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Space Industry
SpaceX launched 165 Falcon 9 rockets into orbit in 2025 — nearly one every other day — accounting for roughly 85% of all U.S. orbital launches and almost twice as many orbital launches as the entire nation of China managed that year.
SpaceX flew 165 Falcon 9 missions in 2025. That is a launch roughly every other day, sustained across a full year, and it amounts to about 85 per cent of all United States orbital launches and nearly twice the number that China, as a nation, managed in the same period.
Astronomers used to assume galaxies formed first and slowly grew the black holes at their centres. But JWST is now finding objects in the early universe where the black hole appears to have arrived first — already enormous before a full galaxy had grown around it.
In 2008, Cassini skimmed past Enceladus’s south pole and flew straight through a plume of icy material erupting from cracks in the moon’s surface. The encounter lasted only minutes, but nearly two decades later, data from that flyby is still revealing new organic chemistry from an ocean hidden beneath the ice.
The James Webb Space Telescope found a spiral galaxy, nicknamed the Big Wheel, that existed just two billion years after the Big Bang — five times more massive than the Milky Way, with a spiral structure our models say couldn't have survived that early
The Roman Space Telescope has the same size mirror as Hubble, but it will survey the sky up to 1,000 times faster — not because it sees deeper, but because it sees wider: each Roman image captures a patch of sky at least 100 times larger, making Hubble’s method look like counting a crowd one face at a time.
SpaceX won a NASA contract worth up to $843 million to build a single machine whose only job is to drag the space station out of orbit and into the Pacific Ocean
A moon only 10 kilometres wide was hiding around Uranus for decades. Voyager 2 missed it. Hubble missed it. But in 2025, Webb finally caught the faint speck circling near the planet’s inner rings, raising Uranus’s known moon count to 29.
In 2019, Canada launched three radar satellites that can see through Arctic cloud and polar darkness, and now, with the original trio seven years into a seven-year design life, Ottawa has handed MDA Space a C$688 million contract to build the replacement before the constellation starts to fail
Astronomers at Cambridge have proposed that the galaxy may contain a vast and previously unrecognised population of habitable planets, characterised by a global liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen atmosphere, that exist across a far wider range of stellar conditions than Earth-like worlds and that may be substantially easier to detect signs of life on than the Earth analogues that astronomers have been searching for over the past three decades
In June 2026, Amazon, Iridium, Globalstar and Telesat launched a trade group in Washington to represent the non-geostationary satellite industry, and the dominant operator they pointedly left out, SpaceX, already runs roughly 22 times as many satellites in that orbit as all four founding members combined
In November 2011, NASA launched a car-sized rover called Curiosity toward Mars on a planned two-year mission to look for evidence of ancient lakes and rivers — and almost 15 years later, the rover is still moving across the Martian surface, still drilling into rocks, and still transmitting data back to Earth
