Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026 is Feb. 25 A single collision could cause a cascading effect in orbit. Elon Musk's plan to launch millions of AI satellites could be disastrous for the planet. At the start of the month, Elon Musk announced that two of his companies -- SpaceX and xAI -- were merging, and would jointly launch a constellation of 1 million satellites to operate as orbital data centers. Musk's reputation might suggest otherwise, but according to experts, such a plan isn't a complete fantasy. However, if executed at the scale suggested, some of them believe it would have devastating effects on the environment and the sustainability of low Earth Earth orbit.

America's great journey in space is about to face its most consequential moment in half a century. Everyone agrees: It's a complete disaster. I. Artemis, We Have a Problem As you may have heard, NASA plans to send a crew of astronauts around the moon in early 2026, followed by a lunar landing in 2027. Or maybe you haven't heard. When I told one of my daughters about this plan to send people to the moon, she said, after a long silence: "But I thought we already sent a bunch of people there a long time ago." This is a standard response when I quiz people about Artemis, NASA's program to return to the moon, and this time to stay . It's named for Apollo's twin sister and the goddess of the moon and the hunt. The other day, I was in a gaggle with six neighbors, all highly informed professional people--two of them with long careers at the National Science Foundation--and none knew anything about Artemis except one thing: It's a plan to send people to Mars. Artemis is a moon mission. There is no Mars mission NASA has no Mars rocket, no Mars capsule, no Mars mission crew. What it does have is a very troubled moon program. Artemis faces fundamental engineering challenges that have called into question the program's basic architecture. Reconfiguring a mission this important is hard in the best of times, but the agency is being forced to do it during a year of unprecedented internal turmoil. A new administration always means turnover, but NASA has been in an uncontrolled spin every bit as alarming as the one Neil Armstrong famously pulled out of during in 1966. More than a year ago, President-elect Donald Trump nominated a billionaire entrepreneur and Elon Musk ally, Jared Isaacman, to become NASA administrator. It was an unconventional choice, but Isaacman drew support from many quarters in the space community. Then, right before Isaacman was poised for confirmation by the Senate, Trump and Musk had a nasty falling-out, and Trump yanked Isaacman's nomination. Since Inauguration Day, NASA had been run by acting administrator Janet Petro, a veteran agency official, and with Isaacman out, she remained in charge until one day in July when Trump suddenly named Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy as interim administrator.

Extended time in space is not exactly harmless to the human body. Radiation, altered gravity, sleep loss, can all take their toll on astronauts. Some are even hospitalized upon their return to Earth. Minor mistakes in space can have devastating consequences, so it is important to know how these stresses can impact an astronaut's cognitive performance. A new study published November 20 in the journal Frontiers in Physiology followed 25 astronauts in Low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

An almost entirely 3D-printed rocket is ready to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, then head for low Earth orbit. Scheduled for a three-hour launch window that opens at 1 pm Eastern time tomorrow, the inaugural launch of Relativity Space's Terran 1 rocket will constitute a major milestone for the California-based startup, and for expanding the use of 3D printing in the space industry. Relativity and similar companies envision ultimately using the technology to construct tools, spacecraft, and infrastructure while in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars--in those cases, utilizing lunar and Martian dirt for building materials. But first, company engineers want to see how Terran 1 fares on this crucial test flight, an event the company has dubbed "Good Luck, Have Fun." "The number one goal for our rocket is to collect as much data as possible and learn as much as possible from the flight," says senior vice president Josh Brost. He and his colleagues will be closely watching its path through the stratosphere as it reaches a trajectory point called "max q" about a minute after launch, when intense dynamic pressure will put stresses on rocket.

Aitech, a maker of rugged computers for military, aerospace and space applications, has tapped Nvidia's Jetson TX2i system-on-module (SoM) for a new radiation-characterized system, it announced recently. The Aitech S-A1760 Venus is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system that can be used for spacecraft and small satellites and takes advantage of around 1 FP32 TFLOPS of "AI performance," as Nvidia puts it. There is a growing need for advanced imaging and data processing in various space applications, but equipping a small satellite with a high-performance, rad-hardened computer is extremely expensive, since tiny satellites are supposed to be light and tiny. This is where Aitech's S-A1760 Venus system comes into play. According to the Aitech, the S-A1760 Venus is targets "short duration spaceflight" as well as near earth orbit (NEO) and low earth orbit (LEO) satellite applications.

