The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, does not often post on the social media site owned by his rival Elon Musk. But on Monday, Bezos did, sharing a black-and-white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows on X.
The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos' privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear. The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, "The Tortoise and the Hare," in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.
Bezos' foray into social media turtle trolling came about 12 hours after Musk made major waves in the space community by announcing that SpaceX was pivoting toward the Moon, rather than Mars, as a near-term destination. It represented a huge shift in Musk's thinking, as the SpaceX founder has long spoken of building a multi-planetary civilization on Mars.
Welcome to Edition 8.29 of the Rocket Report! We have a stuffed report this week with news from across the launch spectrum. Long-term, probably the most significant development this week was a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket successfully launching and then executing a picture-perfect ocean landing. China is catching up rapidly to the United States when it comes to reusable launch.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Orbex is going away. The UK-based launch company Orbex has entered insolvency proceedings after a planned takeover by European space logistics startup The Exploration Company fell through, European Spaceflight reports. In a statement, Orbex said the decision came after all "fundraising, merger and acquisition opportunities had all concluded unsuccessfully." For anyone paying attention, this decision should not come as a surprise. A decade into its existence, Orbex had yet to produce demonstrable, ready-for-flight hardware.
The heavy version of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time Thursday, hauling 32 spacecraft to low-Earth orbit for Amazon's satellite broadband constellation.
The Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on the northeastern coast of South America at 11:45 am EST (16:45 UTC), quickly soaring into a clear sky at the tropical spaceport on the power of a hydrogen-fueled main engine and four strap-on solid rocket boosters.
This Ariane 6 configuration, called Ariane 64, is the first to use the rocket's full complement of four boosters. Collectively, the rocket generated more than 3.4 million pounds of thrust (15,400 kilonewtons) of thrust as it steered northeast over the Atlantic Ocean. Less than two hours later, the rocket's upper stage released all 32 of Amazon's satellites into an on-target orbit at an altitude of 289 miles (465 kilometers).
Moments after liftoff from Florida's Space Coast early Thursday morning, a shower of sparks emerged in the exhaust plume of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. Seconds later, the rocket twisted on its axis before recovering and continuing the climb into orbit with a batch of US military satellites.
The sight may have appeared familiar to seasoned rocket watchers. Sixteen months ago, a Vulcan rocket lost one of its booster nozzles shortly after launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket recovered from the malfunction and still reached the mission's planned orbit.
Details of Thursday's booster problem remain unclear. An investigation into the matter is underway, according to ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But the circumstances resemble those of the booster malfunction in October 2024. Closeup video from Thursday's launch shows a fiery plume near the throat of one of the rocket's four solid-fueled boosters, the area where the motor's propellant casing connects to its bell-shaped exhaust nozzle. The throat drives super-hot gas from the burning solid propellant through the nozzle to generate thrust.
Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.
Construction workers first carved the footprint for the launch pad from the Florida wetlands more than 60 years ago. NASA used the site to launch Saturn V rockets dispatching astronauts to the Moon, then converted the pad for the Space Shuttle program. The last shuttle flight lifted off from Pad 39A in 2011, and the agency leased the site to SpaceX for use as the departure point for the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
SpaceX started launching from Pad 39A in 2017, then installed a new Crew Access Arm on the pad's tower the following year, replacing the aging shuttle-era arm that connected to the hatches of NASA's orbiters. SpaceX added the new arm ahead of the first test flight of the company's human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019. Astronauts started using the pathway, suspended more than 200 feet above the pad surface, beginning with the first crew flight on a Dragon spacecraft in 2020.
On Tuesday night, the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace up to 18,000 feet above the El Paso International Airport in Texas, saying the restrictions would be in place for 10 days. Then, less than 10 hours later, the federal agency reopened the airspace, allowing planes to land and take off at the busy airport.
About an hour after lifting the restrictions, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, whose responsibilities include overseeing the FAA, explained the unexpected closure by saying, "The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion." (The Trump Administration refers to the Department of Defense as the Department of War, or DOW, although its legal name remains the former.)
A little more than two months ago, a Rocket Lab employee called the Stennis Space Center Fire Department from the nearby A3 test stand. There was a grass fire where Archimedes engines undergo testing. Could they please send personnel over?
