On Nov. 8, 2005, Europe launched its first mission to Venus. The spacecraft was called Venus Express.

Venus is a hothouse planet, one where the atmospheric pressure can easily crush an unprotected spacecraft. Even from orbit, Venus Express had to survive harsh radiation. But the spacecraft lasted for more than nine years.

During that time, Venus Express saw a weird vortex swirling around Venus's south pole. It also saw possible signs of active volcanoes. Venus Express also discovered that the planet generates its own auroras. These auroras happen when particles from the sun hit charged particles in the atmosphere.

Late in the Venus Express mission, controllers told the spacecraft to dip down into Venus's clouds — even though the spacecraft wasn't designed to do this. It performed well, but eventually it stopped listening to commands. The spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere in January 2015.

Why it mattered

Venus Express established ESA as the third world organization to successfully send a probe to study Venus, following the United States and Soviet Union. (Japan's JAXA became the fourth five years later.)

"By studying Venus, scientists learn how Earth-like planets change over time," reads a summary of the planet's exploration prepared by The Planetary Society. "Orbital studies [like Venus Express] hint that Venus may have hosted habitable oceans before becoming inhospitable."

"By studying Venus, we can learn how Earth-like planets evolve and what shapes planets throughout the galaxy into temperate, lush worlds instead of sweltering hothouses. Venus also helps scientists model Earth’s climate, and may serve as a cautionary tale on how dramatically a planet’s climate can change," wrote the Society.

ESA returned to Venus in 2018 when BepiColombo, its joint mission with JAXA, used the planet's gravity to redirect its path toward the planet Mercury.

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A new computer simulation that depicts Earth, or a rocky planet in general, without life is the latest tool in the quest to discover whether or not we are alone in the universe.

Life leaves its mark on a planet, particularly its atmosphere, in the form of a mixture of biochemically created gases. Some are obvious, while others can be produced by both biology and geology, meaning that distinguishing a planet that has life from one that does not, solely based on what gases we can detect in its atmosphere, can be difficult. The key is in knowing which atmospheric conditions can be explained without life.

To aid in distinguishing between habitable and inhabited planets, planetary scientist Samantha Gilbert-Janizek of the University of California, Riverside, developed a model that simulates the evolution of a rocky planet without life.

"The model can help us see how habitable but non-living planets might mimic living planets," Gilbert-Janizek, who was a PhD student at the University of Washington when the research was conducted, said in a statement.

Gilbert-Janizek built upon a model previously developed by Washington’s Rory Barnes that simulated the core, mantle, and crust of a planet. This new model pushed the simulation two steps further by incorporating the surface and atmosphere of the planet as well.

In all, the model simulates 19 properties of a rocky planet that are not related to life, including the amount of heat a planet receives from its star, the exchange of heat and chemicals from the core to the surface, and the outflow of certain gases from the subsurface.

Gilbert-Janizek’s starting point was to simulate the development of Earth had life never arisen here, therefore providing a baseline with which to compare to exoplanets. She ran the simulation from the birth of Earth 4.5 billion years ago to 500 million years into the future. The result was a lifeless world, but one that still had oceans and an atmosphere.

"When we interpret observations of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, this tool will help us determine the probability that what we observe indicates life on the surface," said Gilbert-Janizek.

What makes the simulation especially useful is its plug-and-play nature. Researchers can simply apply the bulk properties of whichever planet they are studying to the model, and then just let it run. If the result is a planet with an atmosphere that matches what is detected spectroscopically by the James Webb Space Telescope or, in the future, the various extremely large 30-meter-plus ground-based telescopes or NASA’s planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, then we know that planet probably does not have life as we know it.

However, if the simulated planet without life does not match what we observe on the real planet, then it becomes possible that life is present and altering the atmosphere.

"Dr Gilbert-Janizek’s work represents an exciting step toward understanding where life can exist in the universe,” said Barnes. "After more than a decade of work by many scientists, Dr Gilbert-Janizek has finally completed a model of the Earth that simultaneously reproduces properties of Earth’s core, mantle, surface and atmosphere. That calibration gives us confidence that future simulations of exoplanets will be accurate."

While any deviation from what is predicted by the model will not necessarily mean there is definitely life on a planet, it will help pick out those worlds that are worthy of follow-up studies by the next generation of telescopes.

Gilbert-Janizek’s model is described in a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal.

On Nov. 7, 1996, NASA launched its Mars Global Surveyor mission. This was the first mission NASA sent to Mars in almost 20 years!

The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft was an orbiter. It transmitted data from NASA's Mars rovers Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity back to Earth. The spacecraft also did a lot of its own science. It found surface channels on Mars that appeared to have been created by running water.

Mars Global Surveyor looked at the south pole of Mars and saw signs of possible climate change. It also saw a mineral called hematite on Mars. Hematite usually forms in water. NASA then sent its Spirit and Opportunity rovers to look for the hematite, and both rovers found it near their landing sites.

Mars Global Surveyor survived much longer than expected. But a space maneuver accidentally exposed one of its batteries to the sun, and the spacecraft lost power. It fell silent forever in November 2006.

Why it mattered

As the first successful Mars mission since the two Viking launches in 1975, Mars Global Surveyor ushered in a new era of exploration of the Red Planet, not only through its own contributions to orbit-based science, but by serving a relay for surface-based rovers. As such, it became a primary pipeline for multiple concurrent Mars missions.

"The [Mars Global Surveyor] mission overhauled scientists' understanding of Mars by studying the entire Martian surface, atmosphere and interior. Major findings included dramatic evidence that water still flows on Mars in short bursts down hillside gullies, and the identification of water-related mineral deposits leading to selection of a Mars rover landing site for a subsequent mission," read a NASA description of the probe.

Mars Global Surveyor sent back more than 240,000 images to Earth during its nine active years.

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We still may be some time away from sending humans to distant reaches of the solar system, but you can send your name to Saturn's moon Titan, which has the ingredients of life on its surface thanks to NASA's Dragonfly mission.

Dragonfly is an SUV-sized nuclear-powered rotorcraft that NASA aims to launch towards Titan in 2028. The agency opened a special events page in late October to allow members of the public to put their name on the spacecraft. The names will be put upon a chip on Dragonfly during the spacecraft's assembly, and all names must be submitted before Jan. 15, 2027.

The agency says that the mission has no "ordinary itinerary," as Dragonfly aims to between areas miles (or kilometers) apart after arriving on the surface in 2034. "Nearly a billion miles away, an extraordinary destination awaits. Titan has an atmosphere, rivers and lakes, seasons, sweeping dunes and a landscape rich in organic material," NASA officials wrote in the event page. "Upon arrival in 2034, Dragonfly will fly from place to place on this intriguing world to uncover clues about this remarkable moon, and the chemistry that could help us understand the ingredients for life."

Dragonfly will be one of just a few flying crafts on another world, with the first being NASA's plucky Ingenuity mini-helicopter that arrived on Mars along with the still-running Perseverance rover in 2021. Ingenuity was only designed to make five flights, but made it to 72 until its blades were damaged during a landing on Jan. 18, 2024.

NASA is now planning a SkyFall mission on Mars that would use three helicopters, and which may launch as soon as late 2028 for the Red Planet.

Dragonfly, however, is not the first mission to Titan: that would be Huygens, which operated for just a few hours on Jan. 14, 2005 after deploying from the Cassini spacecraft. Huygens was the first lander on an outer solar system world, and measured Titan's atmosphere and took data from the surface.

For its part, Cassini flew by Titan more than 100 times before the mission concluded in September 2017, providing valuable long-term data about the moon from above. Dragonfly aims to show the moon from up close for about 3.3 Earth years. Its destinations will include dunes and a young impact crater called Selk, according to NASA.

"Dragonfly is expected to make one flight every one to two Titan days, which is called a Tsol and lasts about 16 Earth days," NASA officials added of the mission. Dragonfly will stop at a variety of geologic sites, where it will collect samples of surface material for analysis inside the rotorcraft by a suite of scientific instruments."

Dragonfly's goals include learning more about prebiotic chemistry, or the conditions prior to life arising in a location; figuring out if Titan had habitable conditions in the past; and looking for "chemical indicators" of life based on water or hydrocarbons.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is serious about launching "big rockets" to the moon every single year for the agency's Artemis program. And the new space race with China is fueling that ambition.

"I feel good. I feel like we are certainly on a more achievable path to the lunar surface today than where we were before," Isaacman told Space.com.

We recently sat down with the NASA chief to discuss the state of the Artemis program, and, off the bat, he made it clear that he's confident in the U.S. space program following the success of April's Artemis II mission around the moon. In fact, just prior to our conversation, it was announced that Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman will become the new deputy director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But the road from Artemis II's success to crewed lunar landings and, later, a permanent moon base will take a lot of launches of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, Isaacman stressed.

"You know, a lot of people, especially in the space community, start getting [into] if the landers are there or not. I don't really care about that right now. What I care about is that we are launching big rockets no less than once a year," he said.

"I think that's imperative for NASA to be doing these deep-space human spaceflight missions right now," Isaacman added. "So, we had a great mission in April of '26. We will launch again in '27."

That coming launch will be for Artemis III, a crewed mission to low Earth orbit that will test docking procedures between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the Artemis program's private lunar landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

"We need to continue to exercise those muscles," he said, referring to SLS liftoffs. "And, honestly, once a year isn't great, either. I mean, I don't think we're going to get back to the early [space] shuttle days, you know, four missions a year. I don't think we're going to get back to where we were with Apollo, but once a year is the minimum … I would testify that to Congress in this role years down the road.

"If NASA is going to be doing deep-space missions, complicated missions, [we should] launch at least once a year and get as much out of it as you can for taking the risk and spending the taxpayer dollars and building towards something greater," Isaacman added. "That's what we're doing with Artemis III, and that's what's going to better prepare us for Artemis IV."

A new space race

So, how is NASA coping with the challenges that face them as they approach Artemis III ahead of a crewed lunar landing on Artemis IV, which is targeted for 2028? While NASA can learn some lessons from past moon missions with Apollo, today it's primarily relying on the extensive experience and talent within the agency, according to Isaacman.

"Artemis II is very different from Apollo 8, and Artemis III will be very different from Apollo 9," he said. "Our approach is not exactly the same as it was … But what is the same right now? The spirit, the energy, the potential within NASA. The talent of the workforce and industry is no different than the 1960s."

There's another similarity to the Apollo era: NASA has a rival in its race to the moon. While the adversary in the 1960s was the Soviet Union, today the U.S. is competing against China.

"It is a real space race," Isaacman said. But, he added, "this one is very different than the first one."

"Everything is closer than it was, not just in space. I mean, we had the edge in computing [and] every one of the technology domains during the Cold War. Our capabilities were better by a mile," he said. "[But with] China, it's not [like that]. They're very close."

"We're saying we're going to land on the moon at the end of 2028. China is saying by the end of 2029," Isaacman added. "And it's like, Well, are they going to pull it off? Yes, they will. They've showcased their landers, their rovers, their suits, two-launch architecture with built-in reusability."

So NASA is taking the Chinese threat very seriously, according to Isaacman.

"The consequence of getting this wrong, I'm telling you — it's going to be felt around the world," he said. "It will call everything into question."

"Should I be using American superintelligence or AI? Should I be doing Chinese? Should I be buying their computers? Should I be [buying] ours? Buying their cars, their airplanes, their ships? Whose security guarantees to trust?" Isaacman added. "I think the implications are pretty severe, which is why we're taking it so seriously and putting such extreme focus on the mission right now. But we have that playbook of success, and I think we will prevail."

SpaceX just launched a classified mission for the U.S. military.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base this evening (Nov. 6) at 7:48 p.m. EST (4:48 p.m. local California time; 0048 GMT on Nov. 7), rising into the sky as the sun sank toward the Pacific.

The launch kicked off the USSF-432 mission for the U.S. Space Force, which we know little about. Neither SpaceX nor the Space Force told us much about USSF-432 beforehand, and we learned tonight; SpaceX cut its webcast off about 10 minutes into the flight, shortly after the Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a landing.

That touchdown occurred aboard the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed downrange in the Pacific Ocean. It wrapped up the eighth flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1095.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying its mystery payload skyward. It could be headed to low Earth orbit, outside observers speculate.

"It is possibly a batch of classified LEO satellites for the USSF's Space Based Sensing and Targeting (SBST) portfolio based on SpaceX's Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches," NextSpaceflight.com wrote in a mission description.

Starlink is SpaceX's LEO broadband megaconstellation, which consists of more than 11,000 active satellites. Starshield is a similar system designed to provide services to the U.S. military and its allies. Starshield satellites are believed to be based heavily on the Starlink spacecraft bus.

USSF-432 was the 119th Falcon 9 launch of 2026, and the 14th national-security flight of the rocket so far this year. The vast majority of Falcon 9 missions in 2026 — more than 70% — have been devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

SpaceX has also launched six other missions this year. Three were operational flights of the company's Falcon Heavy rocket, while the other three were test missions of its next-gen Starship vehicle. SpaceX plans to retire both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy shortly after the fully reusable Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is up and running.

On Nov. 6, 1572, the German astronomer Wolfgang Schulër observed a supernova with his bare eyes. He spotted the exploding star in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was as bright as Venus and could even be seen during the day.

Astronomers were really confused, because it looked like a star just appeared out of nowhere. Schulër may have been the first to see it, but the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is widely credited for the discovery. Brahe studied it in detail and wrote a whole book about this so-called "new star." It then became known as "Tycho's Star."

At the time, supernovas had not yet been discovered. Tycho's Star was finally classified as a supernova in the 1940s. Scientists now think it was a small star called a white dwarf that exploded thousands of years ago. Because Tycho's Star is 13,000 light-years from Earth, it took a while before anyone could see it.

Why it mattered

The Tycho supernova, known technically as SN 1572, is known today as a Type Ia supernova, which is a star explosion in a binary star system in which a white dwarf star draws material away from its partner, then explodes. But in 1572, the Tycho supernova appeared as something very different: a bright new star.

While Schulër was first, other astronomers also observed the apparently new star in the sky. Tycho Brahe's numerous observations are the most well known, in no small part becuause he wrote a book all about them in "De Stella Nova" (Latin for "On The New Star." At the time, the prevailing theory among scientists was that the stars were unchanging, yet here was a new star -- a changed sky.

"The 16th century exploding star, which appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, was seen in daylight for about two weeks, and remained visible to the naked eye for 16 months," the University of California Berkeley wrote in 2004. "Brahe's meticulous record of the brightening and dimming of the supernova now allows astronomers to identify its 'light signature" as that of a Type Ia supernova."

"This was at the end of the Dark Ages in Europe, and these observations were an important piece of evidence that the heavens were not immutable," astronomer Alex Filippenko, who led a 2004 study on the origins of the Tycho supernova, said at the time.

Today, astronomers are closely watching another star that might explode. Called T Corona Borealis, or the Blaze Star, the object is expected to be on the verge of exploding in a nova (a star explosion that is smaller than a supernova and may not destroy the star). is one of 11 known stars observed to have recurring nova explosions within gaps of 100 years or so.

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Another new private rocket is in the works.

AST SpaceMobile announced today (Nov. 6) that it's building a reusable rocket called Blacklift to launch its broadband satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), with first flight targeted in 2028.

The news comes just 10 days after Cowboy Space unveiled Big Iron, a rocket designed to launch its constellation of 20,000 AI data centers. Cowboy Space is also targeting 2028 for its first liftoff.

"The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit and providing for most favorable owners’ economics in the industry," Abel Avellan, the company's founder, chairman and CEO, said in a statement today.

"This will accelerate our mission to build a new layer of global connectivity, extending connectivity beyond terrestrial networks and helping to bring AI-enabled services wherever people live, work and travel," Avellan added.

Texas-based AST SpaceMobile is building a LEO constellation composed of its BlueBird satellites, which beam internet service directly to cell phones. The company has launched 13 BlueBirds to date, including eight "Block 2" variants. The antennas on each of these next-gen spacecraft cover a whopping 2,400 square feet (223 square m) — the largest ever deployed in LEO by a commercial satellite.

BlueBirds have flown atop three different rockets to date — SpaceX's Falcon 9, Blue Origin's New Glenn and India's Launch Vehicle Mark-3. But AST SpaceMobile wants to get more vertically integrated, which explains the push to develop Blacklift.

The company won't be starting from scratch. It has signed a deal with another Texas-based outfit, Firefly Aerospace, to provide the engines (and associated engineering services) for the first three Blacklift launches. After that, AST SpaceMobile will build the engines itself, under a licensing agreement with Firefly.

Those engines are Miranda, which will power Blacklift's booster, and Vira, which will power the upper stage.

