Kourou (AFP) Mar 6, 2025
Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket successfully carried out its first commercial mission on Thursday, placing a French military satellite into orbit to give the continent a new independent access to space. After delays including a last-minute postponement on Monday, the heavy-lift rocket blasted off into rainy skies from the Kourou space base in French Guiana. Around an hour after the launch

Boca Chica, United States (AFP) Mar 7, 2025
Elon Musk's SpaceX on Thursday once again lost the upper stage of its massive Starship rocket in a fiery explosion, even as the booster was successfully caught in its orbital test - a near replay of the previous attempt. Minutes after liftoff and booster separation, a live video feed showed the upper stage tumbling uncontrollably before the signal abruptly cut. Dramatic footage circulat

Europe’s newest rocket, Ariane 6, took flight for the second time from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 13:24 local time on 6 March (16:24 GMT, 17:24 CET). This was the first commercial flight for Ariane 6, flight VA263, delivering the CSO-3 satellite to orbit. Arianespace was the operator and launch service provider for the French Procurement agency (DGA) and France’s space agency CNES on behalf of the French Air and Space Force’s Space Command (CDE).

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Albania’s capital Tirana and its surroundings.

At MWC25 Barcelona, the European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled a funding initiative, promoted in partnership with GSMA Foundry, to support projects aimed at integrating satellite and terrestrial networks for seamless connectivity.

Week in images: 03-07 March 2025

Discover our week through the lens

Image: Webb wows with incredible detail in star-forming system

It's a long way to Mars, and explorers headed there will either have to take enough food and supplies to last the whole trip or use in-situ resources to make what they need. A recent ESA Discovery project led by the Universitat de València explored whether microalgae extracted from lichen could survive on Mars and be used to produce oxygen, food and other useful substances.

To kick off this year’s ESA Academy Experiments programme, five university student teams from across Europe were invited to visit the experimental test facilities at ESTEC – ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands – and Novespace, France.

Tokyo (AFP) Mar 4, 2025
Japanese startup ispace on Tuesday set a June 6 target touchdown date for its Moon lander, following the success of its rocket "rideshare" buddy, a spacecraft from a US firm. ispace's unmanned Resilience lander was launched in January on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket together with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost - which aced its lunar landing on Sunday. Blue Ghost is only the second private