According to the fire station's November 30 dispatcher log, the employee said, "The fire started during a test when an anomaly caused an electrical box to catch fire."
Satellite imagery from before and after the anomaly appears to show that the roof had been blown off the left test cell, one of two at the test stand at the historic NASA facility in southern Mississippi. One person with knowledge of the anomaly said, "The characterization of this as an electrical fire doesn't reflect what actually occurred. This was a catastrophic engine explosion that resulted in significant infrastructure damage."
China's space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular.
The demonstration "marks a significant breakthrough in the development of [China's] manned lunar exploration program," the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement. China and the United States are racing to accomplish the next human landing on the Moon in a competition for national prestige and lunar resources. The Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou spacecraft, both tested Tuesday, are core elements of China's lunar architecture.
The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule's safety system. The test began with liftoff of the Long March 10 booster from a new launch pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 10 pm EST Tuesday (03:00 UTC or 11 am Beijing time Wednesday).
The Federal Aviation Administration abruptly halted flights into and out of El Paso International Airport on Tuesday night at 11:30 pm local time (1:30 am EST Wednesday) and said the restrictions would remain in place for 10 days.
In its notice, the FAA also restricted air space extended in a radius of 10 nautical miles from the airport. Violators were subject to being shot down, the agency said.
However, less than 10 hours later and without any additional explanation, the FAA ended the restrictions. "The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted," the federal agency said on social media. "There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal."
The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX's next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company's previous booster.
SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: "Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster's redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength."
Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey's Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster's propellant tanks on launch day.
As more than 120 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl for kickoff on Sunday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk turned instead to his social network. There, he tapped out an extended message in which he revealed that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a "self-growing" city on the Moon.
"For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years," Musk wrote, in part.
Elon Musk tweet at 6:24 pm ET on Sunday.
Credit:
X/Elon Musk
This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk.
Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it.
The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?
Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible. This strategy worked, as SpaceX has lowered its internal launch costs of a Falcon 9, even with a new second stage, to about $15 million. The company is now focused on making the larger Starship rocket fully reusable.
Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to approve a NASA authorization bill this week, advancing legislation chock full of policy guidelines meant to give lawmakers a voice in the space agency's strategic direction.
The committee met to "mark up" the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, adding more than 40 amendments to the bill before a unanimous vote to refer the legislation to the full House of Representatives. Wednesday's committee vote was just one of several steps needed for the bill to become law. It must pass a vote on the House floor, win approval from the Senate, and then go to the White House for President Donald Trump's signature.
Ars has reported on one of the amendments, which would authorize NASA to take steps toward a "commercial" deep space program using privately owned rockets and spacecraft rather than vehicles owned by the government.
Move over Snoopy, because NASA has a new character helping to promote its deep space exploration plans. His name is Uncle Traveling Matt.
No really, move over.
Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure has taken over the same theater the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida previously used for All Systems Are Go, featuring the comic strip beagle. The new stage show stars the Jim Henson Company's subterranean Muppets as they discover outer (outer) space for the first time.
Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket's leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin "pauses" New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.
Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat.
Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real.
Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide.
Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000.
The iPhone is going orbital, and this time it will be allowed to hang around for a while.
On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.
"NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II," Isaacman wrote on X. "We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world."
European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent. From a report: Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites but could also allow Moscow to manipulate their trajectories or even crash them.
Russian space vehicles have shadowed European satellites more intensively over the past three years, at a time of high tension between the Kremlin and the West following Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For several years, military and civilian space authorities in the West have been tracking the activities of Luch-1 and Luch-2 -- two Russian objects that have carried out repeated suspicious maneuvers in orbit.
Both vehicles have made risky close approaches to some of Europe's most important geostationary satellites, which operate high above the Earth and service the continent, including the UK, as well as large parts of Africa and the Middle East. According to orbital data and ground-based telescopic observations, they have lingered nearby for weeks at a time, particularly over the past three years. Since its launch in 2023, Luch-2 has approached 17 European satellites.
