Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA's Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the "spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations" to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will "provide the first integrated, daily, global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds."
The Aeolus payload will have four instruments on board for studying the Martian atmosphere, which NASA says will "directly inform entry, descent, and landing systems and support safer, more predictable mis …
For years, scientists and engineers have highlighted the potential of space-based solar power for addressing terrestrial energy shortages.
Now, researchers at Xidian University, China, are developing new technologies to harvest solar energy in space and transmit it wirelessly to Earth.
The project, known as Zhuri or “chasing the sun,” focuses on building systems capable of beaming power from geostationary orbit, more than 36,000 kilometres away.
On the university campus in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, associate professor Fan Guanheng and his team have demonstrated key components for their new approach to space-based solar power.
Using a 4.8-metre dome-shaped mirror suspended from a 75-metre tower, they concentrate sunlight onto solar panels.
The generated electricity is then converted into microwaves and transmitted over 100 metres to a rectenna, which converts the waves back into usable power.
Recent tests achieved kilowatt-level transmission and showed the system could direct energy to multiple moving targets simultaneously, according to an expert review panel last month.
The Xidian University team is also experimenting with 2-7 meter-wide Fresnel lenses, which focus light efficiently with less material while using cooling fluids to manage heat.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Fan explained the process in three stages: light concentration, microwave conversion and transmission, and rectification. The researchers conducted their tests during peak sunlight hours between 10 am and 3 pm.
Space-based solar power offers significant advantages over ground installations. Solar energy density in orbit can reach six times that on Earth’s surface, unaffected by night cycles, weather, or atmospheric interference.
“That is why space-based solar power is a potential way out of the energy crisis on Earth,” Fan said.
The new project is led by Xidian’s Duan Baoyan, a pioneering electromechanical engineer and former president of the university.
Duan, who was inspired to start this work in 2012 by NASA’s SPS-ALPHA concept of modular satellite arrays, envisions large-scale systems. A one-gigawatt station –sufficient for a mid-sized city–would require mirrors spanning hundreds of metres.
However, challenges remain, such as addressing the deployability of foldable or self-assembling structures, achieving precise microwave targeting, and ensuring beam safety for aircraft and the environment.
The new Xidian design uses modular units flying in formation rather than a single massive structure, improving resilience and maintenance.
China’s efforts place it among leaders in the field, alongside the United States and Japan.
While orbital deployment remains the long-term goal, nearer-term applications include wireless charging of satellites in orbit or powering lunar bases from orbit or the Moon’s surface.
For the team, the next priority is securing funding for orbital experiments. If successful, the technology could provide continuous, high-efficiency clean energy, transforming the global power supply.
MDA Space is buying smallsat manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) for $620 million, giving the Canadian company greater access to the lucrative U.S. government market.
The post MDA Space to buy Blue Canyon Technologies to gain foothold in U.S. market appeared first on SpaceNews.
Astronomers have discovered an unexpected surprise on the famous “Pink Planet,” a strange world known as GJ504b. Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists found that the object is surrounded by salty clouds and has an atmosphere filled with unusual chemicals. GJ504b was first discovered in 2013. It orbits a sun-like star about […]
The post The universe’s famous ‘pink planet’ has salty clouds in its sky appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
ElevationSpace Inc. (CEO: Ryohei Kobayashi), a company developing Space-to-Earth transportation as well as a Space Environment Utilization and Recovery Platform, has raised a total of US $40 million in its […]
The post ElevationSpace Secures US $40 Million in Series B Funding, Bringing Total Raised to US $63.5 Million appeared first on SpaceNews.
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to go before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a like like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currently of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
A Martian meteorite fragment containing unexpected grains of mineral could hold clues to the Red Planet’s geological history, according to an international team of researchers.
Prior to the team’s new paper, which was published in Geochemical Perspectives Letters, the red mineral garnet had never been observed in any martian rock sample. Now, the meteorite discovery provides scientists with new clues to Mars‘ extreme past conditions, over its 4.5 billion-year history, which could include hidden magma sources or ancient impact events.
