August 19, 2026

China's Landspace Becomes First Non-US Company to Land Booster on Legs (Sources: Space News, Douglas Messier)
Landspace successfully recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket Tuesday, becoming the third entity, after SpaceX and Blue Origin, to land an orbital booster on legs. The successful landing is China’s second booster recovery, coming just a month after China caught a Long March 10B orbital booster using a drone vessel at sea equipped with a net-capture system.

Zhuque-3 is a two-stage rocket that is 65.9 meters tall. It is powered liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Zhuque-3 can place 11,800 kg into low Earth orbit (LEO) in its expendable form or 8,000 kg into LEO when the first stage is recovered. Approximately 137 seconds after liftoff, the first and second stages separated, and the second stage continued its flight, accurately sending the Honghu 03 satellite, independently developed by Hongqing Technology, into its predetermined orbit. (8/18)

RFA is now RF (Source: Rocket Factory)
German launch provider Rocket Factory Augsberg (RFA) has rebranded itself and is now simply Rocket Factory (RF). "What started with a small team and a shared interest in rocketry has grown into a journey of designing, building, testing and learning through every challenge we face. This rebrand marks the beginning of a new chapter for us." (8/16)

Space Forge to Collaborate with Texas A&M University System (Source: Space Forge )
Space Forge Inc, the US subsidiary of the UK company using space to produce semiconductor materials, has signed an agreement with The Texas A&M University System, for a research collaboration. It marks a first step towards Space Forge establishing its initial semiconductor materials manufacturing and processing capability in the US.

The Texas A&M System was selected for the strength of its existing semiconductor facilities and infrastructure, including cleanrooms, material processing and characterization capabilities, alongside aligned research, access to a skilled local workforce and the major semiconductor projects planned across the region. (8/17)

Astra Space Seeks $250 Million to Revive its Launch Programs (Source: American Bazaar)
is seeking investors for reviving its launch programs and to expand its satellite propulsion operations. The company is seeking to raise $250 million, based on a company’s valuation of $1 billion with the deal expected to be completed by the third quarter this year. Astra Space CEO Chris Kemp said that the company is looking to rebound from years of financial struggles. Astra is now betting on low-cost expendable launch vehicles that could be used by militaries to launch satellites from dispersed locations.

Editor's Note: Astra has been working at Launch Complex 46 on the Cape Canaveral Spaceport toward a December 2026 debut "Rocket 4" mission. Rocket 4 is 18.9 meters long with a 1.8 meter diameter. The company is developing a portable launch capability similar to Rocket Lab's GHOST deployable system for Electron/HASTE missions. (8/17)

Sophie Adenot Becomes First Frenchwoman to Spacewalk (Source: LeMonde)
Sophie Adenot became the first French female astronaut to venture outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk on Tuesday, August 18, accompanied by American astronaut Anil Menon. During the six-and-a-half-hour mission, the two astronauts were to replace an antenna that allows the ISS to communicate with mission control in Houston, according to NASA. The two space travelers could be heard chatting and laughing in NASA footage of their adventure. (8/18)

SpaceX Reverses Starlink Roaming Restrictions for Polish Customers After Payment Dispute (Source: European Spaceflight)
SpaceX has reversed its decision to restrict Starlink roaming for customers in Poland, resolving a dispute that included an official threatening to reconsider $50 million in annual payments. The reversal underscores the commercial and policy sensitivities surrounding satellite broadband service access in national markets. (8/18)

NASA Reworks Voyager Power Systems To Extend Interstellar Mission Into the Early 2030s (Source: New York Times)
NASA engineers are reworking the power systems aboard the nearly 50-year-old Voyager spacecraft to conserve energy and keep both probes operating in interstellar space. The changes could extend the mission into the early 2030s, preserving an unprecedented source of long-duration data beyond the solar system. (8/18)

The Pentagon Wants Thousands of Missile Interceptors in Orbit (Source: Scientific American)
Somewhere in the world, a missile’s engines ignite, and it lifts toward the sky. Somewhere above the world, satellites sense its launch. They, in turn, send out an alert, along with information about the missile’s path. Almost instantly an interceptor in orbit—essentially a big bullet—gets its own message: fire toward the missile. Ideally the space-based weapon strikes the missile early in flight, before the rocket can release a warhead or decoys, turning a threat to the U.S. into a bunch of debris. Or at least that’s the idea behind space-based interceptors, the most audacious part of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile-defense initiative to shield the U.S. from airborne attacks.

