Blue Origin plans bespoke high-speed Starlink rival
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 20:48
Blue Origin aims to start deploying more than 5,400 satellites from late next year for its own Starlink broadband competitor, targeting up to 6 Tbps capacity for enterprise, data center and government customers.
The Exploration Company in talks to acquire Orbex
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 17:02
The Exploration Company is in talks to acquire Orbex, the U.K.-based small launch vehicle developer that has reportedly been in financial distress.
Starfish Space wins SDA contract to deorbit satellites
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 13:00
Starfish Space has won a contract from the Space Development Agency to deorbit satellites in a missile-tracking and communications constellation, evidence that deorbiting services are moving into the mainstream.
Accelerating digital transformation is the keystone to deterring space war
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 13:00
The United States cannot beat China without accelerating digital transformation: cloud-native services, edge computing, AI/ML-driven autonomy, software-defined payloads, zero-trust cybersecurity, network maneuver and automated DevSecOps pipelines.
Stratolaunch secures major funding to scale hypersonic flight services
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
Stratolaunch has completed a significant capital raise to accelerate the growth of its hypersonic test and flight services business, adding Elliott Investment Management L.P. as a new investor alongside existing backer Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. The new funding is intended to rapidly expand Stratolaunch's role in the American defense industrial base through higher production rates and mor Major equity deal backs Gilmour Space expansion of sovereign launch capability
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
Gilmour Space Technologies has raised 217 million Australian dollars in private equity funding to accelerate the next phase of its sovereign space operations in Australia.
The Series E round was jointly led by the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation (NRFC) and superannuation fund Hostplus, with participation from Future Fund, Blackbird, Funds SA, HESTA, NGS Super, Main Sequence, QIC, Lunar impacts limit late delivery of Earth ocean water
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
A long-standing idea in planetary science proposes that water rich meteorites arriving late in Earth history delivered a major share of the planet's water inventory. A new study led by researchers at Universities Space Research Association and the University of New Mexico uses the Moon's surface record to impose strict limits on that scenario, concluding that impacts over the last 4 billion year ExLabs and ChibaTech team up to land student CubeLanders on asteroid Apophis
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
ExLabs has partnered with Japan's Chiba Institute of Technology and its Planetary Exploration Research Center to deliver university-led payloads to the surface of asteroid Apophis during its close approach to Earth in 2029. The ApophisExL mission is described as the world's first commercial deep-space rideshare and is supported through mission design and operations collaboration with NASA's Jet Polar weather on Jupiter and Saturn hints at the planets' interior details
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
Over the years, passing spacecraft have observed mystifying weather patterns at the poles of Jupiter and Saturn. The two planets host very different types of polar vortices, which are huge atmospheric whirlpools that rotate over a planet's polar region. On Saturn, a single massive polar vortex appears to cap the north pole in a curiously hexagonal shape, while on Jupiter, a central polar vortex Birth conditions fixed water contrast on Jupiters moons
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
While Io, the most volcanically active moon in the solar system, appears completely dry and devoid of water ice, its neighbor Europa is thought to harbor a vast global ocean of liquid water beneath an icy crust. A new international study co-led by Aix-Marseille University and Southwest Research Institute finds that this stark contrast in water content was imprinted at birth as the moons formed a Europa ice delamination may deliver nutrients to hidden ocean
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
A new geophysics study proposes a mechanism that could move life-sustaining nutrients from the battered surface of Europa down into its buried global ocean, improving the odds that the Jovian moon could support microbial life.
Europa, one of Jupiters largest moons, holds more liquid water beneath its frozen shell than all of Earths oceans combined, but the ocean is sealed away under thick Study links Europa's quiet seafloor to hidden potential for life
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
The giant planet Jupiter has nearly 100 known moons, but none has captured scientific attention quite like Europa, which likely hides a global salty ocean beneath an icy crust that may contain twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined. A new modeling study led by Washington University in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) suggests that, despite this ocean, Quantum collapse models point to subtle limits in timekeeping accuracy
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
Quantum mechanics describes a microscopic world in which particles exist in a superposition of states, being in multiple places and configurations at once, encoded in a mathematical object called a wavefunction. But this picture clashes with everyday experience, where objects appear in definite locations and configurations, never in superpositions.
To account for this, standard quantum the Cosmic dust chemistry forges peptide building blocks in deep space
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
New experiments show that key molecular building blocks for life can form spontaneously on icy dust grains in deep space long before planets emerge from collapsing gas clouds.
In a laboratory at Aarhus University and at the HUN-REN Atomki facility in Hungary, researchers Sergio Ioppolo and Alfred Thomas Hopkinson reproduced the extreme conditions in giant interstellar dust clouds, where te Mercury and Earth chorus waves show shared plasma behavior across magnetospheres
Wednesday, 21 January 2026 12:11
An international team has shown that natural electromagnetic chorus waves, long known in Earths magnetosphere, also occur in Mercurys much weaker magnetosphere with strikingly similar frequency behavior. The work uses coordinated observations from the BepiColombo Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter Mio during six Mercury flybys between 2021 and 2025, together with decades of data from Earths GEOTAIL 