Although the gemstone garnet can come in many colors, it is best known for its dark red varieties, which were historically popular in ancient Egypt, Rome, and Victorian England. Beyond its beauty, the rock is important for the record it keeps of its birth, providing Earth’s geologists with information on our planet’s tectonic forces, ore-forming processes, and the fluid-rock interactions of the crust and mantle.
Similarly, the small grains of garnet discovered in the meteorite sample contain important data for reconstructing the forces that forged the Red Planet long ago.
“The findings add a striking new dimension to our understanding of the geology of Mars and open an exciting new window into the evolution of our planetary neighbour,” said co-author Professor James Darling.
“This discovery is going to expand our knowledge of the geologic processes that are possible on this planet,” said lead author Tanya Kizovski, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences, from Brock University in Canada. “This new garnet-bearing rock type could give us clues to how Mars has changed throughout its history and new insights into the ancient environments that could have formed the garnet and related minerals.”
The garnet fragments were discovered in a tiny Martian meteorite sample held in the Royal Ontario Museum’s collection, designated NWA 8171, discovered in northwest Africa. Kizovski led the team in analyzing the sample’s mineral and chemical composition after identifying it as a unique piece within the collection.
“This little section of the meteorite looked really interesting, and the chemistry was a bit odd,” Kizovski said. “At first, we assumed it was a mineral called pyroxene, which is very common, but then we decided to take a second look.”
The international effort brought in researchers from Italy’s University di Trieste and the UK’s Open University, utilizing the Royal Ontario Museum’s laser equipment and the University of Portsmouth’s Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis Unit.
Having never been observed in any previous Martian sample, the researchers were surprised to identify garnet in the meteorite’s composition. From their analysis of the sample’s chemistry and mineralogy, the researchers began to consider how the unexpected garnet could have formed.
“Garnet is a classic example of a mineral often found in metamorphic rocks on Earth,” Kizovski said. “The process of metamorphism transforms igneous or sedimentary rocks into a new form through exposure to extreme heat, high pressure, or hot fluids.”
“On Mars, the heat and pressure needed to produce garnet through metamorphism could have come from the impact of a meteorite hitting the surface of Mars, magma rising up into the Martian crust, or both,” Kizovski continued.
While garnet provided geologists with some data about how it formed, this is not like the point of origin stamped on a manufactured good. It is possible that the garnet was deposited on Mars during an earlier meteorite impact, only to later travel through the solar system again, or that it was created by a heretofore unknown magma source on Mars.
Only further analysis of the garnet’s isotopic signatures will allow the researchers to determine whether the mineral formed on Mars or elsewhere. Unfortunately, to do so, the team would have to destroy a portion of this rare and precious sample, which measures only 0.8 by 0.5 millimeters to begin with.
“Measuring oxygen isotopes from the garnet-bearing rock type itself would help to confirm if it is Martian in origin or from an exotic meteorite impactor,” Kizovski said.
“Isotopes are a collection of atoms with equal numbers of protons and electrons, but different numbers of neutrons,” she added, “which was avoided thus far due to its rarity, as it may be the only garnet-bearing Martian rock we have for study.”
A few members of the team are continuing their study of the sample by comparing their findings to Martian data collected by rovers and orbital platforms. Further insights, they hope, may help them discover more about how the garnet could have formed, and what its presence means for the deeper history of the Red Planet.
The paper, “Expanding Mars’ Lithologic Diversity: Discovery of a Garnet-Bearing Clast in NWA 8171,” appeared in Geochemical Perspectives Letters on June 16, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
A robotic spacecraft built by a Flagstaff, Arizona, startup is preparing to chase down one of NASA’s space telescopes and boost it into a higher orbit. Katalyst Space Technologies’ craft, called LINK, is set to launch later this month aboard an air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, then rendezvous with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and raise its altitude.
The target is a telescope that cannot save itself. After 21 years in orbit, Swift is sinking. The spacecraft carries no thrusters of its own, and its low Earth orbit has been decaying for years as it brushes against the top of the atmosphere. A recent stretch of heightened solar activity made the problem worse, puffing the atmosphere outward, thickening the drag, and pulling Swift down faster than NASA had planned for.
Swift launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. NASA describes it as a kind of cosmic dispatcher: when a sudden, violent event flares somewhere in the sky, Swift pins down where it happened and alerts other observatories to swing around and look. Over two decades it has fed discoveries about exploding stars, flares from distant galaxies, comets, asteroids, and even high-energy lightning on Earth.
