SpaceX will launch its next-generation Starship — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built — as early as Tuesday (May 19), the company announced.

Starship V3's maiden voyage to space will be a big test for SpaceX, which wants to land humans on the moon for NASA in 2028 and hopes to avoid the kind of spectacular explosions that have plagued some previous Starship tests.

The launch window for what will be Starship's 12th test flight opens at 6.30 p.m. EDT at Starbase in southern Texas. As with previous Starship tests, the launch countdown schedule doesn't end with "Starship liftoff" but rather "excitement guaranteed."

SpaceX has experienced its fair share of setbacks with Starship. Last year, the seventh and eighth Starship test flights saw fiery debris rain from the heavens. The ninth fell short of its target, and a Starship exploded on the launchpad during a routine test before the 10th. However, Starship did end up having a successful 10th flight in August 2025, despite taking some damage, and its 11th run, in October, was clean.

The latest Starship, made up of a Starship spacecraft and a Super Heavy rocket, stands 407 feet (124 meters) — taller than a football field is long and about 85 feet (26 m) taller than the NASA Space Launch System that carried the Artemis II mission to orbit. It boasts a suite of upgrades over its predecessor, including new Raptor 3 engines, and it will lift off from a newly designed launchpad, according to a statement from SpaceX.

What will happen during the Starship V3 flight?

If all goes according to plan, the upcoming test flight will last a little over an hour. Starship is supposed to go up in a suborbital trajectory. The spacecraft will detach from the Super Heavy booster, which will flip around and return to Earth for a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX is known for returning its rockets to land. But because this is the first test flight of a "significantly redesigned vehicle," the company won't attempt its landing site "catch."

After it ditches the Super Heavy booster, the Starship spacecraft is scheduled to deploy 22 Starlink simulator satellites. These dummy satellites will be similar to the next generation of Starlink satellites. Two will also scan the Starship's heat shield, which SpaceX has deliberately compromised.

"For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing," a SpaceX spokesperson wrote in the statement.

Finally, a successful test flight would see the spacecraft practice relighting one Raptor engine in space, before dropping down for a controlled splash landing in the ocean. (SpaceX didn't specify where.)

Changes to Starship

The third version of the Super Heavy booster has a variety of novel features, including new grid fins at the bottom of the booster for stability during landing, and a completely redesigned fuel transfer tube to allow all 33 of the new engines to ignite at the same time. The Raptor 3 engines themselves are supposed to deliver more thrust than previous models.

Starship V3 also boasts new features. For example, the spacecraft has a redesigned propulsion system that allows for a new engine startup method, a higher fuel tank volume and an improved reaction control system for steering, according to SpaceX. Finally, changes to Starship's launchpad include increased storage capacity for the propellant and more pumps so the rocket can be filled faster.

The company said these changes "aim to unlock the vehicle's core functions, including full and rapid reuse, in-space propellant transfer, deployment of Starlink satellites and orbital data centers, and the ability to send people and cargo to the Moon and Mars."

What does this mean for the moon?

NASA is relying on commercial partners to help return humans to the moon. This includes a commercial lunar lander that NASA needs to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface during the upcoming Artemis IV mission. SpaceX has been developing a moon-landing variant of its Starship for that job, but the company faces competition from rival Blue Origin and its Blue Moon lander.

NASA's moon-return plan is a little complicated, but basically, the space agency aims to send astronauts to the moon in its Orion spacecraft, as tested in the historic Artemis II mission, before rendezvousing with a commercial lander in lunar orbit. The commercial lander will then take the astronauts to the surface and launch them back up to Orion for the trip home. Next year, NASA will test docking Orion with one or both of its commercial lander options in low Earth orbit.

NASA is clear that lander readiness will determine which commercial provider gets to take astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028. Of course, this assumes NASA is also ready by then. The Artemis program is behind schedule and over budget and, at the time of writing, doesn't have suitable spacesuits for a moon landing, which it is waiting on from another commercial provider.

A discarded piece of a SpaceX rocket carelessly left adrift in space will likely crash into the moon this summer, a new report finds.

The renegade rocket poses no risk to the moon or any working spacecraft, the report stresses. However, the collision — which is predicted to occur Aug. 5 on the border of the moon's near and far sides — may be of "minor scientific interest" if it creates a new crater that can later be studied.

"It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of," according to report author Bill Gray, a professional astronomer and developer of the Project Pluto software used to track near-Earth objects.

What's happening on the moon?

The object in question is a 45-foot-tall (13.8 meters) upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched in early 2025 and has been orbiting the Earth-moon system ever since. The rocket delivered two spacecraft to the moon — the Blue Ghost lander (developed by private company Firefly Aerospace), which successfully touched down on the moon in March 2025; and the Hakuto-R lander (developed by Japanese company ispace), which lost contact with Earth and crash-landed on the moon later that June.

According to Gray, various asteroid surveys observed the rocket's used upper stage more than 1,000 times over the past year as it tumbled through Earth orbit, staying roughly at the same distance as the moon. With this data, Gray used his software to predict with high certainty the likely time and place of the impending impact: approximately 2:44 a.m. EDT on Aug. 5, near a crater known as Einstein on the edge of the moon's Earth-facing side.

"The motion of space junk is mostly quite predictable; it simply moves under the influence of the gravity of the earth, moon, sun, and planets," Gray wrote. He added that radiation pressure from the sun's light could nudge things slightly, but isn't likely to drastically change the time or place of impact.

Unfortunately, any impact flash from the event will likely be too faint to be seen from Earth, even with a large telescope. Any scientific value will come by studying the fresh crater left behind by the debris.

A growing trend?

This isn't the first time Gray has predicted a lunar rocket crash. In 2022, he correctly predicted that a used rocket part would slam into the moon on March 4, getting the time of the crash right within a few seconds and the location correct within a few miles. (Gray initially predicted that the spent rocket was a Falcon 9 upper stage — in reality, it turned out to be a Chinese rocket booster.)

Gray's new report has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but he did ask several astronomers to review his findings. He predicts the debris will hit the moon at roughly 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h), or about seven times the speed of sound on Earth.

Although there is currently no human infrastructure on the moon for the incoming debris to damage, that may not be the case just a few years from now. Both the United States and China plan to increase the cadence of lunar launches, with the U.S. aiming for annual moon missions starting with Artemis IV and V as soon as 2028. China, meanwhile, plans to land its first taikonauts on the moon by 2030.

With international interest in building permanent bases near the lunar south pole, the region could soon become crowded with cargo, crews and spacecraft. In the meantime, it will be increasingly important for space agencies and corporations to mitigate the downstream hazards of space junk by sending used rocket stages into orbit around the sun, rather than around Earth and the moon.

Editor's note: This article's headline and lead image were changed on May 12, 2026. The article was republished because the topic is trending on social media.

How quickly can you name all 12 Apollo astronauts that walked on the moon? Find out with our moon landing quiz!

A Chinese satellite equipped with a robotic "octopus arm" has passed a key refueling test in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to state-run media. The achievement highlights China's continued leadership with this particular technology, which NASA has not yet caught up with.

The experimental spacecraft will eventually deploy a giant balloon in LEO, which could help solve another important issue surrounding satellite "megaconstellations" like SpaceX's Starlink network.

The satellite, dubbed Hukeda-2 (also known as Yuxing-3 06 within China), launched March 16 aboard the Kuaizhou-11 rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, according to the website of Jonathan McDowell, a now-retired astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking the movements of Earth-orbiting spacecraft for more than two decades. It was one of eight satellites deployed during this mission, and it is now orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 335 miles (540 kilometers).

Hukeda-2 is a demonstration satellite intended to test new technologies in LEO. Its most notable attachment is an octopus-like robotic arm that "can curl, twist and wrap around objects to work in tight, complex spaces, with a nozzle-like tip at one end designed to line up and connect with a target port," according to the South China Morning Post.

The arm is made of a series of spring-like tubes threaded with cables attached to a motor, allowing it to bend in almost any direction and make the small adjustments needed to dock with another satellite while both spacecraft are traveling at speeds of around 16,800 mph (27,000 km/h).

On March 24, Chinese state media reported that Hukeda-2's robotic arm had successfully completed its first refueling test. It was initially unclear if this test involved another satellite. However, photos have since confirmed that the robotic arm instead docked with a target port located on Hukeda-2 itself.

This is the biggest milestone for satellite refueling since June 2025, when China's Shijian-25 satellite successfully connected to and refueled the Shijian-21 satellite, which had previously run out of fuel. This encounter occurred in a higher, geosynchronous orbit, around 22,000 miles (33,500 km) above Earth's surface, and was the first confirmed case of satellite-to-satellite refueling, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Refuel, reuse, recycle

When satellites run out of fuel, they can no longer maintain their altitude and are slowly pulled back toward Earth, before eventually burning up in the upper atmosphere. By refueling them, operators can keep the same spacecraft in orbit much longer, thus making them more cost-effective and sustainable, reducing the need to launch replacements. This has been a big aim for NASA and Western companies for several years, but has remained out of reach so far.

China will likely attempt to use similar refueling spacecraft to service its rapidly expanding Qianfan, or "Thousand Sails," constellation, which launched its first batch of satellites in 2024 and is set to rival Starlink in the coming years. (There are currently about 108 active Qianfan satellites in orbit, with plans to deploy 15,000 by 2030.)

SpaceX, on the other hand, does not appear interested in sustaining its active satellites. Instead, the company favors repeated launches of new spacecraft with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket to keep costs down.

Another issue with expanding constellations is that the number of dead spacecraft waiting to fall back to Earth is rising fast and taking up valuable space that could be occupied by new satellites. In an attempt to fix this, Hukeda-2 will deploy an 8-foot-wide (2.5 meters) balloon at the end of its mission, which will increase atmospheric drag and speed up its return to Earth.

If this works, future Chinese satellites could be deployed with similar devices that allow them to fall back to Earth without initiating a final deorbiting burn. However, it is unclear when Hukeda-2 will deploy its test balloon.

Although quick deorbiting of satellites is prudent, it is unlikely to fix the greater issue of overcrowding that is expected to occur in LEO in the coming decades, especially if SpaceX's controversial plan to launch 1 million orbital data centers comes to fruition.

Recent research has also revealed that satellite reentries release high levels of metal pollution in the upper atmosphere, which is likely triggering issues we are still not fully aware of.

"What goes up must come down," University of Regina astronomer and vocal megaconstellation critic Samantha Lawler recently wrote for Live Science.

Earth-orbiting satellites could begin colliding with one another in less than three days in a worst-case-scenario scenario — potentially triggering a runaway cascade that may render low Earth orbit (LEO) unusable, a new preprint study warns. This is 125 days quicker than if an emergency had happened just seven years ago, according to the researchers' newly devised "CRASH Clock."

The number of spacecraft orbiting our planet is rising fast, thanks largely to the rise of satellite "megaconsetllations," such as SpaceX's Starlink network. As of May 2025, there were at least 11,700 active satellites around Earth, most of which are located in LEO — the region of the atmosphere up to 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above Earth. For context, that is a 485% increase on the roughly 2,000 satellites in LEO at the end of 2018, before the first Starlink launch in 2019. And all signs suggest that this is only the beginning.

One of the big problems with having so many satellites circling us is an increased chance they may collide with each another, creating clouds of fast-moving debris that could impact other spacecraft, including human-occupied space stations. Satellite operators are largely able to avoid these collisions. However, if they were to lose control of their respective spacecraft — either via a technical glitch, a cyber attack or a massive solar storm — they would be powerless to prevent a potential catastrophe.

In a new study, uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on Dec. 10, researchers proposed a new way of measuring the risk of a collision occurring if every spacecraft was rendered inoperable by one of these worst-case scenarios. The team dubbed this metric the Collision Realization And Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock. By modelling the distribution of spacecraft in LEO, the CRASH Clock shows how long it would take for the first collision to occur. (This is similar to how the infamous "Doomsday Clock" shows us how far we are away from a hypothetical global armageddon.)

"The CRASH Clock is a statistical measure of the timescale expected for a close approach that could give rise to a collision," study co-author Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia, told Live Science in an email. "The idea is that it can be used as an environmental indicator that helps to evaluate the overall health of the orbital region while enabling people to conceptualize just how much or how little room there is for error."

In the new paper, the team calculated that the value of the CRASH Clock by the end of 2025 was around 2.8 days, with a 30% chance that a collision could occur within 24 hours of an emergency that renders satellites inoperable. This is much less than the clock's predicted value for 2018, estimated to be 128 days, which would have given operators much more time to recover their assets.

These findings have not yet been peer-reviewed, and the study team now thinks that they slightly overestimated how short the CRASH Clock really is, Boley told Live Science. However, the rate at which these timeframes have changed, regardless of their exact values, is what is most concerning. (A new, more reliable value for the CRASH Clock is likely to be published later this year.)

"Seeing that difference [in values] is one factor that motivated us to develop the CRASH Clock further," Boley said. The fact that the value has decreased so significantly already is just as good an "indicator of the stress on orbit" as the CRASH Clock itself, he added.

The value of the CRASH Clock will likely continue to decrease further in the coming years as more satellites are deployed. In 2025, for example, there were 324 orbital launches, which is a new record and represents a 25% increase compared to 2024, SpaceNews recently reported.

The researchers have not predicted exactly how much the CRASH Clock will change in the coming years. However, they suspect that the current trend will continue: "Whether the CRASH Clock decreases will depend on the continued approach to industrializing Earth orbits," Boley said. "It could continue to get shorter if densification of orbital shells continues."

The most likely way that a CRASH Clock scenario would play out is via a sizable solar storm, which can temporarily scramble satellite systems with large doses of radiation, study lead author Sarah Thiele, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, recently told Live Science's sister site Space.com. During such an event, "it becomes impossible to estimate where objects are going to be in the future," she added.

If satellites remained offline for longer than the CRASH Clock value then multiple collisions could occur, which could push us dangerously close to the threshold of the Kessler Syndrome — a theoretical scenario where cascading collisions in LEO triggers causes space junk to exponentially increase to the point where nothing could safely operate there.

The researchers are reluctant to predict a timeframe for this scenario because there are too many variables surrounding subsequent satellite collisions, and nobody really knows at what point the Kessler syndrome will be triggered, Boley said. However, if we are not careful, we may soon "be in the early stages" of an irreversible cascade of collisions, he warned.

The idea of humans living beyond Earth was once only possible in science fiction, but now space agencies are making plans to bring space colonization closer to reality. NASA and SpaceX are exploring long-term missions to the moon and Mars, while astronomers continue to discover potentially habitable exoplanets orbiting distant stars beyond our solar system.

Supporters of planetary colonization argue that becoming a multi-planet species could safeguard us from potentially Earth-ending events. However, it will require an enormous effort to colonize another planet or moon. And if we look beyond Mars, potentially habitable planets may take thousands of years to reach.

But as technology advances and space agencies consider long-term human settlements on other planets, a more fundamental issue now beckons — not whether we can expand to other worlds, but whether we should.

What's your take? Answer our poll below and share the reasoning behind your choice in the comments.

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SpaceX's secretive "Starshield" government-operated intelligence satellites are deliberately emitting radio signals the "wrong way around," and outside of the frequency ranges designated by international authorities, a new paper has revealed.

The signals, which were accidentally discovered by an amateur astronomer, may have the potential to negatively impact other spacecraft around them, NPR recently reported.

Starshield satellites are an offshoot of SpaceX's ever-expanding Starlink constellation that have been specially built for and operated by branches of the U.S. government. Very little is known about the Starshield program, which was first announced in 2023, including where the satellites are positioned around Earth, what their mission parameters are, or how they differ from standard Starlink satellites, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

SpaceX has launched dozens of Starshield batches into space so far. They likely total more than 200 individual satellites, although the exact number is unclear. The majority of the satellites are operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), while a small number are controlled by the U.S. Space Force. In total, the U.S. government has paid an estimated $1.8 billion for the Starshield network, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On Oct. 17, Scott Tilley, an amateur astronomer and citizen scientist who has previously tracked China's mysterious space plane and rediscovered a lost NASA satellite, released a new paper describing a series of anomalous satellite signals. Tilley initially came across these signals by mistake, after switching his equipment to a frequency range that is almost never used by satellites, and he was initially unsure what was causing them.

"It was just a clumsy move at the keyboard," Tilley told NPR. "I was resetting some stuff and then all of a sudden I'm looking at the wrong antenna, the wrong band." After comparing the signals to data collected from other amateur astronomers, he realized that they were likely coming from Starshield satellites, which he "wasn't expecting at all." (Tilley's findings have not yet been peer-reviewed.)

The new signals have frequencies between 2,025 and 2,110 megahertz, which are normally used for "uplink" signals, sent from Earth-based operators up into space. But in this case, these frequencies are being used to send "downlinks," or messages from satellites back to the planet's surface. As a result, the signals do not fall within the downlink frequencies approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — a United Nations agency that coordinates the use of the radio spectrum across the globe and in space.

"These signals seem to be intentionally emitted by Starshield satellites, but outside of permitted frequency ranges," Benjamin Winkel, a radio astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy in Germany, told Live Science. But it is unclear why they are using uplink signals instead of standard downlink frequencies, he added.

In addition to potentially revealing the satellites' classified locations, Tilley warned that the Starshield signals could disrupt other spacecraft: "Nearby satellites could receive radio-frequency interference and could perhaps not respond properly to commands — or ignore commands — from Earth," he told NPR.

