A new way to move around Earth's outer atmosphere could soon get a field test.

The Spanish company Kreios Space plans to launch into orbit the world's first satellite that uses scooped-up air to push it forward, the company announced on Tuesday (Aug. 4).

The technology Kreios Space has been developing is called air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP). It relies on air sourced from Earth's atmosphere, which is then heated up, ionized and expelled to generate thrust.

This method will allow satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO) — the region from roughly 60 miles to 250 miles (100 to 400 kilometers) above our planet — to counteract atmospheric drag without the aid of liquid fuel.

"Kreios is building the satellites that make sustained operations in very low Earth orbit possible," Kreios Space CEO Adrián Senar said in the Aug. 4 announcement.

"By enabling satellites to fly lower, longer and more efficiently, we are enabling higher-resolution Earth observation, much better satellite communications, more responsive and accurate missions and a more sustainable orbital infrastructure," he continued.

Kreios Space chose Lithuanian-based Kongsberg NanoAvionics to provide the satellite bus that will carry the ABEP system into orbit for the test run.

"Kreios is tackling one of the most demanding operating environments in space, and this mission joins a very short list of European VLEO initiatives," Kongsberg NanoAvionics CEO Atle Wøllo said in the same statement.

"Our engineering team has worked closely with Kreios to configure the MP42 satellite bus to the mission's specific requirements and support the integration of Kreios' technology," he added.

Kreios Space did not give a target launch date for the mission in Tuesday's statement, saying that the company will launch it "at a time when interest in and development of VLEO technologies has accelerated." But the company's website identifies 2027 as a notional target for its first space mission.

A new, very low frontier

Satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) — altitudes of roughly 100 miles to 1,200 miles (160 to 2,000 km) — generally don't need constant propulsion. Usually, a small boost from traditional thrusters here and there is enough to keep a LEO satellite on the right track. To power the thrusters, these satellites usually have some form of fuel built in.

VLEO works differently. It's low enough that there's still some atmosphere present, which generates drag on spacecraft. If you want a satellite to move around VLEO, it'll need to employ propulsion most or all of the time to counteract that drag. Any fuel that the satellite brings with it therefore won't last long.

So, if satellites are going to operate in VLEO, it would be very helpful to have a method of propulsion that doesn't require traditional fuel — a method like ABEP.

Satellites in VLEO have a few advantages over those operating in LEO, like sharper imagery thanks to the closer vantage point. One of the biggest advantages is that VLEO is much less crowded. There are thousands of satellites in LEO — most of them SpaceX's Starlink broadband spacecraft — and the number is growing all the time. But VLEO has plenty of room.

If ABEP technology works and companies start outfitting satellites with this new propulsion method, then we might start seeing satellites operate quite close to Earth, zooming through the atmosphere and using the air around it to stay on course.

On Aug. 9, 1976, the Soviet space program launched its last moon mission.

Luna 24 was a robotic sample return mission and the third of its kind. It lifted off on a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and safely landed on the lunar surface nine days later.

The probe landed in a dark plain of the moon known as Mare Crisium, or the "Sea of Crises" and collected 6 ounces (170.1 grams) of soil samples, which it brought back to Earth on Aug. 22, 1976. Scientists then found that the samples from Luna 24 contained tiny traces of water — about 0.1% by mass.

Why it mattered

The Soviet Union lost the Space Race to land the first humans on the moon, but its Luna program of robotic probes was prolific. The country's Luna 2 was the first spacecraft ever to land on the moon (it slammed into the lunar surface in 1959), with the more advanced Luna 9 making the first-ever soft-landing on the moon in February 1966, beating NASA's Surveyor 1 by about 4 months.

By 1976, 12 NASA astronauts had walked on the moon, the last two on Apollo 17 in 1973 and the Space Race was over. But the Soviet moon program was not, with Luna probes and Lunakhod rovers.

• The 21 Most Marvelous Moon Missions of All Time

The Luna sample return missions consisted of a lander equipped with a descent stage, ascent stage and Earth return capsule. The probes could collect samples of the moon, place them in the return capsule on the ascent stage, then rocket it from the moon for the trip back to Earth. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured photos of the descent stages of Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24 still on the moon.

The Luna 23 spacecraft remained on the moon entirely, as it was damaged during landing and wasn't able to return a sample. NASA's LRO images later revealed Luna 23 likely fell on its side. But Luna 24, the last of the series, worked as planned, landing on Mare Crisium on Aug. 16, 1976, collecting a sample of the lunar regolith and launching back into space less than 24 hours later.

While Luna 24 was the last Soviet moon sample return mission, it was not the last for Russia.

In August 2023, Russia's Roscosmos space agency launched the Luna 25 mission, its first in 47 years, toward the lunar south pole.

Luna 25 was planned to be the first in a new fleet of moon probes, but ultimately crashed into the moon after an orbital maneuver went wrong.

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SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit today (Aug. 8) from California's scenic central coast.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 12:35 p.m. EDT (1635 GMT; 9:35 a.m. local time), carrying 24 of the internet-beaming spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The rocket's first stage returned to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 16th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1093.

B1093's most recent flight before today was on July 14, when it launched 27 Starlink satellites to LEO from Vandenberg.

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage continued carrying the 24 Starlink satellites toward LEO today, deploying them about 61 minutes after liftoff as planned.

Today's launch was the 92nd Falcon 9 liftoff of 2026, and the 71st of the year devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

Starlink, by far the largest orbiting network ever assembled, currently consists of more than 10,900 active satellites — and it's growing all the time.

On Aug. 8, 1977, the Salyut 5 space station fell out of space and burned up in Earth's atmosphere.

Salyut 5 was a Soviet space station and part of the highly-secretive Almaz military space station program. It launched in 1976 and housed two crew of cosmonauts as they conducted military experiments and other scientific research in orbit. Originally, four crewed missions were supposed to go to Salyut 5. However, the third crew was unable to dock their spacecraft and had to return home.

The fourth mission had to be canceled because Salyut 5 was starting to run low on propellant for its main engines and attitude control system. Salyut 5 couldn't be refuelled, so it was deorbited and left to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Why it mattered

When it comes to space stations, Salyut 5 was the last of its kind. While it was the Soviet Union's fifth Salyut station, Salyut 5 was actually the third and final space station dedicated primarily to Earth reconnaissance from space, and was part of the Almaz military space station program, the Soviet Union's counterpart to the U.S. Manned Orbiting Laboratory spy station.

Salyut 5 launched in June 1976 and was expected to host at least four cosmonaut crews during its time in orbit, but only three missions were ultimately launched.

• Russian and Soviet space stations throughout history

The first mission, Soyuz 21, arrived at Salyut 5 a month after its launch, but returned to Earth early due to a noxious smell (possibly due to a fuel leak) on the station. A second mission, Soyuz 23, failed to dock at the station in October 1976 when their rendezvous system experienced a malfunction. After using too much propellant, they abandoned the docking attempt and returned to Earth, only to splash down in a frozen lake, making it the only Soyuz ever to land in water, according to RussianSpaceWeb.com.

The third and final Salyut 5 crew , Salyut 24, visited the station in February 1977, venting its air to avoid any lingering contamination before spending about 18 days in space. After the cosmonauts' departure, a small reentry capsule carrying the film from their reconnaissance photography separated from Salyut 5 and returned to Earth, RussianSpaceWeb reported.

By mid-1977, Salyut 5 was running low on propellant and couldn't be refueled. A fourth crewed mission was canceled and it was ultimately deorbited. Two more Salyut stations, Salyut 6 and 7, would eventually fly as science stations.

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It looks like Starship's two-week-long ocean adventure won't have a happy ending.

The SpaceX megarocket conducted its 13th test flight on July 24, lifting off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas. Things went pretty well on Flight 13, especially for Starship's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage, known as Ship, which splashed down as planned in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

In an unexpected first, Ship survived that homecoming, staying in one piece even after toppling over and hitting the waves. It remains intact still, and SpaceX is towing it toward shore in Western Australia to get a better look. But the ambitious effort is unlikely to succeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told us today (Aug. 7).

"Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now. Nonetheless, we were able to obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades," Musk wrote this afternoon via X, the social media site he owns.

He was responding to a SpaceX post from an hour or so earlier, which provided an update about the recovery effort and shared two photos and a video of the activities.

The recovery team has "been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port," SpaceX wrote in the post.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall when stacked. Both of its stages — Ship and the Super Heavy booster — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will revolutionize spaceflight.

A key enabler of rapid reuse is Ship's heat shield, which protects the vehicle during its downward trips through Earth's atmosphere. Musk has described heat shield development as perhaps the biggest challenge on Starship's road to operational flight — but that challenge may now be in the rearview mirror.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4), during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call.

It's no surprise that Starship and Flight 13 came up in that call. The megarocket is key to SpaceX's ambitious future plans, which include assembling and operating a million-satellite AI constellation in Earth orbit.

Flight 13 was similar to previous Starship test missions; it was a suborbital jaunt that ended with Super Heavy coming down in the Gulf of Mexico and Ship landing in the Indian Ocean.

There was a big milestone, however, in addition to Ship's unexpected transition to seagoing vessel: During its time in space, the upper stage deployed 20 functional Starlink V3 satellites, the bigger, next-gen variant of SpaceX's broadband spacecraft.

These satellites quickly came back down to Earth on July 24, but Flight 13 was a vision of the future nonetheless. SpaceX wants to operate a constellation of 100,000 or so Starlink V3s, and this network will be lofted by Starship.

NASA just made an interstellar tweak to the Voyager 2 spacecraft, known as the "Big Bang", to keep its remaining 50-year-old science instruments running a little longer.

Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977, called Voyager 1, rely on a form of nuclear battery known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat produced by the decay of plutonium. But the supply of plutonium on each probe drops at about four watts a year on each spacecraft.

To keep the probe running on this dwindling power supply, engineers recently reduced Voyager 2's power requirements by turning off a few non-science devices and using "lower-power alternatives" that are still effective enough to keep the spacecraft warm while it's so far from the sun, NASA officials said in a statement. "The spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems," NASA officials wrote of the mission, which is managed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The drop in power is having a measurable science impact on both spacecraft — each has turned off two of their science instruments since 2024 alone. While some of these instruments were shut off after the spacecraft finished their historic planetary flybys decades ago, others were turned off due to power requirements.

Each spacecraft initially launched with 10 instruments, and Voyager 2 is now down to only three instruments. At first it looked as though Voyager 2 would have to shut down another of these instruments later this year, but luckily, the new power shifts will allow all three to operate "for at least another year," NASA said.

Voyager 1 will be tasked to do the same "Big Bang" power change "in the coming months." A signal to each spacecraft takes nearly 24 hours (or one light-day) to make a one-way journey, and officials noted Voyager 1 is further from Earth than its twin. (Voyager 2 is at about 142 astronomical units or sun-Earth distances, while Voyager 1 is nearing 171 AU.)

The two spacecraft initially launched to take advantage of a rare alignment between the outer solar system gas giant planets, which in order of distance from the sun are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Each Voyager spacecraft first flew past Jupiter and Saturn, taking unprecedented imagery of the planets and their moons.

Next, Voyager 1 was directed to fly above the plane of the solar system (also known as the ecliptic) while Voyager 2 continued flying past Uranus and Neptune, becoming the first spacecraft to see these worlds and their moons. Voyager 2's last planetary flyby was in 1989.

The two spacecraft continue to send scientific data from interstellar space; Voyager 1 passed into that region in 2012, while Voyager 2 did so in 2018. Voyager 1 is Earth's most distant spacecraft, currently around 15.9 billion miles (25.5 billion kilometers) away from us, according to NASA.

A private rescue spacecraft is having troubles of its own in Earth orbit.

LINK, a satellite built and operated by the Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies, launched July 3 on a daring and unprecedented mission: Rendezvous with NASA's Swift space telescope and boost the observatory to a higher orbit before it falls out of the sky.

About three weeks after launch, however, LINK started spinning at an unexpected rate, a problem that caused a temporary communications dropout and a reset of its satellite platform. And two of LINK's three orientation-controlling reaction wheels stopped working.

Spacecraft operators always work hard to fix such problems when they crop up, but there's a special urgency where LINK is concerned. It needs to reach Swift soon, or atmospheric drag will pull the observatory — which possesses no thrusters of its own — down past a point of no return. NASA thinks this boundary lies at around 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Earth, an altitude that Swift is expected to reach by October.

So the original plan called for LINK to meet up with Swift in early August, just a month after launch — pretty much as soon as commissioning work on the rescue craft wrapped up. That's not going to happen at this point, but mission teams haven't given up on the rescue attempt. Indeed, they're making progress on getting LINK back up to speed, as a new update relates.

"LINK originally was in a multi-axis spin rotating at about 9 degrees per second, which resulted in sporadic communications and impeded LINK’s progress toward Swift," NASA officials wrote in the update, which the agency posted on Thursday (Aug. 6).

"Using a series of burns from one of LINK’s electric propulsion thrusters, the Katalyst team now has slowed that spin to about 1.47 degrees per second," they added. "Katalyst plans to keep LINK at that spin rate as it proceeds with next steps for the mission."

Those next steps include uploading flight software updates "with new attitude controllers designed to maintain LINK’s stability in its current configuration," NASA officials wrote. "These updates would allow LINK to begin maneuvering to align with Swift’s orbit."

The updates are expected to be beamed up to LINK "in the coming days," according to the update.

Swift — officially known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic events in the universe.

The $250 million telescope's initial altitude was about 375 miles (600 km). But it has fallen considerably since then, and the descent is accelerating: The lower Swift goes, the more atmosphere it encounters and the greater the force of frictional drag becomes.

Swift is still working just fine, which explains why NASA wants to save it. Last September, the agency awarded Katalyst $30 million to build LINK — a refrigerator-sized spacecraft with three robotic arms — and fly its rescue mission.

