All articles
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Science & Discovery
The asteroid that wasn't: 1998 SH2 outed as an active comet
A NASA/JPL-led study in Nature Astronomy has reclassified near-Earth object 1998 SH2 as an active comet — now P/1998 SH2 — after tiny outgassing-driven accelerations and a faint tail gave it away during a 2025 close pass.
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Astronomy
Beta Pictoris d: The Faintest Exoplanet Ever Directly Imaged From Earth
Astronomers pulled a third giant planet, Beta Pictoris d, out of 11 years of VLT data and confirmed it with JWST — at ~2.4 Jupiter masses and 100x fainter than Beta Pic b, it's the faintest planet ever directly imaged from the ground.
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Military Space
A CubeSat That Sniffs for Neutrons: The First Peer-Reviewed Way to Catch a Nuke Hiding in Orbit
MIT physicist Areg Danagoulian's new Nature paper describes a 9U CubeSat that hunts spallation neutrons from fissile material, offering the first peer-reviewed method to detect thermonuclear warheads secretly parked in Earth orbit.
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Missions
NASA Bolts Starlink Lasers to Orion as Artemis III Becomes a Docking Rehearsal
NASA has tapped SpaceX to mount two Starlink mini laser terminals on Orion for Artemis III, beaming 4K docking-test footage to Houston over infrared light as the mission is reframed into a 2027 low-Earth-orbit rehearsal of crewed lander rendezvous ahead of a 2028 Moon landing.
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NASA & Agencies
Serbia Signs the Artemis Accords, Becoming the 69th Nation — and the Latest to Straddle Two Rival Lunar Camps
Serbia became the 69th Artemis Accords signatory on July 16, 2026, and the 10th nation to join this year — while also holding membership in China's rival lunar station program, a growing pattern of dual participation.
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Military Space
Saltzman's Exit Warning: Orbital Mechanics Will Drag Everyone Into a Space War
In his farewell address as Chief of Space Operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman warned that orbital mechanics gives no nation an opt-out from a war in space — and that the only real deterrent is a force visibly able to win one.
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Astronomy
Hunting for Alien Industry in the Ashes of Dead Stars
A team led by Beijing Normal University's Bo-Lun Huang tested 697 white dwarf abundance records against 3,493 meteorite analyses, asking whether the debris raining onto dead stars carries the chemical signature of refined metal. It doesn't — but the framework they built to ask is the real result.
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Missions
Two Landers, Two Philosophies: Inside the Artemis III Rehearsal's Engineering Split
NASA's July 15 breakdown of the 2027 Artemis III demo reveals how far apart SpaceX and Blue Origin's test articles are: astronauts will open the hatch on Blue Moon Mark 2, but never set foot inside a 171-foot Starship that docks nose-first with a bolted-on docking system and no crew cabin.
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Science & Discovery
The Meteorite That Crashed Through a New Jersey Roof Was Carrying Alien Amino Acids
Two years to the day after a fireball rattled New York City and a two-pound rock punched through a Hillsborough, NJ roof, scientists report the meteorite preserves sodium-carbonate salts and extraterrestrial amino acids brewed in briny fluids on a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid.
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Commercial
The 3D-Printed Washing Machine Taking On the Geostationary Giants
SWISSto12 raised $70 million on July 16 to scale HummingSat, a 3D-printed, washing-machine-sized GEO satellite — backed by $500M in contracts, $140M in 2025 revenue, orders from SES and Intelsat, and 73 million euros of ESA member-state money betting on European space sovereignty.
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Military Space
Half the Constellation: SDA Resumes Tranche 1 Satellite Launches After Nine-Month Pause
SDA launched 21 more York-built data-relay satellites after a nine-month pause to fix on-orbit software and hardware issues, bringing half of its 126-satellite Tranche 1 Transport Layer into orbit even as GAO warns the program may not deliver capability on schedule.
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Science & Discovery
The Ceiling Was an Illusion: NASA-Led Study Says Solar Storms Could Hit Earth Harder Than We Thought
A NASA-led analysis of over a million solar wind measurements finds the long-assumed "saturation" limit on geomagnetic storm intensity is a statistical artifact, not a real ceiling — meaning the worst space weather could still be ahead of us.
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