Neither engine has flight experience. (Firefly's currently operational rocket, Alpha, uses Reavers in its booster and Lightnings in its upper stage.) But Miranda has been tested extensively on the ground, firing for more than 4,200 seconds over the course of 175 hot fires, according to AST SpaceMobile.

"The Miranda engine will allow us to leapfrog the traditional five-to-10-year development cycle as we build Blacklift," AST SpaceMobile President Scott Wisniewski said in the same statement.

The "supply and services" agreement for the first three launches is worth $500 million. The licensing agreement cost AST SpaceMobile about $800 million, with half of that paid in cash and half in stock, according to the statement.

Blacklift will be able to haul 20 tons to LEO. Each launch will therefore be able to loft up to five BlueBird satellites, according to today's announcement. (For perspective: The Falcon 9's LEO lift capacity is about 25 tons.)

BlueBirds will continue going up while AST SpaceMobile gets Blacklift ready to fly: The company already holds contracts with other providers to launch more than 100 of the satellites over the course of 2027 and 2028.

The launch landscape will likely be very different when Blacklift, Big Iron and other new rockets come online. SpaceX has said that it plans to phase out the Falcon 9, as well as its Falcon Heavy heavy lifter, after its Starship megarocket gets up and running.

That milestone could come in the next few years, ushering in something of a launch crunch for satellite operators. SpaceX has indicated that it will prioritize launches of its own satellites with Starship. And there will be a lot of them to loft — 100,000 Starlink V3 satellites and a million Starmind AI data centers, company founder and CEO Elon Musk has suggested.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Hera spacecraft has gotten its first close-up look at the Didymos binary asteroid system. If that system sounds familiar, it's because it made headlines in September 2022 when NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft smashed into it.

The aim of the DART mission was to test whether an impact could divert an asteroid away from a collision course with Earth. The purpose of Hera is to follow up on DART by making up-close observations of the Didymos system.

"The first thing we said was, 'Wow,'" Hera Principal Investigator Patrick Michel said in a statement about the image, which ESA released on Thursday (Nov. 5). "This is the other side of Didymos from the one that DART’s camera showed us shortly before impact, so this feels like looking at a whole new world."

What is it?

The Didymos system consists of the eponymous 2,560-foot-wide (780 meters) space rock and its "moonlet" Dimorphos, which is about 530 feet (160 m) in diameter.

The DART mission impacted Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022, with the aim of causing a change in the orbital period of the moonlet. And it worked: Before the impact, Dimorphos completed one lap around Didymos in around 11 hours and 55 minutes. The DART collision reduced the length of this period by around 33 minutes.

The change is a result of the fact that Dimporphos is now traveling at around 2.7 millimeters per second more slowly than it did before the collision.

The newly released photo shows Didymos in detail. Just a sliver of Dimorphos is visible, below and slightly to the left of the main asteroid.

Why is it incredible?

The changes caused by DART were small. But in a real Earth-threatening scenario, even such a tiny shift could help divert an asteroid on a collision course — as long as scientists get enough advance warning of its approach.

Hera's observations should help reveal what other changes have occurred on and around Didymos.

Scientists are already seeing that, while Didymos has the same central ridge along its equator as before the impact, many changes have occurred. This includes the creation of multiple boulders, craters, and patterns of grooves or ridges.

"Since we expect a lot of impact-ejected material to have made it across the approximately 1 kilometer [0.62 miles] of space from Dimorphos to Didymos, it may be that some of these characteristics originate from this transport of material, and we have exciting work ahead of us to sort it out," said Michael Kueppers, ESA’s Hera mission scientist. "We look forward to seeing much more of both bodies and systemically mapping all the changes we identify."

Stay tuned to Space.com for more Hera findings from Didymos.

NASA will host a first-of-its-kind air show and aerospace expo on Florida's Space Coast this weekend.

The show, called Max Power, will take place Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 7 and Nov. 8) at and around NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). That name should be familiar to "Simpsons" fans, by the way: Max Power is an alias that Homer uses in the 13th episode of the show's 10th season. (He got it off a hair dryer.)

There will be a lot to see at NASA's event, so you should consider dropping by if you're on the Space Coast this weekend. (Tickets are required; you can buy them here.) Here are a few of the highlights.

Saturday, Nov. 7 (all times local, EST):

• 11:15-11:30 a.m.: Overview of NASA's "quiet" supersonic jet, the X-59
• 12:30-1:00 p.m.: Discussion of NASA's science and exploration goals by Nicky Fox and Lori Glaze (the heads of NASA's Science Mission Directorate and Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, respectively)
• 12:45-1:00 p.m.: Q&A with the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis III mission
• 1:00-1:30 p.m.: "How Is NASA Preparing Astronauts to Live and Work on the Moon?" with Suzanne Bell, who leads NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center
• 1:30-2:00 p.m.: Discussion of NASA's planned lunar outpost, with Moon Base program head Carlos García-Galán
• 2:00-2:30 p.m.: Summary of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, by senior project scientist Julie McEnery

Sunday, Nov. 8

• 11:15-11:30 a.m.: "How NASA uses aircraft for research! Topic: Connecting flight to research"
• 12:45-1:15 p.m.: Update on the U.S. Space Academy with NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson
• 12:45-1:00 p.m. (different stage): Q&A with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station
• 1:00-1:30 p.m.: Discussion of SR-1 Freedom, NASA's planned nuclear-powered spacecraft that will launch mini-helicopters to Mars in 2028
• 1:30-2:00 p.m.: "The X-Factor: NASA's Flight Revolution Topic: X-Planes"
• 2:00-2:30 p.m.: Conversation with an (as yet unnamed) NASA astronaut
• 3:00-3:15: "In the Cockpit: Meet the NASA Pilots!"

NASA will also hold a livestreamed press conference on Saturday at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT) about its moon base plans. It will feature Fox, García-Galán, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and Dayna Ise, the acting director of the Utility and Infrastructure Office for the Moon Base Program.

There will also be dramatic flyovers on both days of Max Power, some of them by Isaacman, who's an accomplished pilot as well as a private astronaut. (He funded and commanded SpaceX's Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn missions, which flew to Earth orbit in September 2021 and September 2024, respectively.)

According to NASA's Max Power schedule, Isaacman will perform flyovers both Saturday and Sunday at 11:58 a.m (in an F-5 jet) and 1:31 p.m. (in a MiG-29).

There will also be a lot to see as you're wandering the grounds at the Max Power sites.

The event "will showcase the newest aircraft, autonomous vehicles, technologies, and more defining the future of air and space," agency officials wrote in a Max Power description. "NASA will display its quiet supersonic X-59 plane, and agency partners will showcase moon rovers, spacecraft and more."

Just as NASA is preparing to demonstrate "Max Power" on the ground, two astronauts on a spacewalk have provided the International Space Station (ISS) with the same.

Expedition 75 flight engineers Anil Menon of NASA and Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency installed and deployed the eighth and final ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) on Thursday (Nov. 5), augmenting the space station's legacy solar array wings to produce as much as 30% more electricity.

"We got it done!" said Menon at the end of the 6-hour-and-59-minute spacewalk. The EVA (extravehicular activity) began at 8:36 a.m. EST and ended at 3:35 p.m. EST (1336 to 2035 GMT).

Repeating many of the same tasks as they did on an Oct. 29 spacewalk that added the penultimate iROSA, Menon and Kutryk worked this time on the starboard side of the station's backbone truss on the 3B power channel. The two retrieved the 750-pound (340 kilograms) iROSA assembly from a temporary stowage platform, carried it to the worksite by way of the Canadarm2 robotic arm and mounted it to its previously assembled bracket kit.

Menon then attached the cables to tie the iROSA into the station's systems but ran into a problem.

"We are seeing half of the expected shunt current that we want," radioed Nichole Stilwell, a NASA astronaut serving as the spacewalk officer in Mission Control. "In this current config, we are not necessarily going to deploy."

To address the issue, the connectors needed to be inspected. Out of safety concerns — given that the arrays generate electricity whenever lit by the sun — the astronauts needed to wait for the space station to enter the shadow of Earth to see what could be done. In the interim, they spent the time cleaning up their worksite and returning the Canadarm2 to its park site as they would have done after the deployment.

Fortunately, they were able to clear the issue.

"We are seeing good shunt currents on the ground, so we are go for deploy," said Stilwell.

After releasing two bolts, Kutryk and Menon watched as the array started to unfurl to its full 63-foot (19 meters) length. No motor was needed; the iROSA, as designed, used only the potential energy stored by its rolled-up carbon composite booms to extend itself. The entire process took about 10 minutes.

"Today marks the completion of not just one solar array but, over 15 years after its development, eight arrays," said Menon at the close of the spacewalk. "These solar arrays are incredible. Half the size of the old ones and bringing 40% more power."

Each of the eight iROSAs and their mounting assemblies were delivered to the space station by SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. Beginning in June 2021, four teams of two astronauts did as was done on Thursday to deploy each array. In addition to Kutryk and Menon's work on the 2A and 3B power channels, the spacewalkers included Shane Kimbrough of NASA and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency for the 2B and 4B channels; Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio, both with NASA, on 3A and 4A in December 2022; and NASA's Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg on 1A and 1B in June 2023.

The need for the iROSA augmentations was discovered by flight controllers when the space station's eight original arrays began to show degraded power output as they exceeded their 15-year design life. The iROSAs provide the additional electricity needed to support ISS operations through its retirement and controlled deorbit, which are currently scheduled to occur in late 2030.

"Congratulations to you all on your stellar work to finish the last of the roll-out solar arrays and the upgrades to the ISS power system that will take it to the end of its journey," said Stilwell, addressing Menon and Kutryk. "It is fitting that we just surpassed 26 years of constant human presence on the International Space Station, and you all showed us what the best of humanity looks like executing one of the most difficult and dangerous [things] humans do and making it look easy. Congratulations!"

Menon has now logged 33 hours and 30 minutes on four spacewalks, while Kutryk has tailed 14 hours and 10 minutes on two EVAs. Thursday's spacewalk was the 101st U.S. EVA at the International Space Station without a space shuttle being present and the 286th overall in support of ISS assembly, maintenance and upgrades. It was the ninth spacewalk of 2026 and the sixth conducted by the station's 75th resident crew.

Blue Origin's big rocket is getting a little bigger.

Jeff Bezos' company announced today (Nov. 5) that it has developed a third stage for its New Glenn rocket, which it says will make the powerful launcher more capable and flexible.

The stage, called the GS3, "enhances New Glenn's capabilities," Blue Origin said in a blog post today. "The third stage enables direct deployment of satellite constellations to GEO [geostationary orbit] and supports heavy-lift science and exploration missions to the moon and deep space."

New Glenn is a two-stage vehicle at the moment. Its reusable first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, and its second stage features two of the company's BE-3Us. The rocket stands 322 feet (98 meters) tall and can haul 14.3 tons (13 metric tons) to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) and 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO).

These are the specs for the standard, or "7x2," version of New Glenn. Last year, Blue Origin announced that it's developing a super-heavy variant known as the 9x4, because it will feature nine first-stage BE-4s and four upper-stage BE-3Us. The 9x4 will be nearly 400 feet (122 m) tall, and it will be able to loft 15.4 tons (14 metric tons) to GTO and 77 tons (70 metric tons) to LEO, according to Blue Origin.

New Glenn has flown three times to date, each time in the 7x2 configuration. The rocket debuted in January 2025, then launched again in November 2025 and again on April 19 of this year.

Things didn't go according to plan on that latest mission. The rocket deployed AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite into the wrong orbit, and the spacecraft ended up being lost.

Another setback came just a month later: On May 28, New Glenn exploded on the pad during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working ever since to rebuild the pad and get New Glenn ready for its fourth flight, which is expected to occur late this year.

We now know that Blue Origin has also been working on the GS3 while those repairs were underway. The new stage will be powered by one BE-7 engine, which the company developed for use on its Blue Moon spacecraft, one of the two private vehicles that NASA selected to be crewed lunar landers for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

Blue Moon landing missions won't need to launch on GS3-equipped New Glenn rockets, according to Blue Origin. But the third stage "can support sustained operations around the moon," the company wrote in today's blog post. "By delivering significant payload mass directly to trans-lunar injection (TLI), GS3 enables faster transit times while preserving propellant for on-orbit operations."

And there's already demand for such services: Blue Origin also announced today that a government customer (which it did not name) has booked a GS3 mission to cislunar (Earth-moon) space, with launch targeted for 2028.

And the company dropped yet more news today — that it's working on a new first-stage engine, called Northstar.

Like Blue Origin's other booster engine, the BE-4, Northstar burns liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant, a combination known as methalox. But the new engine is more powerful and less complex.

"Compared to the BE-4 engine, Northstar reduces mass by 30% and parts count by 50%, while increasing thrust from 640,000 to 715,000 pounds-force," Blue Origin said in a second blog post today. "Manufacturing advancements have also significantly shortened production timelines, enabling assembly in less than a day."

Northstar went from program approval to development testing in just 11 months, according to the company. But today's update did not say when the new engine will fly for the first time.

On Nov. 5, 2002, NASA's old Galileo spacecraft was almost out of fuel. But the Jupiter mission still had some science to do. Galileo flew by a small moon called Amalthea. Amalthea is small, but it's interesting for scientists.

The Jupiter moon Amalthea is the reddest object in our solar system. It also generates more heat than it gets from the sun. Scientists think Amalthea creates electrical currents as it orbits in Jupiter's huge magnetic field. Near this little moon, strong radiation from Jupiter is dangerous for spacecraft.

The flyby caused some problems for Galileo. The spacecraft went into safe mode only 30 minutes after going past Amalthea. NASA said it was ready for problems, because Galileo was on its last legs, and the radiation near Amalthea was strong. However, NASA quickly fixed the problem and got Galileo working again.

Less than a year later, Galileo threw itself into Jupiter's atmosphere. The spacecraft was crushed by the high pressure in Jupiter's atmosphere, but its data still survives on Earth.

Why it mattered

The Galileo spacecraft was running on cosmic fumes by the time it reached Amalthea and the flyby would be the last time the probe would ever swing by one of Jupiter's moons.

While it may not look like it in Galileo's black and white images above and below, Amalthea is tinted red due sulfur contamination on its surface. The moon is small, about 168 miles long, and orbits about 112,468 miles (181,000 km) from Jupiter (much closer to the planet than the Earth and its moon).

Galileo flew within 99 miles of Amalthea during its flyby, which also marked the closest Galileo would get to Jupiter before its death dive in September 2005.

"Scientists studying data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft have found that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is a pile of icy rubble less dense than water," NASA announced in May 2005

"Amalthea is throwing us a curve ball," Torrence Johnson, a study co-author on the Almathea flyby and project scientist for the Galileo mission at JPL, said in 2005. "Its density is well below that of water ice, and even with substantial porosity, Amalthea probably contains a lot of water ice, as well as rock."

Originally known as Jupiter V (because it was the fifth Jupiter moon discovered after the so-called Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto), Amalthea was named after naiad, or water nymph, from Greek mythology.

It is fitting that Amalthea was the last of Jupiter's moons to be visited by the Galileo spacecraft. The moon was also last Jupiter moon to be discovered by visual observations when it was first disovered by astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard in September 1892 using the Lick Observatory telescope in California.

The Galileo spacecraft ultimately crashed into Jupiter on Sept. 21, 2005, less than a year after its Amalthea flyby.

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TENERIFE, Canary Islands — Imagine traveling over 250 million miles from home, watching Earth disappear behind the moon and losing contact with the billions of people who call it home. What would you miss most?

For Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover, the answer wasn't a particular place, a familiar view or even the comforts of home. It was something much more fundamental: human connection.

Speaking during a discussion with former astronaut Chris Hadfield at the Starmus VIII festival on Oct. 18 in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Glover reflected on the extraordinary experience of traveling around the moon and how being so far from Earth had given him a renewed appreciation for the people living on it.

"The greatest reason to go to space, it isn't to be a swashbuckler hero," Glover said. "It's to do something that only 651 people have been able to do: miss Earth and miss other Earthlings."

Glover was one of the four astronauts aboard NASA's Artemis II mission, which launched on April 1, 2026, marking humanity's first crewed journey to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the crew traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them.

As the Orion spacecraft traversed the far side of the moon, the Artemis II crew watched Earth disappear below the lunar horizon before losing radio contact with our planet. Around 40 minutes later, Earth came back into view as the spacecraft emerged from behind the moon.

For Glover, however, the experience was about much more than the view. He believes that if everyone on Earth had the opportunity to make the same journey, they would come away with a similar appreciation for what they'd left behind.

"I think all of us would say something in our native language, in the most basic way we can communicate about love, joy, hope and inspiration," Glover said.

Although Glover shared the extraordinary journey with three fellow astronauts, the four of them were separated from the rest of humanity by hundreds of thousands of miles.