A US House committee with oversight of NASA unanimously passed a "reauthorization" act for the space agency on Wednesday. The legislation must still be approved by the full House before being sent to the Senate, which may take up consideration later this month.
Congress passes such reauthorization bills every couple of years, providing the space agency with a general sense of the direction legislators want to see NASA go. They are distinct from appropriations bills, which provide actual funding for specific programs, but nonetheless play an important role in establishing space policy.
There weren't any huge surprises in the legislation, but there were some interesting amendments. Most notably among these was the Amendment No. 01, offered by the chair of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), as well as its ranking member, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and three other legislators.
European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent.
Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites but could also allow Moscow to manipulate their trajectories or even crash them.
Russian space vehicles have shadowed European satellites more intensively over the past three years, at a time of high tension between the Kremlin and the West following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.
The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster's prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.
You remember the last time NASA tried to launch the world's largest orange rocket, right? The space agency rolled the Space Launch System out of its hangar in March 2022. The first, second, and third attempts at a wet dress rehearsal—elaborate fueling tests—were scrubbed. The SLS rocket was slowly rolled back to its hangar for work in April before returning to the pad in June.
The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"Engineers pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives," NASA said in a statement following the conclusion of the mock countdown, or wet dress rehearsal (WDR), early Tuesday morning. "To allow teams to review data and conduct a second Wet Dress Rehearsal, NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test."
The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.
SpaceX has formally acquired another one of Elon Musk's companies, xAi, the space company announced on Monday afternoon.
"SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform," the company said. "This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!"
The merging of what is arguably Musk's most successful company, SpaceX, with the more speculative xAI venture is a risk. Founded in 2023, xAI's main products are the generative AI chatbot Grok and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. The company aims to compete with OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms. However, Grok has been controversial, including the sexualization of women and children through AI-generated images, as has Musk's management of Twitter.
SpaceX has formally acquired another of Elon Musk's companies, xAi, the space company announced on Monday afternoon.
"SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform," the company said. "This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!"
The merging of what is arguably Musk's most successful company, SpaceX, with the more speculative xAI venture is a risk. But Musk strongly believes that artificial intelligence is central to humanity's future and wants to be among those leading in its development.
If all goes according to plan Monday, NASA's launch team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will load more than 700,000 gallons of super-cold propellants into the rocket built to send the Artemis II mission toward the Moon.
The fuel loading is part of a simulated countdown for the Space Launch System rocket, a final opportunity for engineers to rehearse for the day NASA will send four astronauts on a nearly 10-day voyage around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. The Artemis II mission will send humans farther from Earth than ever before. The astronauts will be the first to launch on NASA's SLS rocket and the first people to travel to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 53 years.
Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA's launch director for the Artemis II mission, will supervise the practice countdown from a firing room inside the Launch Control Center a few miles away from the SLS rocket at Kennedy Space Center. In a recent briefing with reporters, she called the Wet Dress Rehearsal—"wet" refers to the loading of liquid propellants—the "best risk reduction test" for verifying all is ready to proceed into the real countdown.
Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative.
The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.
So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company's longest-running program?
A consequential debate that has been simmering behind closed doors at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, must soon come to a head. It concerns the selection of the next spacecraft the agency will fly to Mars, and it could set the tone for the next decade of exploration of the red planet.
What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA's MAVEN spacecraft. NASA's best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.
Congress cared enough about this issue to add $700 million in funding for a "Mars Telecommunications Orbiter" in the supplemental funding for NASA provided by the "One Big Beautiful Bill" passed by the US Congress last year.
Welcome to Edition 8.27 of the Rocket Report! If all goes well this weekend, NASA will complete a wet dress rehearsal test of the Space Launch System rocket in Florida. This is the final key test, in which the rocket is fueled and brought to within seconds of engine ignition, before the liftoff of the Artemis II mission. This is set to occur no earlier than February 6. Ars will have full coverage of the test this weekend.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Why did the UK abandon Orbex? European Spaceflight explores the recent announcement that British launch company Orbex is preparing to sell the business to The Exploration Company in close cooperation with the UK government. This represents a reversal from early 2025, when the United Kingdom appeared prepared to back Orbex as a means of using British rockets to launch British satellites into space. Now the government is prepared to walk away. So what happened? "There are still too many unknowns to count, and the story is far from told," the publication states.
