The service awarded other transaction authority (OTA) agreements — worth up to a combined $3.2 billion — to the vendors in late 2025 and early 2026, according to a Space Systems Command press release. Under the contracts, the companies will develop prototypes of a space-based architecture that can shoot down enemy missiles after they’re launched.

The companies that received OTAs are Anduril, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly and Turion Space Corp.

The twelve companies have very different capabilities, suggesting the Space Force is hoping to get a lot of different ideas and proposals that will not only give it options but could also provide it multiple methods for destroying in-coming missiles.

I have embedded video of the explosion below.

The remaining infrastructure at the site—including the assembly and testing complex, railway lines, liquid oxygen storage facilities, and fueling systems—will be transferred to MaiaSpace, a French startup affiliated with Arianespace. The company plans to reuse up to 80% of the existing infrastructure for its own launch vehicle program.

MaiaSpace is not “affliated with Arianespace.” It is a wholly owned subsidiary of ArianeGroup, the company that makes the much larger rocket Ariane-6. The company hopes MaiaSpace’s smaller Maia rocket can capture some of the smallsat business presently owned by Rocket Lab and SpaceX.

The Russians had almost a dozen launches scheduled from this launchpad, worth more than a billion dollars in revenue, when Putin decided to invade the Ukraine in 2022. Russia immediately became a pariah to the rest of the work. That revenue instantly vanished and the companies found other launch providers.

Europe meanwhile gave control of French Guiana back to France, which owns it. France in turn has now been leasing out the unused launchpads there to new rocket startups. Though some pie-in-the-sky academics lobbied to preserve the Soyuz launchpad for “historical reasons”, the French had no desire to do so. Better to make money.

The end of an era of European-Russian space cooperation.

On April 24, 2026, the former launch pad for Russian Soyuz-ST rockets at the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) in Kourou, French Guiana, was demolished as planned.

Cooperation with the Russian terrorist regime ended with the… pic.twitter.com/3fWrDFoYh0

— Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 (@jurgen_nauditt) April 25, 2026

In an unexpected twist, the opening of the European HQ was eventually announced on 15 April 2026, not by the company but by Luxembourg Economy Minister Lex Delles – and not at the Grand Duchy office, but on his visit to the 41st annual Space Symposium, held in Colorado Springs in the US.

Blue Origin’s office on the capital’s Avenue de la Liberté had, in fact, opened right on schedule, Tim Collins, the company’s Vice- President of Global Operations and Supply Chain, told the Luxembourg Times in interview on Wednesday.

…Asked why Blue Origin declined to confirm its opening schedule until April, despite media follow-up requests, Collins said there was no cover-up: the company merely wanted to have something to show off before officially opening. The process has been roughly on schedule throughout, he stressed.

The office will work with Blue Origin’s European customers as well as manage its foreign supply chain, not just in European but globally.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. The state-run press did add this about the payloads:

These satellites will be mainly used to carry out technology tests and verifications, including direct satellite-to-phone broadband connectivity and space-ground network integration.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

49 SpaceX
22 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 39.

My heart be still! The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced that a full-sized model of its Space Rider reusable capsule is now ready for landing drop tests from a helicopter.

The avionics – Space Rider’s ‘brain’ – were installed in the second week of March. This computer hosts the Guidance, Navigation and Control algorithms that will steer the parafoil, adapting to the wind – including any gusts– to guide Space Rider to a soft landing.

Roughly the size of a mini-van, the drop-test model is a full-size stand-in for the 4.6-m long reentry module, Space Rider lands on skis with the landing gear permanently open on this model as the mechanism is not part of the drop test.

To get an idea how unserious ESA is, we need to review this project’s overall schedule. This reusable capsule concept — which appears to be a variation of either Varda’s returnable capsule or Boeing’s X-37B — was first tested by ESA in 2015. By 2017 the agency was promising it would be flying commercially by 2025. A decade later and they have not yet begun testing a full scale spacecraft.

And the development pace now is glacial. Last summer ESA did helicopter drop tests of just the “brain” and parafoil. It is now going to do those drop tests again, a year later, with this full scale model. Expect another year to pass — at a minimum — before it tries another set of helicopter drop tests, this time with the first actual Space Rider capsule.

