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  • A Starlink satellite seems to have exploded

    A Falcon 9 launched 29 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit on December 1st, 2025. | Image: SpaceX

    SpaceX says it has lost control of a Starlink satellite that’s now falling back to Earth after suffering an anomaly. The sudden loss of communications, drop in altitude, “venting of the propulsion tank,” and “release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,” suggests the anomaly was some kind of explosion. SpaceX says it poses no threat to the crew of the ISS and will burn up in the atmosphere “within weeks.”

    This mishap comes a week after SpaceX reported a near miss with a Chinese satellite.

    Read the full story at The Verge.

  • These are the flying discs the government wants you to know about

    Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design.

    The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical dispenser on top of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket when it lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at 12:03 am EST (05:03 UTC). A little more than an hour later, the rocket’s upper stage released the satellites one at a time at an altitude of about 340 miles (550 kilometers).

    The launch was the starting gun for a “proof of concept” mission to test the viability of a new kind of satellite called DiskSats. These satellites were designed by the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit federally funded research and development center. The project is jointly financed by NASA and the US Space Force, which paid for DiskSat’s development and launch, respectively.

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  • NASA will soon find out if the Perseverance rover can really persevere on Mars

    When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now.

    At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next lander could be ready for launch as soon as 2026—or more likely in 2028. Its mission would have been to retrieve Martian rock specimens collected by the Perseverance rover, then billed as the first leg of a multilaunch, multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return campaign.

    Here we are on the verge of 2026, and there’s no sample retrieval mission nearing the launch pad. In fact, no one is building such a lander at all. NASA’s strategy for a Mars Sample Return, or MSR, mission remains undecided after the projected cost of the original plan ballooned to $11 billion. If MSR happens at all, it’s now unlikely to launch until the 2030s.

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  • Trump commits to Moon landing by 2028, followed by a lunar outpost two years later

    A couple of hours after a judge formally swore in private astronaut Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of NASA on Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order outlining his space policy objectives for the next three years.

    The executive order, titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” states that the country must “pursue a space policy that will extend the reach of human discovery, secure the nation’s vital economic and security interests, unleash commercial development, and lay the foundation for a new space age.”

    White House sets priorities

    There is nothing Earth-shattering in the new executive order, as much of it builds on previously announced policies that span multiple administrations. There are some notable points in the document that clearly reflect the White House’s priorities, though, and Isaacman’s leadership of NASA.

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  • TDK Ventures, Accel set to back India’s EtherealX in reusable launch vehicle push: Sources

    EtherealX aims to take on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 with its fully reusable rocket.

  • The inside story of SpaceX’s historic rocket landing that changed launch forever

    On Dec. 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That night, just days before Christmas, the company successfully landed the first stage for the first time. The story behind this remarkable achievement is nowhere more fully told than in the book Reentry, authored by Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and published in 2024. To mark the tenth anniversary, Ars is reprinting a slightly condensed chapter from the book that tells the inside story of this landing. The chapter begins in June 2015 with a tragedy, the disintegration of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the CRS-7 cargo supply mission for NASA. It was the first time a Falcon 9 had been lost in flight.

    Seconds after the Dragon-bearing Falcon 9 rocket broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, David Giger shouted into his headset, “Dragon is alive!”

    In the decade since he joined the company straight out of graduate school, Giger had taken on management of the entire Dragon program, reporting directly to Elon Musk. He watched the CRS-7 launch from mission control in Hawthorne not with a particular role, but rather providing a leadership presence. Giger could sense the Dragon mission team, mostly younger engineers, freeze up as video showed debris from the rocket showering back to Earth. A lot of the people involved in the hairy early flights of Dragon, including the C2 mission in 2012, had moved on to other positions at SpaceX or departed.

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  • Billionaire Jared Isaacman confirmed as new head of NASA

    The Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman’s appointment as the head of NASA on Wednesday, a decision that comes just months after President Donald Trump pulled his nomination before picking him yet again in November, as reported earlier by CNBC.

    Isaacman, the founder and CEO of a payments platform called Shift4, has flown to space twice through private missions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. After choosing Isaacman as head of NASA in December 2024, Trump pulled his nomination in May, later saying in a Truth Social post that he thought it would be “inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA.”

    Isaacman attemp …

    Read the full story at The Verge.

  • NASA finally—and we really do mean it this time—has a full-time leader

    Jared Isaacman, a pilot and financial tech billionaire, has commanded two groundbreaking spaceflights, including leading the first private spacewalk.

    But his most remarkable flying has occurred over the last year. And on Wednesday, he stuck the landing by earning formal Senate approval to become NASA’s 15th administrator.

    With a final tally of 67 to 30, Wednesday’s Senate confirmation came 377 days after President Trump first nominated Isaacman to serve as NASA administrator. Since that time, Isaacman had to navigate the following issues:

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  • Jared Isaacman confirmed as next head of NASA

    Isaacman will run the space agency at a time when Trump is trying to both downsize it and task it with returning astronauts to the moon.