Space news

Few modern systems are as consequential — or as exposed — as the Global Positioning System. A temporary loss of access to its positioning, navigation and timing signals would ripple through the global economy and severely impair military operations. Yet despite repeated warnings that GPS signals can be jammed, spoofed or denied — often using […] The post Space Force may be done with R-GPS, but Congress isn’t appeared first on SpaceNews.

The award was made under NGA’s Luno program. The post Vantor wins $5.3 million NGA contract to spot terrain changes using commercial satellite data appeared first on SpaceNews.

Dedicated research and development, funded by European Union (EU) and European Space Agency (ESA) programmes over the years, has played a key role in Galileo Second Generation. 

About 2,900 Olympic athletes have converged on northern Italy to sort out who is the GOAT—or perhaps the stoat.

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee unanimously approved a new NASA authorization bill today after adopting a number of amendments. Overall the bill reemphasizes congressional commitment to U.S. leadership […]

The House Science Committee unanimously approved a NASA authorization bill Feb. 4 after adopting dozens of amendments. The post House committee advances NASA authorization bill appeared first on SpaceNews.

SAN FRANCISCO — Viridian Space Corp. signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The five-year CRADA will provide the Southern California startup with access […] The post Viridian inks cooperative agreement with Air Force Research Laboratory appeared first on SpaceNews.

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Jan. 30, 2026 Mars has emerged from its holiday behind the Sun, and we here on Earth have been able to reconnect with Curiosity and get back to work on Mars. Our first planning day last Friday gave Curiosity a full […]

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and the University of Texas System (UT System) announced the signing of a collaborative Space Act Agreement on Jan. 9, 2026. The agreement expands research and workforce development partnership opportunities across NASA centers and UT System facilities. The agreement builds upon decades of collaboration between NASA and the UT […]

"We will continue to rely on the ingenuity of the private sector."

Biomedical research to promote astronaut health and Earth observations to understand the effects of natural catastrophes topped the science schedule aboard the International Space Station on Wednesday. The Expedition 74 trio is also gearing up for the arrival of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission while continuing lab maintenance for the upkeep of the orbiting lab.

As a member of the Crew Operations Office, Erin Edwards and her team manage astronaut candidate training schedules, including field medical exercises, land survival, and underwater operations at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston. She also develops and tests new training programs to keep crews mission-ready.   Along with her role as a crew operations officer, Edwards works in the […]

Northrop Grumman has successfully tested the Bombardment Attack Missile Motor 29! 2.0, also known as… The post Northrop Grumman tests second solid motor developed under 2025 SMART program appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

Space is the new battlefield high ground, and the upcoming United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket flight will help to protect U.S. national security orbital assets by launching a “neighborhood watch” surveillance system directly into geosynchronous orbit. The USSF-87 multi-manifested mission for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command will launch aboard a Vulcan VC4S rocket on Feb. 12 from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.  The rocket will use four side-mounted solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and dual-engine Centaur V upper stage to deliver the heavy payload more than 22,00 miles (35,000 km) above the Earth. Vulcan’s versatility and purpose-built, high-energy rocket architecture is designed to meet all of the demanding national security requirements of our nation’s space launch needs.  

The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) conducted a technical assessment to evaluate alternatives to dichloromethane, traditionally used for bonding transparent polymeric materials. This effort was initiated in response to potential regulatory restrictions under the EPA Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which could impact critical bonding processes used in spaceflight hardware and experimental systems. Download […]

NASA is leveraging expertise, capabilities, and partnerships across its centers to make Artemis campaign and deep space exploration safer, more reliable, and efficient. At NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, contributions include technical leadership, unique flight-testing capabilities, and management of a key technology program that advances critical exploration concepts. Artemis II is an […]

This Jan. 29, 2026, photo captures the streak the Varda Space Industries W-5 capsule made while returning to Earth. The capsule uses a protective heat shield Varda produced made of cutting-edge material it licensed from NASA. The material, known as C-PICA (Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), provides a stronger, less expensive, and more efficient thermal protection […]

Description These observations by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma. The comet brightened significantly during the December 2025 period when SPHEREx made the observations — about two […]

