Sydney, Australia (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
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,

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
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

To land on the right foot on the Red Planet, European engineers have been dropping a skeleton of the four-legged ExoMars descent module at various speeds and heights on simulated martian surfaces.

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Weather Office is closely monitoring a notable space weather event, first detected 18:09 UTC on Sunday, 18 January 2026. We are collecting detailed information from our expert service centres.

Further details and updates will be provided here as they become available.

This page was last updated on 20 January 2026, at 14:00 CET.

Image: This image, captured by Copernicus Sentinel-3 on 18 January 2026, shows clouds of smoke from wildfires on the coast of Chile.

Image: Helix Nebula (NIRCam image)