October 26, 2025

NASA’s SLS Rocket for Artemis II Fully Stacked in VAB (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
Despite the ongoing government shutdown, NASA did manage to complete a major milestone in its effort to send astronauts back to moon. Teams completed the stacking of the Orion spacecraft atop the Space Launch System rocket at Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building this week. The fully stacked rocket is slated to fly as early as Feb. 5 to take four astronauts on a trip around, but not land on, the moon on Orion’s first flight with humans on board. (10/25)

Texas' Newest City is Already Home to Millions in New Development (Source: My San Antonio)
The Starbase community, located along a lonely highway in deep South Texas, didn’t wait for their city’s incorporation election to become official before diving headlong into a massive development effort that has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in industrial, residential and commercial development. From a mega-factory that will one day send rockets to Mars, to a “retro-futuristic” hangout meant to evoke the nostalgia of tomorrow’s yesteryear, to shopping centers, clinics, and schools, the strip of land along Texas 4 whose most defining features were rolling sandy hills called “lomas,” tidal flats, and scraggly, sunworn patches of brush now looks like something straight out of a science fiction novel. (10/25)

SpaceX Completes Vandenberg’s Third Starlink Launch of Week, Breaking 2024 Launch Record (Sources: Noozhawk, Spaceflight Now)
The West Coast team for SpaceX completed the week’s trifecta Saturday with another Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex-4, with the first-stage booster successfully landing on the droneship minutes afterward. This was its 135 Falcon 9 launch of 2025, breaking its record number of orbital launches achieved in all of 2024. (10/25)

China Successfully Launches New Satellite (Source: Xinhua)
China on Sunday sent a new satellite into space from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in its southwestern Sichuan Province. The Gaofen-14 02 satellite was launched aboard a Long March-3B rocket. (10/26)

Texas City Council Approves Incentives for New Firefly HQ (Source: Community Impact)
As the Cedar Park-based Firefly Aerospace continues its push to expand, the company is looking to move into a larger facility that could attract up to 300 jobs to the city. On Oct. 23, Cedar Park City Council approved a $1 million performance-based grant for Firefly to expand their headquarters. The company is looking to move into a 44,000-square-foot facility, about 1 mile north of the company’s current headquarters. (10/24)

With Local Economic Development Support Micro-G Team Launches Another Suborbital Mission (Source: Micro-G)
On 18 October the micro-G, Inc. (µG) team conducted a suborbital flight test at the Friends of Amateur Rocketry site outside of Mojave, CA. The K-103 test vehicle featured a 500 lbf-thrust LOX-ethanol FAR LR1 engine and reached an altitude of 1,200 feet, which was followed by a successful parachute deployment using a pneumatic ejection mechanism.  Additionally, an Arduino-based telemetry experiment that incorporated a LoRa RF link provided real-time in-flight instrumentation data.

 The K-103 is the same vehicle that previously served to pathfind static fire testing at sea off the coast of Mississippi last August with the support of The Spaceport Company. For this latest campaign, the team included the Atmospheric Vehicles & Spacecraft Flight Exploration organization (logistics) as well as the City of Long Beach Economic Development & Opportunity department. Through the EDO’s Space Beach Camp, high school and college students participated in vehicle development, test preparations and the on-site launch campaign.  They then presented their observations and lessons learned at the City’s College & Career Expo that took place on 21 October. (10/22)

Honeywell Aerospace Leadership and HQ Location TBD (Source: Flight Global)
Who will lead Honeywell’s soon-to-be divested aerospace business, and where that business will be based, remain unsettled. But those details are now being considered by the company’s board of directors and will be revealed before year-end, says Honeywell chief executive Vimal Kapur. The discussions come as Honeywell prepares in 2026 to divest its Honeywell Aerospace Technologies division into a separate publicly traded company called Honeywell Aerospace.

The aerospace business is now based in Phoenix and led by sector CEO Jim Currier, a longtime Honeywell executive. Honeywell has not yet confirmed the post-spin leadership team. (10/23)

JWST Found a Hidden Moon Factory Beyond Our Solar System (Source: SciTech Daily)
JWST just spotted a carbon-rich moon factory 625 light-years away, revealing how moons like ours may have first taken shape. Our solar system is home to eight major planets and more than 400 known moons orbiting six of them. But how did all those moons come to exist? Scientists have proposed several ways they could have formed. In the case of the large moons, such as Jupiter’s four Galilean satellites, the leading idea is that they developed from a disk of dust and gas that surrounded the planet as it took shape. That process would have occurred over 4 billion years ago, leaving only faint traces of evidence today.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now captured the first direct look at material within a disk encircling a massive exoplanet more than 625 light-years from Earth. This carbon-rich disk may serve as a kind of workshop where moons take shape. Because moons are thought to outnumber planets across our galaxy, and some could even host life, studying how they form is key to understanding planetary systems as a whole. (10/24)

