All articles
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Missions
NASA Bets $3.2 Million on 18 Wild Ideas, From Sun-Dimming Dust Clouds to Lava-Tube Robots
NASA's NIAC program handed 18 teams up to $175,000 each to spend nine months proving out concepts ranging from a controllable sun-dimming dust cloud to hovering robots for lunar lava tubes.
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Commercial
Caltech and a JPL Spinoff Just Patented the Cooling Trick Space Data Centers Need
Sophia Space and Caltech won a U.S. patent for TILE, a modular passively-cooled computing panel meant to let data centers run in orbit, with an on-orbit demo planned for 2027.
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Science & Discovery
A New Theory Explains How Fast Star-Forming Gas Actually Lives and Dies
A University of Maryland-led simulation study finds that individual clumps of star-forming gas survive for as little as 400,000 years, reframing how astronomers should read galaxy-scale star formation data.
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NASA & Agencies
Five University Teams Are Flying Balloons Into an Eclipse's Shadow for NASA
NASA has set its coverage plan for the August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain, while five NASA-funded university teams launch roughly 80 balloons into the eclipse shadow to study how the atmosphere reacts when the Moon briefly cuts off the Sun.
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Commercial
FAA Wants to Waive 13 Environmental Laws to Speed Up Rocket Launch Licenses
The FAA's new proposed rule would let it bypass NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and 11 other statutes when licensing commercial rocket launches — the biggest shake-up of launch environmental oversight since 2021.
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Military Space
GAO: Space Force Doesn't Know How Many Guardians It Actually Needs
A new GAO report finds the Space Force filled only 75% of its identified FY2025 positions and has no standardized way to calculate how many Guardians it actually requires — a gap opening just as the service plans to roughly double in size.
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Astronomy
Hubble Finds Andromeda's Star Formation Has Dropped 80% in 500 Million Years
A new Hubble-based study mapping 200 million stars across Andromeda shows its star-formation rate has fallen 80% in 500 million years, with the steepest drop in just the last 40 million.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA Astronaut, Two Cosmonauts Land in Kazakhstan After 241-Day Mission
Soyuz MS-28 parachuted onto the Kazakh steppe on July 26, closing out a 241-day Expedition 73/74 stint that carried NASA's Chris Williams and two Roscosmos cosmonauts more than 102 million miles around Earth.
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Stargazing
Full Moon to Wash Out Peak of Delta Aquariid–Alpha Capricornid Double Meteor Shower
A nearly full moon will drown out most of the Southern Delta Aquariids' July 28-29 peak, but the slower, brighter Alpha Capricornid fireballs that follow on July 30-31 should still cut through the glare.
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Commercial
Starship Flight 13 Deploys First Operational Starlinks, but Booster Splashdown Gets Rough
SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 delivered 20 production Starlink satellites and an in-space Raptor relight, but Super Heavy limped to a hard splashdown on just five of 13 engines.
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Astronomy
The Sun Fired Two Eruptions at Once, and One Just Missed Us
A central-meridian filament blast and a far-side prominence erupted in near-perfect sync on July 28, while AR4494 kept flaring and a G1 storm carried over from an incoming CME due July 30.
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Science & Discovery
A Black Hole Wandered 30,000 Light-Years From Home — Then It Ate a Star
NASA's Swift Observatory and a UNC-Chapel Hill team caught a roughly million-solar-mass black hole shredding a star far outside its galaxy's core — the farthest such offset ever seen, and evidence that black holes can go wandering after galactic mergers.
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