And for Glover, that distance brought with it a strange contradiction: the farther he traveled from humanity, the more he longed to connect with it.

"At the point of ultimate disconnection, [there is] this longing for connection," Glover said.

The experience gave him a perspective that he carried back into everyday life.

"There are moments where I am rushing through traffic and want to get where I'm going because I'm being selfish," Glover admitted. "But I don't have to stay there."

Instead, he remembers what it felt like to look back at a planet so distant that everyone who has ever lived could be covered by his hand.

"I wish you could all feel what it's like to come back home after that disconnection," he said.

The 'sea level effect'

Astronauts often describe experiencing the "overview effect", a profound shift in perspective that can come from seeing Earth from space. But Glover believes that there's something equally powerful waiting to be discovered much closer to home.

When asked by a Starmus VIII attendee whether people needed to undergo something extraordinary to develop a greater sense of kindness toward others, his answer was no.

Glover encouraged people to look more closely at the natural world around them, whether that meant walking along the beach, watching the ocean or simply examining a leaf held up to sunlight.

Even something as ordinary as a leaf, he explained, is capable of turning sunlight into food through photosynthesis. And although science can explain how that happens, understanding the process doesn't make it any less remarkable.

"We have to choose to be moved by these things," Glover said.

He worries that modern life, with its endless technological distractions, has made it all too easy to overlook the extraordinary things happening around us.

"Familiarity breeds contempt. Have you heard this? I think it's worse than that. Familiarity breeds indifference," he said.

Glover has a name for this perspective he hopes people can rediscover without traveling into space: The sea level effect.

It's about finding the same sense of wonder and connection that astronauts experience in orbit, but right here on Earth, where most of us spend our lives. And ultimately, Glover believes the greatest wonder isn't the moon, the stars, or even the incredible complexity of nature. It's the people we share our planet with.

"I think the hardest place to see this miracle is in the actual greatest miracle in the universe: other humans," he said.

"We all feel it with babies, but when we get old enough to have opinions, we start to want to argue with each other."

Glover hopes that by taking the time to appreciate the natural world, people might become a little more willing to appreciate one another too.

"That's the mission that I want to be part of for the rest of my life," Glover said.

Voyager, 1, humanity's most distant spacecraft, is back in contact after briefly losing touch with Earth last month.

The spacecraft stopped phoning home for about 48 hours between Oct. 18 and 20 due to a communications glitch that Voyager 1 resolved on its own, before engineers could send the long-running spacecraft a remote fix.

"This is the first time we've seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected," Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in an agency statement about the incident on Oct. 29.

Voyager 1 is almost one light-day from Earth, meaning that a command takes nearly a day to reach the spacecraft and a response takes another day to come back to our planet. The spacecraft will reach the light-day milestone on Nov. 18, at 16.09 billion miles (25.89 billion kilometers) from Earth.

NASA's Deep Space Network of three antennas does check-ins to make sure the spacecraft is doing well. On Oct. 18 and 19, Voyager 1 did not respond. Its signal fortunately reappeared on Oct. 20.

"Engineers still are investigating what caused the communication loss," JPL added in the statement, but said it appears Voyager 1 went into a sort of safe mode. "The team has so far determined that one group of thrusters went offline and their backups turned on. Such a swap is programmed to occur automatically if the spacecraft computers detect something amiss with the active thrusters."

Voyager 1 and its still-operational twin, Voyager 2, both launched in 1977 on an initial mission to explore planets in the solar system. The two spacecraft took advantage of a rare alignment that allowed them to swing from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus and Neptune using a minimum of fuel, although funding to explore the more distant planets and moons was not guaranteed at launch.

The spacecraft duly swung by Jupiter's and Saturn's systems (some months apart from each other) to great acclaim before parting pathways. Voyager 1's close-up view of Saturn's rings as well as the moon Titan — which may have prebiotic or pre-life chemistry — altered the spacecraft's trajectory to put it high above the plane of the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 flew on to Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively, providing the only up-close view of these planetary systems to date.

Running on nuclear power, and continuing to deliver valuable science from deep space, the Voyagers saw their missions extended repeatedly. Both crossed into interstellar space a few years ago, and are still operational.

But with age comes a cost: the plutonium power sources on both spacecraft are diminishing, requiring engineers to periodically shut off instruments or come up with other clever ways of saving power. Voyager 1 just underwent one of those power adjustments, nicknamed the "Big Bang" because it reconfigured a number of spacecraft instruments.

"In early September, engineers successfully turned off three devices on the Voyager 1 spacecraft and substituted them with three lower-power alternatives," JPL wrote of the effort, noting that Voyager 2 also had a "Big Bang" about six weeks previous to that.

JPL did not provide an estimate for how long the missions could keep running, but noted each spacecraft loses four watts of power a year — each launched with 470 watts — and that the spacecraft could continue operating science instruments "longer than previously anticipated" due to the Big Bang. On Voyager 1, for example, the falling power would have otherwise meant switching off another instrument possibly as soon as next summer.

In 2022, Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at JPL, stated the hope was the mission would continue to operate into the 2030s.

Spacewalks are hard work, so sometimes you need to take a break for a moment and snap a gorgeous selfie with your home planet in the background.

What is it?

During a pre-Halloween spacewalk on Oct. 29, 2026, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk took a moment to pose for a photograph.

In this moment, the International Space Station to which he was tethered was orbiting 267 miles (430 kilometers) above the South Atlantic Ocean down below on Earth.

During this spacewalk — the first for a Canadian since 2019 — Kutryk and NASA astronaut Anil Menon worked together to install a new roll-out solar array on the station while also performing some "get ahead" tasks to prep for the next spacewalk, which is happening today (Nov. 5).

During today's excursion, the same two astronauts will venture out into space, tethered to the space station, to install the eighth and final roll-out solar array. These eight new arrays will boost the station's available power by a total of 30%, according to NASA officials.

Why is it incredible?

When we think of astronauts working in space, we might think of the important science and research they're doing aboard the station. Astronauts work on everything from biomedical research to plant science and physics experiments. But the job also includes work on the space station itself.

Sometimes they have to venture out into the vacuum of space to fix urgent problems. These situations can be tense, and there's a lot of pressure to get things absolutely right.

But even spacewalks that do relatively mundane maintenance work, like the one on Oct. 29, come with pressure. Every minute that astronauts spend outside of the space station, there are countless risk factors floating around. Earth orbit is a very harsh environment, after all, even if it does allow for some pretty amazing selfies.

When Jessica Watkins became commander of her mission to the International Space Station, she didn't just fulfill her duty as an astronaut — she made history.

Watkins is commanding SpaceX's Crew-13 mission, which launched her and three other astronauts to the International Space Station on Oct. 1. As their Crew Dragon capsule lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket that day, Watkins became the first Black woman to command a crewed mission to space. Spaceflight and space science are historically white and male-dominated fields, so this milestone carries incredible significance.

"This is certainly an important milestone, I think both for our agency and for the country," Watkins said in a press briefing ahead of Crew-13's launch.

This is Watkins' second spaceflight. She previously flew on SpaceX's Crew-4 mission in 2022 and has spent more than 200 days in space to date, though that number will keep climbing for a while, as Crew-13 is set to be an approximately six-month mission. A geologist, astronaut, aquanaut and former professional rugby player, Watkins brings an incredible variety of skills to her new role as mission commander. And, in addition to what she's bringing to her colleagues on mission, she's also providing some serious inspiration for those back on Earth.

"Jessica is an inspirational symbol to a lot of people," commercial astronaut and fellow geologist Sian Proctor, who became the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft on SpaceX's private Inspiration4 mission to orbit in September 2021, told Space.com. Sian shared that the two even crossed paths years ago, when their astronaut training aligned.

"It just means so much to so many people when you see a diverse crew, and particularly women, and women of color, in leadership positions," Proctor said. "And it means something for America."

The visibility of Watkins' accomplishments and missions carries significant cultural weight. However, in addition to recognizing her many achievements, "you also should celebrate the fact that she's African American and a role model for her community," Proctor said.

Proctor, who similarly made spaceflight history with her mission, sees Watkins' role in Crew-13 as potentially more than just an exciting moment. Hopefully, she said, it will help lay the foundation for a more diverse future in human spaceflight.

"When they announced Jessica, I was super excited because it shows progress," Proctor said, sharing that she finds incredible importance in the "idea of looking at your crew and recognizing the fact that diversity makes the crew stronger."

While Watkins' historic milestone has been celebrated on social media and across the broader media landscape, NASA did not make a public statement commemorating the historic achievement. However, the agency confirmed its pioneering nature in an email to Space.com.

"NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins launched on her second spaceflight on Oct. 1, 2026, as commander of the agency's SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station, becoming the first Black woman to command a crewed space mission," a NASA spokesperson wrote in the email.

"Watkins was selected as commander of Crew-13 based on her spaceflight experience, leadership, and ability to help the mission accomplish its objectives," the spokesperson added. "As a member of NASA's astronaut corps, she represents the best of America's talent, dedication, and spirit of exploration."

The future of spaceflight

To date, the U.S. and the Soviet Union are the only nations to have launched Black astronauts into space. (The Soviets beat the U.S. to this milestone, launching Cuba's Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez in 1980. NASA's Guion Bluford became the first Black American in space three years later.) But, as Proctor shared, perhaps moments like this could serve to inspire other nations to follow suit.

"We can be a leader in saying, Look, if your country is diverse and has people from all different backgrounds, you should be encouraging them to apply and have a chance to be selected," Proctor said.

And, as a commercial astronaut herself, Proctor added that commercial space can continue to play a vital role in diversifying spaceflight.

"Jared did not even hesitate when he offered me the mission pilot seat for Inspiration4," Proctor said of her own selection as mission pilot by Jared Isaacman, the tech billionaire who funded and commanded the SpaceX mission. He now serves as NASA administrator.

"Commercial space has opened up so much opportunity and access. We are celebrating that because that's another way in which the space industry has diversified so much," Proctor added. "You can look at the history of space exploration and who's had access, and then you look at what commercial's done in the last five years, and it's incredible."

On the topic of the future of space exploration, Proctor expressed confidence that future crewed moon landings with NASA's Artemis program will be diverse.

"NASA is going to send diverse crews to the moon because they've done a good job of selecting diverse individuals with different heritages in their background," she said. NASA's current astronaut corps is roughly 45% women and 25% people of color. However, to-date only 6 Black women (including Watkins) have ever flown to space.

"Do I want to see more? Do I want women of color? Absolutely. They only have two Black women," Proctor said. But with the current diversity in NASA's astronaut corps as well as the continued development of commercial spaceflight, she is optimistic about a diverse future on the moon.

So far, NASA's Artemis program has been making some inroads when it comes to diversity. With Artemis II, we saw four people launch to the moon which included Victor Glover, the first person of color to ever travel beyond low-Earth orbit, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen who became the first woman and first non-American to make the same leap.

Additional pressures

In reaching her own historic milestone as the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft, Proctor understands that a historic moment like this carries not just incredible significance but a fair amount of personal pressure as well.

"If something goes wrong, because of who you are, maybe your gender or your ethnicity or race, you're looked at differently," she said. "When it goes right, you're not necessarily celebrated. But if it goes wrong, then that [adds to] that whole idea of 'not being qualified,'" that can come from prejudice.

"Because of who you are and the community you represent, you become the scapegoat," she added. "So, there's pressure to not have things go wrong and do everything you can to be better than the best."

But whether or not these pressures weigh on Watkins' mind, "we're all celebrating" back on Earth, Proctor said. "We're proud of her."

Two spacewalking astronauts will finish upgrading the International Space Station's power system today (Nov. 5), and you can watch the action live.

NASA astronaut Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk will install the eighth and final International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) today, during a roughly seven-hour spacewalk that's scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. EST (1330 GMT).

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 7 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT).

Today's extravehicular activity (EVA) will be the second in a week for Menon and Kutryk, who installed the station's seventh iROSA during an Oct. 29 spacewalk. That excursion was the 100th U.S. spacewalk from the ISS to date, and the first EVA for a Canadian astronaut since 2019.

Today's spacewalk will wrap up an ambitious ISS power upgrade that has taken more than five years to pull off.

"The installation job will complete the years-long process that began in June 2021 to augment the space station’s power generating capacity from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts," NASA officials wrote about the EVA in a blog post on Tuesday (Nov. 3). That's a boost of about 30%.

Menon and Kutryk are currently sharing the ISS with five other astronauts — NASA's Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov, Anna Kikina and Sergey Teteryatnikov.

Delaney, Kutryk, Teteryatnikov and Watkins arrived at the ISS on Oct. 1, on SpaceX's Crew-13 mission. Dubrov, Kikina and Menon got there in mid-July, aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

On Nov. 4, 2015, the United States Air Force planned to launch an experimental rocket for small satellites from the Pacific Missile Range Facility off Barking Sands, Kauai, Hawaii. The launch didn't according to plan.

For this mission, the Air Force was testing out the Super Strypi rocket. The rocket used a rail to help with the liftoff.

Super Strypi left the ground, but the rocket quickly spun out of control. When it crashed, it destroyed all of the tiny satellites riding aboard the rocket. The cause? Likely a problem with the first stage motor.

The mission lost 13 tiny satellites known as cubesats. Cubesats are a popular option for space missions, because they are small and cheap, and they often operate in swarms. After failing to launch this batch of cubesats, the Super Strypi program never recovered from its failure, and the Air Force never tried launching another one.

Why it mattered

The Super Strypi rocket was a 21st century take on a 1960s rocket. It was designed to be a modern version of the three-stage Strypi sounding rocket used for for reentry vehicle and anti-missile target tests. Its three stages, powered by Aerojet Rocketdyne solid rocket motors, was designed to reach orbit, rather than suborbital trajectories common to most sounding rockets.

The U.S. Air Force hoped Super Strypi would be a new tool for quick-response launches based on national security needs. Altogether, it was designed to launch small payloads of up to 300 kilograms into space for a mere $15 million per mission.

The rocket's primary payload was the ORS-4 satellite, short for Operationally Responsive Space 4, which was built for the Air Force by engineers at the University of Hawaii (who nicknamed it HiakaSat). It was designed to capture Earth imagery and monitor the environment over the course of a year.

The 12 other payloads on Super Strypi included eight cubesats for NASA's Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks mission, and as well as four others for universities that had been added as secondary payloads.

Since the Super Strypi failure, neither the Air Force or Space Force has opted to use the rocket for a new mission. The Space Force has turned instead to commercial companies for fast-turnaround launch support.

In June of this year, the U.S. Space Force teamed up with Rocket Lab to launch the Victus Haze mission with just 17 hours of notice, a new record to demonstrate short-turnaround launch response.

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President Trump issued a declaration yesterday (Nov. 3), proclaiming space open to all humanity for exploration, and the right of American citizens to develop and settle the solar system according to United States laws.

"The American Declaration of Freedom in Space," describes space as the "province of all humans" and asserts that the United States will lead humanity's expansion into the cosmos. The proclamation reiterates the administration's goals with NASA's Artemis program to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and eventually sending astronauts to Mars, but introduces no new funding, programs or policy directives.

"Our Nation will lead the way in the exploration, development, use, and settlement of these new frontiers — forging an interplanetary civilization founded on the enduring and inalienable rights of freedom and individual liberty," the document says.

Trump invoked America's "frontier spirit," highlighting Apollo 11 astronauts as the first people in history to walk on the moon's surface and robotic rovers exploring Mars as examples of U.S. leadership, and emphasized the country's flourishing commercial space sector helping ensure "American space superiority for all eternity."

"The nation that leads in space will shape the future of humanity," the declaration says, and pledges that America will carry the values of faith, freedom and individual liberty into an interplanetary civilization.

The proclamation also highlights the success of NASA's Artemis II mission in April, which carried four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and set a record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. The follow-up to that mission, Artemis III, is scheduled to launch next summer (2027), and will test rendezvous and docking operations between NASA's Orion spacecraft and the program's two commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit.

Artemis IV will be the program's first lunar landing mission, and is targeted for 2028. A December 2025 executive order from the President reaffirmed the goal of meeting that timeline, as well as the deployment of the initial elements for a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.

Trump's declaration yesterday does not establish new NASA programs, allocate additional funding or issue instructions to federal agencies. Its sweeping language, though, does echo some of the principles in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which guarantees freedom of exploration while prohibiting national sovereignty claims on other planets.

NASA's Swift space telescope has reached the end of its long and winding road.

Swift fell uncontrolled to Earth today (Nov. 4), 22 years after it launched but just three months after a private spacecraft was supposed to boost it to a higher, life-extending orbit.