But not everyone is convinced. "I think it [the signals] is definitely happening," Kevin Gifford, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who specializes in radio interference from spacecraft, told NPR. However, it is too soon to tell if these signals interfere with other spacecraft, and no such incidents have been reported so far, he added.

Tilley detected signals coming from 170 different Starshield satellites, hinting that the downlinks are probably being used by the entire constellation. This further suggests that the signals are being emitted on purpose, which some experts find unsurprising.

"SpaceX is smart and savvy," Gifford said. It's possible they decided to just "do it and ask forgiveness later," he added.

Neither SpaceX nor the NRO has commented on the newly discovered signals so far.

Disruptive SpaceX signals

This is not the first time SpaceX has run into issues regarding radio signals.

In 2023, a group of astronomers revealed that Generation 1 Starlink satellites are accidentally leaking a large amount of radio pollution, known as unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR), into space — and that the frequencies of these signals overlap with those used by radio astronomers. A follow-up study, in 2024, also revealed that Generation 2 Starlinks are leaking even more UEMR than their Generation 1 counterparts.

This problem is likely to get much worse as the number of private satellites increases. For example, SpaceX recently launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite into orbit. And while not all of those satellites remain operational, those that do represent around 60% of the roughly 12,000 active satellites currently orbiting our planet. Some experts also predict that we could end up with around 100,000 satellites by 2050.

Earlier this year, Live Science revealed that, if left unchecked, the UEMR from these future satellites could eventually disrupt all forms of ground-based radio astronomy, significantly handicapping our ability to study the cosmos.

Initial observations suggest that the new Starshield signals will not have a major impact on radio astronomy, Winkel said. However, like every other private satellite, they will likely be emitting some form of UEMR, he added.

Human stem cells get worn out and age much faster in space, a new study has found, which is a problem for anyone hoping to take a long trip through our solar system.

Scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to track changes to stem cells delivered by SpaceX resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS). Up in space, the stem cells lost some of their ability to generate new cells, became more susceptible to DNA damage and aged faster, according to a statement released by the researchers.

The study's findings, published Sep. 4 in the journal Cell Stem Cell, build on previous space health research that highlight the challenges of putting people in space for prolonged periods of time — something humanity would have to overcome if it wants to colonize other planets such as Mars.

"Space is the ultimate stress test for the human body," study co-author Catriona Jamieson, the director of the Sanford Stem Cell Institute and professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, said in the statement. "These findings are critically important because they show that the stressors of space — like microgravity and cosmic galactic radiation — can accelerate the molecular aging of blood stem cells."

Related: 'Why would you even want to go?': Readers react to the hypothetical 400-year voyage to Alpha Centauri

The human body is not built for space. Up there, our species is subjected to completely different environmental strains. Two notable, harm-causing stressors are the near-complete weightlessness of microgravity and cosmic radiation — tiny, subatomic particles that zoom through space.

Previous studies have documented that humans experience a variety of adverse health effects in space. For example, a 2022 study found that astronauts suffer decades of bone loss from spending more than six months in orbit; and scientists have even suggested that colonizing Mars may require some DNA tweaking to ensure that our bodies cope with life away from our home planet.

In the new study, researchers looked at hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, or HSPCs. These cells regulate immune system health and cancer immune surveillance. Previous work has shown that exposure to microgravity can impact immune and metabolic changes, but not how time in space affects the molecular integrity and functional capacity of HSPCs, according to the study.

The team acquired human cells from the bone marrow of consenting individuals undergoing hip replacement procedures before growing the cells in a nanobioreactor, a type of vessel that can facilitate biological reactions. The researchers carried out their experiment on Earth and on four missions to the ISS.

Using AI-powered imaging tools to monitor cell activity, the scientists noticed that cell changes in the space samples were similar to those seen in normal cell aging on Earth, yet they occurred at an accelerated rate. For example, the cells were more active than normal and were losing their ability to rest and recover. The researchers also observed more activity in part of the "dark genome" — poorly understood regions of the genome linked to stress responses and aging, according to the study.

While the study's findings paint an ominous picture for long-duration space travel, they do come with a silver lining: Damage seen in the cells began to reverse when they were placed in a young, healthy tissue environment. This recovery suggests that it may be possible to rejuvenate aging cells, according to the statement.

The cell changes and accelerated aging documented in the new study could help researchers better protect astronauts spending time in space, as well as people aging under normal conditions on Earth.

"Understanding these changes not only informs how we protect astronauts during long-duration missions but also helps us model human aging and diseases like cancer here on Earth," Jamieson said. "This is essential knowledge as we enter a new era of commercial space travel and research in low earth orbit."

SpaceX's Starship has finally pulled off a successful test flight in a stunning reversal of fortunes for Elon Musk's most ambitious rocket.

The uncrewed 403-foot-tall (123 meters) rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday (Aug. 26).

Starship completed a nerve-wracking, hour-long flight, reaching a maximum altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Earth's surface, before its upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Earlier, after separation, the rocket's Super Heavy booster landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ecstatic applause erupted as SpaceX's engineering teams celebrated the rocket completing its journey. Unlike previous attempts, Starship was finally able to use its satellite deployment system to drop mock Starlink satellites into space for the first time.

Much more was riding on this 10th test launch than dummy satellites. The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth — and eventually to the moon and Mars. SpaceX has a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2027.

The latest test flight, coming two days later than planned due to issues with Starbase's ground systems and bad weather, marks a comeback for the company after a string of failures.

Starship's ninth launch fell short of its target, while its eighth and seventh launches ended in dramatic explosions that hurled fiery debris across the Caribbean. In June, a Starship rocket also exploded on the launch pad while preparing for a flight. Last year, scientists revealed that a previous explosion, during the second test flight in November 2023, temporarily ripped a "hole" in the atmosphere.

"Congratulations to @SpaceX on its Starship test. Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III," NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy wrote on X following the flight. "This is a great day for @NASA and our commercial space partners."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

Yesterday's mission was intended as a test for the ship's new heat shield tiles and its ability to deploy payloads in orbit, alongside many other upgrades to improve on previous flights. It was also a demonstration of SpaceX's "fail fast, learn fast" mantra, where test rockets are flown beyond their technical limits — the company treats failures as opportunities to gather more data.

Despite the 10th launch's success, signs of stress on the rocket were evident during flight, with the rocket's flaps catching on fire and swinging back and forth.

The rocket's hexagonal heat shield tiles were also licked by fire during the rocket's blazing-hot supersonic reentry. They were developed as a fully reusable orbital heat shield, a historical departure from traditional shields that take refurbishment after each flight. For example, NASA's retired Space Shuttle took nine months to refurnish its heat shields between flights, Musk noted during a webcast on Monday (Aug. 25.)

"What we're trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately," he said.

The speed of the rocket's development is driven by SpaceX's NASA contract, which will see a modified version of the craft take humans to the moon as part of its Artemis programme in 2027. Musk has also suggested that the rocket could start uncrewed test flights to Mars in the next 12 months.

Yet remaining technical challenges could force these key dates to slip. SpaceX still needs to demonstrate that the rocket can be refueled in orbit, a key test before it can carry out missions further into space.

There's a secret, extra member of Crew-11 aboard the International Space Station right now: disease-causing bacteria.

Or, at least, such bacteria will be growing aboard the orbiting laboratory very soon. Scientists at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel, in partnership with U.S.-based space tech company SpaceTango, have developed a study that will examine how microgravity affects the growth of certain bacterial species that cause diseases in humans. To pull it off, researchers will grow different strains of bacteria under microgravity, freeze that bacteria at -80 degrees Celsius and then return the samples to Earth to see how they’ve grown differently than the same bacteria grown on the home planet.

The bacterial strains involved are E. Coli, Salmonella bongori and Salmonella typhimurium, and they were launched toward the International Space Station (ISS) aboard NASA's Crew-11 mission that SpaceX successfully launched on Friday, Aug. 1. (Editor's note: The Crew-11 team docked to the ISS on Aug. 2 and is now adjusting to life in orbit).

Scientists have already studied how a lack of gravity affects the way bacteria grows, and research from NASA is already underway to study bacteria in space in general. But researchers behind the current ISS-and-bacteria mission specifically hope to bring home data that will help curb the spread of infectious disease, or at least help experts find ways to stop bacteria from developing antibiotic resistance — a major public health problem that means some disease-causing bacteria is no longer wiped out by drugs that've been developed to clear the bacteria from people’s bodies and get them healthy again

"We know that space conditions affect bacterial behavior, including how they grow, express genes, and acquire traits like antibiotic resistance or virulence," Ohad Gal-Mor, Head of the Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory at Sheba Medical Center, said in a statement.

Related: Unknown strain of bacteria found on China's Tiangong Space Station

"This experiment will allow us, for the first time, to systematically and molecularly map how the genetic expression profile of several pathogenic bacteria changes in space."

The health of astronauts and microgravity's effect on the human body has been top of mind as people explore space and the idea of what life off Earth looks like. Human genes sometimes express themselves differently in microgravity conditions, and scientists have linked such an environment to the expedited loss of muscle seen in astronauts, and even their likelihood of developing skin rashes.

If examined on their own, however, genetic changes in bacteria will hopefully give researchers more clues about how they act once inside a human, whether it's how fast they spread or their likelihood of getting around our treatments: both in space and here on Earth.

There's no doubt that SpaceX's Starlink internet service has connected the world like never before — but at what cost? Astronomers have long voiced concerns about Starlink's satellite constellation interfering with observations of the universe, and a new survey by Curtin University confirms those fears.

An analysis of 76 million images from a prototype station for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope found Starlink satellite emissions affected up to 30% of images in some datasets; such interference could affect research outcomes that depend on that data.The survey identified more than 112,000 radio emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites, and found that uch of the observed interference is not intentional.

"Some satellites were detected emitting in bands where no signals are supposed to be present at all, such as the 703 satellites we identified at 150.8 MHz, which is meant to be protected for radio astronomy," study lead Dylan Grigg, a Ph.D. candidate at Curtin University, said in a statement.

Grigg noted these unintended emissions might come from onboard electronics. "Because … they're not part of an intentional signal, astronomers can't easily predict them or filter them out," he said.

While the International Telecommunication Union does regulate satellite emissions to protect astronomical observations, current rules "focus on intentional transmissions and do not cover this type of unintended emission," said Steven Tingay, a Curtin professor and executive director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy.

Related: 'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching

However, it's not only Starlink satellites that are the problem. The study team's survey focused on Starlink because it currently has the most extensive constellation, with more than 7,000 satellites deployed at the time of the survey, but other satellite networks can "leak" unintended transmissions, too.

"It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong. Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive," said Tingay. "We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research that are currently underway."

The team's research was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

SpaceX's Starship has exploded once again — adding to a growing list of setbacks for the company's rocket.

The upper stage of the rocket, the largest ever built, was undergoing routine testing to prepare for its 10th test flight at SpaceX's South Texas Starbase site on Wednesday night (June 18) when it "suffered a catastrophic failure and exploded," local authorities wrote on Facebook.

The gigantic fireball adds to a string of recent headaches for the rocket's upper stages. The ship exploded mid-flight during two previous test flights in January and March, and fell to pieces during an earlier-than-planned reentry in May.

In a post on X, SpaceX has attributed the latest explosion to "a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase," yet the exact cause of the malfunction is unclear.

"A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for," SpaceX added in the post. "Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials. There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing [sic] operations continue."

Starship is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport spacecraft, crew members, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Designed primarily with affordable and efficient manufacturing in mind, the gargantuan rocket uses inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX claims can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

These early failures are unlikely to deter SpaceX from further developing the rocket. Musk announced in March that he expects the ship to carry Tesla's Optimus humanoid robots to Mars by the end of 2026, and the rocket is also set to carry some of the Starlab private space station into orbit once the International Space Station retires after 2030.

SpaceX has also won around $4 billion in NASA contracts to develop the Human Landing System (HLS). This is a lunar lander variant of the spacecraft, and has been selected by NASA to carry American astronauts to the moon aboard the 2027 Artemis III mission — the first time humans will have walked on the moon in more than 50 years.

The impact of yesterday's explosion on SpaceX's launch date for Starship’s 10th flight is unclear. Currently, the company is investigating what happened to cause Flight 9's failed reentry alongside the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

An explosive, and very public, feud between President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk on Thursday (June 5) has raised doubts over the future of America's space industry.

The war of words could place $22 billion of SpaceX’s government contracts with multiple U.S. space programs at risk, according to one estimate, although the real figure — which remains classified — could be significantly higher.

Following threats from the president on his social media platform Truth Social that the U.S. could cancel the government contracts and subsidies awarded to Musk's companies, the CEO of SpaceX retorted that his space company would "begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately."

Hours later, Musk responded to a follower telling him to "cool off" by saying "Good advice. Ok, we won't decommission Dragon."

The disagreement began on Tuesday (June 3) when Musk criticized the administration's proposed tax and spending bill on his social media platform X.

"This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it," Musk wrote on X.

Related: 'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching

This then escalated into a full-blown social media feud on Thursday, with Musk claiming that Trump's name appears in unreleased files relating to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The White House condemned these allegations. "This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill because it does not include the policies he wanted," representatives wrote on X.

Trump then claimed Musk "just went CRAZY," posting: "The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!"

What is SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, and why would decommissioning it be a problem?

SpaceX's Dragon capsule is a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying up to seven passengers and cargo to and from Earth orbit, according to SpaceX. NASA currently relies on the capsule to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), so canceling these government contracts effectively eliminates America's ability to launch astronauts to space from American soil, Live Science's sister website, Space.com, reported.

NASA also heavily relies on SpaceX for other space programs, having selected the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), a lunar lander variant of the company's next-generation Starship spacecraft, to carry American astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years aboard the 2027 Artemis 3 mission.

NASA is investing $4 billion into Starship's development, and canceling its contract could seriously handicap NASA and the future of U.S.-led space exploration.

While other competitors exist, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, they lag far behind SpaceX.

The Starliner capsule is not yet certified to fly operational astronaut missions and was responsible for "stranding" two astronauts on the ISS for nine months last year. The astronauts returned to Earth on March 18 aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, and neither Boeing nor NASA have offered any significant updates into fixes that will make Starliner flightworthy.

SpaceX's lead on its competitors is reflected in the size of its government subsidies. In April, the U.S. Space Force, the military branch of U.S. space exploration, awarded the company nearly $6 billion in launch contracts, while the United Launch Alliance received $5.4 billion and Blue Origin $2.4 billion.

In response to the feud between Musk and Trump, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens declined to comment on SpaceX, but she did tell Reuters that "we will continue to work with our industry partners to ensure the president's objectives in space are met."

NASA's deputy administrator Lori Garver told Reuters that, as well as not being in national interests, canceling SpaceX's contacts would probably not be legal. However, she also added that "a rogue CEO threatening to decommission spacecraft, putting astronauts' lives at risk, is untenable."

In 2024, several farmers across Saskatchewan, Canada, had to deal with a bizarre situation: chunks of SpaceX space junk had crashed onto their land. As I helped a couple of these farmers negotiate the wild world of international space law, not significantly updated since the Apollo era, I knew this situation would become increasingly common.

The first generation of megaconstellation satellites, led by the SpaceX Starlink initial launch of 60 satellites in 2019, have now reached the end of their incredibly short operating lifetimes.

The end-of-life plan for virtually every satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is to burn them up in Earth's atmosphere. Economically, this makes sense: it takes a lot less propellant to bring a satellite down into a lower orbit than up into a higher orbit, sometimes called a "graveyard" orbit.

But the economic argument for bringing these satellites back down to Earth ignores the very real environmental consequences of atmospheric disposal. The chassis, leftover propellant, electronics, antennas, and solar panels don't disappear when a satellite "burns up" — the mass of the metals and plastics that comprise the satellite is deposited in the atmosphere as metal vapor.

When just a few satellites are burned every year, it's not a significant change to atmospheric chemistry. But Starlink alone plans to have 42,000 satellites with 5-year operating lifetimes, so the mass of metal vapor entering the atmosphere (particularly highly reactive aluminum and lithium) will exceed natural infall rates by 25 times or more.

This much extra metal vapor in the stratosphere can change atmospheric chemistry and may cause ozone depletion. By 2023, 10% of stratospheric aerosols already included metals from rocket and satellite reentries.

LEO satellites burning up are a source of upper atmospheric pollution that's going to increase exponentially — and scientists are only just beginning to study what this massive increase in metal vapor could do in the stratosphere.

Whatever parts of the reentering satellites don’t burn up will hit the ground. Just in the past few months, spacecraft pieces have fallen on Poland, Kenya, North Carolina, and Algeria, while scientists carefully tracked a 1970s Soviet Venus probe's reentry and speculated about ground casualty risks. That spacecraft, Kosmos 482, crashed into the Indian Ocean earlier this month.

While identifiable debris from only one Starlink satellite has so far been recovered, there are likely many, many more pieces already on the ground in other places that are covered by woods or mountains.

Related: 'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching

At some point, a bit of falling space junk will kill someone. Scientists recently calculated the risk of a casualty from one of the over 2,000 rocket bodies in orbit is 10% in the next decade, but that doesn’t include the tens of thousands of satellites expected to reenter in that same time period.

So what's the solution?

Leaving unmaneuverable, dead satellites in orbit is not an option. They pose a safety risk to other satellites, potentially orbiting for decades at 16,000 mph (25,000 km/h).

