SpaceX reached a milestone with its latest Starlink launch, sending the satellites into orbit on its 600th flight of a flight-proven booster.

The sexacentennial launch came on the second of two Falcon 9 missions that lifted off less than eight hours apart overnight from Monday to Tuesday (July 13 to July 14). The first flight, with Starlink batch 15-14, launched at 9:28 p.m. EDT (0128 GMT or 6:28 p.m. PDT local time) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The second flight, with Starlink group 10-45, followed at 5:10 a.m. EDT (0910 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Both launches successfully deployed their payloads — 27 and 29 Starlink satellites, respectively — into their intended orbits, as confirmed by SpaceX.

Both flights also successfully recovered their Falcon 9 first stage boosters. B1093, launched from Florida, completed its 15th flight. B1080, launched from California, achieved its 28th mission. The record for a single Falcon 9 first stage's re-flight stands at 36 launches.

The addition of 56 more Starlink satellites to SpaceX's megaconstellation brought the total active number of broadband internet relay units to 10,839, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell.

In addition to Tuesday's launch being the 600th launch of a flight-proven Falcon 9 stage, SpaceX now stands at 83 Falcon 9 missions this year to date.

Astronomers have spotted four dead star white dwarf stars playing a game of cosmic hide-and-seek, all four of which were hiding in the glares of red dwarf companion stars.

This marks the first detection of white dwarfs existing in double star systems in our cosmic backyard. The white dwarfs are all located within around 65 light-years of Earth, and one of them is number nine in the top 10 closest white dwarfs to the solar system.

White dwarfs are the type of stellar remnants left behind when stars around the size of the sun run out of fuel needed for nuclear fusion. This leads to their cores collapsing. The lack of fusion also means these stellar remnants cool and become dim. Thus, the light of much larger and brighter red dwarf stars is incredibly effective at hiding white dwarfs.

"Nearby isolated white dwarfs are usually easy to find, but we couldn't see these four stars directly in visible wavelengths because their red dwarf companions were drowning out their light," team leader Mairi O'Brien of the University of Warwick in the UK said in a statement. "It's a reminder that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we can still find surprises if we look in the right way, at the right wavelengths."

Wobbles gave them away

Though astronomers have been diligently surveying our cosmic backyard for decades, white dwarfs are extremely good at remaining unseen. In fact, the only thing that gave these four hidden dead stars away? Curious "wobbles" caused in the motion of the stars they were hiding behind, like a hiding child causing a curtain to ripple.

The team followed up on these telltale clues by taking a closer look at these systems with NASA's long-serving Hubble Space Telescope. This investigation was conducted in ultraviolet light and using custom calibration to prevent flaring from the red dwarf companions from mimicking white dwarf signals.

This investigation not only revealed the four lurking white dwarfs, but also demonstrated that one of these systems, G 203-47, located just 25 light-years away, has some curious characteristics. Twenty-seven years elapsed between the initial radial wobble and the detection of this hidden dead star.

That isn't the weird thing, though. What is strange is that the red dwarf companion of this white dwarf only rotates once every 100 Earth days or so, yet it only takes about 15 days to orbit its dead star companion. This means that gravitational forces have failed to lock the red dwarf and white dwarf together, which is what happens in similar systems.

"What's fascinating is that G 203-47 shouldn't be rotating this slowly if it formed the same way as similar systems. This suggests that these binaries have had very different evolutionary histories," team member David Wilson, of the University of Colorado Boulder, said. "Some underwent violent, prolonged interactions early on that locked them tidally. Others, like G 203-47, experienced gentler, briefer encounters that left them in this unusual state."

The discovery of these white dwarfs helps researchers better understand the population numbers of the dead stars throughout the Milky Way. In fact, predictions would have suggested finding roughly four to five closely orbiting white dwarf-red dwarf pairs within around 65 light-years of our solar system, so finding four should instill a lot of confidence in our current theoretical models.

"Only about 30% of red dwarfs within 20 parsecs [65 light-years] have been systematically surveyed for hidden white dwarf companions," team member and University of Warwick researcher Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay said in the statement. "We think there could be as many as nine or 10 additional binary systems in our local stellar environment that we haven’t found yet.

"If we put more targeted effort into observing red dwarfs, perhaps we will find more surprises like this."

The team's research was published on Tues (July 14) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

The first of 10,000 missing black holes in the Omega Centauri globular cluster has been found thanks to teamwork by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

The two observatories discovered the black hole after watching a star orbiting around something massive but dark, and which therefore could not be seen. The Hubble data ran from 2003 to 2023, and the James Webb Space Telescope picked up after that to help refine the measurements.

Astronomers used the space telescopes to focus on a particular star in a binary system that appeared to be home to another, dark object called oMEGACat BH-2. Previous studies had suggested that the dark object was a neutron star. However, the new results are conclusive: the object has a mass 4.46 times that of the sun. This is too massive to be a neutron star, so it must therefore be a black hole.

Omega Centauri is the most massive of our Milky Way galaxy's globular clusters. It is so massive that astronomers suspect that it is actually the core of a dwarf galaxy that has lost most of its stars to the Milky Way's gravitational cannibalism, which over the aeons has torn strips from Omega Centauri. Even so, Omega Centauri still contains about 10 million stars, collectively located 18,000 light-years from Earth.

In 2024, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found clinching evidence that an intermediate-mass black hole – one that has a mass about 8,200 times that of our sun – lurks at the center of Omega Centauri, strengthening its claim of being the remnant of a dwarf galaxy, since galaxies harbor black holes at their center but star clusters typically do not.

However, alongside this intermediate-mass black hole should be about 10,000 other stellar-mass black holes born from the supernova explosions of massive stars. Searches have focused on binary systems where a star orbits a compact object, but until now astronomers had drawn a blank.

Now, a team led by Matthew Whitaker of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City have come along to save the day by diligently sifting through 20 years of Hubble observations, plus additional supporting views from the JWST, to uncover a stellar-mass black hole in Omega Centauri for the first time.

Whitaker's team used a technique called astrometry, which is the measurement of the changing positions of stars as they move through space. Although the black hole itself is dark, it is orbited by a normal star with a mass 78% that of our sun. Thanks to the unprecedented vision of Hubble and the JWST, Whitaker and his colleagues were able to track the motion of this star around the black hole.

It turns out that the star is on a 94-year-long orbit around the black hole, which is the widest separation of a binary composed of a stellar-mass black hole and star ever found. Over that 20-year-period, Hubble saw less than a quarter of the star's total orbit, but it coincided with the star's closest approach to the black hole, during which the star moved faster.

Based on this motion, Whitaker's team were able to measure the strength of the black hole's gravitational field acting on the star, and from that calculate the mass of the black hole.

"The precision of these measurements is incredible, down to a fraction of a pixel on Hubble and Webb's detectors," said Whitaker in a statement. "It would not have been possible to find this black hole without these two space telescopes."

Given how wide the orbit of the star is around the black hole, the likelihood is that the black hole's gravity captured the star when it passed close. This is a state of affairs that will not last forever; within another billion years, encounters with other stars in the crowded environs of the cluster will probably pluck the black hole's companion away.

The mass of oMEGACat BH-2 does seem unusual, however, in the sense that it is lower than expected. The mass of oMEGACat BH-2 exists in a void that has only become apparent during the past eleven years of gravitational wave detections. These gravitational waves are produced by the mergers of stellar-mass black holes, but black holes with masses between 2.5 times the mass of our sun (the theoretical limit for neutron stars) and five solar masses are conspicuous by their absence in the gravitational-wave events. Yet here is oMEGACat BH-2, sitting within that mass gap.

"It's important to understand black hole populations in globular clusters because there's uncertainty about their physics and formation," said Anil Seth of the University of Utah.

"More specifically, understanding the process of forming black holes and then dynamically forming binaries is vital, because it affects our ability to interpret and understand gravitational-wave events. Environments like Omega Centauri are the primary places where we think binaries are merging and creating these waves."

In particular, the stars of Omega Centauri are more primitive than our sun, chemically speaking, with fewer elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Which types of massive stars produce black holes when they explode as supernovas is still an area of active research, but oMEGACat BH-2 adds another complication to the mix in that its progenitor star contained few heavy elements.

"We need to figure out how that happens," said Seth.

So that's one down, and 9,999 or thereabouts to go. Whitaker's team continue to use Hubble and JWST data to find more stellar-mass black holes in Omega Centauri, but he also highlights the potential of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to find black-hole binary systems in our Milky Way galaxy at least when the telescope launches later this year.

"Roman … will image the crowded galactic bulge, including the galactic center, very regularly with Hubble-like resolution and with a much wider field of view," said Whitaker. "We're hoping we'll be able to find black hole binary systems like this one because of the regular cadence of Roman's observations."

The details regarding oMEGACat BH-2 are described in a paper published on July 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

As our planet revels in the recent achievements of this spring’s Artemis 2 mission and its four astronaut crew members, a new four-part PBS documentary series takes a scrutinizing look at space exploration and its inherent perils and promises. "Once Upon a Time in Space" will be available to watch on PBS (and the PBS app) starting on July 14, 2026 (9pm ET).

Directed by James Bluemel and his filmmaking team — the crew behind the award-winning "Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland" and "Once Upon a Time in Iraq" — "Once Upon a Time in Space" explores the connections between those venturing beyond Earth's gravity and the support staff remaining behind while pioneering souls venture into hostile outer space territory.

"'Once Upon a Time in Space' tells the human stories behind one of our most extraordinary endeavors: the exploration of space," states the official synopsis. "Moving beyond scientific achievement, the series examines the personal experiences of astronauts, cosmonauts, ground-based participants, and the loved ones left on Earth. Across four episodes, it traces significant landmarks in spacefaring history, from the birth of the Shuttle and the pioneering Space Station Mir to the rise of commercial spaceflight."

"Through powerful firsthand testimony and intimate, unseen archival footage, a complex portrait of humanity emerges: one that lays bare both our fragility and boundless curiosity. Accounts of bravery, friendship, and tragedy are told against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world, connecting technical and geopolitical developments to those who experienced them."

Here’s a schedule of the docuseries’ chapters and their slated air dates:

• Episode 1 "America First" – Tuesday, July 14 – 9:00 p.m. ET
• Episode 2 "The Russian Thing" – Tuesday, July 21
• Episode 3 "Politics Always Wins" – Tuesday, July 28
• Episode 4 "Friends Forever" – Tuesday, August 4

This remarkable show features NASA astronauts Charlie Bolden, Anna Lee Fisher, Bill Fisher, Michael Foale, Jerry Linenger, Mike Mullane, Dan Tani, and Terry Virts. They’re joined by cosmonauts Sergei Zalyotin and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Lazutkin, NASA officials, aerospace engineers, and numerous family members.

Produced in collaboration with the BBC, "Once Upon a Time in Space" was first broadcast last fall in the UK, but now makes its U.S. premiere at 9:00 p.m. ET on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS app.

A miniature X-ray machine is set to transform astronauts' health prospects following a successful test in orbit. As a bonus, as well as checking for broken bones on the moon, the technology could also be distributed to small towns and villages in rural areas to provide enhanced medical care far from major hospitals.

For much of the Space Age, astronauts have only had access to ultrasound machines as tools to diagnose injuries. Unlike ultrasound, which requires a medium through which sound waves can pass, X-rays can be used in a vacuum. The problem with X-ray machines is that traditionally they have been big and bulky, they use a lot of power, they have difficulty imaging something that isn't perfectly stationary (resulting in blurred images), and they tend to get damaged when jostled about during launch and atmospheric re-entry. Yet, as human spaceflight and voyages beyond Earth-orbit come to prominence once more, with proposals for an outpost on the moon, there is a greater chance of an astronaut being injured and therefore a greater need for medical X-rays in space.

Technology has now reached the stage where small-scale, portable X-ray devices are commonplace on Earth.

"Portable X-ray machines are in use everywhere — at the Kentucky Derby, on the sidelines of the Super Bowl and around the globe in low-resource areas — because they can run on solar power and can be operated by individuals with no medical expertise," Sheyna Gifford, who is a medical doctor and assistant professor of aerospace medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said in a statement.

Gifford wanted to put one of these portable X-ray devices to the test in space. The first chance her team got to simulate taking an X-ray in space conditions was during a parabolic flight in 2022 (when an aircraft simulates microgravity by climbing high on a parabolic trajectory, as in the famous "Vomit Comet") when members of the flight crew used a portable X-ray machine to produce an X-ray image of someone's hand.

The real test, though, came on March 31, 2025, with the launch of the private Fram2 mission, which took four first-time astronauts on a 3.5-day mission around Earth on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The astronauts, none of whom were medical experts, received four hours training on the portable X-ray device before launch, and then while in orbit they were tasked with taking X-rays of a smartwatch, a hand, an abdomen, a pelvis and a chest. These X-ray images were recorded digitally, enabling the astronauts to review them straight away without having to develop film.

Back on Earth, three independent medical experts compared the Fram2 X-rays with similar X-rays taken prior to launch. They found that while the ground-based X-rays were better quality, the space-based ones were good enough to be used to diagnose injuries such as broken bones.

Furthermore, the X-ray device made it back to Earth on board the Crew Dragon with only minimal damage to its exterior after being buffeted around. The Fram2 crew members all reported that the X-ray machine was easy to use, and they recommended that in future it be designed to be easier to clamp securely into place inside the crew cabin.

"We believed an off-the-shelf portable system would stand a very good chance of surviving pre-launch testing and be operational in space by crew members with minimal training," said Gifford. "By acquiring the first human and equipment X-rays in space, our study demonstrates the feasibility of in-orbit radiography and expanded diagnostic capabilities for crew health and hardware evaluation."

The usefulness of X-ray machines in space extends beyond just applying them to human health. X-rays can be used to inspect potential damage to electronics and spacesuits, to diagnose problems with malfunctioning satellites, and even be strapped to lunar rovers for analyzing the surface of the moon.

The next step, says Gifford, is to make the portable systems even smaller.

"It is my hope that we can further reduce the size of portable imaging systems and improve their ruggedness and usability so they can be included in future missions," she said.

The technology can also prove its value here on Earth. Easy to use and highly portable X-ray devices that can produce digital images that can be scrutinized on a tablet or even a smartphone would be invaluable to rescue teams in remote areas or tight spaces. It would also transform medical care in rural towns and villages that are far from large hospitals — reducing the burden on those large hospitals in the process.

"Disseminating autonomous miniature X-ray systems around the globe could also change the game in public health," said Gifford. "The sky is not the limit when it comes to X-rays in space and here on Earth."

The findings from the X-ray tests were reported on July 14 in the journal Radiology.

Astronomers have, for the first time, directly mapped the magnetic field surrounding an unusual "lighthouse" pulsar, revealing an invisible cosmic highway that channels particles blasted from the rapidly spinning stellar remnant.

Using NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, researchers measured the magnetic field around the pulsar PSR J1101−6101 — nicknamed the "Lighthouse" — and confirmed a long-standing prediction that its high-energy particles stream along magnetic field lines extending through the Milky Way. This discovery offers a rare look at how some of the universe's most extreme objects accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, according to a statement from the space agency.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars — the ultra-dense remnants left behind when massive stars explode as supernovas. Their powerful magnetic fields channel beams of radiation from their magnetic poles that sweep across space as the stars spin, much like the beam of a lighthouse.

PSR J1101−6101, which is located at the center of the Lighthouse Nebula, spins about 16 times every second and is traveling at supersonic speeds after receiving a powerful kick from the supernova that created it. As it tears through interstellar gas, it leaves behind a bright X-ray tail while producing a narrow filament that juts out almost perpendicular to its direction of travel. Astronomers had long suspected this unusual structure traced energetic electrons escaping along the Milky Way's magnetic field.

"We wanted to test that theory,"Jack Dinsmore, lead author of the study and undergraduate student at Stanford University, said in the statement. "The 'smoking gun' would come by measuring the polarization of the light, which indicates the magnetic field direction. If the magnetic field points along the filament, that confirms that the filament's particles are flowing along the field."

Unlike conventional X-ray telescopes, IXPE measures the polarization of X-rays — the preferred orientation of their electric fields — allowing scientists to reconstruct the geometry of otherwise invisible magnetic fields. Because the Lighthouse Nebula is relatively faint in X-rays, the researchers developed new analysis techniques to extract as much information as possible from the observations.

The team found that the magnetic field runs parallel to a remarkably long filament extending away from the pulsar, confirming that high-energy particles are streaming along magnetic field lines. But the observations also uncovered an unexpected twist: the field is far more orderly than scientists anticipated. The unusually strong polarization signal suggests the filament contains much less magnetic turbulence than current models predict, offering new insight into how fast-moving pulsars inject energetic particles into the surrounding galaxy.

"The striking divergence in magnetic field orientations observed between radio and X-ray wavelengths provides compelling evidence for the highly structured nature of these objects," Niccolò Bucciantini, co-author of the study from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, said in the statement. "This marks the first clear indication that particles of different energies occupy distinct regions within the system, hinting at the presence of multiple, and potentially very different, acceleration mechanisms at work."

Their findings were published July 9 in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA's Curiosity rover has spotted a strange honeycomb texture on the surface of Mars. But what is it?

What is it?

Almost 14 years since landing on the Red Planet, Curiosity is still hard at work exploring. And in new observations, Curiosity has revealed an image that is certainly ... peculiar.

Curiosity went to get a closer look at an area first observed from Mars orbit, and found what appears to be a honeycomb structure in on the planet's surface. Polygonal shapes, nearly identical to one another, make up a pattern almost like a Martian wallpaper or carpet.

But what is it? Why does it look like that? What is a honeycomb doing on Mars?

Why is it incredible?

This is one of many mysteries we have yet to solve on Mars. While the team saw this area first from orbit around the planet, when the rover arrived and saw this structure they were surprised, they shared in a blog post.

In addition to the honeycomb texture, the area was littered with dark rocks and strewn around. But even these pebbles lack explanation. Did they "float" down from higher rock levels, did they launch out of Gale crater during some ancient collision or could they possibly even be meteorites from outside of Mars that ended up strewn across the surface? Researchers think any one of these explanations could be possible.

Previous, similar dark stones have been found on Mars with minerals like nickel that are common in meteorites and uncommon in Mars rocks. But are these similar? Perhaps part of a similar collision event? We don't yet know.

As researchers find new mysteries on Mars, they also continue to find new ways to investigate the unknown. With further study, they will explore both these strange honeycombs and the dark rocks scattered amongst them.

Sometimes weeks go by without anything notable happening in the sky. Then along comes something spectacular, like a total solar eclipse, the peak of a major meteor shower or a bright planet reaching a landmark moment in the evening sky. On Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, all three occur almost simultaneously. As a bonus, if you are under a dark sky for the Perseids, the Milky Way's bright central regions will stretch across the southern sky by around midnight.

Exactly what you'll see of the eclipse depends on where you are on Earth. From within a narrow 180-mile-wide path of totality across eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain, a total solar eclipse will briefly turn day into night for lucky locals and intrepid eclipse chasers. Across the U.K., millions will see a partial eclipse of the sun, ranging from 90% to 95%. Across Europe and northwest Africa, an equally deeply eclipsed sun will peak at sunset, creating a truly strange sight. Minutes later, brilliant Venus reaches dichotomy — appearing exactly half-lit in telescopes, while to the naked eye it blazes at magnitude -4.4 in the western twilight. A few hours later, the annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak.

Wherever you are, there will be something worth looking at. Here's exactly what will happen, where and when, depending on where you are (times are from Time and Date).

Iceland or Greenland: a total solar eclipse … and aurora?