A deep dive into the evolution of identity management and cardspace technology. Learn how modern enterprise sso and ciam solutions replace legacy frameworks.
The National Reconnaissance Office, the agency overseeing the US government's fleet of spy satellites, has declassified a decades-old program used to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's military communication signals.
The program was codenamed Jumpseat, and its existence was already public knowledge through leaks and contemporary media reports. What's new is the NRO's description of the program's purpose and development and pictures of the satellites themselves.
In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat "the United States’ first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite."
Over the first quarter of the 21st century, two major trends have transformed the global space industry.
The first is the rapid rise of China's space program, which only flew its first human to orbit in 2003 but now boasts spaceflight capabilities second only to the United States. The second trend is the rise of the commercial space sector, first in the United States and led by SpaceX, but now spreading across much of the planet.
Both of these trends have had profound impacts on both civil and military space enterprises in the United States.
Forty years ago, a stack of bright red tags shared a physical connection with what would become NASA's first space shuttle disaster. The small tags, however, were collected before the ill-fated launch of Challenger, as was instructed in bold "Remove Before Flight" lettering on the front of each.
What happened to the tags after that is largely unknown.
This is an attempt to learn more about where those "Remove Before Flight" tags went after they were detached from the space shuttle and before they arrived on my doorstep. If their history can be better documented, they can be provided to museums, educational centers, and astronautical archives for their preservation and display.
If you're in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I've written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usually—but not always—reveal what went wrong.
But I never expected to write this story. Maybe this was a failure of my own imagination. I'm used to writing about engine malfunctions, staging issues, guidance glitches, or structural failures. Last April, Ars reported on the bizarre failure of Firefly Aerospace's commercial Alpha rocket.
Japan's H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.
One of NASA's three large WB-57 aircraft made an emergency landing at Ellington Field on Tuesday morning in southeastern Houston.
Video captured by KHOU 11 television showed the aircraft touching down on the runway without its landing gear extended. The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle as it slides down the runway, slowing the aircraft through friction. The crew was not harmed, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.
WB-57 landing.
"Today, a mechanical issue with one of NASA’s WB-57s resulted in a gear-up landing at Ellington Field," she said. "Response to the incident is ongoing, and all crew are safe at this time. As with any incident, a thorough investigation will be conducted by NASA into the cause. NASA will transparently update the public as we gather more information."
For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that’s about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms.
The first of those stations could be Haven-1, which the California-based company Vast aims to launch in May 2026. If all goes to plan, its earliest paying visitors will arrive about a month later. Drew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut, will help train them and get them up to speed ahead of their historic trip. Feustel has spent 226 days in space on three trips to the International Space Station (ISS) and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Feustel is now lead astronaut for Vast, which he advised on the new station’s interior design. He also helped create a months-long program to prepare customers to live and work there. Crew members (up to four at a time) will arrive at Haven-1 via a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which will dock to the station and remain attached throughout each 10-day stay. (Vast hasn’t publicly said who will fly on its first missions or announced the cost of a ticket, though competing firms have charged tens of millions of dollars for similar trips.)
In this artist’s rendering, the Haven-1 space station is shown in orbit docked with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
VAST
Haven-1 is intended as a temporary facility, to be followed by a bigger, permanent station called Haven-2. Vast will begin launching Haven-2’s modules in 2028 and says it will be able to support a crew by 2030. That’s about when NASA will start decommissioning the ISS, which has operated for almost 30 years. Instead of replacing it, NASA and its partners intend to carry out research aboard commercial stations like those built by Vast, Axiom, and Sierra.
I recently caught up with Feustel in Lisbon at the tech conference Web Summit, where he was speaking about his role at Vast and the company’s ambitions.
Responses have been edited and condensed.
What are you hoping this new wave of commercial space stations will enable people to do?
Ideally, we’re creating access. The paradigm that we’ve seen for 25 years is primarily US-backed missions to the International Space Station, and [NASA] operating that station in coordination with other nations. But [it’s] still limited to 16 or 17 primary partners in the ISS program.
