Once upon a time, space was a business of two superpowers. Since the end of the Apollo era, a growing number of state and non-state actors have joined the club, with commercial space recently driving much of the expansion of space activities.

Innovation is happening in space. There is an exciting profusion of new ideas, companies, and funding in the space market. At the same time, we are also seeing pressures as investors seek to better understand their likely returns, driving more rigorous examination of space business models.

More than 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle is a small island called Devon, home to the Haughton impact crater. Haughton is a cold, dry and windy Arctic desert that is nearly always light in the summer and always dark in the winter. Its average temperature over the year is 1 degree Fahrenheit (minus 17 degrees Celsius).

In the deep waters of Earth’s oceans, scientists have discovered a new species of bacteria flourishing in the plumes from submarine hot springs. 

The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found. 

WASHINGTON — Even as the space industry complains of a shortage of launch capacity, SpaceX said it has room to increase an already surging pace of launches.

WASHINGTON — Budget pressures in NASA’s planetary science program could force the agency to choose between continuing a mission to Venus that has already been delayed or requesting proposals for a future mission.

The Minister for Industry and Science, the Hon Ed Husic MP, along with dignitaries from the Australian Space Agency and NASA announced the EPE & Lunar Outpost Oceania Consortium as one of two successful groups to receive Stage 1 grant funding from the Australian Government’s Moon to Mars Trailblazer Initiative. The project received grant funding from the Australian Government through the Australian Space Agency.

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the last two satellites March 17 that SES needs to claim C-band spectrum clearing proceeds worth nearly $4 billion in total.

NASA, in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, requested $949.3 million for Mars Sample Return (MSR), the program that will send missions to Mars to take samples collected by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth. MSR is a joint effort with the European Space Agency, with NASA leading work on a lander and ESA an orbiter.

Earth’s gravity attracts more than a hundred tons (more than 90 metric tons) of small objects and dust from space daily, according to NASA. Most of this material burns up in the atmosphere without any effect on the planet; larger chunks may produce a bright streak of light that’s visible in the night sky or a small meteorite for a rock hunter to find.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been in orbit since 1998 and space debris has forced evasive maneuvers dozens of times. According to a December 2022 NASA report (opens in new tab), the ISS has course-corrected itself 32 times to avoid satellites and trackable space debris since 1999.

The moon instrument, called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), is a pathfinder being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

In a March 7 earnings call, John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said the company’s Vigoride-5 tug, launched in January, was in good condition as it went through a “deliberate commissioning process” in orbit. The tug carries a single smallsat for Singapore-based Qosmosys as well as a hosted payload from Caltech to test technologies for space-based solar power.

WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the Florida coast March 11, returning four people from the International Space Station after more than five months in space.

NASA released additional details March 13 about its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal. An outline of the proposal, published by the White House March 9, requested $27.2 billion for the agency, a 7.1% increase from 2023 that roughly keeps pace with inflation.