At this pace, Space Rider might fly by 2030, maybe. In the meantime, expect at least a half dozen private capsules to fly commercially, for profit. Following Varda’s success investment capital has poured into this industry. All will go from a blank sheet of paper to a flight model in less than five years.

And even if ESA finally gets Space Rider operational, it has established some very complex rules about who can use it commercially, rules so complex I predict few will be interested.

Russia’s state-run press released almost no information about this launch, partly because of its military nature but also because it has discovered recently that the Plesetsk spaceport is within range of Ukrainian drones, with one attack causing a launch to be scrubbed.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

49 SpaceX
21 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 38.

The agency said in a statement that Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud will come to China soon as reserve astronauts for training. After completing all training and evaluations, one of them will participate in a space mission as a payload specialist, becoming the first foreign astronaut onboard the Tiangong space station.

This flight is part of Pakistan’s partnership with China in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project to build a lunar base, created by China to counter the U.S.’s Artemis Accords alliance. Pakistan will also fly a small demo rover on China’s Chang’e-8 unmanned lunar mission, scheduled presently for a 2029 launch.

While the American alliance has now signed 63 nations covering most of the world’s major nations, only thirteen nations and about eleven eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies — mostly third world — have joined China.

This Chinese international manned mission mirrors largely what the Soviets would do during the Cold War, flying someone from one of its captured countries to garner international propaganda points. Do not expect these astronauts to do much concrete work. During the Soviet era, the Russians would joke that these foreign astronauts would all get “red hands” disease, caused whenever they tried to touch anything and a Russian astronaut would then slap their hands, saying firmly “Don’t touch that!”

The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

49 SpaceX
21 China
6 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 37.

Because all of JAXA’s rockets are presently grounded due to technical failures, Japan’s space agency has had to turn to Rocket Lab. In fact, these eight satellites were originally supposed to launch on JAXA’s Epsilon-S rocket, which remains grounded after an explosion during a static fire test. There have been no updates on the status of Epsilon-S since December 2024.

Rocket Lab was also supposed to do a suborbital hypersonic test flight yesterday out of Wallops Island in Virginia, using the first stage of Election in its HASTE suborbital configuration. As this is a test for the War Department, little information is generally released. This video from a distance confirms the launch apparently took place, but whether it was a success or not remains unknown. That Rocket Lab’s announcers did not tout its success either before or after today’s JAXA launch — as they have routinely done in the past — suggests something might have gone wrong, though this too is pure speculation.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

48 SpaceX
21 China
6 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 48 to 37.

Cool image time! The panorama above, created from three pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity (see here, here, and here), takes a look at a small relatively fresh crater on the slopes of Mount Sharp. From an update from the rover’s science team yesterday:

At the beginning of the week, Curiosity arrived right on target on the rim of the 10-meter (33 feet) “Antofagasta” crater. The crater looked fresh and deep as we had hoped with a nice well-defined rim that didn’t look too eroded, but the bottom of it turned out to be filled with dark rippled sandy material that covered up the most interesting rock layers. There were a few rock exposures just above the sand cover that seemed like they might have been deep enough to have been sheltered from space radiation between the time their sediments were deposited and the crater-forming impact, but reaching them from the rim would have put the rover at such an awkward angle that we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the sample to the instruments.

Click for interactive map.

It’s possible that we might have been able to get into a better position by instead placing the rover on the rippled crater fill, but the chance that the rover could get stuck in all that sand made it much too high a risk. We also looked at the nearby blocks in case they could have been ejecta from the crater, but since all the rocks visible in the crater wall looked very similar to each other, there wasn’t a good way to tell which ejecta blocks might have come from the deeper layers of the crater. Because of this, the team decided against attempting to drill in or around the crater.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s location when the pictures above were taken. The yellow lines roughly indicate the area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line marks the future planned route, the white dotted line the rover’s actual travels.

Note the flat rocks in the foreground of the panorama, all part of the crater’s rim. Each looks like a large flat paving stone that was very precisely shattered into numerous tiny pieces, all about the same size. Very strange. On Earth you’d assume some craftsman had laid these small pieces down like tiles, but of course, that couldn’t have happened on Mars.

The European startup Atmos announced today that it has raised an additional €25.7 million [$30 million] as part of its ongoing commercial program to develop its Phoenix orbital research capsules that will fly in space for several months — where products can be produced in weightlessness — and then return those products safely to Earth.

