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Space Race Frenzy: Satellite Triumphs, Cosmic Surprises & Billion-Dollar Bets Galvanize Space Industry

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Space Race Frenzy: Satellite Triumphs, Cosmic Surprises & Billion-Dollar Bets Galvanize Space Industry

Key Facts

  • Government Agency Milestones: NASA and ESA unveiled a new ocean-monitoring Sentinel-6B satellite set to launch in November, promising improved marine weather forecasts to protect ships nasa.gov. NASA also highlighted how its Artemis II Moon crew will double as research subjects, running deep-space health experiments to prepare for future lunar and Mars missions nasa.gov. In orbit, Russia’s Progress 93 cargo ship launched on Sept. 11 with 3 tons of food, fuel, and supplies bound for the International Space Station nasa.gov, even as Roscosmos faces delays in its Moon program. Europe’s Columbus laboratory on the ISS marked 100,000 orbits around Earth on Sept. 12, a testament to ESA’s long-term role in space research esa.int.
  • SpaceX Soars (Again): SpaceX conducted two major Falcon 9 launches in 48 hours. On Sept. 10, a Falcon 9 from California lofted 21 military satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency’s new “Tranche 1” orbital network space.com, the first of a 126-satellite constellation to provide encrypted global communications for warfighters space.com. A day later in Florida, SpaceX finally launched Nusantara Lima, a powerful Indonesian telecom satellite, after three weather scrubs spaceflightnow.com space.com. The veteran booster (on its 23rd flight) stuck its landing, and the satellite is now en route to geostationary orbit to expand internet across Indonesia’s 17,000 islands by 2026 space.com.
  • Megadeal for Starlink: In a blockbuster move, SpaceX acquired $17 billion worth of wireless spectrum from satellite operator EchoStar to turbocharge Starlink’s direct-to-cellular service space.com. The deal, paid half in cash and half in SpaceX stock, lets Starlink boost its satellite-to-phone bandwidth by up to 20× on next-gen satellites space.com. “For the past decade, we’ve acquired spectrum…with the foresight that direct-to-cell connectivity via satellite would change the way the world communicates,” EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan said, calling the transaction a win-win space.com. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell agreed: “It will advance our mission to end mobile dead zones… In this next chapter, with exclusive spectrum, SpaceX will develop Starlink satellites with a step change in performance” space.com.
  • Private Sector Launch Updates: Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket remains grounded – an Aug. 23 uncrewed research flight (NS-35) was scrubbed due to booster avionics issues, and the company is still troubleshooting with no new launch date yet blueorigin.com. Meanwhile Rocket Lab celebrated its 70th Electron launch in late August and is gearing up for upcoming missions, including U.S. hypersonic test launches from Virginia. Traditional launch providers ULA and Arianespace stayed relatively quiet these two days, as Arianespace prepares for the long-awaited debut of Ariane 6 later this year.
  • Global Startups & Satellite Operators: Apex Space, a Los Angeles startup mass-producing small satellite buses, raised $200 million in a Series D led by former SpaceX executives, hitting a unicorn valuation of $1 billion reuters.com. Founded in 2022, Apex plans to double its factory size and speed up production by 50% to meet surging Pentagon demand for satellites amid a new space defense race reuters.com. In China, commercial firm CAS Space unveiled “Lihong,” a fully reusable suborbital space-tourism spacecraft that can carry 7 passengers above the Kármán line and fly 30 missionsen.people.cnen.people.cn. The company envisions a fleet of ten vehicle flights providing up to 3 minutes of weightlessness to adventurers. CAS Space is also preparing its new Lijian-2 rocket for a Q4 maiden flight to deliver a “Qingzhou” cargo module to China’s Tiangong space station, a step toward commercial resupply capabilitiesen.people.cnen.people.cn. On the operator front, Indonesia’s PSN celebrated the successful deployment of Nusantara Lima, which will add 160 Gbps of capacity to connect remote communities across the archipelago space.com. And in a sign of industry consolidation, debt-laden EchoStar effectively exited its LEO constellation ambitions via the spectrum sale to SpaceX, opting to partner on Starlink’s direct-to-device service space.com space.com.
  • Science & Discovery: This week brought breakthrough cosmic insights. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope studied an ancient brown dwarf nicknamed “The Accident,” finding a chemical clue that may solve a long-standing mystery about Jupiter and Saturn’s formation. Webb detected silane (SiH₄) in the brown dwarf’s atmosphere – the first time this silicon-bearing gas has ever been seen on a substellar object nasa.gov nasa.gov. Scientists realized that because “The Accident” formed 10–12 billion years ago when the universe had very little oxygen, its silicon bonded with hydrogen into silane instead of with oxygen. Such molecules “have been previously seen only in young brown dwarfs or not at all,” researchers noted, and their presence in this ultra-old object helps explain how gas-giant planets like Jupiter might hide silicon in their deep atmospheres nasa.gov nasa.gov. “We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane. The universe continues to surprise us,” one astronomer said of the finding nasa.gov. In planetary science, new analyses of Japan’s Hayabusa2 samples from asteroid Ryugu revealed evidence that liquid water once flowed inside Ryugu’s parent body – long after the asteroid formed. Scientists report that radioactive decay gently warmed Ryugu’s primordial parent asteroid ~4.7 billion years ago, melting buried ice and releasing water that percolated through the rock, triggering chemical reactions that left telltale minerals behind space.com. This suggests small asteroids experienced prolonged wet, active periods in the early solar system – “a genuine surprise” forcing a rethink of how and when ingredients for life might have circulated in early planetary building blocks. Separately, NASA confirmed the OSIRIS-REx mission’s samples from asteroid Bennu contain carbon-rich organic compounds and even “presolar” stardust older than our Sun, offering an invaluable time capsule of solar system formation (as reported just days earlier) space.com space.com.
  • Mission Milestones & Upcoming: Across the globe, space missions are hitting critical junctures. India’s ISRO, fresh off its Chandrayaan-3 Moon landing last month, is pressing ahead with its Gaganyaan human-spaceflight program – in late August ISRO successfully performed the first integrated drop test of the Gaganyaan crew capsule’s parachute system, a key step toward an uncrewed orbital test by next year economictimes.indiatimes.com. Japan’s JAXA welcomed astronaut Kimiya Yui to the ISS as part of SpaceX Crew-11 in late July and is developing its H3 rocket and Smart Lander for future missions, though no major launches occurred on Sep 11–12. Meanwhile, NASA and SpaceX are gearing up for a joint Crew-8 mission and two CRS cargo deliveries to the ISS in coming days (a SpaceX Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus are slated for mid-September nasa.gov nasa.gov). And the global space community is converging for the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in late September, where agencies and companies are expected to announce new partnerships and ambitious projects for 2026 and beyond.