If you've traveled to (or live in) western Iceland, or you're booked on an expedition cruise ship on Aug. 12, you're in for a treat. The point of maximum eclipse — 2 minutes 18 seconds — is off the coast of Iceland, accessible by ship, but likely not by many. It's possible that expedition ships in the lower reaches of Scoresby Sund, Greenland, will experience the most totality, with 2 minutes 17 seconds possible at 4:36 p.m. WGST, with the eclipse 25 degrees above the west-southwest. Here, the sun will set at 10:15 p.m., with the darkest time about 12:50 a.m. — there is no truly dark night, just all-night civil twilight. That makes the Perseids and aurora unlikely to be seen even if they're present. Ditto Venus — Greenland is too far north.

In Iceland, totality will begin between 5:43 and 5:50 p.m. GMT, depending on the exact location. It will last longest in regions farthest west, with 2 minutes 13 seconds at Látrabjarg in the remote Westfjords (5:44 p.m.) and 2 minutes 10 seconds at the westernmost coast of Snæfellsnes Peninsula (5:45 p.m.). The eclipse will be 25.5 degrees above the west-southwest. The sun will set at 9:53 p.m. in Reykjavík, with the darkest window from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. (and the darkest time 1:30 a.m.). That makes Perseids and aurora possible — though summer twilight often limits visibility. However, Venus will not be visible after sunset.

Spain: Totality, Venus and the Perseids

For anyone within Spain's path of totality, Aug. 12 promises to be one of the greatest days of skywatching imaginable. The main event comes late in the day as the moon completely covers the sun. In parts of northern and eastern Spain, totality will occur with the sun hanging low above the western horizon, creating one of the most photogenic eclipse scenarios of the century.

In Spain, totality will begin between 8:26 and 8:33 p.m. CEST, depending on the exact location. Its maximum duration in Spain will last longest in regions farthest northwest, with 1 minute 50 seconds at Playa de la Escaladina in Galicia (8:26 p.m.), where the eclipse will be 11 degrees above the west-northwest. It will be at its shortest, at 1 minute 36 seconds, at Bellavista, Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands (8:31 p.m.). The eclipse will be just a couple of degrees above the west-northwest. The sun will set at 9:16 p.m. in Madrid, with a dark night from around midnight through 4:40 a.m. CEST. The darkest part of the night — and the point when the radiant point Perseus will be high above the horizon — will be around 02:00 a.m. CEST.

Unless there's a whopping solar storm (unlikely), concentrate on the Perseid meteor shower, rather than hoping for aurora. Light pollution is irrelevant for a total solar eclipse, but if you've cross-referenced your eclipse-viewing sight with a Light Pollution Map, you'll be in Bortle 4 skies in rural Spain, ready for a potentially unforgettable Perseids (the solar eclipse means by definition that it's taking place at new moon, after all). Under rural Spanish skies, particularly in dark-sky regions away from towns and cities, observers could see 30 to 50 meteors per hour, with occasional bursts producing even more.

It might be wise to have an afternoon nap before the eclipse — it could be a long, exciting night if skies are clear.

U.K: Deep eclipse, Venus and the Perseids

The path of totality misses Britain entirely, but Aug. 12 will still be a remarkable day. Across most of the U.K., more than 90% of the sun will be covered by the moon, with maximum eclipse shortly after 7 p.m. BST. The sun will hang low above the west-northwest horizon as a narrowing crescent, so the best locations will be coastal viewpoints, hilltops and open landscapes with clear western horizons. London, Manchester and Glasgow all experience about 91% coverage, while Cardiff reaches 93%. The deepest eclipse will be seen in the far southwest, with 96% coverage in the Isles of Scilly and almost 96% at Land's End in Cornwall.

Although it will not become as dark as during totality, observers may notice a subtle drop in temperature and a strange dimming of the landscape. Shadows will soften, colors will become muted, and daylight will take on an unusual quality that many first-time eclipse watchers find surprising.

Once the eclipse ends, Venus becomes the next target. Look west after sunset for the dazzling Evening Star. Venus is only days from its greatest elongation and near its best evening appearance of 2026, making it hard to miss. Even a small telescope will reveal its half-lit phase. The Perseids will then peak during the early hours of Aug. 13.

Western Europe: Eclipsed sunset, Venus and the Perseids

For millions of people across Western Europe, Aug. 12 offers a slightly different spectacle. Instead of totality or a partial eclipse in late afternoon, many locations will witness a deeply eclipsed sun setting below the horizon. An eclipsed sunset is surprisingly rare, and particularly one this deep. In some places, more than 90% of the sun will be obscured as it approaches the horizon, creating a dramatic crescent-shaped sunset. In places such as Corsica, the Ligurian coast, Venice, the Alps and parts of central Europe, photographers will have the chance to capture one of the most dramatic sunset eclipses visible anywhere this decade.

With Venus visible across Europe after sunset, as well as the Milky Way and the Perseids peak, Aug. 12 will effectively become an all-night astronomy festival across Europe.

North America: Partial eclipse, Venus and the Perseids

The total solar eclipse — and a deep partial eclipse — may belong to Europe, but North America gets its own small version of the event. A partial solar eclipse will be visible from Alaska to New England, touching 26 U.S. states and every Canadian province. While the eclipse is modest compared with North America's recent total eclipses, millions of people will still be able to participate in the global event.

The deepest U.S. eclipse occurs in Alaska, where Fairbanks will see about 37% of the sun covered and Anchorage almost 28% (8:21 a.m. AKDT). In the Northeast, Maine gets the best view, with about 28% obscuration (1:50 p.m. EDT), while Boston sees 16% (1:55 p.m. EDT) and New York City about 10% (1:54 p.m. EDT). In Canada, the eclipse becomes considerably more impressive. Iqaluit, Nunavut, will see 61% of the sun covered (1:24 p.m. EDT), while St. John's, Newfoundland, will experience more than half of the sun obscured (3:35 p.m. NDT). Every Canadian province will see at least some part of the eclipse. Remember that eclipse glasses are still essential, even for small partial eclipses.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to make the most of these incredible skywatching events, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals are here to help. Interested in capturing the night sky? Check out our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.

SpaceX's next Starship test flight aims to achieve a major milestone by deploying 20 upgraded Starlink satellites, marking the first Starlink Version 3s to deploy in space..

Liftoff for the spacecraft’s upcoming 13th test flight is scheduled for Wednesday, July 16, at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT) from the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. You can watch the launch live on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff. Follow our Starship live blog for more mission updates.

The mission follows a nearly two-month pause after Flight 12 ended with the loss of the Super Heavy booster during its return to the Gulf after stage separation. After reviewing the anomaly and SpaceX's corrective actions, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the company to resume Starship launches.

“The upcoming flight will aim to complete similar objectives targeted on the previous flight test, which debuted the Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles, while also carrying next-generation Starlink V3 satellites for the first time,” SpaceX officials said in a statement announcing the test flight.

As with previous flights, Flight 13's primary goal is to gather engineering data while testing upgrades to the world's most powerful rocket. Here's what to watch for:

The mission will begin with all 33 Raptor 3 engines igniting on the Super Heavy booster, generating up to 18 million pounds (about 8,200 metric tons) of thrust at liftoff. About 2.5 minutes later, the booster will separate from the Starship upper stage and begin its return toward the Gulf of Mexico for a controlled splashdown rather than a launch tower catch. SpaceX is continuing to refine its booster recovery procedures following Flight 12's landing burn failure.

One of Flight 13's biggest milestones will come after stage separation, when Starship is expected to deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites for the first time. The satellites are designed to test Starship's payload deployment capabilities and will intentionally reenter Earth's atmosphere after completing the demonstration rather than remain in orbit.

The flight will also continue testing SpaceX's upgraded Starship vehicle, including improvements to its propulsion system, avionics and overall performance. Engineers will closely monitor the rocket throughout ascent to evaluate how the latest design performs under flight conditions.

After completing its satellite deployment, Starship will continue along a suborbital trajectory before reentering Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The spacecraft's descent will provide additional data on its heat shield, flight controls and guidance systems before ending with a planned splashdown roughly an hour after launch.

While Flight 13 remains another developmental mission, it represents an important step toward making Starship an operational launch vehicle. Successfully deploying Starlink satellites would demonstrate the rocket's ability to begin carrying real payloads while continuing to advance SpaceX's goal of building a fully reusable system for missions to Earth orbit, the moon and eventually Mars.

Landing spacecraft on the moon could contaminate ancient clues about how life may have originated on Earth, a new study finds.

As NASA continues on with its plan of sending astronauts back to the moon with the Artemis program, researchers are exploring what possible unintended consequences may arise from humans visiting the lunar surface. For instance, Artemis IV will land astronauts near the moon's south pole and the agency has future plans for building a longer-term moon base on the lunar surface, which would require many more trips. And indeed, a new study has found the exhaust from spacecraft involved with these landings could expel enough methane to contaminate the moon's surface — possibly destroying molecules that could help to explain how life may have originated on Earth.

"We are trying to protect science and our investment in space," senior study author Silvio Sinibaldi, the planetary protection officer at the European Space Agency, said in a statement. "Our activity can actually hinder scientific exploration."

While experts have had concerns for some time about how rocket launches on Earth pollute our planet and atmosphere, scientists have only really considered this issue with our own planet. This is especially because we haven't been to the moon's surface in over 50 years; concerns of accidental effects of a lunar landing simply haven't been top-of-mind. That's what makes this new study so important. It points to a potential issue that could mean that future moon landings might actually be detrimental to science.

Life's clues on the moon?

So why do we think the signs of life could be hiding on the moon? It's actually hiding in ice. Dark craters near the moon's poles, which exist in perpetual shadow, hold ancient ice. This ice is thought to contain material from asteroids and comets that smashed into the moon billions of years ago. Trapped in lunar ice to this day, these bits of ancient collisions could include what the researchers describe as "prebiotic organic molecules," or molecules that could have preceded life on Earth.

It's thought that these molecules from asteroid and comet visitors could have sparked life on Earth, and by studying those possibly trapped on the moon, researchers could be looking at the molecules that ended up combining and creating life as we know it.

The molecular history of life on Earth is pretty much nonexistent on our own planet, as it was largely destroyed by the billions of years of changes we've experienced. But the moon has remained mostly unchanged, so these wells of ice are a uniquely-preserved sampling of pre-life molecules.

"We know we have organic molecules in the solar system — in asteroids, for example," Sinibaldi said. "But how they came to perform specific functions like they do in biological matter is a gap we need to fill."

This ice exists in a somewhat fragile ecosystem, so left alone in darkness, this ice isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But with Artemis, NASA is planning on sending crewed landers to the moon's south pole. That might pose a problem. With computer models in this new study, researchers have shown that the methane exhaust from these landers could very quickly and permanently contaminate this ancient ice, destroying the molecular evidence sealed within.

Inside the simulations

In those computer models, the researchers simulated how methane, the main organic component expelled by planned lunar landers, would spread across the moon's surface after a landing at the south pole. While the simulations included the effects of solar wind and radiation, the moon's lack of an atmosphere caused the methane to spread incredibly quickly, reaching the moon's north pole in under two lunar days.

Within one lunar week (which is roughly seven months on Earth), over half the methane was trapped at the moon's cold polar areas, with a whopping 42% of the substance trapped at the south pole compared to 12% at the north pole. This methane could collect in the same cold pockets where ice and ancient molecules have been collected for billions of years, possibly contaminating this finite, scientific evidence.

"Their trajectories are basically ballistic," lead author Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, said in the statement. "They just hop around from one point to another."

In better news, there may be a way to circumvent some of this methane disturbance. For instance, the study suggests it's possible that by choosing colder landing sites, scientists can avoid having the methane travel as quickly or as far. Additional simulations are needed to better understand how exhaust compounds travel on the moon, however, as well as the risks that this poses for scientific investigations and if there are other materials lunar trips will involve that could contaminate the environment. Above all, the new study's team emphasizes that as we push toward future lunar exploration, it is key to balance our dreams of settling the moon with preserving its priceless history.

"We have laws regulating contamination of Earth environments like Antarctica and national parks," Paiva said. "I think the moon is an environment as valuable as those."

This work was described in a study published last year in the journal the American Geophysical Union.

SpaceX's massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is scheduled to launch its critical test flight no earlier than Thursday, July 16, at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT) from Starbase, Texas. Our live webcast will begin about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.

You can see our latest updates on the Starship V3 (short for Version 3) rocket, including its test flight goals, system upgrades and more. Flight 13 is the 13th test launch of the Starship vehicle since 2023.

Launch livestream | Starship V3 upgrades explained | SpaceX

SpaceX targeting July 16 for Starship Flight 13

The next Starship launch has arrived!

SpaceX is targeting no earlier than July 16 for the next launch of its massive Starship rocket, the company announced on in a post on X. Flight 13 will be the second launch of the vehicle's Version 3 configuration and will be similar in profile to Flight 12. It will be the second launch for Starship "Version 3" (V3), a bigger, more powerful upgrade from previous Starship designs, and will come a little less than two months after V3's debut.

A 90-minute launch window will begin on Thursday at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT). A livestream of the mission will begin about 30 minutes prior to liftoff and stream on the company's mission page, profile on X and here on Space.com.

Full story: SpaceX targets July 16 for Starship Flight 13, reveals what went wrong on previous launch

Super Heavy booster moved back to hangar

Following a static fire engine test last Friday (July 10), SpaceX has lowered the Flight 13 Super Heavy, Booster 20, from the launch stand and transported the stage back to its hangar at the company's Starbase, Texas, facility.

The booster will roll back to the pad in the next day or so, along with Ship 40, the Flight 13 Starship upper stage. The pair will be stacked a Starbase's pad 2, where it's expected the rocket will undergo at least one additional engine test prior to launch.

SpaceX is still targeting July 16 for liftoff of Starship's 13th test flight, scheduled to get off the ground during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

Read how this launch will deploy SpaceX's first batch up upgraded Starlink Version 3 satellites into space.

How to watch SpaceX launch Starship Flight 13 on July 16

The International Space Station has three new residents.

NASA's Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina lifted off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT; 7:47 p.m. local time in Baikonur), heading toward the orbiting lab.

Their Soyuz executed nominal side booster separation about two minutes after launch, followed by second stage separation about 2.5 minutes later, as the rocket flew at 105 miles (169 kilometers) in altitude. Third stage orbital insertion and separation was completed at about 8 minutes and 46 seconds, putting Russia's Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft and crew on course to chase down the International Space Station (ISS).

The trio caught up to the ISS after just two orbits, docking with the outpost at 1:52 p.m. EDT (1752 GMT). The two spacecraft were flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Mediterranean Sea at the time, NASA officials said during the agency's docking webcast.

That webcast will resume at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) ahead of the opening of the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS, which is expected around 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT).

The MS-29 trio will join the seven astronauts already living aboard the ISS — NASA's Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

This is the first spaceflight for Menon, who was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in December 2021, in the agency's Group 23. He's married to Anna Menon, who was picked in the next astronaut candidate class, Group 24, in September 2025.

Anna Menon has already been to space, though not with NASA. In September 2024, while an employee of SpaceX, she flew on the company's Polaris Dawn mission to Earth orbit. That five-day flight, which was funded and commanded by current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, featured the first-ever commercial spacewalk and reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) — higher than any previous crewed Earth-orbiting mission had gotten.

Anil Menon is a former SpaceX-er as well; he was the company's first-ever flight surgeon.

MS-29's flight is the second-ever space mission for both Dubrov and Kikina. Dubrov lived aboard the ISS from April 2021 to March 2022, and Kikina spent five months on the outpost, from October 2022 to March 2023.

Kikina, the only female member of Russia's active astronaut corps, flew to and from the ISS back then on SpaceX's Crew-5 mission. That was a big deal: She was the first Russian ever to fly on a private U.S. spacecraft, and the first cosmonaut to fly on any American space vehicle since December 2002, when cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergey Treshchov came back to Earth from the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour.

The MS-29 trio will spend about eight months living and working on the orbiting lab. Menon will help conduct a wide variety of scientific experiments during that stretch.

"He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices," NASA officials wrote in a July 9 media advisory.

"Menon also will perform ultrasound using augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods that could eliminate the need for medical support from Earth on future space missions," they added.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:55 p.m. ET with news of successful docking.

Clouds formed from vaporized rock could create the ultimate thermal insulation on one of the most common types of exoplanets discovered so far — the sub-Neptunes — raising temperatures so high that these worlds' solid surfaces melt and turn into oceans of magma.

"This work takes us one step closer to answering the question of what these mysterious worlds are made from," said astronomer Luis Welbanks, of Arizona State University, in a statement.

Sub-Neptunes are planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. They are especially mysterious since we do not have a world of this type in our solar system. They are thought to contain a rocky core surrounded by a deep atmosphere, but not much else is known about their composition and structure. Their atmosphere could be hydrogen-rich like Jupiter's, or it could be abundant with water vapor and carbon-based organic molecules. In some cases, they might even be habitable under the hycean world paradigm, wherein a thick hydrogen atmosphere encases a global ocean of liquid water.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is busy probing the atmosphere of several sub-Neptunes to try and learn more about their bulk composition because their atmosphere should be representative of what such planets are made from, but results so far have been inconclusive.

Atmospheres of sub-Neptunes are deep and dense, meaning crushing pressures close to the boundary between the atmosphere and the solid body of the world can turn minerals into vapor that forms clouds. These minerals include aluminium oxide, iron, magnesium silicate, manganese sulfide, potassium chloride, sodium sulfide and zinc sulfide.

Using detailed computer simulations, a team led by Sagnick Mukherjee of Arizona State University explored what effect these clouds could have on both the surface and atmosphere of a sub-Neptune.

They showed that when these mineral clouds form deep down, they act as efficient insulating blankets that trap heat (and lots of it) leaking out from the core of the planet.

"Among the sub-Neptunes currently being studied with JWST, we were amazed to find that cloud-driven heating can raise the temperature at the planet's atmosphere–interior boundary by roughly over 1,400 to 2,600 degrees Celsius [2,550–4,712 degrees Fahrenheit]," said Mukherjee.

At the same time, because heat is being prevented from escaping, the upper atmosphere cools noticeably.

With all that heat retained close to the surface, the rock begins to melt.

"For some of the planets we modeled, that extra heat is enough to melt the planet's surface, creating a magma ocean," said team-member Matthew Nixon of Arizona State University.

These potential magma planets include GJ 1214b, which orbits a red dwarf star 48 light-years away. At one time it was thought to be a cool water-world, but JWST's discovery in 2025 of metallic vapors and carbon-dioxide haze in GJ 1214b's atmosphere rule this out, and now it seems that its surface, undetectable beneath the thick atmosphere, could be completely molten.

However, the presence of magma oceans opens up possibilities for more complex atmospheric chemistry. Gas seeps out of the magma and diffuses into the atmosphere, in theory enriching it in oxygen, silicon hydride and silicon monoxide, while going the other way the magma absorbs ammonia, methane and water vapor from the atmosphere. In other words, the atmosphere becomes enriched by material from underground, while also becoming depleted in some gases that astronomers would expect to see in greater abundance.

This means that JWST's attempts to learn about the bulk composition of a sub-Neptune exoplanet from the spectrum of its atmosphere could be skewed by this exchange of gases between a magma ocean and the atmosphere. The extra heating deep down will also impact the future of these sub-Neptune planets, since the extra heat will keep their lower atmosphere bloated and prevent the planet from contracting over billions of years.

