WASHINGTON — The two companies NASA selected earlier this month to develop spacesuits for the International Space Station and Artemis lunar missions were the only companies to bid on the project, according to agency procurement documents.

Solar cycle 25 kicked off last year. Forecasters thought it would be a mild one, but it’s turning out to be quite the opposite. From its onset, this solar cycle has been steadily outpacing predictions, producing more sunspots and spewing way more solar wind, flares and eruptions than the world’s leading experts predicted. 

A new simulation of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission suggests that rather than leaving a crater behind, the DART impactor could severely deform the small asteroid it will collide with.

Among the first pictures coming in from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope will be “the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken,” according to NASA administrator Bill Nelson.

You can help NASA scientists do cloudspotting on Mars for free using the Zooniverse platform. Sign up for the project here at Zooniverse (opens in new tab). The project, dubbed Cloudspotting on Mars, will invite people to look through 16 years of photos collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has operated at the Red Planet since 2006.

TALLINN, Estonia — Chinese launch service provider Expace has secured $237 million in B round funding, following last week’s return to flight of its Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Space Force acquisition executive Frank Calvelli this week will visit United Launch Alliance’s factory in Decatur, Alabama, and get an update on the company’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket, a vehicle that the U.S. military has invested in and expects to use to launch national security satellites.

WASHINGTON — Sierra Space announced an agreement with the Turkish Space Agency and an affiliated company June 29 that could lead to cooperation on human spaceflight and lunar missions.

TAMPA, Fla. — Italian rocket maker Avio secured 340 million euros ($358 million) in government funding June 29 to develop launch vehicles for the next decade.

On Sept. 16, 2021, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ascended into space with a crew capsule atop it, carrying four private citizens—two men and two women. It was the first orbital spaceflight in history without a government employee aboard. More recently, in April of 2022, another milestone was achieved, with the first fully private flight to the International Space Station, in which the four-man crew performed research there for more than two weeks before returning to Earth.

WASHINGTON — An Electron rocket successfully launched a NASA-funded cubesat mission June 28 that will test the stability of the orbit around the moon the agency plans to use for future Artemis lunar missions.

The clash of two galaxy clusters in Abell 2146 is teaching astronomers about the kinds of “collisionless” shock waves that occur in our own solar system.

NASA’s Voyager 1 team is trying to work out why the spacecraft appears to be confused about its location in space, but the mission’s distance from Earth makes solving the issue challenging.

PASADENA, Calif. — In-space transportation company Impulse Space, which raised $20 million in a seed round earlier this year, announced June 17 it raised another $10 million to help accelerate work on orbital transfer vehicles.

In a June 15 statement, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) acknowledged the impending end of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with a 2.7-meter infrared telescope mounted in its fuselage. NASA announced April 28 an agreement with its partner on SOFIA, the German space agency DLR, to cease flight operations of SOFIA at the end of September. That announcement came a month after NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget request proposed ending the project.