That's a very tight timeline, but Katalyst hit it, getting LINK ready by its launch date and checking off a number of commissioning milestones before running into trouble. The company has experience delivering under pressure, so maybe it can pull off the rescue craft's rescue before it's too late.

The Chinese commercial launch company Landspace is set for a second attempt at catching an orbital booster.

The startup launched its first Zhuque-3 rocket in December 2025, in what was a milestone for Chinese rocket reusability efforts. While the Zhuque-3 second stage successfully reached orbit, the first stage exploded in a dramatic fireball during its final powered descent toward the landing pad.

Now, Landspace is poised for a second attempt at liftoff and landing, with airspace closure notices indicating that launch is scheduled from the Dongfeng commercial space innovation pilot zone at Jiuquan spaceport, in northwest China, at around 7:45 p.m. EDT on Aug. 10 (23:45 GMT, or 7:45 a.m. Beijing time, Aug. 11).

The company conducted a successful static fire test on June 29 in preparation for the launch.

"All systems operated normally, and test data and results met expectations, validating the correctness and coordination of system operations and laying a solid foundation for upcoming flight missions," Landspace stated in a post that day on the social media platform X.

Zhuque-3 is a 216-foot (66-meter) stainless steel rocket powered by methane-liquid oxygen engines. It's similar in capabilities to SpaceX's Falcon 9, and is capable of sending 40,350 pounds (18,300 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Aug. 10 launch will be China's fourth orbital booster recovery attempt. The first was the Zhuque-3 launch in December 2025; the second was the debut, just days later, of the Long March 12A, which also reached orbit but with a first-stage recovery attempt ending in flames. The third try, using the Long March 10B, took place on July 10. That one was successful: China made history, becoming just the second country to land an orbital booster, in this case using a vessel equipped with a net-capture system.

Landspace, when it makes its expected second attempt next week, will use a powered descent and landing legs, similar to the Falcon 9.

On Aug. 7, 1980, NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft ended its epic and historic mission on the Red Planet.

Viking 1 was the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars. It was one of two Viking missions NASA launched in 1975 to go look for evidence of life on Mars. Each of the Viking missions were composed of an orbiter and a lander. Viking 1's orbiter took photos of the Martian surface that helped NASA decide where to drop the lander.

• Viking 1: The Historic First Mars Landing in Pictures

After four years of orbiting Mars, the orbiter ran out of attitude-control propellant, so NASA had to shut it down. The lander continued its scientific observations for another three years before it lost contact with NASA in 1983.

Why it mattered

NASA's Viking 1 mission is most well-known for making the first truly successful landing on Mars, but the mission was more than just a huge lander. Viking 1 actually consisted of two spacecraft, the Viking 1 Lander and the Viking 1 Orbiter. The two spacecraft rode to Mars together, with the lander separating from the orbiter ahead of its landing on the Red Planet.

In fact, NASA sent FOUR Viking spacecraft to Mars in total. The Viking 2 mission also carried both a Lander and Orbiter. But the Viking 1 probes were the first of that wave. The two orbiters were based on NASA's general Mariner 9 spacecraft bus, but more sophisticated. They carried three primary instrument suites: A two-camera imaging system; infrared spectrometer for water vapor mapping; and an infrared radiometer for thermal mapping.

The Viking missions were only planned to last 90 days, but both the lander and orbiter lasted years beyond their design lifetime. The Viking 1 Orbiter studied Mars for four years, orbiting the planet 1,488 times before shutting down on orbit 1,489 on Aug. 7, 1980.

The Viking 1 and Viking 2 Orbiters captured a combined 52,663 high-resolution photos of Mars, mapping about 97% of its surface with a resolution of about 984 feet (300 meters). They also snapped photos of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, in great detail, far surpassing what NASA achieved with the Mariner 9 Mars orbiter in 1971.

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Two NASA astronauts installed the seventh and final set of mounting hardware for new sets of solar arrays during a successful 6.5-hour spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.

Jessica Meir and Anil Menon on Thursday (Aug. 6), assembled the modification kit for one of the space station's eight power channels, which will allow for the future addition of a new ISS Rolll-Out Solar Array (iROSA). Since 2021, astronauts on prior spacewalks have deployed six of the iROSA assemblies, leaving now just two awaiting delivery to the station later this year.

Like building a giant erector set, Meir and Menon worked to assemble and bolt together the triangular brackets on the 3B power channel, located on the far right, or starboard (S6) segment of the station's backbone truss. Menon was positioned on an articulating portable foot restraint (APFR) atop a worksite interface (WIFEX), providing a stable angle to work from the truss.

Once the modification kit structure was built and secured to the 3B mast canister, the two spacewalkers routed cabling that will carry the electricity from the future iROSA into the 3B power channel and then covered the struts with multi-layer insulation to protect them from micrometeoroid strikes.

The iROSA wings sit forward of the legacy solar arrays, augmenting their electricity generation rather than replacing it. The station's eight original arrays began showing degraded power output as they exceeded their 15-year design life. When used in tandem with the new iROSA wings, the upgraded system will increase the station's electricity supply by 20% to 30%.

The other power channel currently without an iROSA deployed is 2A on the left, or port side, of the station.

"Anil, you can see the moon to the — well, I am not sure what way you're facing, but…," said Meir, taking a short break during the spacewalk to notice NASA's next destination for astronauts under its Artemis program.

"To my right. Yeah, I see it — thanks for the heads-up," said Menon. "I can see a future moon base there."

"I can see it, too!" Meir said.

Meir later turned her attention to Mars with her closing words of the day.

"On this day in 2012, NASA's robotic rover Curiosity successfully landed on the surface of Mars with the goal of understanding if the planet could have fostered life. Curiosity achieved that goal within a year," she said. "One day, humans will visit Curiosity, propelled by the groundbreaking science, technology demonstrations and operations conducted here on the International Space Station for almost 26 years now."

"Today, we made one more step toward expanding the ISS power system, further sustaining our human presence in low Earth orbit, as we prepare to take those next steps," said Meir.

Thursday's spacewalk began at 8:33 a.m. EDT (1233 GMT) when Meir and Menon switched their spacesuits to internal battery power. After collecting their tools and reentering the Quest airlock, the spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), concluded at 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), 6 hours and 27 minutes after it began.

This was the 96th U.S. EVA and 281st spacewalk overall in support of the International Space Station's assembly, maintenance and enhancement. It was the first career spacewalk for Menon and the sixth for Meir, bringing her total time on EVA to 42 hours and 33 minutes.

This was the first spacewalk for the space station's Expedition 75 crew. There are two more U.S. outings scheduled for this month: EVA 97 will work to replace a space-to-ground antenna on Aug. 13, and EVA 98 will connect power channel cables and data relay systems as part of ongoing maintenance, including preparations for the station's future deorbit, as well as replace a navigational aid used for spacecraft docking on Aug. 25.

A Japanese Earth-observing satellite got to orbit early this morning (Aug. 6), five weeks later than originally planned.

The spacecraft — a radar satellite that will be operated by the Tokyo-based company iQPS — lifted off atop a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle from New Zealand today at 5:18 a.m. EDT (0918 GMT; 9:18 p.m. local time).

It was a deferred round two for the mission: Rocket Lab originally tried to launch it on June 30 but aborted that attempt at the last second. The company has not yet revealed what caused that abort.

Everything went well on this morning's flight, which Rocket Lab called "The Grain Goddess Provides." The Electron deployed the iQPS satellite into its target orbit about 357 miles (575 kilometers) above Earth, Rocket Lab announced via X this morning.

The spacecraft — known as QPS-SAR-13 or MIKURA-I, after a Japanese goddess associated with abundance and prosperity — will study our planet using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which can peer through clouds and collect imagery both day and night.

iQPS is building a constellation of 36 such SAR satellites in low Earth orbit. Electron is the primary launcher for this network; "The Grain Goddess Provides" was the eighth of a total of 15 launches that Rocket Lab will conduct to help assemble the constellation.

Today's mission was the 92nd overall for Rocket Lab and the company's 13th of 2026. Most of these flights have involved the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, the company's workhorse small-satellite launcher. But a growing number these days are performed by HASTE, a suborbital variant of Electron that allows customers to test technologies in a hypersonic flight environment.

And we could soon see an increase in the cadence of HASTE liftoffs. Rocket Lab recently signed a $266 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 suborbital missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska, a new launch locale for the company.

Blue Origin is close to figuring out why its New Glenn rocket went boom a few months ago.

The explosion — which destroyed the rocket and some key pieces of pad infrastructure — occurred on May 28 during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working hard ever since to determine the cause of the anomaly, and it has made considerable progress, according to a new update.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Wednesday afternoon (Aug. 5). "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn features a reusable first stage, which is powered by seven BE-4s and designed to launch at least 25 times. The heavy lifter is a big part of Blue Origin's ambitious plans, which include helping humanity establish a foothold in the final frontier.

"The rocket is engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly humans, and will enable our vision of building a road to space for the benefit of Earth," Blue Origin's website states.

The company, and NASA, are counting on the rocket to get important hardware to the moon. New Glenn will be the ride for Blue Origin's Blue Moon, one of two crewed landers that NASA picked to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

And there's an important Blue Moon mission coming up: the first test flight of the prototype Mark 1 lander, which is scheduled to make an uncrewed lunar touchdown by the end of this year, if possible. That mission will help prove out the vehicle's capabilities ahead of crewed flights.

New Glenn debuted in January 2025 and has flown two more times since, in November 2025 and April 19 of this year. There was an issue on that most recent launch, which carried up AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite: New Glenn failed to deploy the payload into the proper orbit, and it was lost.

Despite that issue, and the May 28 explosion, Limp expressed confidence that Blue Origin will soon get New Glenn up and running again.

"The path forward is clear," he added in Wednesday's X post. "We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis."

NASA's Perseverance rover witnessed a rare event recently, when Earth briefly disappeared behind Mars' moon Phobos in the Red Planet sky.

What is it?

These new composite images were released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and taken on July 2, 2026, the 1,907th Martian day of Perseverance's mission. They consist of nine different images taken by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument as it pointed up into the hazy Martian sky, watching our planet, seen here as a pale dot, cross behind the Mars moon Phobos.

This type of event is known as an occultation, from the Latin word occultare, meaning "to hide." On Earth, the most common type of occultation occurs when our moon passes in front of background stars or when planets pass behind the moon.

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos is the larger and innermost moon. Both are lumpy and irregularly shaped, and astronomers aren't sure whether they came from the asteroid belt or were formed from an ancient impact near or on the Red Planet.

Why is it incredible?

The image took careful preparation and required Perseverance to be in the right place at the right time.

"Phobos crosses the Martian sky three times a day, and Earth is visible for months at a stretch, but catching one directly behind the other takes planning and a little luck," said Mark Lemmon, a Mastcam-Z co-investigator at the Space Science Institute.

Aside from catching Earth passing behind Phobos, Perseverance has also witnessed Phobos passing in front of the sun, in what JPL calls a "Martian solar eclipse."

On Aug. 6, 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface.

At the time, the Curiosity rover was the biggest and most ambitious Mars rover that NASA ever launched. Its landing involved a new kind of maneuver that had never been tried before using something called a "sky crane." Like previous rovers that have landed on Mars, Curiosity used a parachute and rocket engines to slow down as it descended through the Red Planet's atmosphere.

But while other rovers used airbags to cushion the last part of the fall, Curiosity's rocket-propelled sky crane hovered over the ground and gently lowered it with cables. Touchdown was confirmed at 1:31 a.m. EDT (0531 GMT), though it was 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 at Curiosity's JPL control room.

• 15 Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover

Why it mattered

The Curiosity Mars rover was built by engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The space center's motto is ambitious: "Dare Mighty Things." With Curiosity, JPL may have dared more mightily than it ever had before.

First, there's the rover's immense size. It weighs nearly 1 ton on Earth and is the size of a small car. It's powered by a nuclear battery and was the first of a new family of massive rovers to land on Mars. The sky crane landing approach was a big departure from the direct touchdowns of the Viking landers, as well as the bouncy airbag landings of the Mars Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity missions.

It all had to go right autonomously during a time NASA called the "7 minutes of terror" — the time it took for the landing, which would happen faster than the rover could get instructions from flight controllers on Earth due to the signal travel time to reach Mars. And it all worked spectacularly.

Curiosity not only aced its landing at Gale Crater on Mars, but it changed Mars landings forever. NASA repeated the feat nine years later with the successful landing of the Perseverance rover at Jezero Crater on Mars in February 2021. Curiosity and Perseverance are the largest rovers ever to explore Mars and set a new benchmark for what is possible on other planets.

As of this writing, Curiosity has spent 14 years exploring Mars, drilling into rocks and finding new clues about water on Mars and the planet's potential habitability in the ancient past. It's still going strong, even if it got a rock stuck on its drill for a few days earlier this year.

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On Aug. 5, 2011, NASA launched the Juno spacecraft on a mission to study Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.

The robotic spacecraft lifted off on an Atlas V rocket from what is now Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and spent the next five years making the 1.74-billion-mile trek to Jupiter.

• Next Stop, Jupiter! Launch Photos of NASA's Juno Mission

Since it arrived in Jupiter's orbit in 2016, the Juno spacecraft has taken the most amazing photos of Jupiter anyone has ever seen! But it has also taken plenty of scientific measurements to study Jupiter's composition, magnetic fields, weather patterns and more.

Why it mattered

Juno is an interesting mission. It was the first dedicated orbiter at Jupiter since NASA's prolific Galileo mission, which ended in 2003, and is the first solar-powered spacecraft to the gas giant. Indeed, each of its three 30-foot-long solar wings is as long as a semi truck to collect enough sunlight to power its systems.