Following NASA’s intentions, we are planning to become a service provider to not only the US government, but other sovereign nations around the world, to allow greater access to a low-Earth-orbit platform. We can be a service provider to other organizations and nations that are planning to build a human spaceflight program.
Today, you’re Vast’s lead astronaut after you were initially brought on to advise the company on the design of Haven-1 and Haven-2. What are some of the things that you’ve weighed in on?
Some of the things where I can see tangible evidence of my work is, for example, in the sleep cores and sleep system—trying to define a more comfortable way for astronauts to sleep. We’ve come up with an air bladder system that provides distributed forces on the body that kind of emulate, or I believe will emulate, the gravity field that we feel in bed when we lie down, having that pressure of gravity on you.
Oh, like a weighted blanket?
Kind of like a weighted blanket, but you’re up against the wall, so you have to create, like, an inflatable bladder that will push you against the wall. That’s one of the very tangible, obvious things. But I work with the company on anything from crew displays and interfaces and how notifications and system information come through to how big a window should be.
How big should a window be? I feel like the bigger the better—but what are the factors that go into that, from an astronaut’s perspective?
The bigger the better. And the other thing to think about is—what do you do with the window? Take pictures. The ability to take photos out a window is important—the quality of the window, which direction it points. You know, it’s not great if it’s just pointing up in space all the time and you never see the Earth.
VAST
You’re now helping shape the astronaut training program at Vast. Tell me what that program looks like, because in some cases you’ll have private citizens who are paying for their trip that have no experience whatsoever.
A typical training flow for two weeks on our space station is extended out to about an 11-month period with gaps in between each of the training weeks. And so if you were to press that down together, it probably represents about three to four months of day-to-day training.
I would say half of it’s devoted to learning how to fly on the SpaceX Dragon, because that’s our transportation, and the greatest risk for anybody flying is on launch and landing. We want people to understand how to operate in that spacecraft, and that component is designed by SpaceX. They have their own training plans.
What we do is kind of piggyback on those weeks. If a crew shows up in California to train at SpaceX, we’ll grab them that same week and say, “Come down to our facility. We will train you to operate inside our spacecraft.” Much of that is focused on emergency response. We want the crew to be able to keep themselves safe. In case anything happens on the vehicle that requires them to depart, to get back in the SpaceX Dragon and leave, we want to make sure that they understand all of the steps required.
Another part is day-to-day living, like—how do you eat? How do you sleep, how do you use the bathroom? Those are really important things. How do you download the pictures after you take them? How do you access your science payloads that are in our payload racks that provide data and telemetry for the research you’re doing?
We want to practice every one of those things multiple times, including just taking care of yourself, before you go to space so that when you get there, you’ve built a lot of that into your muscle memory, and you can just do the things you need to do instead of every day being like a really steep learning curve.
VAST
Strawberries and other perishable foods are freeze-dried by the Vast Food Systems team to prepare them for missions.
Making coffee in a zero-gravity environment calls for specialized devices.
VAST
Do you have a facility where you’ll take people through some of these motions? Or a virtual simulation of some kind?
We have built a training mock-up, an identical vehicle to what people will live in in space. But it’s not in a zero-gravity environment. The only way to get any similar training is to fly on what we call a zero-g airplane, which does parabolas in space—it climbs up and then falls toward the Earth. Its nickname is the vomit comet.
But otherwise, there’s really no way to train for microgravity. You just have to watch videos and talk about it a lot, and try to prepare people mentally for what that’s going to be like. You can also train underwater, but that’s more related to spacewalking, and it’s much more advanced.
How do you expect people will spend their time in the station?
If history is any indication, they will be quite busy and probably oversubscribed. Their time will be spent basically caring for themselves, and trying to execute their experiments, and looking out the window. Those are the three big categories of what you’re going to do in space. And public relation activities like outreach back to Earth, to schools or hospitals or corporations.
This new era means that many more everyday people—though mostly wealthy ones at the beginning, because of ticket prices—will have this interesting view of Earth. How do you think the average person will react to that?
A good analogy is to say, how are people reacting to sub-orbital flights? Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic offer suborbital flights, [which are] basically three or four minutes of floating and looking down at the Earth from an altitude that’s about a third or a fifth of the altitude that actual orbital and career astronauts achieve when they circle the planet.