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the mission, with partners that include Penn State, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the UK Space Agency, the University of Leicester, and the Italian Space Agency. Losing the telescope to an uncontrolled reentry would end all of that.
Rather than let Swift fall, NASA decided to try something it had never done with a science satellite. In September 2025 the agency awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract, routed through its Small Business Innovation Research program, to mount a robotic boost on a compressed schedule. NASA framed the speed itself as the point, calling the effort a way to prove it can go from concept to implementation in under a year.
“This is a forward-leaning, risk-tolerant approach for NASA,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the acting director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division at the time of the award, who noted that boosting Swift is both cheaper than building a replacement and a way to extend satellite servicing to “a new and broader class of spacecraft.” The clock is real: without a boost, NASA expects Swift to reenter the atmosphere in the fall of 2026, and for the rescue to have its best chance the telescope needs to stay above roughly 185 miles, about 300 kilometers. To buy time, controllers suspended Swift’s science observations and reoriented the spacecraft to cut its drag, a change the mission had never made before.
The choice of a Pegasus XL is itself a consequence of the rush. Swift sits in an unusually low-inclination orbit of 20.6 degrees, which is hard to reach from U.S. launch pads, where most small rockets are confined to steeper angles. Pegasus solves that by skipping the pad entirely: Northrop Grumman’s modified L-1011 aircraft, named Stargazer, carries the rocket aloft and releases it in midair, letting it start its climb from tens of thousands of feet and from a location chosen to match Swift’s path.
NASA has been careful about what it is claiming. By the agency’s own description, a successful boost would be the first time a commercial robotic spacecraft captures a government satellite that is uncrewed, or not originally designed to be serviced in space. That qualifier matters. Robotic servicing has been demonstrated before on craft fitted with docking targets or otherwise built to be approached; Swift was not. LINK, an 880-pound spacecraft that grips its target with three robotic arms, will have to dock with an observatory that was never built to cooperate with a visiting robot, over a maneuver NASA expects to unfold across several months.
It is also, for now, an attempt rather than a sure thing, and the schedule remains soft. NASA has described the launch as targeted for later in June while cautioning that shifting solar activity could still move the timing. Whether the boost works or not, it is a test of a capability NASA says it will need as satellites pile up in orbit and more of them, someday, may be worth saving rather than discarding.
The post A commercial robot will try to catch NASA’s sinking Swift telescope this month — a first for a satellite never built to be serviced appeared first on Space Daily.
The manipulation of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals has grown far beyond local combat zones, becoming a constant and mostly unseen problem. For the first time, data from an experimental Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite has mapped the wide reach of active GPS jamming and spoofing from space.
These orbital measurements surprised aerospace engineers by showing that intentional attacks on Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) data are strong enough to block satellite receivers flying hundreds of miles above Earth.
In the past, electronic warfare tactics such as jamming, which blocks real satellite signals with noise, and spoofing, which sends false coordinates to receivers, were seen as local threats limited to low-altitude areas or specific military regions.
But over the past five years, as global politics have changed, more countries have used electronic countermeasures. This shift has changed how safe Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is from electromagnetic threats.
This ongoing problem now threatens the imaging, weather tracking, and altitude systems used by commercial space networks.
Modern satellite navigation is vulnerable because of how orbits work. Standard GPS and other global systems operate in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), more than 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometers) above Earth. Since their signals must travel so far, the radio waves that reach receivers on the ground or in the air are very weak.
This structural fragility makes it is easy for transmitters on the ground to overpower them. Researchers expected that people on the ground and airline flights would be most affected by this interference. However, they did not know how much these jamming fields reached into space until the Pulsar-0 technology demonstrator was launched.
The mapping breakthrough was achieved by Pulsar-0, a specialized test satellite manufactured by Xona Space Systems. Launched into a 310-mile (500-kilometer) altitude LEO orbit, the spacecraft was built primarily to flight-validate new navigation technologies before the company initiates the mass deployment of its planned 300-satellite constellation later this year.
To ensure full interoperability with existing space architecture, the small probe was equipped with a standard, high-sensitivity commercial GPS receiver.
