NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Commercial
The Upper Stage Problem: Why Reusable Second Stages Are Harder Than They Look
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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Commercial
Low Earth orbit has a garbage problem. Here's who's trying to clean it up.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, and hundreds of thousands more too small to track. Two companies — Astroscale and ClearSpace — are building the first commercial debris removal spacecraft. The engineering is harder than it sounds.
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Commercial
Private companies are landing on the Moon. Here's what the scoreboard actually looks like.
NASA's CLPS program has funded multiple private lunar landers with mixed results. Intuitive Machines stuck the landing sideways; Astrobotic's Peregrine did not reach the surface. A clearer picture of commercial lunar capability is forming, and it's more complicated than press releases suggest.
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Commercial
The first private module is going to the ISS. It's a down payment on something bigger.
Axiom Space is attaching a commercial module to the International Space Station — and it's designed to eventually detach and operate as an independent station after the ISS is decommissioned. The module going up now is the foundation for the first fully private orbital outpost.
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Commercial
People keep saying we'll manufacture things in space. Here's what's actually happening.
The promise of manufacturing in microgravity has been discussed for decades — purer crystals, exotic alloys, biological structures that can't be made on Earth. In 2026, that promise is starting to become a real, if small, industry. This is what's actually coming off the production line.
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Commercial
Space tourism in 2026: who's actually going, and what it costs them
A few years after the first wave of commercial passengers reached space, the market has settled into something more defined. The flights are still rare and the prices are still very high, but the customer base has grown beyond billionaires and the competitive dynamics are shifting.
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Commercial
Starship made it to orbit. What that actually means for space access.
SpaceX's Starship — the largest rocket ever built — has now completed an orbital test flight with both stages recovered. The implications for what space access could cost over the next decade are difficult to overstate, and the aerospace industry is quietly reorganizing around that possibility.
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Commercial
ULA's Vulcan rocket is flying. What it means for the launch market.
United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur has completed its certification flights and is entering regular commercial service. The rocket is designed to handle everything ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV carried — and it's arriving at a moment when the launch market is more competitive than it has ever been.
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Commercial
New Glenn flew. Now Blue Origin has to prove it can do it again.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket reached orbit on its first attempt — a significant achievement for a company that spent years being compared unfavorably to SpaceX. But a single successful launch is a beginning, not a business. What comes next will define whether New Glenn becomes a serious player.
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Commercial
A startup is building a space station. Haven-1 is closer than most people realize.
Vast Space is developing Haven-1, a small commercial space station aimed at hosting private astronauts and eventually science payloads. SpaceX is launching it. The timeline is aggressive and the company is a newcomer, but the hardware is real and the contracts are signed.
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Commercial
Some things can only be made in zero gravity. A small industry is building the infrastructure to make them.
Microgravity enables manufacturing processes impossible on Earth: near-perfect optical fibers, protein crystals for drug development, organs grown without scaffolding, and alloys that separate under gravity. A nascent commercial sector is building the satellites and ISS platforms to exploit these properties.
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Commercial
Satellites are replaced when they run out of fuel. A nascent industry wants to refuel and repair them instead.
In-space servicing — refueling, repairing, and repositioning satellites — could extend the operational life of billion-dollar space assets by decades. Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicles have already done it commercially. The next generation aims to do it at scale.