But it's the science that makes Juno stand out. When Galileo orbited Jupiter, its high-gain antenna did not fully deploy, meaning the probe was never able to record detailed video of Jupiter's atmosphere as hoped. While Juno was initially built to study the inner workings of Jupiter, its camera recorded the first detailed video of the planet's clouds and atmosphere.

The Juno spacecraft's primary mission ended just 20 months after entering orbit, but NASA extended the orbiter's mission several times, most recently in 2021. That most recent extension sent Juno on multiple flybys of three of Jupiter's largest moons, Ganymede, Europa and the volcanic moon Io.

Juno's observations are already helping the science planning of future missions to Jupiter, including science targets for the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, or JUICE, and NASA's Europa Clipper probes, which are currently en route to the giant planet.

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SpaceX will make some history this month, if all goes according to plan.

The company aims to launch the 14th test flight of its Starship megarocket before August is out, Elon Musk said today (Aug. 4) during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call. Starship will deploy viable payloads into orbit on Flight 14, something it has never done before — and there will be other unprecedented action as well.

"I'd say things look very good, and that's why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month," Musk said during today's call.

"Ship" is the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage of Starship, which also features a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a breakthrough that, combined with Starship's immense power, will revolutionize spaceflight, according to SpaceX.

And "things look very good" is a reference to Starship Flight 13, which lifted off on July 24. Musk was talking specifically about Ship's performance on that suborbital jaunt, which ended with the upper stage's soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

Ship's heat shield survived the harrowing downward trip through Earth's atmosphere in great shape on Flight 13, according to SpaceX (as did the entire vehicle, which is still in one piece to this day). And that gives SpaceX confidence to plan for a tower catch on Flight 14 — a crucial component of Starship's future reusability.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said.

Starship's two launch towers at its Starbase site in South Texas feature large "chopstick" arms, which stack Super Heavy and Ship atop the pad — and can also catch the vehicles when they come back to Earth at the end of their missions.

SpaceX has already executed a tower catch with Super Heavy on three Starship test flights, but it has not yet tried to do so with Ship. So Flight 14 could be momentous, provided SpaceX gets permission from regulators to make an attempt.

Flight 14 will also carry up a batch of SpaceX's V3 Starlink satellites, a larger and more capable version of the spacecraft that currently populate the company's broadband megaconstellation. Flight 13 toted 20 Starlink V3s, but Ship deployed them into suborbital space; the satellites will be placed into an operational orbit on the upcoming mission, if all goes to plan, Musk said.

SpaceX goes public

Musk founded SpaceX as a private company back in March 2002. It stayed that way until this past June 12, when SpaceX went public via the richest IPO in history, which raised $86 billion and valued the company at $1.77 trillion.

SpaceX now has to provide earnings reports every quarter, starting with Q2 of this year. And these first publicized numbers show considerable improvement compared to a year ago, according to the company.

The newly released report states that total revenue in the March-June time period was up 92% over the same stretch in 2025 — $7.8 billion versus $4.1 billion. And SpaceX had a net loss during this span of $541 million, down from a net loss of $1.0 billion in Q2 2025.

More than half of this quarter's revenue — about $4.3 billion — came via the company's Starlink satellite-internet megaconstellation. That number crystallizes a truth that has been apparent for a while now — SpaceX is not just a launch company anymore.

Rockets will bring in a smaller and smaller share of SpaceX revenue over the coming years, if all goes according to plan. Launch will continue ceding this financial ground to Starlink, but also, increasingly, to SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI) operations.

Indeed, SpaceX sees itself becoming more and more of an AI outfit over time. A few months ago, the company revealed that, over the long haul, it's targeting a "total addressable market" of $28.5 trillion per year, nearly $23 trillion of which will be in the field of "enterprise AI applications." That's quite an ambitious goal; in 2025, the gross domestic product of the entire United States was a little less than $31 trillion.

Speaking of ambitious: SpaceX plans to make a lot of this money via an orbiting constellation of one million AI data centers, which together will comprise a constellation known as Starmind. (Yes, SpaceX has a thing for "Star" names.)

SpaceX expects to start launching operational Starmind spacecraft in 2027, Musk said during today's call. It will take a lot of Starship launches to get the network up and running, but he doesn't see that as a bottleneck.

"We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly, and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more," Musk said.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying three of AST SpaceMobile's massive direct-to-cell BlueBird satellites launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT) on Wednesday, minutes after the opening of its 96-minute window.

Today's launch further expands AST SpaceMobile's constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which will beam internet service directly to unmodified smartphones once operational.

The newcomers bring the total number of BlueBird spacecraft launched to 13 and marks a significant milestone toward getting the constellation fully up and running, according to AST SpaceMobile.

"This orbital launch, combined with expanded manufacturing capacity and the recent successful launch and deployment of BlueBird satellites 8, 9, and 10, position us for beta services later this year with our space-based cellular broadband coverage," Scott Wisniewski, the company's president, said in a July 28 statement.

AST SpaceMobile began assembling its constellation with "Block 1" spacecraft, which have communications arrays that cover 693 square feet (64.4 square meters) when unfurled.

That's pretty big, but the company upped the ante with BlueBird 6, which reached LEO atop an Indian LVM3 rocket in December 2025. That was the first "next-generation" BlueBird, a class whose antennas cover a whopping 2,400 square feet (223 square m).

Prior to today's launch, there had been four next-gen BlueBirds in LEO — numbers 6, 8, 9 and 10. (BlueBird 7 was lost shortly after liftoff this past April after its Blue Origin New Glenn rocket suffered an anomaly.) So, BlueBirds 11 through 13 nearly double the off-Earth population.

"These next-generation BlueBird satellites are expected to deliver nearly double the peak download speeds achieved by the company's initial Block 1 BlueBird satellites, which recently demonstrated peak download speeds of 98.9 Mbps directly to standard smartphones," AST SpaceMobile wrote in the same statement.

The Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth roughly 8.5 minutes after launch today as planned, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas."

It was the 30th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. The rocket also flew the BlueBird 8-10 mission in June.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, went on to deploy the three BlueBird satellites into LEO over an 11-minute span beginning 53.5 minutes after liftoff.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5 a.m. ET on Aug. 5 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

SpaceX has launched yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites to the final frontier.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Aug. 4) at 1:05 p.m. EDT (1705 GMT; 10:05 a.m. local time), carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 90th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year and the 70th of 2026 devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes after launch, touching down on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 34th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1063.

That's just two flights shy of the Falcon 9 reuse record, which was set last month on a different Starlink launch.

If all goes according to plan, the 24 Starlink satellites will be deployed into LEO about 61 minutes after liftoff. They'll join quite a few other spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation — nearly 10,900 at last count.

There's some other SpaceX action on tap today as well. At 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT), the company will host a webcast to discuss its first-ever public earnings report, which covers the second quarter of 2026. You can listen live via SpaceX's X account.

SpaceX was a private company from its founding in 2002 until mid-June of this year, when Elon Musk took it public in the largest IPO in history.

The next crew, spacecraft and rocket to fly to the International Space Station are on schedule to meet their mid-September launch date, mission managers and the astronauts told reporters on Monday (Aug. 3).

SpaceX's Crew-13 astronauts — commander Jessica Watkins and pilot Luke Delaney of NASA, mission specialist Josh Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency and mission specialist Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos — will become only the second crew to fly aboard the Dragon spacecraft "Grace" when they lift off no earlier than Sept. 12 from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

They will then dock with the space station the following day to begin a seven-month stay on the orbiting outpost, as part of the Expedition 75/76 crew.

"We expect a very busy mission with lots of station maintenance, both internal and external, with a few EVAs [extravehicular activities, or spacewalks] on the docket," said Watkins, who is the only member of Crew-13 to have flown into space before and will become the first active NASA astronaut to fly on Dragon twice. "[We also expect] visiting vehicle capture and stowage operations, lots of science — very interesting science experiments that will be flying with us as well — and plenty of outreach."

Kutryk will be the fourth Canadian to serve on an ISS crew and the second from his country to fly this year, after Jeremy Hansen launched around the moon on the Artemis II crew in April.

"Personally, myself, I grew up on a cattle farm in Canada. It's a long way from being here with this mission in front of us, but the one thing that has resonated at every twist and turn in that journey has been the complexity of these missions and the enormity of the teams that go into pulling missions like this off," said Kutryk. "So, we need to say thank you to everyone."

Cybertrucks, spacesuits and mudflats

"Every time we do a human spaceflight mission, it gives us an opportunity to strengthen our understanding of low Earth orbit. It gives us an opportunity to broaden our international relationships and an opportunity to showcase to the world what we can do in low Earth orbit for human spaceflight," said Joel Montalbano, NASA's deputy associate administrator for human spaceflight.

During the mission, Watkins, Delaney, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov will take part in research to combat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem cell-derived tissues. They will also explore crop production that's important for longer-duration spaceflight missions, and help improve scientists' understanding of blood flow abnormalities that are seen on long missions. The crew will also test new diagnostic medical equipment for keeping an eye on their overall health.

First, though, they must get to space.

"Final integration of the Dragon is complete. The capsule was stacked on the trunk just last week and mission preparations are proceeding well for a mid-September launch," said Dana Weigel, NASA's manager for its low Earth orbit program. "Falcon 9 booster maintenance will kick off this month. That same booster was flown on Crew-12. We are not tracking any major issues for this mission campaign."

This Friday (Aug. 7), the crew will don their SpaceX suits — the first "Rev. 3" models with improved donning and doffing capabilities, as well as adjustments to account for spinal growth on orbit — and get their first chance to board "Grace," their ride into orbit and back. This "test drive" will help them gain some muscle memory — some familiarity within the the vehicle mission — and provide them a very big psychological boost, managers said.

"Grace" will also sport new metal "mud flaps" for its Draco abort thrusters, replacing earlier carbon fiber models. In addition, should the crew encounter an emergency before launch, they will be evacuated from the launch pad area for the first time by Tesla Cybertrucks operated by SpaceX, reducing conflicts when SpaceX and NASA want to launch crewed flights at the near or same time.

"There was a lot of certification that had to go into making sure those Cybertrucks would start up with a gloved hand. There were a lot of tests in terms of making sure you could egress the vehicle with a bulky suit on," Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said in a response to a question from collectSPACE and Space.com. "All of those things were proven to be already intact, and they're going to configure those Cybertrucks to be ready."

Departures and arrivals

The four members of Crew-13 will be sharing their time on the space station with outgoing and incoming Russian Soyuz crews, who will launch and land with members of Delaney's astronaut candidate class, "The Flies," selected in 2021.

"It's really exciting to see the class fly," said Delaney. "We're going to be meeting Anil [Menon] up there. He's part of our class. Deniz [Burnham] will come up right behind to replace him. Working closely with both of those two throughout astronaut training, it's really just satisfying."

"I'm slightly hoping we get delayed a little bit, so we have some overlaps, so that way we can have three Flies back to back, he said.

For Kutryk, some timing just cannot be controlled.

"It's about midway through — pretty much perfect timing. That's sarcasm," said Kutryk, referring to the upcoming birth of his third child, who is expected to come into the world while he is on the space station.

"It's been done a couple times before," he said, referring to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke and Randy Bresnik, who both had children born while on the ISS. "I think that my family is ready. I have a wonderful, huge support network, from my wife outwards, around us, and we're looking forward to that challenge and to the uniqueness of this experience."

On Aug. 4, 2007, NASA launched its Phoenix Mars Lander on a mission to touch down on Mars.

The robotic spacecraft was designed to search for environments that could be suitable for microbial life and to study the history of water on the Red Planet. It lifted off atop a Delta II rocket at about 5:30 a.m. ET from what is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and spent almost 10 months making its way to Mars.

When it arrived at the Red Planet, it landed farther north than any spacecraft had ever gone before. Not only did Phoenix find water-ice, but it also found what appeared to be small globs of liquid water.

Why it mattered

The Phoenix Mars Lander was one of NASA's biggest do-overs. The lander, which touched down in the arctic plains of Mars known as Vastitas Borealis in May 2008, was designed to seek water ice below the surface and hunt organic molecules. Its origins, however, began years earlier as NASA's 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, which was canceled after the agency's Mars Polar Lander was lost during an attempted landing in 1999.

NASA repurposed the 2001 Mars lander into a Martian arctic explorer, and gave it a suite of science instruments that were improved versions of ones that rode upon the Mars Polar Lander. Its name, "Phoenix," was a reference to its "rising from the ashes" of both the dead Mars Polar Lander and the canceled Mars Surveyor.

After landing on Mars, Phoenix used a robotic arm to dig into the arctic Martian dirt to confirm the existence of subsurface ice. Perhaps the mission's biggest discovery was the existence of perchlorate, an oxidizing chemical that can be food for some microbes while toxic for others.

In November 2008, after surviving two months longer than it was designed to, the Phoenix Mars Lander fell silent, succumbing to the harsh Martian winter. Subsequent photos of the lander taken from orbit by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed that Phoenix likely suffered severe ice damage to one of its solar panels, ending its mission.

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When people grow impatient at the lack of success in the search for alien life, researchers often point to how few of the Milky Way's 100 billion stars or so have been searched so far. But it may be that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has surveyed more stars than astronomers had realized.

Louisa Mason, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, had a recent epiphany that astronomers have actually searched much more of our galaxy for radio signals than we thought. Mason came to the conclusion by using a specific simulation of the Milky Way, called the Besançon Galactic Model, and then comparing it to surveys of the sky conducted by the Green Bank and Parkes radio telescopes. Based on star catalogues, it was calculated that the two telescopes had seen 288,315 stars seen in 1,327 observations of the sky. However, by applying the Besançon Galactic Model, Mason discovered that the survey had actually included more than 6.1 million stars, most too faint to be obvious.