Collisions at these speeds are catastrophic, producing debris bullets that can crash into other satellites, producing more debris. The worst-case scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, where these collisions become self-propagating, and the debris field makes LEO unusable for decades to centuries.

Starlink has the highest density of operational satellites that has ever existed in orbit. It has reported an average of one collision avoidance maneuver within their megaconstellation every two minutes in the second half of 2024, and they have already launched hundreds more satellites into that orbital shell since then.

So far, Starlink has been impressively successful at avoiding collisions. But the frequency of collision avoidance maneuvers means that if there is a large solar flare, or their systems get hacked, or there's a simple human error, no maneuvers can be executed for any significant window of time — raising the risk of a collision.

Having fewer satellites in orbit naturally reduces the danger of collisions and the worst-case scenario of Kessler Syndrome. It also reduces light pollution from satellites, which is the reason I originally started worrying about megaconstellations. Satellites are already degrading astronomy research, including the discovery of potentially hazardous asteroids. Fewer satellites will allow astronomers to continue exploring space with telescopes, and stargazers to continue exploring space with their eyes.

LEO is a valuable resource that must be protected and shared in a way that benefits the most people while simultaneously protecting LEO for use by future generations. We cannot have tens of thousands of satellites in LEO without severe consequences for the atmosphere and an increasingly high likelihood of Kessler Syndrome, which will limit our use of satellites for decades to centuries.

This is the urgent challenge that satellite engineers and operators must now meet: if they need to provide services from orbit with fewer, longer-lived satellites, how will they do that? Without far-reaching, international regulation, or self-imposed limits from satellite companies, current practices in LEO threaten the planet, and our ability to explore beyond it.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

If you look up at the sky on a clear night, shortly after one of SpaceX's many Falcon 9 rocket launches, you might see a bright string of lights zooming across the heavens.

This phenomenon, known as a Starlink train, occurs when light reflects off a newly deployed batch of SpaceX satellites before they eventually fan out and become part of the wider Starlink network. It is also a common reminder that giant groups of private satellites, known as "megaconstellations," are quickly becoming a reality.

But behind these lights lurks an invisible — and much more problematic — form of radiation: radio waves.

If our eyes could also detect this hidden radiation, the sky would be full of bright spots and nonstop flashing that would obscure the distant signals from objects beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). And unlike the light pollution we see from satellites, these intrusive signals don't just happen at night or in the hours after new satellites are released — they happen all the time.

Some researchers are so worried about this invisible pollution that they think we could eventually reach an "inflection point," beyond which ground-based astronomy instruments could become radio-blind to the cosmos.

"It would basically mean that no radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore," Benjamin Winkel, a radio astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy in Germany, told Live Science. "It will eventually reach a point where it is not worthwhile to operate a [radio] telescope anymore."

At the rate that megaconstellations are growing, this could happen within the next 30 years, some experts predict.

Unique view of the cosmos

Radio astronomy allows us to see a host of hidden cosmic structures and phenomena that we can’t detect through visual light alone.

Scientists use radio frequencies to study a range of phenomena, from the jets of energy shooting from supermassive black holes to the subtle changes in the trajectories of near-Earth asteroids.

Radio telescopes are also constantly finding phenomena, such as fast radio bursts — millisecond pulses of ultra-energetic radiation, some of which repeat at regular intervals — that come from super-dense, highly magnetic objects such as neutron stars. Their observations also provide some of the best insights into the "Age of Reionization," as far back as 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were emerging from clouds of primordial hydrogen.

Scientists scouring the skies for signs of alien life, such as those at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, also favor hunting in radio waves because any advanced civilizations will likely use these wavelengths for communication, just as humans do.

We also rely on radio telescopes to pin down our precise location compared to other cosmic objects, which is constantly shifting.

The radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ranges from roughly 3 kilohertz to over 300 gigahertz — equal to wavelengths from more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) long down to 0.04 inches (1 millimeter). However, not all of these wavelengths are visible from Earth, and most astronomers hunt for signals somewhere between 1 megahertz and 100 GHz, according to the British Astronomical Association.

Many of the world's biggest radio telescope arrays focus on even narrower ranges. For instance, the world's largest single telescope, China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, searches between 70 MHz to 3 GHz; while the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), the world's largest array of radio telescopes scattered across Australia and South Africa, scans between 50 MHz to 14 GHz.

But increasingly, many of these frequencies are being bombarded by noise from Starlink and other satellites.

Leaking radio waves

While satellite messages deliberately beamed down to operators on Earth, known as intended downlinks, are problematic, the biggest risk to these projects is what's known as unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR), or the radio waves that inadvertently leak out of the spacecraft at all times.

"This was not a problem before, when the number of satellites was low," Federico Di Vruno, a radio astronomer at SKAO and co-director of the International Astronomical Union's recently created Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference (CPS), told Live Science. "But now the situation has changed."

And UEMR is particularly prevalent among private satellite constellations, such as Starlink.

When Di Vruno and colleagues used Europe's Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) to observe a group of Generation 1 Starlink satellites, they found that the satellites were leaking UEMR at a much higher rate than other orbiting spacecraft. In their results, published in 2023, they reported that this radiation had frequencies between 110 and 188 megahertz, representing a large portion of the operating range of LOFAR (10 to 240 MHz), which scans for signals from pulsars, solar wind, cosmic rays and galaxies from the Age of Reionization.

"We were not surprised that we detected something," Winkel, who was a co-author of the study, told Live Science. "But we didn't anticipate that the level would be so high." However, what came next was even more shocking.

In September 2024, Di Vruno and Winkel were co-authors of a follow-up LOFAR study that showed that the newer Generation 2 Starlink satellites were leaking over 30 times more UEMR than their predecessors, even though the researchers had previously warned SpaceX about the findings of the initial study. This radiation was emitted in roughly the same frequency bandwidth as the Gen 1 satellites.

And SpaceX will not be the only source of UEMR. Other companies, agencies and countries are also launching competing satellite constellations. These include Amazon's Project Kuiper, Eutelsat's OneWeb network (which is being launched by SpaceX), the European Union's IRIS² network, AST SpaceMobile's giant communication satellites, and China's Qianfan, or "Thousand Sails," constellation, Di Vruno noted.

"We don't know [how much UEMR these spacecraft will emit] yet," Winkel said. "Every satellite will have UEMR, but it remains to be seen, at what level." As a result, many other frequencies could be affected, he added.

Closing cosmic "windows"

In addition to overlapping with the frequencies of distant signals, UEMR is also much more intense, or brighter, than naturally occurring radio-emitting objects.

For example, the UEMR emitted by the Gen 2 Starlink satellites is up to 10 million times brighter than the faintest radio-visible objects in the night sky, which include ancient galaxies located billions of light-years from Earth.

"This difference is similar to the faintest stars visible to the naked eye and the brightness of the full moon," Cees Bassa, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and lead author of the 2024 study, previously stated.

Trying to detect signals from beyond one of these satellites is "like taking a photograph while someone points a flashlight in your direction," Winkel said.

Some radio telescopes, such as LOFAR, will be hit harder than others, due to the frequencies they specialize in, but all radio telescopes will be affected "in different ways," Di Vruno said.

Studies that require long-term datasets will be particularly susceptible to interference because there is a greater chance that leaky satellites will pass over them during the data collection period.

"As some projects need to continuously record data over hours, days, months or years, even tiny interference signals can have a statistical impact on the results," Winkel said. "And perhaps the astronomer analyzing the data is not even aware of it."

Intended downlinks, which are sent in multiple frequencies over 1 GHz, are also extremely bright and often appear in tandem with UEMR, exaggerating these effects.

As the problem gets worse, certain frequencies will become increasingly hard to study.

"Some radio bands could be completely wiped out," Di Vruno said. "And if [these] science cases are just not possible anymore, it would mean that we are effectively closing 'windows' to observe our universe."

Approaching the inflection point

As of May, there are 11,700 active satellites orbiting Earth. More than 7,300 of those (over 60%) are Starlink satellites, which have all been launched since 2019, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking satellite launches and reentries since 1986.

But this is just the beginning. Well over 1 million satellites have been proposed by various organizations across the globe. And, while most of these may never be launched, many experts agree that we could eventually have up to 100,000 private satellites in LEO, potentially by as early as 2050. (This will likely be the maximum number that can be sustained at once without satellites crashing into one another.)

Related: What goes up must come down: How megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink network pose a grave safety threat to us on Earth

If that maximum number is reached, there is "real possibility" that we could reach an inflection point, beyond which ground-based radio astronomy would become effectively impossible, Di Vruno said.

Not all radio frequencies will be impacted. However, the obscured wavelengths will likely be lost for good, and the unaffected frequencies are unlikely to yield as many meaningful discoveries, he added.

At this point, we would no longer be able to "observe faint signals far out into the universe," which would be "a serious problem," Fionagh Thomson, a research fellow at Durham University in England who specializes in space ethics and was not involved in the LOFAR research, told Live Science.

Some radio astronomy could also still be achievable from space on a smaller scale. For example, there are plans to build a radio telescope on the moon. However, this would be very expensive and would capture limited data compared with the current suite of radio telescopes on Earth.

But even if we avoid the "worst-case scenario," we risk severely limiting our astronomical capabilities unless satellite operators and researchers can find viable solutions to the problem, Thomson said.

Plugging leaks and cleaning data

Satellite operators can limit the impacts of their spacecraft on radio astronomy in a few ways.

For example, most intended downlink frequencies are kept separate from those used by radio astronomers. Some companies, including SpaceX, are also investigating the implementation of "boresight avoidance," in which the satellites temporarily halt signal sending as they pass over radio "quiet zones," or areas where radio telescopes are actively collecting data.

However, for astronomers, it is also imperative that these companies minimize UEMR. We know that this is possible because spacecraft from NASA and other space agencies produce much less accidental radiation than private satellites do.

But companies can only mitigate a satellite's UEMR before it is launched into space. Once in LEO, "they are hard to fix," Winkel said, so it is vital that they are tested for leaks before launch.

"If satellite operators care about the UEMR, we will be OK," Di Vruno said. "It will be more difficult to conduct radio astronomy than it is now, but we understand technology evolves and we will evolve with it."

Astronomers can also limit the impacts of radio pollution by removing the interfering signals from their datasets. However, this "cleaning" may cause astronomers to miss crucial data that is masked by the interference.

"The amount of data you have to discard or the effort that you need to put in to somehow clean the data also increases the more interference there is," Winkel said. One way around this is to collect more data so that there is more left once you've cleaned it, but this also makes it much more expensive to do research, he added.

By working together, satellite operators and radio astronomers can solve the radio pollution issue without any external help, Thomson said. "But inevitably, satellite operators and the radio astronomy community have different goals, priorities and budgets, and finding workable solutions is no easy feat."

Laying down the law

Because private companies and scientists have different priorities, the most effective solution to the problem is to impose strict limits on the amount of UEMR that private spacecraft can give off, experts told Live Science.

"We would, of course, be more relaxed if proper regulation was in place," Winkel said.

At present, specific radio frequencies, like those used by LOFAR, are protected on behalf of astronomers by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — a United Nations agency responsible for regulating global communications technologies. However, these regulations apply only to Earth-based sources of radio pollution, not to private spacecraft.

Most satellite operators do try to respect the ITU's guidelines when using intended downlinks — with limited degrees of success. But UEMR frequently overlaps with the protected wavelengths and remains perfectly legal.

Some experts also argue that the ITU's radio-quiet frequency bands are no longer wide enough to protect radio astronomy: "They were set in a different era and are arguably too narrow for modern radio astronomy," Thomson said.

The IAU's CPU is hoping to have strict new regulations in place by the end of the decade and hopes that a breakthrough can be achieved at the next World Radiocommunication Conference, in 2027, Di Vruno said. Therefore, it is important for researchers to closely monitor the radiation leaking from private satellite constellations over the next few years, so that any new rules can have an effective and long-standing impact, he added.

However, even stricter guidelines might not be enough if organizations don't respect them.

"There is an assumption that imposing laws will fix complex problems," Thomson said. "But not all viable solutions involve implementing binding legislation," she warned.

In the last five years, the number of satellites orbiting Earth has more than doubled and will likely double again within a similar timespan, thanks to the efforts of private companies such as SpaceX. But while these spacecraft can provide important benefits, they are also causing multiple issues that are only just being realized by scientists.

So, how many satellites can we expect to see in our skies in the coming decades? And — more importantly — how many is too many?

As of May 2025, there are around 11,700 active satellites in orbit around Earth, ranging from military spy satellites and scientific probes to rapidly growing private satellite networks. But the rate at which spacecraft are being launched into space is increasing year-on-year.

The biggest contributor to this trend is SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which currently has around 7,500 active satellites in orbit — more than 60% of the total number of operational orbiting spacecraft, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking satellites since 1989, told Live Science. All of these have been launched since May 2019.

However, other organizations are also beginning to develop their own "megaconstellations," such as Amazon's Project Kuiper and China's "Thousand Sails" constellation. It is also getting easier to put new satellites into space thanks to the reusability of rockets, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which is being used to launch multiple competing satellite networks. Other companies are also exploring new ways of launching larger payloads, including shooting hundreds of satellites into space at once using a giant spinning cannon.

Related: There was nearly 1 rocket launch attempt every 34 hours in 2024 — this year will be even busier

All of this activity has left researchers wondering how many satellites could eventually end up orbiting our planet and what problems they might cause along the way.

"Megaconstellations are planning to cover most of the Earth's surface," Fionagh Thomson, a senior research fellow at the University of Durham in the U.K. who specializes in space ethics, told Live Science. But there is still "a large amount of uncertainty" over how large they might get and how damaging they could become, she added.

Best guess

It is difficult to estimate how many satellites will be launched in the future because satellite companies often change their plans, Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia in Canada who has extensively studied the potential effects of megaconstellations, told Live Science.

"Companies update their plans as they develop their systems, and many proposed systems will never be launched. But many will," Boley said.

Proposals for more than 1 million private satellites belonging to around 300 different megaconstellations have been submitted to the International Telecommunications Union, which regulates communications satellites, according to a 2023 study co-authored by Boley. However, some of these, including a proposed 337,000-satellite megaconstellation from Rwanda, are unlikely to come to fruition, the researchers noted.

The proposed number seems massive, but most private satellites have short lifespans. For example, the average Starlink satellite spends around five years operational, after which it falls back to Earth and burns up upon reentry. So even if all 1 million proposed satellites are launched, they will not all be orbiting Earth at once.

While it is tricky to predict how many satellites will be launched and when, researchers have estimated a maximum number of spacecraft that can coexist within low-Earth orbit (LEO) — the region of space up to 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) above Earth's surface, where a vast majority of private satellites operate. Above this upper limit, or carrying capacity, satellites would likely start constantly crashing into one another.

McDowell and Boley, as well as other astronomers — including Federico Di Vruno at the transnational Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Observatory and Benjamin Winkel at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany — all believe that the carrying capacity for LEO is around 100,000 active satellites. Above this number, new satellites will likely only be launched to replace those that come to the end of their operational lives.

It is unclear exactly when this carrying capacity will be reached. However, based on the current rate of increasing launches, several experts told Live Science that it could happen before 2050.

Mega-problems

Given the impending rise in satellite numbers, researchers are hard at work trying to figure out what problems they may cause.

A major issue associated with megaconstellations is space junk, including rocket boosters and defunct satellites, that will litter LEO before eventually falling back to Earth. If space junk collides , it could create thousands of smaller pieces of debris that increase the risk of further collisions. If left unchecked, this domino effect could render LEO effectively unusable. Researchers call this problem the "Kessler syndrome" and are already warning that it should be tackled now, before it is too late.

Megaconstellations also threaten to severely limit ground-based astronomy in two main ways: First, light reflecting off satellites can interfere with optical astronomy by photobombing telescopes as they pass overhead; Second, electromagnetic radiation that unintentionally leaks from communications satellites can interfere with radio astronomy by obscuring signals from distant objects, such as faraway galaxies.

If the carrying capacity is reached, some experts fear that the level of radio interference could render some types of radio astronomy completely impossible.

Related: Controversial paper claims satellite 'megaconstellations' like SpaceX's could weaken Earth's magnetic field and cause 'atmospheric stripping.' Should we be worried?

Satellites can also impact the environment via greenhouse gases that are emitted during rocket launches, as well as through metal pollution that is accumulating in the upper atmosphere as defunct satellites and other space junk burn up upon reentry.

Given all these potential impacts, most researchers are calling for companies to reduce the rate at which they launch satellites.

"I don't think a full stop on satellite launches would work," Boley said. "However, slowing things down and delaying the placement of 100,000 satellites until we have better international rules would be prudent."

Do we need 100,000 satellites?

While private satellites help monitor Earth and connect rural and disadvantaged communities to high-speed internet, many experts argue that these benefits do not outweigh the potential risks.

Others are more skeptical and question whether the payloads being put into orbit will really do any good or if they are just a way for companies to make more money. "Do we really need another CubeSat in space that allows us to take selfies?" Thomson asked. "And in reality, does connecting remote communities [to the internet] help solve systemic issues of inequality, poverty and injustice?"

Many benefits could also be achieved with fewer satellites. The proposed numbers are so high, mainly because there are so many different companies competing to provide the same services.

"It would be better to cooperate more, in order to need fewer satellites," Winkel told Live Science. "But I find that highly unlikely given the current situation in the world."