When flight engineers activated the internal receiver a few months post-launch, the incoming telemetry data revealed an immediate operational anomaly. As Pulsar-0 traversed space corridors extending from Western Europe all the way to the western borders of Pakistan, its onboard GPS capabilities vanished entirely.
In the hardest-hit areas, the strength of the authentic GPS signal at the satellite dropped from the usual 40 decibels to just 10 decibels, making it almost impossible to read.
This sharp 30-decibel drop caused an almost complete blackout of normal positioning data, making it impossible for any satellite over the area to quickly determine its altitude or exact location.
This widespread electromagnetic interference affects much more than just commercial flight delays. Modern observation and remote-sensing satellites need clear GPS signals to aim their cameras or radar correctly before taking high-resolution images of specific places.
Without an active, unjammed PNT lock, these multi-million-dollar imaging platforms suffer severe degradation in altitude determination, leading to significant geometric errors in their data sets. Furthermore, artificial electronic interference is frequently exacerbated by unpredictable space weather.
Major solar events, such as the historic Gannon superstorm in May 2024, have shown that natural forces can disrupt GNSS signals and shut down automated systems across continents for days.
To build a resilient backup infrastructure that withstands both geopolitical jamming and solar anomalies, aerospace engineers are pivoting toward low-altitude, high-power solutions.
Constellations like Xona’s upcoming Pulsar network are designed to broadcast specialized PNT signals from LEO. Because these satellites operate significantly closer to the surface than traditional MEO arrays, they can deliver navigation signals that are roughly 100 times stronger than traditional legacy GPS.
According to empirical simulation profiles, this massive 100-fold boost in signal amplification will alter the economics of electronic warfare: existing terrestrial jammers that currently disrupt hundreds of square miles of airspace will see their effective disruption radius reduced to a mere 5% of their current reach, effectively neutralizing widespread systemic blind spots.
The quote has a clean, precise quality that most observations about fear do not. Reid Wiseman posted it to Twitter in October 2014, a few days after completing the first spacewalk of Expedition 41 aboard the International Space Station: “While #spacewalking I realized something: I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.”
He was floating outside the station at roughly 400 kilometres above Earth, working with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst for six hours and thirteen minutes on cooling pump relocation and external robotics work. The spacewalk was conducted on 7 October 2014. At that altitude, with nothing below and the planet curving away at the edge of peripheral vision, Wiseman noticed the absence of something he had expected to find: the fear he thought he had.
The quote has resurfaced in the months around the Artemis II mission, for which Wiseman serves as commander. On 1 April 2026, he launched as part of the first crewed mission to the Moon since Gene Cernan commanded Apollo 17 in December 1972. The insight is more than a decade old. It reads differently now, from a trajectory that takes Wiseman and his crew past the Moon and back.
The difference between fearing heights and fearing gravity sounds like wordplay until you hold it carefully. Both terms are commonly used to describe the same cluster of behaviour: the discomfort on balconies, the reluctance to stand near the edge of a cliff, the particular unease of a glass floor above a long drop. The behaviours are consistent. What Wiseman is questioning is the diagnosis.
A fear of heights, understood as a response to elevation and exposure, locates the problem in the altitude. But what most people are responding to in those situations is not the height in any abstract sense. It is the fall. It is gravity’s action on the body in the event of a slip. It is the trajectory the body would follow if the ledge gave way, and the irreversibility of what that trajectory leads to. The height is the setup. Gravity is the mechanism.
In microgravity, the mechanism has been removed. There is no directional pull toward a surface that recedes infinitely. There is no trajectory the body would follow if it lost contact with the station. An astronaut outside the ISS is not high in the sense that a person on a balcony is high, because the relationship between position and consequence that produces the fear of heights has been cancelled. Wiseman was in the most extreme version of elevation a human can occupy, and the thing he expected to feel was not there.
He worked backward from that absence to what it meant. The fear he had carried was not of heights. It was of gravity.
This kind of revision is harder than it sounds. Most people who believe they fear heights have arranged something around that belief: the avoidance patterns, the decisions about which windows to stand near, the self-description offered when explaining a refusal. The label has become load-bearing. It organises behaviour.