The funding will support an initial three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 fleet, the launch of ATMOS WORKS for governmental and defence customers, and development of PHOENIX 3, the company’s next-generation orbital return vehicle.

The round is co-led by Balnord and Expansion, and joined by Keen Defence and Security. The European Innovation Council (EIC) participates through its Accelerator programme via blended financing, combining grant and equity components. Additional investors include OTB Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), APEX Ventures, Seraphim, Faber, E2MC, Kirch Ventures, Lennertz & Co., Mätch VC, MBG Baden-Württemberg, and Tech Horizons.

Since the American company Varda successfully demonstrated there was money to be made flying these small recoverable capsules, investment capital has poured into this industry. In the U.S. Varda, Inversion Space, and Sierra Space, have raised money for doing such orbital work. In Europe, The Exploration Company in France, Atmos in Germany, PLD in Spain, Genesis in Croatia, and Space Cargo in Luxembourg have also raised capital.

At this moment, however, only Varda has successfully launched and recovered a capsule.

In a statement about its first-quarter financial results, the company said its Space Systems division recorded a $71 million “unfavorable adjustment” to earnings at completion on its GEM 63XL booster “associated with a launch anomaly that occurred during the first quarter.”

The GEM 63XL solid-fuel booster is used on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. On a Feb. 12 launch, one of four boosters shed debris about 65 seconds after liftoff. The “observation,” as ULA termed it initially, did not affect the success of the USSF-87 mission, placing its payload into its planned geosynchronous orbit.

ULA later called the incident a “significant performance anomaly” with the booster that it would investigate before returning Vulcan to flight. The vehicle has not launched since then.

A similar incidence took place during an earlier Vulcan launch, with the rocket’s core stage and the remaining undamaged boosters getting the payload into the proper orbit. The continuing problem however has now grounded Vulcan, though the military is considering using it for some small payload launches, without the GEM strap-on boosters.

As a result, the Pentagon has already shifted several launches from ULA to SpaceX, costing ULA a significant amount of revenue. In addition, Vulcan’s grounding will impact the launch of Amazon’s Leo internet constellation, which had a major contract with ULA to get its Leo satellites into orbit.

The failure of the eighth H3 rocket was likely caused by an adhesion problem in the satellite mounting structure, which led it to break apart during flight, according to an investigation by JAXA. Similar issues were found in other units, prompting the space agency to fix them so the components can maintain their structural integrity.

In the June launch, a dummy satellite will be mounted on the test vehicle to collect data and verify the effectiveness of the measures. For future launches of actual satellites or space probes, JAXA plans to review the mounting structure design to reduce the risk of failure.

In other words, the method for attaching the payload to the rocket at some points failed, so that the satellite separated prematurely. The June launch will be to test a new mounting system.

Posting has been light the last few days as I deal with recovery from knee surgery.

Then tonight SpaceX launched a GPS satellite for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The first stage completed its 7th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. That drone ship, “Just read the instructions,” is now being shifted to support Starship operations, and will no longer be used for Falcon 9, after supporting 155 first stage landings. What it will do in connection with Starship has not been made clear. The two fairing halves completed their 2nd and 3rd flights respectively.

The Space Force had originally intended to launch this satellite on a ULA Vulcan rocket, but a month ago it shifted the contract to SpaceX because of the nozzle problem that has plagued two different ULA Vulcan launches. Because of this shift, the time from contract award to launch was the quickest by SpaceX for the Space Force.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

48 SpaceX
21 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 48 to 36.

According to NASA’s inspector general’s report today [pdf] on the state of NASA’s effort to create new spacesuits for use by its astronauts on future space stations as well as in its Artemis lunar program, the planned schedules for the lunar landing and those stations are threatened because the agency presently has only one contractor, Axiom, building new suits, and has not established any spacesuit standardization rules should it want to issue contracts to others. From the report’s conclusion:

While NASA is taking steps to mitigate schedule risk, it must also contend with the unique risks inherent to a single-provider environment until future competition is introduced. … If Axiom cannot satisfy its contractual requirements in a timely or cost-effective manner, then NASA could be forced to continue using the problematic EMUs throughout the life of the ISS and significantly adjust its lunar plans. [EMUs are the complex suits presently used on ISS, and would not work well for any lunar landing mission.]