"One of the most exciting things about this work is realizing that we've surveyed many more stars than initially thought," Mason said in a statement. "Even a very small observation can contain a huge number and diversity of stars that we might never have intended to study." But while Mason's calculations show that we've actually surveyed many more of those stars than we realized, there's no need to grow disheartened by the lack of a detection.

When a radio telescope points towards a target star, it isn’t just listening to that star, but is also eavesdropping on all the other stars in the field of view. This is very useful for a practice called commensal SETI, whereby a SETI instrument piggybacks on a radio telescope's usual day-to-day observations.

Typically, the number of stars in a radio telescope's field of view is estimated by comparing it to detailed star catalogues such as those compiled by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. However, these catalogues are limited because they only include stars bright enough to be seen; there are many more stars too faint to be seen by our optical and infrared telescopes. Yet if a radio telescope is pointed in their direction, it could still detect a radio signal from them even if we cannot see the star.

Although the search may be bigger in terms of the number of stars, it is still very small in terms of the time spent listening to each star, and is still limited in the radio frequency range covered. We could very easily have missed a signal by observing between broadcasts, or at the wrong frequency.

So Mason has also looked to expand the range of radio frequencies that can be searched. Ever since modern SETI began in 1960, the bulk of SETI searches have focused on a frequency range known as the 'water hole', between the emission frequency of atomic hydrogen at 1,420 MHZ, and hydroxyl (a molecule composed of one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen) at 1,666 MHz. The name 'water hole' comes about because if you combine hydrogen with hydroxyl you get a water molecule (two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom).

One of the reasons the water hole has been so favored is because radio waves in this frequency range are not absorbed by Earth's atmosphere. Furthermore, a lot of astronomy is conducted around the hydrogen frequency, so there's a good chance of a coincidental SETI detection. Plus, aliens might recognize the importance of water to life and the symbolism of transmitting in that frequency range.

However, there are many other frequencies that could be looked at, and in that vein Mason has conducted the first ever SETI search with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

"For decades, SETI researchers have concentrated on a relatively small part of the radio spectrum," said Mason. "We wanted to ask what might happen if we looked somewhere very different."

Mason didn't perform new observations with ALMA, but searched a small amount of archive data for any narrowband signals that could easily have been missed. ALMA operates at shorter radio wavelengths and therefore correspondingly higher frequencies than most regular radio telescopes.

One of the advantages of looking at higher frequencies is that they suffer less from dispersion, which is when lower frequency waves interacting with electrons in space are delayed and arrive at their destination a little later than higher frequencies, therefore distorting the signal overall.

Although Mason didn't come up with any promising new signals in her ALMA search, she remains optimistic about using higher frequencies.

"The millimeter and submillimeter radio bands remain almost completely unexplored for SETI, so this is really about opening up a new area of parameter space to search," she said.

Mason presented her work at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham in July. The research is also described in two papers – one on the ALMA survey, the other on the Besançon Galactic Model, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The great technological leaps in American history have often featured influential industrialists who step forward as vanguards, leading the way to a better tomorrow while emerging as major players in extreme endeavors.

Spaceflight is no exception.

A new CNN documentary titled "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" shines a light on how a pair of visionary billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have been shaping and steering our country's space program and the bright future of private space enterprise.

Premiering on Sunday (Aug. 9) at 8 p.m. EDT/PDT on CNN, the documentary examines the contributions of the two men and how their considerable wealth have affected America's spaceflight efforts. It also features exclusive interviews with Chief Ambassador of The Planetary Society Bill Nye, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, journalist and CNN contributor Kara Swisher, Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson and many others.

"'Eclipsing Power' traces how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have transformed the future of space exploration, shifting what was once an endeavor primarily led by government into a race driven by private ambition," states the show's official synopsis.

"It follows the rise of SpaceX and Blue Origin, detailing how two of the world's most influential entrepreneurs have come to play an outsized role in America's space program. The hour looks at both the opportunities and the risks of NASA's growing reliance on private industry, the race to return humans to the moon, and what this new era of commercial spaceflight could mean for the future of humanity."

"What am I most excited about in space exploration?," Nye shares in our exclusive clip. "Well, for me, discovering evidence of life elsewhere. Maybe the rocks on Mars. Maybe under the ice on Europa, the moon of Jupiter with twice as much ocean water as Earth. Maybe Enceladus or Titan. It would change the course of human history. We’ll see you up there!"

CNN’s FlashDocs division offers provocative storytelling on topical issues shaping society and culture. Former FlashDocs programs have included "Bad Bunny and the Halftime Show: Rhythms of Resistance" and "Behind the Bob: Vogue's Anna Wintour."

Executive produced by Eric Johnson alongside CNN Studios' Amy Entelis and Katie Hinman, "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" will first stream exclusively at CNN.com/Watch and on the CNN app beginning on Friday (Aug. 7) and has its broadcast debut on Sunday at 8 p.m. EDT on CNN.

NASA's Europa Clipper is currently on a 1.8-billion-mile journey to Jupiter, tasked with assessing whether the icy moon of its namesake, Europa, could support life.

Based on data from the historic Voyager and Galileo missions, scientists know Europa hides a global ocean beneath its frozen crust, containing more than double the water of all Earth's oceans combined. During the Europa Clipper's planned 49 close flybys of the icy moon, planetary scientists hope the spacecraft detects giant water plumes or warm surface pockets supplied by this subterranean ocean, offering a convenient way to analyze the hidden ocean's chemistry from orbit.

A new study, however, suggests any shallow water the Europa Clipper detects may not necessarily be a direct window into Europa's ocean after all.

Research led by planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University indicates that Europa's icy shell acts as a far more formidable barrier than previously assumed. Computer simulations modeling the physics of water traveling through fractures in the ice reveal that liquid rising from the ocean would move turbulently, shed heat rapidly and freeze the cracks shut — often in a matter of hours — long before reaching shallow depths.

"There's an icy shell, there's water underneath, and there's all this speculation about how that water can come from deep underground and make its way all the way up without freezing en route," Ojha said in a statement. "That's really what we think we disproved."

To test this scenario, Ojha's team built computer simulations to evaluate whether ocean water could rise through fractures in the crust and collect in shallow reservoirs closer to the surface. Such reservoirs, if fed directly by the ocean, would be significantly easier for passing spacecraft to detect and analyze than an ocean buried miles below.

While earlier models assumed water would flow smoothly through these pathways, real-world physics creates a far more chaotic journey, according to the new study. Instead of a steady stream, rising water churns turbulently against the frigid walls of the fractures, rapidly losing heat.

"It's going to be left and right, it's going to be up and down, it's going to have a swirling motion," Ojha said in the statement. "And when that happens, that liquid water is going to cool very, very fast as it approaches the surface."

As the water rapidly cools, it remains liquid below its standard freezing point in a process called supercooling. This phenomenon, the study notes, triggers the formation of tiny, slushy ice crystals known as frazil ice that then quickly builds up and clogs the pathway.

While wider fractures could theoretically carry larger volumes of water, the results suggest that to prevent complete freezing, those channels would need to be "unrealistically long or occur in large numbers," the university statement read.

The findings could alter how scientists interpret incoming data from Europa Clipper, which is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030, as well as the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. JUICE is set to arrive in July 2031 to study Jupiter alongside three of its ocean-bearing moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

If these spacecraft do discover shallow liquid pools or similar surface features, Ojha's study suggests they are more likely created by localized melting inside the ice shell itself, rather than direct upwellings from the deep ocean.

"This helps future missions interpret what they find and better understand where to look for signs of habitability," Ojha said in the statement.

This research is described in a paper published July 23 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

On Aug. 3, 2004, NASA launched the MESSENGER spacecraft on a historic first mission to orbit the planet Mercury. The spacecraft's name stands for the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging mission.

It blasted off on a Delta II rocket that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:15 a.m. Eastern Time and spent the next six and a half years making its way to Mercury's orbit. Because Mercury is so close to the sun, a spacecraft travelling toward the planet speeds up as the sun's gravity pulls it in.

In order to slow down enough to avoid falling into the sun, MESSENGER utilized the gravitational pull of Venus and Mercury with multiple flybys along the way. It made 15 trips around the sun before it finally arrived in Mercury's orbit in 2011.

Why it mattered

Mercury is an odd planet. It is close to the sun, yet holds the promise of water ice on its surface. It completes one orbit every 88 days. But it can be a devil of a planet to reach with a spacecraft.

The launch of NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft was the first step to bring the rocky, craggy Mercury within tantalizing reach of scientists hoping for an upclose look at the planet. The spacecraft made some surprising discoveries, revealing that Mercury's core is huge — roughly 85% of its radius (Earth's core is only 50% of its own radius). The planet is also very flat, with less elevation changes than those found on Earth's moon and Mars. MESSENGER's greatest finds may have been extremely "radar-bright" deposits in craters at Mercury's poles, which are in permanent darkness and may hold pockets of water ice.

MESSENGER's primary mission at Mercury ended in 2012 and its mission was extended twice. In 2015, NASA ended the MESSENGER mission by crashing the probe into Mercury.

A new spacecraft is now headed for Mercury. The BepiColombo mission, a joint project by Japan and the European Space Agency, launched two different orbiters to Mercury in 2018 and is due to arrive at the planet in November.

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Martin Halliwell is a Partner at NewSpace Capital, one of the world's first private equity firms devoted exclusively to growth-stage companies working in the space technology sector. He formerly served as Chief Technology Officer of SES, where he led global technology and R&D from 2011 to 2019. Halliwell contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices section.

For most of the space age, satellites have been puppets on a string. Every meaningful decision — where to point a camera, when to fire a thruster, how to route a signal — was made by engineers on the ground and radioed up on a schedule.

That model is starting to break down, not because it stopped working, but because the number of satellites in orbit has exploded. A single company can now operate thousands of spacecraft at once, and no ground team can watch that many moving parts in real time. Artificial intelligence is stepping into the gap, and it's changing three things in particular: how individual spacecraft think for themselves, how whole constellations act as a team, and how the communication networks those satellites form get managed.

AI on the spacecraft itself

The simplest change is that satellites are starting to make more decisions on their own, onboard, without waiting for instructions from Earth. This matters because of a basic physics problem: a satellite in low orbit is only in radio contact with a given ground station for a few minutes at a time, and even geostationary satellites face communication delays and limited ground-station bandwidth. If a satellite has to wait for a human to notice a problem, approve a response, and send it back up, that can take hours. An onboard AI system can notice something interesting — a wildfire, a ship, a hardware fault — and act on it immediately.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been testing this idea directly, with onboard AI that analyzes data as it's collected and decides what's worth keeping, what's worth acting on, and what to ignore. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has gone a step further, demonstrating a neural network that controlled a satellite's orientation in orbit without a human in the loop — AI managing not just the payload, but the spacecraft's core flight functions. Newer Earth-observation satellites are even carrying small, purpose-built processors (similar to the chips used in some laptops) so they can combine different types of sensor data on the spot and beam down a finished answer instead of a mountain of raw data for humans to sort through later.

AI for managing constellations

Once you have hundreds or thousands of satellites flying together — a "constellation" — a new problem appears: they need to behave like a coordinated fleet, not thousands of individuals. This is one of the areas where AI has the clearest, most practical role.

The most visible example is collision avoidance. Low Earth orbit is increasingly crowded with active satellites and debris, and a mid-size constellation can face dozens of close-approach warnings a day, each requiring a decision about whether to move the satellite out of the way. That volume is beyond what human teams can evaluate one by one, so operators are turning to AI systems that ingest tracking data, calculate collision risk, and in some cases plan or even execute an avoidance maneuver without waiting for a person to sign off. NASA's Starling project and related "distributed spacecraft autonomy" work go further still, teaching small satellites to share data with each other, divide up observation tasks, and adjust their collective plan on the fly — essentially letting the constellation manage itself as a team rather than as separate spacecraft that happen to share an operator.

AI for network orchestration

The third shift is in how satellites talk to each other and to the ground — and this is where AI may have the biggest impact on ordinary users, because it's what makes services like satellite broadband fast and reliable. A modern broadband constellation is a network in constant motion: every satellite is moving at roughly 17,000 mph (27,400 kph), links between satellites and ground stations are constantly breaking and re-forming, and demand for bandwidth shifts by time of day and location. Deciding which satellite should talk to which ground station, how to route a data packet through a mesh of satellites overhead, and how to shape each satellite's radio beam to serve the busiest areas — all of that has to be recalculated continuously.

This is a scale of real-time optimization that traditional, rule-based network management can't keep up with. Operators are turning to AI models — often the same family of technology used for demand forecasting or logistics — that can predict traffic patterns hours in advance and continuously re-optimize beam shapes, routing paths, and satellite handoffs across the whole constellation at once. SpaceX's Starlink network, for example, has described using this kind of AI-driven system to manage traffic across its laser inter-satellite links and adjust beam patterns in real time as demand shifts around the globe. Researchers are also applying newer AI techniques, including models that treat the whole constellation as a connected graph, to make these routing decisions faster and more efficient as networks scale into the tens of thousands of satellites.

Why it matters

None of this replaces human oversight — operators still set the rules, review anomalies, and can step in when something looks wrong. But it does change the job: instead of manually commanding every satellite, ground teams increasingly supervise AI systems that handle the routine, high-volume decisions on their own. As constellations grow from hundreds of satellites to the tens of thousands now being planned, that shift from "human commands every satellite" to "human supervises an AI-managed fleet" isn't just convenient — it's becoming the only way these systems can keep working at all.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:50 p.m. ET on Aug. 7 with a significantly revised version.

On Aug. 2, 1971, a lunar liftoff was televised for the first time. Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin spent three days on the moon before departing in the lunar module, named "Falcon."