What Wiseman found was that the label was describing a proxy rather than the cause. The altitude was consistently present when the fear appeared, so the altitude got named. But the consistent presence of altitude was itself a consistent presence of gravity’s consequences. The two variables had never been separated. Spacewalking separated them.
The implication is not that people who fear heights are wrong about their fear. The fear is real and the behaviour it produces is real. What shifts is the precision of the account. Someone who understands their discomfort as being about gravity’s consequences, rather than about altitude per se, has a different description of where the sensitivity lives. That description may or may not change anything practical about what they avoid. But it is more accurate, and accuracy in these matters has a certain value even when it is not immediately actionable.
Wiseman did not overcome a fear. He reclassified one. The distinction matters because overcoming implies confronting the same situation repeatedly until the response diminishes. Reclassification involves recognising that the situation you have been avoiding is not quite the thing you thought it was.
Wiseman is 50 years old, a retired United States Navy captain and test pilot. As of April 2026, he is the commander of a mission carrying him further from Earth than any human since the Apollo programme. His crew includes NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Artemis II is a circumlunar flyby, not a landing. The crew will loop around the Moon and return. The distances involved, the communication delays, the duration, make any analogy between this and an ISS spacewalk look quite small. The environment Wiseman occupied in 2014 was far more controlled than the one he entered in April 2026.
The 2014 insight does not become more or less true in this context. It is not predictive of how Wiseman or anyone else experiences the Artemis II mission specifically. But the Artemis II frame does something to the quote: it makes the scale of what he has learned to not be afraid of more visible. The man who discovered in 2014 that his fear was of gravity, not altitude, is now travelling to a distance at which Earth’s gravity is a much smaller presence.
There is a version of this story that treats it as an arc of overcoming, each mission more extreme than the last, the fear perpetually shrinking. That is not what Wiseman is describing. He is describing a single clarification, arrived at empirically, during six hours of work outside a space station. The rest followed from that, or did not.
Wiseman’s observation raises a question that has no clean answer: when we say we fear something, how often are we naming the right thing?
The fear of heights is a durable shorthand, but it collapses a set of variables that could in principle be separated. The height. The exposure. The lack of handholds. The awareness of what would happen if the body fell. The mental simulation of the fall itself. These are not identical. They would, if separated, suggest different things about where the sensitivity lives. Most people never encounter the conditions that would separate them. Wiseman did.
There is no general lesson here that applies predictably from person to person. What seems clear is that the precision of Wiseman’s account is a function of the specificity of the test. An environment that removed gravity as a variable allowed him to see that gravity was the variable that mattered. Ordinary environments, which almost always include gravity as a background constant, do not offer the same diagnostic clarity.
He has not said whether the reclassification changed anything else. He has said that he now knows which word to use.
The post Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman on spacewalking: “I used to think I was scared of heights — now I know I was just scared of gravity” appeared first on Space Daily.
A few months ago, I found myself deep in a conversation about Mars colonization timelines. The other person — a software engineer, genuinely enthusiastic, not naive about the engineering — was walking me through radiation shielding approaches, the habitability of lava tubes, the logistical case for SpaceX’s Starship architecture. It was fascinating. He clearly knew far more than I did about the technical specifics. But somewhere in the middle of it, a question started forming that I couldn’t quite place, until eventually I did: we hadn’t once asked whether any of this was a good idea.
We had been talking about how for an hour, and neither of us had said the word why.
That conversation has been sitting with me since. Not because the technical questions aren’t important — they’re genuinely hard, and the people working on them are doing serious work. But there is a gap between “this is technically possible” and “this is what we should do,” and that gap tends to close faster in the Mars discourse than it does almost anywhere else. The survival problem gets all the oxygen. The ethical one gets treated as settled — as if the answer to “should we go?” is obviously yes, and the only thing left to figure out is the radiation shielding.
I’m not a space scientist and I don’t have a strong stake in any particular answer here. What I do have is a persistent discomfort with how questions get framed — with the way the tractable problem has a tendency to absorb all the attention that the harder one deserves.