Government Agencies: New Satellites, ISS Resupply & Artemis Science

NASA & ESA – Ocean Satellite and Artemis Research: On Sept. 11, NASA and the European Space Agency spotlighted their upcoming Sentinel-6B oceanography satellite, due to launch in November. Sentinel-6B will succeed the current Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich in tracking sea-level rise and ocean conditions. Its altimeter radar will monitor sea surface height, wave heights and wind speeds – data vital for marine weather forecasts that warn ships of storms and high seas nasa.gov. “Sentinel-6B will soon take on the vital task of improving ocean and weather forecasts to help keep ships, their crews, and cargo safe,” noted Dr. Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, NASA’s lead ocean altimetry scientist nasa.gov. The satellite, a US-EU partnership, launches from California in a few weeks and will ensure continuity of the decades-long sea level record. NASA also released an in-depth Artemis update: the Artemis II lunar flyby crew (three NASA astronauts and one from CSA) will perform over a dozen biomedical experiments during their circa-10-day Moon mission. As both test subjects and operators, the crew will wear smart monitors to log sleep and cognition changes, give saliva and blood samples to track immune function, and even fly “organ-on-a-chip” microfluidic devices to study how deep-space radiation affects human cells nasa.gov nasa.gov. This research – ranging from monitoring stress and teamwork to measuring cosmic-radiation impacts on bone marrow – will help NASA devise countermeasures to keep astronauts healthy on future long-duration missions nasa.gov nasa.gov. (Artemis II is slated for late 2024, so NASA is intensifying crew training and science prep now.)

