Last month, NASA announced that it was launching an unprecedented and risky mission to rescue its aging Swift observatory.

The telescope, which has spent over two decades in orbit studying the most powerful explosions in the universe, has seen its orbit decay over time. With the help of a specialized space tug developed by contractor Katalyst Space Technologies, the space agency was hoping to give Swift a much-needed push to a more stable orbit, prolonging its life.

But as it turns out, it’s not the observatory that ended up needing help. After launching its robotic spacecraft, dubbed LINK, on July 3, Katalyst Space watched in horror as it started tumbling out of control following a series of unfortunate events.

According to a new update, NASA admitted that the “spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.”

“Preliminary investigation shows that two of LINK’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system,” the agency noted. Reaction wheels are motor-driven flywheels used by spacecraft for attitude control.

At least there’s a silver lining. LINK’s other subsystems are still functional, allowing the ground team to communicate with the spacecraft.

And not all is lost just yet. The Katalyst team is hoping to stop LINK from spinning before reevaluating how to go forward with the rescue mission, if at all.

But considering that a rapidly spinning spacecraft is the very last thing the Swift observatory needs in its vicinity, it’s clearly not the result the agency was hoping for.

And time is rapidly running out. Without a boost, the telescope is destined to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in the upcoming months.

While it has long outlived its originally intended lifetime at almost 22 years old, it’s currently the only orbital telescope that can detect gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Fortunately, the space agency didn’t have to dig too deep into its own pockets. Its Katalyst contract was $30 million, which in the grand scheme of things is a drop in the bucket when considering the untold billions NASA is spending to return astronauts to the Moon.

Even before LINK launched and started spinning out of control, agency officials were content with NASA’s willingness to give it a shot.

“From a programmatics standpoint, I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we’re even going to try this,” NASA astrophysics director Shawn Domagal-Goldman told Ars Technica last month.

More on the mission: NASA Prepping to Launch Extremely Risky Rescue Mission

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A Chinese rocket was smitten by a bolt from the heavens right after it lifted off. And if this was a blessing or a curse from a higher power, we don’t know.

The spacecraft, a Long March-3B rocket, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China on Thursday, according to Space.com. Its mission was to deliver a communications relay satellite to geostationary orbit, something the dependable workhorse routinely does.

It turned out to be more than just a regular launch. Awe-inspiring footage of the occasion (another angle here) shows cheers erupting from the crowd as the rocket heaves itself into the air. But they’re soon stunned by an even greater spectacle: thirty seconds into the flight, lightning crackles across the sky and strikes the rocket, eliciting cries of disbelief. All one man can say is “lightning, lightning!” repeatedly. An incredibly-timed photo even shows the bolt right at the moment that it struck the tip of the spacecraft.

Chinese Rocket gets struck by lightning.
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If this was some sort of divine augury, it appeared to be benevolent. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation announced that the rocket safely survived the trip into space and deployed the satellite, though it’s unclear if it sustained any minor damage that didn’t drastically affect the mission.

NASA’s Apollo 12 mission in 1969 was struck by lightning twice, damaging the Saturn V rocket that was carrying a crew of three astronauts, affecting some of the onboard instruments. It continued mostly without a hitch after that.

Not all were so lucky. In 1987, Space.com notes, an unmanned Atlas-Centaur 67 rocket was zapped by lightning just 48 seconds into its flight, causing one of its computers to go haywire. This drastically changed the rocket’s course, and it broke up midflight. Since then, NASA has adopted Lightning Launch Commit Criteria that places stricter rules on the weather conditions rockets are launched in.

Take heed, Chinese rocketeers. Maybe this is a sign.

More on spaceflight: China Is Catching Up With SpaceX Fast, Landing First Reusable Rocket Booster on Offshore Platform

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Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX took another beating when trading resumed on Monday, sliding to an all-time low of just under $139, well below its IPO opening price of $150.

It’s now over 38 percent down from its all-time high of $225 three weeks ago, illustrating how rapidly the hype has inverted into widespread skepticism over Musk’s vision.

Following a blockbuster Wall Street debut, the space company has struggled to maintain any degree of momentum as investors continue to ask some very hard questions, including over its major pivot to orbital data centers and its near-term profitability. Despite being valued at almost two trillion dollars, the company lost nearly $5 billion last year.

Shares have hovered below the company’s opening price for weeks now, despite plenty of bullishness among analysts.

The news comes just days after Chinese state-run media showed a Long March 10B rocket booster being caught by an offshore recovery platform, indicating the country was making major strides in catching up with SpaceX’s reusable rocket tech. Over the weekend, an experimental Japanese reusable rocket safely took off and landed, suggesting the nation may be right behind China as well.

Beyond some steepening international space launch competition, experts believe SpaceX’s transformation into an “AI play” may be closely related to its Wall Street woes, as the BBC reports.

“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” CFRA investment research analyst Keith Snyder told the broadcaster.

“With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited,” he added. “But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play.”

How SpaceX will cover its enormous losses and start actually making some money — not to mention, prove that orbital data centers don’t just make sense but are even feasible to begin with — remains a major point of contention.

In short, the initial enthusiasm surrounding SpaceX’s IPO is firmly behind us.

“If you bought around the first tick you’re definitely underwater,” Snyder told the BBC. “It started to look a lot like a meme stock.”

“If you’re an IPO investor, you’re ok,” Mergermarket analyst Samuel Kerr added. “If you bought in the first few days, you’re not very happy right now.”