NASA has added SpaceX's giant Starship rocket to a major commercial contract, putting the world's most powerful launch vehicle in contention for future missions — even though the shiny spacecraft keeps exploding in mid-air, and has yet to deliver a single payload into space.

On March 28, the American space agency announced that Starship was being added to the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract, which lists all the privately built spacecraft that can be considered for future missions. Starship is the 10th rocket to be added to the contract, which also includes SpaceX's Super Heavy and Falcon 9. Other listed rockets include United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur and Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL, which has been used by NASA since the early 1990s.

The contract does not guarantee Starship's use in any NASA missions. However, there is also no upper limit on how many times each rocket in the contract can be selected for missions between now and the end of the contract's current lifespan in December 2032.

The launch vehicles listed in the NLS II contract are separated into three groups based on how they have performed in the past: Category 1 (high risk), Category 2 (medium risk) and Category 3 (low risk), with Category 3 rockets the most likely to be used in missions.

It is unclear which category Starship will be put in. However, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which was the most recent rocket to be added to the NLS II, was initially listed in Category 1, despite successfully making it to orbit on the first attempt in January. This suggests that Starship will likely be put in the same bracket, according to Space News.

Related: SpaceX rockets keep tearing blood-red 'atmospheric holes' in the sky, and scientists are concerned

SpaceX aims to have Starship operational in time for the third Artemis mission, currently slated for mid-2027, which will put humans back on the moon for the first time since 1972. However, the initial test flights may raise questions about that timeline.

The company's CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed a strong desire to use Starship to send humans to Mars.

Musk's plans to expand Starbase — a spaceport in Texas dedicated to future Starship production and launches — in addition to his close ties to the Trump administration and incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, may have influenced the decision to include Starship in NLS II despite its recent issues, Futurism reported.

Explosive tests

Starship is the world's tallest rocket, standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall when perched upright on a launchpad. It is made up of two stages, both of which are designed to be reusable, in a similar way to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets. To date, Starship has been launched eight times, with varying degrees of success.

The first test launch was carried out in April 2023. The rocket exploded around four minutes after liftoff, when engine failures caused it to go into an uncontrollable spin. Launch controllers then intentionally detonated the craft to prevent it from crashing back to the surface. However, the self-destruction took longer than expected and, as a result, large amounts of debris rained down on the area surrounding the launchpad, triggering a federal investigation and angering environmental groups.

During the second test, in November 2023, two different parts of the rocket exploded. First when the rocket's booster unexpectedly detonated shortly after separation, and again when the upper stage underwent a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." The latter punched a temporary hole in the upper atmosphere, studies later revealed.

Nothing exploded during the third test launch. However, SpaceX lost control of the rocket shortly after it entered suborbital flight, and it crashed back to Earth at an unknown location in the Indian Ocean. The next three test flights were less eventful, although none of the rockets' upper stages reached low-Earth orbit before crashing back into the same ocean.

However, this year, Starship experienced back-to-back explosions during the seventh test flight on Jan. 16 and the eighth test flight on March 6. The former was arguably the most impressive detonation yet, creating a spectacular fireball above the Caribbean and littering several islands with shrapnel, while also releasing large amounts of atmospheric pollution.

Despite the setbacks, the tests have yielded some positive results. For example, during the fourth, fifth and sixth test flights, SpaceX was able to land the rocket's first stage by catching it with robotic arms, like a pair of giant chopsticks. Every failed test also produces data that is useful to the scientists building the next iteration of the rocket.

The next test flight is scheduled for later this month, although the exact date is yet to be announced.

A new NASA space telescope has turned on its detectors for the first time, capturing its first light in images that contain tens of thousands of galaxies and stars.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) arrived in orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 11.

The six released images, collected by the space telescope on March 27, were each snapped by three different detectors. The top three images span the telescope's complete field of view, and are captured again in the bottom three which are colored differently to represent varying ranges of infrared wavelengths.

Within each image's full field of view — an area roughly 20 times wider than the full moon — roughly 100,000 light sources from stars, galaxies, and nebulas can be glimpsed.

"Our spacecraft has opened its eyes on the universe," Olivier Doré, a SPHEREx project scientist at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It's performing just as it was designed to."

Related: Euclid space telescope: ESA's groundbreaking mission to study dark matter and dark energy

Costing a total of $488 million to build and launch, the new telescope has been in development for roughly a decade, and is set to map the universe by observing both optical and infrared light. It will orbit Earth 14.5 times a day, completing 11,000 orbits during its lifetime to filter infrared light from distant gas and dust clouds using a technique called spectroscopy.

Once it is fully online in April, SPHEREX will scan the entire night sky a total of four times using 102 separate infrared color sensors, enabling it to collect data from more than 450 million galaxies during its planned two-year operation. This amounts to roughly 600 exposures a day, according to NASA.

This dataset will give scientists key insights into some of the biggest questions in cosmology, enabling astronomers to study galaxies at various stages in their evolution; trace the ice floating in empty space to see how life may have begun; and even understand the period of rapid inflation the universe underwent immediately after the Big Bang.

SPHEREx's wide panorama view makes it the perfect complement for the James Webb Space Telescope, flagging regions of interest for the latter to study with greater depth and resolution.

After lofting it to space, NASA scientists and engineers have performed a nail-biting series of checks on the new telescope. This includes ensuring that its sensitive infrared equipment is cooling down to its final temperature of around minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius) and that the telescope is set to the right focus — something that cannot be adjusted in space.

Based on these stunning preliminary images, it appears that everything has worked out.

"This is the high point of spacecraft checkout; it's the thing we wait for," Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx deputy project manager at JPL, said in the statement. "There's still work to do, but this is the big payoff. And wow! Just wow!"

A Bitcoin billionaire and a trio of other first-time astronauts are currently orbiting Earth's poles — a first for human spaceflight — as they embark on a roughly 4-day mission to "advance space exploration" by conducting several unorthodox experiments. However, several experts have questioned how much they can learn during such a short mission, and whether science is the true motivation of the project at all.

On Monday (March 31), the Maltese cryptocurrency mogul Chun Wang and the other members of the "Fram2" mission entered low-Earth orbit aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon "Resilience" capsule, which was propelled into space by a Falcon 9 rocket that launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at around 9:46 p.m. EDT, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. (The name Fram2 was chosen to pay homage to the Fram expedition, which explored the Arctic between 1893 and 1896.)

Wang, who is leading and funding the mission, was accompanied by Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics engineer Rabea Rogge and Australian polar explorer Eric Phillips — all of whom received around 8 months of astronaut training before launch, according to Spaceflight Now. The group is expected to return to Earth at some point within three to five days of launch, when they will splash down off the coast of California.

The two main goals of the Fram2 mission are to achieve the first human spaceflight above Earth's poles and to carry out research that may help future space travel, according to a statement released March 24. There are 22 planned experiments, which range from classic space tests that measure physiological changes experienced by the astronauts to first-of-their-kind experiments, such as growing mushrooms and taking X-rays of one another — all of which will be carried out inside a 13-foot-wide (4 meters) living space.

"With the same pioneering spirit as early polar explorers, we aim to bring back new data and knowledge to advance the long-term goals of space exploration," Wang said in the statement. "The science and research projects onboard will inform how we prepare for future missions, ultimately helping make space more accessible to us all."

Related: Futuristic, 'alien-like' nuclear fusion rockets developed in total secret could revolutionize space travel — if they actually work

Despite the mission's rapid-fire agenda of world-first experiments, several experts have raised doubts about how much useful science the civilian crew will be able to produce.

Fram2 is "a notch above [a] gimmick, but not exactly a groundbreaking milestone," Christopher Combs, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told CNN. Because this is a private mission, "you need something to say [it's] different and exciting," which is likely why they are attempting to do so many things that have never been done before, he added.

Meanwhile, John Prussing, an aerospace engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, thinks so little of the mission that he initially thought it was an April Fools' joke, as the initial launch window stretched into April 1, CNN reported.

Others have questioned if the Fram2 crew is well-suited to the task at hand and whether a billionaire paying for their own space mission sends the right message in terms of making space travel more accessible.

After reading all the "marketing hype" around the mission, "I didn't feel I really had a handle on the intentions of those on board or how their skills or background relate to the experiments [they will be conducting]," Fionagh Thomson, a researcher at Durham University in England that specializes in space ethics, told Live Science.

"The claim that it will open up space for all is arguably an exaggeration," Thomson added. As was the case with the early polar explorers that the mission is named after, this type of opportunity is only available to "privileged" people and "the elite," she said.

Quick-fire science

One of the biggest criticisms of Fram2 is that the mission is trying to do too many experiments at once — and will not last long enough to collect any meaningful data on any of them.

"Extrapolating any results from short time-span studies is ill-advised," Thomson said. Some of the data could be incorporated into existing research, she added, "assuming they share their results." However, "we will have to wait and see" if this is the case.

A standout example is the "MushVroom" experiment, which will be the first to grow mushrooms in space. However, this will be done using oyster mushrooms, which can take several weeks to fully grow, meaning that the team is unlikely to be able to study the entire growing process.

Another example is the decision to X-ray the astronauts in space for the first time. While this type of scanning can reveal changes in human physiology over time, the astronauts are unlikely to experience any detectable changes after just four days in orbit, which raises the question of why they are doing it at all.

The time limitation will be a similar problem for other tests that will assess physiological changes to things like blood flow, brain anatomy and bone density. These metrics have also already been extensively studied in astronauts on long-duration space missions, such as Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams who recently returned to Earth after spending 286 days on board the ISS.

The Fram2 mission is attempting to address some health questions that have not been extensively studied in space so far, such as the quality of sleep, the effects of diabetes (even though none of the astronauts are known diabetics) and changes to the female reproductive hormones — which will be monitored by a phone app linked to sensor-rigged diapers worn by the female astronauts. However, these tests will also suffer from the same limited time window as the others.

If the true intention behind these experiments was to improve our understanding of space travel for future generations, then the funding for this mission may have been better spent on other long-term research projects, Thomson argued.

A "space adventure"

The other key goal of Fram2 is to fly humans over Earth's poles for the first time. SpaceX has already shared images taken by the mission crew that show this has been achieved. However, this endeavour has also been questioned by experts.

"There's nothing unique to a polar orbit, and the science advantages are kind of overblown," Prussing told CNN. The only reason this has not been done before is that it is very fuel-intensive to put a spacecraft into a polar orbit compared to circling the equator, he added.

While no astronauts have ever passed over the Arctic or Antarctica before now, these areas have been extensively mapped by satellites with instruments much more advanced than those available to the Fram2 crew, meaning that the team is unlikely to see anything we haven't seen before.

For Thomson, the decision to execute this particular orbit, coupled with the decision to name the mission after polar explorers, hints that the mission is geared to be more of a "space adventure" than a research project.

Thomson says she has no problem with billionaires funding space exploration, but is less impressed with "vanity projects," and adds that it is important that we can identify them when they happen. "We need transparency and honesty," she said. "If it's about being 'heroic in space' then [just] say so."

Human spaceflight quiz: How well do you know our journey into space?

A pair of NASA astronauts stuck on board the International Space Station (ISS) for more than nine months have finally returned to Earth.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams splashed down near the coast of Florida aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule at 5:57 p.m. ET on Tuesday (March 18). NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov were also part of the four-person crew returning to Earth Tuesday.

The astronauts were met with cheers from mission control as their capsule sailed safely into the ocean. Williams and Wilmore appeared to be in good health and high spirits as their mission, planned to last just eight days but extended to nearly 300, finally ended.

"Nick, Alex, Butch, Suni — on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home," mission controllers declared on a NASA live stream.

"What a ride," commander Nick Hague said after landing. "I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear."

A long journey

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS as part of Boeing's first Starliner Crew Flight Test. Boeing's spacecraft blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5, 2024.

But not long after the spacecraft entered orbit, a number of issues cropped up — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system thrusters — that led to the mission's abandonment.

The return flight, part of NASA's scheduled rotation between the ISS' Crew-9 and Crew-10 missions, also included Hague and Gorbunov — half of the usual crew contingent, to allow space for Wilmore and Williams.

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

The SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the crew undocked from the ISS' Harmony module at 1:05 a.m. EDT before embarking on its 17-hour voyage home.

"We'll miss you, but have a great journey home," NASA astronaut Anne McClain, said aboard the space station as the capsule carrying Williams, Wilmore and the other two astronauts pulled away 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Pacific Ocean.

Before the Crew-10 rotation, Wilmore and Williams spent their time aboard the ISS performing a number of maintenance tasks and participating in scientific projects.

Their stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board at the time, to take cover inside their respective space capsules.

The Starliner astronauts' 286consecutive days in space is nowhere near the current record of 437 days, set by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995. But it's still a long — and completely unexpected — extension of the astronauts' shift aboard the ISS.

The future of Boeing's Starliner capsule following the scrubbed mission remains unclear. Following its return, NASA engineers have been testing the craft's thruster housings in a vacuum chamber at White Sands, New Mexico, for potential faults. Despite being unlikely to fly again in 2025, Boeing has insisted it is still confident in its craft and will obtain a new flight readiness certification for a new mission.

Editor's note: This article was updated on March 21 to amend Wilmore and Williams' stay in space from 300 days to 286 days.

A pair of NASA astronauts stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for more than nine months will return to Earth on Tuesday (March 18) at the earliest, NASA has said.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will depart the space station aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Tuesday morning and splash down near Florida by the evening, if the weather permits.

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS in June as part of Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight. But a number of issues with Boeing's spacecraft — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters — led to the mission being abandoned and the duo's time in space extended from eight days to nearly 300.

Their return, part of NASA's scheduled rotation between the ISS's Crew-9 and Crew-10 missions, was originally scheduled for Wednesday (March 19), but has been bumped forward to 5:57 pm ET on Tuesday (March 18) due to favorable weather conditions, according to NASA.

"The updated return target continues to allow the space station crew members time to complete handover duties while providing operational flexibility ahead of less favorable weather conditions expected for later in the week," NASA wrote in an announcement on Sunday (March 16).

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

If everything goes according to plan, Wilmore and Williams will ride home on the Crew-9 Dragon capsule, called "Freedom", alongside fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — half of the usual Crew-9 crew to allow space for the Starliner duo.

The Starliner astronauts' 300 consecutive days in space is nowhere near the current record of 437 days set by Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995, but it's still a long, and completely unexpected extension of the astronauts' shift aboard the ISS.

And it's also one that can have deleterious effects on the human body, causing the heart, bones and muscles to shrink over time under low gravity. These are well known side effects of long-term spaceflight that all astronauts must face, and not related to the extension of Wilmore and Williams' mission. To mitigate them, the astronauts have been doing two hours of resistance and endurance training every day.

"Mission managers will continue monitoring weather conditions in the area, as Dragon's undocking depends on various factors, including spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors," NASA wrote in its update. "NASA and SpaceX will confirm the specific splashdown location closer to the Crew-9 return."

For those who want to watch Wilmore and Williams on their return, NASA will stream the event beginning on Monday (March 17) at 10:45 p.m. ET as the hatches close between Freedom and the ISS. The stream will then resume two hours later for undocking, which is expected at 1:05 a.m. ET. Live coverage will resume in the evening when the astronauts begin to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, currently scheduled for 5:11 p.m. ET.

NASA has launched a new infrared space telescope into orbit that is set to rival the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in its unprecedented view of our universe.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 11. at 11:10 p.m. EST.

Once it is fully online, the space telescope will scan the entire night sky a total of four times using 102 separate infrared color sensors, enabling it to collect data from more than 450 million galaxies during its planned two-year operation. This dataset will give scientists key insights into some of the biggest questions in cosmology: such as the ways galaxies take shape and evolve over time, the origins of water, and how our universe came to be.

This makes SPHEREx the perfect complement for the JWST, flagging regions of interest for the latter to study with greater depth and resolution.

"Taking a snapshot with JWST is like taking a picture of a person," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, told reporters during a news conference on Jan. 31. "What SPHEREx and other survey missions can do is almost like going into panorama mode, when you want to catch a big group of people and the things standing behind or around them."

Related: Euclid space telescope: ESA's groundbreaking mission to study dark matter and dark energy

SPHEREx, which cost a total of $488 million and has been in development for roughly a decade, is set to map the universe by observing both optical and infrared light. It will orbit the Earth 14.5 times a day, completing 11,000 orbits during its lifetime to filter infrared light from distant gas and dust clouds using a technique called spectroscopy.

By peering through these clouds, the scientists operating the cone-shaped telescope hope to piece together an unprecedented picture of our cosmos using some of its most ancient light.

This will enable astronomers to study galaxies at various stages in their evolution; trace the ice floating in empty space to see how life may have begun; and even understand the period of rapid inflation the universe underwent immediately after the Big Bang.

"Literally a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the observable universe went through a remarkable expansion," Jamie Bock, principal investigator of SPHEREx at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said during the news conference. "Expanding a trillion trillion fold, and that expansion expanded tiny fluctuations smaller than an atom, to enormous cosmological scales that we see today... We still don't know what drove inflation or why it happened."

SPHEREx isn't the only payload aboard the rocket. The rocket is also carrying thePolarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) instrument, which will study how the sun's corona — its outermost layer of plasma — streams across our solar system in the form of solar wind.

"We expect we'll revolutionize how space weather is forecasted," Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute and the PUNCH mission's principal investigator, said during a Feb. 13 news conference. "We're the first mission able to track space-weather events in three dimensions."