ISS Operations – Russia and U.S.: At the International Space Station, Expedition 73 crew maintenance and research carried on while two robotic resupply missions lined up in quick succession. On Thursday (Sept. 11), Roscosmos launched its Progress 93 cargo freighter atop a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur at 11:54 a.m. EDT, “safely in orbit, headed for the ISS” with 2.8 tons of supplies nasa.gov space.com. Progress 93 is delivering fresh food, fuel, science experiments, and spare parts for the orbital lab; it docked at the Russian Zvezda module about 3 hours after launch. This comes just days after an earlier Progress (No. 91) undocked and burned up, making room for the new ship nasa.gov. Meanwhile, NASA announced that a U.S. Cygnus cargo craft (NG-19) and a SpaceX Dragon CRS-30 are queued for launch around Sept. 14–15 to also stock the ISS nasa.gov. The busy traffic underscores the cooperative spirit on station: Russia’s launch proceeded normally despite geopolitical strains, and NASA affirmed continued collaboration on ISS logistics through 2028. In a rare gesture of diplomacy, NASA’s (acting) Administrator met Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov in Florida earlier this summer – the first such meeting since 2018 – to discuss extending ISS partnership and even future lunar cooperation reuters.com reuters.com. Despite tensions on Earth, in orbit it’s all hands on deck keeping the 25-year-old space lab running.

ISRO & JAXA – Quiet Achievements: Though Sept. 11–12 saw no new Indian launches, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is still riding high on August’s success of Chandrayaan-3 (the first landing near the Moon’s south pole). ISRO used the early September lull to analyze lunar rover data and to advance its next flagship project: Gaganyaan, India’s inaugural crewed spaceflight. On Aug. 24, ISRO conducted a crucial Integrated Air Drop Test of Gaganyaan’s parachute system – releasing a prototype crew module from an aircraft to test its parachutes’ deployment sequence economictimes.indiatimes.com. The successful test, involving India’s Air Force, Navy and DRDO, demonstrated the capsule’s end-to-end descent and recovery hardware. Officials confirmed the Gaganyaan launch vehicle is fully developed and all abort motors have passed static firing economictimes.indiatimes.com. This keeps ISRO on track for an uncrewed orbital test (Gaganyaan-1) by late 2025, aiming to send Indian astronauts to low Earth orbit by 2026. Over in Japan, JAXA did not have any launches during these two days, but it made news in July by sending astronaut Kimiya Yui to the ISS on SpaceX Crew-7 and in August by unveiling two new career astronauts (one being Japan’s first new female astronaut since 1985). JAXA is also continuing testing of its next-gen H3 rocket after a failed debut in 2023, and is preparing for the Martian Moons Explorer (MMX) mission launch in 2024. Notably, JAXA has partnered with ESA on a potential Apophis asteroid mission and is seeking funding to contribute a probe for when asteroid Apophis visits Earth in 2029 esa.int. These efforts, while less flashy day-to-day, show Japan and India steadily bolstering their space capabilities.

SpaceX and Commercial Launchers: Record Paced Launches, Massive Spectrum Deal

SpaceX Launch Triumphs: SpaceX’s launch cadence in 2025 is nothing short of unprecedented. Thursday night (Sept. 11), SpaceX notched its 114th Falcon 9 flight of the year space.com space.com, dramatically surpassing its previous annual record. That mission carried Nusantara Lima (N-5), a 4.5-ton communications satellite for Indonesia’s PSN, into geosynchronous transfer orbit. After three days of weather delays and a last-minute technical scrub on Wednesday, Falcon 9 finally roared off Cape Canaveral at 9:56 pm EDT under clear skies space.com. The well-traveled booster (B1078) successfully landed on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, marking SpaceX’s 503rd booster recovery to date spaceflightnow.com. Nusantara Lima separated 27 minutes after launch and will maneuver to its slot at 113°E over the equator space.com. There, it will join the SATRIA-1 satellite (launched in June) to deliver 160 Gbps of Ka-band internet connectivity across Indonesia and Southeast Asia space.com. PSN Group’s CEO Adi Rahman Adiwoso said this new satellite “will empower communities, schools, and businesses that have never had reliable access before… making sure no one is left behind as Indonesia grows” space.com. Nusantara Lima’s launch – following multiple scrubs due to Florida thunderstorms – underscores SpaceX’s reliability as the go-to ride for international satellite operators.