The survival discourse is, in its way, extraordinary. Cosmic radiation at the Martian surface running at roughly six to seven chest X-rays per day under normal conditions — and significantly higher during transit and solar storm events. An atmosphere that amounts to about one percent of Earth’s. Temperatures swinging 70 degrees Celsius or more between day and night. The progressive bone density loss from low gravity that compounds across months into something that isn’t easily reversed. These are real problems, and the engineers working on them deserve the coverage they get. None of that is what I’m questioning.
What I’m questioning is the habit of treating “can we survive there?” as a proxy for “should we go?” — as though answering the first settles the second. It doesn’t. They are different questions that require different kinds of thinking, and we have, for the better part of a decade, let the excitement and tractability of the first crowd out serious engagement with the second.
One of the more uncomfortable things I’ve come across in reading about this is the planetary protection question — specifically, the possibility that Mars might not be as empty as the colonization narrative tends to assume. The debate about whether Mars currently harbors microbial life, perhaps in briny subsurface water or in the recurring slope lineae that have been periodically interpreted as evidence of seasonal liquid water, remains genuinely open. No confirmed biology has been found. But “not yet confirmed” is not “not there,” and the question of what we would do if we found it — before or after we arrived — seems to get less serious treatment than it warrants.
NASA’s planetary protection guidelines exist precisely because this uncertainty is real. They were built around the concern that Earth microbes carried on spacecraft could contaminate Mars and compromise any future ability to find or study native life there — or vice versa. The protocols apply most strictly to robotic missions, which can be sterilized. They apply far less cleanly to humans, who exhale, shed skin cells, and carry an internal ecosystem of trillions of organisms that are not optional passengers. A crewed mission, by design, cannot be managed the same way a probe can.
What this means, if taken seriously, is that any crewed mission to Mars before we have higher confidence about the biological status of the planet carries a non-trivial risk of introducing an extinction event for whatever might be living there. Carl Sagan, who spent his career both advocating for space exploration and urging caution about it, made this point repeatedly — that introducing Earth organisms into a low-diversity Martian ecosystem, if one exists, could eliminate it entirely before we ever knew it was there. The argument has not aged out. If anything, growing scientific interest in Martian subsurface habitability has made it more pressing, not less.
We have spent years asking whether humans can survive on Mars. We have spent much less time asking what Mars might be surviving from, if we arrived.
The most common justification offered for Mars colonization at the level of civilizational stakes is the backup argument: a multi-planetary species is an insurance policy, and the cost of not going is existential risk to the entire human project. Stephen Hawking made this argument in his final years. Elon Musk has built it into the explicit ideological foundation of SpaceX’s long-term mission — a self-sustaining city on Mars as a hedge against collapse on Earth.
I find this argument more worth taking seriously than most critics give it credit for. The underlying concern about existential risk is real. The logic that a species concentrated on one planet is more vulnerable than one distributed across two is coherent. But the argument is doing more work than it usually admits, and some of its hidden premises deserve more scrutiny.
The most obvious one is timing. The existential threats most likely to end civilization on Earth in the foreseeable future — climate change, engineered pandemics, nuclear conflict, biodiversity collapse — are immediate relative to any realistic projection of a self-sustaining Martian colony. A genuinely self-sustaining Mars city, by most serious estimates, is generations away. The threats we are failing to address are not. If the backup civilization argument is meant to be taken literally as a response to existential risk, it would seem to require securing the primary civilization first — not as an alternative to Mars ambitions, but the sequencing matters considerably more than the discourse tends to acknowledge.
The governance question matters here too. The Mars colonization effort as it currently stands is being driven largely by the decisions of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals and their companies, operating mostly outside democratic institutions, international treaty frameworks, or any serious mechanism of public deliberation. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits national sovereignty claims over celestial bodies, but it was not designed to address private colonization by corporations operating under whatever regulatory minimums they can find. The choices being made now — when to go, at what pace, under what protocols — will shape the terms of Mars activity for a very long time. The fact that those choices are being made by a small group of people with specific and concentrated interests seems like something a more serious public conversation would address.
I want to resist the easy conclusion here — the “we should never go” position that treats any Mars ambition as inherently reckless or hubristic. There are real arguments for human Mars exploration. The science alone — the geology of ancient riverbeds, the evidence of a once-warmer world, the complex chemistry of the regolith — has produced discoveries with no parallel in the history of planetary science, and there are legitimate cases that humans on the surface could accelerate that science in ways robots fundamentally cannot. I find the impulse to go, the sheer ambition of it, genuinely compelling on some level I can’t entirely defend rationally.
