Latest articles on AI, technology, and software development.
Northrop Grumman and Starfish Space are running commercial life-extension missions on real satellites for real money. Actual debris removal remains a government-funded demo, still years from its first paid contract.
Tianwen-2 arrived at quasi-moon Kamoʻoalewa while Hayabusa2 flew past the contact-binary asteroid Torifune — a rare overlap that revealed both objects are stranger than predicted.
Varda Space Industries has now flown and safely reentered six orbital manufacturing missions, while UK startup Space Forge has grown plasma at 1,000°C aboard a free-flying satellite. Neither is a demo anymore — both are building toward regular commercial production.
Astroscale, Orbit Fab, and Northrop Grumman are moving from PowerPoint pitches to actual fuel transfers in orbit. A Space Force refueling mission this summer marks the point where on-orbit servicing stops being an experiment and starts being infrastructure.
With 50,000 pieces of debris in orbit and over 1.2 million satellite slots proposed, Low Earth Orbit is a shared resource with no binding governance. The Kessler cascade that could trap us on Earth is not science fiction — it is a policy failure in progress.
The International Space Station deorbits in 2030. NASA has no government replacement planned. Instead, four private stations are under active development — with commercial research, manufacturing, and tourism as the business model. Here is where each program actually stands.
After a string of dramatic explosions and regulatory setbacks, SpaceX's Starship completed its first fully successful orbital flight in late 2025 — catching the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower's mechanical arms and proving the full reuse architecture works end-to-end.
NASA's Artemis program was supposed to return humans to the Moon by 2024. Artemis 2 has still not launched, Artemis 3 has slipped to 2027 at the earliest, and SpaceX's Starship — the planned lunar lander — is still not human-rated. Here is an honest accounting of where the program stands, what is actually working, and what still needs to go right.
For most of the 2020s, SpaceX ran the global launch market almost unchallenged. In 2025 and 2026, Blue Origin's New Glenn, ULA's Vulcan Centaur, and Rocket Lab's growing fleet have changed the picture — not by beating SpaceX, but by being real alternatives for the first time.
Perseverance has been caching Martian rock samples since 2021. Getting them back is the top priority in planetary science. But an independent review found the original mission architecture could cost $11 billion and slip to 2040 — triggering a fundamental redesign that is still in progress.
The James Webb Space Telescope has now been operating for more than three years. The results have not simply confirmed what astronomers expected — in several cases they have forced genuine revisions to models of galaxy formation, atmospheric chemistry, and the early universe. A summary of where the science has landed.
NASA's CLPS program was supposed to bring competition and cost efficiency to lunar surface access. Two years after the first crashes and partial failures, the program is producing real results. Here's what the commercial Moon lander industry actually looks like in 2026.