SpaceX's Starship has dramatically exploded mid-flight, leaving smears of confetti-like wreckage across the sky as its remains tumbled back to Earth. The fireball triggered diversions and delays to air traffic in Florida and the Caribbean amid warnings of falling debris.

The uncrewed rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas at 6:30 p.m. EST on March 6.

But the vessel spun out of control about nine minutes after launch, resulting in "a rapid unscheduled disassembly", SpaceX representatives said in a post on the social platform X.

Starship struggles

This is the eighth Starship launch since April 2023 and the second consecutive failure this year for SpaceX's rocket. Less than two months ago, the seventh Starship flight ended in an explosion that hurled fiery debris across skies above the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Just like after the previous failed launch, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded further flights of the rocket pending a mishap investigation, which will be conducted by SpaceX.

"We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand [the] root cause," company representatives wrote on X. "As always, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

The mission was a test flight, with the aim of testing the rocket's capabilities by deploying four mock Starlink satellites and restarting its engines in space before plopping down in the Indian Ocean. The exact cause of the explosion is currently unclear, although SpaceX representatives attributed it to "an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship" that caused the loss of several Raptor engines.

The explosion caused delays at Fort Lauderdale, Miami International and Philadelphia International airports between an average of 30 to 45 minutes, while planes flying over the Caribbean altered their flight paths to avoid the wreckage, imagery from Flightradar24 shows.

Flying wreckage from the previous failed launch, which is still being recovered, reportedly caused minor damage to a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

SpaceX said at the time that there were no toxic materials among the debris, although anyone who finds a piece of debris is advised not to handle it directly and to instead contact local authorities or the SpaceX Debris Hotline.

Following the previous explosion, SpaceX announced it had made upgrades to the Starship spacecraft that flew yesterday, including the installation of additional vents and a purge system that used nitrogen to flush fuel leaks and make the aft less flammable. It's clear that these didn’t get rid of the problem, but company representatives are optimistic that they can find and fix the faults.

"Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we've got some practice now," Dan Huot, a communications manager at SpaceX, said on a live stream of the launch.

2024 set spaceflight records for the fourth consecutive year with 259 launches worldwide and one launch attempt roughly every 34 hours, according to a recent analysis of the global space economy.

The report, published by The Space Report, the research arm of the Colorado-based non-profit organization Space Foundation, also predicts that the pace of launches will keep rising this year. This growth is partly driven by a renewed focus on independent launch capabilities in Europe, where launch vehicles in France, Germany and the U.K. are awaiting their debut flights.

"There is reason to have confidence in upward trajectory of the space economy," Space Foundation CEO Heather Pringle said in a statement. "One of the best ways to sustain that growth is continuing to build capacity for others to join us."

According to the report, SpaceX, a key provider of launch services to NASA and the Pentagon, recorded 132 Falcon 9 flights last year — representing a little more than half of the global launch traffic. Nearly 90 of those launches were meant to help expand the company's Starlink communications network, which serves over 4 million customers around the world and is projected to reach $11.8 billion in revenue this year.

Additionally, military spacecraft deployment increased by 86%. That major uptick is primarily due to the over 100 satellites SpaceX launched for the Starshield constellation to support national security efforts, according to proprietary research conducted by The Space Report and publicly available orbital information maintained by the U.S. Space Force.

The U.S. "dominated the launch cycle in 2024, outpacing China by more than 2-to-1," the report states. Meanwhile, Russia significantly increased the number of satellites it deployed into Earth orbit, rising from 21 in 2023 to 98 in 2024, with half of these spacecraft joining a network built to monitor ships along the strategically important Northern Sea Route as well as other oceans.

Still, space is poised to get even busier this year. In the U.S. alone, Blue Origin's long-awaited New Glenn rocket made its debut flight last month, reaching orbit and giving the company a chance to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9. Among the missions New Glenn will eventually support is Amazon's Project Kuiper, which aims to rival SpaceX's Starlink network in providing global broadband internet services.

This year will also mark the inaugural flights of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane to the International Space Station atop a Vulcan rocket — scheduled for no earlier than May — and Rocket Lab's partially reusable Neutron rocket in mid-2025.

"These activities underscore the increasing prominence of commercial ventures in space," Matt Ondler, the chief technology officer at Axiom Space, told The Space Report.

In preparation for a busy year ahead, the Federal Communications Commission formally allocated additional spectrum for commercial space launches and introduced a more streamlined process to accelerate regulatory procedures. This change is designed to "enable companies to conduct launch activities without needing to request temporary authority from the FCC for each space launch," according to a statement by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In Europe, French company Latitude is gearing up for the debut flight of its small launch vehicle named Zephyr this year. Similarly, Germany's Rocket Factory Augsburg is aiming for the inaugural launch of its RFA One rocket; the company is rebuilding the first stage after the original was destroyed during a static fire test.

Meanwhile the U.K.-based spaceflight company Orbex expects to launch its first two-stage rocket named Prime toward the end of this year, and Scotland-based Skyrora is preparing to launch its Skylark L suborbital flight following a year of regulatory roadblocks.

In Australia, launch vehicle startup Gilmour Space is preparing for the maiden Eris rocket launch — the first Australian-made rocket to lift off from Australian soil.

"The launchers may be small, but they are significant for nations striving to develop sovereign launch capability," the new report notes, with the above nations "looking to smaller launch vehicles to give them assured access to space."

Originally posted on Space.com.

The rapid unscheduled disassembly (aka explosion) of SpaceX's Starship megarocket that rained scorching fragments of metal across the Caribbean in mid-January may have released significant amounts of harmful air-pollution into the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere.

The rocket's upper stage blew up at an altitude of around 90 miles (146 kilometers) according to astronomer and space debris expert Jonathan McDowell, and weighed some 85 tons without propellant. Its plunge back to Earth through the atmosphere may have generated 45.5 metric tons of metal oxides and 40 metric tons of nitrogen oxides, according to University College London atmospheric chemistry researcher Connor Barker. Nitrogen oxides in particular are known for their potential to damage Earth's protective ozone layer.

Barker, who had recently published an inventory of rocket emissions and pollutants from satellite re-entries in the journal Nature, posted the estimates on his LinkedIn profile shortly after the mishap. He, however, stressed in an email to Space.com that the numbers are a rough, preliminary estimate rather than an accurate calculation of the accident's environmental impact.

In Barker's LinkedIn post, however, the scientist said that the amount of metallic air pollution potentially produced in the accident equals that generated by one third of meteorite material that burns up in Earth's atmosphere every year.

Exactly how much pollution the Starship mishap produced in the higher atmosphere is hard to tell. Scientists, for example, are also not sure how much of the megarocket's mass burned up and how much of it fell to Earth.

Related: ISS dodges its 39th piece of potentially hazardous space junk. Experts say it won't be the last.

McDowell told Space.com that "many tons" likely splashed down into the ocean.

Fortunately, the Starship upper stage is made of stainless steel and not aluminum like satellites and upper stages of many other rockets including SpaceX's Falcon 9. The incineration of aluminum is what worries many scientists. When aluminum burns at high temperatures during a satellite re-entry, it produces aluminum oxides, or alumina, a white powdery substance known for its potential to damage ozone and change the reflectiveness of Earth's atmosphere.

In recent years, the number of satellites orbiting Earth and that of subsequent atmospheric re-entries has been rising fast. With that the amount of alumina released into the mesosphere and upper stratosphere — the otherwise pristine middle layers of the atmosphere — has been skyrocketing. Air pollution in the mesosphere and upper stratosphere concerns scientists as the high altitudes at which it arises mean the pollutants remain in the air for a very long time.

Scientists think that the quantity of alumina from incinerated satellites is already approaching the same levels that result from the atmospheric demise of natural space rocks such as asteroids or meteoroids, which contain only trace amounts of aluminum. The amount of nitrogen oxides produced during re-entries is also nearing that generated by natural space rocks.

Nitrogen oxides arise as space rocks or space debris fragments, travelling at hyper-sonic speeds, compress the surrounding air as they fall to Earth. The atoms of nitrogen heat up and react with oxygen, creating the harmful oxides.

With the expected increase in rocket launches and the growth of satellite fleets and the subsequent frequency of re-entries, concentrations of these damaging gases and particles could quickly rise. The pollutants could thwart the recovery of the planet's ozone layer, worsening the damage caused by ozone-depleting substances used in aerosol sprays and refrigerators in the past. The air pollution from incinerated satellites could also change how much heat the Earth's atmosphere retains, leading to possibly serious consequences on the planet's climate.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Astronomers have been left red-faced after announcing the discovery of a new near-Earth asteroid — only to realize that the supposed space rock was the remains of Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit-clad driver "Starman."

The misidentified object, which was launched into space on board a SpaceX rocket in 2018, highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors, researchers say.

On Jan. 2, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) added a new object, dubbed 2018 CN41, to its list of near-Earth asteroids. The supposed space rock was identified by an unnamed amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of publicly available data, Astronomy.com reported. However, just 17 hours later, the MPC released an editorial notice retracting the discovery after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake.

The Tesla Roadster, which was previously used by Elon Musk, was launched into space on Feb. 6, 2018, as the test payload for the maiden launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The publicity stunt garnered widespread attention at the time, partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car's driving seat that was wearing a likely defective spacesuit and "listening" to David Bowie's album "Space Oddity" on loop.

The car and its driver headed toward Mars after escaping Earth's gravity and were supposed to enter a stable orbit around the Red Planet, which raised alarms at the time that it could become a potential Martian "biothreat" if it accidentally crash-landed there. However, the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sun. Now, it circles the sun and occasionally zooms past Mars.

Related: 15 of the weirdest things we have launched into space

The Tesla has now completed roughly 4.5 trips around the sun, traveling at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h), according to whereisroadster.com. This means that the car has now exceeded its initial 36,000-mile warranty around 100,00 times.

However, the car is probably unrecognizable now after being exposed to years of intense radiation from the sun and bombarded by tiny fragments of space rocks, which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman.

Mistaken identity

This is not the first time that human-made objects have been mistaken for near-Earth asteroids. The MPC has temporarily listed a number of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two decades — including the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, NASA's Lucy probe, the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission and others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris, according to Astronomy.com.

This type of confusion will also likely increase as more human-made objects are launched into space.

These misidentifications could lead to more false alarms for near-Earth asteroids, which could in turn result in costly errors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy.com. "Worst case [scenario], you spend a billion [dollars] launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it's not an asteroid when you get there," he said.

While space agencies and private companies are required to accurately track their products in orbit around Earth, there is currently no legislation that forces them to do the same for spacecraft and debris that escape Earth's gravity, like the Tesla Roadster.

However, "such transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, [and] avoiding interference with observations of natural objects," members of the American Astronomical Society warned in a 2024 statement.

Stunning footage has captured the moment Thursday's failed SpaceX rocket launch lit up the skies above the Turks and Caicos islands. The impressive display, which saw dozens of burning chunks of the giant spacecraft smear a colorful streak of smoke over the Atlantic, was caught on camera by a family vacationing on Grand Turk island, Associated Press reports.

SpaceX launched Starship's seventh test flight from Starbase in Texas at 4:37 p.m. CT on Jan. 16. However, after the rocket booster successfully separated, the company lost touch with the spacecraft and a fire developed in the rocket's back section, causing it to explode above the Atlantic Ocean around 8 minutes after launch.

"Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn," SpaceX said in a post on the social platform X at 5:24 p.m. CT Jan. 16. "With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will help us improve Starship's reliability."

Related: China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than 'all the oil on Earth'

Elon Musk, the company's primary owner, responded to the footage on X, saying "success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!"

While the spacecraft was destroyed, the Super Heavy rocket booster successfully returned to the launch tower, where it was caught by the tower's giant robotic arms, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

No astronauts were on board the spacecraft.

This is not the first time that Starship has exploded during a test flight. During the rocket's second-ever launch in November 2023, the spacecraft exploded around 4 minutes after launch and punched a temporary hole in the upper atmosphere, known as an "ionospheric hole." However, it is currently too soon to tell if the latest eruption created a similar disturbance.

The exact reason for the sudden disassembly of the spacecraft is still unclear, although Musk said there appeared to have been an oxygen or fuel leak into the cavity above the ship engine's firewall.

The debris is thought to have landed around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, although at time of writing the exact location is unclear. If someone finds a piece of debris from the spacecraft, the company urges them not to attempt to handle or retrieve it. "Instead, please contact your local authorities or the SpaceX Debris Hotline," SpaceX said.

This year will be an exciting time for space missions.

2025 kicks off with two moon landing attempts in January, followed by SpaceX's daring demonstration to transfer propellants between two Starship vehicles in low Earth orbit — a critical step in testing the company's ability to use the spacecraft to reach the moon and Mars. Later in 2025, Europe will launch an uncrewed robotic laboratory, and NASA's Juno spacecraft may reach the end of its extended mission and burn up in Jupiter's dense atmosphere.

Here are the coolest space missions to look forward to in 2025.

Blue Ghost 1 and Intuitive Machines' moon landings

In mid-January, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace will launch the "Ghost Riders in the Sky" mission, which aims to ferry a moon lander with 10 NASA payloads. The moon lander will head to Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature on the near side of the moon that was formed by volcanic eruptions over 3 billion years ago.

The lander, called Blue Ghost 1, is expected to operate during the daylight hours of one lunar day, or roughly 14 Earth days, during which it will gather data about the moon's regolith, or rocky surface, and how that rock interacts with the solar wind (the stream of charged particles that flows out of the sun's outer atmosphere) and Earth's magnetic field.

Toward the end of its mission, Blue Ghost 1 will take images of the moon's sunset and collect data about what changes occur on the lunar surface at dusk.

Meanwhile, Texas-based Intuitive Machines hopes to land its IM-2 spacecraft at the moon's south pole in February. The spacecraft aims to measure the regolith's volatiles, or delicate chemical compounds, using a drill and mass spectrometer. The spacecraft will also carry a small satellite, Lunar Trailblazer, which is designed to map water deposits on the moon to help NASA identify future landing sites for its Artemis missions IM-2 will fly a more direct route than Blue Ghost 1 and aims to land on the moon just a week after launch.

SpaceX's attempt at daring in-orbit propellant transfer

SpaceX is gearing up for a groundbreaking test to transfer propellant from one Starship to another while docked in low Earth orbit. The demonstration, scheduled for March 2025, will involve launching two windowless Starship vehicles about three to four weeks apart, with the second serving as a refueling tanker for the first.

This test is a crucial step in demonstrating that the spacecraft can be used to reach the moon and, eventually, Mars. Current NASA plans to reach the moon and Mars rely on the Human Landing System variant of Starship. In theory, astronauts who board the Human Landing System as a part of the Artemis 3 mission will reach the moon no sooner than mid-2027.

First NASA-ISRO Earth science mission

Also in March 2025, NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are teaming up to launch the first of their spacecraft on the Earth-observing NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, which will scan much of Earth's land and ice nearly every week. Using a pair of radar instruments that can see through clouds in both day and night, the spacecraft will measure the motion of Earth's surface down to fractions of an inch. Such precise measurements will help scientists track land movements that may be precursors to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, as well as monitor changes in forests and agricultural lands.

The U.S. and India are also partnering on a high-profile effort to send the first Indian astronaut — Indian Air Force test pilot Shubhanshu Shukla — to the International Space Station no sooner than April 2025 on the private Axiom Mission 4.

Liftoff of delayed "Blue" and "Gold" Mars satellites

NASA's two Mars-bound satellites, which were designed at the University of California, Berkeley, will study how and when the Red Planet lost its atmosphere. They are now slated to launch no earlier than spring 2025, following a delay of the mission's original October 2024 launch.

The satellites — named "Blue" and "Gold" as a nod to UC Berkeley's school colors — will orbit Mars at different altitudes to gather simultaneous data on the planet's plasma and magnetic fields. With this information, scientists hope to learn how atoms are stripped from the Red Planet's atmosphere.

The mission, called Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE), was paused in September due to concerns that the delivery vehicle, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, wouldn't be ready. The alignment of Earth and Mars creates an ideal launch window every 26 months, so even small schedule changes can cause months-long delays. The spring 2025 launch will include a necessary gravity assist past Venus, which will lengthen the flight time by 1.5 years.

China's mission to snag samples from a near-Earth asteroid

China is preparing for an ambitious mission to scoop up pieces of a near-Earth asteroid, return them to Earth, and then explore a comet in deep space. The Tianwen-2 spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in May 2025, will rendezvous with 469219 Kamo'oalewa, a quasi-moon of our planet that was discovered in 2016. Ground-based observations suggest that, unlike most near-Earth asteroids, 469219 Kamo'oalewa may have been blasted from the moon's surface by a major impact between 10 million and 1 million years ago, relatively recently in the solar system's history.

Tianwen-2 will carry out remote sensing observations to assess potential landing sites before attempting to collect samples from the space rock. Then, the spacecraft will deliver the extraterrestrial bounty to Earth and use our planet's gravity to fling itself into a seven-year trajectory that will take it to the main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS in the mid-2030s.

Juno's potential death swirl into Jupiter

NASA's $1.1 billion Juno spacecraft has been studying Jupiter and its moons since 2016. The mission, which had been extended, will finally end in September 2025 as the spacecraft swirls into the gas giant, unless it survives Jupiter's intense radiation.

