PARIS — The NASA associate administrator responsible for the agency’s science programs will resign by the end of the year after more than six years on the job.

The discovery means China is the third country to discover a new lunar mineral, following the United States and former Soviet Union.

The milestone comes courtesy of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which launched just last fall. On Sept. 26, DART will slam headfirst into a small asteroid, the rare case when a spacecraft’s destruction is the desired outcome. The mission is in the name of planetary defense, which seeks to protect Earth from any potential asteroid impacts; scientists hope that should a dangerous asteroid threaten the planet in the future, a mission like DART could avert the disaster.

China’s government has officially approved three robotic moon missions that will lay groundwork for a permanent lunar base.

PARIS — The European Space Agency will seek a roughly 25% increase in funding from member states this fall despite economic and geopolitical challenges in Europe.

PARIS — Days after NASA proposed to make its next attempt to launch the Artemis 1 mission on Sept. 23, the agency changed course and pushed back the launch.

HELSINKI — China launched a Long March 7A rocket Tuesday, successfully inserting the Zhongxing-1E satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit.

PARIS – Skyloom and Space Compass, a joint venture between NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT, plan to establish a constellation to relay data from low Earth orbit to the ground through satellites in geostationary orbit.

PARIS — A problem with Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle caused an in-flight abort a minute after liftoff Sept. 12, causing a capsule filled with payloads but not people to fire its launch abort motor and parachute to a safe landing.

At a meeting of the Earth Science Advisory Committee Aug. 2, Greg Stover, program manager for NASA’s Earth System Pathfinder Program, said NASA was in talks with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to fly the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) instrument on a future Italian satellite.

HOUSTON — As NASA prepares to select the crew of the second Artemis mission, the agency’s chief astronaut says the entire astronaut corps, and not a previously announced subset, is eligible for that flight and future missions to the moon.

WASHINGTON — A large ship that Blue Origin planned to convert into a landing platform for New Glenn boosters is instead being sent to the scrapyard as the company changes its recovery plans.

Two coronal mass ejections (CMEs), eruptions of charged particles from the sun’s upper atmosphere known as the corona, burst from the sun on Aug. 14 and 15 respectively, according to the U.K. forecaster Met Office (opens in new tab). As the CMEs cross the 900,000-mile (150 million kilometers) distance between the star and our planet, they might cannibalize each other, according to SpaceWeather.com (opens in new tab), creating a single super powerful CME. 

American Airlines has agreed to buy 20 Boom Supersonic Overture passenger jets, which are expected to carry passengers at twice the speeds of conventional passenger aircraft.

LOGAN, Utah — Spaceflight shipped its Sherpa-LTC2 orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) Aug. 10 to Cape Canaveral in Florida, where it will make a second attempt to debut the chemically powered space tug on a SpaceX launch.