October 6, 2025

Firefly to Acquire SciTec for $855 Million (Source: Space News)
Firefly Aerospace announced Sunday it will acquire defense contractor SciTec for $855 million. The acquisition is intended to expand Firefly’s footprint in the defense market, where Firefly is trying to capture opportunities in the Golden Dome program. SciTec has secured major contracts with the U.S. Space Force for next-generation missile warning data systems that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning. Firefly, which raised about $1 billion going public this summer, will pay $300 million in cash and $555 million in shares to purchase SciTec. Once the deal is finalized, SciTec will operate as a Firefly subsidiary led by Jim Lisowski, current CEO of SciTec. He will report to Firefly’s CEO Jason Kim. (10/6)

Eurospace Merger Negotiations Stick on Workshare Arrangements (Source: Reuters)
Negotiations to combine the space businesses at three European companies have run into more problems. A report in a French newspaper Monday said that Thales Alenia Space and Leonardo asked for more time to complete a deal with Airbus Defence and Space to create a satellite joint venture, citing issues with how work would be split among the companies. The companies may need several more weeks to complete those negotiations, a source said. A deal on creating the joint venture was expected this summer. (10/6)

Space Cybersecurity a Big Concern for DoD and Intel Officials (Source: Space News)
The biggest concern that intelligence officials have about space assets involves cyber attacks. Chris Scolese, director of the NRO, said at a recent conference that he is worried less about kinetic or directed-energy anti-satellite weapons than cyber, because that is much cheaper for adversaries to pursue. The NRO itself saw a breach this summer when hackers compromised its Acquisition Research Center website, which contractors use to submit bids. That did not directly hurt space systems but it showed cyber adversaries are probing every corner of the ecosystem, including the industrial base. (10/6)

New Satellite Will Help Cyber Defenders Train to Stop Hackers in Orbit (Source: Air and Space Forces)
To help the military and industry develop new cyber defenses, technology contractor Deloitte has launched a microwave oven-sized satellite into low-Earth orbit to act as “an on-orbit, live-fire cyber training range,” said Deloitte Managing Director Brad Pyburn. Deloitte-1, a 22-pound cubesat launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., in March, will allow Deloitte and its government and private sector partners “to conduct training operations, test [the satellite], even attack it, and make sure it’s resilient and responds in the way that you want. (10/2)

SpaceX Has a Few Tricks Up its Sleeve for the Last Starship Flight of the Year (Source: Ars Technica)
On its surface, the flight plan for SpaceX's next Starship flight looks a lot like the last one. There are, however, some changes to SpaceX's flight plan for the next Starship. Most of these changes will occur during the ship's reentry, when the vehicle's heat shield is exposed to temperatures of up to 2,600° Fahrenheit. Like on the last Starship flight, SpaceX has removed some of the ship's thousands of ceramic thermal protection tiles to "intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle."

Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded directly to Starship's stainless steel structure, without a backup ablative layer, according to SpaceX. Engineers are refining the heat shield's design to make it robust against damage during reentry and landing. Any heat shield damage would require refurbishment, risking SpaceX's goal of making Starship fully and rapidly reusable.

One of the new test objectives will be a "dynamic banking maneuver" during the final phase of the trajectory "to mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase," SpaceX said. This will help engineers test Starship's subsonic guidance algorithms. The next flight—Flight 11—will mark the second time SpaceX has reused a Super Heavy booster flown on a previous mission. SpaceX said 24 of the 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines launching on the booster next month are "flight-proven." (9/30)

Commercial Space’s Data Mirage: Why Early-Stage Ventures Must Face Reality (Source: Courtney Stadd)
Space an ecosystem brimming with ambition, ingenuity, and genuine technical achievement. But it’s also one that suffers from a persistent problem: magical thinking. This is not the starry-eyed enthusiasm of the young engineer sketching a Mars lander on the back of a napkin — that kind of optimism can be productive fuel. The magical thinking we see today is more insidious. It resides in C-suites, government offices, and particularly in the investor community.

And that’s the problem. Everyone who’s taken even a basic statistics course knows that global market forecasts are, by necessity, built on multiple layers of assumptions. Those assumptions — sometimes dozens of them — each represent an experienced but nonetheless subjective judgment made by a market analyst. The best reports document these assumptions in detail, but the moment the headline number gets into a press release, those caveats evaporate.

One of the most troubling consequences of this overreliance on headline forecasts is that it often replaces the far more laborious, far more necessary work of building a realistic market model. In the absence of hard data — and let’s be honest, in much of commercial space the data is sparse — leaders must rely on informed intuition. That means grounding assumptions in experience, historical analogs, and a sober assessment of the competitive landscape. (9/23)

Firehawk Aerospace Achieves Critical Milestone with Successful Tests of Solid Rocket Motors (Source: Firehawk)
Firehawk Aerospace has successfully completed the flight tests of an additively manufactured Javelin and Stinger-class Firehawk Analog systems, using 3D-printed propellant for the launch motors of each system. These tests are the final milestone of a Phase III SBIR contract with the Army Applications Laboratory (AAL) which also included a hybrid rocket engine system flight test earlier this year. (9/30)

