Key Facts SpaceX Shatters Launch Records and Starlink Surges SpaceX began September by making history on the launch pad. The company slated five Falcon 9 launches in one week, aiming to deploy four batches of Starlink satellites (over 100 new satellites total) and one commercial payload nasaspaceflight.com nasaspaceflight.com. On Sept. 2, a Falcon 9 from…
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Key Facts Satellite Launch Highlights Starlink Launch Surge: SpaceX punctuated the end of August with a sunrise Falcon 9 launch on Aug. 31, carrying 28 Starlink V2 Mini satellites to low Earth orbit spaceflightnow.com. Liftoff occurred at 7:49 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-40, and about 8½ minutes later the veteran booster (B1077, now with 23 flights) nailed…
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Key Facts (More details and expert insights on these developments below.) Consumer Tech & Gadgets Google’s Pixel 10 Debuts: Google’s latest flagship phones, the Pixel 10 series, hit store shelves this week after an official unveiling. The 10th-gen Pixels sport a refreshed design with a satin-finish aluminum frame, polished glass back, and the signature camera bar…
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Key Facts Artist’s cutaway illustration of Mars showing debris from ancient impacts (bright fragments) scattered through the mantle. Seismic waves from a meteoroid impact (left) travel through this lumpy interior before being detected by NASA’s InSight lander (right) on the surface watchers.news watchers.news. Probing Mars’ Interior: InSight Mission Background NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic…
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Key Facts Space and Astronomy A Planet Is Born: In a feat long thought nearly impossible, astronomers have directly imaged a planet in the act of forming. Using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, a team snapped a clear picture of WISPIT 2b, a gas giant about five times Jupiter’s mass, carving out a gap…
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In 2011, NASA retired the Space Shuttle, leaving the ISS without its primary American supply line. May 2012 marked SpaceX’s Dragon as the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous and berth with the ISS, delivering about 1,200 pounds of cargo and later returning roughly 1,300 pounds. October 2012’s CRS-1 mission launched the first official NASA Commercial…
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OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, with a 256,000-token context window and added GPT-5-mini and GPT-5-nano variants. OpenAI published open-weight models GPT-OSS 120B and GPT-OSS 20B under the Apache 2.0 license on August 5, 2025, to run and fine-tune locally and counter China’s open-source progress. Anthropic expanded its Claude model to a 1,000,000-token context…
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Falcon 9’s first flight occurred in June 2010; the two‑stage rocket is 70 m tall, 3.7 m in diameter, uses nine Merlin 1D engines on the first stage and one Merlin Vacuum on the second, delivers about 7,600 kN of thrust at liftoff, carries ~22.8 t to LEO, and its first stage (Block 5) is…
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3I/ATLAS was first spotted on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile, and officially designated 3I/2025 A1 (ATLAS), the third confirmed interstellar object after 1I/‘Oumuamua (2017) and 2I/Borisov (2019). It is traveling through the inner solar system at about 60–61 kilometers per second relative to the Sun on a hyperbolic trajectory,…
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On Aug. 17, China launched the Long March-4C from Xichang at 4:55 p.m. local time with the Shiyan-28B 02 satellite for space environment exploration and technology tests. Hours later on Aug. 17, China launched a Long March-6 from Taiyuan at 10:15 p.m., deploying the ninth batch of low-Earth orbit satellites to form a new internet…
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