While xEVAS [the new suit concept] is flexible enough to allow for additional providers, doing so may not help the Agency meet its more immediate Artemis goals. Critically, NASA must address existing design and safety risks resulting from the lack of standard requirements for spacesuits to be compatible with various lunar spacecraft and assets.

As shown by the photo above, the development of Axiom’s spacesuit has been proceeding, and seems likely to be available for next year’s Artemis-3 Earth orbit test mission. At the same time, it is still behind schedule, a fact that has been mitigated because NASA’s entire Artemis program is equally behind schedule.

The report lists three commercial companies that might be able to provide alternative suits, and thus some redundancy, as shown by the image below.


SpaceX’s suits, while already tested during a spacewalk (by NASA’s own administrator Jared Isaacman), would need major upgrades, as they get their power and oxygen through an umbilical cable. They are not capable yet of operating independently.

ILC Dover’s suit is based on extensive past work, so it is possible it could be developed quickly.

The most interesting of these three options is the design being proposed by Genesis. Rather than a spacesuit, it is a pod similar to the pod seen in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Designed as a less complex, more efficient, and safer alternative to traditional spacesuits, this spacecraft would not require an airlock, could be piloted by crew in the vehicle or teleoperated from the ISS, and would utilize the same pressure as the Station—avoiding the need for lengthy prebreathe processes astronauts must perform prior to using EMUs.

Whether such a single-person spacecraft would work either on the Moon or to do delicate repair or installation work on future space stations remains unclear. I suspect its usefullness will be limited, but who knows?

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. It shows a small section of the Trifid Nebula, located about 5,000 light years away.

This location has been imaged numerous times in the past by Hubble. The area shown illustrates some fundamental aspects of stellar and nebula formation. The dark area in the lower right is a thick dust cloud. Several energetic O and B supermassive stars are out of view at the top. The radiation from these stars (indicated by the blue), is hitting that dust cloud and literally destroying it. It appears that the foreground “horn” exists because a larger object is blocking the radiation, allowing dust to survive in the background.

I have no explanation for the background “horn”.

This new image was taken in parallel with an image of the entire Trifid Nebula, taken by the new Rubin Telescope in Chile. Though Rubin cannot see with the same resolution as Hubble, its image is quite worthwhile viewing.

Blue Origin in the early morning hours today successfully completed the third launch of its New Glenn rocket, lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida and placing in orbit AST SpaceMobile’s Bluebird-7 cellphone satellite. For Blue Origin, this launch was the first for a commercial outside customer, a significant step forward for the company, which has sadly earned a reputation for operating too slowly.

Unfortunately, according to an update from Blue Origin the satellite was deployed but in an “off nominal orbit.” An update just posted by AST states the satellite is a loss and is being de-orbited. This satellite would have been the seventh in AST SpaceMobile’s 45-60 satellite constellation designed to act as cell towers in space. AST hopes to have at least half the constellation in orbit by the end of ’26. Several major phone companies, such as AT&T, Verizon, and Vodaphone in Europe, have already signed on.

For Blue Origin, the launch wasn’t a total failure. The rocket’s first stage had flown in November 2025 on the second New Glenn flight, and was refitted (with a new set of engines) to fly again on this flight, the rocket’s third. It not only did its job, getting the upper stage into space, it successfully landed for the second time on New Glenn’s barge in the Atlantic. This fast reuse and successful landing should do a great deal to improve the company’s slow reputation. Unfortunately, the failure to deliver the customer’s satellite will counter that most significantly.

As for Blue Origin, this was its first launch in 2026, and it was also unsuccessful. The leader board for the 2026 launch race remains unchanged:

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

46 SpaceX
21 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 46 to 36.

The Council of the European Union (EU) in Brussels at the end of March released [pdf] a revised draft of its proposed Space Act that would impose a single regulatory framework for all space activities across the entire EU.

I have just finished reading this odious 157-page monstrosity, and I can say without question if passed it will not only isolate Europe from all international space commercial activity, it will squelch any possibility that Europe will develop its own space industry.

The first draft of the law, first put forth in 2025, was routinely blasted by American officials, by think tanks in and out of Europe, and by industry representatives. It imposed byzantine regulations on Europe’s space industry while also demanding that non-European companies be required to follow these rules as well, national sovereignty be damned.

The newly released draft does the same, but now does so in a manner that is somewhat vague and unclear.