Barely a day earlier on Sept. 10, SpaceX executed another high-impact mission: a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg SFB lofted the first 21 operational satellites of the U.S. military’s new “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture” spaceflightnow.com space.com. This network, overseen by the Space Development Agency (now under U.S. Space Force), will form a mesh network of missile-tracking and secure comms satellites in low Earth orbit. SpaceX’s launch (dubbed “Tranche 1, Layer 0”) put the initial layer of 21 small satellites – built by York Space Systems – into polar orbit at ~1,000 km altitude spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com. They are the vanguard of 126 satellites planned for SDA’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer, which will provide global high-bandwidth communications and data relay for U.S. forces space.com. Importantly, these satellites feature optical inter-satellite links (laser crosslinks) to pass data in space and to ground with low latency spaceflightnow.com. SpaceX launched at 7:12 am local (14:12 UTC) and deployed all payloads successfully; the Falcon 9’s first stage landed downrange on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com. Defense officials hailed the event as a major step toward a resilient, next-gen military “internet in space.” With this, SpaceX has firmly entrenched itself as a key launch provider for Pentagon programs, in addition to its dominance in commercial and civil launches.

$17 Billion Spectrum Purchase: In perhaps the most consequential commercial deal of the year, SpaceX agreed to purchase a block of satellite communications spectrum from EchoStar for a staggering $17 billion space.com. The spectrum in question (the 1915–1920 MHz AWS-4 / H-block frequencies) was previously intended for EchoStar’s now-abandoned “S-band” mobile network. EchoStar, a veteran satellite operator known for Dish Network TV satellites, had struggled with debt and was unable to deploy its own new LEO constellation. Enter SpaceX: flush with Starlink’s success, it will pay $8.5 billion in cash and $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock to acquire EchoStar’s spectrum licenses space.com. This immediately bolsters Starlink’s plans to offer direct-to-cellphone service worldwide. SpaceX started test texting via satellite in 2024 using Starlink v2 Minis, but this spectrum purchase gives it dedicated bandwidth to roll out voice and data to ordinary mobile phones in the coming years space.com space.com. EchoStar’s CEO Hamid Akhavan said the sale “allows the combination of [our] spectrum with SpaceX’s rocket and satellite capabilities to realize the direct-to-cell vision in a more innovative, economical and faster way” space.com. For SpaceX, the spectrum means its upcoming Starlink V2 satellites (and the even larger Starlink V3 in development) won’t have to share bandwidth – enabling perhaps 20× more throughput per satellite for mobile users space.com. Gwynne Shotwell emphasized that Starlink’s first-gen direct-to-cell service already proved vital during disasters, and that “with exclusive spectrum… next-gen Starlink direct-to-cell satellites will have a step change in performance”, ensuring you can stay connected “wherever you are in the world” space.com. This bold move also effectively removes a competitor (EchoStar) from the low-orbit internet race, leaving SpaceX and soon Amazon’s Project Kuiper as the dominant players. It showcases SpaceX’s increasing clout – not just launching rockets and satellites, but now buying up spectrum like a telecom giant.

Blue Origin & Others – Mixed Fortunes: While SpaceX grabs headlines, other launch firms had a quieter few days. Blue Origin attempted to resume flights of its New Shepard suborbital rocket this summer after a year-long hiatus (following a booster failure in 2022). The NS-35 mission, carrying over 40 scientific payloads (including 24 student experiments from NASA’s TechRise competition) blueorigin.com, was scheduled for Aug. 23 from West Texas. However, an avionics issue forced a scrub, and after several days of analysis the Sept. 26 relaunch attempt was also “stood down… to continue to troubleshoot” the booster blueorigin.com blueorigin.com. As of mid-September, Blue Origin has not announced a new target date for NS-35’s liftoff, and the vehicle remains grounded. This mission’s delay is significant: it will be the first New Shepard flight since an anomaly halted the program, and it’s carrying only research payloads (no crew), including experiments to test lunar gravity and student science projects. Blue Origin’s bigger projects – the New Glenn orbital rocket and Blue Moon lunar lander – are progressing slowly in the background (New Glenn’s debut is anticipated in 2024). Meanwhile, Rocket Lab continued to steadily carve out its niche. The U.S./New Zealand small launch company completed its 40th Electron launch (“We Will Never Desert You”) in August and even announced its 70th overall mission success on Aug. 23 news.satnews.com uk.finance.yahoo.com. That launch from Mahia, NZ deployed a Capella radar satellite. Rocket Lab’s next mission, intriguingly, is a hypersonic suborbital launch for the U.S. military using a modified Electron (called HASTE) from Wallops Island, Virginia – demonstrating how diverse its manifest has become. Elsewhere, new launch entrants are on the horizon: ULA’s Vulcan rocket had been slated for a summer test flight but remains delayed (after a test article exploded in March), and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 is nearing its inaugural launch (ESA just announced a late-September hot-fire test of the main stage). None of these had launches in our timeframe, but the competition in launch services is intensifying heading into late 2025, as both legacy and startup rockets come online.