If the findings are correct, they could place a huge obstacle on sub-Neptunes being habitable. Even if the boundary between the atmosphere and solid body of the planet isn't hot enough to form magma, it would still render the surface too hot to support liquid water or life.

The findings were published on July 8 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The assembly of NASA's next Artemis rocket is well underway, with the recent arrival of one of the launch vehicle's solid fuel booster sections to the agency's integration facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The bottom segment of the left-hand solid rocket booster (SRB) that will help launch Artemis III was transported to KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) this week, according to a NASA social media post. It's one of two SRBs that will be affixed to either side of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which together provide a combined 7.2 million pounds of force — more than 75% of the rocket's power at liftoff.

"Soon, assembly of the rocket will begin as we prepare to send crew aboard Orion to test the rendezvous and docking capabilities needed for future lunar landings," the NASA post said.

It took about one year for NASA to stack the Artemis II SLS once each of the rocket's components were delivered to the VAB. The same timeline gives Artemis III a small amount of wiggle room, as it progresses toward a targeted launch in mid-to-late 2027 — and stacking of the entire rocket may not begin immediately.

The Artemis III SLS core stage arrived in the VAB in May. Unlike the core stage's arrival for Artemis II, Artemis III's was delivered without the engine section. Once that's attached, it may be some time before other components are stacked onto the main vehicle. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has said that the agency aims to complete a wet dress rehearsal on the rocket before the end of the year. In the meantime, other SLS components and SRB segments will continue arriving at the VAB.

Each SRB stands about 177 feet (54 meters) tall. They're packed with polybutadiene acrylonitrile (PBAN), ammonium perchlorate, and aluminum powder, which bring their combined weight to 3.2 million pounds (1.45 million kg). Unlike liquid-fueled rocket engines, once the SRBs' solid propellants ignite, they cannot be turned off. Without them, the four RS-25 engines on SLS's core stage would not be powerful enough to lift the rocket off the launch pad.

Artemis III will be the second crewed mission of the Artemis program — NASA's next-generation push to return astronauts to the moon. And, while Artemis III itself won't actually fly to the moon, it will help progress the hardware and spacecraft technologies the space agency needs to ensure success on future missions to the lunar surface.

Like Artemis II, which flew four astronauts on a 10-day mission around the moon in April, the Artemis III astronauts will launch on SLS aboard the Orion spacecraft — but they won't fly beyond low Earth orbit this time. Instead, the four-person crew will spend about two weeks testing out rendezvous and docking procedures with prototypes for the two Artemis moon landers, both of which have been privately contracted by NASA.

The space agency has partnered with SpaceX and Blue Origin for those vehicles, each of which is expected to launch once the Artemis III crew are on orbit. They'll first meet up with Blue Origin's lander, Blue Moon. After docking, the astronauts will have the opportunity to enter Blue Moon's crew cabin, where they will also have the chance to test parts of the Artemis extravehicular activity (EVA) suit designed for astronauts to wear on the lunar surface.

A rendezvous with SpaceX's Starship will follow Orion's stint with Blue Moon. SpaceX has indicated it will fly a boilerplate Starship V3 (Version 3) vehicle equipped with a docking adapter, but it will not have a crew cabin. V3 is SpaceX's newest version of Starship, which has been upgraded for high launch efficiency and capacity, but it will lack a fully developed life support system in time for the Artemis III launch next year.

If all goes according to plan and NASA is able to maintain its current mission timeline, the first moon landing of the Artemis program will take place on Artemis IV, scheduled to launch in late 2028.

SpaceX is targeting this week for the next launch of its massive Starship vehicle.

Following engine tests on both Starship stages in the last two weeks — igniting all six Raptor 3s on the "Ship" upper stage and all 33 Raptor 3s on the "Super Heavy" first stage — SpaceX is proceeding with the launch of Starship Flight 13, which is scheduled for no earlier than Thursday (July 16), according to a July 11 SpaceX social media post.

It will be the second launch for Starship "Version 3" (V3), a bigger, more powerful upgrade from previous Starship designs, and will come a little less than two months after V3's debut on Flight 12. To validate those upgrades, SpaceX didn't add any major objectives to Starship Flight 12 that hadn't already been proven on the spacecraft's previous V2 configuration. But the new design didn't quite check all the necessary boxes last time around, so Flight 13 will largely attempt an improved outcome of the same mission.

Though still in its development phase, Starship is designed for full reusability. Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 first-stage booster, which is equipped with legs capable of touching the rocket down on coastal landing zones or one of the company's droneships at sea, both Ship and Super Heavy are designed for a return directly to the launch site, where chopstick-like arms on the "Mechazilla" tower catch the stages out of mid-air.

SpaceX has yet to attempt such a recovery with Ship but has succeeded in doing so with Super Heavy three times so far. Two of those caught boosters were then reflown on subsequent launches. When flying the new V3 hardware during Flight 12, though, SpaceX opted for Super Heavy to perform a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, rather than risk launch pad infrastructure on an unproven vehicle, but Super Heavy didn't make it to the planned touchdown zone.

According to a new SpaceX analysis, a sequence change in Ship's engines, which ignite before the two rocket halves physically detach in a maneuver known as "hot staging," led to a 90-degree error in Super Heavy's orientation after separation. Super Heavy's boostback burn was also cut short when five of its 33 engines failed to relight. SpaceX says it has introduced a modified startup sequence for Ship and hardware updates to Super Heavy to address the orientation anomaly and ignition issues, respectively, "along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment."

Ship ran into a bit of trouble during Flight 12 but also managed to pull off some firsts. One of the spacecraft's three vacuum-optimized Raptors was lost 40 seconds after stage separation, but it still reached its designated suborbital trajectory, demonstrating its "engine out" capabilities, according to the SpaceX update. The loss did, however, prevent Ship's in-space engine relight attempt. SpaceX traced the failure to "interconnected causes" and has introduced a number of fixes for the upcoming Flight 13, "with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine."

Flight 12 also featured the first deployment of two of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites equipped with cameras for inspecting Ship's heatshield tiles and exterior conditions while in space. They were deployed with several Starlink V3 mass simulators, a payload that's getting an upgrade of its own for Flight 13.

Stowed inside Ship's payload bay for Flight 13 are the first functional Starlink V3 satellites that Starship will deliver to space. SpaceX plans to eventually launch perhaps 100,000 of the upgraded version of its internet satellite constellation spacecraft, which it says will increase the capacity and speed of its wireless network services. SpaceX is including 20 Starlink V3 satellites aboard Flight 13, which will be released for functionality testing while in space. Six of those will be outfitted with cameras for the same type of heatshield inspection performed during Flight 12. Ultimately, due to Starship's suborbital trajectory on this launch, all of these satellites are expected to burn up in Earth's atmosphere about 20 minutes after they are deployed.

For Flight 13, Super Heavy's main objectives will be the successful launch and separation from the Ship upper stage, a complete boostback burn and a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the deployment of Ship's 20 Starlink V3 payloads, SpaceX is also planning the in-space relight of one of the spacecraft's Raptor engines, followed by the successful descent and soft splashdown of the stage in the Indian Ocean.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the closure of its investigation into SpaceX's Flight 12 mishaps this morning (July 13), approving the compnay's corrective actions and clearing the way for Flight 13.

SpaceX is targeting the launch of Flight 13 during a 90-minute window beginning on Thursday at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT). A livestream of the mission will begin about 30 minutes prior to liftoff and stream on the company's mission page, profile on X and here on Space.com.

If everything goes smoothly, it's very likely that SpaceX will attempt the first Starship V3 recovery back at its Starbase, Texas, launch site for either Super Heavy or both stages on the following mission, Flight 14, but there are a number of other technical achievements Starship has left on its checklist before the vehicle can become fully operational. Those include launching into a stable orbit, demonstrating successful rendezvous and docking with other spacecraft, and conquering the technological hurdle of transferring and maintaining cryogenic fuels for long-term use in zero-g.

SpaceX is hoping to accomplish all that within the year — quite a tight timeline. NASA has contracted Starship as one of two lunar lander vehicles to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on the agency's Artemis program missions and is expecting a crew-capable version to be ready by 2028 for Artemis IV. The company plans to fly a boilerplate Starship V3 equipped with a docking adapter for NASA's Artemis III mission in 2027, which will launch astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft for rendezvous operations demonstrations with Starship, as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, in low Earth orbit.

Disney+’s imaginative anime anthology series, "Star Wars: Visions", is getting a standalone expansion next month with "Star Wars: Visions Presents –The Ninth Jedi".

This 8-episode limited series is a continuation of the saga of Lah Kara, Margrave Juro, and their ragtag crew in the search for her kidnapped father. "Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi" debuts on Disney+ on Aug. 5, 2026.

Fans were first introduced to the intriguing story in "Star Wars: Visions" Volume 1’s chapter titled "The Ninth Jedi", and now writer/director Kenji Kamiyama and his animation studio Production IG will revisit Kara’s world to elaborate more on the mythology behind lightsabers of different hues.

In the original 2021 episode, viewers met a bright Force-sensitive girl named Kara and her sabersmith father, Zhima, as they harvest Kyber Crystals to forge new lightsabers for Margrave Juro, the leader of an outer rim planet called Hy Izlan.

Juro is collecting worthy Jedi to help repopulate the Jedi Order, but evil Sith mercenaries are hiding within his candidates’ ranks. Kamiyama’s short initially presented the cool notion of lightsabers changing colors to reflect their users’ true links to the Force.

A direct sequel to Kamiyama's episode, "The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope," was delivered by anime master Naoyoshi Shiotani and premiered on Oct. 29, 2025, for "Star Wars: Visions" Volume 3. Lucasfilm's new show takes place shortly after the events seen in the two "Star Wars: Visions" shorts as Kara advances her training and searches for her father.

"Every time we finished one of the anthologies, the first conversation would be, 'God, I’d love to expand that story,'" James Waugh, Lucasfilm Senior V.P. and "Star Wars: Visions" executive producer, told TechRadar last year after the project was announced at Star Wars Celebration Japan.

"We love the shorts, but Kathy [Kennedy] heard that, and there was a moment to say, 'Let’s see what could happen if we expanded this.' That’s really where 'Visions Presents' comes from. If we could give a bigger canvas to paint on, what would we get? We’ve been so impressed with what Kamiyama and his Production IG team has delivered so far."

Directed by Shunsuke Tada and with Kenji Kamiyama acting as supervising director, "Star Wars: Visions Presents - The Ninth Jedi" arrives Aug. 5 on Disney+ and Hulu.

The Extremely Large Telescope just passed a serious milestone while coming together. But it's not done yet; the immense telescope is about to get even larger.

What is it?

The European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO)'s Extremely Large Telescope is under construction on a mountaintop in Chile.

In this new photo, we can really get an idea of the telescope's size. The snapshot was captured during a milestone moment for the crew working on the observatory. They rotated the telescope's structure around its vertical axis for the first time.

This wasn't just an exercise for the dedicated crew working on the ELT, but rather an important test. The team needed to ensure this rotational motion works smoothly to confirm it's possible to point the telescope at any area of the night sky.

Why is it incredible?

This rotation was no small feat with a telescope weighing about 7.7 million pounds (3,500 metric tons), and we can see some of the crew who made it happen posing with their handiwork. They had to first rotate the telescope by hand just centimeters at a time. This push led to auxiliary motors taking over to complete the full rotation.

At its current size, the ELT is enormous. But it will actually get bigger and heavier. Later on in the process, mirrors and science instruments will be installed, skyrocketing the telescope to over 10 million pounds (4,600 metric tons).

"For me, this is a beautiful reminder of what can be achieved when people push in the same direction, literally and figuratively,” Roberto Tamai, the ELT’s Program Manager at ESO, shown on the right in this image, said in a statement.

Tamai is shown standing next to Marco Sciarra, Executive President of Cimolai (a company working on the telescope's construction), in the middle and Pascal Martinez, ESO's Project Manager for the Dome and Main Structure of the ELT, on the left.

HYDERABAD, India — When Space.com visited Skyroot Aerospace's Max-Q campus here in February, the company's first orbital rocket, Vikram-1, was still coming together.

Inside the company's 55,000-square-foot (5,110 square meters) rocket factory, engineers sat before computer screens, running critical simulations and systems checks on Vikram-1's Orbit Adjustment Module, the liquid-fueled upper stage that stands at the center of the room and will guide the rocket's final maneuvers in space. Unlike the rocket's three solid-fueled lower stages, the upper stage can restart its engine, allowing Vikram-1 to deploy multiple customer satellites into different orbits during a single mission.

At the time, it was one of the last major components awaiting an overnight transport to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, where the rocket's lower stages had already arrived for final integration.

Five months later, the fully assembled, seven-story rocket stands on the coastal launch pad, monitored by a launch team of about 200 people — roughly one-fifth of Skyroot's workforce — preparing for a launch window that opened on July 12 and runs through Aug. 4. (The company has not yet announced a firm target date.)

If all goes as planned, Vikram-1's mission, named Aagaman — Sanskrit for "arrival" — will place multiple customer payloads into low Earth orbit, at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). Success would be historic: No private Indian company has ever launched a satellite to orbit.

The manifest includes Skyroot's SCOPE satellite; a technology demonstration from the German company DCUBED; Indian startup Grahaa Space's SOLARAS S3 satellite; and Embrace, a robotic arm designed to capture debris in orbit, from fellow Indian company Cosmoserve Space.

Vikram-1 will also carry two symbolic payloads — a floral-shaped artwork called Cosmic Bloom from the lab-grown-jewelry company Cosmos Diamonds, and a miniature 18-karat gold rocket by artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada that honors Indian scientific pioneers Vikram Sarabhai (after whom the Vikram rocket series is named), C.V. Raman and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

A successful mission would also move Skyroot closer to its goal of offering dedicated launches for small satellites that require precise orbital destinations. Rather than flying as secondary payloads aboard larger rockets, customers would be able to purchase missions tailored to their own orbital requirements — a model most successfully employed these days by the California-based company Rocket Lab.

Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana likens the strategy to booking a cab rather than taking a train.

"The 'cab' market is what we want to put our mark on with the Vikram series," Chandana told Space.com. "There are very few opportunities for customers to reach customized orbits today."

Aagaman is the first of three planned development flights intended to validate Vikram-1 before Skyroot begins commercial operations. If the vehicle performs as expected, the company hopes to scale production to one orbital rocket a month from its two Hyderabad campuses, according to Chandana.

"The whole idea is to go there as prepared as possible and to attain as much data as possible from the launch, so that we can get to fast-paced, high-frequency launches as soon as possible," he said.

Skyroot first drew headlines in 2022, when its Vikram-S vehicle became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach space.

The vehicle was a suborbital technology demonstrator, climbing to an altitude of roughly 54 miles (88 km) before falling back to Earth. (That's above the boundary of space according to some, but not all, metrics.) According to Chandana, about 80% of the technologies now flying on Vikram-1 — including its carbon-composite structures, solid propulsion system, avionics and thermal protection materials — were first validated during that mission.

Even so, developing a rocket capable of reaching orbit took another four years. Roughly four times larger than Vikram-S, Vikram-1 must not only reach an altitude of 280 miles (450 km) but also accelerate its payloads to about 8 km (5 miles) per second — fast enough to remain in orbit around Earth. Along the way, it must execute a precisely timed sequence of stage separations before relying on its restartable liquid-fueled upper stage to place satellites into their intended orbits — capabilities that Skyroot has extensively tested on the ground but has yet to demonstrate in flight.

"We were very optimistic that we will get to an orbital launch in maybe two, three years from there," said Chandana. "However, rocket science is rocket science."

"We learned a lot of things on the go," he added. "Because of that optimism, we were able to process progress very fast."

When Chandana and co-founder Bharath Daka left the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to establish Skyroot in 2018, India's private launch industry was almost nonexistent. The country had yet to adopt a national space policy or create a formal framework for private investment, and startups had no established pathway to use government launch facilities. Instead, Skyroot relied on India's existing aerospace supplier base, the expertise of former ISRO engineers and the founders' belief that India's proximity to the equator would eventually help make the country an attractive base for commercial launches. (Earth spins faster near the equator, giving rockets launched from low latitudes an extra push toward orbit.)

"We just took the leap of faith," Chandana said.

That bet paid off. In 2020, the Indian government opened the space sector to private companies by establishing the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center (IN-SPACe). The move, followed by a new space policy in 2023, allowed startups to independently design, test and launch their own space technologies while also giving them access to ISRO's launch pads, propulsion test stands, and other facilities.

"That accelerates our development cycles, because we need not invest and put energy into building facilities," Chandana said.

Since the reforms, India's space sector has grown from a state-dominated enterprise to an ecosystem of more than 400 startups. Jitendra Singh, India's minister of state for science and technology, recently estimated that the country's space economy, valued at roughly $8.4 billion in 2022, could expand to about $40 billion over the next decade as private investment and launch activity accelerate.

Skyroot is already looking beyond small satellites to capture a share of that growing market. Chandana said the company, now valued at $1.1 billion after raising $60 million in May, plans to develop larger launch vehicles capable of carrying heavier payloads while investing in reusable rocket technology to decrease launch costs.

"There's a very attractive market for the bigger payloads and bigger vehicles as well," Chandana said. Reusable rockets, he added, will become increasingly important particularly for launching big satellite constellations.

For now, however, the company's attention is fixed on the rocket standing on the launch pad in Sriharikota.

The final days before launch are among the most operationally demanding for the team. Chandana said there is also a palpable sense of excitement in the debut of India's first privately developed orbital rocket, particularly for the company's young workforce, many of whom are experiencing their first orbital launch campaign.

"We have been preparing ourselves for quite some time towards this launch," said Chandana. "For us, the mood is very energetic right now."

Tiny pieces of space junk only 2 inches (5 centimeters) in size are cluttering a valuable orbital region where some of the costliest satellites reside, a new study has found.

Researchers from the University of Warwick in the U.K. found that the geostationary orbit — a region of space at the altitude of 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) — is full of dangerous, previously unseen bits of space junk that could destroy satellites.

The geostationary orbit is quite unique. Satellites at this altitude circle Earth in sync with the planet's rotation, appearing permanently suspended above a fixed spot on the equator. A single satellite in the geostationary ring has a constant view of a vast portion of the globe. This feature has been taken advantage of for decades for things like TV broadcasting, internet delivery, Earth observation and weather monitoring. But, as it appears, those satellites might not be safe up there at all.

"The debris in geosynchronous orbit is a potential minefield," Stuart Eves, the study’s co-author and space consultant at SJE Space, said in a statement. "No one in their right mind would enter a terrestrial minefield without a mine detector. Similarly, no one in their right mind should launch a satellite to GEO without an adequate debris survey."

The researchers uncovered the previously invisible debris by re-examining a dataset from an earlier space debris survey conducted by astronomers using the 8.3-foot (2.54-meter) Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, Canary Islands. They ran the data through new image processing algorithms to distinguish smaller and much fainter fragments than was previously possible in the distant geostationary orbit.

"The blind stacking technique is a very powerful method for improving the sensitivity limit of astronomical datasets," Ben Cooke, a research fellow at the University of Warwick's Center for Space Domain Awareness and co-author of the paper, said in the statement. "It involves testing many potential paths in an image sequence along which hidden targets might be moving and stacking the images to help bring those targets above the noise floor. This project shows a successful, real-world application of the method."

The researchers found 25 previously missed debris tracks in the images, 80% of which were caused by previously unknown objects.

The finding is concerning as space debris at such high altitudes behaves differently from that circling closer to Earth. The residual atmosphere at 22,000 miles is almost non-existent, meaning there is no air drag to force the orbital clutter spiral into the atmosphere and burn up.