But I think we owe it to the question — and possibly to whatever might be living on that planet — to stop treating the survival problem as a substitute for the ethical one. An honest accounting would start with the life question: invest seriously in determining whether Mars is biologically empty before a crewed mission departs, and treat a positive finding as a real constraint on what comes next rather than a footnote to manage. It would include meaningful international deliberation about who gets to make these decisions, and why the current answer to that question is “the people with the most rockets.” It would take the backup civilization argument seriously enough to notice what it actually implies about sequencing and urgency on Earth.
The conversation I had a few months ago was a good one. The engineer was genuinely thoughtful, and I learned things I didn’t know. But I’ve been bothered, in the time since, by how naturally we both moved through the technical questions and how completely we both skipped the other kind. The “can we?” problem is captivating in a way the “should we?” problem never quite is. It has cleaner edges. It has milestones. It announces itself as progress.
The harder question doesn’t do any of that. It just sits there, waiting for the conversation to slow down enough to make room for it.
The post We keep asking whether humans can survive on Mars and skipping the more important question of whether we should go at all appeared first on Space Daily.
Take two pairs of entangled photons that were generated separately and never interacted. Perform a single joint measurement on one photon from each pair, and the two leftover photons — strangers until that instant — come out entangled with each other. Boeing has now pulled off that maneuver, called entanglement swapping, on a compact payload built to survive a rocket launch rather than sit on a temperature-controlled optical bench.
The company announced on June 18 that its Q4S satellite system demonstrated high-fidelity entanglement swapping during ground testing, then passed environmental qualification and moved into final spacecraft integration ahead of a planned 2027 launch and a one-year orbital demonstration. According to SpaceNews, Boeing ran the swapping tests for more than a year before beginning integration. The question the mission exists to answer is not whether the physics works — it does — but whether it survives the constraints of a spacecraft: power budgets measured in watts, thermal swings of hundreds of degrees, and vibration loads that would shatter a laboratory optical bench.
Entanglement swapping is the protocol that makes a real quantum network possible, and the mechanics are worth slowing down on. Two pairs of entangled photons are generated independently. A joint measurement is then performed on one photon from each pair, and the remaining two photons — which never interacted — become entangled with each other.
The effect is, in essence, quantum teleportation of entanglement itself. Without it, the maximum distance over which entangled photons can be reliably shared is limited by fiber loss and atmospheric attenuation, capping any terrestrial quantum link at a few hundred kilometers. With swapping, those links can be chained, node to node, into something that spans a continent.
The theoretical foundation traces back decades. A foundational Nature Photonics review identified photonic systems as a natural carrier for quantum information, owing to their high transmission speed and low noise. Photons do not decohere easily in transit. They simply get lost.
That loss is the engineering problem. Repeater architectures built on entanglement swapping are the proposed solution, with a review of quantum communication in Nature Photonics framing such repeaters as the central architectural choice for scaling quantum networks beyond metropolitan distances.
Fiber attenuates photons exponentially with distance. Vacuum does not. A satellite in low Earth orbit looking down through the atmosphere only has to push photons through roughly 10 kilometers of dense air at each end of the link — a far gentler optical path than 1,000 kilometers of glass.
This is the geometric argument that has driven nearly every serious proposal for global quantum networking toward space. China’s Micius satellite demonstrated satellite-to-ground quantum key distribution in 2017. Boeing’s Q4S goes a step further by aiming to test the swapping protocol itself in orbit, which is what a true quantum repeater node would need to perform.
According to Boeing, the Q4S mission is intended to test quantum networking protocols under real space-mission constraints, moving beyond laboratory demonstrations.
The qualification matters. Laboratory demonstrations of entanglement swapping have existed for years. None have flown.
Single-photon detectors typically need cryogenic cooling. Entangled photon sources require precise temperature control and vibration isolation. Optical alignment tolerances are measured in micrometers. Compressing all of that onto a spacecraft bus is the kind of problem that consumes engineering careers — and Boeing’s partner HRL Laboratories has described fitting the core capability into a roughly briefcase-sized, 15-kilogram space-grade subassembly.