An RCA TV camera was mounted onto their lunar rover, which Scott parked about 300 feet away with the camera pointed at Falcon. Flight controllers in Mission Control Houston had the option to move the camera, but because of some technical difficulties, they opted to leave the camera pointed in the same direction during liftoff. from the moon. Following a quick pop and a bunch of sparks, Falcon quickly disappeared from sight. Shortly afterward, Falcon joined the command module "Endeavour," and Apollo 15 began its journey back to Earth.

• Apollo 15 in Photos: A Moon Landing and the 1st Lunar Car for Astronauts

The Apollo 15 mission launched to the moon on July 26, 1971. The mission was commanded by David Scott, with James Irwin as lunar module pilot. Astronaut Al Worden served as command module pilot and remained aboard Endeavour as Scott and Irwin explored the moon's surface. The Apollo 15's Falcon lunar lander touched down on the moon on July 30. Orwin and Scott performed three moonwalks and test drove NASA's new lunar rover before lifting off on Aug. 2.

The Apollo 15 crew remained in lunar orbit until Aug. 4, when they departed for Earth. The mission ended with a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean on Aug. 7.

Why it mattered

When Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon, their first lunar steps were broadcast to the world live. But their liftoff, not so much.

But capturing a liftoff live from the moon was the next logical step to chronicle NASA's lunar exploration in real-time. The TV camera mounted on Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle, which also made a moon debut on this mission, and was remote controlled by flight controllers on Earth, pioneering a process that is commonplace today on the International Space Station. It also allowed engineers to see how a lunar module actually behaved during liftoff in the moon's one-sixth gravity.

That legacy of live video from the moon took center stage in April 2026 during NASA's Artemis II mission, which sent the first astronaut to visit the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The Artemis II Orion spacecraft was covered in cameras, both inside and out, allowing NASA to livestream the entire voyage to the moon and back, nonstop.

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German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) just put the brakes on its first launch.

While testing its RFA One rocket on the launch pad at the U.K.'s SaxaVord Spaceport on the Shetland Islands in Scotland, the company found "an issue with the vehicle that requires further investigation," RFA wrote on X on Wednesday (July 28). Previously, the launch had been expected to happen in August or September, but RFA did not disclose a new launch date.

RFA did not disclose the nature of the issue, but said it would de-stack the staged rocket and that it would provide more details as the investigation continues. The situation means that the U.K. will need to wait at least a few more weeks to attempt its first-ever vertical launch from the region, amid global constraints in launch capacity and calls for increased European spaceflight autonomy.

RFA One, a smaller rocket designed to launch smaller satellites, is a three-stage rocket that will eventually include a reusable first stage in an effort to push down cost and to increase launch cadence. It will target a range of orbits, with examples including geosynchronous (where a satellite can constantly look at one area of the Earth), polar (allowing satellites to scan the whole Earth, as the planet orbits underneath) or sun-synchronous (which gives consistent lighting conditions.)

It's common for new rockets to encounter issues during development, including in later stages such as integrated pad testing or even during the first launch, because spaceflight is inherently hard. That said, there is more pressure on startup launching companies than ever to achieve their goals quickly, for commercial and defense reasons.

Rockets are in high global demand in large part due to constantly launching satellite batches for large satellite constellations, most especially SpaceX Starlink, and planned orbital data centers. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Defense is asking companies to launch more often for security missions, such as the quick-turnaround VICTUS HAZE mission that Rocket Lab launched in June only 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving the military's request.

Conflicts in Ukraine and Iran and other defense activities, meanwhile, have pushed other countries into more sovereign launch work that is accelerating already ongoing spaceport construction, in jurisdictions such as the U.K., Europe and Canada.

RFA has been trying to position itself as one of the leading new companies in Europe, on the back of receiving a spaceflight operator license in January, from the UK Civil Aviation Authority, for the SaxaVord spaceport launch. Meanwhile, SaxaVord is working to become an alternative to older, busier launch ports (especially Kourou's Guiana Space Centre, a popular location for high-profile launches such as the James Webb Space Telescope.)

"This is a groundbreaking moment for RFA and for Europe's space industry," Jörn Spurmann, RFA chief commercial officer, said in a statement released shortly after his company obtained the license. "Securing the first-ever launch license outside the European Space Agency's established site in Kourou is not just a regulatory milestone—it's a powerful endorsement of our technical excellence and a turning point for European space innovation."

Rumors are also abounding in the industry that the popular SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which companies worldwide use for rideshare missions, might not be accepting slots for its popular Transporter series beyond 2028 or 2029. If this happens, the demand in launch capacity transferring from SpaceX might lead to more opportunities for companies such as Rocket Lab and RFA One, assuming more rockets are ready in time.

On Aug. 1, 1968, NASA canceled the production of its Saturn V moon rocket. At the time, the giant rocket was the only launch vehicle to have ever carried astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, and it was then the largest, most powerful rocket ever.

NASA built 15 of these rockets but only flew 13 of them. When NASA made the decision to stop building the Saturn V, it was almost a year before Apollo 11 astronauts would walk on the moon for the first time.

• 10 Surprising Facts About NASA's Mighty Saturn V Moon Rocket

A federal budget deficit and the rising costs of the Vietnam War led Congress to slash nearly three-quarters of the funding that President Lyndon Johnson had allotted for the Apollo program.

The last Saturn V launched in 1973, and it was originally supposed to send Apollo 18 to the moon. However, that mission was canceled, and that Saturn V launched the Skylab space station instead.

Why it mattered

From start to finish, NASA spent a reported $9.4 billion on the Saturn family of rockets (which would be an estimated $118 billion in today's dollars) to develop the Saturn V. That includes the Saturn I and Saturn IB blocks. But the decision to shut production down in 1968 over those costs spelled the end of NASA's Apollo program to send astronauts to the moon a year before the Apollo 11 astronauts even walked on the moon in 1969.

Without a steady supply of heavy-lift rockets (the Saturn V was the most powerful of its day), NASA only had a limited number of moonshots left. The final Saturn V rocket to carry astronauts sent the Apollo 17 astronauts to the moon in 1972. The Skylab mission flew a year later, with the final Saturn IB rocket launching an Apollo command module on the Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975.

It would not be until 2022, when NASA launched the first Space Launch System on the Artemis I mission, that the space agency had another megarocket to rival the Saturn V. In April 2026, that new rocket launched NASA's Artemis II astronauts around the moon.

SpaceX has developed a new megarocket that is even more powerful than the Saturn V, with its Starship and Super Heavy booster.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

SpaceX has sent yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Friday (July 31) at 11:08 p.m. EDT (8:08 p.m. local time; 0308 GMT on Aug. 1).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 26th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1081.

The 24 Starlink satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO) 61.5 minutes after liftoff as planned, SpaceX confirmed via X.

They're joining more than 10,800 other spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

SpaceX has now launched 89 Falcon 9 missions in 2026, 69 of which have been dedicated Starlink flights.

The company also has three other liftoffs under its belt this year — one launch of its powerful Falcon Heavy vehicle and two test flights of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

We just got an amazing new view of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, thanks to one of the company's next-gen Starlink satellites.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, launched on its 13th test flight from South Texas last Friday (July 24). The suborbital jaunt was similar in many respects to past Starship test missions, with one big exception: This time, the vehicle deployed a batch of functional, next-gen Starlink internet satellites into space.

Six of those "Starlink V3" spacecraft carried cameras, so that SpaceX could get good views of the heat shield on Starship's upper stage, which is known as Starship, or simply Ship. The satellites did that job and more, capturing amazing views of Ship as it cruised away from them high above Earth.

SpaceX shared one such view on X Friday evening (July 31) — a 65-second video that stitches together imagery taken by four different cameras on a single Starlink V3 satellite.

The video starts with an up-close view of the shiny, 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship. We see more of the vehicle as the footage rolls and the two spacecraft get farther and farther apart. Toward the end, we see Ship in its entirety, and we get a sense of its activity; three of its six Raptor engines are firing, and small puffs of white vapor indicate that the vehicle is engaging its fine-tuning reaction control thrusters.

Like all Starship test missions to date, Flight 13 targeted a suborbital trajectory. So the 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the first ever to reach space, did not stay up for long; they came back down to Earth about 20 minutes after deploying into the final frontier.

Their successors will get higher — and there will be many of them. According to a filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX wants to operate a megaconstellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 satellites.

Starship will be key to building and maintaining this constellation, which will require many launches of the brawny, fully reusable rocket. (SpaceX currently operates a constellation of nearly 11,000 Starlink satellites, but those V2 craft are considerably smaller than the 4,400-pound V3 iteration.)

Ship seems to have checked all of its boxes on Flight 13. After deploying the satellites and successfully reigniting one of its Raptors in space, it splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia about 65 minutes after liftoff.

The vehicle survived its harrowing return trip through Earth's atmosphere in one piece and remains intact today, as far as we know; SpaceX recently shared a photo of the vehicle bobbing in the Indian Ocean five days after splashdown.

But Starship's giant first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, had a few issues on Flight 13. Its landing burn employed only five of a planned 13 Raptor engines, for example, and the booster hit the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at a higher velocity than intended. (Super Heavy has a total of 33 Raptors, all of which fire at liftoff.)

Starship remains in the development phase, but SpaceX wants to get the megarocket operational soon. It's slated to fly on NASA's Artemis III astronaut mission to low Earth orbit in mid-2027 and to land a crew near the moon's south pole on Artemis IV in late 2028.

NASA is planning to send two maneuverable probes to lunar orbit in order to learn how spacecraft are affected by the complex gravitational environment near the moon.

The mission, known as CAPSTONE 02, is currently aiming to launch in 2027. It will see the two probes maneuver in close proximity to one another and fly in "formation" so mission operators can better understand the gravitational effects spacecraft experience in cislunar space. This area of space is under the influence of both Earth's gravity and the moon's, meaning spacecraft operating there will have to navigate what are known as "three-body orbits."

While testing spacecraft maneuverability in these complex orbits, CAPSTONE 02 will also study communication and navigation systems that will be used in NASA's planned Artemis missions of lunar exploration and moon base construction. "This mission represents an important step in the maturation of cislunar capabilities," said NASA's Sean Fuller, Moon Base CAPSTONE manager, in an agency statement. "CAPSTONE 02 lays the foundation for lunar infrastructure and commercial services that support Artemis, Moon Base, and future missions to deep space."

The two CAPSTONE 02 probes are being built by Terran Orbital Systems, Inc. Once in space, they will alternate jobs while flying in formation, switching between what NASA calls "chaser" and "target" roles.

The spacecraft pair will use celestial navigation, optical sensors and data collected by telescopes on the ground during these maneuvers. This is similar to how NASA will use a variety of data to help its Orion spacecraft meet up with a lunar lander en route to the moon.

On the upcoming Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2027, NASA will test some of these techniques as Orion will rendezvous with both Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander and SpaceX's Starship, if all goes according to plan.

"Transporting crew to the lunar surface from cislunar orbit depends on knowing how well navigation systems will perform during these operations. Since these conditions can't be fully recreated on Earth, they must be tested in space," NASA wrote in its statement outlining the CAPSTONE 02 mission.

As its name implies, this will be the second mission under NASA's CAPSTONE program, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. The first CAPSTONE probe launched in 2022 and operated for four years before NASA officially concluded its mission in June 2026.

That microwave-oven-sized CAPSTONE spacecraft tested communications tech and became the first spacecraft to test three-body orbits around the moon, according to a NASA statement.

CAPSTONE was tested in what is known as a near rectilinear halo orbit. This is a fairly gravitationally stable orbit, thanks to the nearly equal pulls of both Earth's gravity and the moon's.

It was Lucky 13 for SpaceX, as new videos show just how much work came into getting the latest flight of Starship’s upper stage softly down into the ocean.

After Starship made its 13th launch on Friday (July 24) from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, the upper stage achieved all major milestones: putting 20 next-gen Starlink satellites aloft to watch it go, reigniting a Raptor engine in space, and then the soft splashdown off the coast of Western Australia.

While the lower stage of Starship faced engine issues, fresh video shows some incredible views of the successful upper stage. Starlink satellites, ferrying signal from a buoy in the Indian Ocean, helped create a video on X showing the 171-foot (52-meter) upper stage roaring above the water, then generating steam as the engines swiveled to make a gentle splashdown.

Getting down that way was no easy feat, as SpaceX posted another video on Tuesday (July 28) showing Starship swaying dramatically in midair to achieve a near-vertical orientation above the water. If you don’t mind a bit of vertigo, SpaceX also provided an on-ship view of the splashdown, complete with dramatic swings and ocean steam.

The upper stage's ocean arrival was so soft, in fact, that days after launch on July 28 the 171-foot (52-meter) stage was reported as still afloat in the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said on X, adding that its Starship recovery team is continuing to gather imagery of the vehicle at sea.

Starship's Version 3 (which flew on Friday) is a 408-foot-tall stacked system including the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage, also known as Starship (or Ship). SpaceX aims to make this system rapidly reusable for applications ranging from astronaut moon missions to launching even more powerful and larger Starlinks.

That said, SpaceX still needs to notch some goals ahead of its expected participation for docking during the Artemis III astronaut mission scheduled for next year, and to possibly bring astronauts to the moon's surface during Artemis IV.

And Ars Technica (quoting experts) recently raised concerns about the Starship heatshield, noting more changes will be required for reusability.

Sometimes to go to the moon, you first have to go underwater.

NASA is currently developing the training program for NASA's Artemis astronauts, some of whom could set foot on the moon during the agency's planned Artemis IV mission. As part of that development, two agency scientists recently donned Artemis moonsuits and took to NASA's underwater training facility.

What is it?

These photos show two NASA exploration geologists and Artemis science officers practicing using the same types of geology tools that astronauts might use when they explore the moon.

The scientists also "deployed a mock lunar payload under low-angle lighting conditions," according to a NASA statement accompanying the photo. NASA is currently aiming to place astronauts at the lunar south pole, where many areas remain in permanent shadow. As such, future lunar explorers may have to operate in near-total darkness and learn how to carry out their missions with very little light.

