A Space Daily column

Mission Notes

Spaceflight and industry

Mission Notes follows the business and engineering of spaceflight. Rockets, satellites, contracts, and the industry behind the missions. Space Daily has reported on this beat since 1995, when the launch industry was a fraction of its current size.

Tech Space

The most powerful electric thruster currently operating on a NASA spacecraft draws about 4.5 kilowatts as it pushes Psyche toward a metal-rich asteroid. In February 2026, JPL fired a different lithium-fed prototype at 120 kilowatts—more than 25 times the input power—and engineers now want to scale a single thruster to one megawatt.

JPL fired a lithium-fed MPD thruster five times at up to 120 kilowatts. Reaching one megawatt will require far more than multiplying the input power.

Aug 29, 2026

Aerospace

More than 600 people have flown into space since 1961, yet only 27 people were documented as having reached Challenger Deep by July 2022 — the deepest known point in Earth’s oceans, nearly seven miles below the surface.

We've conquered space far more easily than we've conquered the deep, a gap that reveals something troubling about human ambition and capability.

Aug 28, 2026

Tech Space

The biggest unproven technology standing between Starship and Mars is not the rocket or the distance—it is large-scale orbital refuelling. Spacecraft have transferred conventional propellants in orbit since 1978, but no one has docked two giant spacecraft and moved hundreds of tonnes of supercold methane and oxygen between them, potentially over multiple tanker flights. After Starship’s 13th test flight in July 2026, SpaceX still had not attempted it.

Starship has moved multiple tonnes of oxygen between its own tanks, but its Moon and Mars architecture still depends on an unattempted vehicle-to-vehicle cryogenic refuelling campaign.

Aug 27, 2026

Space Travel

In 2025, NASA funded LEAP, a jumping robot concept designed to bound directly through the geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, collecting water and ice expelled from its buried ocean. The appeal is beautifully simple: instead of drilling through kilometres of ice to reach the ocean, let the ocean erupt directly into the robot’s sampler.

NASA's early-stage LEAP study asks whether small one-legged robots could jump through Enceladus's active jets and compare ocean-derived samples close to their source.

Aug 27, 2026

Space Travel

NASA has awarded Helicity Space an early-stage grant to test the feasibility of the Helicity Drive, a proposed fusion-propulsion system whose developers say could carry a crew to Mars and back in under four months. That entire theoretical round trip would be shorter than the roughly nine months a conventional chemical-powered mission may spend travelling in one direction—but the engine remains an unproven concept, not a flight-ready NASA system.

NASA funded a Phase I feasibility study of Helicity Space's pulsed fusion concept, not a flight engine or approved four-month crewed Mars mission.

Aug 27, 2026

Moon Daily

Scientists have developed a method that could map water ice hundreds of metres beneath the Moon without extensive drilling—by measuring how moonquakes travel through the ground. Laboratory tests and simulations suggest ice-rich soil carries seismic waves two to three times faster than dry lunar regolith, while the current model extends to depths of about 800 metres.

Frozen regolith should accelerate, reflect and scatter moonquake waves in recognisable ways, allowing future surface arrays to prioritise deep lunar ice targets before drilling.

Aug 26, 2026

Tech Space

In 2017, SpaceX proposed flying passengers from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes by sending Starship through space and landing it vertically near the destination—and while that service remains speculative, the rocket architecture behind it has now flown through space and survived re-entry.

SpaceX has demonstrated the high-speed flight and re-entry at the centre of its 2017 Earth-to-Earth animation, but not the passenger system required around it.

Aug 26, 2026

Moon Daily

China built Chang’e‑7 to place a rover and hopping probe near the Moon’s south pole, probably close to Shackleton Crater, where the hopper would venture from sunlight into a permanently shadowed cold trap and search for ice that may have survived since long before animals appeared on Earth.

Chang’e‑7’s delayed south-pole mission combines orbital mapping with a mini-flying probe designed to sample permanent shadow near Shackleton and measure water and its isotopes.

Aug 25, 2026

Tech Space

Inside Johnson Space Center’s Building 9, Starlab’s multi-floor mockup already occupies the training floor alongside hardware from SpaceX and Blue Origin — an early glimpse of how the historic astronaut-training facility could evolve as NASA transitions from the ISS to commercially operated stations around 2030.

Starlab's three-level ground mockup is taking shape inside Building 9, turning NASA's planned shift from an agency-owned ISS to commercially operated stations into a human-scale test.

Aug 24, 2026

Tech Space

Starship’s first integrated test in April 2023 was so powerful it tore apart the concrete beneath its launch pad and hurled debris hundreds of metres — by Flight 13 in July 2026, its upper stage was travelling more than 16,000 kilometres from Texas before touching down so gently in the Indian Ocean that it remained intact and afloat.

Across 13 integrated tests, Starship moved from breaking its own launch pad to guiding an intact upper stage into a distant ocean landing zone.

Aug 24, 2026

Science

A round-trip Mars mission could last roughly three years, and a model based on bone-density data from 69 astronauts predicted that everyone following the longer mission profile would return with osteopenia, while roughly one-third could be at risk of osteoporosis.

The striking percentages came from a 2020 nonlinear model, not a Mars crew. Its input data predated current resistance exercise and stopped at 228 days, far short of the 1,000-to-1,200-day profile it projected.

Aug 24, 2026

Launch Pad

Falcon 9 booster B1067 was originally built around a goal of at least ten flights without major refurbishment. It has now launched and landed 36 times in barely five years—only three flights short of the 39 missions Space Shuttle Discovery accumulated across its entire 27-year career.

B1067's 36 flights show how Block 5 moved beyond its original ten-flight maintenance goal, but comparing the first stage with Discovery requires care about what each vehicle did.

Aug 24, 2026

Launch Pad

The Artemis II rocket and spacecraft took nearly 12 hours to crawl four miles to their launchpad at less than 1 mph—then, after carrying four astronauts around the Moon, the Orion capsule returned to Earth at nearly 25,000 mph, more than 30,000 times faster.

Artemis II's first four-mile rollout took nearly 12 hours at no more than 0.82 mph. Orion later met Earth's atmosphere near 25,000 mph before its heat shield and parachutes slowed the crew for splashdown.

Aug 23, 2026

Deep Space

Voyager 2’s three surviving instruments are part of humanity’s only direct scientific presence in interstellar space—and with no approved successor under development, engineers remotely reconfigured the 49-year-old probe’s power system in July 2026, completing a delicate operation across a 39-hour command-and-response delay that should preserve its science for at least another year.

Voyager 2's saved watts preserve magnetic-field, plasma-wave and cosmic-ray measurements from beyond the heliopause, where no approved replacement mission is yet on its way.

Aug 23, 2026

Tech Space

SpaceX built the most powerful rocket in history without landing legs on its upper stage, designing it instead to be caught after re-entry by a pair of giant arms on the launch tower — and Elon Musk now says the first attempt could come within months.

SpaceX has already caught a Super Heavy booster. Catching the re-entering Starship upper stage would test whether its legless design can become a practical reuse system.

Aug 22, 2026

Aerospace

Clayton Anderson applied to become a NASA astronaut 15 times over 15 years before he was finally selected in 1998 — he later spent more than 167 days in space and completed six spacewalks.

What separates those who reach the stars from those who give up after rejection—and what can it teach the rest of us about resilience.

Aug 22, 2026