"Debris in the neighborhood of the geostationary belt is particularly concerning," James Blake, also a Warwick research fellow and the study’s co-author, said in the statement. "It's very far away, well above the Earth's atmosphere, so small objects tend to be incredibly faint and difficult to detect, and any debris that's generated will stick around indefinitely."

While orbits near Earth naturally clear up as the residual air at these altitudes slows the junk fragments down, at the higher altitude, the concentrations of such fragments will forever keep rising, making the region ever more tricky to operate in.

Moreover, the satellites that reside in this unique orbital region tend to be very large and expensive, designed for much longer missions than those making up megaconstellations in low Earth orbit. These satellites, frequently fitted with solar panels spanning 100 feet (30 meters) or more, can suffer substantial damage from a collision with the tiniest piece of junk.

"Pieces of space junk can be moving very quickly relative to one another, as much as several kilometers every second," Blake said. "The energies involved are really high, and even small debris can cause a lot of damage to very expensive satellites, so small things really matter."

The researchers are now looking to analyze additional images obtained by other telescopes around the world to get a fuller understanding of the scale of the debris contamination in the region.

The study was published in the Journal of Astronautical Sciences in June.

The first of perhaps tens of thousands of sunlight-directing space mirrors just got cleared for liftoff.

California-based startup Reflect Orbital just got a license from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch and operate its first demonstration satellite, a spacecraft that will unfurl a reflective surface that measures about 60 feet (18 meters) on a side.

That satellite, called Eärendil-1 is targeted to fly later this year. And it could be the first of many: Reflect Orbital aims to operate 50,000 or more such mirror-craft in low Earth orbit by 2035, beaming reflected sunlight down to a variety of customers on the surface.

"We're grateful to the FCC for recognizing the importance of testing novel technologies in space," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's co-founder and CEO, said in an emailed statement on Friday (July 10).

"This license is the first step toward rigorously testing our technology's efficacy and the safeguards we have developed," he added. "We're excited to demonstrate how our technology works and to introduce transformative, clean technology the world urgently needs."

That technology could aid a variety of industries and endeavors, according to Reflect Orbital.

"Imagine the endless possibilities when sunlight is not limited by geography or time of day," the company's website reads. "A search-and-rescue team locates a missing person in minutes. A city has safer, evenly lit streets without the carbon emissions. Construction projects complete in half the time with teams able to work through the night safely."

The planned mirror constellation will also boost the productivity of solar arrays on Earth, allowing them to take more of the electricity-generating load from polluting options such as fossil fuels, according to the company.

Not everybody is thrilled about Reflect Orbital's plans, however. Satellite megaconstellations in general are controversial. Some folks object to how they're changing the night sky, for example, and others worry that deorbiting huge numbers of satellites will pollute Earth's atmosphere with heavy metals.

There are some specific concerns about Reflect Orbital's plans as well — namely, that it will introduce a new type of light pollution for people and ecosystems to deal with.

"The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation," John Barentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory in Tucson, Arizona and a consultant at Dark Sky Consulting, previously told Space.com.

"That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well," he added.

Reflect Orbital stresses that it will do its best to minimize such potential impacts.

"We design for safety in three ways: 1) the light is contained within the spot, 2) the light can be turned off quickly and at any time so that none of it reaches the Earth, and 3) we can intentionally avoid sensitive areas like research observatories or protected habitats," the company's website states.

"The light is not bright enough to start fires or harm eyes, even when viewed through a telescope, and cannot be concentrated past maximum natural sunlight irradiance," it adds.

Space is incomprehensibly vast. So huge that the human mind struggles to even conceptualize it. The observable universe spans roughly 93 billion light-years. Even our own humble galaxy, the Milky Way — a few tiny stitches of the universal canvas — stretches across 100,000 light-years and contains hundreds of billions of stars.

It's no wonder, then, that space video games struggle so mightily with anything approaching a "realistic" interpretation of those incredible distances, especially in an age where we have yet to invent a technology that can traverse them in a reasonable time.

The Artemis 2 mission's Orion module got up to speeds of around 25,000 mph during its trans lunar injection burn. Ignoring fuel and safety concerns, at those speeds, it would still take us at least 80,000 years to reach our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri.

So how do game developers manage to distill some of the awe of the vastness of space while making it feel like a manageable space? How do they shrink space to a navigable size without making it feel small or claustrophobic?

I spoke to astrophysicist Dr. Jeffrey Bennett, founder of Big Kid Science and author of "The Scale of the Universe", to get a sense of the scope of the problem.

The true scale of space

"On a 1 to 10 billion scale — which makes the Sun about the size of a large grapefruit — Earth is smaller than the ball point in a pen and located about 15 meters (49 feet) away from the Sun," explains Bennett. "On that same scale, the Moon — the farthest a human being has ever traveled — lies only about 4 centimeters (1½ inches) away from us. The planets of our solar system are much farther, though you can still walk to the outermost planets in only 10 minutes or so."

Bennett said most science fiction films and games get the scale wrong by making long-distance travel look too easy. Considering the above 1-to-10 billion-scale representation, for instance, and given that reaching the outermost planets in our system — far further than any human being has ever travelled — would take ten minutes, "to reach the nearest stars, you’d have to walk the distance across the United States."

Just simulating a small part of the existing universe would push current hardware to its limits, even with crutches like procedural generation. Developers use various techniques, like level-of-detail scaling, instancing, and streaming, to create the illusion of vastness without melting hardware.

Bennett also talks about how scale works in the case of interstellar objects like asteroids and maneuvering around them.

Films and games, he says, "tend to make it look very difficult to avoid collisions with asteroids, with spacecraft having to dart this way and that to pass through an asteroid region safely. In fact, while there are many millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt of our solar system, the full region is so large that it would take incredibly bad luck to crash into an asteroid by accident. That is why spacecraft studies of asteroids require careful planning to get a spacecraft close enough to any asteroid to get photos and other data."

The reality is that even in its most populated regions, asteroids are typically hundreds of thousands to millions of kilometers apart in our system's asteroid belt. Standing on one of the asteroids, it would be incredibly unlikely that you'd be able to see even one of the largest other asteroids with the naked eye.

How games cope with the enormity of space

"This absolutely IS a design conflict that all space games have to solve," said Bernd Lehahn, Founder and Managing Director of Egosoft, the company that makes the successful X franchise of space simulators (most recently X4: Foundations).

"On the one hand, space must feel very large, or else players will feel cheated. Space and sci-fi have always been about the dream of infinite distances and exploration in a seemingly endless universe. At the same time, most games, the X games included, do not want to force players through unnecessarily long flight times or, god forbid, boredom."

Lehahn says his studio tries to strike a balance between areas that feel more content dense with regions that feel more like an unsettled frontier, to impart a sense of the true emptiness of space.

"There should be room for both extremes: dense, highly populated regions, often with artificial means of transportation that allow the player to find and visit many important places relatively quickly, but also the empty, remote, fringe areas of space, where the experience is much slower, but where exploration happens, and the uncharted map allows for mystery and secrets."

Finding a solution to modeling and traversing the vastness of space has been an issue for Egosoft from the release of the original X game back in 1999, and continues to be something the studio grapples with today. The reality is that most of space is empty, so empty that you don't even have visual cues to indicate you're moving through it. Traveling through it without some kind of cheat or compression would involve unimaginable stretches of black emptiness with nothing happening, but too much compression begins to feel artificial.

"X4: Foundations probably has the most sophisticated solution to this conflict," Lehahn said. For the latest game, the team combines a number of solutions. It starts with scaled tiers of engine technologies with increasingly limited steering. Faster, more powerful engines allow for increasingly speedy, but more straight-line or on-rails travel.

The team also uses the conceit of "jump gates" to leap across huge swaths of the universe in a blink, as well as teleportation and time acceleration to similarly compress travel. There are also space highways with slipstream acceleration to hurry things along.

Importantly, the X games also often give players things to do during the downtime of space travel. Giving players minor, uneventful tasks or other distractions can help fill out long stretches of uninterrupted travel. Above all else, Lehahn wants to ensure players are enjoying themselves.

"X4: Foundations is still a game. We want it to feel as realistic as possible—allow players to experience the universe and truly believe the 'sectors' are endless, planets are real size, and you can move in relation to planets and even larger celestial objects. But sometimes, if there is a conflict between fun gameplay and realism, then we may have to compromise on realism a bit."

A different approach

Rather than compress space into a manageable slice, the Elite Dangerous team at Frontier Developments takes on a much more ambitious challenge.

"We have a 1:1 scale Milky Way," says Executive Producer Gauthier Verquerre. "Roughly 400 billion star systems."

To create that vast canvas, the team uses a technology called the Stellar Forge, which uses real astronomical catalog data and models phenomena like the collision of stellar systems and the way stars and planets form to procedurally generate systems. The systems are generated once when a system is discovered and regenerated in the same way whenever a player visits them.

One of the most daunting challenges Elite Dangerous faces is that the game doesn't just model the galaxy on a macro scale. It also has to generate planetary surfaces and space station interiors for players to explore.

"Throughout the universe, we have these spectacular stellar phenomena which players are out there discovering every day," said Verquerre. "The flip side of that is that we have players meeting in the same star systems, or on the planetary surface. We have to represent both the huge 1:1 scale of space that we have in the game for interstellar elements like Lagrange clouds or nebulae, and the personal scale of 'I'm on foot in a planetary settlement.'"

Despite releasing way back in 2014, only a tiny fraction of the space the game simulates has been explored by players.

According to Verquerre, "There's still over 99% of the universe out there, waiting to be explored, where any Commander can be the first to add their name to the system and say 'I was the first one to see this'. We also added System Colonisation last year, allowing our players to construct space stations and planetary settlements. That's been really rewarding for us, seeing the rate at which the bubble has expanded."

To empower players to explore that nearly infinite playground, Elite Dangerous (like X4) takes a tiered approach. Three methods of travel provide increasing compression of space/travel time.

"There's Deep Space, where ships move at ‘slow’ speeds (around 300m/s, under Mach 1) to access individual gameplay actions like combat or mining," Verquerre told me, "Supercruise, which is essentially a form of FTL travel within a system useful for scanning systems, and Hyperspace, where players travel between star systems through a tunnel."

The game also recently introduced a fourth tier of movement, dubbed Supercruise Overcharge, which allows players to navigate star systems at a much greater speed. Even with these many systems for speeding up transit, however, traversing such unimaginably vast distances can eat up a huge amount of time, and Frontier has tried to ensure that travel is peppered with events and resource management to keep players engaged.

"It's all about the player," Verquerre explains. "Explorers often want a little solitude, or an unexpected encounter, whilst our traders are considering the risk of what they're carrying. Fuel and heat management tend to be primary considerations; no one wants to be marooned out in deep space! There are also interdictions, where a Commander can be pulled out of a jump and find themselves hunted."

"Additionally, those long trips that our players are taking out into deep space mean that small damage adds up, canopy cracks and moments of tension take the beauty of space and translate it almost instantly into abject fear."

The magic and awe of the staggering scope of space is a core part of the Elite Dangerous mystique, and it's not lost on Verquerre.

"I remember a journey I once made to Beagle Point, one of the most remote star systems found in Elite Dangerous, which I’d consider to be one of the most memorable gaming moments in my life. The sense of achievement in reaching a system that you’ve plotted out at the end of a journey is something very tangible, and it always makes me look forward to the next adventure."

A (nearly) infinite challenge

Space games don't fail to simulate the scale of the cosmos because developers lack ambition or imagination.

The reality is that the universe operates on scales that challenge not only the capacity of the human behind them, but also that of our machines to reproduce them. Bridging that gap requires not just bigger maps, but smarter design, and a recognition that sometimes, the awe of the infinite matters more than the numbers behind it.

"X4: Foundations" and "Elite Dangerous" are both available to play now on PC. You can also pick up Dr Bennett's book, "The Scale of the Universe", on Amazon.

Nearly 150 million people shared in the "moon joy" of Artemis II on NASA channels, setting a new agency record in the process.

NASA numbers indicate that 149.4 million people used agency platforms in March and April to follow the four astronauts of Artemis II as they prepped for their mission, lifted off aboard the Space Launch System rocket, flew by the moon and finally splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The viewership figure includes the mission's 24/7 livestreams of mission activities and views from the Orion spacecraft.

"Artemis II's human‑spaceflight narrative, real‑time crew updates, and highly visual moments drew millions of new followers across platforms," the agency stated of the historic lunar flyby mission, which ran from April 1 to April 10.

On board were NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The quartet flew farther than any human before them while making the first journey to the moon since Apollo 17's landing in 1972.

Glover, Koch and Hansen became the first Black person, woman and non-American, respectively, to fly beyond low Earth orbit, and the crew engaged repeatedly in live events with politicians, journalists, students and other audiences from afar.

The live broadcast drew praise on social media for showing the work of the astronauts, including struggles with toilet venting, the crew's descriptions of the lunar surface and a moving group hug when the crew suggested naming a lunar crater after Wiseman's late wife, Carroll.

Launch (April 1)

NASA's official Artemis II launch webcast reached a peak of nearly 3.67 million simultaneous viewers. That's a record, surpassing other big launches in recent agency history, NASA stated, including that of the uncrewed Artemis I mission to lunar orbit in November 2022 or the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021. (The agency did not disclose in the release how many views each event received.)

Roughly 16.6 million people watched the Artemis II launch live across agency platforms, with that number rising to 23.9 million views when taking into account those who tuned in after the fact. NASA's Spanish-language broadcast alone received a "landmark peak" of 458,366 simultaneous views, which has since risen to 2.8 million total views, according to the agency.

Lunar flyby (April 6)

NASA's lunar flyby broadcast alone "delivered one of the largest peak audiences ever recorded," according to the agency. As many as 1,471,069 people tuned in at the same time. Nearly 900,000 of those folks watched on YouTube, and about 190,000 viewers tuned in via X or Twitch.

Splashdown (April 10)

The dramatic reentry, splashdown and recovery of the four Artemis 2 astronauts generated a peak of 3,838,418 live viewers on agency platforms — nearly 5% higher than the liftoff's peak viewership.

NASA attributed the increase to interest in the "riskiest moments" that some global news outlets highlighted about the mission, "particularly Orion's re-entry and heat‑shield performance." (Unexpected issues with Artemis I's heat shield drew concerns from some when the agency flew the same design on Artemis II — although all turned out well, partly because NASA modified Artemis II's reentry trajectory.) Some news outlets, however, have said global interest came because the astronauts showed "worldly harmony" and shared their experiences with "heartfelt words."

Total, non-simultaneous live views of the splashdown on agency platforms clocked in at 24.1 million, which rises to 29.5 million when taking into account people who tuned in after the fact. But when bringing in a selection of the major broadcasters who covered the landing, NASA said that viewership rose to "hundreds of millions of potential viewers worldwide."

The agency focused on select streaming platforms in its analysis, including HBO Max, Netflix, Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. News networks were not included. The streaming platforms released subscriber numbers, but not mission viewership numbers. HBO Max had between 120 million and 150 million global subscribers during the mission, Netflix 325 million paid global subscribers (as Netflix allows some account sharing), Peacock between 36 million and 41 million U.S. subscribers, and Amazon Prime Video up to 275 million global subscribers, according to NASA.

Websites

NASA said a "major surge" came in agency website traffic because of Artemis II.

• Entire mission: NASA.gov received 125.1 million page views during the mission, which was a 150% increase over the 50 million who logged in during the entire month of March. A website showing Orion's orbit, called "Artemis II Mission in Real Time," or AROW, "surpassed" 11 million cumulative views since launch, although NASA did not say whether the AROW views continued to be counted after the mission concluded.
• Launch day (April 1): The mission's debut brought 17.6 million page views across all NASA sites, from 8.3 million individual visitors.
• Lunar flyby (April 6): More than 16.5 million page views came to NASA websites from 6.2 million individual visitors. As a part of the total page views, the NASA homepage got 2.3 million, while AROW showed 1.9 million.
• Splashdown (April 10): More than 6.1 million people logged on to NASA websites on splashdown day, generating 16 million page views. Of that figure, AROW alone generated 1 million page views.

Social media

NASA tracked 261 million individuals engaging with its social media accounts (which were not specified) between March 27 and April 13. Splashdown was the only milestone selected for individual analysis, with 35 million engagements shown on April 10.

"Public reaction to NASA's Artemis II mission remained largely steady across launch week, with neutral and positive posts dominating the online conversation. Neutral sentiment consistently led daily discussion, ranging from 47 to 60%, while positive reactions accounted for 30 to 42%, fueled by excitement over the crew's historic lunar journey, striking mission imagery, and renewed interest in deep space exploration," the agency stated of the engagement.

NASA also noted "strong amplification" on social media from "major news outlets, brands, and international partners." The Canadian Space Agency, working with other Canadian government departments and agencies, was the major international partner on Artemis II because of Hansen and backup CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons (who also served as CAPCOM during lunar flyby), among other mission contributions. CSA hosted several live mission events in Canada, and had extensive social media engagement. The European Space Agency, which contributed the service module for Orion, also posted frequently during the mission.

NASA experienced "major social media growth" through Artemis II, with these figures below said to encompass the milestones between liftoff and splashdown. "Collectively, these gains highlight how Artemis II's human‑spaceflight narrative, real‑time crew updates, and highly visual moments drew millions of new followers across platforms," the agency stated.

• NASA's Instagram added 4.6 million followers. (The agency did not include the baseline number of followers during the mission in April, but as of July 7 it stands at 104 million).
• NASA's Artemis account on Instagram grew by 2 million, which was said to be "a 66 percent increase" while the mission was ongoing.
• The agency also noted "significant gains" on X, Facebook and YouTube. Numbers were not released for X. YouTube subscribers increased by 2 million during the mission in April; the baseline number was not disclosed, but as of July 7 numbers stand at 15 million. Facebook reached 1.7 million more people; as of July 7, the agency has 28 million followers on that platform.

Miscellaneous

NASA also highlighted a selection of its campaigns before and during the mission to engage the public's interest but released few metrics about how these contributed to overall viewership and engagement.

• The moon-mascot campaign: Thousands of people from 50 countries contributed ideas for a zero-gravity indicator for Artemis II, which ultimately ended up being "Rise" from eight-year-old Lucas Ye.
• Sending public names to the moon: Rise carried an SD card containing 5.6 million names submitted, from individuals around the world, to fly around the moon.
• Other partnerships: Artemis II was also highlighted on a Google Doodle on April 1, a Spotify playlist that featured the crew's wakeup songs, and on Merriam-Webster's Facebook page.

A company just produced kidney and liver tissue in space for the first time, using a method called bioprinting, which 3D-prints living tissue.

The announcement comes from California-based Auxilium Biotechnologies, whose AMP-1 orbital bioprinter made the breakthrough. The bioprinter used cell and tissue designs from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina.

"The ability to manufacture multiple tissue types alongside clinically relevant medical products highlights both the versatility and scalability of our technology," Auxilium CEO Jacob Koffler said in a statement today (July 9).

The experiments took place aboard the International Space Station in June. In addition to bioprinting kidney, liver, and cartilage tissues, the AMP-1 machine also created 28 nerve repair implants. The bioprinted materials returned to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on June 17.

"Successfully bioprinting living liver and kidney tissue aboard the International Space Station marks an important step forward for regenerative medicine," WFIRM director Anthony Atala said in a statement today (July 9). "The uniform cell distribution achieved aboard the space station points to real possibilities for manufacturing medical devices and tissues in space."