Shown here is Vast’s Haven-1 station as it completes testing in the Mojave Desert in 2025.
VAST
If you look at the reaction of those individuals and what they perceive, it’s amazing, right? It’s like awe and wonder. It’s the same way that astronauts react and talk when we see Earth—and say if more humans could see Earth from space, we’d probably be a little bit better about being humans on Earth.
That’s the hope, is that we create that access and more people can understand what it means to live on this planet. It’s essentially a spacecraft—it’s got its own environmental control system that keeps us alive, and that’s a big deal.
Some people have expressed ambitions for this kind of station to enable humans to become a multiplanetary species. Do you share that ambition for our species? If so, why?
Yeah, I do. I just believe that humans need to have the ability to live off of the planet. I mean, we’re capable of it, and we’re creating that access now. So why wouldn’t we explore space and go further and farther and learn to live in other areas?
Not to say that we should deplete everything here and deplete everything there. But maybe we take some of the burden off of the place that we call home. I think there’s a lot of reasons to live and work in space and off our own planet.
There’s not really a backup plan for no Earth. We know that there are risks from the space around us—dinosaurs fell prey to space hazards. We should be aware of those and work harder to extend our capabilities and create some backup plans.
Correction note: This original version of this story stated that Feustel leads Vast’s astronaut training program. We’ve updated the story to better reflect his advisory role in that program. We apologize for the error.
__________________________ Thai Space Expo October 16-18, 2025 ___ Bangkok, Thailand
It’s a scorching October day in Bangkok and I’m wandering through the exhibits at the Thai Space Expo, held in one of the city’s busiest shopping malls, when I do a double take. Amid the flashy space suits and model rockets on display, there’s a plain-looking package of Thai basil chicken. I’m told the same kind of vacuum-sealed package has just been launched to the International Space Station.
“This is real chicken that we sent to space,” says a spokesperson for the business behind the stunt, Charoen Pokphand Foods, the biggest food company in Thailand.
It’s an unexpected sight, one that reflects the growing excitement within the Southeast Asian space sector. At the expo, held among designer shops and street-food stalls, enthusiastic attendees have converged from emerging space nations such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and of course Thailand to showcase Southeast Asia’s fledgling space industry.
While there is some uncertainty about how exactly the region’s space sector may evolve, there is plenty of optimism, too. “Southeast Asia is perfectly positioned to take leadership as a space hub,” says Candace Johnson, a partner in Seraphim Space, a UK investment firm that operates in Singapore. “There are a lot of opportunities.”
A sample package of pad krapow was also on display.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
For example, Thailand may build a spaceport to launch rockets in the next few years, the country’s Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency announced the day before the expo started. “We don’t have a spaceport in Southeast Asia,” says Atipat Wattanuntachai, acting head of the space economy advancement division at the agency. “We saw a gap.” Because Thailand is so close to the equator, those rockets would get an additional boost from Earth’s rotation.
All kinds of companies here are exploring how they might tap into the global space economy. VegaCosmos, a startup based in Hanoi, Vietnam, is looking at ways to use satellite data for urban planning. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand is monitoring rainstorms from space to predict landslides. And the startup Spacemap, from Seoul, South Korea, is developing a new tool to better track satellites in orbit, which the US Space Force has invested in.
It’s the space chicken that caught my eye, though, perhaps because it reflects the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity seen across Bangkok, a city of ancient temples nestled next to glittering skyscrapers.
In June, astronauts on the space station were treated to this popular dish, known as pad krapow. It’s more commonly served up by street vendors, but this time it was delivered on a private mission operated by the US-based company Axiom Space. Charoen Pokphand is now using the stunt to say its chicken is good enough for NASA (sadly, I wasn’t able to taste it to weigh in).
Other Southeast Asian industries could also lend expertise to future space missions. Johnson says the region could leverage its manufacturing prowess to develop better semiconductors for satellites, for example, or break into the in-space manufacturing market.
I left the expo on a Thai longboat down the Chao Phraya River that weaves through Bangkok, with visions of astronauts tucking into some pad krapow in my head and imagining what might come next.