According to the mission plan, Juno's orbit will degrade naturally, allowing Jupiter's gravity to pull the probe into the planet's dense clouds. The final hurl, which will last about 5.5 days, will ensure the spacecraft and any Earthly bacteria that may have hitched a ride don't accidentally contaminate Jupiter's ice-crusted moon Europa, which scientists consider one of the best places in our solar system to search for alien life.

Europe's launch of reusable uncrewed robotic laboratory

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Space Rider, an uncrewed robotic laboratory about the size of two minivans, is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2025. The space plane will stay in low Earth orbit for two months, during which the robotic laboratory will automatically conduct technology demonstrations and experiments in microgravity.

At the end of its mission, Space Rider will deorbit and land on a runway at Europe's spaceport in French Guiana and get refurbished for at least five more flights. The space plane is ESA's bid to provide commercial customers with affordable end-to-end launch services, with a broader strategy to help Europe maintain independent, routine access to and from low Earth orbit.

What it is: The Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, two dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way

Where it is: 160,000 light-years away, in the constellations Dorado and Mensa (for the Large Magellanic Cloud) and 200,000 light-years away, in the constellations Tucana and Hydrus (for the Small Magellanic Cloud)

When it was shared: Dec. 2, 2024

Why it's so special: Our Milky Way galaxy does not travel through space alone. A spiral galaxy with a disk that spans more than 100,000 light-years, it sits within a neighborhood called the Local Group, which includes more than 50 other galaxies. Some of the neighborhood's less-massive galaxies orbit the Milky Way as satellites.

Two satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, can be seen in the night sky only from the Southern Hemisphere — or from space. This image was taken by Don Pettit, NASA's oldest active astronaut, at 69 years old. He arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sept. 11, after launching from Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, along with two Russian cosmonauts.

He took this long-exposure image from a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the ISS. It was one of three related images published on X by NASA; two featured the Magellanic Clouds, and the other showed the Milky Way.

Called irregular satellite galaxies because of their distorted shapes, the Magellanic Clouds each contain billions of stars. Many incredible astronomical observations have been made there. Perhaps the most famous was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where in 1987, astronomers spotted the last supernova to be seen with the naked eye.

Last month, astronomers revealed the first high-quality, zoomed-in photo of a star outside our galaxy. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the star, WOH G64, is 1,500 times wider than the sun and on the brink of exploding in a violent supernova.

The Magellanic Clouds are most easily seen between December and April from the Southern Hemisphere.

On his fourth spaceflight, Pettit has been taking long-exposure images and posting them on X, including a star trail, SpaceX Starlink satellites and Las Vegas at night, one of the brightest places on Earth.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been besieged by a weird, possibly toxic smell after the arrival of a Russian cargo spacecraft.

The strange odor — reportedly smelling of spray paint — leapt out at Russian cosmonauts after the docking of the Progress spacecraft with the Russian Poisk module of the ISS on Saturday (Nov. 23), forcing them to close the hatch and put on protective equipment.

"After opening the Progress spacecraft's hatch, the Roscosmos cosmonauts noticed an unexpected odor and observed small droplets, prompting the crew to close the Poisk hatch to the rest of the Russian segment," NASA wrote on X on Sunday (Nov. 24).

Following the closing of the hatch, air scrubbers were activated to remove any contaminants from the space station's air, and by Sunday engineers in mission control deemed the air quality inside to be at normal levels.

"There are no concerns for the crew, and as of Sunday afternoon, the crew is working to open the hatch between Poisk and Progress while all other space station operations are proceeding as planned," NASA representatives wrote.

Related: ISS dodges its 39th piece of potentially hazardous space junk. Experts say it won't be the last.

Yet what exactly caused the smell, and just how hazardous it was, remains unclear. Reports from the website Russian Space Web claim that the fumes released were "toxic". Nonetheless, astronauts opened the hatch on Monday (Nov. 25) to find that the unusual odor had come from the "outgassing from materials" inside Progress's pressurized cargo section, NASA representatives told CNN.

This isn't the first time that the Poisk module has caused trouble for the floating laboratory's cosmonauts. According to a recent NASA report, a mysterious five-year leak to the module has intensified to the point that it could lead to the "catastrophic failure" of the station, said Bob Cabana, the chair of NASA's ISS Advisory Committee. Russian officials downplayed the claim, and so far little has been done to address the problem.

Regardless, not much time remains until the ISS is put out of commission. The station's operational life will continue until 2030, after which it will be pushed out of orbit by SpaceX to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Instead of building a replacement, NASA has said that it will leave the construction of successors to the station to private companies, and will instead focus on crewed missions to the moon and Mars.

This new spaceflight tech has a very retro feel.

The world's first wooden satellite, a tiny Japanese spacecraft called LignoSat, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday (Nov. 5) aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule.

LignoSat measures just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side, but it could end up having a big impact on spaceflight and exploration down the road.

"While some of you might think that wood in space seems a little counterintuitive, researchers hope this investigation demonstrates that a wooden satellite can be more sustainable and less polluting for the environment than conventional satellites," Meghan Everett, the deputy chief scientist for NASA's International Space Station program, said in a press briefing on Monday (Nov. 4), a few hours before the Dragon capsule lifted off.

Conventional satellites are made primarily of aluminum. When they burn up in Earth's atmosphere at the end of their lives, they generate aluminum oxides, which can alter the planet's thermal balance and damage its protective ozone layer.

Related: NASA and Japan to launch world's 1st wooden satellite as soon as 2024. Why?

These impacts are becoming more of a concern as the orbital population grows, thanks to the rise of megaconstellations like SpaceX's ever-growing Starlink broadband network, which currently consists of about 6,500 active satellites.

Wooden satellites like LignoSat — which substitutes magnolia wood for aluminum — could be part of the solution going forward; they wouldn't pump such damaging pollutants into the atmosphere when they fell back to Earth, mission team members have said.

"Metal satellites might be banned in the future," retired Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, an aerospace engineer who's now a professor at Kyoto University, told Reuters. "If we can prove our first wooden satellite works, we want to pitch it to Elon Musk's SpaceX."

LignoSat, which was developed by researchers at Kyoto University and the Tokyo-based logging company Sumitomo Forestry, will soon get a chance to prove itself.

About a month from now, the cubesat will be deployed into orbit from the ISS' Kibo module. If all goes according to plan, its onboard electronics will record and beam home key health data for the next six months.

"Student researchers will measure the temperature and strain of the wooden structure and see how it might change in the vacuum environment of space, and the atomic oxygen and radiation conditions as well," Everett said.

LignoSat team members also say a successful test could have implications far beyond Earth orbit.

"It may seem outdated, but wood is actually cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the moon and Mars," Kenji Kariya, a manager at the Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute, told Reuters. "Expansion to space could invigorate the timber industry."

Originally posted on Space.com.

SpaceX's iconic Falcon 9 rockets have been grounded for the third time in the last three months after part of the rocket uncontrollably crash-landed in the ocean.

The rocket was carrying a capsule to be used in the "rescue mission" that will eventually bring home the astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) since June. The capsule itself made it to the ISS as planned, but other issues with the mission have prompted an investigation.

At 1:17 p.m. EDT on Saturday (Sept. 28), SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket was carrying two astronauts — NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — to the ISS inside one of the company's Dragon spacecraft capsules, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

That same capsule will also transport stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth in February 2025. Wilmore and Williams have been stuck onboard the ISS since June 5 after multiple issues with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that delivered them into space. These upsets turned a planned week-long mission into what will now be an eight-month stay on the space station. (The compromised Starliner capsule has since landed back on Earth without any passengers.)

Related: SpaceX rockets keep tearing blood-red 'atmospheric holes' in the sky, and scientists are concerned

Saturday's SpaceX mission largely went to plan. The rocket's reusable first-stage booster successfully separated from the second stage and later landed back on Earth. The second stage then deployed the Dragon capsule, which went on to dock with the ISS as expected — and the capsule should be able to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth in just over four months.

However, following the deployment of the capsule, the rocket's second stage experienced an "off-nominal deorbit burn" as it prepared to reenter Earth's atmosphere, which caused the booster to land in the ocean "outside of its target disposal area," Space.com reported.

As a result, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has begun an investigation into what happened, according to an FAA statement. While the investigation is ongoing, SpaceX cannot launch any more Falcon 9 rockets.

These rockets have already been grounded by FAA investigations twice this year: First on July 11, when one of the rockets prematurely released 20 Starlink satellites that fell back to Earth; and second on Aug. 28, when a reusable first-stage booster exploded while landing back on Earth following another Starlink launch.

The FAA similarly grounded SpaceX's super heavy Starship rocket in April 2023, when the massive spacecraft exploded just four minutes after launching and scattered debris on the ground below.

Despite recent groundings, Falcon 9 rockets normally have an excellent success rate. To date, the rockets have been successfully launched into space more than 99% of the time over the last 14 years.

The latest generation of SpaceX's Starlink satellites are leaking even more potentially disruptive radiation into low-Earth orbit than their predecessors, a new study shows. Researchers warn that the continuing unchecked deployment of the spacecraft could lead to an irreversible "inflection point," beyond which we can no longer properly study the universe's most exciting objects.

In July 2023, researchers discovered that SpaceX's Generation 1 Starlink satellites, first launched in 2019, are leaking unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR) into space. This radiation, which mainly consists of radio waves, is inadvertently given off by the satellites in multiple directions as they transmit radio signals to Earth. Unfortunately, these radio wave frequencies are very similar to those emitted by distant objects from across the cosmos, such as stars, exoplanets, black holes and pulsars, meaning that leakage from the satellites can obscure radio astronomers' readings.

Over the last year and a half, SpaceX has been phasing out these satellites in favor of newer Generation 2 models , which were first launched in February 2023. These spacecraft are smaller,more powerful, maneuverable and robust than their predecessors, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, until now, it was unclear if they also leaked UEMR.

In the new study, published Sept. 18 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers used the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope — a giant network of radio dishes spread across eight European countries — to track Gen 2 satellites. The astronomers found that the new spacecraft are even leakier than their Gen1 counterparts. The worst offenders are the "V2 mini" satellites, the current most common type of Gen 2 satellite, which can emit up to 32 times more UEMR than Gen 1 predecessors.

Related: World's largest communication satellite is a photobombing menace, astronomers warn

The UEMR from these new satellites and all those that will follow them into orbit over the next few decades could end up "blinding radio telescopes and crippling vital research of the universe," researchers wrote in a statement.

The UEMR emitted by the Den 2 satellites is up to 10 million times brighter than the faintest radio-visible objects in the night sky. "This difference is similar to the faintest stars visible to the naked eye and the brightness of the Full Moon," study lead author Cees Bassa, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), said in the statement.

The number of Starlink satellites being launched into space is also increasing year-on-year, which means the problem will likely get much worse. SpaceX has already launched more than 1,300 satellites into space in 2024 — all of which have been V2 minis.

Other satellite megaconstellations, such as China's Thousand Sails Constellation and Amazon's Project Kuiper, are also starting to take shape, which could worsen the issue if they also leak UEMR. The study researchers estimate there could be up to 100,000 satellites in orbit by the end of the decade.

Study co-author Federico Di Vruno, an astronomer at the SKA observatory in the UK, says that we will eventually reach an "inflection point" where the amount of UEMR leaking from satellites will completely obscure radio astronomers' view of the cosmos. "We need to take action to preserve our sky as a window to explore the universe from Earth," Di Vruno said.

Other issues

The leaking radiation is not the only issue caused by Starlink satellites. The swarming spacecraft are also causing problems for visual astronomers by photobombing time lapse images with streaks of light. They can also be knocked out of orbit by solar storms and are responsible for over half of the close encounters between orbiting spacecraft.

When the satellites reach the end of their lives and fall back to Earth, they also leave metal pollution in the atmosphere as they burn up. Some scientists even think that this metal pollution could get so bad that it could one day interfere with Earth's protective magnetic field.

The Falcon 9 rockets that launch the satellites have also come under scrutiny. The reusable rockets have already been grounded by federal authorities twice this year due to explosive failures and have been known to create "ionospheric holes" when they leave or reenter the upper atmosphere.

Starlink satellite launches can also create giant swirls of light in the night sky, known as "SpaceX spirals." However, these light shows pose no threat to our planet.

What it is: An image of private astronaut Jared Isaacman on the first-ever commercial spacewalk

Where it is: Partially outside the hatch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft, which was at an altitude of 458 miles (737 kilometers) above Earth's surface at the time

When it was shared: Sept. 12, 2024

Why it's so special: The 106-minute jaunt through empty space that crowned SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission represents the first-ever spacewalk by a commercial crew.

On Sept. 10, 2024, four private astronauts — Isaacman, pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon — launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft.

Around 15 hours later, the team reached an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 km), the highest altitude reached since the Apollo missions, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

From there, the spacecraft plummeted hundreds of miles and depressurized the cabin before Isaacson and Gillis briefly stepped out of the capsule. The duo was conducting mobility tests in new spacewalk suits designed by SpaceX, which could potentially be used for future missions to Mars.

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Isaacman entered the void of space around 6:50 a.m. EDT (1050 GMT), and Gillis left the hatch at 7:04 a.m. EDT (1104 GMT). The cabin began repressurizing at 7:14 a.m. EDT (1114 GMT), according to Space.com.

Isaacman, who is shown in the image, is a 41-year-old tech billionaire who funded the mission.

"Back at home, we still have a lot of work to do," Isaacson said as he raised himself out of the hatch and looked out onto our home planet from the darkness of space. "But from here, it looks like a perfect world."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

After more than three months in space, Starliner's 10-day Crew Flight Test (CFT) has finally concluded.

The Boeing spacecraft made a successful landing over the weekend, parachuting to a soft touchdown in the dark desert night of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) Saturday (Sep. 7). The return marked an end to a long-delayed and issue-ridden mission, which launched with two NASA astronauts, but returned with none. It turns out they would have been totally fine.

Despite the issues it experienced on its flight up to the International Space Station (ISS), Starliner's uncrewed landing performed as expected, with the spacecraft touching down precisely as NASA and Boeing had designed for its delayed return. "If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, during a post-landing press conference. But, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Boeing and NASA spent the past three months performing tests in White Sands, trying to recreate and understand the thruster issues Starliner experienced in space. "It's always hard to have that retrospective look," Stich said after Starliner's return, adding, "if we'd had a model that would have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say we could have had a crewed fight, but we didn't have that."

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts will spend at least 240 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Starliner on June 4, expecting to spend a little more than a week on orbit. The CFT mission was to be Starliner's final qualifying flight before entering into operational rotation as a crew transport to the ISS. However, thruster issues as the spacecraft approached the ISS led to a three-month delay in Starliner's return, which it ultimately did without astronauts onboard.

NASA announced its decision for Starliner to return uncrewed at the end of August, reassigning Wilmore and Williams as part of ISS Expedition 71. That required the agency to designate two empty seats aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft launching SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut mission for NASA later this month so that Wilmore and Williams can ride home in them at the end of the Crew-9 rotation in February.

That means by the time they come home, instead of ten days in space, the duo will have spent ten months aboard the station.

A path forward for Starliner is currently unclear. The spacecraft was slated to begin six-month crew ration missions to the ISS starting in February next year, but that has already been pushed back to August 2025, at the earliest.

"I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing," Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing's Commercial Crew Program said in a statement. "We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program."

Originally posted on Space.com.

The high-altitude explosion of one of SpaceX's supersized Starship rockets last year temporarily ripped a hole in the upper atmosphere, a new study from Russian scientists shows. It is the first time this type of atmospheric disturbance has been created by a human-caused explosion, the researchers say.

On Nov. 18, 2023, SpaceX launched its superheavy Starship rocket — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — for the second time ever from SpaceX's Starbase test and manufacturing facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Around 4 minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first stage — the large, lower part that contains the main engines — detached from the upper part of the rocket as planned but unexpectedly exploded shortly afterward, before it could land back on Earth. Then, another 4 minutes later, the rest of the rocket blew up in a larger "rapid unscheduled disassembly" around 93 miles (150 kilometers) above the ground, when a fire started as the rocket vented liquid oxygen. The company's founder and CEO Elon Musk later said that the rocket would have made it to orbit if it had been carrying a proper payload.

In the new study, published Aug. 26 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers revealed that the second explosion temporarily created a large hole in the ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere between 50 and 400 miles (80 and 650 kilometers) above Earth's surface where gases have been ionized, or stripped of electrons, and turned into plasma.

"Usually, such holes are formed as a result of chemical processes in the ionosphere due to interaction with engine fuel," study lead author Yury Yasyukevich, an ionosphere physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP), said in a translated article from the Russian state media site TASS. This is the first known time that an ionospheric hole has been created by a "catastrophic phenomena" such as a human-made explosion, he added.

Multiple satellites and international ground-based stations observed the disturbance, which lasted for 30 to 40 minutes before the affected part of the ionosphere fully recovered, the researchers wrote. The peak size of the hole remains unclear.

Related: 20 satellites fall from sky after catastrophic SpaceX rocket failure, triggering investigation

Human-caused ionospheric holes are nothing new. Scientists have long known that chemicals in rocket fuel, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, can react with ionized oxygen atoms, causing them to temporarily recombine — or turn back into regular oxygen atoms — leaving a gap, or hole, in the plasma sea within the ionosphere.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets are particularly prone to creating ionospheric holes, either during the separation of the rockets' first and second stages shortly after launch or when the rockets dump their fuel during reentry. When the atoms within these holes reionize and turn back into plasma, they release red aurora-like light, creating bright, blood-red light shows in the night sky that astronomers have dubbed SpaceX auroras.