This wasn't the first bioprinting experiment to be conducted on the ISS. For example, in 2018, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko tested a machine called the "Bioprinter Organ.Aut," which successfully assembled cartilage cells using a magnetic field.

However, Auxilium’s AMP-1 bioprinter is the first tool that has produced multiple types of tissue in space, as well as the first to make kidney and liver tissue in the final frontier. Auxilium says this flexibility will be important as commercial interests expand manufacturing hubs in space for biotech, healthcare and advanced materials development.

"This mission marks an exciting step forward for in-space biomanufacturing and demonstrates what can be achieved when innovative technology is paired with strong collaboration," Isac Lazarovits, Auxilium's engineering vice president, said in the same statement.

"Demonstrating multiple product classes and meaningful production volume within a single mission is an important milestone as we continue advancing toward routine manufacturing operations in orbit," Lazarovits continued.

One month from today, millions will turn their eyes to the skies for one of the most anticipated skywatching events of the year: the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026.

The eclipse will sweep across parts of Greenland, Iceland and Spain, briefly turning day into night for those lucky enough to be within the narrow path of totality.

It's been a long time coming for European skywatchers, as the event marks Europe's first total solar eclipse since 1999.

Where can I see the total solar eclipse?

If you're hoping to experience totality, now is the time to finalize your plans. The path of totality crosses Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain, with maximum eclipse lasting up to 2 minutes and 18 seconds.

Spain is expected to be one of the most popular destinations thanks to its favorable weather prospects, though it's not without a catch! Viewers will need to secure a clear view of the western horizon because the eclipsed sun will sit very low in the sky during totality.

Will I see the eclipse from where I live?

Not inside the path of totality? Don't worry. A spectacular partial solar eclipse will be visible across much of Europe, with more than 90% of the sun covered from locations including London, Paris and Dublin.

If you're still deciding where to watch, we have several guides on the best viewing locations close to popular Spanish holiday destinations, the best Spanish beaches, and the best places to view the eclipse overall.

How we will be covering the eclipse

Over the coming weeks, Space.com will bring you everything you need to prepare for eclipse day. We'll publish viewing guides, safety advice and information on how to watch the eclipse online.

Closer to the event, we'll launch a dedicated live blog covering the latest eclipse news and insights from our reporters in the field.

Skywatching Editor Daisy Dobrijevic will join an eclipse expedition to Greenland with HX, while Skywatching Writer Anthony Wood will travel to northern Spain with the DEB initiative and citizen scientists to report firsthand from the path of totality.

Imagine you're on a hike in a remote mountain range. Your hyperactive dog catches the scent of a deer and, powered by his hunter's instinct, disappears in the forest. He has a GPS tracker in his collar that can send his coordinates via the cellular network. But where you are, there is no mobile coverage. You keep whistling and calling but to no avail: your dog is nowhere to be seen.

That exact scenario prompted technologist Jonathan Bensamoun to develop what he describes as the world's first satellite-connected wearable device for dogs. Bensamoun is the founder and CEO of Fi, which has been manufacturing dog trackers since 2017. He first conceived the idea to make GPS devices for dogs when he adopted a young German shepherd named Thor and wanted to make sure that his hired dog walker wasn't cutting corners when taking him out for walks.

But even though the company had quickly grown into a market leader, Bensamoun kept hearing customers complain about the device's usefulness. That's where SpaceX's Starlink satellites came in.

"The number one complaint from customers is either 'I live in an area where the cellular network is not really good' or 'I get really worried about my dog when it's away from the typical suburban area. I am worried when it escapes the yard and runs into the woods," Bensamoun told Space.com.

When Starlink began delivering connectivity directly to smartphones in 2024, Bensamoun knew a solution to the problem was on its way. And on July 8, the world's first satellite dog tracking service came online.

The device combines a GPS receiver, which determines the dog's position in real time, and a simple battery-powered modem that connects to T-Mobile's cellular network, which partners with Space's Starlink system. When the dog's position registers outside a pre-defined zone, the owner receives a message via a smartphone app.

When no cell tower is within reach, the device links with an overflying Starlink satellite to complete the task. The dog owner can also set a geo fence around the dog, an area within which the dog is allowed to move without triggering an alert. When the dog crosses that virtual boundary, for example, escapes from the backyard, the tracker sends a message to the owner.

The device's battery lasts "multiple days", according to Fi, giving the desperate pet owner plenty of time to locate the refugee. To speed up the search, Fi enables the owner to send the dog signals — short bursts of vibrations or sounds — to entice it to come home voluntarily.

"You can train your dog with those vibrations and reward it with food every time they receive the vibration," said Bensamoun. "That way, they will start associating the vibration with their food being ready at home."

GPS tracking has been around for decades. In the animal realm, wild, endangered animals became the first to wear them in the 1990s. But those early devices were clunky and expensive, good for large mammals such as moose and caribou, but not fit for commercial use on pets. The technology finally shrunk to small enough dimensions in the early 2010s when first GPS dog trackers entered the market.

Today, some 11 million dogs worldwide are tracked or monitored by GPS in some form. Fi's new tracker — the Fi Ultra Direct-to-Cell tracker — takes the technology another step further by providing "nearly omnipresent connectivity," said Bensamoun.

On Episode 218 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss NASA's new moonbase plans with planetary scientist Dr. Pascal Lee.

Starting with Artemis V (so far), the US plans to begin preparations for a permanent base situated in the south polar regions of the moon. Details are somewhat fluid, but one thing stands out: the poles are likely to be the most challenging places to set up shop in an already hostile environment. Pascal joins us to discuss moonbase siting options and why the poles may not be the best choice at first.

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Space news of the week

• Making history! China lands rocket during an orbital launch for 1st time ever
• NASA's New Horizons probe just woke up from hibernation 6 billion miles away beyond Pluto. What's it doing out there?
• Wally Funk, trailblazing pilot and astronaut, passes away at 87
• Moon Base - NASA
• Project Horizon - Wikipedia
• The Artemis Accords
• NASA, Department of Energy to Develop Lunar Surface Reactor by 2030

Model Falcon 9!

Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners collectSPACE.com.

About This Week In Space

This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.

We didn't realize it at the time — nobody ever does — but the '90s were a vintage era in Hollywood.

It was a time when major studios were happy to take a punt on original scripts, knowing that people would, as often as not, buy theater tickets to watch quality releases. Good movies will always be made, of course — just as even the most golden of ages produce their fair share of stinkers — but this was a time when the Venn diagram circles labelled 'acclaimed' and 'popular' intersected on a satisfyingly regular basis.

But beyond the critic-friendly fare produced by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese, this was also a peak period for popcorn-friendly action movies… and especially sci-fi action movies. Highbrow reviewers didn't always appreciate their brilliance back then, but looking back all these decades later, many of the best examples still stand up now.

"Independence Day" — which turned 30 last week — isn't even the best entry in the genre, but it repeatedly shows why the end of the 20th century was the perfect time to experience blockbuster thrills and spills in a multiplex. And, spoiler, there was barely a superhero in sight.

The '80s had teed up the subsequent decade's action explosion perfectly. On one side was the family-friendly fare championed by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, timeless movies like the "Star Wars" sequels, "ET", "Back to the Future," and "Indiana Jones" that produced a generation of budding cinephiles. They were complemented by the more rugged, violent, and grown-up adventures popularized by the likes of "Aliens", "Predator", and "Die Hard".

Anything less than spectacular would no longer cut it in the blockbuster stakes, as the kids of the '80s got that little bit older and decided to take their new favorite genre with them.

It's easy to dismiss this kind of filmmaking as simplistic and dumbed down. Its poster boys were uber-producers Jerry Bruckheimer and his late filmmaking partner Don Simpson, whose "high concept" ethos distilled movies down to a pithy elevator pitch you could squeeze into a single sentence.

But the company's undisputed classics of the era make it obvious they were on to something — "Crimson Tide" (feuding submariners try to avert World War III), "The Rock" (rogue marines capture Alcatraz to hold San Francisco to ransom) and "Con Air" (a bunch of prisoners capture their transport plane). It's a formula that also worked for "Speed" (a bomb will explode if a bus goes under 50mph), "Twister" (scientists chase tornadoes across America), and "Under Siege" ("Die Hard" on a boat).

The director/producer duo of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were clearly paying attention when they made "Independence Day", their follow-up to 1994's "Stargate". Let's start with their own high concept, easily summed up as a modern-day spin on HG Wells' "The War of the Worlds", but with bigger spaceships and a more pronounced fetish for major landmarks.

Speaking to the Guardian, Devlin recalled Emmerich's original idea. "[He said], 'What if we woke up tomorrow morning and we walked outside to get the newspaper and above it was a 15-mile-wide spaceship blotting out the sun for an entire city?' Then he turned to look at me and goes, 'I think I have our next movie.'"

"Independence Day" didn't need to be part of a major franchise to get noticed. The teaser trailers, with their carefully choreographed moments of tourist hotspot destruction, were enough for that, as was the brilliant sci-fi movie poster, which saw Manhattan dwarfed by a flying saucer. "The question of whether or not we are alone in the universe has been answered," said the wonderfully doom-mongering tagline.

As with many of the other action movie classics of the era — not to mention the classic Irwin Allen disaster epics of the 1970s, such as "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno" — "Independence Day" prioritized its cast over spectacle.

The biggest name on the roster was arguably Jeff Goldblum, who, thanks to the double whammy of "Jurassic Park" and "ID4", briefly had the two highest-grossing films of all time on his resumé.

But Emmerich and Devlin also spotted the star power of Will Smith before he became a bona fide A-lister, and packed out the vast supporting cast with familiar — though not necessarily movie star — names: "Taxi"'s Judd Hirsch as Goldblum's dad, Bill Pullman as an idealistic POTUS, and Randy Quaid as a former pilot with a bone to pick with ET. They also boosted the film's geek credentials by casting Brent Spiner ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"'s Data) as Area 51's eccentric head of ET research.

Populating the film with quality actors paid big dividends, helping to ground a film whose script rarely shied away from the ridiculous. In a screenplay that shifts from gung-ho action to self-aware gags to over-earnest, tub-thumping presidential speeches (and back again), it certainly helps if your cast can play their roles as if they're on stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the same way, nobody could watch Ed Harris in "The Rock" or Gene Hackman in "Enemy of the State" and claim they were phoning it in.

There's also a lot to be said for the "Independence Day"'s deployment of practical effects. The mid-'90s were a dangerous time to be a filmmaker, when many were tempted to use computer effects when they should have known better. Look at the best action movies of the era, however, and they tend to use the CG to enhance, rather than replace, more traditional techniques.

As groundbreaking as "Jurassic Park" was, Steven Spielberg was remarkably sparing with the digital moments, while "The Matrix" — a film whose bullet-time effects quickly became ubiquitous — hung its action credentials on its live-action fights and wire work.

"Independence Day" was cut from the same cloth, using CG in the right places (most notably in its spectacular aerial dogfights) while also building (and subsequently blowing up) intricate practical models to deliver moments of pure, joyous cinematic carnage. These moments would undoubtedly be animated in a computer now, losing the tactile qualities — and the intrinsic gravity of the situation — you only capture in real life.

Thirty years on, "Independence Day" and its '90s action brethren have come to feel like relics. Sure, superhero movies, their most obvious descendants, still set their eyes on top acting talent, and the best directors (most notably Christopher Nolan) tend to make a point of shooting practically when they can.

But, aside from the numerous "Die Hard" spin-offs, the '90s generation were predominantly telling original stories, well away from the restrictions of franchise filmmaking, starting and finishing an entire story in roughly two hours. Indeed, it's remarkable how few of the classics of the era were followed up by a successful sequel. ("Independence Day: Resurgence" took 20 years to arrive, and when it did, didn't even make half as much at the box-office as its predecessor.)

And crucially, the action movies of the late 20th century were usually about people. Most of the time, they were ridiculous, over-the-top, broadly drawn, clichéd, cookie-cutter characters, but they also tended to — more or less — obey the laws of physics. Without superpowers or magic to fall back on, heroes had to rely on little more than implausible levels of ingenuity and resilience, a capacity to dodge bullets/laser fire, and a gift for making the right quip at the right time. "Independence Day" may just have been on to something.

"Independence Day" is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been appointed as the head of a new White House group to study unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP, a new catch-all term for UFOs that might appear not just in the air but also in space or underwater. Loeb says the group is focused on evidence, instrumentation, data analysis and collection standards.

The move follows recent Trump administration initiatives to bring more transparency to the topic of UFOs, or UAP. The UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb explains, was established by the White House, the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other members of the Intelligence Community.

Loeb co-founded and leads the Galileo Project, designed to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations "from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research."

As chair of the just-formed UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb has built a team of researchers that he describes as "an amazing A-team of exceptional scientists and experts."

Members of the group come from a wide range of disciplines from data science and instrumentation to biology, oceanography, anthropology and psychology.

The council's stated purpose is to help government agencies study the nature of UAP through rigorous scientific methods, with an emphasis on collecting and analyzing higher-quality data rather than relitigating older material that cannot be independently verified.

Meet the team

But first things first.

What is the current membership makeup of Loeb's Council? It's quite a mix of talent to undertake a new look at UAP:

• Liberty Capito is a professor of practice in data science at the Olin Business School at the Washington University in St. Louis.
• Carol Cleland is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
• Richard Cloete is a computer scientist at Harvard University and a member of Loeb's Galileo Project.
• Omer Eldadi is in the department of psychology at Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel.
• Tim Gallaudet is a retired Navy admiral and oceanographer.
• Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University statistics and economics.
• Ross Howard is producer of John Michael Godier's Event Horizon podcast that explores the technosignatures of alien technology. He is also with the Sol Foundation aimed at addressing the UAP issue and preparing society for its social implications.
• Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany.
• Ravi Kopparapu is a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center expert having research interests in extrasolar planet habitability, atmosphere modeling and characterization.
• Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO Of Colossal Biosciences, the world's first de-extinction company.
• Jacob Haqq Misra, of Blue Marble Space, is a meteorology and astrobiology specialist.
• Devesh Nandal is a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian.
• Garry Nolan is professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine and is executive director of the board of the Sol Foundation.
• Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and an educator on critical thinking.
• Peter Skafish is a sociocultural anthropologist and secretary of the Sol Foundation.
• Matthew Szydagis is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Albany.
• Jennice Vilhauer is a clinical psychologist with expertise in quantitative psychology and the psychological dimensions of potential disclosure.

Data-driven, physics-based

Space.com reached out to several of the UAP Council members to get their personal views on this new study approach.

"I expect the council and myself to follow methods and techniques deeply rooted in the scientific principles," said Devesh Nandal.

"The UAP Science council in particular is focused on a data-driven and physics-based approach on the topic of UAP," said Nandal. "We approach this topic with the same rigor we apply in our respective scientific fields and we hope to provide an unbiased analysis on this topic."

Nandal said his role is to help with quantitative data analysis and apply his expertise in astrophysics to help the council decipher the origin of UAPs.

"My first and foremost passion is in stellar astrophysics where I study the life and death of massive and supermassive stars," Nandal said. "I also find the anomalous nature of UAP sightings to be quite intriguing, and whether these events are of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin, I am excited to apply my understanding of physics to decipher their true nature," he said.

If such events can be explained using known principles, "that's excellent," Nandal advised, as this gives him a chance to test the laws of physics to explain a phenomenon that is captivating fellow humans.

"If such events are beyond our current understanding, I see this as a brilliant opportunity to learn all that I can about the Universe and share my findings with everyone," Nandal concluded.

Public trust in science

Council member Liberty Capito said she's honored to be a part of the study group.

"Avi is one of the most brilliant scientists of our time and what he has put together, is what I believe to be a blueprint for re-establishing the public's trust in science by having people with vastly different views, beliefs and science on it," Capito said.

From Council member, Robin Hanson: "It's an honor to be invited, and it's a great cause. I worried at first if we could find much useful to do, but it seems that we do have some promising ideas."

Another member of the UAP Council is Carol Cleland, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute Affiliate and a member of CU Boulder's Center for Astrobiology.

"I anticipate having a council of outside experts will pressure the government to be more open about releasing information and allowing members of the council to interview UAP witnesses," Cleland told Space.com.

Potential positive

Identifying the unidentified deserves a high priority within the U.S. government and the scientific community, explains Loeb.

Nevertheless, for organizations that also continue to diligently sort out what's behind unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the past and the current UAP tag line, they are taking a cautiously optimistic attitude.

"The involvement of serious, independent scientists is a potential positive development, and the government requires that for any thorough and credible investigation of UAP," said Mark Rodeghier, president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies since 1986.

The key issue is not the credentials of the people involved, Rodeghier said, but the structure they are working within.

"If the Council lacks a clear mandate, access to relevant data, a collaborative relationship with those actually grappling with the UAP problem in the government, and then a path for public reporting, its practical value may be quite limited," Rodeghier told Space.com.

Wait and see

Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, said he's adopting a "wait and see" attitude regarding the UAP Council at this point in time.

"Since the UAP Council seems to have the ear of some in Congress," Powell told Space.com, "I hope that they will spend some of their time advocating that Congress appropriate funding specific to the study of UAP through the National Science Foundation."

In SCU board meetings, Powell added, they are a strong proponent of making funding available to the scientific community and academia.

"We never know from where a breakthrough may occur in the study of UAP," Powell said, "and the more scientists involved from all areas of research, the better."

A SpaceX rocket just inched closer to the record books.

A Falcon 9 vehicle lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California tonight (July 10) at 11:01 p.m. EDT (8:01 p.m. local time; 0301 GMT on July 11), carrying 29 of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 35th flight for this rocket's first stage, a booster designated B1071. The SpaceX record is 36, set just a few days ago by B1067 on another Starlink mission.

And, there will likely be more flights for B1071 down the road. The booster came back to Earth for a touchdown tonight as planned, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" about 8.5 minutes after launch.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 29 Starlink satellites aloft. They're scheduled to be deployed in LEO about 62 minutes after launch.

The Starlink megaconstellation currently consists of more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. The network is growing all the time, however, and it could eventually get very large indeed; SpaceX recently applied for approval to operate 100,000 of the spacecraft in LEO.

Tonight's launch was the 81st Falcon 9 mission of 2026. About 80% of them have been Starlink flights.

A supermassive black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy is behaving similarly to black holes that existed just after the Big Bang, voraciously feeding on copious amounts of matter. The relatively close cosmic titan could therefore provide insight into the much more distant universe.

Indeed, the intense accretion behavior demonstrated by the supermassive black hole, which sits at the center of the galaxy SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 located 1.8 billion light-years away, is something scientists have only ever seen in the earliest supermassive black holes.

SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 has been shining brightly in radio waves for many years, and these waves were the smoking gun that pointed to the feeding habits of the galaxy's central black hole.

"Such high-energy events can provide astronomers with a wealth of insights," Kovi Rose from the University of Sydney’s Sydney Institute for Astronomy said in the statement. "By observing these jets and outbursts, we can study the physical processes in some of the most extreme environments in the universe."

Even the hungriest black holes are messy eaters

All large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their heart with masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun. However, not all supermassive black holes accrete vast amounts of matter.

For example, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, consumes so little gas and dust from its surroundings that, were it a human being, it would be existing on a diet of one grain of rice every million years. (That is one heck of a diet.)

When black holes are surrounded by copious amounts of gas and dust, their immense gravitational influence causes this material, in a flattened swirling cloud called an accretion disk, to glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves to high-energy X-rays.

Additionally, supermassive black holes are notoriously messy eaters, meaning some of the matter in accretion disks is channeled to the poles of the black hole, from where it is blasted out as jets of plasma traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light. These jets too are responsible for bright emissions of electromagnetic radiation.