The 3,200-pound (1,450 kilograms) observatory reentered Earth's atmosphere at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT) today over northern Sumatra, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who cited U.S. Space Force data. The fall likely didn't make much of an impact; NASA officials predicted beforehand that most of the minibus-sized Swift would burn up as it fell, and they put the odds of any of the surviving pieces hurting anyone on Earth at just 1 in 2,100.

Several videos circulating on social media appear to show the spacecraft's fiery reentry, though it has yet to be independently verified.

Swift — officially known as the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer — launched to Earth orbit in November 2004 on a two-year mission to study gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful explosions in the universe. "Swift" was not an acronym but rather referred to the spacecraft's observational agility.

"Swift needed to detect and locate gamma-ray bursts, communicate their position to other observatories, and then swing its telescopes around to image the burst locations before their afterglows faded out," S. Bradley Cenko, Swift's principal investigator (PI) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in an Oct. 23 statement. "This typically took Swift about a minute to do."

Swift didn't just observe GRBs. It also studied a variety of other cosmic bodies and phenomena, from faraway supernova explosions and feeding black holes to asteroids and comets in our own solar system.

And it kept doing this long after its warranty expired — for about 20 years after, in fact. The space telescope didn't conduct its final science observation until this past Oct. 20. (Swift underwent a name change during this stretch: In 2018, it was rechristened the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory after its first PI, who died the previous year.)

"Swift delivered an incredible, lasting return on investment for the nation, designed for a two-year primary mission but productive for more than 10 times as long," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in the same Oct. 23 statement.

"In that time, Swift played a major role in advancing our understanding of the changing universe and was part of a revolution in astrophysics that showed how critical rapid-response observations are to the entire community," he added.

Swift was incredibly productive, observing more than 2,000 GRBs and 1,400 supernovas over the course of its long scientific life. But it could have gathered even more data, had a dramatic rescue mission worked out.

In September 2025, NASA awarded the Arizona company Katalyst Space a $30 million contract to design, launch and operate a robotic spacecraft that would meet up with Swift and boost it to a higher orbit, thus extending its operational life.

Swift was falling back to Earth: It had no onboard thrusters to counteract the effect of atmospheric drag, which had been pulling the observatory down ever since it launched. The process was accelerating as Swift got lower, so Katalyst had to work fast. And the company did: It launched its refrigerator-sized, three-armed LINK servicing spacecraft on July 3, targeting an August capture of Swift.

That didn't happen, however. LINK suffered problems with its propulsion system and orientation-maintaining reaction wheels, which nixed the planned meetup. Still, it was a worthwhile effort, according to NASA.

"From the beginning, this was a high-risk, high-reward mission," Domagal-Goldman said in a statement on Sept. 25, the day that LINK itself crashed back to Earth.

"And while we'll be sad to see Swift's mission come to a close, we knew this boost effort would be worthwhile either way — advancing U.S. spacecraft servicing technology, challenging us to meet unprecedented mission timelines, and testing how we operate satellites to extend their time in low Earth orbit," he added.

Swift's crash today wasn't exactly unusual, by the way. At least three large objects — dead satellites or spent rocket bodies — fall back to Earth every day on average, a 2025 report found. And that number is bound to rise in the coming years, as humanity builds out more and more megaconstellations in Earth orbit.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Nov. 5 at 4:45 a.m. EST (0944 GMT) to include social media videos that may show the spacecraft's fiery demise.

The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission in April 2026 caused significant disturbances in Earth's ionosphere that could have triggered temporary, localized errors in GPS positioning, a new study has found.

The study, by a team of researchers from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, analyzed data from high-precision networks of fixed, ground-based GPS receivers, used by U.S. scientific institutions to measure the minuscule motions of Earth's tectonic plates in the lead-up to earthquakes. By measuring how long it takes GPS signals to travel from space to ground stations, the researchers were able to reconstruct how the passage of the Artemis II mission's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket changed the concentrations of free electrons in the ionosphere — the electrically charged layer of Earth's atmosphere at altitudes above 30 miles (50 kilometers).

The measurements found that the ionospheric disturbances resulting from the sheer power of the Artemis II launch were more significant than any caused by other rocket launches to date and up to ten times more intense than those observed following the test launches of SpaceX's Starship, which is twice as powerful as the SLS based on liftoff thrust.

Artemis II saw humans return to the lunar space for the first time in more than fifty years, a mission that NASA hopes will pave the way for lunar landings and eventually the establishment of a sustained human presence on the moon.

During the mission's launch, ground-based GPS stations detected changes in the ionospheric electron density equivalent to positioning errors of several meters. Such inaccuracies could easily throw self-driving cars off track, potentially causing traffic collisions, according to Charles Lin, an earth science professor at National Cheng Kung University and one of the co-authors of the paper.

"A positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes," Lin told Space.com. "It could have a strong impact not only on self-driving cars but also on drone positioning."

GPS receivers determine their position on Earth's surface at any single moment by measuring their distance to four different GPS satellites. When concentrations of free electrons in the upper atmosphere change — for example during a solar storm or after a rocket passage — the signal reaches Earth either faster or more slowly, resulting in inaccurate measurements.

Satellites of the U.S. GPS constellation and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems orbit Earth at an altitude of around 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers), far above the upper edge of the ionosphere, meaning the positioning, navigation and timing signal these satellites transmit must pass through this volatile atmospheric layer to reach Earth.

Severe solar storms can disrupt GPS signals for days by dumping energy into the atmosphere in the form of charged particles from the sun. The impact of rocket launches, triggered by the supersonic flight of the rocket body through the high-altitude air, is much more short-lived. As the rocket soars up, it creates a shock wave, which virtually punches a hole into the ionosphere.

In the aftermath of the Artemis II launch, the researchers observed two such holes — one left behind by the 212-foot-long (65 meters) SSL core stage, and the other caused by two subsequent thruster burns of the rocket's upper stage. In both cases, these holes stretched across the American continent from East to West like giant 3,100-mile (5,000-kilometer) contrails.

Despite the enormous power of the SLS core stage, the disturbance caused by the second-stage burns directly inside the ionosphere was far more prominent.

Those two burns, at altitudes around 115 miles (185 kilometers), took place more than an hour after lift-off and allowed the Orion capsule to break free from Earth's gravity and head for the moon.

"Rocket launches from the ground to space produce that kind of effect, but we have never seen this kind of orbital maneuver in an interplanetary mission," said Lin. "In the future, as we are going to see many more missions going to the moon and to Mars, these space weather effects will become much more significant."

The study was published as a pre-print online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

In May 2026, four Russian military satellites came close to ICEYE-X36, a private synthetic aperture radar satellite widely believed to be providing battlefield intelligence for Ukraine, in an apparently aggressive and risky "grey zone" maneuver that spooked many in the space industry.

Close enough to jam or interfere with the satellite's signal, blind it with a laser, fire a metal dart at it or, simply, force it to maneuver and burn fuel, the satellites' seemingly intimidatory behavior has increased the West's desire to develop defensive technology for satellites. In October 2026, it was reported that one of those same four Russian satellites passed within 500 meters (1,650 feet) of the same ICEYE satellite.

Now, U.K. startup Shield Space is racing to apply the lessons of drone warfare in Ukraine to develop swarms of up to 100 very small, low-cost, attritable drone-like autonomous spacecraft called cubesats. Released by a car-sized carrier in Earth orbit, these microwave-sized spacecraft will act as interceptors to protect Western satellites, and their deployment will mark a next step in the evolution of orbital warfare. Shield Space says that these space drones will use "effectors" like lasers or microwaves to defend Western satellites even if controllers lose contact with them.

"We're talking about deploying 100 cubesats on a protect-and-defend mission for less than £100 million [$134 million US], which is how [much] you would pay for one satellite previously," said Graeme Ritchie, co-founder and CEO of Shield Space.

Launched in 2023, NASA's civilian project Starling demonstrated that a swarm of four small satellites can cooperate and operate autonomously in space on a civilian science mission without relying heavily on real-time commands from ground control. But that seems like a far cry from the adversarial or defensive missions Shield Space and its competitors imagine. It is telling that the leading space powers appear not to have demonstrated swarm combat in space — although they tend to be reluctant to reveal their space warfare capabilities.

In the fourth quarter of 2027, Shield Space plans to take this next step in space warfare's evolution by demonstrating rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) with two very small spacecraft. This effort, named Project Broadsword, will launch on SpaceX's Transporter-21 rideshare mission. It will send up an 8U cubesat and a smaller 3U target craft, which Shield Space plans to maneuver from 100 kilometers (62 miles) apart to within 100 meters (330 feet) of each other and, through four stages of autonomy, from human-in-the-loop to "approximately" fully autonomous. (A cubesat unit, or U, is a cube that measures 10 cm, or about 4 inches, on a side.)

The gaps between a true satellite-defense capability and this demonstration appear to be great, in terms of the technological and practical challenges of squeezing propulsion and power systems, AI compute power, sensors, the lasers the swarm needs to communicate and weapon systems onto small, lightweight maneuvering satellites. But it is a gap that Shield Space believes it can bridge through the purchase of relatively cheap off-the-shelf technology rather than more expensive bespoke designs.

"Yes, it's a problem because of size, weight and power," Ritchie told Space.com. "We've had to totally innovate from scratch some elements of the mission… but we have only got roughly 100 cm by 100 cm [40 by 40 inches], so saving space or having systems that are already completely integrated is the main aim."

"We have commissioned EnduroSat to build us an autonomous 8U cubesat that has chemical propulsion and its own imagery-collecting capability, which we will put our software on," said Dan Molland, co-founder and CTO of Shield Space, "and which we will then use to conduct our RPO.

"The good thing about cubesats is they're very standardized and they're very off the shelf," he added. "There's always some level of adjusting you've got to do, but these cubesats are a lot more plug and play than more conventional platforms, which are usually all custom-built."

Yet to focus on the technical issues may be to miss the point. "It takes an extraordinary amount of data to train the models and algorithms to achieve a fully autonomous mission," said Ritchie, "and the problem [unlike in the Ukraine war] is that data is not readily available.

"We can train AI using synthetic data, but it's just not quite good enough for space. It's incredibly important to gather data from missions like this if we really want autonomous missions in the future."

There is also the complexity of the AI needed in a war-fighting system. "Starling is a really great example," Molland told Space.com. "With Starling, you're essentially just asking a guidance system to make sure you stay within a given range of this or that satellite… But if you are controlling a swarm to deliver [a] military mission, you have a much more complex set of questions."

It also comes with the challenge of ensuring that AI complies with any rules of engagement.

But Ritchie and Molland believe these technical challenges can be overcome, and they have an aggressive schedule of demonstrations planned that they think will prove it.

Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor of astropolitics at Durham University in the U.K. and author of the book "War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics" (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), is more cautious about Shield Space's plans for the evolution of space warfare.

"They remind me of a late Cold War missile-defense scheme called Brilliant Pebbles," he told Space.com. "It was one of the more advanced research and development programs in the Strategic Defense Initiative."

The plan was to defend the U.S. against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by using thousands of small autonomous orbiting interceptors to destroy them by collision.

"With enough investment, a lot is feasible," Bowen said.

"But you're looking at many years of development and testing," he added, "and finding someone to buy the system."

It is clear from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine that the future of warfare includes swarms of low-cost autonomous drones — and Shield Space is already planning an aggressive schedule of missions to prove that this pattern applies to the final frontier as well.

According to Ritchie, the startup hopes to quickly go from the first RPO demonstration to testing two full-sized 16U cubesats. It will then move on to a full carrier of 10 such cubesats, and then to a "super carrier" of 10 carriers, which will be deployed across multiple orbits.

"We then get towards our future vision, which we call space-based carrier strike," said Ritchie. In this scenario, "responsive launch or pre-positioned carriers will give us an ability to protect and defend entire orbits, should you choose."

Editor's note: The original version of this story suggested that Shield Space may be working on "kinetic impact" satellite-defense techniques. The company says it is not doing this, so the story was updated to that effect at 10:45 a.m. ET on Nov. 5.

The three Americans currently living off Earth just made sure their electoral voices were heard.

Anil Menon told us today (Nov. 3) that he and fellow NASA astronauts Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins voted in the U.S. midterm elections from the International Space Station (ISS).

"Yes, you can even vote from space! All three U.S. crew members had the privilege of voting from space station. We filled out an electronic ballot and sent it securely to the election officials," Menon wrote in an X post this morning.

That post included a 29-second video, in which Menon — wearing, like many of us today, an "I voted" sticker — shows us his "voting booth."

It's actually his room on the ISS, Menon explained. "Inside of it is my computer, where I was able to fill out an electronic form and send it to Harris County so I could vote today," he said.

Most NASA astronauts register to vote in Texas' Harris County; it's home to Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency's human spaceflight hub.

Americans have been able to vote from space since 1997, when Texas passed a law allowing this to happen. The first person to take advantage of the legislation was NASA astronaut David Wolf, who cast his ballot from Russia's Mir space station that same year. (The ISS didn't welcome its first crew until November 2000.)

"Just like any other American away from home, astronauts may fill out a Federal Post Card Application to request an absentee ballot," NASA officials wrote in an astronaut-voting explainer.

The process is somewhat involved, however.

"After an astronaut fills out an electronic ballot aboard the orbiting laboratory, the document flows through NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System to a ground antenna at the agency's White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico," they added. "From New Mexico, NASA transfers the ballot to the Mission Control Center at NASA Johnson and then on to the county clerk responsible for casting the ballot. To preserve the vote's integrity, the ballot is encrypted and accessible only by the astronaut and the clerk."

Delaney and Watkins launched to the ISS on Oct. 1 on SpaceX's Crew-13 mission. Menon has been there since mid-July, arriving aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The trio currently share the orbiting lab with four other people — Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and cosmonauts Anna Kikina, Pyotr Dubrov and Sergey Teteryatnikov. Kutryk and Teteryatnikov are members of Crew-13, whereas Dubrov and Kikina shared the Soyuz with Menon.

Europe's Hera planetary defense spacecraft is closing in on the binary asteroid system targeted by NASA's DART deflection test, and can now tell the two rocky bodies apart.

Hera is nearing the end of its voyage to the Didymos asteroid system, having launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in October 2024. The spacecraft snapped the image of Didymos and the smaller Dimorphos on Oct. 18 from a distance of 795 miles (1280 kilometers) from the pair, which are currently about 122 million miles (197 million km) from Earth.

"With this image, the smaller Dimorphos asteroid becomes visible for the first time," Michael Kueppers, Hera project scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), said in a statement. "Before this acquisition, the spacecraft was still resolving the Didymos system as a single dot. But now, even though Dimorphos is made up of only around one pixel in this initial image, it is clearly well separated from its parent body."

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) smashed into Dimorphos in September 2022, changing the asteroid's orbit in a pioneering planetary defense demonstration. Hera's job is to survey the damage and refine our understanding of the impact, as well as the asteroids themselves.

Hera performed braking maneuvers earlier in October to slow its approach and put it on course to rendezvous with the binary system. The spacecraft is designed to make follow-up observations of the asteroids using 12 payloads, providing new insights that will prove valuable for planetary defense efforts. The mission also carries a pair of cubesats for a closer look and eventual landing on the 495-foot-wide (151 meters) Dimorphos.

For now, Hera is continuing its approach and preparing for arrival, with a big reveal expected to occur later this month.

"Our views will grow much sharper as Hera comes closer," said ESA's mission manager Ian Carnelli. "We will unveil the first detailed images of Dimorphos — the first object in the solar system to have had its orbit measurably shifted by human action — on 25 November."

A tiny robot cube is zipping around the International Space Station, trying to help astronauts with the endless challenging tasks onboard.

What is it?

Reminiscent of Rocky rolling around the lab helping out Dr. Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary, the Astrobee robot is a helpful assistant for astronauts aboard the space station.

A metal cube about the size of a toaster, the Astrobees are free-flying robotic assistants that NASA developed to help out astronauts. The first two Astrobee robots (named Bumble and Honey) were sent to the station in 2019. The third Astrobee robot, named Queen, joined later that year, and 7 years later, the program is still going strong.

So what can a free-floating cube help with? The robots are designed to assist the astronauts onboard with testing new technologies in microgravity and helping mission team members back on Earth to better observe inside the station. The little robot cubes can even help astronauts with everyday chores in space.

In this image, snapped by NASA astronaut and Crew-13 commander Jessica Watkins, we can see one of the Astrobee robots helping out in the station's Kibo laboratory.

Why is it incredible?

The idea of a robot assistant helping out with chores and technology development aboard an orbiting space laboratory sounds positively science fiction.

While Astrobee is certainly not the first robot in space or aboard the space station, its compact shape and ability to fly autonomously gives it a unique quality. It really looks like a companion aboard the space station.

While the robotic space helpers of today might be cute little cubes, the success of the Astrobee program begs the question of how robots in space might continue to evolve. Will astronauts on the moon have robotic companions autonomously exploring and helping out? What will they look like?