Much of the technology that could feed into Golden Dome already exists in pieces or inside other defense programs—it just (“just”) needs to be linked together and scaled until it can protect the entire country around the clock. Space-based interceptors, though, don’t yet exist as an operational system. And there isn’t a firm plan for what they will look like—or, for that matter, what Golden Dome as a whole will look like. As Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, puts it, “There is no architecture,” at least not one that’s been released publicly. That fuzziness, however, isn’t stopping American companies from preparing to make orbital interceptors in the hopes of cashing in on the most speculative and, by some accounts, expensive part of the defense project. (8/18)

Japan Launches Second US Military Payload to Monitor Space Above Indo-Pacific (Source: Breaking Defense)
Japan has launched the second of two long-planned US Space Force orbital neighborhood watch sensors on a Japanese satellite. The dual missions represent “the first bilateral” US-Japan cooperative space effort “focused on national security,” US Space Systems Command (SSC) said in an Aug. 14 statement. The first of the two sensors was launched in February 2025. The Space Force sensors, designed and built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, will keep watch on the heavens above the Indo-Pacific region. (8/17)

A 'River' of Cosmic Gas 1 Trillion Miles Long Sent Planets in the Orion Constellation Into Tilted Orbits (Source: Space.com)
A rare planet-forming disk around a young triple-star system in the Orion constellation has been tipped over by a river of gas over 1 trillion miles (1.6 trillion kilometers) long. The discovery, made at radio wavelengths with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, could explain why astronomers keep finding planets with orbits that are drastically misaligned with the rotational axes of their stars.

GW Orionis is a triple system consisting of three pre-main sequence stars, meaning that they are still forming and contracting and have not yet initiated fusion reactions of hydrogen in their core. The stars are located roughly 1,300 light-years away, in the Lambda Orionis star-forming molecular ring in the constellation of Orion, the Hunter. Finding a planet-forming disk of gas and dust encircling all three stars in a system is very rare, and finding a disk consisting of three rings with misaligned orbits is even stranger. (8/17)

Wishing for Rockets (Source: Space Review)
The demand for launch services is higher than ever, but the supply of rockets today is very constrained. Jeff Foust reports on the various factors that make getting a ride to orbit today difficult and expensive, despite the promise of plummeting launch costs. Click here. (8/18)
 
Two Futures on the Moon (Source: Space Review)
The race to return humans to the Moon pits not just two countries but two political philosophies. Alexander William Salter discusses how American leadership in space can establish a humane space agenda. Click here. (8/18)
 
Colonizing Antarctica and Other Anti-Space Fables (Source: Space Review)
One argument that critics of space settlement make is that it would be far easier to settle Antarctica. Milan Ćirković offers several reasons why that argument is wrong. Click here. (8/18)

Rocket Lab Selected to Build Viasat Satellite Bus (Source: Tech Times)
Rocket Lab has expanded its strategic presence in geostationary orbit by serving as a satellite bus supplier for Viasat’s U.S. Space Force anti-jam communications mission under the PTS-G Swarm 1 program. Unlike its earlier role as prime contractor for the Heimdall GEO domain awareness mission, Rocket Lab now supports Viasat as a specialist platform provider, delivering the Lightning-GEO bus while Viasat manages integration, launch and operations. (8/17)

Using Starlink’s Satellites To Study Earth’s Upper Atmosphere (Source: Hackaday)
Aside from global access to cat videos, the presence of thousands of Starlink broadband internet access satellites in LEO has a very pleasant side effect for atmospheric researchers. Starlink publicly publishes near-real-time ephemeris data on its individual satellites. From this data you can deduce many details about the atmosphere at that altitude, including its density at specific altitudes at specific times, information which otherwise would be very hard to gather. Recently, this allowed [Mamoru Yamamoto] to determine the density of the thermosphere using tomography. (8/17)

How an Ancient Collision with Another Galaxy Transformed the Milky Way (Source: Space.com)
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered evidence that our galaxy experienced a significant collision and merger with a dwarf galaxy 11.8 billion years ago. In recent years, one other significant merger has come to light, which is a collision with a galaxy referred to as the Gaia–Sausage–Enceladus (GSE) galaxy about 10 billion years ago. The GSE had its own family of globular star clusters that became integrated with the Milky Way's own globular clusters during the collision. (8/17)

Most Major Aerospace Suppliers Are Raising Their Outlooks (Source: Aviation Week)
Business is so good in aerospace and defense manufacturing that even troubled companies are making money. Take Honeywell Aerospace, which spun off as a stand-alone company June 29—just in time to have to report second-quarter financial results. (8/18)