Space Business: Startups Reach Unicorn Status, China’s Commercial Space Boom

Apex Space – Building Satellites at Scale: The intersection of venture capital and defense needs produced a new space “unicorn” this week. Apex Space, a two-year-old startup in Los Angeles, revealed on Sept. 12 that it closed a $200 million Series D funding round that values the company at $1 billion reuters.com. Apex is part of a growing cohort of firms focused on mass-manufacturing satellites like one would cars or smartphones. It specializes in standardized satellite buses (the structural backbone and propulsion of a satellite) that can be produced quickly and outfitted with different payloads. The fresh funding – led by an investment firm started by ex-SpaceX finance veterans, with participation from top Silicon Valley VCs (Andreessen Horowitz, etc.) – will allow Apex to boost production output by 50% and double its factory floor in Los Angeles reuters.com. The timing is no accident: In the U.S., the Pentagon is urgently seeking hundreds of small satellites for missions like missile-warning, spy imaging, and communications, as part of a strategy to counter China and Russia in orbit reuters.com reuters.com. Apex hopes to fill that demand. The U.S. military’s announcement of a new $175 billion “Golden Dome” space defense initiative (envisioning space-based interceptors and sensor constellations) has “supercharged private interest in LEO constellations,” Reuters notes reuters.com. Apex said in a statement that Golden Dome is among the programs its satellites “could play a role” in, although details are still taking shape reuters.com. The broader trend is clear: after decades of bespoke, slow-built satellites, the market is shifting to agile, assembly-line production of “satellite fleets.” Apex’s rise to unicorn status – along with competitors like Terran Orbital (Tyvak) and Airbus’s new U.S. venture – signals investor confidence that the “assembly line for spacecraft” model will be lucrative. As Apex co-founder Ian Cinnamon put it earlier this year, “Our goal is to be the Henry Ford of satellites” – and now he has a billion-dollar valuation to back that ambition.

Chinese Commercial Space – CAS Space & More: In China, the commercial space sector is booming with government support, and a notable debut was announced on Sept. 11. CAS Space, a spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, unveiled a fully reusable suborbital spacecraft for space tourismen.people.cn. The vehicle, codenamed “Lihong,” is essentially China’s answer to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo or Blue Origin’s New Shepard – but with some differences. Lihong is a single-stage rocket plane that can carry 7 passengers in a pressurized capsule to beyond 100 km altitude (the edge of space), providing a few minutes of microgravity and panoramic Earth viewsen.people.cn. Uniquely, it’s designed for rapid reusability (30+ flights) and includes an observation window for each passenger. CAS Space envisions operating these vehicles in a “theme park” style space tourism facility, with up to ten of the rocket-planes in rotation and launches every 100 hoursen.people.cn. At the Sept. 10 unveiling event in Beijing, CAS Space’s founder Yang Yiqiang declared the company aims to “expand space-based resources…and foster the space economy into an industrial-scale sector” within 5–10 yearsen.people.cn. Besides tourism, the Lihong vehicle could double as a microgravity science lab for researchers and a technology testbed for reentry systems. CAS Space isn’t stopping there: it also announced its new medium-class Lijian-2 orbital rocket is fully assembled and targeting a Q4 2025 maiden flighten.people.cn. Lijian-2 (aka Kinetica-2) is a liquid-fueled booster meant to lift payloads to low Earth orbit and eventually support China’s space station logistics. In fact, the first mission will launch the inaugural “Qingzhou” cargo spacecraft, a smaller freighter intended to resupply China’s Tiangong space station more flexibly alongside the larger Tianzhou vesselsen.people.cn. A heavy-lift version of Lijian-2 was also mentioned – using clustered boosters and designed to be reusable – with capacity for 60 launches per year for megaconstellationsen.people.cn. These developments underscore how rapidly China’s private space startups (many funded by state-linked capital) are innovating – from cutting-edge rockets to space tourism – in parallel to China’s state programs.