Jonathan O’Callaghan is a freelance space journalist based in Bangkok who covers commercial spaceflight, astrophysics, and space exploration.
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared.
It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. It’s also come around the same time as a proposed class-action lawsuit in the state of California, which, according to Bloomberg, alleges that Google gave Gemini AI access to Gmail, Chat, and Meet without proper user consent.
We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
Google has updated some Gmail settings around how its “smart features” work, which control how Gmail analyses your messages to power built-in functions.
According to reports we’ve seen, Google has started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for its smart features. This means your emails are analyzed to improve your experience with Chat, Meet, Drive, Email and Calendar products. However, some users are now reporting that these settings are switched on by default instead of asking for explicit opt-in—although Google’s help page states that users are opted-out for default.
How to check your settings
Opting in or out requires you to change settings in two places, so I’ve tried to make it as easy to follow as possible. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I missed anything.
To fully opt out, you must turn off Gmail’s smart features in two separate locations in your settings. Don’t miss one, or AI training may continue.
Step 1: Turn off Smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet settings
Open Gmail on your desktop or mobile app.
Click the gear icon → See all settings (desktop) or Menu → Settings (mobile).
Find the section called smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet. You’ll need to scroll down quite a bit.
Uncheck this option.
Scroll down and hit Save changes if on desktop.
Step 2: Turn off Google Workspace smart features
Still in Settings, locate Google Workspace smart features.
Click on Manage Workspace smart feature settings.
You’ll see two options: Smart features in Google Workspace and Smart features in other Google products.
Toggle both off.
Save again in this screen.
Step 3: Verify if both are off
Make sure both toggles remain off.
Refresh your Gmail app or sign out and back in to confirm changes.
We don’t just report on privacy—we offer you the option to use it.
Privacy risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep your online privacy yours by using Malwarebytes Privacy VPN.
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
In mid-October, a mysterious object cracked the windshield of a packed Boeing 737 cruising at 36,000 feet above Utah, forcing the pilots into an emergency landing. The internet was suddenly buzzing with the prospect that the plane had been hit by a piece of space debris. We still don’t know exactly what hit the plane—likely a remnant of a weather balloon—but it turns out the speculation online wasn’t that far-fetched.
That’s because while the risk of flights being hit by space junk is still small, it is, in fact, growing.
About three pieces of old space equipment—used rockets and defunct satellites—fall into Earth’s atmosphere every day, according to estimates by the European Space Agency. By the mid-2030s, there may be dozens. The increase is linked to the growth in the number of satellites in orbit. Currently, around 12,900 active satellites circle the planet. In a decade, there may be 100,000 of them, according to analyst estimates.
To minimize the risk of orbital collisions, operators guide old satellites to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. But the physics of that reentry process are not well understood, and we don’t know how much material burns up and how much reaches the ground.
“The number of such landfall events is increasing,” says Richard Ocaya, a professor of physics at the University of Free State in South Africa and a coauthor of a recent paper on space debris risk. “We expect it may be increasing exponentially in the next few years.”
So far, space debris hasn’t injured anybody—in the air or on the ground. But multiple close calls have been reported in recent years. In March last year, an 0.7-kilogram chunk of metal pierced the roof of a house in Florida. The object was later confirmed to be a remnant of a battery pallet tossed out from the International Space Station. When the strike occurred, the homeowner’s 19-year-old son was resting in a next-door room.
And in February this year, a 1.5-meter-long fragment of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket crashed down near a warehouse outside Poland’s fifth-largest city, Poznan. Another piece was found in a nearby forest. A month later, a 2.5-kilogram piece of a Starlink satellite dropped on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Other incidents have been reported in Australia and Africa. And many more may be going completely unnoticed.
“If you were to find a bunch of burnt electronics in a forest somewhere, your first thought is not that it came from a spaceship,” says James Beck, the director of the UK-based space engineering research firm Belstead Research. He warns that we don’t fully understand the risk of space debris strikes and that it might be much higher than satellite operators want us to believe.
For example, SpaceX, the owner of the currently largest mega-constellation, Starlink, claims that its satellites are “designed for demise” and completely burn up when they spiral from orbit and fall through the atmosphere.