Radio signals from the spiral galaxy SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 underwent a 20-fold increase in radio brightness over a short period, increasing to around 10 quadrillion times the intensity of the radio brightness of the sun. This happened around 8 years ago, and the galaxy has yet to show any sign of dimming.

"We are dealing with the prototype of a new class of galaxies that undergo rapid changes in radio emission," team member Phil Edwards from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, said.

Team leader Stefanie Komossa of the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, added: "Luminous radio radiation from rapidly growing, lightweight black holes is rare to begin with. Their transition into a long-lasting, radio-bright state has never been observed before."

The source of this electromagnetic radiation is situated at the heart of SDSS J110546.07+145202.4, right by its central supermassive black hole. The team thinks the brightening of this galaxy began because the rate of matter falling into its supermassive black hole had increased, triggering the generation of plasma jets.

The increase in mass consumption of the supermassive black hole is leading to a level of growth that hasn't been seen in black holes outside of the early universe before. That means that SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 and its feasting supermassive black hole are set to be prime targets for astronomical investigations for some time to come, especially as proxies for ravenous black holes and rapidly growing early galaxies.

"With sensitive facilities like the incoming SKA telescopes, we'll be able to identify similar radio transients in future sky surveys," Komossa said. "This is crucial for filling the gaps in our understanding of the early universe."

The team's research was published in May in The Astrophysical Journal.

German company Isar Aerospace is expanding its operations overseas after signing an agreement with Canada's Maritime Launch Services for use of its Spaceport Nova Scotia.

The deal allows Isar to design and operate the pad infrastructure based on the company's needs, in order to launch its Spectrum rocket. In return, Maritime Launch Services (MLS) will provide the pad and surrounding facilities for vehicle stage and payload integration, testing and a mission control hub for launch operations.

The agreement grants Isar a $150 million, 10-year lease for the MLS launch site, with the option to extend up to an additional 10 years. Development of the facility is scheduled to begin later this year, with Isar targeting 2028 for its first orbital launches from the new site.

"Canada is the next step in our roadmap to bring full end-to-end launch capability to sovereign nations," Alexandre Dalloneau, Isar's mission and launch operations vice president, said in a company statement on Tuesday (July 7). "And we are proud to be doing it here in, and together with, Canada.”

By 2029, Isar hopes to be able to support up to 40 launches from the new Canadian site. “By combining Isar Aerospace’s launch vehicle, Spectrum, with Spaceport Nova Scotia’s licensed infrastructure, we are creating the conditions for reliable orbital launch services from Canada," MLS President and CEO Stephen Matier said in the same statement.

MLS has positioned Spaceport Nova Scotia as a multi-user launch center, designed for expansion based on future customer needs. It's one of Canada's first-ever facilities designed to support orbital launches — Canadian company NordSpace is constructing a launch pad of its own with a similarly flexible framework, but neither it nor Isar has yet carried out a successful orbital launch.

Isar has tried, however. Spectrum launched for the first time in March 2025, from Europe's Andøya Spaceport in Norway, but the rocket began to tumble shortly after clearing the tower and fell back to Earth in a fiery explosion. Since then, the company has rolled Spectrum out several times for a second launch opportunity but has run up against either weather or technical delays that have scrubbed each attempt.

Still, that hasn't slowed the company's efforts. Dalloneau sees Isar's success as one of international importance.

“While every nation needs data from space, almost no nation has the end-to-end capability to access it independently. This makes launch capacity one of the most consequential bottlenecks in defense and intelligence today, and we are here to close it," he said.

It looks like SpaceX's next Starship flight is on the horizon, and it may lift off sooner than you might think.

SpaceX today (July 10) completed a brief static fire of the Starship Super Heavy booster tapped to launch the 13th test flight of the massive, mega-lift vehicle.

Booster 20 — the latest Super Heavy to roll off the assembly line — was transported to the pad at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, facility yesterday (July 9) and hoisted onto its support stand using the launch tower's stalwart "Mechazilla" chopstick arms. By early Friday, SpaceX began preparations leading up to the prelaunch engine test, including closing Boca Chica beach around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) and transferring fuel to the pad's tank farm ahead of loading propellant onto the vehicle.

This is the second "Version 3" (V3) booster to reach the pad at Starbase for testing, and is equipped with 33 of SpaceX's upgraded Raptor 3 engines. Those engines ignited in a blazing heat on Friday just before 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), and underwent a roughly 25-second burn simulating on the launch stand the duration and flight conditions for an actual launch.

The successful completion of Booster 20's static test fire paves the way for Starship's upcoming test launch, Flight 13. That could launch as early as Wednesday (July 15), according to a notice from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Compared to Version 2 (V2), Starship V3 packs a much stronger punch. The rocket was upgraded with enhanced avionics to reduce mass and increase launch capacity, a taller fuel tank with a larger volume, and equipment for transferring propellant between spacecraft, which will be needed to fulfill many of the missions Starship is being designed to carry out.

A handful of those missions will be for NASA's Artemis program, and the agency's plans to return to the moon. Starship is one of two lunar landers currently contracted to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface, so, its success and timely demonstration of the technologies needed to do so are coming under a microscope as the timeline for those missions shrinks.

Flight 13 will follow the same basic timeline as Flight 12, which lifted off in May with mixed success. Flight 12 was the first launch of Starship V3, and prompted SpaceX to fly a slightly more conservative mission than many previous tests, which have built on previous successes with increasingly expanding goals. Starship's last flight sent the vehicle's upper stage, Ship, on a suborbital trajectory with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX ran into some issues, though, when the rocket's Super Heavy booster (Booster 19) failed to maneuver itself for a soft ocean splashdown of its own. Ship (Ship 39) also ran into an engine anomaly that caused SpaceX to forgo the stage's in-space engine relight demonstration.

Ship 40 and Booster 20, the Starship vehicles that will fly on Flight 13, will follow the same set of mission objectives to shake out the remainder of kinks in Starship V3. Spacex hopes the mission will pave the way for further technology demonstration tests the vehicle needs to complete before reaching full operational status. That includes the retrieval of both stages back at their Starbase launch pad, for refurbishment and reuse on future flights.

Starship is designed to be fully reusable, and capable of delivering over 100 tons to low Earth orbit. Once the rocket begins regularly delivering payloads, Ship and Super Heavy will be able to both return to Starbase to be caught by the Mechazilla arms on both of the site's two launch towers. SpaceX has succeeded in a handful of V2 Super Heavy catches during its previous flight tests, and managed to launch two of those recovered boosters on subsequent missions, but has not yet attempted to do the same with a Ship upper stage.

That's because landing Ship is much different than landing Super Heavy. SpaceX has a lot of practice landing and reflying rocket boosters. The company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launches several times a month, and is routinely recovered, refurbished and reflown within a short few weeks. A batch of Starlink satellites recently launched on one of SpaceX's most-flown Falcon 9 boosters, which broke a reflight record as it touched down for the 36th time after delivering its payloads to orbit. Though it lacks the landing legs of Falcon 9, Super Heavy's descent back to Earth is very similar to a Falcon 9 booster, and therefore less complex an engineering question to have to solve compared to Starship's upper stage.

Ship drops through the atmosphere belly-first, allowing the black, hexagonal heat shield tiles that cover half the vehicle to absorb the blazing temperatures of reentry. Fins near the spacecraft's nose and base control its orientation and attitude, which remains mostly horizontal during its freefall. To an extent, Ship's descent profile is not very unlike the space shuttles, except for its actual touchdown, which differs significantly.

As Ship's altitude decreases toward sea level, the vehicle performs a "flip and burn" maneuver that swings the whole stage upright and arrests its descent for a soft touchdown — eventually back at the Starbase pad on future launches, but once again in the Indian Ocean for Starship's upcoming mission.

Flight 13 will give SpaceX a chance to demonstrate that descent profile again using Ship 40, while also working through the booster and engine issues encountered during Flight 12. If all goes according to plan, the launch will bring Starship V3 closer to more ambitious tests, including orbital insertion, propellant transfer and the recovery of both stages back at Starbase.

Should stargazers also be cloudspotters? Everyone knows clouds are the first thing you see as soon as you get under a dark sky or buy a new telescope — it's almost guaranteed! However, by early July, I usually start actively looking for a special kind of noctilucent or "night shining" cloud — and they can be a magnificent sight to rival anything celestial.

At its core, the search for these so-called "space clouds" is the flip side of the seemingly never-ending twilight in July in mid-northern latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. You wait all winter for tolerable temperatures, then summer arrives and the night sky never properly commits to darkness. At my latitude, the northern horizon glows all evening in early-to-mid July like somebody forgot to turn the sun off completely. Serious stargazing gets harder as even bright constellations seem washed out by lingering light.

Cue noctilucent clouds. Peer at the northern sky during twilight between late May and August, and you may see strange silver-blue ripples. Delicate yet bright, they can look artificial — thin electric-blue strands stretched across twilight, with a texture like smoke. They seem entirely detached from the normal atmosphere.

Noctilucent clouds are an accident. They are caused by sunlight striking ice crystals roughly 50 miles above Earth, near the edge of space, where ice crystals can only form under extremely cold conditions. They exist so high in the mesosphere — a layer of Earth's atmosphere above the stratosphere and below the thermosphere — that they continue to glow long after sunset, because the sun is still shining on them even though it has set as seen from beneath.

Water vapor should not exist in the mesosphere, a dry layer on the edge of space. Yet under the right conditions, trace amounts of water vapor can freeze onto tiny particles, creating the ice crystals that make noctilucent clouds possible.

While greenhouse gases warm the Earth's surface, they cool the mesosphere, allowing the increased moisture to freeze. There is growing evidence that changing upper-atmosphere conditions and increasing atmospheric moisture may be affecting how often noctilucent clouds appear and how far south they are seen.

Perversely, noctilucent clouds arrive exactly during the brightest weeks of the year, when many stargazers are complaining that there is nothing worth observing. Cloudspotting on summer nights was probably not on your stargazing wishlist when you started, but for some of us, the chance of noctilucent clouds is all we have for a few weeks. See them once, and they'll fast become a seasonal delight you'll wait all year for.

What's happening and when to look

If you want to search for noctilucent clouds this week, look north about an hour to two hours after sunset, or before sunrise, during deep twilight when the sky is dark except in the extreme north. July is prime season across northern latitudes, including much of the U.K., northern Europe, Canada and the northern U.S. You do not need total darkness.

The key is a clear northern horizon. Noctilucent clouds usually appear low in the sky as pale blue, silver or sometimes faintly gold ripples and filaments. Beginners often mistake them for illuminated cirrus clouds at first, but ordinary clouds darken after sunset. Noctilucent clouds keep glowing with an oddly cold brightness.

How and when I'm watching it

You wouldn't typically go out on a special trip to see noctilucent clouds — it's too much of a long shot (though if they're sighted one night, going out the following night is a good idea). Instead, I have developed a habit of checking the northern horizon obsessively every clear July evening before bed. If I'm lucky, I'll pause if the twilight looks suspiciously textured. Noctilucent clouds don't hang around for long — they reward attentiveness more than planning. You don't need telescopes or even dark-adapted eyes, just a willingness to keep looking north during a season when many astronomy enthusiasts assume nothing interesting is happening.

Stargazer's corner: July 10-17, 2026

The real challenge in July is not moonlight but the simple fact that darkness never fully settles at northern latitudes. This week, the moon wanes toward new, creating some fabulous opportunities for anyone crazy enough to get up very early. The prime moment is about 80 minutes before sunrise on July 11, when you can glimpse a 15%-illuminated waning crescent moon curled up to the Pleiades open cluster (M45), with Mars and red supergiant star Aldebaran below. For something more leisurely, look west after sunset on July 17 to see the exact opposite sight — a 15%-illuminated waxing crescent moon close to Venus. Put a telescope on Venus itself, and you'll see that it's now a 60%-lit gibbous shape as it gets closer to Earth.

Constellation of the week: Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia becomes especially useful during the noctilucent cloud season because it remains visible above the northern horizon throughout summer twilight. It's a familiar W-shape that cuts through even bright skies surprisingly well. It's a circumpolar constellation, so it always sits opposite the Big Dipper, forming two distinctive shapes permanently wheeling around Polaris, the North Star.

My latest stargazing obsession

I'm always on the lookout for puddles. The dark skies coming this week will be a fabulous time to photograph nightscapes, including the Milky Way, but composition is everything. The night sky reflected in still water can look more dramatic than the sky itself because reflections compress and simplify structure. If I'm under a dark sky (or even in twilight) with a camera, I actively search for reflective surfaces — parked car roofs, wet pavements, ponds and puddles. Stargazing teaches you that observing is not always about pointing higher into the sky. It's often just as much about noticing how Earth participates in the view.

Is it a space jellyfish? Is it an alien? No, it's the aftermath of a SpaceX rocket launch!

What is it?

Have you ever looked up and thought, "Why is there a giant glowing jellyfish cloud in the sky?" If so, chances are that you've seen the remnants of a rocket launch, and not a surprise alien visitor.

In the early hours of July 9, SpaceX launched 29 of its Starlink broadband satellites from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to low Earth orbit. It was the rocket's 36th flight, a record.

The rocket lifted off at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 GMT), and the scene it painted in the dark early-morning sky looks truly out of this world. But there is a practical, Earthly explanation.

When a Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its engines expel water vapor and carbon dioxide. As it climbs higher into the sky, the temperature drops and the water vapor quickly freezes, forming ice crystals that trail behind the rocket in the spectacular plume we're seeing here. And this view is made more colorful and striking by the sunlight of early morning.

Why is it incredible?

While this photograph's beauty speaks for itself, it is also a colorful example of how real scientific moments can spark the imagination.

Do you think it looks like a jellyfish? I think it looks like a comb jelly, which isn't actually a jellyfish but rather a different type of transparent, squishy invertebrate that drifts through the ocean. It could also look like a glowing football or even a mythological monster.

Whatever you think it looks like, while we have a real scientific explanation for why this rocket launch was followed by a giant, glowing, uniquely shaped cloud, it's still fun to use our imagination.

Before dawn on July 11, early risers will be treated to a striking celestial scene low in the east-northeast sky.

A slender waning crescent moon, softly glowing with earthshine, will appear to align with the orange light of Mars, the orange-red star Aldebaran, with the sparkling Pleiades and Hyades star clusters close by. Together, they will form a beautiful morning tableau in Taurus — one well worth setting an alarm to see.

First: the moon

Most obvious is, of course, the moon, appearing as a lovely waning crescent, 14% illuminated. It rises around 2:00 a.m. local daylight time and will likely appear as a thin arc of light enclosing a ghostly ball. Here is one of nature's beautiful sights and fits the old saying, "the old moon in the new moon's arms." Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the first to recognize it as earthshine. That faint bluish-gray light is light from Earth reflected toward the moon. Earth's light, of course, reflects sunlight, so earthshine is really sunlight that is reflected off Earth to the moon and reflected toward Earth.

Next: Mars

The second object is a planet: Mars. It will appear as an orange-yellow star roughly five degrees below and slightly to the right of the moon. Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees in width, so Mars will hover roughly 'half a fist-width" below the lunar disk.

Mars rises around 2:40 a.m. local time and is about 15 degrees above the east-northeast horizon by dawn. So as the eastern sky begins to lighten up, Mars will be about "one and a half fist-widths" above the horizon.

It currently resides within the boundaries of the zodiacal constellation of Taurus the Bull. Mars remains rather inconspicuous, but its luminosity continues to increase as we gain on it in our smaller, faster orbit, though it is a very slow process. The planet moves from 17.5 light minutes away on July 1 to 15.4 light minutes by Sept. 1, brightening ever-so-slightly from magnitude +1.3 to +1.2. At its closest approach this coming February, Mars will be only 5.6 light minutes from Earth and will appear to shine fully 10 times brighter than it does now.

Finally: Aldebaran

Shining about 5.5 degrees below and slightly to the right of Mars will be a similarly hued, orange-red star, appearing to shine nearly twice as bright as the planet. That will be Aldebaran, marking the angry right eye of Taurus. Aldebaran is the fourteenth brightest star in the sky and lies 67 light-years from Earth. This is a red giant star, 45 times larger than our sun, 1.6 times more massive and over 400 times as luminous. Aldebaran is older and redder than the sun and is preparing to fuse its lightweight core into heavier elements, which are common among stars of its type. Aldebaran has a surface temperature of about 6,760 degrees F (3,738 degrees C). And Aldebaran is really a double star; its companion is much smaller and far dimmer, with an overall mass less than half that of the sun and only about one-third as large.

Incidentally, although it appears among them, Aldebaran is not actually a member of the V-shaped Hyades cluster. But it's much closer to us in space than the other Hyades stars, so it's simply an "innocent bystander," but nicely completes the V-shaped face of the Bull in our sky. Henry M. Neely (1879-1963), a long-time lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, wrote in his book: A Primer for Stargazers:

"When Taurus is in the night sky, it is well worth the while of any stargazer to beg, borrow or steal a pair of binoculars. . . because the most dazzling of the stars are not visible to the naked eye. This is particularly true of the area inside the V of the Bull's face. Someday I hope an imaginative designer of jewelry will duplicate this superb setting of celestial gems, matching them in color, sparkle and design."

And completing this lovely early morning tableau, is the beautiful Pleiades star cluster. They'll glitter, as Tennyson imagined, "like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." They'll sparkle about six degrees to the moon's upper right. Good binoculars will reveal a score of stars in this little group, while long-exposure observatory photographs show about 1000 in the area — all suffused in great clouds and streamers of nebulous light.

What a great way to start the second weekend of July!

So, rise before the first blush of dawn, seek out a clear east-northeast horizon, and let the morning sky reward your early vigil. With binoculars in hand, linger a little longer among the Pleiades and the nearby celestial jewels—an ancient sparkle waiting quietly above the waking world.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

A new ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court protecting voter rights could extend to astronauts living and working in space and training internationally, their families, and the multitude of NASA workers who travel to support their missions.

On Monday (June 29), the Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots can be counted toward a total vote even if they arrive after election day, as long as they are postmarked by election day. The ruling followed efforts by the Trump Administration to place restrictions on mail-in voting. In a new statement, the nonpartisan activist organization Astronauts for America spoke out in support of the Supreme Court's decision, which supports absentee voting.

"We don't want to see barriers put in place [that] make it more challenging for somebody to exercise their constitutional right of voting," retired NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence told Space.com. Lawrence is a member of Astronauts for America, as well as a veteran of the U.S. Navy, where she served as a captain, engineer and helicopter pilot.

What happened?

An executive order issued by President Trump in March 2026 attempted to place a number of restrictions on voting in the country, including limitations on mail-in or absentee voting. The order directed the United States Postal Service to only transmit ballots for states that compile and submit lists of eligible mail-in voters 60 days before elections, added requirements and complications to mail-in ballots and attempted to limit who receives a ballot in the mail.

This order not only added layers to limit voting access, but it conflicted with existing procedures set by states for absentee voting. Additionally, the U.S. Constitution places the authority to change election rules and processes with Congress, not the president, though this was not the first executive order put out by Trump to attempt to change election rules, CNN has reported.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court blocked the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out this executive order, declaring that mail-in ballots may be counted if they arrive up to five days after election day, as long as they are postmarked by election day.

"This is key to making sure we have free and fair elections, that people have the ability to cast their vote, and it's not an overwhelming burden for them to do that again," said Lawrence.

Astronauts vote (and so do the people around them)

In a statement shared on social media, Astronauts for America commented on the recent ruling.