On Nov. 3, 1957, a Soviet space dog named Laika became the first animal to orbit Earth. Laika was a 3-year-old stray husky-spitz mix from the streets of Moscow, and she was recruited by the Soviet space program for her small size and calm temperament.

Unfortunately for Laika, this mission was a one-way trip. The Soviets didn't design a way to bring her back down to Earth. With only 7 days worth of oxygen and a little bit of food on board, Laika launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with a Russian Sputnik rocket. This was the same kind of rocket used to launch the first Sputnik satellite.

Laika was alive when she reached orbit, but she died shortly afterward because the spacecraft's heat shield had broken off. Laika overheated before she had the chance to die of starvation of oxygen deprivation.

Why it mattered

Laika has remained one of space history's most beloved and tragic figures. People around the world have dogs as pets who they love as members of their own families. And even nearly 70 years after this flight, it is so heartbreaking to think of Laika on that frightening journey from which she never returned.

Laika was one of many different animals that were used in early spaceflight testing. Both the U.S. and Russia launched a number of primates on flights testing early flight technology. Sadly, like Laika, many of these brave creatures did not make it back.

Unbelievably, though, some did survive the journey. For example, the chimpanzee named Ham and nicknamed the "astrochimp" survived a 1961 test flight to space. Though, the team behind that flight was so unsure of how it would go that Ham didn't get his name until after it was found that he'd survived his return.

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NASA's Artemis IV moon mission will be a complicated affair — especially if SpaceX's Starship ends up being the lunar lander.

For all of the changing components of the Artemis program over the past several years, one of its most persistent may be the question of how many refueling flights Starship will need to land astronauts on the moon.

By summer 2021, it was common knowledge that Starship would require multiple launches to pull off an Artemis moon landing. A Government Accountability Office audit at the time, for example, estimated that it could take up to 16.

Earlier this month, a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said the refueling number could be as high as 22. But that estimate was quickly refuted by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, who posted on his social media platform, X, that it would actually be closer to six or eight.

Perhaps an even bigger head scratcher, though, is how the refueling process will be carried out. Where (and when) will Starship's upper stage gas up when it's off planet? NASA released a graphic during a recent Artemis update that outlined an order of operations for the spacecraft on Artemis IV, which will be the program's first crewed lunar landing.

The mission will launch a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the four Artemis IV astronauts aboard NASA's Orion capsule to high Earth orbit, where they will rendezvous and dock with the Starship lunar lander.

Using Starship's engines, the two spacecraft will burn for the moon, and separate upon their arrival in low lunar orbit. Two astronauts will remain aboard Orion, while the other two will head down to the lunar surface in Starship.

After a little run through the regolith and a celebration of America's triumphant return to the moon, the duo will board Starship again to launch back to lunar orbit and dock with Orion before beginning the trip back to Earth.

All that seems well and good for a mission to the moon, and even has some resemblances with missions from NASA's Apollo days. What doesn't seem as immediately obvious when mapping out the Artemis IV mission outline, though, are the steps that Starship will be taking during its refueling process before the astronauts ever make it to space.

Orion will rendezvous with Starship in high Earth orbit — but that's not where the lander will launch initially. According to NASA's Artemis IV outline, SpaceX will first launch a depot ship to low Earth orbit (LEO), which will serve as the repository for all the fuel the Starship lander will eventually need.

The graphic shows a tanker Starship docked with the depot with "(multiple)" written next to it, so we don't know how many refueling flights will be needed for this initial depot fill. Once that's done, SpaceX will launch the Starship lunar lander to join the depot in LEO for its first pit stop.

Then, and this is where some of the head scratching begins, Starship will undock from the depot and raise its altitude to what NASA has labeled the "final tanking orbit," or FTO.

At some point after the Starship lander departs LEO, SpaceX will launch another round of "(multiple)" tanker ships to fill the depot with even more propellant. It will apparently then send the depot to meet the lander for another refill in FTO, where, as the name suggests, the two will dock for the pair's final fuel transfer.

After bidding the depot a second farewell, Starship will ascend to high Earth orbit to meet Orion.

NASA's graphic shows SLS launching Orion before Starship gets the last of its fuel, and the agency's website explainer for Artemis IV says the unusually choreographed order of operations for the mission does serve a purpose.

However many fuel boosts Starship ends up needing to get from LEO to the surface of the moon, its staggered orbital staging will apparently create some flexibility around when SLS can launch the Artemis IV astronauts to begin their mission.

And while Starship's orbital dance seems unnecessarily complicated, NASA says the new approach will actually reduce the amount of fuel SpaceX needs for the mission.

That's partly because Starship will take Orion directly to low lunar orbit, instead of the much higher orbit envisioned in previous mission plans.

But keep in mind: None of this is set in stone. If SpaceX can't demonstrate that its orbital refueling strategy works, or if it can't pull off an uncrewed lunar landing mission by the end of next year, NASA could still select Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander for Artemis IV — assuming Blue Moon is able to check its required boxes in time. Regardless of which company's lander delivers the first Artemis astronauts to the moon's surface, exactly how the pieces of those missions will come together should become clearer as the launch date gets closer. So, while SpaceX's refueling remains an open one for the time being, it's one of many for which we'll soon have an answer.

On Nov. 2, 2000, the International Space Station welcomed its first long-term residents: NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. The mission was called Expedition 1.

Before this expedition, NASA had launched five, one-week-long Space Shuttle missions to help build the space station and bring up supplies. But this time, the crew would be staying for four and a half months, and they weren't taking the shuttle. Instead, they took a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and this was the first Soyuz to ever dock at the space station.

During their stay at the space station, they unpacked supplies and installed new equipment, including the first solar arrays. They left on the space shuttle Discovery, which brought up the Expedition 2 crew that would take their place.

Why it mattered

As of today, there has been a continuous astronaut presence in space aboard the International Space Station for 26 years. For all of these years, not a day has gone by without someone living in space, orbiting our planet from aboard the space station.

While the ISS was not the first space station, it has been the longest-running space statin by far. This first crew were pioneers, showing how humans could actually live and work aboard this station. This exploratory mission proved that the station could successfully support astronaut crews.

Since this mission 26 years ago, there have been literally hundreds of astronauts from around the world who have flown to and lived aboard the ISS. While NASA has stated that the station might be decommissioned in the coming years, these accomplishments will remain forever in spaceflight history.

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SpaceX is building and operating two satellite networks at the moment, Starlink and Starshield. What’s the difference between the two, and who uses them?

For more than a week in October 2026, Ukrainian drone operators found their high-speed satellite links shut off. Officials in Kyiv said that terminals for SpaceX’s Starshield network stopped working at speeds of above 160 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour) from Oct. 14, hampering efforts to conduct defensive operations and intercept Russian drones. Full connectivity was restored on Oct. 24, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The arguments over who did what continue, but the affair highlighted how little is publicly understood about Starshield — what it is, how it relates to Starlink, and how it is operated.

What is Starlink?

Starlink is SpaceX’s commercial, mass-market satellite internet service. The company says it now has more than 11,000 Starlink broadband and mobile satellites in orbit, operating approximately 342 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth. This follows years of deployment using the company's Falcon 9 rocket..

The network serves consumers, enterprises and government customers across more than 160 countries. It is owned and operated by SpaceX. Anyone from a rural household to an airline can buy a terminal and a service plan.

Governments are also customers, with public agencies using Starlink for a range of purposes including connectivity, disaster response and national security, notably in the case of Ukraine in the wake of the invasion by Russia, which began in February 2022 and is ongoing.

What is Starshield?

Starshield is SpaceX’s network for serving national security customers. The company announced the program in December 2022, stating it would apply Starlink technology and SpaceX's launch capability to government needs, initially in three areas: Earth observation, communications and hosted payloads.

"They are using the same satellite buses," says Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor of astropolitics at Durham University in the U.K. “They look the same, but they have a lot more kit on them that allows them to do more things. They provide similar broadband internet, but with more secure hardware and software and hardened systems.”

The company says it has won multi-billion-dollar, multiyear contracts from the U.S. military in 2026 for Starshield-related services.

Some Starshield satellites may also carry sensors for intelligence and surveillance. But much about Starshield is secretive, with its finances not revealed and launches often classified.

Starshield makeup

Starshield is made up of a range of different assets, including spy satellites, military data satellites, and secure communications for ground users.

The spy satellites are sent into orbit in launches for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), for a "proliferated architecture" of spy satellites, including electro-optical, radar and relay spacecraft. The NRO does not use the Starshield name, but said earlier this year that it had launched more than 200 satellites in recent years, many of which are for its proliferated architecture.

Then there is the Space Data Network Backbone. The U.S. Space Force awarded SpaceX a $2.29 billion fixed-price contract to build the network, previously known as MILNET, using Starshield satellites. It is meant to move data quickly between missile-warning sensors and interceptors as part of the Trump administration's Golden Dome missile defense plan. A prototype is due by the end of 2027. A Space Force official has described MILNET as government-owned and operated by SpaceX as a contractor, under Space Force oversight.

Starshield provides encrypted connectivity for military users through terminals. These can be dedicated Starshield terminals, or Starlink terminals for Starshield services.

Crucially, the networks overlap. "Those Starshield satellites are physically separate from Starlink satellites, but the Starshield satellites can use the Starlink network if they need to," Bowen said. That interoperability is available to U.S. national security users, he added, "but not if you're a commercial user of Starlink."

Use restrictions differ, too. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that Starlink's terms of service bar its use for offensive drone strikes, while decisions about Starshield use rest with the U.S. government.

Who controls Starshield is a question that entered the public consciousness in the wake of the Ukraine Starshield speed limit affair. The U.S. government is the customer, and also in some cases the owner, but SpaceX builds the satellites, operates the underlying Starlink network on which some Starshield services run and, in some arrangements, operates the Starshield satellites themselves. How this command is divided between the government and SpaceX is unclear.

Bowen compared it to the U.K.’s Skynet military satellite system, in which contractor Babcock operates the satellites. "The actual button punching is done by the contractors, but the military and government are in the room and are calling the shots,” he said.

That question matters, because it determines whether SpaceX can act on its own or only with government oversight and approval.

What’s next?

Starshield appears set to become more central to U.S. military space. The Space Data Network Backbone prototype is expected next year, while NRO launches will continue, according to contracts. With SpaceX now a public company, quarterly reports could provide more insight into the system. For now, however, much remains classified.

Rocket Lab launched its 99th mission to date today (Nov. 2), sending a private Japanese Earth-observing satellite toward orbit.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site today at 11:41 a.m. EST (1641 GMT; 5:41 a.m. on Nov. 3 local New Zealand time).

The mission, which Rocket Lab calls "The Sea God Surveys," is carrying an Earth-observing radar satellite to low Earth orbit (LEO) for the Japanese company iQPS. All went according to plan: The spacecraft was deployed at an altitude of 357 miles (575 kilometers), Rocket Lab announced about 56 minutes after launch.

"The Sea God Surveys" was Rocket Lab's 10th launch to date for iQPS, which is assembling a constellation of three dozen synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in LEO.

SAR satellites offer advantages over those that view our planet in optical wavelengths. They can peer through cloud cover, for example, and study our planet at night as well as during the day.

Today's launch was the 99th overall for Rocket Lab and the 90th for the two-stage, 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to space. The workhorse vehicle has now flown 17 times this year.

Rocket Lab's other nine launches to date have been conducted by HASTE, a suborbital version of Electron that allows customers to test their tech in the hypersonic flight environment. HASTE (short for "Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron") debuted in June 2023 and generally flies classified payloads.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:55 a.m. ET on Nov. 2 with news of successful launch, then again at 1 p.m. EST with news of successful satellite deployment.

On Nov. 1, 1962, the Soviet Union launched the Mars 1 spacecraft on a mission to fly by the Red Planet.

While it did end up flying by Mars, the mission was not exactly a success. After it separated from the rocket, it deployed its solar panels and started cruising toward Mars.

When mission controllers were checking out the telemetry it transmitted back to Earth, they found out that Mars 1 had sprung a leak in one of the gas valves that controls the spacecraft's orientation. And without a working orientation system, Mars 1 would have a hard time pointing its antennas in the right direction. It lost contact with Earth when it was about halfway to Mars.

Why it mattered

Ever since Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope to the red-tinted star and identified as a planet, Mars has captivated scientists' interests as to its nature. So it was of no surprise that as soon as we gained the ability to send missions into space, that the focus turned to the "fourth rock from the Sun."

As it turned out, though, reaching Mars, let alone entering its orbit or landing on its surface,, was and continues to be difficult.

Mars 1, despite its name, was actually the Soviet Union's fourth attempt at sending a probe to the planet. The first three ended in launch failures. Similar problems faced the United States, as well, but it was NASA's Mariner IV mission that became the first to successfully fly by Mars two years later.

Still, as humanity continues to push forward to the day people land on, explore and live on Mars, the 1962 Soviet mission stands as the first to get close to revealing the first details about the planet.

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Update for 2:45 p.m. ET on Nov. 4: NASA's Swift space telescope fell to Earth today at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT) over Indonesia. Read our story here.

NASA's Swift space telescope is expected to crash back to Earth in the next few days.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will reenter Earth's atmosphere in an uncontrolled fashion, after a robotic rescue mission failed to boost the scope to a higher orbit.

Swift launched to Earth orbit back in November 2004. Over the next two decades, it studied gamma-ray bursts — the most powerful explosions in the universe — and other cosmic objects and events using a trio of telescopes: a Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), an X-Ray Telescope (XRT), and its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT).

On Oct. 20, NASA reported that Swift's orbit had decayed to 171 miles (275 kilometers) above Earth and that the roughly 3,300-pound (1,500-kilogram) observatory was no longer able to compensate for the effects of the increased drag. It entered safe mode, followed by Swift's operations team at Pennsylvania State University sending a command to the spacecraft that effectively ended its operations ahead of its destructive and fiery nose-dive.

It's unclear at the moment exactly when and where Swift will plunge to Earth. But researchers definitely have their eyes peeled.

A surge of reentries

In physics fashion, for the most part, what goes up must come down — with more space hardware to follow.

Thanks to the growing surge in low Earth orbit constellations and technology refresh cycles, there are 10 times more objects reentering per year than there were just five years ago, said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that keeps a watchful eye on what's going on above our planet.

"It is unfortunate that Swift was not 'reorbited,' but from a reentry hazard perspective it is a small portion of the stuff coming back in. The rub on this, of course, is that, while many people bemoan the reentry of more objects, I am much more upset about the rapid rate of abandoning massive objects above 400 miles [644 km]," McKnight told Space.com.

Swift will likely disintegrate sufficiently upon reentry to not pose a ground casualty hazard, McKnight said. However, the internal workings of the observatory's X-ray and optical telescope might survive, McKnight said.

Where in the world?

Similar in view is Dean Sladen, a quality manager and aerospace engineer at the U.K. precision-components supplier Accu Components.

"Once Swift falls to about 120 kilometers [75 miles], the end usually comes within a few minutes. The air in front of it heats up so much that the satellite will start to glow. Solar panels and antennas are typically the first to tear off, and at around 78 kilometers [48 miles], roughly eight times the height of a passing airliner, the main body breaks apart. Most of it will melt and vaporize," said Sladen.

While it isn't yet known exactly where any surviving pieces will land, Sladen noted that Swift's orbit only passes over a band within about 21 degrees of the equator.

"That band is mostly ocean, though it also crosses populated parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Latin America," he said.

Surviving leftovers

As for which parts are most likely to survive and reach ocean or ground, Sladen pointed out that most of Swift's body is aluminum, wiring and electronics, which melt away early in the reentry process. What reaches Earth is usually small, dense and heat-resistant, such as titanium, steel and glass.

"The most likely survivors are its six heavy reaction wheels, the spinning flywheels it used to aim itself, along with tougher telescope parts such as lenses and mirrors. Its mask of around 52,000 tiny lead tiles will almost certainly melt. Only a handful of small, scorched fragments are expected to make it down — nothing recognizable as a telescope," Sladen said.

Sladen said that, at the current time, it appears that no detailed risk assessment has been published for Swift's fall.

"However, this does not mean NASA has not done the work," said Sladen.

"NASA's own orbital debris requirements state that the risk of human casualty from surviving debris shall not exceed one in 10,000, so it is highly likely this work has been completed but not published," he told Space.com. "Personally, I believe it should be published, as NASA has done with previous satellites. The risk is almost certainly very small, but it would give people a clear, factual picture rather than guesswork."

Design for demise

Sladen added that there's far more focus on how a satellite's life ends these days than there was in the past.