Why is it incredible?

The fact that NASA is preparing to send humans back to the moon is incredible in itself. Humanity hasn't set foot on our natural satellite since 1972. While NASA still has many technical hurdles to cross when it comes to developing and selecting a moon lander, the agency is pushing ahead with developing the training it will use to prepare its astronauts to explore the lunar surface.

For this particular part of Artemis training development, NASA placed two scientists in its Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), a 40-foot-deep (12-meter) pool at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The particular test in these photos was "the first time that two geologists were suited up simultaneously for lunar geology training in the NBL," according to NASA's statement.

For these tests, a portion of the underwater laboratory was outfitted with soil and rocks that simulate the surface of the moon. The buoyancy of the pool can be manipulated in order to simulate different levels of gravity, helping astronauts train for spacewalks or for exploring other worlds like the moon.

On July 31, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts drove on the moon for the first time.

David Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, and James Irwin, the lunar module pilot explored the moon for three days by driving around in the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden remained in orbit around the moon. This moon buggy was folded up and stowed inside the lunar module and deployed after landing. Unpacked, it measured about 10 feet long, 7 feet wide and 45 inches high.

The lunar rover could travel up to 8.6 miles per hour and allowed the astronauts to venture farther from their landing site than previous Apollo astronauts could. For their first drive, Scott and Irwin went to Elbow Crater to gather samples and take photos. Throughout their stay on the moon, they drove more than 17 miles.

• Apollo 15 in Photos: A Moon Landing and the 1st Lunar Car for Astronauts

The Apollo 15 mission launched to the moon on July 26, 1971. The mission landed on July 30, with Scott and Irwin ultimately performing three moonwalks in addition to their lunar rover test drive. The Apollo 15 crew left the moon's surface on Aug. 2 and left lunar orbit on Aug. 4. They returned to Earth on Aug. 7, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Why it mattered

Apollo 15's moon rover made space history as the first human-driven rover on the moon, let alone another world entirely.

While developing the rover, NASA had to wrangle many issues at once. How do you build a rover light enough to land on the moon with the Apollo 15 lunar lander? How do you make it compact as well?

• Driving on the Moon: Photos of NASA's Lunar Cars

The result was an aluminum, foldable moon car built by Boeing and powered by batteries that could carry up to 1,080 pounds (490 kg) of cargo — about twice its own weight — while carrying two astronauts. The rover design flew on Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. Those three rovers are still on the lunar surface awaiting fresh batteries.

Today, NASA is looking to new companies to build unpressurized rovers like the Lunar Roving Vehicle, as well as pressurized vehicles that would allow crews to drive without a spacesuit on. Those rovers will be a critical asset for Artemis astronauts as they build a permanent moon base, NASA has said.

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A new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposal says the agency wants to speed up commercial space licensing for rocket launches and spacecraft re-entries by removing "unnecessary" environmental regulations.

The proposed FAA rule, released yesterday (July 29), has a 30-day period for comment and if approved, would apply to rocket launches, re-entering spacecraft, and the sites at which launches and re-entries take place. The FAA proposes to "waive requirements of laws of the U.S. for a license or permit, after consultation with the head of the appropriate executive agency, when the requirement is not necessary to protect the public health and safety, safety of property, and national security and foreign policy interests of the United States," the text of the proposal reads, in part.

The Department of Transportation stated that the proposal, if implemented, would allow the agency to waive what it calls "unnecessary environmental laws and regulations" that it claims are "slowing American innovation." However, the proposal will still require the FAA to ensure that launches do not impede on public health and safety, or U.S. national security or foreign policy.

To do so, the FAA plans to remove 13 federal laws from applying to "certain commercial space licenses and permits", with examples including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, parts of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.

The proposal takes place as the United States is seeing unprecedented demand on its limited spaceports for commercial launches, fueled by broadband satellite constellations like SpaceX Starlink, as well as emergent orbital data centers. Earlier this month, the U.S. government proposed moving some launch operations offshore to ease the demand backlog. More rocket launches, according to peer-reviewed research, could cause environmental issues.

The proposal also appears to build on two recent Trump administration executive orders. The first, from December 2025, saw the administration aim to redirect a wide swath of space policy — including boosting the number of rocket launches and landings. (These already were at unprecedented levels last year, mostly on the back of SpaceX.) The second one, in August, focused on streamlining launch licensing and accelerating spaceport construction.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is trying to procure a federal land swap in south Texas, mostly for Starship operations, but its proposal prompted an emergency injunction last week filed by a coalition of conservation and tribal groups.

The groups allege this proposal would degrade the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge — from which the land is coming from — with legal implications as well, but the court has not yet ruled on a lawsuit the coalition raised in June.

On July 30, 1610, the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei became the first to observe rings around the planet Saturn.

Shortly after the telescope was invented in 1608, Galileo peered out into the solar system and saw the amazing ring system. At first he didn't actually think they were rings.

Instead, Galileo thought Saturn might have planetary "love handles" that gave it a weird shape. He also wondered if perhaps he was looking at two very large moons on either side of the planet. It wasn't until 1659 that another astronomer named Christiaan Huygens figured out that these weird features were actually Saturn's rings.

Why it mattered

Today, we may take Saturn's rings for granted. After all, it IS known as the "ringed planet" and the jewel of our solar system. But there was a time when we didn't know planets had rings at all, and that's where Galileo's discovery came in.

The telescope was a brand new technology, just two years old, when Galileo took it from a seafaring and distance tool and turned it into an essential item for astronomy. It helped him discover the major moons of Jupiter (we call them the Galilean moons for a reason) and also Saturn's rings. In time, astronomers discovered rings around other large planets in our solar system (Jupiter has them, and Uranus, too), revealing them to be made up of tiny pieces of what may have been torn apart moons.

The study of Saturn's rings has allowed astronomers to see the raw materials of the early solar system. They're made mostly of water ice and shaped by so-called shepherd moons, tiny satellites that orbit Saturn in between ring bands. Saturn's rings even have "kittens," distinct formations scientists are only now starting to understand.

NASA's Pioneer 11 passed through Saturn's ring plane in 1979, with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes visiting in the 1980s. The Cassini spacecraft was the first to orbit Saturn, ultimately passing through the rings several times in 2017 before ending its mission in a "grand finale" with a crash into Saturn itself.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

Things aren't going so well for NASA's latest satellite rescue mission.

NASA launched the Swift Boost mission on July 3, sending a specialized spacecraft to low Earth orbit on a Northrop Grumman air-launched Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft is called LINK and was built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. LINK was sent to orbit to try and link up with NASA's Swift observatory, a highly successful scientific satellite designed to search for gamma-ray bursts, some of the most energetic events in the universe.

But it looks like just a few weeks after launch, LINK is experiencing some issues. "Katalyst's LINK servicing spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications," NASA wrote in an update on Tuesday (July 28). Despite the malfunction, however, the space agency says the rest of the spacecraft is functioning normally and remains in otherwise good health.

According to preliminary analysis of the issue, two of the LINK spacecraft's three reaction wheels are not operating. In addition, there is "some loss of functionality" in LINK's cold gas thruster system.

The failure with the LINK spacecraft's reaction wheel is slightly ironic, given that the Swift observatory itself once had issues with its own reaction wheels. In 2022, NASA placed the observatory in safe mode when one of its reaction wheels caused minor issues with the spacecraft's movements.

Mission teams will now try to use the spacecraft's electric propulsion system to stop the spinning and regain control. If that can be done, NASA and Katalyst will then have to evaluate if the mission can proceed as planned.

Swift's orbit has been decaying for years, and the observatory is unable to boost its orbit on its own. Thus, LINK was designed to meet up with Swift in low Earth orbit and spend some time studying the observatory to determine how best to grab onto it with three robotic arms. Once it has linked up with Swift, LINK should be able to use its own thrusters to boost the observatory to a higher orbit and extend Swift's life.

The Swift observatory, officially known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, was launched in 2004 at a cost of $250 million. The Swift Boost mission only cost NASA $30 million.

Over the last 22 years, Swift has been searching the sky for gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy astrophysics phenomena in the cosmos. In 2022, the observatory spotted a gamma-ray burst nicknamed the "BOAT," short for Brightest of All Time. At the time of discovery, it was the most powerful space explosion ever seen.

SpaceX launched a secret reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government early on Thursday morning (July 30).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, kicking off the mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-95.

The launch occurred at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 GMT).

We know very little about NROL-95; the NRO, which operates the country's fleet of spy satellites, has provided no details about the payload or its activities.

The agency has revealed the NROL-95 mission patch. It depicts a snarling ferret with a nighttime sky in the background and the words "We are the Champions" on the emblem's lower border.

"The ferret, a clever creature, embodies agility and resilience — key traits for exploration. Its confident grin and bright eyes reflect a spirit of victory in a realm where determination meets adventure," NRO officials said in an NROL-95 mission description.

"The bold phrase 'We are the Champions' encapsulates the camaraderie and pride shared among those on this purposeful mission," they added.

NROL-95 was the fourth NRO launch of 2026. The other three — NROL-105 in January, NROL-172 in May and NROL-179 in June — also flew aboard Falcon 9s, but from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Those three other missions were devoted to building out the NRO's "proliferated architecture" constellation, which will consist of hundreds of relatively small, cost-efficient reconnaissance satellites in Earth orbit.

On Thursday, the Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a landing at Cape Canaveral about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the seventh mission for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

SpaceX cut off its livestream shortly thereafter, at the request of the agency.

SpaceX's Starship V3 looks absolutely seaworthy in this new photo taken days after its most recent flight test.

What is it?

SpaceX launched its Starship vehicle on July 24, sending the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) Starship Version 3 (V3) rocket on a suborbital trajectory that saw the rocket's upper stage make its softest splashdown yet.

In fact, the landing was so smooth that Starship is still floating off the coast of Western Australia. SpaceX shared the photo of Starship on Tuesday (July 28), posting on X that the vehicle is "still afloat in the Indian Ocean."

The scorch-streaked 171-foot (52-meter) Starship upper stage resembles an orca or a submarine in the photo, resting mostly out of the water.

Why is it incredible?

It wasn't just the splashdown that was so stunning. Video taken from aboard Starship and from the Starlink satellites that were deployed alongside the upper stage during Flight Test 13 truly looks like the stuff of sci-fi.

Starship, which consists of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and the somewhat-confusingly-named upper stage known as Starship (or Ship), is designed to be rapidly reusable. That means, if all goes according to plan, SpaceX will eventually be able to land both stages and have them refueled, inspected and ready for flight again in a matter of days.

But there are still major hurdles to cross before that goal is ever reached. SpaceX will have to figure out how to make Starship's heatshield more durable and reusable, a feat some experts call a "dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability," according to Ars Technica.

Nevertheless, having a fully intact second stage rocket floating on the ocean four days after a flight test is quite a feat.

On July 29, 1982, the Salyut 6 space station fell out of space and safely burned up in Earth's atmosphere along the way.

Salyut 6 was the eighth space station the Soviet Union had built for its Salyut program. It spent almost five years in orbit and supported five different crewed cosmonaut missions. While aboard Salyut 6, those cosmonauts made astronomical observations and studied the effects of spaceflight on the human body.

Though the aging space station was still considered fully functional in 1982, a mold problem in the crew quarters led the Soviets to abandon the orbiting lab. They intentionally sent it plunging toward Earth, where it would burn up in the atmosphere before hitting the ground.

Why it mattered

Launched in 1977, Salyut 6 marked an evolution of space station design for the then-Soviet Union. It was the USSR's first to have two docking ports, which allowed longer missions by Salyut cosmonauts since an uncrewed Progress cargo ship could periodically resupply a crew.

That second docking port could also be used by a visiting crew, flying on a short trip to Salyut 6 on a new Soyuz and returning home on the host crew's original capsule. (The U.S. Skylab station also had two docking ports.)

• Top 10 Soviet and Russian Space Missions

Salyut 6 also had an airlock for spacewalks and has been hailed as the first "second generation" space station. The longest mission to Salyut 6 lasted 185 days, a record at the time in 1981.

The advancements demonstrated on Salyut 6 can be seen in routine use on the International Space Station today. The ISS has multiple docking ports for visiting crews, crew handovers and automated cargo ships. It has multiple airlocks for spacewalks (depending on if they are U.S. or Russian-led) and regularly hosted missions of at least 6 months in duration. The longest mission to the ISS by an American was 371 days, a record set in 2023 by NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.

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SpaceX launched 24 more satellites for its Starlink network on Saturday (July 25), a day after demonstrating it could do the same on its next-gen rocket.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink group 17-51 lifted off at 11:51 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT or 8:51 a.m. PDT local time) on Saturday from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

About an hour later, the 24 broadband internet satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO), as planned.

The launch marked the eighth flight of the Falcon's 9 first stage (Booster 1100), which touched down on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship, stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

The successful launch raised the total number of active Starlink satellites to 10,865, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. That number had been 20 units higher for about 20 minutes on Friday, when SpaceX conducted a deployment and operations trial during the 13th test flight of its Starship launch vehicle.

The Starship test was planned to be short-lived but was successful in providing data to support NASA's decision to fly Starlink systems on its Artemis III crewed mission to LEO, which is scheduled to fly next year.

Saturday's launch was SpaceX's 87th Falcon 9 mission of the year.

On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a total solar eclipse was recorded by a Prussian daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski.

Daguerreotypy is an old photographic process that uses silver-plated copper treated with chemical fumes that make it light-sensitive. Previous attempts to take photos of solar eclipses failed to show the contrast between the sun's corona and the dark disk of the moon.

Using a small, 6-centimeter telescope, Berkowski captured an 84-second exposure starting right after the moon moved completely in front of the sun.