Japan Launches Advanced New Cargo Spacecraft to ISS for 1st Time (Source: Space.com)
Japan's new HTV-X cargo spacecraft launched on its first-ever mission to the ISS on Saturday. The HTV-X is the successor to JAXA's HTV, also known as Kounotori (Japanese for "White Stork"), which flew nine missions to the ISS between September 2009 and May 2020. An H-3 rocket launched the cargo mission at the Tanagashima spaceport. (10/25)

Rocket Launches are Blasting a New Hole in Our Ozone Layer (Source: New Atlas)
As private companies race to make spaceflight routine, Earth’s upper atmosphere has become an unintended testing ground. Exhaust and propellant residues react with ozone, thinning the layer that shields life below. It’s a problem scientists are just beginning to quantify, and one that’s rising as fast as the rockets themselves. (10/25)

Blue Origin Has a LOT Riding on November New Glenn Flight (Source: Next Big Future)
Blue Origin has a critical next flight in November for New Glenn. It will determine if they have a chance for 4 flights in 2026 or 8. They have to be able to cleanly fly and land the booster stage. This will determine if they can reuse the booster every 6 months. Any flight problems will lead to an FAA investigation that will delay third launch by 3-6 months.

If they cannot land and reuse boosters and have clean flights in November and then all launches in 2026, then there is very low chance that they will get a NASA $2 billion restart of their lunar landing program. The Lunar landing program will add 5 more challenging launches with at least unmanned missions to the moon. If they are still showing problems getting beyond 2-4 launches per year, then you could not add 5 launches and expect to do them in a timely fashion. (10/24)

Could We Blast Space Debris Out of Harm's Way with Ion Beams? (Source: Space.com)
A new space debris removal project aims to blast hazardous junk out of harm's way from a distance, without the need for physical contact. Called ALBATOR, the 3.9 million Euro ($4.6 million USD) early-stage concept is examining non-kinetic methods to move space junk out of the way of satellites or objects like the ISS before they threaten these spacecraft.

ALBATOR aims to use a type of particle beam with ions (charged electrons) to move the debris around, which means no need to touch the junk in the first place. This approach is distinct from other methods that require physically touching the object. Examples include huge catching nets, or docking with stray objects to force them back down into Earth's atmosphere. (10/26)

Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth (Source: Futurism)
Regardless of where exactly the latest Australian debris item came from, it’s evidence of a universal problem in an accelerating space industry: pollution. Rocket launches are more frequent than ever, and Elon Musk has thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit. There’re so many of these expendable satellites, in fact, that there’s now at least one of them falling to Earth every single day.

It’s rare for such large chunks of space debris to land on Earth, because they’re supposed to completely burn up in the atmosphere before they can ever touch the ground. But rare doesn’t mean never, and a spate of these objects crashing all around the world has some experts fearing that we’re vastly underestimating the threat they may pose. (10/25)

Black Hole Caught Snacking on Star Far From Host Galaxy’s Center (Source: Astronomy)
For the first time, astronomers have detected intense, fast-changing radio signals from a tidal disruption event, dubbed AT2024tvd, located outside its galaxy’s core. Now, astronomers are trying to understand what the black hole is doing 2,600 light-years from where they expected it to be, what its strange signals mean, and whether there are more off-kilter events like it happening across the cosmos. (10/24)

Astronomers Stunned by Bizarre Three-Planet System (Source: SciTech Daily)
An international group of scientists has announced the discovery of three Earth-sized planets orbiting within the binary star system TOI-2267, located roughly 190 light-years from Earth. The finding provides new insights into how planets can form and remain stable in double-star systems, which were once thought to be too unstable to support complex planetary structures. (10/25)

New Model Solves the Mystery of Opposite Winds on Giant Planets (Source: YNet)
Blasting around the equators of the solar system’s giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — are fierce jet streams that reach speeds of 500 to 1,500 kilometers per hour. For years, scientists have puzzled over why these extreme winds blow eastward on Jupiter and Saturn but westward on Uranus and Neptune, even though all four planets share similar conditions: each receives little sunlight, has a moderate internal heat source and rotates rapidly.

Now, researchers have developed a new model that, for the first time, offers a single mechanism explaining this long-standing mystery. Their findings were recently published in Science Advances. They used hydrodynamic modeling to show that variations in atmospheric depth can account for the opposite wind directions. In other words, under the same physical conditions, a planet’s jet streams can flow either eastward or westward depending on how deep its atmosphere extends. (10/25)

NASA’s Moon Race Looks Like a Losing Bet (Source: Scientific American)
Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that the U.S. must win a race back to the moon with China, NASA looks increasingly unlikely to succeed, experts say. Meanwhile China insists it isn’t in a race at all yet looks poised to win the 21st century’s lunar scramble. Landing U.S. astronauts on the moon is officially slotted for 2027, on NASA’s Artemis III launch. The only problem is that former and retired space agency officials are now publicly calling that timing unlikely. The effort comes as China makes steady progress on its own lunar program.