Other startup news globally includes a new space robotics venture (Rendezvous Robotics) emerging with plans to build autonomous in-orbit servicing drones (with a modest $3 M seed round), and a European laser communications firm Cailabs raising €57 M to produce optical ground stations for satellite laser links techfundingnews.com. Even legacy satellite operators are dabbling in startups: for instance, Eutelsat/OneWeb has been partnering with small rocket companies for future launches, and Intelsat just announced an investment in an inflight connectivity startup. All told, investor appetite in the space sector remains strong in late 2025, especially for companies aligned with either the booming demand for LEO satellites or the emerging markets of space tourism, debris removal, and in-space manufacturing.

Science & Exploration: Webb’s Latest Find, Asteroids’ Ancient Secrets, Mars Mysteries

Webb Telescope Cracks a Planetary Puzzle: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to deliver paradigm-shifting discoveries. Astronomers this week reported Webb’s detection of a peculiar molecule – silane (SiH₄) – in the atmosphere of an old brown dwarf known as “The Accident.” This brown dwarf, discovered by NASA’s WISE survey, earned its nickname by being an oddball outlier. It’s extremely ancient (10–13 billion years old) and cool, with properties unlike any other known brown dwarf nasa.gov nasa.gov. Webb’s infrared spectroscopy has now revealed why: the brown dwarf’s atmosphere contains silane, a silicon-hydrogen compound. Such a molecule “has been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs” and not at all in planets nasa.gov nasa.gov. Its unexpected presence in an object so old is a clue about chemistry in the early galaxy. Scientists believe that when “The Accident” formed, oxygen was extremely scarce in the universe (heavy elements were only forged in later generations of stars). With little oxygen around to bind with silicon (and form silicon oxides), the silicon instead bonded with abundant hydrogen, producing silane nasa.gov. By contrast, in younger brown dwarfs or gas-giant planets like Jupiter (which formed in a more oxygen-rich era), silicon prefers to bind with oxygen into silicates, so silane doesn’t show up. Thus, Webb has observed directly the effect of cosmic time on chemistry: “Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres” under low-oxygen conditions nasa.gov. One researcher explained, the lack of silane in Jupiter-like planets is because any silicon there gets “gobbled up” by oxygen, whereas “less oxygen was present in the universe when [this] ancient brown dwarf formed… [so] available silicon bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane” nasa.gov nasa.gov. This solves a riddle about weird spectra seen in some cold brown dwarfs and also informs models of our own Solar System’s gas giants. The science team was astonished – “we weren’t expecting silane… the universe continues to surprise us”, one astronomer said nasa.gov – and excited, noting that studying such “extreme objects” helps refine techniques to analyze exoplanet atmospheres (in the quest for life signatures) nasa.gov. In short, a serendipitous “accident” is teaching us about the formative years of planets and stars.