Investors remain sharply divided on where SpaceX shares are headed next. Many analysts from major investment banks remain bullish, expecting the stock to make massive gains. Case in point, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.

Snyder has a far more muted outlook, expecting SpaceX to fall down to just $115 a share.

Meanwhile, Musk has said he thinks “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals,” a characteristically ambitious and perhaps delusional argument that assumes a lot of things will go right for the company.

Whether investors will buy into this lofty vision remains to be seen. Given its recent stock performance, it’s far from a guarantee.

“If SpaceX can do all the things it says it will do, yes, investors are sitting on the most valuable company ever,” Kerr told the BBC. “But it’s got a lot of work to do to get there.”

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Says His Goal Is for SpaceX to Be Worth More than the Entire Earth

The post SpaceX Stock Plunges to All-Time Low After Competitor Makes Major Leap appeared first on Futurism.

SpaceX has radically reduced the cost of reaching space thanks to its reusable rockets, a revolutionary capability that has greatly set it apart from its competitors.

But its dominance in the domain is seriously being challenged by China. Footage shared by the Chinese state-run CCTV shows a Long March 10B rocket booster being caught by an offshore recovery platform. Engineers can be heard cheering on the slowly descending rocket as it confidently sets down.

As Engadget reports, that makes China only the second country to have pulled off such a feat, following the United States — a “historic breakthrough” that could have major implications not just for SpaceX, but for the space industry as a whole.

The rocket was developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), a subsidiary of the state-owned Chinese space program contractor China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).

The rocket has a payload capacity of 16 tons to low-Earth orbit, not far off from SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, which can carry 22 tons. However, unlike the Falcon 9, which lands autonomously with the help of four deployable landing legs, CALT’s recovery platform picks the descending rocket out of the air with “landing hooks.”

Previous attempts have resulted in descending rockets missing the launch pad. Chinese competitor LandSpace is trying an even more SpaceX-like approach using a leg system. In December, the company successfully sent its Zhuque-3 rocket into orbit, but it ended up blowing up in a fireball while trying to land.

CALT is envisioning it as a new platform to launch Starlink-like internet broadband satellites and other larger commercial satellites.

By reusing the first stage, the company is hoping to dramatically reduce launch costs, much like SpaceX.

The Elon Musk-led company first successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket following orbital flight in December 2015. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin became the second company to have pulled off such a feat in November, with its New Glenn booster gently touching back down in November, just under a decade later.

While CALT’s latest feat is undoubtedly a major sign of progress, China has its work cut out to reach SpaceX’s unparalleled launch cadence. The rocket company came close to launching a rocket every other day in 2025, completing an astonishing 165 orbital flights — almost twice as many as China’s entire space program.

More on China’s space program: New Report Finds That China’s Space Program Is Rapidly Outstripping NASA

The post China Is Catching Up With SpaceX Fast, Landing First Reusable Rocket Booster on Offshore Platform appeared first on Futurism.

Satellites perform a delicate dance to maintain their orbit, by locking themselves to a speed just fast enough to counteract the downward pull of gravity.

To stop their orbit from decaying too much, satellites use small in-space thrusters, which broadly speaking, fall into two categories: chemical or electric. The former uses a combustible fuel source that gets accelerated through a nozzle, while the latter uses electrical energy to convert propellant into kinetic energy.

Now, New Zealand space startup Zenno Astronautics says it’s tested an entirely new type of thruster that, unlike either of those conventional technologies, uses superconducting magnets to maintain a satellite’s orbit and orientation. As Space.com reports, the magnets convert solar energy directly into momentum, effectively harnessing the Earth’s magnetic field itself.

“Energy is the one thing that is abundant in space, and you can use it to energize the magnet to create a magnetic acceleration device,” Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky told the site. “It gives you acceleration without fuel.”

The company’s “Supertorquer” system, attached to a Mira satellite developed by Impulse Space, was launched into space as part of a SpaceX rideshare mission in November.

“It’s a technology that allows a spacecraft to not tumble violently in space and point in the right direction,” Arshavsky told Space.com.

When the spacecraft needs to move, superconducting coils draw energy from a solar powered battery.

“The unit has multiple superconducting magnets that are positioned in different axes,” Arshavsky added. “When we power up the magnets, they generate a magnetic field, which interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, and because we can control the magnetic field on the satellite, we can control the way in which it turns with respect to Earth.”

During its test last fall, the Supertorquer successfully altered the Mira satellite’s orientation on command, just as designed.

For superconducting magnets to work, they have to be cooled to extremely low temperatures. On Earth, that requires cryogenic liquids, which are ill-suited for a satellite. Even in space, the satellite is warmed up to around 68 degrees Fahrenheit by the Sun’s rays, which meant that Zenno had to get creative.

Using a heat pump, the extensively insulated magnet system expels heat to allow the coils to power up at temperatures as low as 77 kelvin, or -321 degrees Fahrenheit. Zenno claims its cooling system is highly efficient, drawing only up to 48 watts at peak.

The startup has some ambitious plans and is hoping to scale up the system to enable future spacecraft to perform docking maneuvers or even help propel them to the Moon or Mars by exclusively relying on solar power. How feasible those lofty plans will turn out to be remains to be seen, but the startup is optimistic.

Arshavsky even suggested that superconducting magnets could create “umbrellas of magnetic fields” that could “shield people in space” from harmful levels of radiation.

More on satellite thrusters: NASA Fires Up Futuristic Plasma Thruster Designed to Take Us to Mars

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