May 19, 2025

Finally! Webb Has Discovered Water Ice Around a Nearby Star Just Like Our Own Solar System (Source: BBC)
Scientists have found frozen water ice around a star like our Sun, just 155 lightyears away. Astronomers have long suspected that frozen water lurked in systems around distant stars, and now the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered proof. What's more, the water ice discovered is the exact type that we find in our own Solar System. (5/16)

Varda's W-3 High-Speed Reentry Demos Australia's Southern Launch's Capabilities (Source: Space Daily)
Southern Launch and Varda Space Industries successfully executed the reentry of the W-3 mission at the Koonibba Test Range on May 14, 2025. This milestone came just ten weeks after the W-2 mission, Australia's first commercial spacecraft reentry, further demonstrating Southern Launch's ability to support rapid mission turnarounds. (5/15)

China's Satellite Navigation Industry Reaches $79.9 Billion in 2024 (Source: Space Daily)
China's satellite navigation and positioning service industry achieved a total output value of 575.8 billion yuan ($79.9 billion) in 2024, reflecting a 7.39 percent year-on-year growth. A new report highlights the ongoing expansion and technological advancements within the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS). By the end of 2024, the cumulative number of satellite navigation patent applications in China surpassed 129,000, while approximately 288 million mobile phones were equipped with positioning capabilities powered by BDS. (5/19)

Voyager Technologies Plans IPO (Source: Space News)
Voyager Technologies has filed for an initial public offering, providing details about its finances and plans for its biggest project. The company filed a prospectus for the IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday after confidentially filing for an IPO in January. The prospectus notes that the company had $144.2 million in revenue in 2024, split evenly between space and defense work, with a net loss of $65.6 million. The company's biggest project is the Starlab commercial space station, which it is developing through a joint venture that Voyager owns two-thirds of. Voyager estimates that Starlab will cost $2.8-3.3 billion to develop, launching in 2029. Once in operation, Voyager said it expects Starlab to provide a "significant portion" of its revenue and profits. (5/19)

Solestial Secures $17M Series A to Accelerate Space Solar Manufacturing (Source: Space Daily)
Solestial has closed a $17 million funding round, managed by Global Brain Corporation. The funding will enable Solestial to expand its manufacturing capacity to 1 megawatt per year, roughly matching the combined production capability of all U.S. and EU III-V space solar manufacturers. (5/19)

Capella to Continue Radar Imaging After Being Acquired by IonQ (Source: Space News)
Capella Space said it is not abandoning its radar imaging work as it is acquired by a quantum computing company. IonQ announced earlier this month it would acquire Capella for $318 million in an all-stock deal. Executives with the companies said they will continue to operate Capella's fleet of synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites, doubling the number of satellites to eight by next year. Beyond the SAR imaging, the vision is to leverage IonQ's quantum systems to address long-standing issues in space-based Earth observation: latency, security, and data throughput. (5/19)

NGA to Open St. Louis Campus (Source: Space News)
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) expects to open its new St. Louis campus later this year. The $1.7 billion NGA West facility, the largest federal investment in St. Louis history, will replace the NGA's current downtown site and serve as a hub for geospatial intelligence operations. NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said the new NGA West campus will open in late September. Regional leaders have framed it as a catalyst for transforming St. Louis into a national center for geospatial science and technology. (5/19)

SES to Demo Satellite Orchestration for DoD (Source: Space News)
SES Space & Defense plans to demonstrate "satellite orchestration" technology for military communications. Under a new contract with the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit,  SES Space & Defense plans to demonstrate a software platform that would make it easier for users to access and manage bandwidth from multiple satellite networks across orbits. It would help enable multi-orbit networks that are increasingly sought by the military as it faces sophisticated electronic warfare and anti-satellite threats. (5/19)

China's Galactic Energy Launches Ceres-1 Rocket From Ship (Source: Xinhua)
Another Chinese startup launched four satellites early Monday. A Ceres-1 rocket launched from a ship off the coast of China's Shandong Province. The rocket placed into orbit four satellites for the Tianqi constellation, which provides Internet of Things communications services. (5/19)

Rocket Lab Launches Japanese SAR Satellite From New Zealand (Source: Space News)
Rocket Lab launched a Japanese SAR satellite Saturday. An Electron rocket lifted off from the company's Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 4:17 a.m. Eastern. Its payload was the QPS-SAR-10 for iQPS, a Japanese company developing a SAR constellation. That launch was the second in a multi-launch deal between iQPS and Rocket Lab that includes six more launches through 2026. (5/19)

JAXA Open to Artemis Role Changes (Source: Reuters)
The head of the Japanese space agency JAXA said his agency is willing to accommodate any changes NASA makes in the Artemis lunar exploration effort. Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of JAXA, said that if NASA does make changes to Artemis "we must respond to it" by offering different technologies. JAXA is currently providing elements for the lunar Gateway, which NASA proposes to cancel. Yamakawa said JAXA could provide alternative infrastructure to support lunar exploration, like high-precision landing technology and resupply services. (5/19)

SpaceX Acquires Akoustis Assets (Source: Akoustis)
SpaceX has acquired the assets of a bankrupt electronics supplier. Akoustis Technologies said last week that it completed the sale of substantially all of its assets to Tune Holdings, a subsidiary of SpaceX, for $30.2 million and assumption of certain liabilities. The North Carolina company makes radio-frequency filters used in broadband communications systems. SpaceX will continue operations of Akoustis and keep most of its employees. (5/19)

Is Terraforming Mars a Realistic Goal? (Source: Space Daily)
"Believe it or not, no one has really addressed whether it's feasible to terraform Mars since 1991," said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. "Yet since then, we've made great strides in Mars science, geoengineering, launch capabilities and bioscience, which give us a chance to take a fresh look at terraforming research and ask ourselves what's actually possible." Click here. (5/19)

New Theory Suggests Dark Matter Is Frozen Relics of Light-Speed Particles (Source: Science Alert)
In an ongoing quest to guess the secret behind the Universe's excess in gravity, two researchers from Dartmouth College in the US have proposed a chilling union between massless particles soon after the Big Bang. Physicists Guanming Liang and Robert Caldwell picture a newborn cosmos sizzling with massless particles zooming about at high speed – a form of matter that has more in common with light than with cold chunks of darkness.

Over time, particles within this fog of high-energy material collided and cooled, leaving them with the required mass to explain the Universe's unseen source of gravity. (5/17)