But Beck, who has performed multiple wind tunnel tests using satellite mock-ups to mimic atmospheric forces, says the results of such experiments raise doubts. Some satellite components are made of durable materials such as titanium and special alloy composites that don’t melt even at the extremely high temperatures that arise during a hypersonic atmospheric descent.
“We have done some work for some small-satellite manufacturers and basically, their major problem is that the tanks get down,” Beck says. “For larger satellites, around 800 kilos, we would expect maybe two or three objects to land.”
It can be challenging to quantify how much of a danger space debris poses. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) told MIT Technology Review that “the rapid growth in satellite deployments presents a novel challenge” for aviation safety, one that “cannot be quantified with the same precision as more established hazards.”
But the Federal Aviation Administration has calculated some preliminary numbers on the risk to flights: In a 2023 analysis, the agency estimated that by 2035, the risk that one plane per year will experience a disastrous space debris strike will be around 7 in 10,000. Such a collision would either destroy the aircraft immediately or lead to a rapid loss of air pressure, threatening the lives of all on board.
The casualty risk to humans on the ground will be much higher. Aaron Boley, an associate professor in astronomy and a space debris researcher at the University of British Columbia, Canada, says that if megaconstellation satellites “don’t demise entirely,” the risk of a single human death or injury caused by a space debris strike on the ground could reach around 10% per year by 2035. That would mean a better than even chance that someone on Earth would be hit by space junk about every decade. In its report, the FAA put the chances even higher with similar assumptions, estimating that “one person on the planet would be expected to be injured or killed every two years.”
Experts are starting to think about how they might incorporate space debris into their air safety processes. The German space situational awareness company Okapi Orbits, for example, in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center and the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol), is exploring ways to adapt air traffic control systems so that pilots and air traffic controllers can receive timely and accurate alerts about space debris threats.
But predicting the path of space debris is challenging too. In recent years, advances in AI have helped improve predictions of space objects’ trajectories in the vacuum of space, potentially reducing the risk of orbital collisions. But so far, these algorithms can’t properly account for the effects of the gradually thickening atmosphere that space junk encounters during reentry. Radar and telescope observations can help, but the exact location of the impact becomes clear with only very short notice.
“Even with high-fidelity models, there’s so many variables at play that having a very accurate reentry location is difficult,” says Njord Eggen, a data analyst at Okapi Orbits. Space debris goes around the planet every hour and a half when in low Earth orbit, he notes, “so even if you have uncertainties on the order of 10 minutes, that’s going to have drastic consequences when it comes to the location where it could impact.”
For aviation companies, the problem is not just a potential strike, as catastrophic as that would be. To avoid accidents, authorities are likely to temporarily close the airspace in at-risk regions, which creates delays and costs money. Boley and his colleagues published a paper earlier this year estimating that busy aerospace regions such as northern Europe or the northeastern United States already have about a 26% yearly chance of experiencing at least one disruption due to the reentry of a major space debris item. By the time all planned constellations are fully deployed, aerospace closures due to space debris hazards may become nearly as common as those due to bad weather.
Because current reentry predictions are unreliable, many of these closures may end up being unnecessary.
For example, when a 21-metric-ton Chinese Long March mega-rocket was falling to Earth in 2022, predictions suggested its debris could scatter across Spain and parts of France. In the end, the rocket crashed into the Pacific Ocean. But the 30-minute closure of south European airspace delayed and diverted hundreds of flights.
In the meantime, international regulators are urging satellite operators and launch providers to deorbit large satellites and rocket bodies in a controlled way, when possible, by carefully guiding them into remote parts of the ocean using residual fuel.
The European Space Agency estimates that only about half the rocket bodies reentering the atmosphere do so in a controlled way.
Moreover, around 2,300 old and no-longer-controllable rocket bodies still linger in orbit, slowly spiraling toward Earth with no mechanisms for operators to safely guide them into the ocean.
“There’s enough material up there that even if we change our practices, we will still have all those rocket bodies eventually reenter,” Boley says. “Although the probability of space debris hitting an aircraft is small, the probability that the debris will spread and fall over busy airspace is not small. That’s actually quite likely.”
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