"We at Astronauts for America are pleased to see the justices take this critical step toward safeguarding free and fair elections, and ensuring that every eligible voter has their ballot counted," the statement reads. "As astronauts, some of us cast our votes from space. As military veterans, many of us relied on voting by mail. Upholding this grace period ensures that astronauts and other Americans are able to exercise their civil rights."

"Voting is the cornerstone of our American democracy, and this is an important step forward in our battle to ensure everyone has the right to vote," the statement continued. "While the Supreme Court ruling should be celebrated, we must continue standing up for our democracy and constitutional principles."

Astronauts have used absentee voting systems for decades, and they do so regularly: Astronauts have been living in orbit on board the International Space Station continuously since November 2000. When astronauts are going to be in space during an election, NASA has a digital system that allows them to submit absentee votes. But as the statement above suggests, astronauts don't just need absentee voting during their space missions.

Astronaut training can take place all around the world, especially if there is a mission with international collaboration. Lawrence shared that, during her tenure with NASA's space shuttle program, there was a 16-month period when she had to live and train full-time in Russia. And, astronauts don't prepare for space in a vacuum. Family members like spouses might travel with them for long-term training, and there are a wide variety of mission managers and support staff for crewed missions (and their families) who might have to be on long-term travel as well.

Additionally, many astronauts like Lawrence are also military veterans who, during their service, are only able to vote through absentee voting, sometimes for years on end. While this ruling extends far past astronauts, even within the space sector, absentee voting has protected the constitutional rights of many.

The universe is haunted by "cosmic ghosts" called neutrinos, and new research suggests they may be the "whispers" of stars that died in supernova explosions over the course of billions of years.

The discovery is an important step forward in our understanding of the life and death of stars and how they enrich their environments with metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It could also help better understand how black holes and neutron stars are born when massive stars die.

The second most common particles in the universe, neutrinos get their spooky nickname because they are chargeless and near-massless, so phantom-like that around 100 trillion neutrinos pass through you at nearly the speed of light every second, but over your entire life only one will interact with the atoms of your body, if you're lucky.

The newly suggested connection between neutrinos and a history of supernova blasts has emerged from the first detection of a flux of neutrinos called the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB). It was detected by one of the world's largest neutrino detectors, the Super-Kamiokande, located 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) underground in Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

"Observing the world's first indication of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background is a deeply meaningful achievement and has been a long-cherished goal since the beginning of the Super-Kamiokande project," Hiroyuki Sekiya of the University of Tokyo said in a statement.

Stars go out with a bang but continue with a whisper

Supernovas come in a range of types, but the ones this research concerns are so-called "core-collapse supernovas." These occur when stars much more massive than the sun reach the end of nucleosynthesis in their cores. When they are no longer able to fuse elements to create metals heavier than iron, the stars become unable to produce the outward energy that for millions of years has balanced them against the inward push of gravity.

Thus, with gravity the ultimate winner of this cosmic tug of war, the star's core collapses, sending violent shockwaves rippling outward into the outer stellar layers, which are ripped away. This leaves the core as a stellar remnant, either a neutron star or a black hole, initially surrounded by an expanding shell of supernova debris.

The energy from these events is carried away by particles of light (photons) spread across the electromagnetic spectrum, but also by neutrinos. Yet, despite the fact that supernovas have been erupting every second over the course of 13 billion years or so to produce the neutrinos that accumulate as the DSNB, this ghostly signal is still faint, a whisper rather than a shout.

To "hear" these cosmic whispers, the team behind this research analysed almost 14 years of data from Super-Kamiokande in the form of Cherenkov light generated when neutrinos interact with 50,000 tons of ultrapure water.

This revealed a signal of neutrinos in line with what would be expected from the DSNB. This signal still needs to be confirmed, but it is a strong indicator of the DSNB, the first humanity has ever had.

"We are already planning on incorporating ongoing observations at Super-Kamiokande together with its successor detector, Hyper-Kamiokande, to further improve sensitivity in future collaborative studies," said team member Yosuke Ashida,of Tohoku University.

The team's results were presented on June 25, 2026, at Neutrino 2026: XXXII International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, held at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

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• We've got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

Danger: Spoiler Alert Ahead!

Fans are eagerly anticipating the third season of The Ark following season 2’s thrilling cliffhanger finale, where the crew of Ark One discovered a habitable, human-friendly planet. However, evidence of an ancient alien civilization and a frantic distress call from deep space instantly cut those celebrations short.

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Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, lego and much more.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

China just notched a huge spaceflight milestone.

The nation has recovered a rocket during an orbital launch for the first time ever, pulling off the feat during the Long March 10B's maiden liftoff on Friday (July 10). And that recovery was unique: The rocket's first stage nestled softly into a net-like structure carried by a ship at sea.

"This mission marks my country's first successful controlled recovery of a launch vehicle and the world's first network-based recovery of a launch vehicle," the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced via social media shortly after the launch. (Translation by Google.) "It signifies a historic breakthrough for my country in the field of reusable rocket technology and will lay a solid foundation for accelerating the improvement of my country's space access capabilities."

The Long March 10B is a two-stage rocket that stands about 207 feet (63 meters) tall, according to the state-owned CASC, the main contractor for China's space program.

The vehicle's first stage burns kerosene and liquid oxygen (LOX) propellants, whereas the second stage uses LOX and liquid methane. In reusable mode, the Long March 10B can loft about 16 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.

And the rocket flew with a payload on its debut liftoff — a satellite that successfully reached "its predetermined orbit," according to the CASC update. That post did not provide any details about the spacecraft or its orbit. It did give a brief rundown of the first-stage recovery, however.

"Approximately 6 minutes after the first and second stages separated, the first stage returned vertically and was successfully recovered at a sea-based recovery platform using a net system," CASC officials wrote, noting that launch occurred from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site on Friday at 12:15 a.m. EDT (0415 GMT; 12:15 p.m. Beijing time.) "The launch and first-stage recovery missions were a complete success."

China plans to refly the first stage by the end of the year, they added.

Until now, vertical landings of orbital-class rockets had been performed only by SpaceX, which does them on a regular basis. Indeed, Elon Musk's company has landed orbital rockets more than 600 times to date.

Such extensive reuse has allowed SpaceX to fly more cheaply and efficiently than its competitors and dominate the launch market — something that China is working hard to emulate.

The Long March 10B's "reusable configuration significantly reduces launch costs, offering advantages of large payload capacity and high cost-effectiveness," CASC officials wrote in the post-launch update.

Other partially reusable Chinese rockets are in the works as well, including CASC's Long March 12A and the Zhuque-3, a vehicle built and operated by the Beijing-based company Landspace. Both of those rockets debuted this past December, with similar results: They reached orbit as planned, but their first stages didn't stick the landing.

The Chinese companies CAS Space, Galactic Energy and Deep Blue Aerospace are developing reusable vehicles of their own — Kinetica-2, Pallas-1 and Nebula 1, respectively. So, before too long, Chinese rockets could be returning to Earth with a frequency that rivals SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9.

Wally Funk, who flew to space at 82 after a lifetime of flying and fighting for women in aviation and aerospace, has passed away at age 87.

Born in Texas in 1939, Funk was determined to take to the skies, flying as a teenager and becoming a professional aviator at the tender age of 20. Her dreams extended even beyond Earth, and in 1961 she joined the "Mercury 13" group of women who completed the testing given to NASA's male astronauts. But Funk was the only Mercury 13 alum to ever reach space. After a lifetime of flying, in July 2021, the then 82-year-old Funk launched to suborbital space aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard vehicle, a trip that she described as "incredible."

"We are deeply saddened by the passing of Wally Funk," Blue Origin shared in a statement on X on Thursday (July 9). "Wally was a pioneer in every sense of the word … On NS-16, sixty years later, Wally made history as the oldest astronaut at the time and remains the oldest woman to ever fly to space. It was a moment six decades in the making. We were humbled to be part of her journey. Her story will continue to inspire generations of future explorers. Fly Wally, Fly."

Making space history

Funk's spaceflight was historic in every sense of the word. "I've been waiting a long time to finally get up there," she said during a livestreamed postflight briefing at the time. "I've done a lot of astronaut training through the world — Russia, America … I could always beat the guys on what they were doing, because I was always stronger. I've always done everything on my own."

At the time of her spaceflight, Funk was the oldest person to ever go to space. But she was also the only member of the Mercury 13 to ever make it there. Funk joined the group, officially called the "Women in Space" program, as its youngest member at only 21 years old. Led by physician William Lovelace, the program put a group of young women through the same rigorous physical and mental testing as NASA's male astronauts to see how they would fare. And, across the board, the group either kept pace with or even excelled by comparison.

While the program didn't have official government sponsorship, there was hope that success could pave the way for women to be allowed into the human spaceflight program. (NASA astronauts were all male at the time; the agency didn't select a female astronaut candidate until 1978.) And in a way, it did, though it took far longer than the group likely expected.

Despite the group not leading to spaceflight access for women at the time, the participants proved their capability beyond doubt. In one particular test, participants were submerged in a sensory deprivation tank, a test meant to measure a participant's mental fortitude. While famed NASA astronaut John Glenn — who became the first American to orbit Earth — lasted three hours in the tank, Funk stayed in for a whopping 10 hours and 35 minutes.

'Married to airplanes'

Though Funk was quite young when she joined the Mercury 13, she'd already racked up years of aviation experience and an impressive array of accomplishments. In fact, Funk, who never married, famously said that she was "married to airplanes."

From her teenage experience with the "Flying Susies," Funk found her way to the skies as early as possible. And following her participation in the Mercury 13 program, Funk became the first female civilian flight instructor at a U.S. military base. Her aviation career was storied; she served as the National Transportation Safety Board's first female Air Safety Investigator, competed in air races and was even chief pilot for multiple aviation schools across the country, sharing her knowledge and expertise with countless aviation hopefuls.

But while she continued to make history and pursue her passions in aviation, her love for space never dwindled. When NASA finally began accepting women into the astronaut corps in the late 1970s, Funk was quick to apply. She applied three separate times but was denied on each occasion. Despite these setbacks, she remained close to the space world, even attending a launch with fellow former Mercury 13 members in 1995 to see NASA astronaut Eileen Collins lift off as the first woman to pilot a space shuttle.

A dream, realized

With her spaceflight dream still aflame, Funk was once again quick to act when Blue Origin got New Shepard fully up on running. And on July 20, 2021, Funk finally realized this lifelong goal, on the first-ever crewed flight of the suborbital spacecraft. (Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos was on that flight as well, along with his brother Mark, Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.)

In thinking of her many aviation students, she said at the time, "I don't know if they're going to get to see this or not … but I felt so charged. I was just a normal person going up into space."

Funk will be remembered for her passion, her dedication and her many accomplishments across aviation and aerospace, which will continue to inspire aviators for generations to come.

Using the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope, astronomers have discovered a treasure trove of 31 black-hole-powered quasars in the early universe. The most impressive of these new discoveries is the most ancient and distant quasar ever seen, shining with the light of a trillion suns just 670 million years after the Big Bang.

Quasars occur when supermassive black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun are surrounded by swirling disks of matter called accretion disks. As accretion disks gradually feed these central cosmic titans, the immense gravity of the black holes generates intense friction, causing this matter to glow so brightly that their luminosity can exceed the combined light of every star in their host galaxies.

Despite this, quasars can still be difficult to spot at vast cosmic distances, with their light difficult to distinguish from the light of much more proximate stars. Thus, the hunt for the earliest quasars has been on for decades, with scientists hoping that the discovery of these bodies could help explain how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly so shortly after the Big Bang. Launched in 2023, Euclid has fulfilled its promise in its mission to discover early quasars, with this hitherto unprecedented haul of 31 of these black hole engines.

"These early quasars date back to the Universe's infancy," team leader Daming Yang of Leiden University in the Netherlands said in a statement. "By finding and studying them, we can better understand how these enormous systems formed and grew so quickly — one of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics."

Previously, astronomers took around a decade to discover the first ten or so quasars at distances like this, which makes it incredibly impressive that Euclid has managed to detect more than three times that many ancient black hole engines in just a single year of observations.

The tip of the iceberg

Thanks to this new treasure trove of quasars discovered when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was merely 5% of its current age includes not just the brightest examples of these objects, but also some fainter quasars. That now means scientists can finally study these objects as a population.

"Euclid is a true game-changer," Yang continued. "Before, we could only find a handful of the very brightest ancient quasars, but Euclid lets us search far more efficiently across huge areas of sky to capture much fainter light. It’s a unique tool for quasar hunting."

Of the 31 new quasars, 12 existed when the universe was around 770 million years old, but the two that really stand out are the quasars designated EUCL J172902.75+641018.1 and EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, which are around 13 billion light-years away and existed just 670 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them the most ancient quasars ever documented.

"This finding more than doubles the number of quasars we know of that are so ancient," Antonio La Marca , a European Space Agency (ESA) Research Fellow on the Euclid team, said in the statement. "The Euclid team has taken a true 'census' of quasars at the dawn of the Universe for the first time. It's a big step towards understanding these fascinating objects on a more fundamental level."

The quasars date back to a period of the cosmos known as the epoch of reionization, which lasted from around 680 million years after the Big Bang to 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. During this period, the universe's "dark ages" drew to a close with photons, particles of light, suddenly free to traverse the cosmos. Thus, these 31 quasars offer a unique opportunity to study this vital period in cosmic history.

"Ancient quasars are rare discoveries," ESA Euclid Project Scientist Valeria Pettorino said in the statement. "They're interesting in themselves, but also time machines that enable us to explore the early universe and understand how the first generation of galaxies came to be."

The 31 quasars were discovered as part of the Euclid Wide Survey, which will eventually cover around one-third of the total sky over Earth.

Scientists hope that this survey will shed light on the so-called "dark universe" comprised of two of the most pressing cosmic mysteries: dark energy, the puzzling force driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and the nature of dark matter, the most abundant "stuff" in the cosmos which remains effectively invisible.

"Euclid's capabilities are unrivalled," Pettorino concluded. "The telescope combines a large area, depth, sharp imaging, and unique space-based infrared vision in a way that lets us pick out rare, extremely distant objects far more efficiently than before."

The team's research was published on Monday (July 6) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

SpaceX is nothing if not ambitious.

Elon Musk's company just filed an application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate a 100,000-member constellation of "Gen3" satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

This will presumably be an updated version of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who reported the news via X today (July 9).

The new plan would dramatically expand Starlink's already extensive orbital footprint. SpaceX currently operates nearly 10,800 of the internet spacecraft in LEO and has FCC approval for about 4,000 more.

And each individual Gen3 satellite will be considerably larger than its predecessors. According to McDowell, SpaceX's FCC application states that each one will weigh 4,400 to 5,500 pounds (2,000 to 2,500 kilograms) and cover an area of 3,230 to 4,300 square feet (300 to 400 square meters) with its solar arrays extended.

For perspective: The Starlink satellite version that SpaceX is launching these days, known as the V2 Mini, weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kg) and covers about 1,250 square feet (116 square meters), according to SpaceflightNow.

SpaceX launches V2 Minis aboard its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, generally in fleets of 29 satellites apiece. The Gen3 is so big, however, that it will probably need to fly on Starship, the giant, super-heavy-lift rocket that SpaceX is developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Starlink Gen3 isn't even the biggest satellite assemblage that SpaceX is cooking up: The company also aims to build a million-strong AI megaconstellation called Starmind.

"Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future," Musk wrote in a February 2026 update about the planned AI constellation.

A number of other companies, including Amazon and Blue Origin, are also building out large constellations in LEO, or plan to do so in the near future.

A variety of people and organizations have objected to how crowded Earth orbit is becoming, voicing concerns about the effects on astronomical observations, wildlife, Earth's atmosphere and humanity's enjoyment of the night sky, among other issues.

Environmental and scientific organizations are banding together to demand federal environmental reviews of space-based data center projects, which plan to put more than a million new satellites in Earth orbit over the coming years.

Over the last few months, a number of different companies have requested licenses from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch data centers into space. SpaceX's proposal alone requests licenses for up to one million satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). But the requested licenses don't come with any environmental review of the impacts that the satellites — especially collectively — could have on dark skies, wildlife or our atmosphere. In response, a coalition of environmental and scientific organizations represented by the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice have petitioned the FCC for this review.

"Allowing a million orbiting data centers with no environmental review isn’t just irresponsible — it’s reckless," Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a statement on Wednesday (July 8). "The potential for these projects to degrade the atmosphere with pollution and debris and harm wildlife needs to be carefully considered before licensing these projects."

Space is big, but a million new satellites added to LEO to support space-based data centers would be a massive increase. Currently, just Earth orbit harbors just 15,000 active satellites and 46,000 tracked objects overall. This number was already on track to grow to 58,000 active satellites, thanks in large part to SpaceX's ever-growing Starlink broadband megoconstellation, but the data-center plans could make it absolutely explode.

Experts suggest that this significant addition to the technological ecosystem in orbit could have disastrous consequences for life on Earth.

"Drastically expanding satellites in space has a direct impact on people’s everyday lives as well as the future of our planet," Jan Hasselman, senior attorney at Earthjustice, said in the statement. "Agencies that authorize companies looking to space as the next frontier still must operate within the law, and the law requires the FCC to consider all the risks and impacts of these proposals. If we have to sue so that they comply, we will."

The FCC has not yet required any environmental review for satellite companies seeking authorization to deploy in LEO. With its new petition, this coalition aims to change that, asking the FCC to stop granting licenses for orbiting data centers without an environmental review.

What possible environmental harms are they worried about? First of all, as more and more satellites are added to the orbital population, the greater chance there is of collisions, which could produce debris that not only clutters Earth orbit but also increases the risk of additional collisions.

Further the rocket launches that propel the satellites to orbit contribute greenhouse gas emissions to our atmosphere. And the spacecraft cause further pollution when they deorbit, releasing heavy metals and other materials when they burn up in Earth's air.

In addition, a massive increase in satellites will fundamentally change the night sky. Light pollution is known to impact wildlife and ecosystems, disrupting natural rhythms and influencing everything from migration patterns to daily feeding schedules. These disruptions can push animals like bats to miss windows in which insect prey are available, causing them to starve. They can also prevent mountain lions — apex predators that uphold their local ecosystems — from roaming normally at night, fragmenting populations over time, according to the National Wildlife Federation.

The effects of light pollution on wildlife would doubtless grow if suddenly a million new, blinking satellites were added to our night skies. And issues with light pollution extend to our species as well, as life would look quite different if our night skies were much more crowded by bright lights.

"These projects could permanently alter the night sky as we know it," Ruskin Hartley, executive director of DarkSky International, said in the statement. "The FCC needs to take seriously its obligation to ensure these projects do not cause unnecessary harm to naturally dark skies, or to our overall environment."

Apple TV’s riveting sci-fi series, "Silo," is stretching its narrative legs for its third and penultimate season. Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) deals with amnesia after her fiery return to Silo 18, satisfying secrets are revealed, and we strap in for temporal jumps 352 years back to the "Before Times" to figure out how the apocalypse arrived.

"We rolled the dice a bit and hoped it would work and weren’t entirely sure, but felt it would," Executive Producer and Showrunner Graham Yost tells Space regarding the new season's time shifts. "After the fact, I heard some of the quibbles about too much time in 17, but we made our best guess on that one as well. What we did feel was that cutting back and forth was not a real problem. Even though it's 350 years separating the two stories, it's not like we're going back to Elizabethan times. It’s Silo world, which is its own crazy time. It's a place out of time.

