Space

After Virgin Orbit vanished in bankruptcy court, Virgin Galactic announced its first spaceflight in two years as the Unity 25 mission rocketed to an altitude of 54.2 miles (87.2 km) on May 25, 2023 in the skies over Spaceport America, New Mexico.

ESA is preparing to test a very cool new fold-out heat shield for protecting spacecraft on re-entry. The Pridwen won't burn away like ablative heat shields, and it'll also slow falling satellites down enough to be caught in a hover net.

Space launch company Virgin Orbit has been grounded for good after a US bankruptcy court broke it up and sold off its assets to bidders. The demise of the ambitious venture comes after a failed attempt to conduct its first mission in January.

Black holes come in two distinct types – small and supermassive. A group in the middle has long been hypothesized to exist, and now Hubble has found some strong evidence for one of these intermediate-mass black holes in a nearby star cluster.

After an initial disappointment, Jeff Bezos is back in the Moon business. NASA selected Blue Origin's Blue Moon crewed lander for the space agency's Artemis V mission to the lunar South Pole in 2029 under a firm-fixed price contract of (US)$3.4 billion.

Terran Orbit has demonstrated a record-breaking 200-gigabit orbital data link that finally allows high-bandwidth data transfer from space to Earth. It'll replace antique, low-bandwidth X-band radio technology that's currently a critical bottleneck.

A new, Earth-sized planet has been discovered only 90 light-years away. In astronomical terms, that’s right next door. Moreover, it may be capable of supporting life thanks to volcanic eruptions caused by the gravitational tug of a nearby planet.

NASA's Juno deep space probe has made its closest flyby yet of Jupiter's volatile moon Io. During its 51st orbit of the giant planet, the solar-powered robotic spacecraft came within 22,600 miles (35,500 km) of Io's volcanic surface.

Saturn has overtaken Jupiter as the planet with the most known moons in the solar system. Astronomers have announced a bumper crop of 62 new moons orbiting the ringed planet, pushing its total to well over 100.

Able to detect gravitational waves and visible light sources, ESO's BlackGEM telescopic array at La Silla Observatory in Chile is on the hunt for ripples in space-time. And unlike existing observatories, it can pinpoint where they're coming from.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected water vapor on an object in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system where it wasn’t known to survive. The new observations also reveal something unexpectedly missing.

ESA's Juice Jupiter mission is back on track after Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany managed to shake loose and deploy the stuck ice-penetrating Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna that was stuck due to a tiny pin.

Astronomers have captured the biggest cosmic explosion ever detected. About 100 times bigger than the solar system and two trillion times brighter than the Sun at its peak, the mysterious miasma has remained visible for three years.

Space startup Vast has announced that it intends to launch what it calls the world's first commercial space station, Haven-1, sometime after August 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the first element of a 100-m (330 ft) rotating station.

As its Aeolus wind monitoring mission comes to an end, ESA is testing new procedures for deorbiting the decommissioned 1360-kg (3,000 lb) spacecraft to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, advancing international space safety standards.