All articles tagged with #spaceflight
China’s Long March-10B successfully completed its maiden flight and recovered its first-stage booster on a sea-based net, marking the country’s first controlled recovery of a reusable orbital rocket and signaling progress toward lower-cost launches alongside SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Wally Funk, a trailblazing aviator who pursued space for six decades, died at 87. After earning a pilot’s license early and training as a female astronaut in the 1960s, she finally flew aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin mission in 2021, becoming a symbol of perseverance in space exploration.
Chinese researchers propose using a nuclear blast to destroy or rapidly deflect a large asteroid by carving a crater and detonating a warhead inside; their models favor a pre-excavation detonation for deep energy transfer, potentially making this approach more effective than surface-only hits for rocks around 100 meters in size and offering two defense modes: direct-impact detonation and pre-excavation detonation.
SpaceX launched Transporter-17 on July 7, extending its rideshare missions, but industry rivals warn the future of the Transporter program is unclear, describing the outlook as panicked.
SpaceX will launch the Transporter-17 mission from Vandenberg at 12:12 a.m. PDT, sending 81 small satellites from around the world into a Sun-synchronous orbit as part of the Smallsat Rideshare Program. Exolaunch-manifested payloads account for 49 satellites, including Muon Space’s FireSat trio for wildfire detection (Earth Fire Alliance), along with other satellites such as Iceye SARs and UAE’s Leonav-1; Maverick Space Systems contributes Osiris-A, while Orbital Matter’s Replicator-2 demonstrates onboard 3D printing and deployable solar arrays. The first stage (B1097) will land on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You after ascent, and SpaceX will perform additional upper-stage burns to deploy satellites over roughly 2.5 hours.
Two asteroid milestones dominated the weekend as Japan's Hayabusa2 performed a close flyby of the peanut-shaped asteroid Torifune during its extended mission, and China's Tianwen-2 arrived within about 20 km of the tiny near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa to begin detailed study with a planned sample return in late 2027, while the mission also contemplates future targets such as 311P/PanSTARRS and a possible 2031 encounter with 1998 KY26 if all goes nominal.
Two Besxar Space Industries Fabships—tiny space-based semiconductor substrate test beds—will ride on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 during the Starlink 10-50 mission to assess how wafers endure launch and reentry, while SpaceX deploys 29 Starlink satellites; the move aims to accelerate rapid, repeated testing of space-made substrates.
NASA-supported research envisions Titan as a future industrial outpost where its abundant hydrocarbons, water ice, and nitrogen could be processed on-site to supply rocket fuel, breathable air, habitat materials, and plastics for ships roaming Saturn’s system; while Titan’s dense atmosphere offers radiation shielding and its chemistry is favorable, metals are scarce and the logistical hurdles are huge, so a mature Titan base is likely a century away, with Dragonfly (targeted for 2028) testing some capabilities along the way.
California's Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center will display the Space Shuttle Endeavour in a vertical, launch-ready pose—featuring its orbiter, solid boosters, and external tank—as the centerpiece of a new exhibit opening November 13, 2026, commemorating NASA's shuttle era.
A NASA Inspector General report questions whether Boeing's Starliner will ever receive human-rating certification, noting multiple test flights and a crewed mission were hampered by parachute issues, helium leaks, and propulsion failures, with unrealistic schedules and budget constraints cited as key obstacles as NASA and Boeing weigh next steps before the ISS is decommissioned in 2030.
NASA awarded about $600 million to Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines to develop upgraded lunar landers that will deliver science payloads to the Moon in late 2028, part of a broader push to establish a sustained presence there with a roughly $20 billion budget over seven years. The awards follow nearly $1 billion in funding for first uncrewed moon-base missions, and NASA plans monthly updates while soliciting additional science payloads. The agency also discussed adapting a Mars rover prototype, named Promise, for lunar testing, and Blue Origin’s setback may shift its timeline to next year.
China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft aims to rendezvous with near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa, collect a small sample (20–100 mg) and return it to Earth by April 2027, potentially making it China’s first asteroid sample return; Kamo'oalewa is a quasi-satellite that may be Moon-origin rock, offering clues to the Moon’s early history, with the mission also planning a flyby of main-belt asteroid 311P/PANSTARRS in 2035.
SpaceX launched 24 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on a Falcon 9 rocket. Booster 1088 completed its 17th flight and landed on the droneship; the satellites deployed about an hour after liftoff, bringing the active Starlink network to over 10,700 satellites. The mission marked SpaceX’s 75th Falcon 9 flight in 2026 and continues expanding global broadband coverage.
SpaceX quietly launched Starfall, a small, secretive capsule on a Falcon 9. FAA filings describe Starfall as enabling affordable microgravity access and rapid space-based cargo delivery, with each capsule capable of about 1,000 kg of payload and an autonomous deorbit—if any—requiring a follow-on vehicle; it will splash down in the Pacific after a short demo. While rumors point to possible military applications, SpaceX has not confirmed any such use, and the webcast was cut shortly after liftoff.
NASA and Boeing have extended Starliner’s return-to-flight timeline by at least a year while they fix thruster malfunctions and helium leaks; a previous crewed mission in 2024 highlighted safety issues, and while progress is ongoing, no firm uncrewed launch date is set for Starliner-1, with NASA reducing Starliner missions and relying more on SpaceX as the ISS program heads toward 2030 retirement.