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Feb 03, 2026 A sediment core from the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean has provided a research team led by geochemist Dr Torben Struve from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, with evidence of an unexpected climate feedback in Antarctica. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, links changes in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to variations in marine algae growth over several glacial cycles, but in a wa

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Feb 03, 2026 Deep underground, microbial communities living on rock surfaces are emerging as powerful but largely overlooked drivers of groundwater chemistry and carbon storage. A team from the Cluster of Excellence Balance of the Microverse at Friedrich Schiller University Jena has now shown that these attached microbes follow fundamentally different strategies from free-floating cells in groundwater, with

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 02, 2026 A new radar image from the joint NASA-ISRO NISAR satellite shows how the mission can see through cloud cover to reveal surface features across the Mississippi River Delta region in southeastern Louisiana. The scene, acquired on November 29, 2025, with NISAR's L-band synthetic aperture radar instrument, spans the cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the winding Mississippi River between t

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 02, 2026 NASA's Libera Earth energy instrument has completed a full campaign of environmental testing and is now ready for delivery to its host satellite, marking a major milestone for the agency's long term record of Earth's radiation budget measurements. The test series included thermal vacuum trials that replicated the temperature extremes and vacuum conditions Libera will face in orbit, along with ot

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 03, 2026 Raytheon, an RTX business, has been selected by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop an advanced sensing and targeting system to protect commercial shipping and naval logistics vessels from emerging maritime threats such as unmanned surface vehicles. Under the Pulling Guard program, Raytheon s Advanced Technology team will design, build and demonstrate a system that

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 02, 2026 Lockheed Martin has signed a new framework agreement with the U.S. Department of War that aims to quadruple annual production of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors from 96 to 400 units. The multi year arrangement is intended to expand the supply of missile defense interceptors available to the U.S. military and allied customers amid rising global demand. The company w

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 02, 2026 The U.S. Space Force has activated U.S. Space Forces Northern as its newest component field command, positioning space capabilities more directly in support of the homeland defense mission at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, on Jan 30, 2026. The command, known as SPACEFOR-NORTH, serves as the U.S. Space Force service component to U.S. Northern Command, becoming the seventh Space Force

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Feb 03, 2026 KSAT is introducing a new platform that provides space based maritime situational awareness by combining its global satellite ground network and maritime services with AI powered analytics developed by VAKE. The Vake Powered By KSAT platform delivers detection, identification and tracking of dark vessels from space by using data from optical, radiofrequency and radar satellites operated by

Washington, United States (AFP) Feb 3, 2026 NASA said Tuesday its next crew rotation to the International Space Station could be delayed after SpaceX announced it was grounding flights of its Falcon 9 rocket to investigate an unspecified issue. SpaceX, the private space company owned by Elon Musk, has paused flights of its Falcon 9 rocket following an issue its second stage experienced during a routine launch Monday of Starlink satell

Washington, United States (AFP) Feb 3, 2026 NASA said Tuesday it's delaying until March the launch of its first crewed flyby mission to the Moon in more than 50 years, after encountering leaks during final tests. The mishaps during a run-through that the US space agency calls a "wet dress rehearsal" dashed hopes that the mission around the Moon could launch as soon as Sunday. The next possible launch window now opens March 6. The

ExoAnalytic tool aims to show when fire-monitoring satellites can actually see the ground The post FireSat adds orbit-visualization software to help firefighters plan around satellite passes appeared first on SpaceNews.

Light is the fastest phenomenon in the universe, clocking in at just under 300,000 kilometers per second. The telescopes that observe that light, from radio waves to gamma rays, are built at rather slower speeds. Take, as one example, the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA began feasibility studies for the mission in the mid-1990s and […] The post Space telescopes at light speed appeared first on SpaceNews.

"You know, you're right, the flight rate—three years is a long time."

German rocket builder Isar Aerospace has announced plans to expand its testing facilities at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. The announcement comes as the company prepares for the second flight of its Spectrum rocket, currently expected no earlier than 19 March. Isar Aerospace was founded in 2018 and is developing a 28-metre-tall rocket designed […] The post Isar Aerospace to Expand Testing Facilities as it Prepares for Next Spectrum Flight appeared first on European Spaceflight.

