There are, by various estimates, several trillion planets within what is known as the Local Group of galaxies—our closest galaxy neighbors, including our own Milky Way. Many of these planets are within the habitable zone of their stars. So if life finds a way, where are the alien civilizations?

This is the crux of what is known as the Fermi paradox, which posits that if life is fairly common in the Universe, humans should have collected credible evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations by now. People who think about this paradox believe there may be some “filter” that limits or entirely prevents an advanced civilization from sending out probes or even life-bearing spacecraft to nearby stars.

Philip Johnston is someone who thinks a lot about the Fermi paradox. A mathematician and physicist from the United Kingdom, Johnston has gained some notoriety lately in the space community as one of the biggest proponents of orbital data centers. He co-founded Starcloud in 2024 to develop such data centers, and the company is presently valued at $2.3 billion.

Johnston is in the midst of scaling up Starcloud, working through technical issues, and raising hundreds of millions of dollars. So he’s pretty busy. But Johnston also wants to send a mission to the nearest star to our Sun and investigate the Fermi paradox.

On Tuesday, Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1 kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in fewer than 80,000 years. Why? In conversations about the Fermi paradox, Johnston realized such a mission would knock two “filters” off the list: Species won’t want to send spacecraft beyond their home star, or species will find that interstellar transit is too difficult.

The goal was not to run to NASA to try to get it to fund a $1 billion mission or seek to develop a new propulsion technology like the Breakthrough Starshot mission proposed a decade ago. Rather, the Fermi Explorer team wants to use existing technology to do something cheap and fast and launch by 2029.

Twenty years ago Pluto lost its planethood, and I’m partially to blame.

“Blame” is a strange word to use for what seems like a matter of mere semantics; after all, Pluto exists as an intriguing world worthy of study and exploration, regardless of labels. But after two decades in the rearview, Pluto’s demotion still stirs anger and controversy, and many people regard its change in status as a very bad thing.

You might object that your opinion of the moon has no effect on your feelings for Pluto, but equating these two objects is unavoidable for anyone seeking to manufacture a philosophically consistent reason for Pluto’s planethood. The main argument, these days, for why Pluto’s status should be restored boils down to an astrophysical version of what’s best known as “the duck test”: if something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. In Pluto’s case, the idea is that “geophysically” it’s a planet, which simply means it looks like a planet (it’s round!) and acts like a planet (it probably once had active volcanoes, albeit of water!). Earth’s moon—which also has the advantage of being 50 percent larger than Pluto and of having volcanoes that once spewed actual lava instead of mere water—fully deserves planethood by these very same metrics.

SpaceX’s most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn’t over yet.

The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX’s launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship’s life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown.

Numerous onboard sensors and cameras, along with buoys and drones in position at the splashdown zone, have provided important data for SpaceX to assess the performance of the ship’s heat shield after each test flight, so officials accepted the post-flight conflagrations. That day, Starship tipped over and remained intact, surprising just about everyone.

Engineers have reams of data from all 13 test flights of Starship and its giant booster rocket, known as the Super Heavy. But there’s no match for inspecting hardware after returning from space. SpaceX routinely recovers and reuses Falcon 9 booster stages with near-flawless performance. The handful of minor failures with the Falcon 9 have centered on the rocket’s single-use upper stage.

So, getting Starship back in one piece is a boon. A recovery ship towed the spacecraft engine-first several hundred miles across the Indian Ocean to Christmas Island, an Australian territory. SpaceX announced the ship’s arrival just off the coast of Christmas Island on Tuesday.

“A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase,” SpaceX wrote on X.

Astronomers claim to have discovered a new kind of cosmic object, a black hole “star”, which is the size of the entire solar system and glows with a brilliant red light.

The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot in images of the early solar system captured by Nasa’s James Webb space telescope.

The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, billions of light years from Earth. It is thought to have formed 660m years after the big bang, astronomers’ leading theory as to how the universe began.

Measurements of the exotic body found that while it resembles an immense star, it releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The energy output is far closer to that observed from black holes than stars.