Boeing’s earlier work points toward how the company built toward this moment. NASA, the University of Illinois and Boeing had already shown that a payload in orbit could generate pairs of photons that remained entangled in microgravity. That experiment validated the source. Q4S now has to validate the network primitive built on top of it.
Boeing is moving in a field that is starting to attract serious commercial interest beyond research institutions. Cisco has publicly identified quantum networking as a strategic direction for its long-term roadmap, signaling that the traditional networking industry now treats this as more than a physics curiosity.
Recent ground-based progress has accelerated the timeline. A team at Heriot-Watt University reported teleporting entanglement across two linked quantum networks in late 2025, joining two smaller networks into a single reconfigurable eight-user system and showing that a network-of-networks architecture works at lab scale.
The geopolitical stakes are difficult to ignore. China has invested heavily in quantum communication infrastructure. The European Union has funded a quantum communication initiative aimed at deploying a secure network across member states. The United States has been slower to commit at the federal level, leaving room for companies like Boeing to define what American space-based quantum capability looks like.
The on-orbit mission has a narrow scientific goal: demonstrate that the entanglement-swapping protocol Boeing has tested on the ground performs at acceptable fidelity when subjected to launch, orbital thermal cycling, radiation exposure and the mechanical realities of a satellite bus.
Fidelity is the figure of merit. Quantum protocols degrade gracefully — entanglement is not binary — and the question is whether enough quality survives the trip to support useful applications. Boeing has said it will share technical results for peer review, a notable choice for a payload funded entirely by company research-and-development money rather than a government contract that would typically mandate disclosure.
That choice signals where Boeing thinks the value lies. Q4S is not a product. It is a credentialing exercise — a way to show that the company can build flight-qualified quantum hardware in a field where the customer base of the future likely includes national security agencies, financial institutions, and whoever ends up operating the backbone of any quantum internet.
The Q4S launch will arrive in a year already crowded with significant space milestones. Commercial cargo programs are maturing — China has shortlisted four commercial launch providers for its low-cost Qingzhou cargo spacecraft, whose first full-scale mission is tentatively scheduled for January 2027. Artemis hardware is moving toward crewed lunar flight. Multiple commercial space stations are targeting initial elements.
Against that backdrop, a roughly briefcase-sized payload doing physics experiments may sound modest. The implications are not. If quantum networking matures into infrastructure, it would reshape the security architecture of global communications, enable distributed quantum computing across continents, and provide timing references precise enough to redefine geodesy and navigation.
What separates a footnote from a foundation comes down to the orbital numbers: the fidelity the swapping protocol holds in space against its ground-test baseline, whether the payload survives the full mission rather than failing on a single component, and whether Boeing follows Q4S with a constellation or a partnership once governments decide they need flight-qualified quantum nodes. The company has not said what comes after. Funding the work itself and publishing the results suggests it is positioning for the contracts that follow.
For now, the hardware sits in a clean room, two photon sources and a measurement stage compressed into something that weighs about as much as a large suitcase, waiting for a ride to orbit. The photons it will entangle up there have never met and never will, in any ordinary sense. Whether that fragile connection holds through launch vibration, vacuum, and the long thermal day-night cycle of low Earth orbit is the one thing a workbench can never tell you — and the only thing the 2027 flight is built to find out.
The post In ground tests this year, Boeing engineers got two separately created pairs of entangled photons to hand their entanglement to two photons that had never met, all on a 15-kilogram payload, and the open question now is whether that fragile trick survives the handful of watts and violent thermal swings of orbit appeared first on Space Daily.
Austrian satellite propulsion startup Gate Space has won 6.3 million euros in funding from Europe’s government-backed accelerator program, joining a wave of European companies attracting capital for greater space sovereignty.
The post Austrian propulsion startup joins sovereign space funding surge appeared first on SpaceNews.
A new cosmic bounce model suggests that remnants from a pre-Big Bang Universe may still exist today. What if some of the Universe’s oldest objects are actually older than the Big Bang itself? A new study from the University of Portsmouth suggests that ancient black holes may have survived from a time before the Universe [...]
WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
© NASA/Scott Wiessinger
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
© NASA/Scott Wiessinger
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