On June 28, SpaceX launched back-to-back Falcon 9s from Cape Canaveral (27 Starlink satellites) and Vandenberg (26 Starlink satellites), with boosters landing on the droneships “A Shortfall of Gravitas” and “Of Course I Still Love You.” These two Starlink launches in a single day pushed SpaceX’s active constellation to over 7,900 satellites in orbit. SpaceX…
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The USSF-178 task order is an $81.6 million NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 award to SpaceX to launch WSF-M2 on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg SFB in the first half of FY2027, including a BLAZE-2 rideshare. This award marks SpaceX’s third consecutive Lane 1 win under NSSL Phase 3, following two earlier Lane 1 awards…
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Shubhanshu Shukla became India’s 634th person in space, traveling to the ISS on the Axiom-4 mission after a 28-hour journey and a 41-year hiatus. NASA and Roscosmos are conducting investigations as four astronauts arrive at the ISS amid a mysterious air leak detected in the Russian Zvezda module. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory achieved first…
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The James Webb Space Telescope directly imaged a Saturn-mass exoplanet, TWA 7 b, about 0.3 Jupiter masses at 50 AU from its star, marking Webb’s first direct exoplanet discovery. The missing baryon problem was resolved using 69 fast radio bursts, showing about 76% of ordinary matter lies in hot intergalactic gas, ~15% in halos around…
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In August 2022, T-Mobile and SpaceX announced the Coverage Above and Beyond partnership to end mobile dead zones by connecting standard smartphones to Starlink satellites, branded as T-Satellite with Starlink, aiming to cover roughly 500,000 square miles of the U.S. Starlink Gen2 satellites feature Direct to Cell antenna arrays that enable direct-to-device connectivity with unmodified…
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SpaceX’s Starship suffered a further explosion during a static-fire test at Starbase, Texas, as the company has now completed nine Starship test flights with a record launch cadence in 2024–2025. SpaceX’s Axiom-4 mission docked with the International Space Station, marking India’s return to human spaceflight after 41 years as Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla became the…
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Summary of Recent Developments (Mid-2025) SpaceX’s Starship vehicle lifting off on its ninth test flight from Starbase, Texas in May 2025. Starship is the company’s next-generation, fully-reusable rocket system under development. In summary, by mid-2025 SpaceX is breaking launch records, advancing Starship’s development amid regulatory hurdles, expanding its Starlink network, and securing a growing share…
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Artemis I launched on November 16, 2022, marking NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) first flight and sending an uncrewed Orion around the Moon. The global space economy reached about $570 billion in 2023, with roughly 80% of that value produced by commercial activities. As of 2025, there are over 11,000 active satellites serving Earth, out…
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France 2030, launched in 2021 as a €30 billion investment plan, prioritizes converging 5G with space through end-to-end NTN pilots. The European Commission’s IRIS² programme, approved in 2022, will deploy hundreds of satellites (about 270 LEO and 18 MEO) and be fully operational by 2030, with Eutelsat as a prime contractor. In early 2025, Eutelsat…
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The ROQuET payload, a photonic quantum computer no larger than a shoebox, was developed by Philip Walther’s team at the University of Vienna and measures about 15 × 15 × 45 cm, weighing roughly 9.5 kg with an aluminum frame and a borosilicate glass optical circuit. The device was launched on June 23, 2025, aboard…
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