“We have found a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star,” said Dr Rohan Naidu at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Soundgarden fans rejoiced.

ULA has confirmed it'll be the last launch of the Atlas V Type 551, but they are looking to phase out Atlas entirely in favor of Vulcan. This may very well be the last ever launch of an Atlas Rocket.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds—a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,300 found so far thanks to NASA missions working in tandem with other observatories. And Roman will primarily find them in underexplored regions of the Milky Way.

Last year, less than a month after being named acting administrator of NASA, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy made an eyebrow-raising announcement to the world: NASA was going to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. As part of strengthening U.S. national security in space, he said, this reactor would be designed, built, flown and delivered to the lunar surface by 2030. To many observers, this declaration sounded wild. Why would you want to put a nuclear reactor on the moon?

The thing is, if America (or any spacefaring nation) wants to establish a permanent presence on the moon—an inhabited station that can operate during the frigid and lengthy lunar night—solar power won’t cut it. Through its Artemis program, which just sent four astronauts on a trip around the moon, NASA wants to transform our planet’s argent companion into a scientific outpost, a mining site and a rocket launchpad pointed at Mars. To do that, nuclear power is the sole option. “It’s the only way we can sustain a lunar base properly long-term,” says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales. It’s no wonder, then, that China and Russia are teaming up to put their own nuclear reactor on the moon by 2035 to electrify what they call the International Lunar Research Station—their planned base on the lunar south pole. Sooner or later, from one nation or another, “nuclear power on the moon will happen,” Middleburgh says. “It’s inevitable.”

Experts questioned both the timing and the scale of the nuclear power plant Duffy is proposing. Placing a reactor capable of powering 80 American households on the lunar south pole—an environment no human has yet set foot in—by 2030 sounds rushed, if not impossible. And the last thing anyone wants is for the U.S. to barrel through the conception, construction, launch and landing of a lunar nuclear reactor. “I think the worst-case scenario might be [that] in the quest to be first we skip important design and safety steps,” says Bhavya Lal, a professor of space policy at the RAND School of Public Policy and former acting chief technologist and associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy at NASA. “It’s good to be first—competition is good—but we need to do it right.”

Since time immemorial, humans gazing up at the moon have asked grand questions. Where did it come from? Why does it wax and wane? Is it made of cheese?

We now have responses to most of these (“a giant impact,” “orbital phases” and “no, sadly,” respectively). But as an international 21st-century lunar race intensifies, one pragmatic query remains: How can you make money on the moon?

Helium-3 is spectacularly useful, and demand for it is soaring. A superlative coolant, helium-3 enables quantum computers to reach their operating temperatures, fractions of a degree above absolute zero. The precious substance is also vital for advanced medical imaging, as well as sniffing out smuggled nuclear material, and holds promise as a clean fuel for future fusion reactors. On terra firma, most of the available supply of helium-3 comes as a by-product of nuclear weaponry via the radioactive decay of tritium, a rare isotope of hydrogen that boosts the power of thermonuclear bombs. This process makes just a few kilograms of helium-3 per year worldwide, and a single kilogram currently costs about $20 million.

But scientists estimate that somewhere on the order of a billion kilograms of helium-3 are lacquered onto the lunar surface. So the moon-based mining of helium-3 could, it seems, someday become a multitrillion-dollar industry.

NASA’s goal of reaching the Moon’s surface as many as 21 times over the next two and a half years will require an overhaul of the agency’s approach to buying lunar landers and success in rectifying the myriad problems that have, so far, caused three of the last four US landing attempts to falter.

It will also require improved oversight of NASA’s industrial base and better management of a supply chain that has often failed to deliver on time.

These landers are separate from NASA’s Human Landing System program, which has contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop and deliver human-rated landers to ferry crews to and from the lunar surface for the agency’s Artemis program. Alongside the crew landers, dozens of robotic and cargo landings will deliver payloads to scout for a future Moon base and demonstrate technologies for larger vehicles, mining and resource utilization, and sustained operations during the two-week-long lunar night.