Asteroid Water and Stardust: Earth-bound labs examining asteroid samples made headlines on Sept. 11 with two major findings: one about ancient water flow inside asteroids, the other about pre-solar stardust in asteroid debris. A Japanese-U.S. team announced that microscopic minerals from Asteroid Ryugu show clear evidence that liquid water percolated through Ryugu’s parent asteroid early in the Solar System’s history. Ryugu, a carbon-rich rubble-pile asteroid, was sampled by JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission and returned to Earth in late 2020. By X-ray scanning the chemistry of Ryugu grains at nanoscale, scientists at Brookhaven Lab identified hydrated minerals and chemical byproducts that could only form in the presence of water space.com space.com. The prevailing theory is that Ryugu originated from a larger parent body that formed over 4.5 billion years ago in the outer Solar System space.com. Radioactive elements within that asteroid would have produced a gentle heat; “the parent body was gently warmed by radioactive decay,” researchers explain, which melted ices like water and carbon dioxide trapped inside space.com. Those fluids then “seeped through the rock,” altering the minerals before refreezing or escaping space.com. Essentially, Ryugu’s building blocks were witness to a subsurface asteroid ocean (or at least an extensive fluid flow) that occurred long after the asteroid formed – perhaps tens of millions of years into its life. “These clues begin to tell a story about the starting materials of the asteroid and their early interactions with fluids,” project scientists noted, helping to “define the sequence of fluid activity” that shaped Ryugu space.com. It’s an eye-opening result: small asteroids were not inert rocks but had complex geochemistry including water-based reactions that could create clays and even organic compounds. This finding was underscored by a related surprise: last week, NASA revealed that its own asteroid sample (from Asteroid Bennu, collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission) contains abundant carbon-bearing molecules and even grains of “stardust” older than the Sun space.com space.com. Scientists analyzing Bennu’s sample (which just arrived on Earth on Sept. 24, 2023) found organic material and water-altered minerals making up ~10% of the sample – indicating Bennu’s parent body also had liquid water that produced clays, and likely the same radioactive heating was at work space.com space.com. Even more astonishing, in Bennu’s dust are tiny flecks of highly refractory minerals like silicon carbide – actual presolar grains that formed around other stars long before our Solar System space.com space.com. These hardy grains survived the violent birth of the Solar System and ended up inside the asteroid. Taken together, the Ryugu and Bennu results paint a picture of the early Solar System as a place where water and stardust mixed inside asteroids, potentially creating the primordial soup of ingredients (water, organics, minerals) that would later seed planets – and possibly life. Researchers are giddy that, thanks to sample-return missions, “we can finally see these things about an asteroid we’ve been dreaming of” space.com, enabling us to connect meteorite data, telescope observations, and laboratory analysis into a coherent history of our cosmic origins.

Elsewhere in the Solar System & Beyond: Mars exploration made a philosophical splash in media circles around Sept. 11, as scientists debated tantalizing hints of ancient life in Mars rocks. NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected samples from Jezero Crater that contain organic molecules and features that could be interpreted as biosignatures, according to a new paper. But NASA experts caution “we need to haul its samples home to find out” for sure space.com – essentially advertising the importance of the planned Mars Sample Return mission (now under review due to cost overruns). In astronomy, a team using the Subaru Telescope announced they finally detected elusive dust-shrouded supermassive black holes from the Cosmic Dawn era (within the first 800 million years after the Big Bang) – a discovery that helps explain how very large black holes appeared so early in cosmic history. And skywatchers got a treat: this week the winners of the 2025 Astronomy Photographer of the Year were unveiled, showcasing ethereal images of auroras, galaxies and the Moon (the winning photos were widely shared online) space.com space.com. On the Sun, a new study found that solar flares can reach an astonishing 108 million °F – six times hotter than previously thought – suggesting our models of the Sun’s atmosphere need revision space.com. Finally, as a bit of space history, Sept. 11 marked the 40th anniversary of the first-ever comet flyby (the little-known ICE spacecraft flyby of comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985) space.com, a reminder of how far planetary exploration has come – from that modest encounter to today’s sample returns and sophisticated telescopes peering back to the dawn of time.

Conclusion

From record-breaking rocket launches and mega-mergers in the satellite industry to new scientific revelations about our Solar System and beyond, the past two days have exemplified the breakneck pace and diversity of modern space activity. Government agencies are pushing forward with ambitious missions (returning humans to the Moon, monitoring Earth’s oceans, keeping the ISS supplied) even as new international players like India and private actors like SpaceX rewrite the rules. The commercial space sector is witnessing unprecedented investment – whether it’s SpaceX pouring billions into expanding Starlink’s empire or startups like Apex and CAS Space attracting capital to realize futures that once sounded like science fiction (satellite factories, space tourism fleets). Above all, science remains the North Star of these efforts: each launch and each satellite ultimately contributes to discovering something new, whether it’s safeguarding our planet, connecting humanity, or understanding the universe. As seen on September 11–12, 2025, we are simultaneously expanding our reach outward – deploying constellations of satellites, planning lunar bases, envisioning trips for civilian space travelers – and probing inward for answers, down to microscopic grains older than Earth and faint cosmic signals from the first stars. The coming days promise more to watch: SpaceX and Northrop Grumman’s dueling cargo launches to the ISS, Blue Origin’s next attempt to get New Shepard flying, and the global space community gathering to strategize at the IAC conference. If this roundup is any indication, the space sector is in full throttle, and each day brings new milestones in humanity’s journey to the stars.

Sources:

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