Last month, at the G7 Leaders' Summit in Cornwall, United Kingdom, the leading industrial nations addressed the sustainable and safe use of space, making space debris a priority and calling on other nations to follow suit. This is good news because space is becoming increasingly congested, and strong political will is needed for the international space community to start using space sustainably and preserve the orbital environment for the space activities of future generations. There are more than 28,000 routinely tracked objects orbiting Earth. The vast majority (85%) are space debris that no longer serve a purpose. These debris objects are dominated by fragments from the approximately 560 known breakups, explosions, and collisions of satellites or rocket bodies. These have left behind an estimated 900,000 objects larger than 1 cm and a staggering 130 million objects larger than 1 mm in commercially and scientifically valuable Earth orbits. Today's already active satellite infrastructure provides a multitude of critical services to modern society, including communication, weather, navigation, and Earth-monitoring missions. Its loss would severely damage modern society. Furthermore, a new era in space has just started, driven by commercial, low-latency broadband services that rely on large constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit. These will revolutionize connectivity on the ground and in the air. However, they will also increase space traffic. The satellites to be launched over the next 5 years will surpass the number launched globally over the entire history of spaceflight. Congestion in space is only going to get worse. It is apparent that debris mitigation strategies—defined two decades ago by experts in the world's leading space agencies—are ever more important. They aim to prevent explosive breakups by venting residual energy from space systems at the end of their missions, and to “dispose” of a space object through a final maneuver that causes it to reenter Earth's atmosphere. Although these strategies are widely recognized, dozens of large space objects are still stranded every year in critical orbital regions where they will remain for several hundred years. And an average of eight fragmentation events in orbit occur annually, adding more pollution and increasing the likelihood of more collisions. Operations in space are themselves facing the burden of increasing evasive maneuvers to prevent losing a mission. In the most densely populated orbital altitudes, space objects are receiving dozens of collision warnings per day, of which only the most critical can be avoided. The number of such alerts will grow as large constellations of satellites come online. Another important facet of the debris problem is the risk on Earth from reentering objects. Between 100 and 200 metric tons of human-made hardware reenters Earth's atmosphere every year in an uncontrolled fashion. Heat-resistant material, like titanium or stainless steel, can survive the harsh reentry conditions. Progress can be made by advancing technology to ensure spaceflight safety. For example, the European Space Agency's Space Safety Programme is developing solutions that make disposal and energy passivation actions more fail-safe. “Deorbiting kits” will provide redundant propulsion and communication to ensure disposal of a spacecraft even after it ceases to function. A new field of “design-to-demise” will aim to replace critical components with less heat-resistant material to limit their chance of reaching ground upon reentry. In addition, a more systematic deployment of ground-based laser tracking could increase the accuracy of space surveillance data and consequently limit the number of collision avoidance alerts. Laser power could even transfer a small amount of momentum to objects to prevent their collisions. On top of that, missions, such as Clearspace-1, will aim to remove targeted debris through robotic capture. An internationally binding regime for the management of debris and space traffic is pending. Thus far, space missions have been supervised on the national level only, and states have been encouraged to translate the nonbinding space debris guidelines into national regulations. Space, however, is a commonly used resource with a limited capacity. International harmonization of space traffic would be required for an efficient and interference-free use of space. The coordinated use of the available radio frequencies could serve as a template. Furthermore, the implementation of space debris mitigation requirements should be tracked, following internationally binding principles. New and affordable technical solutions might stimulate more ambitious steps in international regulation to preserve space for the spacefarers of tomorrow.

Work is due to start on the world's first'space hotel' in low Earth orbit in 2025 - and it will come equipped with restaurants, a cinema, spa and rooms for 400 people. Developed by the Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the Voyager Station could be operational as early as 2027, with the infrastructure built in orbit around the Earth. The space station will be a large circle and rotate to generate artificial gravity that will be set at a similar level to the gravity found on the surface of the Moon. Voyager Station's hotel will include many of the features you might expect from a cruise ship, including themed restaurants, a health spa and a cinema. It will feature a series of pods attached to the outside of the rotating ring and some of these pods could be sold to the likes of NASA and ESA for space research.

Astronomers took centuries to figure it out. But now, a machine-learning algorithm inspired by the brain has worked out that it should place the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, based on how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth. The feat is one the first tests of a technique that researchers hope they can use to discover new laws of physics, and perhaps to reformulate quantum mechanics, by finding patterns in large data sets. The results are due to appear in Physical Review Letters 1. Physicist Renato Renner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and his collaborators wanted to design an algorithm that could distill large data sets down into a few basic formulae, mimicking the way that physicists come up with concise equations like E mc 2. To do this, the researchers had to design a new type of neural network, a machine-learning system inspired by the structure of the brain. Conventional neural networks learn to recognize objects -- such as images or sounds -- by training on huge data sets.

Physicists have designed artificial intelligence that thinks like the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus by realizing the Sun must be at the centre of the Solar System.Credit: NASA/JPL/SPL Astronomers took centuries to figure it out. But now, a machine-learning algorithm inspired by the brain has worked out that it should place the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, based on how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth. The feat is one the first tests of a technique that researchers hope they can use to discover new laws of physics, and perhaps to reformulate quantum mechanics, by finding patterns in large data sets. The results are due to appear in Physical Review Letters1. Physicist Renato Renner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and his collaborators wanted to design an algorithm that could distill large data sets down into a few basic formulae, mimicking the way that physicists come up with concise equations like E mc2.

Robots are critical for expanding humanity off-planet. They help not just with exploring distant parts of the universe, but also with advancing our economic activity into Earth orbit. We spoke with Gordon Roesler, who formerly led DARPA's Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites program. We asked for his thoughts on the potentials and difficulties facing space robotics, as well as how individuals can involve themselves in this exciting field. What are some of the most important ways that space robotics can make space more accessible, and which of these ways are most feasible?