“Frequent high-mass, low-cost access to the lunar surface” should be the highest priority for the early phase of the Moon base initiative, said Jacki Cortese, vice president of civil space at Blue Origin. This tracks with the roadmap NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman outlined in March, when he announced that the agency will refocus its efforts on building an outpost on the lunar surface, rather than a mini-space station thousands of miles above the Moon.

The fundamentals for high-frequency missions to the lunar surface are in place. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, announced eight years ago this week, has assembled a roster of commercial providers to design and build robotic Moon landers. Through CLPS, NASA has contracted with US companies for 13 missions since 2019. Four of them have launched, and just one has completed a fully successful landing. Four more commercial landers are under construction now for launches in the second half of this year, but as is common in the space industry, their schedules have a history of delays, and some are likely to move into 2027.

After more than 25 years of US astronauts wearing off-the-rack clothes while living in Earth orbit, a company working to launch the world’s first commercial space station has adopted a more custom approach to its crew attire.

Vast has revealed its astronaut flight suit, a two-piece outfit designed to be worn both on and off the planet. The company also certified a custom-Swiss wristwatch for use aboard its upcoming Haven-1 space station.

“Over the last two decades on the International Space Station, astronauts have moved away from wearing flight suits every day,” Drew Feustel, Vast’s lead astronaut and former NASA mission specialist who spent 225 days in space, said in a statement. “The environment has become safer and more like how we work on Earth.”

Feustel contributed to the design of the Vast Astronaut Flight Suit.

“We wanted to honor the tradition and history of aviation in human spaceflight and flight suits themselves,” he said.

GREENBELT, Md.—On Tuesday, NASA invited the press to look at the fully assembled Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now ready to join the ranks of the great observatories in orbit, ahead of its September launch. The Roman Space Telescope (NGRST), named after a key figure in the planning of the Hubble Space Telescope, is notably distinct from hardware like the Hubble and Webb, as it’s designed around a wide-field view and massive imaging system that will allow it to send back 1.4 terabytes of data to Earth every day.

It also has an unusual history that began when NASA’s planning intersected with surplus spy hardware.

In from the cold

Many of the gases in our atmosphere absorb infrared wavelengths, contributing to the greenhouse effect that has helped keep the planet habitable for us. But that effect also makes infrared astronomy from Earth extremely difficult. That’s unfortunate, as a number of important phenomena, from the earliest galaxies to the features of exoplanet atmospheres, are only detectable at infrared wavelengths. There have been a number of infrared-specific telescopes put into space, notably the Spitzer, one of the original suite of Great Observatories.

But those telescopes were largely designed to provide high-resolution imaging of a tiny slice of the sky. There was also a call for a survey telescope capable of imaging large swaths of the sky simultaneously. In the infrared, this could do everything from revealing the large-scale structure of the early Universe to cataloging far more of the asteroids orbiting in Earth’s vicinity. NASA eventually adopted the idea as a priority in the form of WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

After several tests of unusual “nesting doll” satellites in low-Earth orbit, Russia is now fielding operational anti-satellite weapons with valuable US government satellites in their crosshairs, the four-star general leading US Space Command said this week.

Gen. Stephen Whiting didn’t name the system, but he was almost certainly referring to a Russian military program named Nivelir, which has launched four satellites shadowing US spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office in low-Earth orbit. After reaching orbit, the Nivelir satellites have released smaller ships to start their own maneuvers, and at least one of those lobbed a mystery object at high velocity during a test in 2020. US analysts concluded this was a projectile that could be fired at another satellite.

US officials have compared the Nivelir architecture to a Matryoshka doll, or a Russian nesting doll, with an outer shell concealing smaller, unknown figures inside.

The newest suspected Nivelir satellite was launched last May from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Its launch was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation spun Plesetsk underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole-class optical spy satellite. Civilian missions heading to the International Space Station launch with similarly precise timing, down to the second, to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

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