"So when I saw the first episodes, I felt like this is okay. Part of the good thing about being outside, being people in modern clothing and cars, is you know immediately when you are and where you are. That really helped orient the story."

After Juliette’s harrowing ordeal in Silo 17 last season, audiences were left hungering for answers heading into this new batch of ten episodes. Fortunately, they shine the light of truth on matters — both in the doomsday bunker and back when Earth was still recognizable.

These time shifts allowed the production crew and cinematographers to tinker with the show’s visual style, including using different equipment to film each time period.

"I think they went to a different lens," Yost adds. "The choice was made to go from an anamorphic lens to something else, so there is a slight change and a slightly different framing. We've got the same production designer for both units, so there can be little flavors that Nicole [Northridge] would come up with that we don’t even realize are hints of what’s coming in the future. "

"But the origin story is a political thriller basically. We’re harkening back to 'Three Days of the Condor,' 'The Parallax View' and things like that of the '70s," explains Yost. "That sort of paranoid cinema. There are bits in there that let us feel way more cinematic because we equate that with cinema rather than television."

It's not all about the time jumps back to the past, though; Yost and his team have also been looking to up their game in the Silo's themselves, too.

"Then, in 18 with Juliette, the only expansion there was to spend as much time as we did within the algorithm room with Camille talking to the voice and making that interesting," reveals Yost.

"The answer to that was you cast Alex [Alexandria Riley]. She does such a compelling job that you’re just going to watch her talk to a wall. We knew how good she was from the scene she did in season one, and that's why this whole storyline developed, because we love her."

Apple TV's "Silo" season 3 premieres on July 3, 2026.

Is there life on Mars … in clay? Scientists think that the minerals in clay could be the key to finding signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

The European Space Agency is still working toward launching its ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars to search for signs of life. And, according to a statement from the space agency, the rover is now aiming to land at Oxia Planum, a depression on the Martian surface where it's thought that water was once plentiful. There, scientists think that they might find major clues in the hunt for life in the basin's clay, according to a new paper.

"We will use the instruments on board to ground truth the discoveries made from orbit, learn about the ancient environment in which they formed, and if they preserve any evidence of Martian life. Warmth and nutrients on an early martian seabed could have provided habitats for early life," ExoMars deputy project scientist Elliot Sefton-Nash added in the statement.

Scientists have spent years searching for signs that life once existed on Mars. It's thought that water on Mars evaporated around three billion years ago, but before then the planet likely had a more substantial atmosphere and water flowing in rivers and into lakes all across its surface. Because of the planet's history, many scientists think that it's most likely that at some point in the ancient past, the planet must have supported life. While this has yet to be confirmed, last year scientists found what is currently thought of as the strongest possible biosignature, or physical evidence of life, on Mars.

In a new study, researchers have found extensive clay deposits at Rosalind Franklin's proposed landing site. They found this clay to reach roughly 186 miles (300 kilometers) outward from Oxia Planum, stretching as far as a Martian valley called Mawrth Vallis. To spot the clay, they first studied the planet from orbit.

Researchers used the OMEGA instrument on ESA's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to explore the minerals and rock layers on Mars between Oxia Planum and Mawrth Vallid, finding mineral layers at both sites as well as markers showing changes in water chemistry over time. These observations add to other studies pointing to water on ancient Mars.

With ESA's upcoming rover, some scientists think that the clues to life on Mars could be hiding in this clay in the Oxia Planum region.

"By landing at Oxia Planum, we’ll uncover a large-scale process that shaped ancient clays across Mars," lead author Inés Torres Auré of the University of Lyon in France said in the statement.

Scientists think that it's possible that the area of Oxia Planum could have once been home to a body of water as big as an ocean or the region could possibly have experienced incredible flooding some four billion years ago, according to the statement.

"Because the area is so large, we are not talking about a localised occurrence, but rather a regional or global process that would have required immense amounts of water. We are targeting the oldest deposits in the sequence, which makes the potential implications for the geology and early climate of Mars very relevant for the Rosalind Franklin mission in its search for life," ExoMars project scientist Jorge Vago explained in the statement.

While we have never confirmed life off-Earth and it could be different from the life we know, as far as life on Earth is concerned, water is a necessary ingredient.

ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover is projected to launch to the Red Planet in 2028. The rover will be part of ESA's ExoMars program alongside the agency's Trace Gas Orbiter which is already traveling around Mars. Rosalind Franklin will have a drill, allowing it to explore below the planet's surface as the pair work together from orbit and on the Martian surface to hunt for signs of ancient life.

This work was described in a study published in the journal Science Direct.

If you look at this picture for too long, you might start to hear the waves lapping up against the shore or feel a salty breeze in the air.

You might not have a trip to the Bahamas planned, but you can always enjoy its beauty in this spectacular summertime snapshot captured by NASA astronaut Chris Williams from aboard the International Space Station.

What is it?

In a snapshot that looks straight out of a travel commercial, we can see the crests of rippling waves of sand peeking out from beneath turquoise waters off the coast of the island Eleuthera in the Bahamas.

The moment was captured 263 miles (423 kilometers) above Earth's Atlantic Ocean from aboard the space station orbiting our planet.

This isn't the first fun snapshot captured by Williams who also recently flexed his muscles for a photo mid-spacewalk.

Why is it incredible?

This photo is incredibly beautiful. That much is immediately obvious. And if you've ever swam in picturesque waters like this, then you know how calming and magical such places on Earth can be.

But this photo is more than just pretty, as it shows that we can see Earth's beauty from 263 miles away. It is a reminder that our planet is truly special. Imagine if a future mission saw beauty like this from space on a far off exoplanet, or even a planet outside of our solar system. Currently, our planet is the only one we know of with views like this, but it's possible that in the future we might find tropical shorelines and vacation vistas aren't exclusive to our home planet.

The United States government is looking into launching commercial rockets from sea-based launch sites, but some ocean advocacy experts say the move is part of a larger trend of allowing the spaceflight industry to use the ocean as a dumping ground.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Tuesday (July 7) announced a Request for Information (RFI) to look into launching rockets and recovering spacecraft from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), a region of the United States that extends 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) out from America's coastlines. "Offshore launch, reentry, and recovery infrastructure could expand operational flexibility, increase capacity, reduce constraints on growing launch demand, and strengthen the nation's commercial and national security space capabilities," acting BOEM Director Matt Giacona said in a bureau statement announcing the RFI.

But while BOEM lauds the development of facilities on the continental shelf as a way to bolster America's space economy and support its ambitious space exploration goals, at least one ocean conservancy group says the plan could have disastrous effects on the ocean.

According to the RFI, BOEM is looking for ideas from private industry on how to use existing offshore infrastructure such as oil and gas drilling platforms, as well as how to establish "new, purpose-built offshore facilities dedicated to commercial space launches, space re-entry, and related activities" on the Outer Continental Shelf. BOEM has jurisdiction over some 3.2 billion acres (1.3 billion hectares) of the shelf.

The announcement builds on a White House Executive Order signed in December 2025 titled "Ensuring American Space Superiority" that aims to boost investment in the American space industry and "unleash commercial development and lay the foundation for a new space age."

The order does not list offshore launches specifically, but it does aim to increase the frequency of launches and reentries through "new and upgraded facilities" and policy reforms.

But some critics are already speaking out against the idea. "Space junk and rocket explosions have already been trashing our coastal wildlife refuges, and now Trump wants to expand that destruction farther into our oceans," said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona.

Sakashita added that the initiative is "likely another Trump excuse for allowing the oil industry to leave its rusty old junk in the ocean" and avoid imposing regulations on the energy sector.

"The whales, sea turtles and other marine wildlife off our coasts deserve better than to suffer for Big Oil and the pet projects of trillionaires and billionaires," she said. "It's the administration's job to protect our public waters, not turn them into playgrounds for pipe dreams and profit."

BOEM's RFI will be open for 30 days, closing on Aug. 7, 2026.

China has announced that it wants to develop a "space-ground" asteroid early-warning network, while providing few details on what it could look like. But recent papers and presentations to the United Nations provide clues as to what the country has in mind for planetary defense.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) made the announcement on June 30 — International Asteroid Day — stating plans to construct a coordinated ground-and-space monitoring system for near-Earth asteroids. Li Mingtao, chief scientist at CNSA's Asteroid Monitoring and Early Warning Research Center, told state media that China is studying the feasibility of an asteroid defense system, with the ground-space monitoring network as its core.

"No asteroid has so far been identified that will definitely collide with Earth in the foreseeable future, but concerns over impact risks are not unfounded. Many near-Earth asteroids remain undetected," the state-run media outlet Xinhua quoted Li as saying in a report by Science and Technology Daily.

Li added that China will deploy multiple large-aperture optical telescopes at carefully chosen sites in order to be able to survey the sky, while adding a space-based monitoring constellation, free from atmospheric disruption and day-night constraints, with a particular focus on threats from the sunward direction, which are, from the ground, lost in the glare of the sun. The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, approached roughly from a sunward direction and was only detected once it entered the atmosphere.

Li told Science and Technology Daily that more than 40,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered so far, including over 95% of asteroids at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) wide, which are capable of causing a globally catastrophic impact. However, only around 45% of asteroids in the 140-meter (460-foot) class have been detected, which are large enough to devastate a small country.

The June 30 reports and CNSA statements were vague on what China's actual plans for its monitoring network may be. However, recent journal papers and a 2025 presentation to the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) give more detail on the country's thinking.

For example, a paper published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration in June 2026, co-authored by Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program and a leading voice on the country's asteroid defense plans, lays out the options under study.

For the space-based component, the paper names four candidate orbital positions for a monitoring network: the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, an Earth-leading or trailing orbit, a Venus-like heliocentric orbit, and an Earth-companion distant retrograde orbit (DRO). The paper also describes ongoing research into each option's monitoring effectiveness.

A similar outline was found in a 2025 technical presentation to COPUOS by Chinese researcher Chen Yongcai. A "basic model" would consist of a single satellite at Sun-Earth L1, an orbit about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) inside that of Earth, paired with northern and southern ground stations. An "extended model" includes spacecraft in the three additional orbits stated in the Wu Weiren paper. The Venus-like option in particular closely tracks an earlier proposal known as CROWN, a constellation of small satellites in Venus-like orbits designed to survey the sunward sky and use its favorable geometry to track other populations of near-Earth asteroids.

The status and timelines of these plans are unclear, but they do indicate a clear interest in and commitment to planetary defense by China. The country's 15th Five-Year Plan, approved in March, states that an asteroid defense engineering project is under study, while China is developing a kinetic-impact and observation demonstration mission, similar to NASA's DART mission and the European Space Agency's (ESA) follow-on Hera project, which is scheduled to launch in 2027.

While China's apparent plans are not unique, they could augment global efforts. Anne Virkki, an asteroid researcher at the University of Helsinki who's familiar with international monitoring efforts, noted that NASA and ESA have plans to send missions to Sun-Earth L1 to search for asteroids in infrared light — NEO Surveyor and NEOMIR respectively.

"If China launches a similar mission, hopefully it has some capability that the other two do not, and that it shares the data internationally and not only for Chinese scientists," Virkki said.

Virkki noted that asteroids approaching from the sun's direction aren't physically unusual, but they are simply harder to track, which statistically makes them more likely to produce a surprise. She also pointed to the persistent, less-discussed gap in radar tracking capacity. That capacity took a serious hit with the 2020 collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with no U.S. successor in the works.

China has discussed building its own radar capability, which Virkki said would be a welcome addition, provided the data is shared openly. China has built the "China Compound Eye" or Fuyan project near Chongqing in the country's southwest, which can be used for near-Earth asteroid monitoring. Wu's paper also notes ground-based radar in the proposal for asteroid monitoring.

"Hopefully, as China's planetary defense plans become more specific, we'll see telescopes and space telescopes that complement the existing or planned capabilities of other countries, rather than repeat redundantly, and contribute data openly and collaboratively," Virkki said. She noted that there are likely about 100,000 near-Earth asteroids that could cause significant local damage if they hit Earth, and we know the orbits of less than half of all such space rocks.

2029 will mark the International Year of Planetary Defense, when the infamous asteroid Apophis will fly past the Earth just within the orbit of geostationary satellites. "There is a lot of work left to do, and international collaboration is crucial," said Virkki.

The success of NASA's future moon base depends in large part on mission design, which should allow astronauts to work together well in a way independent from psychological training, a new study asserts.

The goal of the study was to identify "specific conditions" for mission success and to look for any "red flags" that may stand in the way, lead investigator Anamaria Berea, a computational social scientist at George Mason University (GMU), told Space.com via email. (The first author of the PLOS ONE study, which was published in May, was GMU's Raymond Vera.)

The team conducted the research using agent-based models, which are tools for computational simulations in fields ranging from the study of bird flocks to the spread of disease, Berea said. While a lot of modern-day AI "trains" or "learns" to extrapolate from information provided in a data set, agent-based modeling instead uses a data set to "understand emergent phenomena that don't have one single cause or direct cause," she said.

The study team considered scenarios for how many astronauts would be on the moon base and how often resupply missions would occur. In an "initial case," for example, the assumed mission duration was three months, with a single resupply run at Month 2 with food, water, air and a fresh group of astronauts.

Using a complex probability analysis known as a Monte Carlo simulation, the model astronauts in this scenario showed a productivity rate of about 20% against their expected tasks, "which is acceptable for a typical manufacturing process," the authors noted.

This productivity rate doesn't take into account anything unexpected that may crop up during the mission, the authors added. "The low task completion rate suggests that, on average, teams are having challenges to overcoming psychological stressors and environmental disruptions," they wrote.

Lessons from the International Space Station

NASA tracks productivity a little differently on the International Space Station (ISS). The agency uses a metric called "utilization," which largely refers to the amount of crew time and number of scientific investigations that are performed on the space station during an increment or expedition. As of 2014, the ISS program suggested that ideal utilization should be 35 hours per crew per week when there are three people working on the U.S. part of the space station, and 68.5 hours if there are four or more. (The Russian side of the ISS works largely independently in this respect.)

"NASA has generally met or exceeded this goal and set a high of 120 average hours per week devoted to research from October 2019 to April 2020," NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has been tracking all of these productivity figures, stated in a report published in September 2024.

"Starting March 2022 through March 2023, the latest published data, we have seen utilization near 90 hours per week," the OIG noted. "In addition to the hours spent per week on research, the number of scientific investigations performed on-orbit has increased."

Figure 1 of the OIG report also shows both crew time and scientific investigations increasing, as a trend, between 2000 and 2023, suggesting that utilization of the space station is continuing to grow. And this is despite periodic and documented disruptions that required astronauts to take a step back from being productive, such as emergency ammonia leaks requiring spacewalks, the 9/11 disaster, or sheltering in place during brief contingencies such as space debris passing within a few miles of the station.

Not all crew time can be used for utilization even if all goes well, however, as the station requires normal maintenance like cleaning, and astronauts also need daily time for sleep, meals and a little relaxation. Additionally, utilization tends to increase with larger crews on the space station compared with smaller ones, as maintenance becomes less of a burden with more hands to take on these tasks.

But "lack of redundancy" in key supply items to the space station does pose a risk to utilization, the OIG has noted. As just one example, SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules and Roscosmos Soyuz spacecraft are the only two vehicles that bring astronauts to the station right now. "The lack of redundancy and limited capabilities of both cargo and crew transportation increase the risk to NASA's current and future ability to bring critical supplies, science, and crew to and from the station to maintain safe operations and full utilization of the ISS," the OIG wrote in the report.

Isolated environments

Those of us who have been on long car rides in a group, or who remember being in tight quarters with roommates or family during the pandemic, have some idea of what an isolated, confined environment (ICE) feels like: crowded, with limited resources, and possessing few connections with the outside world. Space serves as just one example of a true ICE; isolated research bases (like in Antarctica) or submarines have also been studied in the literature, according to a separate 2021 study in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Put simply, ICE refers to a location where humans must work to a high standard in isolated and often dangerous circumstances, with only long-distance support (if possible) from a mission control or its equivalent. And, as the new study points out, a moon base would be a complex example of an isolated environment — one featuring not only resident astronauts but also rovers, other robots and occasional visiting crews.

"The premise for our modeling approach came from trying to understand better the human factors involved in crewed space missions, particularly the deep-space ones, for which we don't have a lot of historical data," Berea said.

That's because only a handful of people have traveled beyond low Earth orbit — the two dozen who flew to lunar realms on Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 flight around the moon this past April.

"We ran various scenarios of space mission durations, number of astronauts, potentially unforeseen circumstances that can happen on the lunar surface or the habitat," she said. The model suggested the missions with the highest probability of success would include six astronauts working on the moon at a time, with fresh supplies coming from Earth every two weeks, and no extreme fluctuations in the environment from things like radiation or a micrometeorite impact.

"In contrast, the worst-case scenario consists of four astronauts on the moon at one time, only one month resupply window between Earth and moon, and moderate to high adverse environmental probabilities," Berea said. And, when asked if training is a factor in mitigating adverse effects, she did not necessarily agree that the years of work NASA and other agency astronauts put in would be more effective than shorter-duration training used for moon base analogs.

"People can be very, very well trained, but for long-duration or deep-space missions, there will always be a human factor involved," she said. "We looked at combinations of skills and personalities in a team of astronauts, and there is a fine line between having a team that is too small and a team that is too large, and there are synergies and emergent behaviors that come from people interacting with each other and with their environment.

"The team is more than the sum of its people," she continued. "The best ways to overcome these is not by more training, but by fine-tuning other aspects of the missions: the duration of the mission, the frequency of resupply missions, and the contingency plans for accidents and unforeseen conditions in extreme environments."

NASA, however, puts its ISS crews through many years of remote environment training long before they float through the space station hatch — and Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman told The New Yorker that extensive psychosocial training led to the obvious closeness seen live among his own four lunar crewmates despite tight quarters (and vent line issues that led to occasional toilet trouble).

That psychological intervention during training was by design. "Preparation starts by recruiting mentally healthy people and then providing training to help them deal with potential situations and issues," wrote the Canadian Space Agency of this training, citing NASA protocols. "Astronauts repeat this training often enough that they can anticipate their own reactions and those of their teammates. They also receive constant support from teams on the ground and have access to a variety of tools to help them deal with potentially difficult situations."

Berea noted, however, that psychology forms a part (but is not the focus) of her teams' simulation, including considering NASA TLX (task load index) scores and data, which measures coping and stress for astronauts. The researchers also considered case studies from analogs including Antarctic research missions and time aboard submarines or oil rigs, as some examples.

"We need to pay attention not only to the astronauts, but the team as a whole, and each team and space mission are unique. We will not be able to model these with statistics or AI," she said. "But what we can do is to make sure that before we send any human to live and work on the moon, that we understand well the complexity of interactions and scenarios they will face during the mission, and we can help with that."

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched for a record-breaking 36th time early Thursday morning (July 9).

The Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 GMT), carrying 29 of the company's Starlink broadband satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO).

This particular booster, known as 1067, had already completed 35 orbital missions, more than any other SpaceX rocket in history. The overall record is held by NASA's space shuttle Discovery, which flew to orbit and back 39 times.

Thursday's flight extended Booster 1067's company record. The rocket returned to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff, landing on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, hauled the 29 Starlink satellites to LEO and deployed them there 63.5 minutes after launch as planned.

Thursday's launch was the 80th Falcon 9 mission of the year already. About 80% of the rocket's 2026 flights have been devoted to building out Starlink, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

The megaconstellation currently consists of more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. And, as Thursday's launch shows, that number is growing all the time.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:40 a.m. ET with news of successful rocket launch and landing.