But in this case, the ionospheric hole was created "due to the shock wave generated by the Starship explosion," which temporarily scattered the free electrons within the ionosphere, essentially stripping the plasma of its normal properties, the researchers wrote. Any of the rocket's fuel not immediately burned up in the explosion "might have reinforced the depletion and extended its duration," they added — but it was not the primary cause of the hole. As a result, there was no aurora-like light show once the plasma returned.

The researchers said that the effects of ionospheric holes are poorly understood and require further research but added that novel ionospheric phenomena like this provide a rare chance to learn more about the plasma-filled region of our upper atmosphere.

"Analyzing the data and understanding their nature, we understand more deeply the structure of the ionosphere, [and] the nature of the phenomena that occur in it," Yasyukevich told TASS.

This was the second time one of SpaceX's 400-foot-tall (120 meters) rockets exploded in as many flight tests. In the first test, on April 20 last year, the first starship was given a self-destruct code around 4 minutes after lifting off when it entered into an uncontrolled spin around 18 miles (29 km) above the ground. On this occasion, chunks of debris from the destroyed rocket rained down on Earth, triggering a federal investigation and leading to a lawsuit from environmental groups.

A similar ionospheric hole did not occur after the April explosion because the incident happened at a much lower altitude, meaning its shock waves did not reach the ionosphere, the researchers noted.

Starship finally made it to orbit in one piece during its third test flight on March 14 this year but was lost somewhere in the Indian Ocean upon reentry.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday (Aug 28), following a failed landing attempt that left the spacecraft toppled over in flames.

The reusable rocket booster had just completed its record-breaking 23rd mission, successfully launching 21 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit before touching down on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean roughly nine minutes later, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, immediately upon landing, the rocket tipped over, bursting into flames.

No injuries or public property damage were reported in connection with the failed landing.

The FAA announced a pause on all Falcon 9 launches later that day, putting all planned missions on hold until the agency completes its investigation into the mishap. It's not clear how long the investigation will take, but it has already impacted the planned launch of SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission, which was scheduled to take four private citizens into orbit for a five-day voyage, potentially as soon as Friday (Aug. 30). The mission was previously delayed twice, due to unfavorable weather conditions on Tuesday (Aug. 27) and Wednesday.

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts will spend at least 240 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

The Aug. 28 mishap not only ended that particular Falcon 9 rocket's record-breaking recovery streak but also cut short an even longer chain of successful SpaceX landings; before Wednesday's incident, the company had aced 267 consecutive Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy booster landings, according to Space.com.

This is the second time Falcon 9 was grounded this year. In July, the rocket's upper stage malfunctioned in the middle of a Starlink launch, leading to the loss of 23 satellites. Though the rocket's lower booster stage still managed to stick its landing, the FAA grounded Falcon 9 for 15 days following the incident.

NASA's two stranded astronauts will be brought home from the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX vehicle in February 2025, leaving the faulty Starliner spacecraft that took them there to return without a crew, the agency has said.

The announcement, made at a news conference on Saturday (Aug. 24), is the final nail in the coffin for Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight, whose astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams have been stuck aboard the ISS since June, waiting for NASA officials to assess several technical issues that appeared during Starliner's voyage to space.

Originally planned to last as few as eight days, the first crewed test flight of Boeing's spacecraft was marred by numerous helium leaks and thruster faults on its outward leg, delaying its return by more than two months.

Now, following an agency-wide review, NASA has decided that there is too much uncertainty for the spacecraft to safely bring its crew home.

"NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with [SpaceX's] Crew-9 next February, and that Starliner will return uncrewed," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference on Aug. 24. "I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision. We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS."

Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. But not long after entering orbit, a number of faults appeared on the spacecraft — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

This forced engineers to troubleshoot issues from the ground. Tests conducted at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, revealed that during the spacecraft's climb to the ISS, the teflon seals inside the five faulty RCS thrusters likely got hot and bulged out of place to obstruct the propellant flow, according to NASA.

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

A hotfire test conducted while the craft was docked to the ISS on July 27 showed the thrust was back at normal levels, but NASA engineers were still concerned that the problem could reappear during the craft's descent back to Earth. They were also worried that the helium leaks could knock out some of the craft's orbital maneuvering and attitude control system (OMAC) thrusters, which maintain the spacecraft on a safe flight path.

"There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at the news conference. "If we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action."

NASA's new plan is to bring the astronauts home aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule instead. The vehicle will be sent to the ISS on Sept. 24 carrying members of the ISS's Crew-9, who will take over from the current Crew-8 aboard the space station. Instead of Crew-9's usual four-person crew, two astronauts will go to the ISS to leave space for Wilmore and Williams to return in February 2025.

The Starliner capsule is expected to undock from the ISS and make a controlled, uncrewed descent back to Earth in early September, NASA said.

Boeing built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. The company has so far spent roughly $1.6 billion to address numerous setbacks in the development of Starliner, putting its long-term involvement in NASA's program into question.

"We continue to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft," Boeing said in a statement posted on X on Saturday. "We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return."

NASA has pushed back the decision to return its stranded Starliner astronauts to the end of August pending a "major discussion" about the spaceship's flight readiness, agency officials have said. 

Originally planned to last just 8 days, numerous leaks and other technical issues suffered by Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS) in June delayed the planned return flight by more than two months, and left its two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams — stuck in space.

As engineers continue to collect and debate test results on the craft's problems, NASA bosses are still mulling over whether to return the two astronauts on Starliner, or take them back on a SpaceX Dragon capsule six months later instead.

"It's a fairly major discussion to decide whether or not we're going to have crew on board for Starliner's return." Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, said at a news conference Wednesday (August 14). "We're expecting that the data analysis will be ready for a program board by the middle to end of next week, and will be ready for a flight readiness review around the end of next week."

Boeing built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. 

Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. But not long after entering orbit, a number of faults appeared — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters. 

This forced engineers to troubleshoot issues from the ground. Tests conducted at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, revealed that during the spacecraft's climb to the ISS, the teflon seals inside the five faulty RCS thrusters likely got hot and bulged out of place to obstruct the propellant flow, according to NASA. 

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

A hotfire test conducted while the craft was docked to the ISS on July 27 showed the thrust was normal, but NASA engineers are concerned the earlier thruster problems could reappear during the craft's descent back to Earth. They are also worried that the helium leaks could knock out some of the craft's orbital maneuvering and attitude control system (OMAC) thrusters, which maintain the spacecraft on its flight path.

"The worst case would be some integrated failure mechanism, between the helium leaks and the RCS thrusters," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at a previous news conference on Aug. 7. "Then you could end up in some cases that aren't as easily controlled — more stressing cases that the team is worried about." 

NASA's leading contingency plan is to bring the astronauts home aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule instead. The vehicle will be sent to the ISS as early as Sept. 24 carrying members of the ISS's Crew-9, who will take over from the current Crew-8 aboard the space station. Instead of Crew-9's usual four person crew, two astronauts will go to the ISS to leave space for Wilmore and Williams to return in February 2025.

"I do want to keep this in perspective, if Butch and Suni do not come home on Starliner, they will have about 8 months in orbit," Russ DeLoach, NASA's chief of safety and mission assurance, said at the Aug. 14 news conference.

Yet despite Starliner's problems, NASA said that its astronauts are safe and comfortable aboard the ISS.

"This mission was a test flight... they knew this mission might not be perfect," Joe Acaba, NASA's chief astronaut, said at the press conference. "Human space flight is inherently risky, and as astronauts, we accept that as part of the job." 

The stranded Boeing Starliner spacecraft is now delaying SpaceX's planned Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) — and NASA is considering scrapping the spacecraft's crewed return flight to Earth as more details about Starliner's malfunctions come to light.

The delay, which moves the launch of the Crew-9 mission from Aug. 18 to no earlier than Sept. 24, "allows more time for mission managers to finalize return planning for the agency's Boeing Crew Flight Test," NASA wrote in a blog update on Tuesday (Aug. 6).

The update has arrived at a fraught time for NASA and Boeing. The Crew-9 members, who are scheduled to replace the current Crew-8 aboard the ISS, cannot arrive at the station until a free docking port opens up. The preferred Harmony module is currently being occupied by the Starliner spacecraft, which has been stuck on the ISS since June.

There is still no return date for Boeing's spacecraft or its astronauts, who have now been on the ISS for months longer than anticipated. Engineers at NASA are now debating whether they should send Starliner to Earth uncrewed and take the astronauts home aboard a SpaceX vehicle in early 2025.

"I would say that our chances of an uncrewed Starliner return have increased a little bit based on where things have gone over the last week or two, and that's why we're looking more closely at that option" Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, said at a news conference Wednesday (August 7). "But again, new data coming in, new analysis, different discussion — we could find ourselves shift in another way."

Isolating the issues

The problems began shortly after NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams rode to orbit in Boeing's spacecraft following years of project delays, successfully blasting off on Starliner's inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5.

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

Wilmore and Williams were scheduled to stay a week in orbit, but during the flight the Starliner suffered a series of issues, including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system thrusters. This forced engineers to troubleshoot issues on the ground and has extended the two astronauts' stay aboard the ISS from the planned week to two months and counting.

NASA engineers say that they are taking more time to pick up data on the flight worthiness of Starliner and to iron out its faults. However, progress toward an eventual flight home has stalled. NASA expected to begin a flight-readiness review for the spacecraft at the beginning of August, but the process has yet to start.

Tests conducted by engineers at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico revealed that, during the spacecraft's climb to the ISS, the teflon seals inside the five faulty RCS thrusters likely got hot and bulged out of place to obstruct the propellant flow, according to NASA.

A hotfire test conducted while the craft was docked to the ISS on July 27 showed the thrust was normal, but NASA engineers are concerned the problem could reappear during the craft's descent back to Earth. They're also worried that the helium leaks could knock out some of the craft's orbital maneuvering and attitude control system (OMAC) thrusters, which maintain the spacecraft on its flight path.

"The worst case would be some integrated failure mechanism, between the helium leaks and the RCS thrusters," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at the news conference. "Then you could end up in some cases that aren't as easily controlled — more stressing cases that the team is worried about."

Among the reasons for the delay is that Starliner cannot autonomously undock from the ISS, a maneuver that is necessary if NASA decides the craft should return on its own without the astronauts on board, Ars Technica reported. Updating and validating the software needed to make this maneuver will take up to four weeks, sources told Ars Technica.

NASA said it has a number of contingency plans in place, one of them being sending only two out of Crew-9s four astronauts to the ISS so that Wilmore and Williams can return with them in February 2025.

But whatever NASA decides, the decision will need to come soon, Stich said.

"We need to probably decide likely in the middle of August one path or the other to go ahead and meet the launch date for Crew-9" on Sept. 24, he added.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Aug. 7 at 3:25 p.m. ET to include new quotes and information from a NASA press conference.

 There is still no return date for Boeing's stranded Starliner astronauts, who have been stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) since June after their spacecraft developed multiple issues, NASA has announced. 

Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams rode to orbit in Boeing's spacecraft following years of delays, successfully blasting off on Starliner's inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. They were scheduled to stay a week in orbit.

But during the flight the spacecraft suffered a series of issues, including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, forcing engineers to troubleshoot issues on the ground. This extended the two astronauts' stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to the current 50 days. 

Yet NASA and Boeing say that even though ground tests have been completed, there is still no clear date for a flight home.

"We don't have a major announcement today relative to a return date," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference on Thursday (July 25). "We're making great progress, but we're just not quite ready to do that."

When the astronauts will return remains unclear, but NASA officials have previously said that the spacecraft has enough fuel to remain in orbit until mid-August at the latest.

Stich said that NASA and Boeing may perform a test fire of the spacecraft "as early as next week." Following this review, Stich added, an undock time will be set.

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

Starliner was built as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to take astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has tallied 13 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Starliner's journey into orbit has been much more troubled. A software glitch on its first uncrewed test flight pushed Starliner onto the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was scrubbed due to a faulty fuel valve. Other issues, including problems with parachutes and the need to remove nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) of flammable tape, also subsequently cropped up.

The current, third crewed flight attempt was briefly delayed by issues with a vibrating oxygen valve and a small but persistent helium leak. Engineers ultimately deemed the craft safe to fly despite those issues. After liftoff, the leaks multiplied and several thrusters conked out, delaying the craft's docking with the ISS's Harmony module and later postponing its return to Earth.

NASA officials say the spacecraft is still safe, and that the return has been delayed this long so that scientists can collect as much data as possible on the malfunctioning RCS thrusters before they are jettisoned and burn up upon reentry.

"The last several weeks have been really useful in understanding thruster and helium anomalies and how to address these problems for future flights," Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and the manager of the company's commercial crew program, said at the news conference. "That's been the real goal here."

To better understand how these thrusters — which are essential for tilting the craft at the right angle to enter Earth's atmosphere — might behave, engineers at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, have been disassembling copies of them, inspecting them part by part for potential faults, and firing them to collect data.

During their extended time aboard the ISS, Wilmore and Williams have performed a number of maintenance tasks and scientific projects. Once a week, they have returned to the Starliner capsule to work through the thruster issues with engineers at ground control.

The astronauts' stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take cover inside their respective space capsules.

Speaking at a July 10 news conference beamed from the ISS, Wilmore and Williams told reporters that they were confident Starliner could return them to Earth safely.

When asked about backup plans to return the astronauts without Starliner, Stitch said that contingency plans involving SpaceX's Crew Dragon have been looked into, but their focus was on using Boeing's craft.

"Obviously the backup option is to use a different system. I would rather not go into all those details until we get to that time — if we ever get to that time," Stitch said. "We really have our team focused on, as we close in on this final flight rationale, returning Butch and Suni on Starliner."

Twenty Starlink satellites were prematurely released during a failed SpaceX rocket launch last week — and now, observations have confirmed they all burned up in the upper atmosphere after falling back to Earth. Experts are currently investigating what happened, and the rockets responsible will remain grounded until this investigation is concluded.

On July 11, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:35 p.m. ET, one day later than originally planned. The launch initially went as expected, and the rocket's first stage successfully detached from the satellite-laden second stage, before landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. However, the second stage then failed to complete its second burn due to a liquid oxygen leak, leaving it stranded in a low orbit around Earth. (It is currently unclear if the leak caused the delayed launch.)

The rocket's second stage was still able to release its payload. However, the satellites became stuck in an elliptical orbit around our planet, with a minimum altitude of 84 miles (135 kilometers) — around half the height at which they normally operate. At this elevation, atmospheric drag slowed the satellites down, and they began to fall back to Earth by around 3 miles (5 km) every completed orbit, SpaceX representatives wrote in a statement on July 11.

Related: Controversial paper claims satellite 'megaconstellations' like SpaceX's could weaken Earth's magnetic field and cause 'atmospheric stripping.' Should we be worried?

"At this level of drag, our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites," SpaceX representatives wrote. "As such, the satellites will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise."

The company gained control of most of the satellites and ordered them to perform burns at their maximum thrust, known as "warp 9," in a last-ditch attempt to regain altitude, Space News reported. But this was not enough to save the satellites.

Subsequent observations from Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, have since confirmed that all 20 satellites met a fiery death on July 12, Spaceweather.com reported.

The re-entering spacecraft did "not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety," SpaceX representatives wrote. And so far, there have been no reports of the spacecraft reaching Earth's surface, according to Spaceweather.com.

This was the first Falcon 9 launch failure since 2016 and the biggest single loss of Starlink satellites since February 2022, when a geomagnetic storm knocked 40 satellites from the sky shortly after the satellites were put into Earth orbit.

SpaceX is now investigating what happened, under the supervision of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. The company will not be able to launch any more Falcon 9 rockets until this investigation is complete.

SpaceX's interplanetary Starship rocket was similarly grounded by the FAA in 2023 after it exploded minutes after take-off during its first test flight on April 20 last year.

It is currently unclear how long Falcon 9 rockets will be grounded for. But one unnamed industry expert told Space News that the spacecraft could be grounded for months, which — if correct — would force a major reshuffle of the company's launch schedule for the rest of the year.

NASA is preparing to destroy the International Space Station (ISS), awarding SpaceX an up to $843 million contract to push the station safely out of orbit and back to Earth.

According to the space agency's plans, SpaceX's specially designed deorbit vehicle will drag the football field-size ISS back to Earth sometime after the end of its operational life in 2030. The ISS will smash into our planet's atmosphere at a speed of more than 17,000 mph (27,500 km/h) before landing in a crashdown spot in the ocean. 

Deorbiting the space station "supports NASA's plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth," Ken Bowersox, NASA's associate administrator for Space Operations Mission Directorate, said in a statement. 

The floating laboratory's first parts were launched in 1998, and it has been occupied by astronauts from the U.S., Japan, Russia, Canada and Europe since 2000, who have completed more than 3,300 scientific experiments in a close orbit above Earth.

But the space station is showing its age: technical faults and leaks continue to cause issues for crews, and the contracts between the five participating national space agencies — which marked an era of global cooperation in space following the end of the Cold War — will end by 2030.

The ISS also faces risks from the growing problem of space junk — orbital debris made of other defunct satellites, whipping around Earth at high speeds. On thursday (June 27) nine astronauts aboard the ISS were forced to take shelter in the docked Boeing Starliner crew capsule after hundreds of pieces of debris from a shattered Russian satellite threatened the space station's safety. The crew were allowed to return to the ISS after about an hour, and operations continued as normal.

