What's up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
In 1995, astronomers aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky that looked almost empty — a dark spot near the Big Dipper no wider than a pinhead held at arm’s length. After 10 days of exposures, the darkness resolved into roughly 3,000 galaxies, hiding in a place where the human eye saw nothing at all.
In June 2024, a small Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e-6 became the first machine in human history to return samples from the far side of the Moon — drilling and scooping roughly 2 kilograms of lunar soil from a region no spacecraft had ever sampled, and delivering it back to Earth, giving humanity its first physical material from the half of the Moon that has been permanently turned away from our planet since it became tidally locked billions of years ago
In 2028, China plans to launch the Tianwen-3 mission to the surface of Mars, drill two metres into Martian rock, collect at least 500 grams of soil and stone, and return those samples to Earth by 2031 — meaning if the mission succeeds on schedule, China will become the first nation in human history to bring back physical material from another planet, potentially years ahead of NASA and ESA's own delayed Mars Sample Return effort
In April 2026, the Pentagon asked Congress to more than double the U.S. Space Force's budget, from roughly $31 billion to $71 billion, even as a new Mitchell Institute report warned that no one could yet agree where competition in orbit ends and open conflict begins
Webb has confirmed a galaxy, MoM-z14, whose light left just 280 million years after the Big Bang, after travelling about 13.5 billion years. The shock was not that one galaxy shone 100 times brighter than expected, but that JWST is finding bright galaxies from this era far more often than pre-Webb models predicted, and MoM-z14 even shows unusual nitrogen enrichment, hinting that star formation and chemical evolution were already moving faster than astronomers expected.
In 2004, a magnetar on the far side of the Milky Way unleashed a giant flare so intense it disturbed Earth’s ionosphere from tens of thousands of light-years away — and in just 0.2 seconds released as much energy as the Sun emits in roughly 250,000 years.
Water is the most valuable thing in space, not gold, not platinum, not any rare metal — because water can be split into rocket fuel anywhere sunlight reaches, which means the first company to mine it reliably in orbit won't be selling to Earth at all, it will be selling to everyone else going further
NASA's Roman Space Telescope reaches Kennedy eight months ahead of schedule, with a Falcon Heavy launch now set for Aug. 30
Researchers at the University of California Riverside found in May 2026 that living systems distribute their amino acids more evenly than non-living chemistry does — a statistical pattern subtle enough that it went unnoticed for decades and powerful enough to work on data already being collected by current space missions
Jonathan McDowell has been tracking every object in orbit since 1989 — a one-person catalog that started as a weekly email newsletter and became the source governments and newsrooms cite when they need to know how many Starlink satellites are actually up there
