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Shipping cement to the Moon is impossibly expensive. To land massive rockets like Starship, we must build pads from local dust—but a new study reveals a dangerous paradox in the design. Why build a pad? You can't just land in the dirt. A rocket plume kicks up high-velocity rocks that can destroy nearby habitats or damage the rocket itself.

Just like your cellphone switches networks when you travel, NASA's new PExT technology proves spacecraft can "roam" between government and commercial satellites. It’s a game-changer. Imagine if your phone only worked on one specific tower in your hometown. Drive 20 miles away, and you have zero signal. That was essentially the reality for early space missions. They were locked into specific government networks.

Millions of objects careen around Earth at 15,000 mph. Without a cleanup plan, we risk trapping ourselves on our own planet. On November 5, 2025, the threat became real. The Shenzhou-20 crew capsule, docked at the Tiangong station, was struck. A piece of debris smaller than 1mm—roughly a grain of sand—hit the window at 17,000 mph. The result? A crack deep enough to ground the capsule and force a rescue mission.

Every launch leaves a mark. Scientists now argue that the principles of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle must apply to the final frontier before it becomes a graveyard. Transitioning to a circular economy requires more than just better rockets. It requires data. The authors highlight the need for AI systems to track spacecraft health and predict failures before they happen.

On the evening of November 28, 2025, a new era in space science began as Mauve—the first privately funded satellite dedicated to studying stellar flares—launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California. Developed by London-based Blue Skies Space, the compact, microwave-sized observatory will peer into the ultraviolet universe to reveal how stars erupt and how those explosions affect nearby exoplanets.

As humanity races toward the Moon, Mars, and beyond, a quiet revolution is unfolding in spacecraft propulsion—not in the engines themselves, but in the intelligence that designs and controls them. Artificial intelligence, particularly reinforcement learning, is transforming how we develop and operate advanced propulsion systems, from nuclear thermal rockets to compact fusion reactors.

In a significant shift, NASA and Boeing have agreed to keep astronauts off the next Starliner mission, opting instead for an uncrewed cargo test flight to validate the spacecraft’s safety. The decision follows a troubled 2024 crewed mission that left two NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for over nine months—and forced their return on a SpaceX capsule.

There's always a touch of melancholy when a chapter that has absorbed years of work comes to an end. In the case of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), those years amount to nearly 20—and now the telescope has completed its mission. Yet some endings are also important beginnings, opening new paths for the entire scientific community.

Fresh off a successful second mission, Blue Origin is throttling up. CEO Dave Limp has announced "incredible upgrades" to the New Glenn heavy-lift rocket starting as soon as mission No. 3. By pushing their BE-4 and BE-3U engines to new limits, and introducing a future super-heavy variant, Blue Origin is positioning itself as a serious contender against SpaceX's Starship and NASA's SLS.

Cellular communication, GPS, and weather monitoring now rely on mega-constellations like Starlink and Kuiper. But as these networks swell to tens of thousands of satellites, the traditional method of managing them—where ground stations talk to every single satellite—is creating a massive data bottleneck. A new paper proposes a radical shift: let the satellites manage themselves.

The OSIRIS-REx mission has successfully brought back pieces of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and the findings are extraordinary. More than just a simple space rock, Bennu is a composite object, assembled from the rubble of a much larger parent body. Its chemistry tells a story of materials gathered from the hot inner solar system, the icy outer reaches, and even from ancient stars that died long before our sun ignited.

Building on the wild success of its predecessor, CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) will be an order of magnitude more powerful. This homegrown telescope will leverage cutting-edge technology to detect thousands of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in real-time, giving astronomers an unprecedented tool to map the cosmos and understand the enigmatic sources of these fleeting, powerful signals.