"Many now carry enough propulsion to steer themselves into a remote stretch of ocean, or are built from materials designed to burn up completely, an approach called 'design for demise.' NASA and the European Space Agency limit the chance of anyone being hurt by a reentry to one in 10,000, and if a satellite can't meet that, it's expected to come down in a controlled way," said Sladen.

So, should people be worried about having a nasty run-in with Swift leftovers?

Sladen doesn't think so. NASA has said that harm to anyone on the ground is unlikely, and LeoLabs also describes the risk as very small. Most of the spacecraft will burn up, and any surviving pieces will most likely fall into the sea, he said.

"The real concern is the long-term trend. With more satellites being launched than ever, the number of uncontrolled reentries is growing, which is why designing satellites to come down safely matters more and more," Sladen concluded.

On October 31, 2015, an asteroid shaped like a human skull flew by Earth. It arrived with excellent timing on Halloween, which made the already-creepy asteroid even creepier.

During its closest approach, the creepy asteroid was about 300,000 miles from Earth, or 1.3 times the average distance between Earth and the moon. So, it didn't pose a threat to our planet. It was discovered by astronomers at Hawaii's Pan-STARRS observatory only three weeks before the flyby, and it was given the official designation "2015 TB145." But no one knew what it looked like until the day before Halloween, when the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico captured the first radar images.

NASA called the asteroid the "Great Pumpkin," while others called it the "Halloween Asteroid."

Why it mattered

Be afraid, be very afraid... Okay, not really, but there is reason to be concerned about near-Earth objects and the time in which they are detected.

"According to the catalog of near-Earth objects (NEOs) kept by the Minor Planet Center, this is the closest currently known approach by an object this large until asteroid 1999 AN10, at about 2,600 feet (800 meters) in size, approaches at about 1 lunar distance (238,000 miles from Earth) in August 2027," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported in 2015.

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, sometimes called “Spaceguard,” works to catalog these type of objects and predicts some of their paths if they could be potentially threats to our planet. While there are no known credible impact threats to date, it doesn't mean the "Great Pumpkin," or rather a great impactor, isn't real.

As for 2015 TB145, it did return to Earth's vicinity in 2018, but at a much more distant pass of about 24 million miles (38 million kilometers), "or about a quarter the distance between Earth and the sun," according to JPL.

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SpaceX celebrated Halloween with an early-morning launch from California.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Oct. 31) at 12:04 a.m. EDT (0404 GMT; 9:04 p.m. on Oct. 30 local time), sending 27 of the company's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned, touching down about 8.5 minutes after launch on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

It was the 18th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1093. The record for a SpaceX first stage is 37, set this past August by the booster B1067.

The Falcon 9's upper stage did its job as well today, deploying the 27 Starlink satellites into LEO about 62 minutes after launch. They're joining more than 11,000 spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation, which is by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

Today's launch was the 118th Falcon 9 flight of 2026 so far. More than 70% of these missions have been devoted to building out the Starlink network.

SpaceX has also launched its Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets three times apiece this year. Falcon Heavy is an operational vehicle, but Starship remains in the test-flight phase. The company is currently gearing up for another Starship launch, which is expected to take place sometime in November.

Our time on our "space mission" underwater was coming to an end, and I felt like what I imagine an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) must feel before returning to Earth. On one hand, you are excited to return to your home and loved ones, as well as to fresh food and normal hygiene. On the other, you know you will miss your crew and the incredible experience of being in space.

While my SEA STAR crew and I had not left Earth during our mission, we were separated from the surface of our home planet for five days. All we saw was a green alien water world surrounding us. We did this to live and work like astronauts on the ISS. Instead of dealing with the challenges of space that astronauts face, we problem-solved sometimes equally difficult issues that divers have to manage when performing research in sea water.

Our "wet ISS" was the Jules' Undersea Lab, which is located near Key Largo, Florida, at 22 feet (7 meters) underwater. By the end of our mission, we had all officially become aquanauts. An aquanaut is an undersea explorer who remains underwater for more than 24 hours, without returning to the surface, in a state known as saturation.

In this sense, saturation refers to the physiological condition achieved by a person who breathes underwater long enough for the body's tissues to absorb the maximum possible amount of inert gas (like nitrogen), for a specific depth and pressure. The term aquanaut derives from the Latin word "aqua" (water) and the Greek "nautes" (sailor).

There were a lot of things I wasn't going to miss about being an aquanaut. They included the constant loud noises our life support systems made to keep us alive underwater, as well as bathroom plumbing issues and some health concerns linked to living under pressure. We also had to be very careful when performing our "spacewalks" (scuba dives), due to the low visibility of the environment around us.

Nonetheless, I experienced a sort of "underview effect" during this mission. Most astronauts report experiencing an "overview effect" after seeing our whole planet from space, which usually makes them value our unique planet even more. I felt a similar thing when I saw the sun's rays come through the water. I couldn't reach them, but I enjoyed them from afar. My everyday life felt so close, yet so far away. It gave me both a feeling of longing and more determination to take even more care of our home world than before.

I'm grateful that we were able to perform all of the different scientific projects we planned for our mission. As the Commander of the crew, I usually have my work cut out for me managing the crew and overseeing their research projects, as had been the case for most of the 40 simulated space missions that I led previously. Fortunately, this time my crew was made up of experienced analog astronauts and divers, so the mission was mostly smooth sailing.

The research we chose for this mission was relevant for long-duration space missions. Since we can only send a small number of astronauts to the ISS with a limited number of research activities to perform, underwater stations provide us with a valuable way to conduct analog, or simulated, space missions instead. We also performed some environmental conservation work using a type of underwater vacuum device to help protect the nature around the Jules' Undersea Lab.

My scientific project was focused on studying whether our cognitive abilities and reaction times changed under pressure. This study is part of my collaboration with the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ostrava and City Hospital Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The whole crew definitely felt like their response times to these tests were slower during the mission than before it.

We were also interested in seeing how microgreens seeds were affected by the changes in pressure. Our Health & Safety Officer, Dr. Brandy Nunez, grew some of our kale and super salad mix before we started our mission, while other seeds started their growth journey underwater. All seeds were transferred to our underwater station using two varied pressure settings (gradual and sudden pressure release during their descent). After we harvested them, we could see that the latter types of seeds did indeed experience some barotrauma (damage caused by the sudden increase in air pressure).

Executive Officer Paul Bakken's work was related to managing the internal pressure of logistical transfer containers when they are exposed to significant environmental changes in pressure. The fourth crewmember, Mission Specialist Jenn Pint, worked with Interstellar Performance Labs to develop a taxonomy for analyzing environmental and crew interaction factors during simulated space missions.

On top of these projects, we also performed neutral buoyancy experiments during our underwater spacewalks, as well as the testing of environmental sensors developed by high school and university students in Slovakia. The sensors provided important supplemental information to the cognitive study about our simulated space habitat's living conditions.

Just like astronauts on the ISS, we dedicated some of our time to outreach and educational work, too. In our case, we called Cosmic Region, a simulated space station in Slovakia, and gave the team there a tour of our underwater habitat. My crewmembers kindly went into the water at that time and performed a spacewalk to show what our work during the mission was like.

As I put on my "spacesuit" (scuba diving gear) one last time, I breathed the stuffy undersea air once more and then dove out to return to "Earth." My crewmembers and I then took a long detour around the lagoon around us to help our bodies adjust to lower pressures. Even though we were only 22 feet underwater, there was still a small risk of decompression-related problems that aquanauts can face after living under saturation for some time. The final step was to breach the surface at long last. That's when we all enjoyed breathing fresh air again and feeling the sun on our faces, though the temperature in Florida made us quickly hide away from it again 😉.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

India bolstered its homegrown satellite-navigation system today (Oct. 30).

A GSLV Mark II rocket launched the nation's NVS-03 satellite from Satish Dhawan Space Centre today at 2:21 p.m. EDT (1821 GMT and 11:51 p.m. India Standard Time).

Everything went well: The rocket deployed NVS-03 into geostationary transfer orbit as planned, officials with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on X about 30 minutes after liftoff.

NVS-03 is the third next-gen satellite that India has launched for the Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), its version of the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS).

NavIC operates on a smaller scale than its American counterpart, however. It's "a regional navigation satellite system designed to provide accurate Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) service to users in India as well as the region extending about 1,500 km [930 miles] beyond the Indian landmass, which is its primary service area," ISRO officials wrote in the NVS-03 launch brochure.

The Indian constellation currently consists of three fully functioning satellites, and it requires four to provide PNT services. So today's launch was a big deal — and a lot of eyes will be watching NVS-03's commissioning and checkout phase.

Today's launch was the 14th to date for the GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) Mark II, a three-stage rocket that stands 170 feet (52 meters) tall. Twelve of those 14 liftoffs have been successful.

The GSLV Mark II debuted in 2010, the same year its predecessor retired. That previous launchers, the Mark I, flew a total of six times, with two failures.

NVS-03 was the fourth Indian launch of 2026 and the third operated by ISRO. The fourth was mounted by Skyroot Aerospace, which in July became the first Indian company ever to successfully reach orbit.

In the winter of 1946, two men from very different walks of life walked into California's Mojave Desert together, where one of them became convinced an extraordinary experiment they had been conducting had finally succeeded.

One of the men was pioneering rocket scientist Jack Parsons, a self-taught chemist who helped establish what would become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and whose innovations in rocket propulsion would help lay the groundwork for the Space Race that would erupt in the years that followed. His unlikely companion was none other than L. Ron Hubbard, then a science fiction writer who had yet to compose the writings that would form the underpinnings of the Church of Scientology that he later established.

Despite Parsons' work with rockets and his companion Hubbard's fictional writings about them, their work together in the early months of 1946 had nothing to do with rocket propulsion, spacecraft, or other technological innovations that would eventually carry humans to space. Instead, Parsons and Hubbard were engaged in an elaborate series of occult ceremonies at the time, whereby they intended to summon an elemental feminine goddess known as "Babalon" (not to be confused with Babylon) to help them bring an otherworldly entity into physical existence.

Their efforts, known today as the "Babalon Working," represent one of the most unusual affairs in American history, with tangential connections to the history of space exploration.

Given its strangeness, the episode has garnered attention from several scholars and historians over the decades, who have sought to understand a series of events at the intersection of science and the occult involving one of the most unconventional innovators behind modern rocket propulsion.

Rockets and magic

Parsons, born in 1914, would become a key figure in the early development of American rocket technologies by the 1930s and 1940s in California, ultimately helping establish what would become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His contributions included the historic experiments at Pasadena's Arroyo Seco on Halloween Day in 1936, which NASA now recognizes as the foundational experiments that launched JPL.

Very much in contrast with his scientific aptitudes, Parsons also cultivated an interest in ceremonial magic during this period. By the early 1940s, he had immersed himself within the California chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the organization associated with the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley and his religious philosophy known as Thelema. In 1943, Parsons became the new leader of the organization's Agape Lodge, which subsequently began operating out of his Pasadena residence on South Orange Grove Avenue.

Parsons' occult interests became particularly focused on the evocation of supernatural entities during this period, which the young rocket scientist seemed to genuinely believe could be manifested in the physical world through ritual practices. Ultimately, this led him to undertake an ambitious — and utterly bizarre — series of ceremonies aimed at conjuring what was supposedly one of Thelema's most powerful supernatural entities.

The Babalon Working

Parsons first became acquainted with L. Ron Hubbard in the summer of 1945, and shortly after meeting, Hubbard became a resident of the scientist's Pasadena home.

While Hubbard had no formal training in the occult arts, Parsons felt he demonstrated the kinds of aptitudes that would make him a promising partner for a serious ceremonial magic undertaking. Thus, in the first days of January 1946, the pair embarked on a series of rituals, which Parsons documented in a manuscript that later became known as The Book of Babalon.

"In the introduction to this text [Parsons] explained that the underlying philosophy for the Babalon Working is that the present age is under the influence of a violent force," noted University of Gothenburg scholar Henrik Bogdan in a 2016 article published in the journal Numen. "The invocation of Babalon was thus, according to Parsons, an attempt to prevent the world from being destroyed."

Specifically, Parsons believed the force of Babalon could be manifested in a specific woman. "In this sense, the Babalon Working was not only an exercise in ritual magic, but a deliberate attempt to bring a divine feminine force into human form," Bogdan notes. With this goal in mind, during the first two weeks of January 1946, the pair worked to invoke this divine feminine figure, associated with liberation and spiritual transformation according to Crowley's Thelemic system.

High strangeness in the Mojave Desert

On January 18, 1946, Parsons and Hubbard traveled into the Mojave Desert, where, according to Parsons' later writings, a change in atmosphere involving their ritual work suddenly became apparent. Now believing their operation had been a success, Parsons declared their work completed, and the two returned to Pasadena.

Soon afterward, Parsons reported to Hubbard that his elemental mistress had seemingly manifested with the sudden appearance at his home of a blue-eyed, red-haired artist named Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron. A former member of the U.S. Navy's WAVES program, Cameron had been invited to Parsons' residence by a colleague who, like Hubbard, was also lodging there at the time. Upon seeing her, Parsons became convinced this was the elemental lover he and Hubbard had worked to conjure, thereby confirming that the Babalon Working had produced its intended result.

Soon, Parsons and Cameron began a relationship, and borrowing ideas from Crowley's 1929 novel Moonchild, Parsons now believed that his romance with Cameron could facilitate the incarnation of a supernatural force through the literal conception of a child using ritual sex magic. The result, Parsons believed, could help to bring about a transformative new dawn in humanity's spiritual development.

This phase of the Babalon Working mainly involved magic rituals and Enochian incantations performed by Parsons and Cameron, with Hubbard present and assisting (in addition to having proposed Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" as an eerie sonic backdrop for the occasion). For Parsons, the ultimate goal had been to conceive a "magical child" that would become the newborn Thelemic messiah.

Aftermath

Following completion of the rituals in late February 1946, Cameron left on a trip to New York, and Parsons returned to the Mojave Desert where he completed a short treatise entitled Liber 49, believing it to be a "channeled" fourth and final portion of The Book of the Law, Crowley's foundational Thelemic text.

Upon returning from New York, Cameron even claimed to have observed an unusual aerial object—something akin to what later became known as "flying saucers" in the summer of the following year—which she believed to represent the "war engine" referenced in Crowley's work.

Crowley, however, was considerably less enthusiastic about all this. Upon learning what Parsons, Hubbard, and Cameron had been involved with, the famed British occultist confided to a colleague in an April 1946 correspondence that "Apparently he [Parsons] or Ron or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."

Ultimately, a growing divide between Crowley and Parsons would cost the rocket scientist his leadership of the Agape Lodge, prompting his departure from Crowley's OTO before the end of 1946. His relationship with Hubbard similarly dissolved due to Parsons' worsening financial situation. Nevertheless, Parsons soldiered on, marrying Cameron in October 1946 and continuing his efforts to usher in a new spiritual age.

On June 17, 1952, Parsons' unusual life ended prematurely when an explosion occurred in his home laboratory, resulting in fatal injuries. He was only 37 years old. Questions still surround the circumstances of his death; while it was ruled an accident, there have been allegations that it was suicide or even a murder.

The strange legacy of Jack Parsons

During his short life, Parsons still managed to make significant contributions to the science of rocket propulsion, securing a place in the history of American space exploration — albeit one that is often overshadowed by the interest historians and scholars have taken in his occult activities.

Nonetheless, Parsons remains a key figure responsible for helping lay the early foundations for what would become America's space program. Although decades before NASA would begin sending its spacecraft in pursuit of answers to cosmic mysteries, one of its early technological pioneers had been seeking answers to such cosmic questions in a very different way: by exploring the boundary between our physical world and the supernatural realms beyond.

Bibliography

Anthony Testa, The Key of the Abyss: Jack Parsons, the Babalon Working and the Black Pilgrimage Decoded (2006), p. 128.

"Babalon Working." Occult Wiki. Accessed Oct. 29, 2026.

Bogdan, Henrik. "The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, John Whiteside Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic." Numen, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2016, pp. 12–32.

Carter, John. Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. New edition. Feral House, 2004.

Josephson Storm, Jason Ānanda. "Sex, Magic, & Rockets or the Implications of the Babalon Working for Theories of Belief and Rationality." Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Vol. 37, 2025, pp. 323–335.

Riggins, Marleigh. "Shocktober: Babalon Working." LAist, Oct. 26, 2004.

On October 30, 1964, NASA's Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, or LLRV, took to the skies for the first time.

The LLRV was a bizarre, four-legged flying contraption commonly known as the "Flying Bedstead." NASA used it to simulate moon landings and liftoffs on Earth to prepare for Apollo 11, the first crewed lunar landing.

The first person to give it a whirl was the X-15 pilot Joe Walker. During this test flight, he reached an altitude of about 10 feet, and he hovered there for about a minute. He did this two more times that same day. In all, he completed more than 30 test flights with the LLRV.

