000, the company has steadily built a reputation for innovation, ambition, and a bold vision of humanity's future beyond Earth. From reusable rockets to lunar landers, Blue Origin is shaping the next chapter of space exploration.

This quiz dives into the company's origins, its technological breakthroughs, and the missions that have captured global attention.

Whether you're prepping for a trivia night or just want to flex your spaceflight smarts, this quiz will take you on a journey through the stars.

See how well you score below!

What is it?

Airglow is a faint light emitted by Earth's upper atmosphere, produced when molecules emit energy after being excited by cosmic rays or ultraviolet solar radiation. Although far dimmer than auroras, airglow forms a continuous global layer and is always present, both day and night, though it's best visible from space.

Where is it?

This image was taken from low Earth orbit as the ISS flew 260 miles (418 kilometers) above Texas.

Why is it amazing?

Airglow is more than just visually stunning; it can also be used as a diagnostic tool for understanding the structure and dynamics of Earth's upper atmosphere. Airglow can help shed light on atmospheric disturbances, as well as the impacts of space weather coming from solar radiation.

The different colors of airglow are caused by various chemicals found in the atmosphere, so understanding what chemicals are present can help researchers refine atmospheric models used in climate science to get a more accurate picture of how our planet's atmosphere changes over time.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the International Space Station and airglow.

SpaceX just launched a secret payload for the U.S. military.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off into cloudy skies from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today (Dec. 9) at 2:16 p.m. EDT (1916 GMT) on a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-77.

The NRO, which is part of the Department of Defense, operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites.

Those spacecraft and their missions tend to be classified, and NROL-77 is no exception. The NRO's press kit, which you can find here, says the mission "carries a national security payload designed, built and operated by NRO."

There are no details, though the kit does reveal that the mission patch features a flying squirrel, along with the words "Another One Gone — Today, Tomorrow and Beyond'."

"The flying squirrel is a symbol of hard work and endurance — always active gathering foundational knowledge from the space domain for the nation and its allies," NRO officials wrote in the press kit. "Every mission counts, every decision matters, and every advancement propels us further. 'Another One Gone — Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond' embodies the relentless pursuit of excellence."

NROL-77 was the third mission that SpaceX has launched this year for the NRO and U.S. Space Systems Command, according to the company. However, it was the seventh Falcon 9 flight of 2025 carrying the "NROL-" prefix. The others — NROL-153, NROL-57, NROL-69, NROL-192, NROL-145 and NROL-48 — launched between January and September.

The Falcon 9's first stage successfully landed back at Cape Canaveral 8.5 minutes after launch today as planned. It was the fourth mission for this particular booster, which is designated 1096.

We don't know when and where the Falcon 9's upper stage will deploy the NROL-77 payload. SpaceX's mission description doesn't provide that information, and the company cut its webcast off shortly after booster landing at the request of the NRO.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:28 p.m. ET on Dec. 9 with news of successful launch and booster landing.

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut are safely back on Earth after spending eight months aboard the International Space Station.

Soyuz MS-27 crewmates Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos, along with Jonny Kim of NASA, landed on the cold, snow-flurry-covered steppe of Kazakhstan on Tuesday (Dec. 9). The spacecraft, descending under a parachute and cushioned by braking thrusters, met the ground at 12:03 a.m. EST (0503 GMT or 10:03 a.m. local time).

A Roscosmos recovery team, together with representatives from NASA, were quickly on site to assist the three Soyuz MS-27 crew members out of the capsule and into chairs for brief medical checks.

Ryzhikov and Kim looked to be in fine condition and in good spirits. Zubritsky was taken directly from the Soyuz to an inflatable medical tent.

"Congratulations on one more end of a Soyuz vehicle trip. Expedition 73, all tasks complete," said Ryzhikov after the landing. "The crew are feeling great."

The cosmonauts and astronaut will next be flown by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where the recovery teams are based. Kim will then board a NASA aircraft and be transported to Houston, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky will depart for the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim's journey back to Earth began on Monday (Dec. 8), as they boarded and undocked their Soyuz from the station's Prichal module. Their departure at 8:41 p.m. EST (0141 GMT Tuesday) marked the formal end of Expedition 73 and the beginning of Expedition 74.

"What I think I'm going to remember most is the bond that we shared together, and after having spent eight months in space, I firmly believe that the greatest quality of an astronaut and a human is not technical competence or loyalty or any of the myriad of the things that we like to ascribe to astronauts, it's love," said Kim during a brief change-of-command ceremony on Sunday (Dec. 7). "I firmly believe that love is the greatest thing an astronaut can have for each other and for the people that they work with and for our lovely planet."

"I think that's what we accomplished here — we always gave each other grace and had so much love for each other and for the ground, for everyone that supports us, and I think that is what makes space exploration possible and human," said Kim.

Still aboard the space station as the newly formed Expedition 74 crew are commander Mike Fincke and fellow NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Chris Williams, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev.

Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev and Williams arrived in late November, on a Soyuz launch that left Russia's only launch pad capable of supporting flights to the station significantly damaged.

Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim, during their 245 days in low Earth orbit, conducted hundreds of science investigations and technology demonstrations, as well as contributed to the upkeep of the station and oversaw the arrival and departure of uncrewed cargo ships, including the first upgraded spacecraft from Northrop Grumman (Cygnus XL) and JAXA (HTV-X).

Ryzhikov and Zubritsky also conducted two spacewalks to install scientific experiments and relocate a controller for the European Robotic Arm on the exterior of the Russian segment of the station.

Ryzhikov, 51, was the only veteran on the Soyuz MS-27 crew and has now reached a total time in space that only 12 other people in history have exceeded.

"Now [that] I'm commander, my first thing to do is to celebrate something," said Fincke on Sunday (Dec. 7). "Today is the 60th anniversary of Gemini 7, and that was a big deal for the American space program. They were going to go on a really long-duration mission of 14 days. And amongst us here, we have a man who's flown for 600 days in space."

Ryzhikov, who is a colonel in the Russian Air Force, previously served on the Expedition 50 and Expedition 64 crews in 2017 and 2021, respectively.

Zubritsky, 33, was the 630th person to fly into Earth orbit, according to the Registry of Space Travelers maintained by the Association of Space Explorers. Kim, 41, who inspired memes given his prior careers as a U.S. Navy SEAL and medical doctor, was the 631st person to orbit Earth. (Ryzhikov became number 548 when he launched on his first flight in 2016.)

Soyuz MS-27 was Russia's 73rd spacecraft in its class to launch for the station since 2000 and the 156th Soyuz to fly since 1967.