That lack of clarity includes what is required to comply with the regulations. “There are a lot of things where it says you need to do X. What counts as X? Who knows,” said Gabriel Swiney, director of the Office of Space Commerce’s policy, advocacy and international division. “It will probably be determined at some point by some European committee or standards body.”

“Without regulatory clarity with what the regulatory picture should be, it’s really going to have a stifling effect on what industry is striving to do,” said Janna Lewis, senior vice president of policy and general counsel for Astroscale U.S.

The first draft was delayed and apparently rejected because the member nations of the EU opposed it. It appears this new version, having done nothing to ease their concerns, might already be on its way to the dead letter office.

We shall see. If there is anything dear to the hearts of the EU bureaucrats in Brussels, it is imposing insane regulations on others. It appears those bureaucrats haven’t given up — despite opposition by numerous European governments — and are working hard to win that right in space.

Only seven months after NASA awarded the satellite repair startup Katalyst the contract to save the Gehrels-Swift space telescope, the company has delivered the completed LINK spacecraft to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for final ground testing.

Katalyst will move forward with LINK’s vibration and thermal tests using NASA Goddard’s in-house facilities in the coming weeks before installation into Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Gehrels-Swift has been one of NASA’s most productive space telescopes. Unfortunately its orbit is decaying and if nothing is done to raise that orbit it will burn up in the atmosphere in 2029 or so. To extend this timeline engineers have stopped almost all science work in February.

Katalyst hopes to launch LINK as soon as later this year. It was able to get it built so quickly because it was already under construction as the company’s first demo of its repair technology. When NASA put out a bid for boosting Swift, the company shifted gears and reconfigured LINK for this mission.

If successfully, the achievement will be a major coup for this startup.

Due to the continuing and expected decline in power, engineers have now shut down another instrument on Voyager-1 in the hope of keeping the spacecraft operating for just a few more years.

On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity’s first interstellar explorer going.

The LECP has been operating almost without interruption since Voyager 1 launched in 1977 — almost 49 years. It measures low-energy charged particles, including ions, electrons, and cosmic rays originating from our solar system and galaxy.

…The choice of which instrument to turn off next wasn’t made in the heat of the moment. Years ago, the Voyager science and engineering teams sat down together and agreed on the order in which they would shut off parts of the spacecraft while ensuring the mission can continue to conduct its unique science. Of the 10 identical sets of instruments that each spacecraft carries, seven have been shut off so far. For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.

Both spacecraft now have only three operating science instruments. Engineers hope a major reboot on both spacecraft planned later this year might make each operate more efficiently, allowing both to survive maybe until 2030. At a minimum the hope is to make them last until 2027, which would the fiftieth anniversary of their launch.

The bottom line remains: the nuclear power source on board both is running down. The goal now is less gathering science data and more engineering: How long can we keep these spacecraft alive, at the very outskirts of our solar system?

At a conference event this week officials from three of the five American space station startups expressed strong disagreement with NASA’s new space station plan.

The new plan would have NASA build and launch its own new core module, dock it with ISS, and have the new stations attach their first modules to it prior to flying freely. NASA proposed this plan because it does not believe there is enough market to sustain the stations independently and NASA doesn’t have the budget to fully fund them.

The officials repeatedly disagreed about the market issue.

“We believe not only we can be ready by 2030” when the International Space Station is slated to be retired, “but we also believe that we can be profitable on the current market, not waiting for the future market we all will develop and will be successful at,” said Max Haot, CEO of Vast [building the Haven-1 and Haven-2 stations].

…Haot and executives from Axiom Space and Starlab Space said their responses to NASA’s request for information — which were due April 8 — show otherwise. “We put in 390 pages of independent analysis, research studies, datas, contracts, those types of things,” said Marshall Smith, CEO of Starlab Space, which is targeting 2029 for its station to be on orbit. “We’re being very clear and what we can do and how that works.”

One prominent revenue stream the panelists pointed to is other space agencies and nations eager to send their astronauts and payloads to space. “We’ve flown 12 people to space that paid us money to do that,” said Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space, referring to the four private astronaut missions it’s conducted to ISS. “We’ve flown 166 payloads today. All of those are paying payloads that generate revenue for the company.” The Texas company plans to begin operating in 2028 when its first two station modules are slated to be in orbit, then gradually grow the station to five modules.