• The Evolution of Solar Eclipse Photography in Photos

Why it mattered

Until Berkowski, total solar eclipses were something people saw once and never again. The ability to document a solar eclipse visually opened the door for scientists to study the solar event - and the sun - like never before. (Not to mention, make a rare astronomical phenomenon more accessible to people unable to see it.)

To be clear, many photographers did try to capture solar eclipses before Berkowski, but those attempts were often overexposed or underexposed. But Berkowski's daguerreotype was detailed enough that in 2005, 154 years, it was hailed as the first correctly exposed image of the sun's corona, the super-hot outer atmosphere of the sun that is visible around the moon during totality.

Today, more than 170 years later, the advent of digital cameras — and even smartphones — has put the ability to photograph a solar eclipse literally in the palm of our hands. Our Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik has seen two total solar eclipses (in 2017 and 2024), and managed to snap the 2024 eclipse with a smartphone with no training at all (and a bit of luck).

By the way, the next total solar eclipse is coming on Aug. 12 and will be visible across parts of Greenand, Iceland and Spain. To find out how you can capture a totality photo of your own during a total solar eclipse, check out our solar eclipse photography guide and gear up with our best solar eclipse photography equipmetnt for 2026.

And DON'T FORGET! If you're observing a solar eclipse on your own, you'll need eclipse glasses for safety.

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The 13th test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket went pretty well — and provided some amazing visuals, too.

Flight 13 launched on Friday (July 24), sending the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle aloft from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.

Starship's Super Heavy booster had some engine issues on its way back to Earth. But the Ship upper stage hit all of its marks, successfully deploying 20 next-gen Starlink satellites, re-igniting one of its Raptor engines in space as planned and splashing down softly off the coast of Western Australia. So softly, in fact, that Ship didn't explode after hitting the water — a first for a Starship flight.

SpaceX shared these milestones with us in real time, via the company's Flight 13 launch webcast. And the company highlighted a few of them after the fact as well, with some stunning imagery published on its X account.

One Friday post, for example, shows footage from Super Heavy of Ship cruising away shortly after stage separation, its six Raptors glowing with exertion against the backdrop of a gorgeously blue Earth.

Another Friday X post provides a Ship's-eye view of the vehicle's descent toward the Indian Ocean, steering its way from sky to sea. The video switches over to drone footage just before Ship hits the water, capturing from above the dramatic splashdown — and Ship's survival, despite the outbreak of a sizeable fire around its nose.

Both Ship and Super Heavy are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Eventually, both vehicles will return to the launch site shortly after liftoff, for capture with their launch tower's "chopstick" arms, refurbishment and reflight.

SpaceX has already caught Super Heavy on three Starship test flights and will try to do the same with Ship for the first time on Flight 14, provided no red flags emerge during Flight 13 data review, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Starship conducted its first test flight in April 2023. Flight 13 was the second launch Version 3 of the vehicle, the first iteration of the vehicle that's designed to be operational.

SpaceX is working hard to get the giant rocket up and running soon. Starship is slated to fly on NASA's Artemis III astronaut mission to Earth orbit next summer and to land astronauts near the moon's south pole on Artemis IV in late 2028.

Rocket Lab is expanding its launch operations to the snowy north.

The California-based company, which already flies from New Zealand and Virginia, just inked a $266 million deal with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska.

"The size and scale of this contract reflects the Space Force's confidence in our ability to meet their urgent national security demands with speed, responsiveness and scale, and we're proud to provide the high-frequency launch capacity required to keep the U.S. ahead of global threats," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement today (July 27).

The contract covers 12 suborbital launches, with the possibility of up to six more. These missions "will primarily take place" from the Pacific Spaceport Complex, a picturesque site on Alaska's Kodiak Island, which is most famous for its thriving population of brown bears.

The spaceport has hosted nearly three dozen missions since opening in 1998, most of them suborbital flights for the U.S. military. Recently, however, it has supported launches of private orbital rockets — specifically, those built by Astra and ABL Space Systems (now known as Long Wall).

The newly announced Rocket Lab missions will almost certainly be performed by HASTE, a suborbital variant of the company's workhorse Electron small-satellite launcher that customers use to test hypersonic technologies in the flight environment.

They may also be part of the United States' sprawling Golden Dome missile-defense initiative, though we don't know that for sure; today's release provides few details about the launches.

Rocket Lab's primary launch site is on Māhia Peninsula, on the North Island of Peter Beck's native New Zealand. The company also flies from two pads on Wallops Island, Virginia, one of which has been the jumping-off point for all HASTE suborbital launches to date.

HASTE debuted in June 2023 and now has nine missions under its belt. Electron lifted off for the first time in May 2017 and has flown 82 times to date.

On July 27, 1962, two Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soviet airliner and experienced weightlessness without going to space. This was the first time cosmonauts completed zero-G training on an airplane.

The Tupolev Tu-104 was a type of jetliner originally designed to transport 50 passengers. It was modified to accommodate cosmonauts who needed to train in an environment that simulated weightlessness. By flying in a parabolic arc, passengers could experience 6 to 25 seconds of weightlessness on each maneuver.

Cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich were on this flight to prepare for their upcoming orbital missions Vostok 3 and Vostok 4.

Why it mattered

Human spaceflight was barely a year old in July 1962, so methods of training cosmonauts (and astronauts) were still in development. In the early days of the Space Age, the effects of weightlessness on the human body — including basic functions like eating and using the bathroom — were still being understood, so the more realistic training could be the better.

For Nikilayev and Popovich, this training was vital. Their Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 missions flew at the same time, marking the first-ever dual spacefligth of two crewed craft (they were single-person capsules). Vostok 2 lasted nearly four days — something NASA would not beat until the Gemini program in 1965 — while Vostok 4 was a nearly three-day flight. The two spacecraft flew within 4 miles of each other during their missions.

Today, NASA and Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) still train astronauts and cosmonauts on modified jets that simulate weightlessness by flying parbolic flights. You can even buy a ticket to try it yourself through commercial companies like Zero Gravity Corporation, which also flies science flights for NASA.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

The search for alien life has tended to focus on looking for either signs of extraterrestrial technology or evidence of biological processes on other worlds. But new and ongoing research suggests that scientists should start considering signs of intelligence that are not necessarily technological, but which are sufficiently complex as to be evidence of a conscious mind at work.

Biosignatures are possible signs of biology on other planets, whereas technosignatures are clues to the presence of advanced technology that might be detectable across light-years. What, though, of everything that comes between these two extremes? How do we detect life that is more complex than simple microbes and which displays intelligence that is not highly technological?

This is where the field of noosemiotics comes in, says Julia DeMarines, an American astrobiologist who has been involved in both biosignature and technosignature research. "We want to figure out if we can detect signatures of intelligence that occur before the invention of radio communication," DeMarines told Space.com. "We're looking at the ways that mind can be imprinted on matter."

Noosemiotics is derived from the Ancient Greek concept of 'nous', which refers to the theory of mind. In the 1920s the Soviet biochemist Vladimir and the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin developed the idea of the noosphere as being the sphere of human reason or thought encapsulating the Earth.

More recently, Adam Frank, David Grinspoon and Sara Imari Walker applied the noosphere to SETI by considering the collective intelligence of all the beings on a planet acting as a kind of combined planetary scale intelligence.

Therefore, according to DeMarines, a noosignature would be a sign of a noosphere, of conscious minds at work.

"Bread doesn't just pop out of a molecular cloud"

Technology is, of course, a major imprint of mind on matter, and DeMarines acknowledges that just as technosignatures can be biosignatures since they can originate from biological entities, they can also be noosignatures — for instance, gases such as nitrogen released into the atmosphere by agricultural practices. But noosignatures can be something other than biosignatures and technosignatures, too.

Which is where DeMarines’ work comes in. She had been working for a company who were looking to apply the concept of Assembly Theory, which is a chemistry theory originated by Sara Walker and Glasgow-based chemist Lee Cronin, to online data and artificial intelligence to search for thresholds that denote complex signatures of intelligence.

Assembly Theory describes the minimum number of steps required to assemble something. In chemistry it is the steps taken to assemble, for example, important biomolecules, or to facilitate evolutionary processes. The number of steps taken is referred to as the Assembly Index. As part of her work on this, as a thought exercise, DeMarines was given the task of applying assembly theory to 'bread as a technosignature'.

"I know how that sounds," she laughed. "I get weird looks when I tell people about it!"

However, bread, like anything that is made by a conscious mind be it a stone tool or a radio telescope, is a signature of intelligence. At first DeMarines approached it as a proto-technosignature before realizing that it was more appropriate to describe it as a noosignature.

"Bread doesn't just pop out of a molecular cloud, it requires technology, it requires history, it requires intelligence," said DeMarines. "Say that you have samples of bread at different human and hominin archaeological sites throughout time, dating back 14,000 years – the bread would be a signature of intelligence changing over time as the type of bread, its ingredients and how it is made also change."

How it changes over time can be measured by Assembly Theory – the number of steps taken to get from early breads made from wild grain to modern sliced white bread produced from domesticated wheat is the Assembly Index. The task is to identify how many steps it takes to get past certain thresholds that indicate change, or rather developments, in intelligence, such as new technology for farming and germinating seeds, the construction of windmills or mass production.

As such, it fills part of the space between talking about a simple biosphere and searching for a technosphere, as do things ranging from stone tools to the development of written language and everything in between.

Non-technological intelligence

The trick, though, is detecting such signatures. Archaeological finds require being present on a planet, and digging up artifacts. Are there noosignatures that could be detected on other planets remotely from Earth? DeMarines isn't sure yet, and admits that at this stage she is thinking about it from the perspectives of metrics and thresholds rather than detectability.

If there are detectable noosignatures, they could also operate as a sign to anyone watching that there is intelligence on Earth, too. DeMarines highlights the example of gases released into the atmosphere by basic agriculture. Around three-quarters of all human-made nitrogen emissions were produced before industrialization, and agriculture was the source of that, ranging from fertilizers to animal waste to microbes in the soils used, all beginning many thousands of years ago.

For example, it took human civilization 4,000 years of bread-making before they domesticated wheat over 10,000 years ago. The release of excess nitrogen into the atmosphere disrupts the planet's nitrogen cycle, creating a disequilibrium.

While thousands of years is far too long a time for humans to detect such disequilibrium on exoplanets, alien observers may have been watching Earth for a lot longer than that. Common wisdom is that while biology on Earth has been detectable for billions of years through biosignatures, intelligence only became apparent in the past 100 years or so when we began beaming radio waves out into space.

However, if we are producing noosignatures that are detectable, such as disrupting the nitrogen cycle, then that means intelligence on Earth has been visible to the rest of the universe for much longer than we realized.

Then there's the conundrum of non-technological intelligent life in the universe. Often in the past intelligence has been equated to technology, but to solely rely on technology as a measure of intelligence misunderstands what intelligence is. Technological intelligence is one form of intelligence, but there are others.

Dolphins, for instance, are greatly intelligent creatures with sophisticated social interactions, but with the best will in the world dolphins will never have technology because they do not have the dexterity in their flippers to manipulate the environment around them to the necessary degree.

However, can they imprint their minds on their environment in other ways? It has previously been speculated that the universe is silent because technological intelligence is rare, but Dolphin-like intelligence could be abundant  — yet we'd never detect it. Now, thanks to noosemiotics, perhaps a way will be found to detect signs of such life. If that can happen, maybe we will quickly discover that we are not alone after all.

You can read about DeMarines work in a paper published on the open-source arXiv repository.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has experienced some serious wear and tear during its nearly 14 years on the Red Planet.

A new photo posted to Curiosity's raw image server offers a close-up of the damage one of the rover's wheels has experienced as it explores the Martian surface.

What is it?

Curiosity landed in Mars' Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down while hanging under a 'sky crane' that lowered it to the planet's surface. Since then, the rover has traveled over 20 miles (32 kilometers) across the rocky Martian soil, searching for potential signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

All of that mileage has taken a toll on the rover, as these new images show. Curiosity weighs over one ton, and the terrain on Mars can be quite rocky and rugged.

NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) periodically use the rover's cameras to check on the wheels, and despite the holes and cracks, the agency said in a 2024 statement that they're "holding up well despite taking some of the worst abuse from Mars."

Why is it amazing?

We've been exploring Mars for decades now, so it can be easy to take for granted how incredible it is that we get new images beamed from the surface of another planet to Earth daily from NASA's two robotic explorers.

These images of Curiosity's wheels help illustrate the incredible feats of engineering and science it took to place wheeled robots safely on the surface of another planet where they spend years and travel dozens of miles to bring us answers about what other worlds are like.

While they might not be human, Curiosity and Perseverance nonetheless represent humanity's first foray into becoming an interplanetary species. The groundwork laid by the rovers and other Mars orbiters, landers and probes could someday help humanity take its first steps on another planet.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can single-handedly green-light massive spaceflight projects that could completely change the view of the night sky for the entire world. Despite the outcry these projects have caused, space law experts say there is very little other nations and the international community can do to thwart them if the FCC were to grant them licenses.

On July 10, the FCC approved an application by California-based Reflect Orbital to launch a 59-by-59-foot (18-by-18 meters) space mirror to test how to reflect sunlight onto solar farms on Earth after dusk. The decision has sparked outcry among astronomers and environmentalists who are concerned about the impact on global light pollution levels that Reflect Orbital's plans might have.

Opponents see the FCC's approval, despite hundreds of objections filed in response to the application, as an indication that the agency might eventually grant Reflect Orbital a license to fly an entire constellation of 50,000 such sun-reflecting mirrors. On top of Reflect Orbital's plans, companies including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Starcloud are awaiting the FCC's decisions on respective applications to deploy their own massive fleets of orbiting data centers and internet-beaming satellites. If all those projects come to fruition, the view of the night sky could change beyond recognition all over the world.