These test flights took place at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. That facility has since been renamed the Armstrong Flight Research Center after Neil Armstrong, who also piloted — and famously crashed — the "Flying Bedstead" before he went to the moon.

Why it mattered

Over 60 years ago this LLRV test flight was a critical step toward landing humans on the moon for the first time, a historic moment that both served an important political purpose while also showcasing the result of monumental scientific and technical progress.

While images from this test flight might look like the team are having a bit of fun out in the desert, and perhaps they were, it was also deadly serious. The astronauts who signed onto these crewed missions were doing something that had never been attempted. They were putting their lives on the line for this progress, and this testing was a major piece in reassuring them and NASA that lunar landing could be accomplished, and safely.

Today, as we return humans to the moon with NASA's Artemis program, we see parallels between testing done over 60 years ago and testing today. Right now, SpaceX and Blue Origin are testing their lunar landers for crewed lunar landings in the near-future. While we have now been to the moon and have safely and successfully landed humans before, these tests remain critical for the safety and success of the missions.

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Virgin Galactic's first "Delta-class" space plane just made its maiden voyage.

The next-gen suborbital vehicle, named Apeiron (Greek for "Boundless"), lifted off for the first time ever on Thursday (Oct. 28). Flying beneath the wings of its carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, Apeiron traveled from Virgin's manufacturing site in Mesa, Arizona, to its launch site, Spaceport America in New Mexico.

"Seeing the ship fly beneath Eve to Spaceport America was a moment years in the making," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement on Thursday. "To our team and our astronaut community: your Spaceship has arrived."

Apeiron will undergo a series of checks and tests at Spaceport America, leading up to a planned start of commercial service in the spring of 2027.

During those customer flights, Eve will carry Apeiron to an altitude of about 45,000 feet (13,700 meters), then drop the space plane. Apeiron will fire up its onboard rocket motor, which will carry the six-passenger, two-pilot vehicle to suborbital space.

Passengers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see the curve of Earth against the blackness of space before coming down for a runway landing back at Spaceport America.

Virgin Galactic has done this before, with its VSS Unity space plane. Unity flew seven commercial suborbital missions during its operational life, which ran from June 2023 to June 2024.

Apeiron and other Delta-class planes are built for a much heavier workload, according to Virgin Galactic.

"Designed to fly twice per week with a vehicle lifetime of more than 500 missions, each Spaceship in the next-generation fleet is built to support the economics of a scaled commercial operation, with increased flight cadence and a cost profile unprecedented in the industry," company representatives wrote in the same statement.

And there will indeed be a fleet, if all goes to plan. The second Delta ship is under construction, for example, and is expected to enter service in mid-2027, according to Virgin Galactic.

Apeiron and its Delta-class siblings will need to fly a lot to deal with Virgin Galactic's backlog: Nearly 700 ticket-holders are currently waiting to fly, according to the company. And demand remains high; the latest batch of seats, which were priced at $750,000 apiece, sold out. Virgin plans to sell the next tranche of tickets for $850,000 each, LATTE Luxury News reported.

When Apeiron gets up and running, it will be the only game in town for suborbital space tourists.

Virgin Galactic once shared the skies with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which flew paying customers to the final frontier on its New Shepard vehicle. New Shepard conducted 14 crewed suborbital flights between July 2021 and January 2026 but is currently grounded while the company focuses on helping NASA land Artemis astronauts on the moon.

On Oct. 29, 1991, the Galileo spacecraft flew by the asteroid Gaspra on its way to Jupiter. Gaspra was the first asteroid to ever be visited by a spacecraft.

Gaspra orbits near the inner edge of the asteroid belt. The Galileo spacecraft had been travelling through the asteroid belt for about two months before it reached Gaspra. Galileo was 990 miles (1,593 kilometers) away from Gaspra when it whizzed by, and it was travelling at a relative speed of about 5 miles (8 km) per second.

The spacecraft took several photos of the asteroid and used an instrument called the Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer to study its chemical composition and other physical properties. Galileo determined that Gaspra has an irregular and elongated shape measuring about 12 miles long and 7 miles wide. The images revealed that Gaspra was also covered in craters. Because Galileo was too far away for Gaspra's gravity to affect it, the spacecraft was not able to determine the asteroid's mass.

Why it mattered

The Galileo spacecraft's flyby of Gaspra was a pitstop near the midpoint of its 6-year journey to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. NASA launched Galileo toward Jupiter in October 1989, with the probe swinging by Venus and Earth in 1990 before its encounter with Gaspra.

The Gaspra flyby was the first asteroid flyby in history, with Galileo approaching to just under 1,000 miles (1,601 kilometers) while flying at a whopping 18,000 mph. Galileo's photos of Gaspra "revealed a cratered, complex, irregular body about 20 by 12 by 11 kilometers (12.4 by 7.4 by 6.8 miles), with a thin covering of dust and rubble," NASA wrote in an overview.

"The picture we get of Gaspra is one of something that has suffered a lot during its history," the UPI press service quoted Joseph Veverka, a Galileo imaging team member, as saying at the time. "We suspect that this is the survivor of a series of catastrophic collisions in the past."

Galileo would go on to fly by Earth a second time in 1992, then swing close by the asteroid Ida in 1993 before finally arriving at Jupiter in 1995. Along the way, the probe was in the right place at the right time to watch as the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into pieces and crashed into Jupiter in July 1994.

Since Galileo's historic first asteroid flyby, NASA and other space agencies have gone on to land on asteroids (like NEAR on asteroid Eros), collect samples of asteroids and return them to Earth (like NASA's OSIRIS-REx and Japan's Hayabusa probes), and have even intentionally crashed probes into asteroids (like NASA's DART asteroid impact mission) to test planetary protection techniques.

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The leader of NASA's first mission around the moon in half a century is the last to announce what's next for him after retiring from active astronaut duty.

All four astronauts of the Artemis II mission, which flew around the moon in April, have hung up their spacesuits and moved on to greener pastures. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), managed by Caltech, announced yesterday that former NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman will step into the role of Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of JPL, beginning Nov. 30.

"Reid has spent his career at the edge of what is possible, and he has the technical judgment, operational experience, and leadership to help push that edge farther," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a JPL press release.

Wiseman announced his transition to "astronaut emeritus" alongside Artemis II pilot Victor Glover in September. Glover, subsequently, accepted a full-time role as executive advisor to the president of his alma mater, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly).

Artemis II mission specialists, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen, also made the decision to step away from their spaceflight careers. Hansen announced his career change in July, and has since entered into reservist duty with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Koch, more recently, was appointed as NASA's acting deputy chief engineer, effective Nov. 1.

The quartet launched aboard NASA's Orion capsule on April 1, and completed a 10-day flight around the far side of the moon and back. Their mission took them further from Earth than any crewed spaceflight in history, and captured the attention of millions, who were captivated by the astronauts' incredible views and their ability to demonstrate the best traits of humanity, even while being the four people farthest from it.

The mission served as a stepping stone in NASA's Artemis program which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon and eventually establish a permanent base there. NASA is targeting mid-2027 for Artemis III as a flight test with Orion and the two Artemis lunar lander spacecraft (SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon). If everything goes according to plan, that mission will pave the way for Artemis IV, and the program's first crewed lunar landing in 2028.

A Baltimore native, Wiseman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who served as an aviator and test pilot before joining NASA's astronaut corps in 2009. He launched to space for the first time on the on the Soyuz TMA-13M mission to the International Space Station (ISS). He spent 165 days in orbit serving as part of ISS Expeditions 40 and 41, and completed two spacewalks totaling nearly 13 hours.

Before his selection for Artemis II, Wiseman worked as NASA's chief astronaut, overseeing crew readiness, astronaut assignments and flight safety from Dec. 2020 - Nov. 2022.

As JPL's new deputy director, Wiseman will serve under Director Dave Gallagher, helping oversee "strategic leadership, stewardship, and continuous improvement of laboratory operations," according to the JPL release.

JPL is a federally funded research and development center specializing in robotic space exploration. The lab is responsible for some of NASA's most recognizable planetary missions, including the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers, Europa Clipper and the Voyager probes. JPL also operates NASA's Deep Space Network, which provides continuous communications with spacecraft throughout the solar system.

"I've explored the furthest reaches of what a human can explore at NASA — and there were truly no words in the English vocabulary to describe seeing the sun disappear behind the moon from deep space," Wiseman said.

"But that experience was really the jumping off point to go do the impossible things that Caltech and JPL dream, dare together, and do for NASA and the nation.”

Two astronauts successfully installed and deployed the second-to-last upgraded solar array for the International Space Station (ISS) during the 100th U.S. spacewalk from the orbiting outpost.

Anil Menon of NASA and Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), both ISS Expedition 75 crewmates, completed the 7-hour-and-11-minute extravehicular activity (EVA) at 3:08 p.m. EDT (1908 GMT) on Thursday (Oct. 29). The spacewalk began and ended inside the U.S. Quest airlock, with both astronauts wearing NASA's extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuits.

It was the first spacewalk by a Canadian astronaut since April 2019, when David Saint-Jacques ventured into the void with NASA's Anne McClain.

Once outside, Menon and Kutryk worked on unbolting the ISS roll-out solar array (iROSA) from a temporary stowage platform. The 10-by-2-by-4-foot (3-by-0.6-by-1.2-meter) rolled-up assembly was delivered to the space station inside the unpressurized trunk of SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule earlier this month, on the company's 35th ISS resupply mission for NASA.

Menon then secured himself at the end of the Canadarm2 robotic arm and carried the 750-pound (340-kilogram) iROSA to the space station's port side, where he and Kutryk next installed it on the 2A electrical power channel. Kutryk made his way to the worksite along the station's backbone truss.

Using bolts to mount the IROSA in place and connecting its electrical cables to tie it into the station's power system (during a night pass, out of safety concerns), the array was ready to be extended. No motor was needed to deploy the iROSA to its 63-foot (19-m) length. The potential energy held by the assembly's rolled-up carbon composite booms was enough to fully unroll the panel.

"And we see the iROSA deploying now," reported Mission Control four hours and 23 minutes into the spacewalk.

About 12 minutes later, the array had fully extended, draping over about half of the larger but less capable legacy panel on the P4 truss. The station's eight original arrays are showing degraded power output as they have exceeded their 15-year design life. The iROSAs, when used in tandem with their older counterparts, have increased the station's power supply by 20% to 30%.

The additional power is needed to support ongoing and planned station operations, including its safe and controlled deorbit, which is currently scheduled for 2030.

Having worked ahead of their schedule, Menon and Kutryk removed some of the beams holding the final iROSA in place on its temporary platform and rotated two launch locks that were used in its delivery on Dragon.

Thursday's EVA was the 100th U.S. outing from the space station without a now-retired space shuttle docked to the complex. Overall, it was the 285th spacewalk in support of ISS assembly, maintenance and upgrades, including 66 EVAs out of the Russian segment of the station and 119 by visiting shuttle crews.

The first U.S. spacewalk outside of the Quest airlock was made by Expedition 4 crewmates Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch on Feb. 20, 2002. The 5-hour-and-47-minute EVA mostly tested Quest's systems and completed "housekeeping chores."

"Being outside, I can say it is always sunny in space," said Menon at the conclusion of Thursday's EVA. "I find it incredible what we have been able to do to provide new solar arrays to the space station. In fact, we have been ... doing complex operations like this for over 26 years."

"This is USOS [United States Operating Segment] EVA 100, which is an incredible milestone. I think it really signifies how much we have done," he said.

This was Menon's fourth spacewalk and Kutryk's first. Menon has now logged 26 hours and 31 minutes working in the vacuum of space during his current stay on the space station.

Kutryk is the fifth Canadian astronaut to conduct an EVA. He and Menon are scheduled for another EVA on Nov. 5, when they are expected to install the eighth and final iROSA, completing the five-year process to upgrade the station's power supply.

U.S. President Donald Trump just met another NASA Artemis crew.

The astronauts of NASA's Artemis III mission visited the Oval Office on Thursday (Oct. 28) and posed for a few photos with the president.

Their visit came nearly six months to the day after that of the Artemis II crew, who stopped by the White House on April 29, 19 days after the end of their historic flight around the moon.

The Artemis III astronauts are NASA's Randy Bresnik (commander), Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio (mission specialists) and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano (pilot). All four — plus backup crewmate Bob Hines of NASA, and agency chief Jared Isaacman — made the White House trip.

"It was a great day at the White House with President Trump and the talented crew of Artemis III," Isaacman wrote via X on Thursday.

Artemis III will launch to low Earth orbit in the summer of 2027, if all goes according to plan. The roughly two-week-long mission will aim to dock NASA's Orion capsule with SpaceX's Starship vehicle and/or Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

NASA selected Starship and Blue Moon to be the crewed lunar landers for the Artemis program, so Artemis III will provide valuable practice: On moon-landing missions, astronauts will launch aboard Orion and then meet up with either Starship or Blue Moon, which will carry them to the lunar surface and back up again.

That's slated to happen for the first time on Artemis IV, which NASA plans to launch in 2028.

We don't yet know which private lander(s) will launch on Artemis III; NASA would like to fly both of them, but it's unclear if both will be ready when the time comes.

That uncertainty applies to Artemis IV as well. We'll have to wait a bit before we know which spacecraft will have the honor of putting astronauts down on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

SpaceX just checked another big box on the path to its 15th Starship test flight, which promises to be pretty epic.

The company conducted static-fire tests with Starship's Ship upper stage on Monday (Oct. 26) and Tuesday (Oct. 27), igniting its Raptor engines while the vehicle, known as Ship 42, remained anchored to the ground.

"Ship 42 static fires complete. The Starship preparing for Flight 15 performed a full duration, six-engine static fire, and fired a single Raptor engine to simulate a deorbit burn," SpaceX said in a Wednesday (Oct. 28) X post that shared video of the tests.

The Ship 42 tests come on the heels of a successful 33-engine static fire with Booster 22, the Starship Super Heavy first stage that will conduct Flight 15. Everything therefore appears to remain on track for Flight 15, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said is targeted for sometime in November.

All Starship launches are worth watching, but this one should be particularly exciting. Musk said last week that SpaceX will try to catch both Ship and Super Heavy during Flight 15, provided the company can get regulatory approval to do so.

These catches are performed by the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower at Starbase, SpaceX's Starship launch and manufacturing hub in South Texas. The company has snagged Super Heavy on three Starship test flights to date but has not yet attempted a Ship capture.

Double chopstick catches will be the norm on operational Starship launches, if all goes to plan. This recovery strategy will reduce the time needed to get Super Heavy and Ship ready for reflight, significantly boosting launch cadences, according to SpaceX. (Starship is designed to be fully reusable, unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, whose upper stages are expendable.)

SpaceX is already riding a historic success with Starship: The megarocket reached orbit for the first time ever on Flight 14, which took place on Sept. 28.

And Ship deployed 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink V3 satellites during that flight, starting the assembly of a new broadband constellation that Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Starlink V3 missions will therefore make up a significant percentage of Starship launches for the foreseeable future. But SpaceX also plans to use the megarocket to build an even bigger constellation in Earth orbit — Starmind, which could harbor one million of the company's AI data center satellites.

The U.S. Air Force is opening up about the SpaceX Starfall cargo capsule it flew on a recent rideshare mission to orbit — and showing off what the capsule carried.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) completed a point-to-point rocket cargo delivery test using the secretive uncrewed reentry vehicle, confirming on social media its recovery of the package in the Pacific Ocean. "With support from SpaceX, the AFRL agile cargo pods were recovered after splashdown," the AFRL wrote in an X post on Oct. 26.

The Starfall capsule launched on a Falcon 9 rocket as a part of SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 mission, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Oct. 20. Starfall carried a number of AFRL-developed cargo pods designed to transport military equipment through space and back to Earth. The successful recovery of the pods marks a big step forward in the Air Force's effort to examine the viability of point-to-point (P2D) rocket cargo missions.

"This was a critical achievement to demonstrate the potential of Rocket Cargo delivery for point-to-point rapid global mobility for the Future Force," said AFRL Technology Transition Office director Adam Remaly in a press release on Oct. 20.

Photos included in the AFRL social media post show military personnel unpacking a recovered cargo pod for inspection. Each pod contained sensors to monitor temperature conditions through launch, reentry and splashdown, as well as to measure the shock and vibration forces exerted on its cargo.

For its first Starfall mission, AFRL packed its cargo pods with representative items like medical equipment, food ration packs and other military kit that might be helpful for surviving an emergency somewhere that's tough to reach via conventional transportation. To that end, AFRL said it also conducted a fit check of a UNI-PAC III life raft inside Starfall, which could potentially be included in future tests.