The officials also said the core module idea would actually slow things down. NASA would have to first build and launch it, and would be starting from scratch to do so. It takes years to build such a thing, and it will certainly not be ready by 2030, when ISS is presently supposed to be retired. Moreover, forcing them to dock to this module would force them all to completely change their own plans, something they all find counter-productive.

In announcing NASA’s core module plan, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman also stated that he was open to industry feedback. I suspect that his core module proposal is going to die, and be replaced with the more direct transition from ISS to these private stations, the approach these companies favor.

I should add that the three startups that spoke up at this conference are also the three that are in the lead to build their stations, according to my rankings below. As far as I can tell, they are all tied for first place, with their station development very robust and well financed.

• Haven-1 and Haven-2, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company plans to launch its single module Haven-1 demo station in 2027 for a three-year period during which it will be occupied by at least four 2-week-long manned missions. It also plans a manned mission to ISS in ’28. The company is already testing an unmanned small demo module in orbit. It has also made preliminary deals with Colombia, Uzbekistan, Japan, and the Maldives for possible astronaut flights to Haven-1. It has also raised more than a billion in cash for this work.
• Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched four tourist flights to ISS, with the fourth carrying government passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. A fifth mission is now planned for ’27. The company has now raised $450 million in private investment capital. The development of its first two modules has been proceeding, though the first module launch is now delayed until 2028. It has also signed Redwire to build that module’s solar panels.
• Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with extensive partnership agreements with the European Space Agency, Mitsubishi, and others. Though no construction has yet begun on its NASA-approved design, it has raised $383 million in a public stock offering, the $217.5 million provided by NASA, and an unstated amount from private capital. It has also begun signing up station customers, as well as a number of companies to build the station’s hardware. It also plans a mission to ISS in ’28.
• Thunderbird, proposed by the startup Max Space. It is building a smaller demo test station to launch in ’27 on a Falcon 9 rocket, and has begun work on its manufacturing facility at Kennedy in Florida. Its management includes one former NASA astronaut and one former member of the Bigelow space station team that built the first private orbiting inflatable modules, Genesis-1, Genesis-2, and BEAM (still operating on ISS).
• Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. This station looks increasingly dead in the water. Blue Origin has built almost nothing, as seems normal for this company. And while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, its reputation is soured by its failure in getting its Dream Chaser cargo mini-shuttle launched to ISS.

Next, China placed what it claimed was a “high-precision greenhouse gas detection” satellite into orbit, its Long March 4C rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. China’s state-run press provided no other information. Nor did it indicate where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

46 SpaceX
21 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 46 to 36.

Cool image time! In comparing images of one location on Mars taken a half century apart, scientists using Europe’s Mars Express orbiter have discovered that the dark ash covering this region has shifted south by about 200 miles.

The two images above show the change, with a Viking orbiter image taken sometime in 1976 on the left and the Mars Express image taken in 2026 on the right. Both images have been enhanced to match each other, with the white box marking an area seen in close-up by Mars Express.

The overview map to the right provides the context. This region is inside Utopia Basin, one of the largest ancient impact basins on Mars, thought to have been formed by an impact that occurred a little more than four billion years ago. Much of Mars’ dark volcanic dust is thought to come from the Medusae Fossae Formation, a gigantic volcanic ash field the size of India and located on the other side of the planet, in between all of the red planet’s largest volcanoes. Over the eons that ash has gotten distributed across the globe.

In this case, it not only covers large areas of Utopia Basin, but over a half century the prevailing winds in the thin Martian atmosphere has been enough to shift the edge of this particular ash field south by 200 miles.

India’s space agency ISRO today released its annual Space Situational Report, describing the collision possibilities that now exist due to the large increase in orbiting objects. According to this report, in 2025 ISRO did 20 maneuvers to avoid collisions in space.

More than 150,000 alerts issued by the Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) of USSPACECOM for ISRO’s Earth orbiting satellites were analysed using more accurate orbital data from operational flight dynamics. There were 4 collision avoidance maneuvers (CAM) for GEO [geosynchronous orbits], while 14 CAMs, including one for NISAR [A NASA/ISRO radar telescope], which is designated as Risk Mitigation Maneuver in NASA terminology, were performed for LEO [low Earth orbiting] satellites. Wherever feasible, collision avoidance requirements were met by adjusting orbit maintenance maneuvers to avoid exclusive CAMs.