Space-Time Does Not Exist – Here’s Why That Matters (Source: SciTech Daily)
Space-time is a map of happenings, not a real object. Understanding this distinction clears up confusion about time. Whether or not space-time exists should not be considered controversial or even conceptually difficult once we are clear on the meanings of “space-time,” “events,” and “instants.” Believing in the existence of space-time is no more viable than holding onto the old notion of a celestial sphere: both are observer-centered models that are powerful and convenient for describing the world, but neither represents reality itself. (10/4)

50-Year-Old Data Reveals Venus's Clouds Are Mostly Water (Source: Science Alert)
Reanalyzing old data with our modern understanding seems to be in vogue lately. However, the implications of that reanalysis for some topics are more impactful than others. One of the most hotly debated topics of late in the astrobiological community has been whether or not life can exist on Venus – specifically in its cloud layers, some of which have some of the most Earth-like conditions anywhere in the solar system, at least in terms of pressure and temperature.

A new paper just added fuel to that debate by reanalyzing data from the Pioneer mission to Venus NASA launched in the 70s – and finding that Venus' clouds are primarily made out of water. That doesn't mean that it's water in the traditional sense of how we think water vapor makes up clouds here on Earth. The dihydrogen monoxide in Venus' clouds seems to be tied up in hydrated materials rather than standing alone as pure water droplets. (10/5)

The Epic Hunt for a Planet Just Like Earth (Source: BBC)
We can now infer that most stars have planetary systems – and yet, of the thousands of exoplanets found, we have yet to find a planetary system that resembles our own. The quest to find an Earth twin – a planet that resembles Earth in size, mass and temperature – continues to drive modern-day explorers like us to search for more undiscovered exoplanets.

After three decades of observing, a wealth of different planets have emerged. We started with the hot Jupiters, large gas giants close to their star that are among the easiest planets to find due to both deeper transits and larger radial velocity signals. But while the first tens of discovered exoplanets were all hot Jupiters, we now know these planets are actually very rare.

With instrumentation getting better and observations piling up, we have since found a whole new class of planets with sizes and masses between those of Earth and Neptune. But despite our knowledge of thousands of planets beyond the Solar System, we still have not found systems truly resembling the Solar System, nor planets truly resembling Earth. (10/5)

Earth May Not Be So Special After All, New Study Finds (Source: SciTech Daily)
New research suggests that planets outside our solar system contain far less surface water than scientists once believed. Contrary to earlier theories that these exoplanets might be covered by deep global oceans, the study shows they lack the thick water layers that were often imagined.

For years, scientists thought such planets might collect vast amounts of water during their formation and later sustain massive global oceans beneath hydrogen-rich atmospheres. These hypothetical worlds have been called Hycean planets, a term derived from “hydrogen” and “ocean.” “Our calculations show that this scenario is not possible,” says Caroline Dorn. (10/3)

NASA's Asteroid Deflection Test had Unexpected and Puzzling Outcome (Source: New Scientist)
After NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit slowly but surely changed over the next month, and astronomers can’t explain why. In 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) flew a nearly-600-kilogram satellite into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger one called Didymos. Before the impact, Dimorphos completed an orbit every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Observations soon after revealed that the collision had reduced the orbital period by about 30 minutes, but in the following weeks and months, the orbit shrank even further, by another 30 seconds. (10/1)

NASA Kicks Sierra Space to the Curb (Source: Motley Fool)
NASA is tired of waiting for Dream Chaser to get off the ground, and Sierra's IPO window is closing fast. Back in 2023, the privately held company raised $290 million in new funds to complete development of its Dream Chaser spacecraft -- and surged ahead to a $5 billion private market valuation, making Sierra Space 5X a unicorn stock.

For space investors, that's what it's felt like waiting for Sierra Space to do something interesting these last several years. It's been nearly a decade since NASA awarded Sierra Space (technically, its parent company Sierra Nevada Corp.) a role in its $14 billion CRS-2 project to send Commercial Re-Supply spacecraft to the ISS. Valued at roughly $628 million per launch, and with Sierra expected to run seven of the launches, the contract felt like a windfall for Sierra Space.

After 10 years of no Dream Chaser flights, NASA's tired of waiting for Sierra's phantom spacecraft. Now, NASA's telling the company it needs to either prove Dream Chaser can fly, after which NASA might permit it to fly to ISS and pay for the flights -- or else admit Dream Chaser is a mirage and let SpaceX and Northrop handle the work of resupplying the space station. In the meantime, NASA's shutting off the funding spigot to Sierra. (10/4)

Astronomers Stunned by Black Hole Growing Beyond Known Limits (Source: SciTech Daily)
Astronomers have identified a black hole growing at one of the fastest rates ever observed. The finding, made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, may help clarify how certain black holes were able to gain such immense mass relatively soon after the Big Bang. This particular black hole is about a billion times heavier than the Sun and lies roughly 12.8 billion light-years away.

The black hole fuels what scientists classify as a quasar, a brilliant celestial object that shines brighter than entire galaxies. Its extraordinary luminosity comes from the vast amounts of material spiraling around and being pulled into the black hole. X-ray results show that its black hole is growing at a pace that surpasses the typical threshold expected for such objects. (10/3)