"Researchers paid special attention to the electronics equipment and survival gear, including a SATCOM-enabled tracker, batteries, a reverse osmosis desalinator, survival gear and emergency medical equipment," AFRL said in its release.

SpaceX's disk-shaped Starfall capsule made a quiet debut on a Falcon 9 launch in June, and the company has remained relatively quiet about the vehicle to date. Most of what we do know comes from a Federal Aviation Administration environmental assessment published earlier this year.

The hockey-puck-looking vehicle measures approximately 10.2 feet (3.1 meters) across and can return up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of cargo from orbit, according to that report. And it sports a carbon fiber heat shield and compressed gas thrusters for attitude control during reentry, as well as a parachute system for precision landings.

AFRL will assess the data recovered from the Oct. 20 mission to contribute to its broader Rocket Cargo initiative, which the Air Force hopes can evolve to the transportation of tens of tons of cargo per launch. That would exceed Starfall's mass capacity, but Starfall isn't the only vehicle the military has considered for its Rocket Cargo program.

SpaceX's much larger Starship rocket, which is still under development, was a likely candidate for tests at Johnston Atoll, a remote Pacific bird sanctuary where the Air Force proposed building a pair of landing pads for cargo delivery tests. However, those plans were suspended in July 2025 amid environmental concerns, and the status of the search for an alternative site is unclear.

On Oct. 28, 1971, the United Kingdom launched its first satellite. The satellite was named Prospero, but it was also known as the X-3.

This wasn't Britain's first satellite, but it was the first and only one the British space program launched with one of its own rockets. The first six British satellites all launched from the United States on NASA rockets. Prospero launched on a carrier rocket called the Black Arrow.

The Prospero mission was the fourth and final flight of a Black Arrow rocket. Prospero was designed to study how the environment in space affects communications satellites. It tested things solar cells and telemetry systems, and even had a micrometeoroid detector that would determine small particles in space posed a threat to the spacecraft.

The mission lifted off from the Woomera Range Complex in Australia. While the launch was a success, the rocket's final stage bumped into the satellite after it separated, and the collision broke one of Prospero's four radio antennas. But the satellite still worked, and it remained operational until 1973.

Why it mattered

The launch of Prospero is etched in the history books of British spaceflight. To this date, it remains the first and last British satellite ever launched on a native rocket built in the United Kingdom.

The 66-kilogram satellite launched on a three-stage Black Arrow R-3 rocket and flew in an elliptical orbit that ranged between 522 km to 1,300 km above the Earth. The rocket itself was based on the smaller Black Knight research rocket and stood nearly 13 meters tall. While the launch was successful, the Black Arrow program, which had seen two failures and two successes, was ultimately canceled.

The Prospero satellite, meanwhile, operated in orbit for two years, with regular communications ending in 1973, though it was contacted at least once each year through 1996, according to the BBC.

The satellite remains in orbit today, its legacy such that at least one company - the Scotland-based space startup Skyrora, has announced plans to retrieve Prospero in orbit and deorbit in Earth's atmosphere.

That Skyrora plan, announced in 2021, would use the company's space tug to rendezvous with the defunct Prospero, latch onto it and pull it from space. The company aims to launch its Skyrora XL rocket out of a Saxavord Spaceport in Scotland.

"By recovering Prospero, we are not only coming together as a space nation and taking responsibility for what we have launched into orbit, but also confirming our commitment to the sustainable use of outer space," Volodymyr Levykin, Skyrora founder and CEO, said at the time.

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.

Living underwater was surprisingly peaceful. It was in many ways exactly what I imagine living on Mars would be like one day. There were no humans around us, except for my three SEA STAR crewmembers and me. Apart from the human noises we made, we couldn't hear anything other than the life support systems keeping us alive submerged 22 feet (7 meters) below the surface.

We were living in these extreme conditions to study the challenges astronauts may face on long-duration space missions. Since performing research in space is still rare and expensive, there are numerous facilities around the world that focus on recreating space-like conditions on Earth. One of those stations is the Jules' Undersea Lab, where the SEA STAR simulated space mission took place.

This underwater habitat was called "La Chalupa" when it was built in the 1970s. Its purpose was to allow divers to live and perform research as aquanauts — people who spend more than 24 hours underwater in a so-called state of saturation. Today, the Jules' Undersea Lab is located near Key Largo, in Florida. However, it was originally designed to be mobile — inside a barge 20 feet wide and 60 feet long (6 to 18 meters).

The aquanauts could choose an ideal site for their research expeditions underwater and then have the facility be submerged. They did that by flooding most of its inside space, turning it from a boat to a submarine. Once their work was done, they could remove the water and move "La Chalupa" to another location.

Unfortunately, the funding to keep this facility running ran out over time, and it was moved one last time to its current home. Since then, the now Jules' Undersea Lab served as the research station for tens of different aquanaut missions, including a NASA 30-day project and two missions that set world records for the longest time living underwater (73 and 100 days).

On the inside, the underwater station is made up of a galley with a kitchen and dining/work area. Next to it there is a basic toilet, shower and the "moon pool," which is the equivalent of a door to get inside the habitat. The final area is the bedroom with two bunk beds, which can be split in the middle to create two bedrooms and provide additional privacy. Three windows throughout the habitat provide its dwellers with a view of a mostly green outside world.

To start our SEA STAR simulated space mission, we waved goodbye to our Mission Control team on "Earth" and dove down to enter the Jules' Undersea Lab through the "moon pool" at 25 feet (7.6 m) underwater. After that, we did not return to the surface again until five days later. We lived and worked the whole time underwater, performing our space-related research and "spacewalks" (a.k.a. exploration dives in scuba gear).

We were able to survive all this time in such a challenging environment thanks to a number of important life support systems keeping us alive. The communications and umbilical support cables (providing air, fresh water and power) for the habitat were originally supplied by NASA. All the piping and fittings are inside the submerged barge, protected from the air-sea interface and from encrusting marine creatures. There was also a direct line to Mission Control "on Earth" to help us in case of any emergencies.

Our schedule kept us busy all day every day to simulate what astronauts experience on the International Space Station (ISS). All four of us on the SEA STAR crew had research projects that we were responsible for, as well as daily tasks. These tasks involved cooking, medical checkups, cognitive tests, maintenance work and taking care of unexpected issues. As the Commander of the crew, I also made sure everyone was on top of their work and addressed any problems that came up.

We performed "spacewalks" in between all those other activities. They were pretty physically exhausting, which meant that we did not do additional exercise during the mission. I have been the Commander of 40 simulated space missions, and normally we exercise for at least an hour or two during each mission, just like astronauts on the ISS. Nonetheless, the pressure in the Jules' Undersea Lab was approximately twice as high as it was on the surface at sea level. This caused the crew to experience additional stress to their bodies, which is why no further exercise was required.

Even though our hands were full with activities during the mission, none of us felt particularly stressed out. Whether it was because of the effects of the pressurized conditions or thanks to good planning, we actually enjoyed our time living underwater. One of the nice surprises of the mission was that the food wasn't too bad, either. We were allowed to use a small crock pot, which meant we could eat soups, stews and overnight oats. Small joys like that boosted our spirits immensely.

Having said all that, the Jules' Undersea Lab did also make the isolation from our lives on Earth feel very realistic. While we didn't have a view of Earth like the astronauts on the ISS, our very green view of a completely different world outside our windows gave us an impression of living on another planet. It was the alien nature of our lifestyle 22 feet underwater and all the challenges that came with it that made this mission feel Mars-like. Our daily schedule grounded us, the extreme environment around us kept us on our toes and our scientific exploration helped us reach new frontiers.

You can follow Dr. Michaela Musilova at her website and on social media: @astro_michaela (Instagram, TikTok and Threads), @Dr. Michaela Musilova (Facebook) and @astro-michaela.bsky.social (Bluesky).

The next International Space Station (ISS) spacewalk will have more maple-leaf flavor than usual, as a Canadian astronaut will become the first to go outside the orbiting complex in seven years.

Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, who's also a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force, will help the ISS boost its power supply during his first-ever spacewalk on Thursday (Oct. 29). Kutryk will be joined by NASA astronaut Anil Menon, who has done three spacewalks already and also serves as a colonel with the U.S. Space Force.

The duo are scheduled to venture outside the orbiting lab at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), kicking off a spacewalk that will last roughly 6 hours and 45 minutes. You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT).

It will be the first of two extravehicular activities (EVAs) for Menon and Kutryk, with the second expected to occur no sooner than Nov. 5. During the two spacewalks, the astronauts will deploy the seventh and eighth International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSAs).

iROSAs lie on top of the existing, decades-old arrays on ISS, which are naturally degrading with age. The first iROSA rolled out in 2021. Once all eight are installed and running, the station will see its power supply rise from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts — a boost of roughly 30%.

A Canadian capcom, too

The capcom (capsule communicator) for both spacewalks will be CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons. She has experience in this role already, serving as a capcom on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon this past April. And she'll serve as lead capcom for Artemis III, which will test crewed lunar landers in Earth orbit next summer, if all goes to plan.

Also helping Kutryk and Menon will be Canadian space technology, specifically Canadarm2 — the ISS robotic arm tasked for spacewalk support, among other maintenance duties.

"It's been busy preparing for the upcoming spacewalks," Menon said about Canadarm2 in a Saturday (Oct. 24) X post. Ground controllers recently moved the arm over to the "trunk" or storage area of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft, which brought the two iROSA arrays up earlier this month.Canadarm2 picked up the IROSAs and moved them to a transporter for the astronauts. "It even loosened bolts for us before the spacewalks … I'm grateful for the help," Menon added.

During the Oct. 29 spacewalk, Canadarm2 will do even more. Kutryk and Menon will slide an array off its transport rail and then have Menon get onto a Canadarm2 platform, to put the array into his hands. From inside the ISS, NASA astronauts Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins will carefully move Canadarm2 to put Menon and the array at the ISS port-installation site, supporting the 2A electrical-power channel.

Each array is about 10 feet (3 meters) long when folded up and weighs 750 pounds (340 kilograms) here on Earth, according to Garrett Hehn, NASA's spacewalk flight director. The agency therefore knows the iROSAs are "a lot to handle," he said during a press conference on Oct. 20 that previewed the two upcoming spacewalks.

As such, NASA looked at how previous iROSA spacewalks were performed and created a new "elegant series of maneuvers, where we've tried to rotate around the actual center of mass of the arrays, rather than the crew member," Hehn added. "It was a lesson learned from previous EVAs, of how we thought we could make it a little less tiring on Anil."

Kutryk will move over to the installation location, hand-over-hand, to join Menon. There, the two will place the IROSA onto the older solar array, using a "mod kit" placed on a previous spacewalk. "We've got a series of bolts to structurally attach it [the IROSA] and release, in order for this folded-up configuration to fold open, and basically go from about 10 feet long to around 20 feet [6 m] long," Hehn explained.

"These arrays," he added, "I kind of think of them like a snap bracelet … They basically have a series of magnets up the side, where they deploy with enough energy that it just continues rolling out steadily. That process will take about 10 minutes on the day of the EVA."

Following that, the astronauts need to access power cables at a time when that area of the ISS is not in sunlight; the station will be (as always) moving through its orbit, circling the Earth every 90 minutes, so timing will be important.

"We can't have any sun on the arrays, whenever we're handling those hot cables," Hehn said. "Basically, we'll use a jumper to bring together both the legacy arrays' power, and this new rollout solar arrays' power, in order to have a pretty substantial gain to our power-generation capability."

The Nov. 5 EVA will essentially have the astronauts do the same installation procedure with another array, this time heading to the starboard side of the space station. The last IROSA installation, however, will take place a little farther from the station, beyond Canadarm2's reach. So the astronauts will do a "leapfrog" to get out there.

After Menon, the array and Canadarm2 are brought to the installation location, Hehn said, Kutryk — moving to the same location by himself, hand over hand — will go into another platform installed on the station truss, and take the IROSA from Menon's hands. As Kutryk waits in place, Menon will exit the robotics platform, move it from the Canadarm2 to another spot on the space station's truss, and then get back on to the platform to hold the IROSA securely for installation for the 3B electrical-power channel.

"This is the way that we close that final distance that the robotic arm is unable to do on its own," Hehn said.

Canadian robots, support teams — and new funding

The CSA's last spacewalk was during the agency's previous mission seven years ago, which involved astronaut David Saint-Jacques. On April 8, 2019, Saint-Jacques successfully fought difficult equipment during a busy excursion alongside NASA astronaut Anne McClain.

CSA has a 2.3% contribution to ISS, usually working out to a flight every five or six years. However, Kutryk's slot was delayed two years, from 2024 to 2026, because he was originally assigned to fly up on Boeing's Starliner capsule, which needs more flight testing following numerous issues that cropped up during its crewed demonstration flight in 2024.

Kutryk, who launched Oct. 1 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon with three other astronauts, has generated a lot of political and industry excitement in Canada. His mission marks a rare pair of CSA astronaut launches in a single year, as Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen just launched in April. (The last time this happened was in 2009, when Robert Thirsk was doing a long-duration station excursion and Julie Payette visited during a two-week space shuttle mission.)

Canadian astronaut missions are unusual, even when including private missions — or non-CSA government astronauts, like now-retired NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel, who has dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship. Canada is therefore using the new CSA mission as a catalyst. In recent weeks, Canada announced several government and industry commitments to keep the momentum going even after Kutryk returns next spring.

For example, Canada just announced its first bipartisan space caucus, named Hansen a space advisor to the prime minister, pledged to soon give CSA its first space strategy since 2019, and promised, if at all possible, to announce a mission assignment for Gibbons within the next year. (The latter may depend on factors such as NASA's availability for missions, as Canada does not launch astronauts on its own.)

On the industry side, Canada's defense department last week promised the launch company NordSpace $20 million CDN ($14 million USD) for a 10-year launch pad access agreement at the company's young spaceport in the province Newfoundland and Labrador; additional mission costs will be paid when those are ordered. Canada also recently promised $200 million CDN ($140 million USD) to Maritime Launch Services over 10 years, committing to a launch pad at the company's emerging spaceport in Nova Scotia.

Virgin Galactic has officially unveiled the first space plane in its next-gen "Delta" line, and announced the results of the worldwide vote to choose its name.

Spaceship Apeiron will be the first Delta-class vehicle, Virgin Galactic revealed on Wednesday (Oct. 28). Apeiron (pronounced "A'-per-on," according to the announcement) takes its name from the ancient Greek word meaning "boundless," and was selected through a public poll that drew votes from thousands of people across 83 countries and six continents.

The reveal comes on the same day that the space plane is scheduled to be flown from its manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico, where the vehicle will undergo final preparations before beginning flight tests.

Apeiron was one of four finalist names that Virgin Galactic narrowed down from a list of 276 employee-submitted suggestions. After the public weighed in, Apeiron came out on top over Horizon, Explorer and Ascend.

“Apeiron, the Boundless, captures the ambition of human spaceflight and the possibilities it opens for humanity," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Golglazier said in a company statement. "The extraordinary response to the public vote made choosing this name even more meaningful."

The shiny new space plane will be attached to Virgin Galactic's VMS Eve carrier aircraft for its journey to Spaceport America, where engineers will complete work on its avionics software ahead of Apeiron's first flight tests and eventual operational missions.

The new Delta-class vehicle replaces Virgin's earlier space plane model, VSS Unity, which flew seven suborbital missions during its operational lifetime between the summers of 2023 and 2024. The company suspended VSS Unity flights to focus efforts on Apeiron's development, and now hopes to begin flying customers again in mid-2027.

Once they're in regular operation, Virgin plans to fly each of its Delta-class vehicles as many as eight times a month. A second Delta-class space plane is already under construction and is expected to join Apeiron at Spaceport America around the same time that Virgin restarts flying passengers, about 675 of whom are still waiting in line with tickets for a seat on one of the company's suborbital jaunts, according to the company's Q2 2026 SEC filing.

Now, more than 100 of those future space travelers are beginning their initial preparations for flight, with more ticketholders expected to follow once Virgin brings the second Delta-class vehicle into service. When the company began selling seats aboard its space plane in 2014, when VSS Unity was still under construction, tickets were priced around $200,000. Today, that price has jumped to $850,000 per seat, according to a report by Latte.

Like its predecessor, Apeiron and future Delta-class vehicles are designed for short, suborbital spaceflights, and are not capable of reaching orbit around Earth. They fly above the internationally recognized boundary of space, the 100-kilometer-high (62 miles) Karman line, and provide those onboard with several minutes of weightlessness and great views of the planet below.

Virgin Galactic plans to share further details about its upcoming flight tests during its November earnings call.

Virgin is one of two American companies that have flown paying customers to suborbital space and back. The other, Blue Origin, suspended its flights earlier this year to focus on helping land NASA astronauts on the moon.