In August the China National Space Administration test-fired the first stage of its own lunar rocket, aiming to place people on the moon by 2030. Yangting Lin of China's Institute of Geology and Geophysics says: “I believe that promoting the ‘China threat’ theory and the idea of a space race is, in part, intended to secure [Artemis] funding from Congress.” The second Trump administration first sought to kill off SLS but now appears poised to compromise with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is intent on keeping the jobs-delivering-program alive, at least through an Artemis V launch. (10/23)

A Radical Reimagining of Physics Puts Information at its Center (Source: Aeon)
Are the laws of classical physics as we currently understand them missing something important about how the Universe works? This radical notion lies at the heart of a new proposal. The researchers believe a ‘law of increasing functional information’ could help us better understand why everything from atoms to cells to civilizations seems to grow more complex and orderly over time. They suggest that, if information is as fundamental as mass or energy, it could not only account for the similar ways so many systems appear to behave, but also help physicists make sense of the concept of time. (10/23)

Boeing Workers Reject Contract Offer (Source: NPR)
The St. Louis-area machinists union on Sunday voted 51% to 49% against a modified contract proposal after striking for three months against what they said had been “insulting” offers from Boeing. The vote marked the fourth time the union has struck down company proposals since contract negotiations began this summer. (10/26)

Newly Discovered ‘Super-Earth’ Offers Prime Target in Search for Alien Life (Source: Penn State)
The discovery of a possible “super-Earth” less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according to an international team including researchers from Penn State. They dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a “super-Earth” as data suggest it is almost four times as massive as the Earth and likely to be rocky planet. (10/23)

Fragmented Deoxyribonucleic Acid Could Be Extractable From Mars’s Surface Rocks (Source: Nature)
Detecting biomolecules in rocks is vital for understanding life’s evolution on Earth and its possible existence on Mars. The Curiosity rover measured Total Organic Carbon (TOC) levels of 201–273 ppm in 3500 million years (Ma)-old Martian mudstones exposed to radiation for 78 ± 30 Ma. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a unique biological polymer, may be recovered under comparable conditions. We extracted and sequenced DNA from terrestrial sedimentary rocks with TOC ranging from 182 to 63,000 ppm, yielding 184,000 to 3.8 million nucleobases from a 0.5 g rock sample.

After exposure to 10.45 MGy of gamma radiation, equivalent to 136 Ma on the Martian surface, we measured a radiolytic constant of K = 0.17 MGy⁻¹ in microbialite (2800-year-old) and oxide iron formation (2930 Ma old) samples. Despite fragmentation, 1.48–8.45% of sequences remained taxonomically identifiable, demonstrating that DNA fragments can persist in rocks for over 100 Ma. (10/24)

In Orbit You Have to Slow Down to Speed Up (Source: WIRED)
Moving a vehicle in orbit around Earth is way more complicated than you'd think. The maneuvers you might make with an aircraft sometimes have the opposite effect in orbit. Click here. (10/24)

Without Jupiter, Earth May Have Spiraled Into the Sun Long Ago (Source: Space.com)
Jupiter was shaping Earth's fate before our planet even existed, carving gaps in the early solar system that kept its building blocks from plunging into the sun, a new study finds. Jupiter's early growth cut off the flow of gas and dust toward the inner solar system, preventing the material that would one day form Earth, Venus and Mars from spiraling into the sun. In doing so, scientists say the planet's gravity not only stabilized the inner planets' orbits but also shaped the structure of the solar system, carving out rings and gaps that influenced how, and when, rocky bodies formed. (10/24)

How Compact Can a Neutron Star Get Before Collapsing Into a Black Hole? (Source: Space.com)
By developing a new theoretical relation describing just how compact neutron stars — which are the remnants of massive stars that have gone supernova — can get, researchers have found a way to test the properties of nuclear physics under very extreme conditions. Models predict that neutron stars are about a dozen or so miles across, but their exact radius has always been unclear. Researchers were surprised to find that an upper limit exists for the compactness of a neutron star, and that based on this, the ratio between the neutron star's mass and its radius is always smaller than 1/3. (10/24)

Air Force Can’t Afford ‘Runaway’ R&D, Needs More Aircraft (Source: Air and Space Forces)
Pentagon investment over the past decade has so favored research and development over procurement that it “has left the Joint Force increasingly undersized, outdated, and less likely to prevail in high-intensity conflict against a peer,” according to a new report from the Center for a New American Security. (10/23)