"The technology is outpacing the regulatory environment."

The United Nations' Outer Space Treaty conceived in the late 1960s lays down the international framework for the use and exploration of outer space. The document states that approvals for satellite projects are the domain of the nation in which those satellites are registered.

"The U.N. Treaty for Uses of Outer Space very well specifies that how many satellites are shot into space and how they are registered is a prerogative of the country in which they are registered," a source familiar with the operations of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), who didn't wish to be named, told Space.com.

The states from which they launch, however, are responsible for any damage the satellites registered under their flags cause to other countries. But Ruskin Hartley, the CEO and Executive Director of the advocacy group DarkSky International, told Space.com that this liability provision only covers physical damage such as satellites colliding in space or spacecraft crashing down on Earth and damaging property.

"It hasn't been tested at all but most people don't think this damage extends to optical interference," Hartley said. "It would have to be physical damage. If a satellite reflects sunlight down and damages someone's observatory, that probably doesn't count as damage under the Outer Space Treaty."

In its Article I, the Outer Space Treaty states that "the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries." But what exactly that means and what could be done if there is no consensus about those benefits is not clear at all.

The anonymous source told Space.com that UNOOSA and the UN-wide Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) may discuss the issue, but despite the global consequences, are unlikely to come up with a mechanism to stop the corporations from doing what they want if the FCC backs them.

"These UN institutions were all started in the last century and are very slow," the source said. "They require unanimous consensus to pass anything and that obviously hardly ever happens. So nothing gets passed. By the time UN COPUOS and UNOOSA are done discussing anything, SpaceX will have launched another thousands satellites."

The European state of Slovakia in cooperation with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), in fact, submitted a paper to UN COPUOS in June calling for a "general prohibition on the use of space mirrors" or the development of "strong oversight mechanisms."

Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, who has been involved with the initiative, admits that these efforts are not likely to progress fast enough.

"There is indeed a major challenge right now with single states being able to create large changes to the sky and the orbital environment," Boley told Space.com in an email. "At the U.N. COPUOS, there are important steps being taken. But these agreements can be slow to achieve."

Hartley added that the companies pushing for grandiose space projects are taking advantage of existing legal loopholes that are not being effectively closed.

"These entrepreneurs that are pursuing these projects, either in the U.S. context as private entrepreneurs or in some instances in Europe and in China as government-level projects, clearly demonstrate that the regulatory environment and regulatory framework has significant gaps and holes in it," Hartley said. "Essentially, the technology is outpacing the regulatory environment."

Unilateral U.S. decisions

According to international space law and policy expert and former NASA legal council Robin J. Frank, this is not the first time the U.S. has pushed ahead with its agenda regardless of the concerns of the international community.

"This is not the first time the FCC has started down the route of unilateral decisions," Frank told Space.com. "Recently, for example, the FCC has approved direct-to-cell communication systems, which connect from a satellite directly to your phone, to use parts of the radio frequency spectrum that have not been authorized for that use by the International Communications Union. Their argument is that they are giving the U.S. industry a leg up."

The U.S., responsible for roughly 25 percent of the global GDP, has historically been reluctant to agree to binding international mechanisms that could restrict its actions, Frank added. Other major global powers, such as China or Russia tend to have a similar attitude, she said.

Currently, the U.S. is not even a party to the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that binds nations to work toward reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in order to curb global warming.

Frank added that individual nations could, for example, take action against constellations of orbiting mirrors by banning them from beaming light onto their territory at a threat of hefty fines. That however, is still not going to stop the development and mitigate the overall light pollution these satellites cause as they inadvertently reflect light as they zoom around Earth.

DarkSky International previously sued the FCC at the District Court of Columbia, challenging its decision to grant SpaceX a license to launch tens of thousands of satellites without conducting an environmental review. The court eventually rejected the non-profit's arguments, but Hartley said the advocacy group would consider filing another lawsuit if the FCC were to green-light the full Reflect Orbital constellation of 50,000 space mirrors or SpaceX's million orbiting data centers.

Despite the massive growth in the past decade, the satellite industry is exempt from the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act, meaning neither the FCC nor the satellite companies are obliged to prove their technologies will not be detrimental to the environment. That exclusion was put in place in the 1980s when satellite launches were few and far between. Many argue it's more than a high time to do away with it.

"It's a regulatory failure," Hartley said. "The ultimate fix is probably a legislative fix, or an administration that directs them to act differently. But this administration is not going to do that."

"This is an issue that's going to affect the quality of life for everybody on Earth."

A recent study by astronomers from the European Southern Observatory found that the brightness of the night sky would rise by up to 300 percent if all the currently planned constellations were to get deployed. That, the astronomers say, would be an end to astronomy as we know it.

Other experts pointed out that the need to have access to constant sunshine would force all orbital data center operators into a single narrow region of space, creating a bright "Saturn's ring" of satellites around the planet.

In its justification for granting the Reflect Orbital test flight license, the FCC stated that arguments about light pollution are outside its merit to judge. No other U.S. government agency, however, currently has a say over granting licenses to satellite companies.

Hartley added the issue far exceeds the interests of astronomers. The brightening of the sky would affect the entire world, including indigenous communities who rely on stars as part of their cultural heritage. The excessive light pollution is also likely to confuse wild animals and affect ecosystems.

On top of that, the air pollution from large quantities of re-entering satellites and the rockets that launch them risks damaging the ozone layer and altering the thermal balance of Earth's atmosphere, according to ongoing research. Greenhouse gas emissions released during launch and the manufacturing of the satellites may offset the advantages of putting data centers to space, extolled by the companies behind those plans.

"The industrialization of space is going to impact carbon in the atmosphere, through the launch phases of all these rockets, and it's very clear that the deorbit of these satellites is likely to change the composition of the atmosphere," Hartley said.

"This is more than just a niche issue for astronomers. This is an issue that's going to affect the quality of life for everybody on Earth."

NEW YORK — I'm the kind of person who, every so often, falls into accidental daydreams about the concept of space. Usually because I'm listening to some sort of sad girl Spotify playlist, I start feeling infuriated that we may never learn the true meaning of the cosmos and become embarrassingly poetic about our isolation on Earth. I tend to ponder how strange microgravity is and begin Googling things like "what lies beyond the edge of the universe best evidence we have" and "when commercial rocket launch become same price JetBlue flight."

I'm pretty sure I've lived in these clouds ever since I got past the Freddi Fish and Microsoft Paint phase of my internet literacy — but then, a month before my 30th birthday, something huge happened. On a random Tuesday, I woke up, brushed my teeth, made myself an espresso, sauntered over to the Franklin Avenue C, and went to the International Space Station.

Once I got there, it was bizarre to float through the corridors and living quarters I've written about for so long as a science journalist and thought about for even longer. The walls felt lived in. The station's speed in orbit seemed a little too fast for comfort. The highly esteemed cupola — a protruding corner of the station with seven windows arranged in the shape of a daisy — was far larger than I imagined. In fact, the entire ISS was way more enormous than I can explain. Solar panels tower over you like rust-colored billboards and the station's floors threaten to collapse any second, fooling you as you gaze down at Earth. It's a little scary to be so exposed to the void of space, and that's true even when you're there in virtual reality.

Yes, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your caution levels) I launched to the ISS through a virtual reality experience called "Space Explorers: The ISS Experience" shown at Eclipsio in Manhattan. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to the real thing, until of course my dream of a cheap RocketBlue economy seat becomes possible. And most importantly, I'm here to tell you that if you're ever able to do the same, you should do it, too.

Here's what you'd see

The way it works is you put on some VR glasses and follow instructions in your headset to walk a certain direction or move your hands a certain way — your "hands" in the digital world look like floating yellow outlines of hands that correspond to the movements of your actual hands. To be transparent, my glasses were a bit glitchy. My digital hands were quite a bit unstable, for example, which did distract me a little bit but it was easy to get over.

Okay, once you're in the world of space, which is simply darkness, a few things happen (which I won't spoil). Eventually, a life-size structure of the International Space Station (ISS) appears. Suddenly, you're within the station. The interior of this structure isn't totally accurate to reality, to be clear. It's a gray, translucent rendering of the ISS's insides that you can explore. Still, the size is meant to be true to life.

Along the way, you can touch giant floating orbs that bring you a short snippet of video to watch. It is because of these snippets that I think this show is 100% worth it.

Each one corresponds to the location in which the orb sits — a cupola orb might show you a couple of astronauts floating around and looking out the window, while one near the gym equipment might bring you straight into a training session with Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch. Perhaps you'd like to venture "outside" and float eye-level with the station's robotic arm. In your periphery to the left, a spacewalker traverses the exterior of the station. To the right, the Earth is majestic. In front of you, sunlight hitting the laboratory's worn white walls causes a realistic glare. You can't help but squint.

And the reason these snippets are outstanding is that they are made with real footage from the ISS.

A show made by astronauts

I sat down with Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder of Felix & Paul studios — the organization behind the exhibit — to learn how this was possible. What does it take to recreate the ISS with this level of detail, and this level of soul?

"It took about a year and a half to two years to just prepare for this project, and eventually cameras were sent up there in space," he said. "That was the beginning of a three year production."

More specifically, the footage you see in this VR show was filmed across six NASA expeditions and involved shipping three cameras to space — two cameras operating inside the ISS and one camera designed to function in the vacuum of space. That latter camera was attached to the Canadian robotic arm on the exterior of the station and operators on the ground could remotely control it to achieve the cinematic quality they wished. The astronauts first put it on the sliding table of the ISS's Japanese module. Then, the camera was egressed from the station and the robotic arm could pick it up.

When it came to the interior cameras, however, that's where the astronauts themselves stepped in.

"It's not a traditional camera — it's a virtual reality camera," Lajeunesse said. "So, if you're going to be around a table, for example, having coffee together in the morning, well, this camera is not going to be in the middle of the table because no one would ever be there. It will be at the same height as the rest of you around the table because in the end it's going to be replaced by a person being there with you."

"This kind of anthropomorphic idea that the camera is a person really resonated with them," he added.

In order to ensure the camera didn't interfere with the many experiments and procedures on the station Lajeunesse and his team made sure to send the astronauts what he calls a "shooting script" for each day of work. This script explained which different camera positions were desired; if anything wasn't possible, the astronauts would offer suggestions of better locations. "We had this ongoing conversation with them during the production, as if it was on a real set, essentially," Lajeunesse said.

And speaking with Lajeunesse, it became remarkably clear that this show wouldn't have been as heartfelt as it is without the astronauts' own desire to create it. It seems like the astronauts wanted to be able to share their indescribable experience of living beyond our planet with those stuck on it. This is a way for them to show their families the place they used to call home.

The team even made sure to premiere the U.S. version of the show at Houston, Texas, often called "Space City" because that's where NASA astronaut training happens at the agency's Johnson Space Center.

"Our first audience in the United States were the astronauts," Lajeunesse said. "It was quite an extraordinary and emotional turnout — almost all of them referred to experiencing this as going back home."

A time capsule for future generations

As upsetting as it is, the International Space Station isn't forever. Unless a potential boosting mission reaches fruition, it'll be de-orbited and mostly lost in the flames of reentry in the year 2030. Its charred remnants will probably be placed in museums. One day, those museums will be visited by people who never lived during a time when you just knew the iconic lab was up there somewhere in the sky.

When that day comes, this ISS show will grow in sentimental value. It may end up offering the only way for ISS astronauts to go "home."

"VR points to the capacity to create simulations that are just as rich and vibrant and open and possibilities than reality itself." Lejeuneusse said, comparing it to console video games or movies. "I think it's probably the most human medium there's ever been."

He hopes that, someday, VR will improve to the point where it becomes possible to generate open worlds that we can all be a part of together. Perhaps, he says, artificial intelligence will be a big part of that.

"This feeling of witnessing the Earth, this sense of the overview experience is something pretty special, pretty emotional for people, and something that could not be communicated through any other media," he said.

As for what's next? The team is working on a show in Las Vegas called Interstellar Arc, a science fiction futuristic VR experience that Lajeuneusse says is even more interactive than this International Space Station one. But still, he emphasizes that while future VR shows may continue to increase in capabilities, there will always be something profound about the ISS project.

"You know, the International Space Station is one of the most extraordinary examples of human collaboration; human cooperation. It's many different countries, some of them which are opponents at the political stage, that kind of all came together to build this enormous structure in space habitat where humans can go and live," he said. "It was all built through cooperation, and it's all maintained through cooperation."

"When they're up there, they're kind of like a microcosm of humanity," he added. "Just the fact that it exists, just the fact that it continues to exist. We should marvel at that."

A U.S.-Russian crew returned to Earth from the International Space Station early Sunday morning (July 26), after 241 days in orbit.

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos undocked from the orbiting lab on Sunday at 3:03 a.m. EDT (0703 GMT).

The Soyuz, known as MS-28, landed on the steppe of Kazakhstan 3 hours and 24 minutes later, at 6:27 a.m. EDT (1027 GMT).

The crew's departure activities began on Saturday morning with a change-of-command ceremony aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Kud‑Sverchkov handed over the reins of the orbiting lab to NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, part of the transition from ISS Expedition 74 to Expedition 75 (which officially began when Soyuz MS‑28 undocked).

The crew then gave their farewells and closed the hatches between the ISS and Soyuz MS-28 on Saturday night.

Soyuz MS-28 launched to the ISS on Nov. 27, which was Thanksgiving Day. That liftoff kicked off the first space mission for Williams and Mikaev and the second for Kud‑Sverchkov, who now has logged 426 days and 9 minutes in space.

The MS-28 trio orbited Earth 3,856 times and traveled a total of more than 102 million miles (164 million kilometers).

Now back on Earth, the three spaceflyers were first flown by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where recovery teams were based. Williams then will return to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Kud‑Sverchkov and Mikaev head back to their training base in Star City, Russia.