This Startup Thinks It Can Make Rocket Fuel From Water. General Galactic, cofounded by a former SpaceX engineer, plans to test its water-based propellant this fall. If successful, it could help usher in a new era of space travel. There's been this hand-wave, this assumption, this at the core of our long-term space programs. If we can return astronauts to the moon, we'll find ice there.

Each of these enormous collections of spacecraft, dubbed CTC-1 and CTC-2, would contain 96,714 satellites spread over 3,660 different orbits. If completed, China's new mega-constellation would dwarf even SpaceX's bold ambition to put 49,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. Together, CTC-1 and CTC-2 would be the largest assembly of satellites ever put in orbit, and would effectively lock competitors out of a region of low-Earth orbit. With Chinese authorities remaining quiet about the satellites' intended use, experts have raised concerns that the constellation may pose a security or defence threat. As reported by China in Space, the Nanjing University of Aeronautics claims that the satellites will focus on: 'Low-altitude electromagnetic space security, integrated security defence systems, electromagnetic space security assessment of airspace, and low-altitude airspace safety supervision services.'

The astronaut training tourists to fly in the world's first commercial space station Former NASA astronaut Drew Feustel now leads the astronaut training program for the private space company Vast, which aims to put its Haven-1 station into orbit in May. For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that's about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms. The first of those stations could be Haven-1, which the California-based company Vast aims to launch in May 2026. If all goes to plan, its earliest paying visitors will arrive about a month later. Drew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut, will help train them and get them up to speed ahead of their historic trip.

We are approaching the Gregorian New Year, and it's a great time to ponder what's coming next. Are we about to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the sun in a Dyson sphere? If, like me, you are a nerd who loves science and engineering, sci-fi is the place you turn to imagine the answers.

On a commercial thoroughfare in old town Pasadena, California, a stone's throw from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), you'll find the Neon Retro Arcade. Among its collection of vintage video games is the 1979 Atari classic Asteroids, in which a pixelated spaceship shoots down a barrage of space rocks to stave off fatal collisions. After long days of work at JPL, Amy Mainzer used to rack up high scores on that console. "It was a hoot," she says. It was also apt, considering she oversees a space mission designed to spot dangerous asteroids before they crash into Earth. That mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, was conceived in the early 2000s and finally got the green light in 2022. Its components are now being built, tested, and assembled in clean rooms across the United States ahead of its planned launch in September 2027. "We're in the thick of building everything," says Mainzer, NEO Surveyor's principal investigator and now an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The US Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL's) Autonomous Planning In-space Assembly Reinforcement-learning free-flYer (APIARY) experiment pioneers the use of reinforcement learning (RL) for control of free-flying robots in the zero-gravity (zero-G) environment of space. On Tuesday, May 27th 2025 the APIARY team conducted the first ever, to our knowledge, RL control of a free-flyer in space using the NASA Astrobee robot on-board the International Space Station (ISS). A robust 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) control policy was trained using an actor-critic Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) network within the NVIDIA Isaac Lab simulation environment, randomizing over goal poses and mass distributions to enhance robustness. This paper details the simulation testing, ground testing, and flight validation of this experiment. This on-orbit demonstration validates the transformative potential of RL for improving robotic autonomy, enabling rapid development and deployment (in minutes to hours) of tailored behaviors for space exploration, logistics, and real-time mission needs.

Boeing's Next Starliner Flight Will Only Be Allowed to Carry Cargo After a high-profile malfunction left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, NASA is requiring rigorous testing before humans get back on board. The US space agency ended months of speculation about the next flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, confirming that the vehicle will carry only cargo to the International Space Station. NASA and Boeing are now targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, the space agency said. Launching by next April will require completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities, NASA added in a statement . "NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in a statement.

The intrepid spacecraft will cross a major distance milestone in November 2026. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Voyager 1 is one of humanity's most poignant and remarkable technological achievements. Over the course of its nearly half century odyssey, the probe has glimpsed the gas giant Saturn, passed the threshold for interstellar space, and continually sets the bar for our furthest traveling human-made object. But based on NASA's projections, Voyager 1 is less than a year away from reaching yet another milestone.

The fast-moving comet likely comes from a solar system that is older than our own. This image shows the halo of gas and dust, or coma, surrounding comet 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object ever detected by astronomers as it passes through our solar system. The image was taken on Oct. 9, 2025, by an instrument onboard NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which has been studying Mars from its orbit since 2014. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Today, NASA released the most detailed images yet of 3I/ATLAS .

This work presents a global-to-local, task-aware fault detection and identification (FDI) framework for multi-spacecraft systems conducting collaborative inspection missions in low Earth orbit. The inspection task is represented by a global information-driven cost functional that integrates the sensor model, spacecraft poses, and mission-level information-gain objectives. This formulation links guidance, control, and FDI by using the same cost function to drive both global task allocation and local sensing or motion decisions. Fault detection is achieved through comparisons between expected and observed task metrics, while higher-order cost-gradient measures enable the identification of faults among sensors, actuators, and state estimators. An adaptive thresholding mechanism captures the time-varying inspection geometry and dynamic mission conditions. Simulation results for representative multi-spacecraft inspection scenarios demonstrate the reliability of fault localization and classification under uncertainty, providing a unified, information-driven foundation for resilient autonomous inspection architectures.