Related: What is Point Nemo, the remote, watery satellite graveyard where the ISS will go to die?

But it's still unclear exactly when the space station will be brought crashing back to Earth. The 2030 end date is in NASA's budget, but the space agency is committed to operations throughout 2030.

"There's nothing magical that happens in 2030," Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said at a Jan. 25 news conference.

The ISS will likely continue its work until the commercial space stations slated to replace it come online, Stich added. These include Axiom Space's Axiom Station, and the Orbital Reef designed by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Both stations are slated to come online by the end of this decade.

When the ISS is ready to be destroyed, it is also unclear how much other space agencies will shoulder the burden. NASA said in its statement that "the safe deorbit of the International Space Station is the responsibility of all five space agencies," but the extent of their financial or technical involvement in SpaceX's drag-and-dump is unspecified.

The ISS's fiery descent won't be the first performed by a decommissioned space station. In 2001, Russia's Mir space station was sent plummeting back to Earth, and its surviving fragments were swallowed by the Pacific Ocean.

The growing problem of space debris isn't just one that plagues Earth's orbit. Several instances of space trash crashing back down to Earth have made recent headlines, and one family is requesting that NASA pay for the damages. 

The space agency has a claim on its hands after a chunk of space junk crashed through Alejandro Otero's seaside home in Naples, Florida. The incident occurred on March 8, as debris tore through the roof and two floors of his family home, nearly hitting his son, Otero said in a now-deleted post on X. 

NASA has since confirmed the debris came from a 2.9-ton pallet of used batteries jettisoned from the International Space Station in March of 2021; the structure was expected to burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere. Otero speculated as much in posts online following the incident, and voiced his expectation that the responsible parties be held accountable. "[The Otero family is] grateful that no one sustained physical injuries from this incident, but a 'near miss' situation such as this could have been catastrophic," said Mica Nguyen Worthy in a statement from the law firm representing the family.

In the letter, Worthy points out that, under the Space Liability Convention, NASA would be liable had the debris caused damage in another country, and thinks that policy should apply within the United States as well. "We have asked NASA not to apply a different standard towards U.S. citizens or residents, but instead to take care of the Oteros and make them whole," Worthy said. 

Related: Object that slammed into Florida home was indeed space junk from ISS, NASA confirms

The incident has the potential to set a precedent for governments and private space companies in terms of how compensation could be handled for victims of similar incidents in the future. Though their damage was less severe than that caused at the Otero home, several other reports of crashing space debris have occurred in the past year as well, including portions of a SpaceX Dragon trunk found in Canada and North Carolina, and a piece of an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) rocket landing on a beach in Australia.

"Here, the U.S. government, through NASA, has an opportunity to set the standard or 'set a precedent' as to what responsible, safe, and sustainable space operations ought to look like. If NASA were to take the position that the Oteros' claims should be paid in full, it would send a strong signal to both other governments and private industries that such victims should be compensated regardless of fault," Worthy said.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Editor's note: NASA announced on Friday that Starliner's troubleshooting has been extended for a third time, meaning that the astronauts will stay aboard the International Space Station indefinitely until some time in July.

Two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on Boeing's Starliner are currently stranded in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after engineers discovered numerous issues with the Boeing spacecraft. Teams on the ground are now racing to assess Starliner's status.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended for a third time due to the ongoing issues.  The astronauts will now return home no sooner than June 26th, according to NASA. 

After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5. But during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five separate helium leaks to the spacecraft's thruster system.

Now, to give engineers time to troubleshoot the faults, NASA has announced it will push back the perilous return flight, extending the crew's stay on the space station to at least three weeks. 

"We've learned that our helium system is not performing as designed," Mark Nappi, Boeing's Starliner program manager, said at a news conference on June 18. "Albeit manageable, it's still not working like we designed it. So we've got to go figure that out."

The return module of the Starliner spacecraft is currently docked to the ISS's Harmony module as NASA and Boeing engineers assess the  vital hardware issues aboard the vessel, including five helium leaks to the system that pressurizes the spacecraft's propulsion system, and five thruster failures to its reaction-control system. 

Related: China's secret space plane has released another unknown object over Earth

After powering the thrusters up on June 15, engineers found that most of these issues appeared to be at least partially resolved, but their exact causes remain unknown. 

However, the Harmony module's limited fuel means Starliner can only stay docked for 45 days, so the window for a safe return flight is narrowing.

The issues are the latest in a long list of setbacks and headaches for Boeing's spacecraft. The company built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 12 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable.

The current mission is Boeing's third attempt to take the crew to the ISS. The previous two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on which Starliner was mounted (and which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer glitch in a ground launch sequencer, respectively.

Boeing's Starliner has sprung two additional leaks en route to the International Space Station (ISS), forcing the two astronauts on board to close them manually, according to NASA.

After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT yesterday (June 5). Following a 25-hour flight, the two-person crew are set to join a team of astronauts on the ISS later today (June 6).

But a handful of hours into the journey, just as NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams were preparing to go to sleep for the night, two helium leaks appeared on the spacecraft. This is in addition to a third leak that engineers discovered prior to launch.

The astronauts were given instructions on how to fix the new leaks, and were required to close valves manually to stop the helium from escaping. 

"Teams have identified three helium leaks on the spacecraft. One of these was previously discussed before flight along with a management plan," NASA wrote on X late on Wednesday . "The other two are new since the spacecraft arrived on orbit. Two of the affected helium valves have been closed and the spacecraft remains stable."

Related: China's secret space plane has released another unknown object over Earth

Fixing the faults cut into an hour of the crew's nine-hour bedtime. But following the fixes, Boeing and NASA determined the crew were safe and told them to sleep while the situation was monitored.

"Helium is used in spacecraft thruster systems to allow the thrusters to fire and is not combustible or toxic," Boeing noted during a previous helium leak.

The effect of the leaks remains unclear. Nonetheless, Starliner remains on course and is expected to dock with the ISS today. 

Boeing developed the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 12 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Boeing's capsule has lagged significantly behind. Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable. 

The current launch is Boeing's third attempt to take the crew to the ISS. The previous two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on which Starliner is mounted (and which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer glitch in a ground launch sequencer, respectively.

A bizarre, "horned" spiral of light recently photobombed a vibrant aurora display above Europe. The misshaped luminous swirl was painted in the sky by a dying SpaceX rocket, but it is unlike any light show we have seen before. 

The stunning galaxy-like spiral appeared above parts of Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic on May 2 at around 9:00 p.m. GMT (4:00 p.m. EDT), Spaceweather.com reported. Around 90 minutes earlier, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a pair of Earth-observation satellites launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The swirling light show is an example of what researchers commonly call "SpaceX spirals," which are made up of fuel dumped in space by Falcon 9 rockets shortly before they fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. The fuel freezes into tiny crystals that reflect sunlight and form the shape of a spiral because the rockets spin as they discard it.

Normally, these spirals have a perfect vortex shape. But photos of the recent spiral above Europe show this spiral had two faint, horn-like pillars of light, which have not been seen in any previous spirals. It is not clear what caused the horns to form, but it is likely tied to how the rocket dumped its fuel, Spaceweather.com reported.

The light show only lasted for around 10 minutes before disappearing completely as the frozen fuel began to disperse.

Related: Controversial paper claims satellite 'megaconstellations' like SpaceX's could weaken Earth's magnetic field and cause 'atmospheric stripping.' Should we be worried?

This spiral coincided with a strong G3 geomagnetic storm that began on May 2 after a coronal mass ejection from the sun smashed into Earth's magnetic field, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As a result, the northern lights can also be seen in some of the images. One photographer even captured a timelapse video of the spiral as the aurora danced in the sky.

SpaceX spirals are becoming more common in the night sky as the company has increased the number of launches over the last few years. 

Recently, a massive white SpaceX spiral photobombed the northern lights above Iceland in March. Similarly, stunning swirls were also spotted above Alaska in April 2023 and over Hawaii in April 2022. 

But SpaceX spirals aren't the only atmospheric light shows caused by the company's Falcon 9 rockets. 

As the dying spacecraft reenter the atmosphere, they release chemicals that can react with ionized oxygen in the upper atmosphere, causing the molecules to recombine into normal atoms and temporarily emit bright red light like an aurora. Scientists call this an "atmospheric hole," and such holes are also becoming more common as the rate of SpaceX launches rises.

In March, a photographer managed to capture a timelapse photo of a Falcon 9 rocket's reentry burn, which created a strange dashed line in the sky.

NASA has postponed the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule due to an issue with a noisy valve on the rocket meant to carry it into space.

Boeing's Starliner crew capsule was due to blast off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:34 p.m. ET on Monday (May 6) with NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams on board. The two-person crew will be joining a team of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). 

But two hours before the scheduled liftoff, a valve on the ship's Atlas V rocket began buzzing at an audible 40 hertz, forcing the flight team to halt the mission. 

"Today's Starliner launch is scrubbed as teams evaluate an oxygen relief valve on the Centaur Stage on the Atlas V," NASA representatives wrote in a post on the social platform X, formerly Twitter. "Our astronauts have exited Starliner and will return to crew quarters."

Related: Mysterious object that crashed through Florida home was likely space junk from the International Space Station

Boeing developed the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 10 successful missions since it began operating in 2020.

But Boeing's capsule has lagged significantly behind. Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable.

However, this latest setback was related to the Saturn V rocket, which TKTK and was due to take Boeing's Starliner into orbit.

"Right now we are going through all the data," Tory Bruno, CEO of the United Launch Alliance which owns the Atlas V rocket, said at a post-scrub press conference. "[There's] a fair chance we'll know tomorrow whether the valve exceeded its life or not or whether it has enough life against the qual limit that we established to do another attempt."

The earliest window for a second launch attempt opens on Friday (May 10), although NASA has yet to announce a new launch date.

An eerie, blood-red orb of light was recently photographed in the night sky above Texas after SpaceX launched a satellite-laden rocket into space. The increasingly common phenomenon, known as a "SpaceX aurora," was the result of an atmospheric hole that was ripped open by the dying rocket.

On April 10, photographer Abdur Anwar spotted the bright light at around 3:15 a.m. EDT above Big Bend National Park in southern Texas. The light quickly faded out of view from the naked eye. But using a smartphone camera, Anwar was able to take a long-exposure image that captured the faint blob before it disappeared completely. However, he "couldn't explain" what it was, according to his Instagram post. 

What Anwar managed to capture was the tail end of an aurora-like phenomenon that was triggered by a hole in the ionosphere — the upper part of the atmosphere between 50 and 370 miles (80 and 600 kilometers) above the Earth's surface where gases are turned into plasma by solar radiation. But this hole was not a natural occurrence. Instead, it was birthed by one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets falling back to Earth, according to Spaceweather.com. 

The rocket, which was carrying 23 Starlink satellites, launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at around 1:40 a.m. EDT — around 90 minutes before Anwar spotted the light, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. 

After separating from the rocket's reusable booster, the rest of the spacecraft deployed the satellites into low-Earth orbit. Then, the now-defunct rocket began a deorbit burn to land in the Pacific Ocean, according to Spaceweather.com. This was done to minimize the amount of space junk in orbit around our planet.

During the deorbit burn, the rocket released water and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which reacted with ionized oxygen atoms to create regular oxygen, temporarily reducing the amount of plasma in the ionosphere. This transformation excites these molecules and causes them to emit light as a result. The light has the same red wavelength as auroras given off by oxygen atoms but quickly disappears as the molecules reionize.

Related: Oops! US Space Force may have accidentally punched a hole in the upper atmosphere

This phenomenon is becoming increasingly common, especially above Texas and the surrounding states where rockets that launch from Florida begin their deorbit burns.

Above the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, astronomers observe "2 to 5 of them each month," observatory researcher Stephen Hummel previously told Spaceweather.com. 

SpaceX rockets can also create much larger ionospheric holes as they launch into space. For example, in July 2023, a Falcon 9 rocket created a massive red streak in the sky above Arizona after blasting off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 

As the rockets deorbit, they can create other visually stunning light shows, such as "SpaceX spirals." These luminous whirlpools of light are created when the spacecraft's dumped fuel freezes outside the atmosphere, creating a vortex of ice crystals that reflect sunlight back to the surface. One of these striking spectacles was photographed above Iceland in March this year.

As far as we know, these visual phenomena are harmless and cause no long-term effects on our atmosphere. However, researchers are concerned about the payloads that the rockets are frequently deploying in space. 

Starlink satellites are already proving to be a nuisance to astronomers because of their ability to photobomb telescopes and disrupt radio astronomy. This problem is also likely to get much worse as more and more satellites are placed in orbit. 

There are also concerns about what these satellites, and other space junk, may be doing to our atmosphere when they inevitably fall back to Earth. Researchers have already noticed a sharp increase in the amount of metal particulate left behind in our skies as spacecraft burn up on reentry, and some have even warned that this pollution could destabilize our planet's magnetic field, although this has not been proven.

Striking new photos show a perfect dashed line of light left behind by a dying SpaceX rocket in the night sky above Arizona. The luminous streak, which is the result of some clever photo trickery, is the latest reminder of the company's rapidly increasing launch schedule. 

On Saturday (March 30th), SpaceX launched two of their Falcon 9 rockets in less than four hours, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. The first rocket, which was carrying the Eutelsat 36D telecommunications satellite, took off at 5:52 p.m. EDT from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The second rocket, which was carrying 23 of the company's Starlink satellites, launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Center, located next door to KSC, at 9:30 p.m. EDT.

After deploying their payloads, the rockets' second stages — the main part of the rocket that separates from the rocket's reusable boosters — underwent controlled deorbit burns, which caused them to fall toward Earth and burn up in the planet's upper atmosphere.

Photographer Jeremy Perez had initially planned to capture the deorbit burn of the first rocket from near his home in Flagstaff, AZ but was left empty-handed due to thick cloud coverage. But by the time the second rocket began the same maneuver, the skies had cleared and Perez was able to catch some stunning images of the deorbiting debris, Spaceweather.com reported. 

In the new images, Perez combined multiple long-exposure shots of the ignited second stage as it passed overhead. The breaks in the luminous streak represent points where the camera's shutter was closed. 

Related: 10 bizarre phenomena that lit up the sky (and their scientific explanations)

In real-time the event appeared very differently: "It looked like a delicate, cometary dandelion poof drifting overhead," Perez told Spaceweather.com. The light also appeared white in real-time instead of the bright blues seen in the photos, he added.

In zoomed-in versions of the photos, you can also see a second dimmer line alongside the falling space junk. This streak is made up of light from the satellites deployed by the rocket, which were drifting alongside it before it started its final maneuver.

An increasingly common sight 

Saturday's twin launches were not the only SpaceX launches this week. 

On Monday (April 1), another Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenburg Space Force base in California and later deployed 22 more Starlink satellites into orbit, Space.com reported. The company also plans to launch two more Falcon 9 rockets on Friday (April 5) and Sunday (April 7), which will both deploy more satellites into orbit, according to SpaceFlightNow.com.  

The continued increase in SpaceX launches greatly enhances the chances of people seeing deorbiting material or other phenomena caused by the dying rockets, such as SpaceX spirals — swirls of light created by frozen rocket fuel ejected from deorbiting Falcon 9 boosters. For example, on March 4, one of these spirals briefly outshone the northern lights across large parts of the Arctic. 

Falcon 9 rockets can also be seen for miles as they rise into space and can occasionally punch holes in the upper atmosphere, triggering blood-red aurora-like light shows. 

But these light shows are not the only aspect of these ever-increasing launches that are catching people's eyes. Experts are also concerned with the number of Starlink satellites that are being deployed into low-Earth orbit, which are obscuring our ability to study the cosmos.

When these newly-launched satellites inevitably fail and are sent to burn up in the upper atmosphere, they will also release high levels of metal pollution in our skies, which could have potentially damaging impacts. 

A rocket transiting the moon is a pretty rare sight. Capturing a good photo of that kind of transit takes some serious skill.

That skill is worthy of some major praise. Pascal Fouquet, a photographer from Orlando, Florida, captured such a shot, and was chosen as the United States' National Award first place winner for the Sony World Photography Awards 2024. The awards program comes out of a partnership between Sony and the World Photography Organization, and receives hundreds of thousands of photo submission from across the globe.

Fouquet captured his winning shot of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket passing in front of the moon just before the new year, when SpaceX launched the United States Space Force X-37B spaceplane on the USSF-52 mission. The uncrewed X-37B spacecraft lifted off atop Falcon Heavy from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Dec. 28, at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT on Dec. 29).

Fouquet realized the upcoming opportunity to try and nail that shot less than 48 hours before the launch took place, he told Space.com. "Scouting for an ideal location proved challenging, given the limited spots available for capturing the shot. Ultimately, I settled on a somewhat unconventional choice — an open field behind a hospice center 13.8 miles away from the launch pad," he said in an email.

Related: Space photo of the week: Bruce McCandless II floats untethered as the 1st 'human satellite' in history

The trick, Fouquet said, was to expose the camera to capture the details of the moon, not the rocket. Shot with a Nikon D850, Fouquet set his shutter speed to just 1/1600 of a second, capturing the split second moment Falcon Heavy passed in front of the moon.

This was the seventh launch for the Space Force's secretive X-37B space plane, which remains in orbit at the time of this publication. On its last mission, X-37B broke its own on-orbit record after returning from its mission that lasted 908 days.

Originally posted on Space.com.