In the consumer electronics playbook, custom silicon is the final step in the marathon: you use off-the-shelf components to prove a product, achieve mass scale and only then invest in proprietary chips to create differentiation, improve operations, and optimize margins. In the modern satellite communications (SATCOM) ecosystem, this script has been flipped. For the industry’s […] The post Silicon as strategy: the hidden battleground of the new space race appeared first on SpaceNews.

NASA Scientist Alex Gardner highlights how Landsat made his research into the dynamics of glacial flow possible.

From the ESA Blogs.

Engineers are working through a data review of the Wet Dress Rehearsal for Artemis II,… The post Artemis II: WDR resolutions in work ahead of March target appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

Engineers are working through a data review of the Wet Dress Rehearsal for Artemis II,… The post Artemis II: WDR resolutions in work ahead of March target appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 Governments, industry representatives and international organizations from over 70 countries have agreed on new guidance to strengthen the resilience of submarine telecommunications cables at the International Submarine Cable Resilience Summit 2026 in Porto, Portugal. The event focused on protecting the subsea infrastructure that underpins global digital communications and economic activity.

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 A research team at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) has demonstrated a secure holographic platform that encodes and reveals information using only the wavelength of light and the spacing between stacked metasurface layers. The approach targets the growing limitations of conventional digital security by shifting the encryption key from electronic code to the physical properti

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 As commercial spaceflight moves closer to routine operations and missions extend in duration, a new expert report argues that reproductive health in space has shifted from a theoretical concern to an urgently practical issue. The authors warn that space is an environment fundamentally hostile to human biology, yet human activity beyond Earth is rapidly expanding without matching standards for ma

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 Muon Space is entering a new phase of operational scale as it moves from discrete missions to sustained, multi-mission satellite constellation deployment for government and commercial customers. The Mountain View based company reports that its growing mission portfolio, expanding launch manifest and increasing demand for end-to-end, mission-optimized systems are driving this transition. In

Paris, France (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 When satellites fall back to Earth, most of their structure burns up in the atmosphere, but engineers still lack detailed data on how real spacecraft actually break apart during reentry and which components survive the plunge. To close this gap, the European Space Agency has retargeted the final orbits of its remaining two Cluster satellites so that both can be observed from an aircraft during t

Amherst MD (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy - 100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of p

Paris, France (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 For more than half a century, planetary scientists relied on a handful of spacecraft flybys to pin down Jupiter's size and shape. Now, an international team led by the Weizmann Institute of Science has used a trove of new radio data from NASA's Juno mission to redraw the gas giant with unprecedented precision. The study, published in Nature Astronomy, replaces six measurements from NASA's

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 Voyager Technologies has launched a strategic lunar initiative designed to align with the White House Securing American Space Superiority executive order and to reinforce United States leadership beyond low Earth orbit. The initiative is framed as a long-term effort to support exploration, national security and commercial activity on and around the Moon by focusing on durable infrastructure rath

Paris, France (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 Before any building rises on the Moon, engineers will need to understand the soil beneath their structures just as they do on Earth. To address this challenge, a recent ESA Discovery project led by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) has produced a design for a specialised calibration chamber that will allow cone penetration instruments to be tested under lunar conditions, providing the g

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 04, 2026 ExLabs has selected CUS-GNC's SpacePilot onboard autonomy software to provide guidance, navigation, and control for its planned Mission to Asteroid Apophis, a commercial deep-space campaign that will operate at distances exceeding 100 million kilometers from Earth. The company describes itself as a commercial deep-space mission operator developing next-generation platforms for exploration beyond

A Senate committee has delayed consideration of a bill intended to expedite Federal Communications Commission reviews of satellite license applications amid concerns that the proposal may be too permissive. The post Senate committee delays consideration of bill to streamline FCC satellite licensing appeared first on SpaceNews.

After helping place proliferated LEO constellations at the center of U.S. military space planning, the SmallSat Alliance is now tackling how these networks can be used together as a unified system. The post SmallSat Alliance shifts focus from proliferation to coordination appeared first on SpaceNews.

Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force’s vice chief of space operations, spoke with SpaceNews’ Sandra Erwin as part of an event focused on the Space Force 2040 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center on Jan. 21. Here are six takeaways from their conversation: Planning for 2040 means more space superiority A long-range planning initiative […] The post As satellites become targets, Space Force plans a broader role appeared first on SpaceNews.