In addition, ISRO had to twice shift the orbit of its Chandayaan-2 lunar orbiter because of an orbital conflict with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

The report has a lot more interesting details, as ISRO is also trying to increase its ability to track everything in orbit, rather than rely on data from the American military or American commercial tracking companies, which has been the policy in the past.

The long-delayed Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands in Great Britain appears to now face two new problems that could block future launches, one regulatory and the second financial.

First the financial issue: The spaceport, which has lost about $7 million in both ’23 and ’24, appears to be in technical default of a loan of a bit more than $14.3 million. In this case, the lender is willing to ignore the technical issue, assuming the spaceport meets certain conditions presently being negotiated.

The regulatory issue however is more serious, and could block the spaceport’s expected first launch later this year by the rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg.

Despite claiming to be ready for launch, the spaceport has also been subject of a formal complaint to the SIC [Shetland Islands Council] over allegations that the facility has not yet been granted a completion certificate or approval for occupation. The complaint alleges that the fire detection and alarm systems appear not to have been installed and that the premises may be in use without adequate fire precautions. It asks the council to confirm whether the premises has been subject to regulatory oversight and whether it has undertaken an inspection of the site.

The SIC said in response: “Concerns have been raised with the council and these are being looked at by our building standards service. A site inspection is scheduled this week as part of the live building warrant process, including to establish the current position in relation to the building on the site that falls within the council’s building standards remit. Any further action will be considered in light of the findings of that inspection.”

In other words, if the local council finds the fire detection and alarm systems not installed and within its regulatory responsibility, it will deny Saxavord its launch permit.

Meanwhile, the spaceport has been trying for years to get other rocket companies interested in using Saxavord, to no avail. Rocket startups have enough difficulties. They quite rightly don’t need the added delays caused by the UK’s red tape, delays that contributed to the bankruptcy of two different rocket startups. For example, most of the regulatory delays — lasting years — have initially come from a variety of national agencies, with Great Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority leading the way. This new issue is local, an additional bureaucratic layer that must be satisfied.

The space station startup Vast yesterday unveiled its proposed Large Docking Adapter, designed to provide a docking port more than three times wider than the standard space station ports presently used on ISS.

The image to the right provides an clear comparison. The two smaller ports on the left are presently used on ISS. Vast’s new port is on the right.

Vast, the company developing next-generation space stations, announced today at the 41st Space Symposium the Large Docking Adapter, including its current development, its availability for purchase, and Vast’s plans to open-source its interface.

Future space stations will use larger modules, have greater overall mass, and dock with a new generation of bigger crewed vehicles. New docking standards and universal hardware are required for the future generation of space vehicles and habitats. The Large Docking Adapter is engineered to support higher mass and increased structural demands while enabling varying types of modules and vehicles to dock together. By open-sourcing the interface, slated for May 2026, Vast is intending to encourage industry-wide collaboration and accelerate the development of interoperable space systems.

Animations of the adapter at this Vast website suggest strongly that the company wants to encourage SpaceX to use the adapter on Starship. Since the company is releasing the design as open-source, it also wants everyone to use it as the standard.

Such a port could also be used on a variety of other spacecraft designs presently under development, and if used would enhance their capabilities significantly.

NASA today announced that it has awarded Voyager Technologies a slot to fly a tourist mission to ISS in 2028.

The mission, named VOYG-1, is expected to spend as many as 14 days aboard the space station. A specific launch date will depend on overall spacecraft traffic at the orbital outpost and other planning considerations.

Voyager will submit four proposed crew members to NASA and its international partners for review. Once approved and confirmed, they will train with NASA, international partners, and the launch provider for their flight.

Voyager is the lead company in the consortium that is building the Starlab station, a single very large module to be launched on SpaceX’s Starship.

At this moment three of the five commercial stations that are developing private space stations — Axiom, Vast, and Voyager — now have deals to fly such missions to ISS. The two remaining likely didn’t pass muster with NASA, for different reasons. Max Space is a late comer to this competition, only declaring that it is building its own station this year. Orbital Reef, led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space, is apparently a dead project, with neither company doing anything to sell its project for the past year or so.

In my rankings below of the five American commercial space stations presently in development, the first three are essentially tied at this point.

