Space Exploration News 3 July 2025 - 15 August 2025

Rocket Launch Triumphs: New Heavy-Lifters and Constellation Boosts Lunar Missions & Spaceflight Milestones: Moon Race Intensifies Next-Gen Satellite Tech & Services: Innovation in Orbit Space Policy & International Developments: Safety, Funding, and Collaboration Sources: Spaceflight Now spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com; Space.com space.com space.com; Space & Defense spaceanddefense.io; Reuters reuters.com reuters.com; Space.com (B. Tingley) space.com space.com; Space.com (M. Wall) advanced-television.com advanced-television.com; Spaceflight Now spaceflightnow.com; Reuters (Kyivstar/Starlink) reuters.com reuters.com; Aerospace Corp. aerospace.org aerospace.org; Via Satellite satellitetoday.com; Keeptrack Brief keeptrack.space keeptrack.space; Slashdot/Reuters (Crew-10) science.slashdot.org science.slashdot.org.

NASA’s Crew-10 astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov completed a 146-day mission with a splashdown off the California coast at 11:33 a.m. ET on Aug. 9, 2025, the first crewed West Coast splashdown under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. China completed the first full-scale test of the Lanyue (“Embrace the Moon”) crewed lunar lander in Hebei on Aug. 6, 2025, validating its ascent and descent engines ahead of a 2030 lunar mission. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is slated for its first national-security launch with mission USSF-106 as early as Aug. 12, 2025, marking Vulcan’s inaugural national-security and Post-Certification

NISAR was launched on July 30, 2025, by ISRO and NASA using a GSLV rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 5:40 p.m. IST, costing $1.5 billion, with dual L-band and S-band radars to map the entire planet every 12 days. The NISAR mission will provide freely available data to aid global climate and disaster monitoring and is described as a pathfinder for U.S.-India space cooperation. China launched the sixth batch of Guowang low-Earth broadband satellites on July 30 with a Long March 8A from the new Hainan commercial spaceport, as part of a planned 13,000-satellite constellation. SpaceX launched 19

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launched NASA’s TRACERS mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base on July 23 at 2:13 p.m. EDT. The Falcon 9 first stage was on its 16th flight and performed a pinpoint landing at Vandenberg, marking SpaceX’s 479th booster recovery. TRACERS, Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, consists of two 200-kg satellites to study magnetic reconnection in Earth’s magnetosphere. Five small rideshare satellites accompanied TRACERS carrying experiments such as next-generation communication terminals and Earth radiation budget sensors. In the U.S., House appropriators on July 23 directed NASA to study alternatives to the SLS’s planned Exploration Upper Stage for

Astronomers confirmed 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) as the third confirmed interstellar object to visit our solar system, about 20 km wide, detected by NASA’s ATLAS survey, and it will pass inside Mars’ orbit in October 2025 at a minimum distance of 1.6 AU. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope directly imaged exoplanet TWA 7 b, a Saturn-mass world 34 light-years away, making it the lightest planet ever directly imaged and potentially habitable. MethaneSAT, an $88 million methane-emissions satellite backed by Jeff Bezos, Google, and the Environmental Defense Fund, launched in March 2024 and lost contact after just over a year, deemed unlikely