• Haven-1 and Haven-2, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company plans to launch its single module Haven-1 demo station in 2027 for a three-year period during which it will be occupied by at least four 2-week-long manned missions. It also plans a manned mission to ISS in ’28. The company is already testing an unmanned small demo module in orbit. It has also made preliminary deals with Colombia, Uzbekistan, Japan, and the Maldives for possible astronaut flights to Haven-1. It has also raised more than a billion in cash for this work.
• Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched four tourist flights to ISS, with the fourth carrying government passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. A fifth mission is now planned for ’27. The company has now raised $450 million in private investment capital. The development of its first two modules has been proceeding, though the first module launch is now delayed until 2028. It has also signed Redwire to build that module’s solar panels.
• Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with extensive partnership agreements with the European Space Agency, Mitsubishi, and others. Though no construction has yet begun on its NASA-approved design, it has raised $383 million in a public stock offering, the $217.5 million provided by NASA, and an unstated amount from private capital. It has also begun signing up station customers, as well as a number of companies to build the station’s hardware. It also plans a mission to ISS in ’28.
• Thunderbird, proposed by the startup Max Space. It is building a smaller demo test station to launch in ’27 on a Falcon 9 rocket, and has begun work on its manufacturing facility at Kennedy in Florida. Its management includes one former NASA astronaut and one former member of the Bigelow space station team that built the first private orbiting inflatable modules, Genesis-1, Genesis-2, and BEAM (still operating on ISS).
• Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. This station looks increasingly dead in the water. Blue Origin has built almost nothing, as seems normal for this company. And while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, its reputation is soured by its failure in getting its Dream Chaser cargo mini-shuttle launched to ISS.

The Swedish Space Agency has signed a cooperative licensing agreement with the FAA to help facilitate orbital launches by American rocket companies from its Esrange spaceport.

While the Esrange Space Centre has been in operation since the 1960s, it has strictly been used for suborbital flights. In 2023, SSC Space, the commercial operator of the facility, inaugurated a new launch complex at Esrange to support orbital missions. While the facility has yet to host a launch, South Korea’s Perigee Aerospace and US launch provider Firefly Aerospace have both committed to using it in the future.

Sweden’s efforts to enable US rocket launches from Esrange took another step forward on 15 April 2026, as the Swedish National Space Agency signed an agreement with the FAA to coordinate the licensing of those missions. The agreement builds on a 2025 Technology Safeguards Agreement between the two countries, which laid the groundwork for US launch providers to export what the US government considers “advanced space technology” to Sweden.

Esrange’s interior location remains a problem, however. Any orbital launch is going to have to fly over other countries, either Finland, Russia, or Norway, and it remains unclear whether those countries will approve. Norway has already expressed opposition.

Link here. The main take-away of the article is that the investigation into the two launch failures of ISRO’s PSLV rocket has stalled everything, including the planned two unmanned orbital test missions of its Gaganyaan capsule, needed before the actual manned mission can fly in early 2027. The first was originally supposed to fly in March, but has been delayed pending completion of the investigation of the PSLV failures.

That investigation however has stalled far more than just Gaganyaan:

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which had announced an aggressive manifest of 18 launches for 2026, has so far completed only one in the first four months of the year, and that mission [PSLV] ended in failure.

The article also notes a decline in ISRO’S transparency in recent months, a decline that bodes ill for the agency and its programs. I have noted this as well. When ISRO in February 2026 announced the next PSLV launch for this coming June, it released no information from its investigation of the previous two launch failures. If ISRO knows what went wrong, it wasn’t saying. All it has told us so far is that the cause of the two launch failures was for different reasons.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, in Arizona has now completed its initial five-year nominal mission, mapping more than 47 million galaxies to produce a rough 3D map of the universe.

By comparing how galaxies clustered in the past with their distribution today, researchers can trace dark energy’s influence over 11 billion years of cosmic history. Surprising results using DESI’s first three years of data hinted that dark energy, once thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be evolving over time. With the full set of five years of data, researchers will have significantly more information to test whether that hint disappears or grows. If confirmed, it would mark a major shift in how we think about our Universe and its potential fate, which hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy.

The image to the right shows the map, with the blank areas to the left and right regions blocked by the Milky Way.

DESI will continue mapping for at least another three years, refining its data. I suspect when scientists begin analyzing this information they will find there are more than one way to interpret it.