September 9th, 2026
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On August 20, 2026, U.S. President Trump signed The National Space Transportation Policy presidential memorandum, which sets a target of enabling over 1,000 space launches and reentries annually by 2030 through expanded launch infrastructure and industrial base capacity. What’s up with China’s plans for launch, and more recently, recoverable rocketry? What are the challenges and […]
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NASA is pressing forward on the plan to establish a Moon Base in the lunar South Pole region. Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, NASA posted a NextSTEP-3 Broad Agency Announcement Appendix A. The Lunar Enabling Infrastructure Accelerator solicitation aims to mature and demonstrate capabilities in five areas: Vertical solar array technology that can provide consistent […]
China is making progress on its Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission. It appears on track getting the trek underway next year, dedicated to bring back to Earth roughly 500 grams of Red Planet collectibles in 2031. According to the China National Space Administration, the Tianwen-3 probe will have a lander, an ascender, a service capsule, […]
Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek by Glen E. Swanson and Foreword by Margaret A. Weitekamp of the Air and Space Museum; 2025; 288 pages (Hardcover); $35.00 Put aside the issue of cranky sliding doors on the USS Enterprise. Level out those pointy Spock ears and discount […]
The Oscar- and Emmy-nominated documentarist Nanette Burstein working with co-screenwriter and editor Tal Ben-David, brings to life the story of Carl Sagan. The new National Geographic documentary film, Carl Sagan: We Are Made Of Star Stuff, made its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The 53rd Telluride Film Festival was held September 4 through […]
We are a “planet-based” species – all of us on a spin-filled Earth now housing 8.3 billion people. That’s the gravity of the situation. But we’re also a world of floods, typhoons, earthquakes, heat and cold calamities, volcanic eruptions, even encounters with Sun-caused aurora and bruises from incoming space rocks. It’s quite a world worth […]
Could Earth’s Moon be a witness plate, peppered with extraterrestrial material evidence of past extraterrestrial technology? “Whereas electromagnetic SETI is restricted to contemporaneous transmitters, searches for artificially generated particles integrate over gigayear timescales and are therefore sensitive to technomaterial released by civilizations long extinct.” The idea is that technogenic artifacts may survive natural interstellar transport […]
The European Space Agency’s Planetary Defense Office/Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center has published the following Imminent Imactor based on 11 observations: Imminent Impactor: CERNQ52 The Imminent Impactors page contains a list of the confirmed impacting objects detected by ESA’s Meerkat monitoring system in the last 15 days. Meerkat computes impact solutions using the systematic ranging method. […]
Venus appears pale yellow in visible light, but ultraviolet images reveal dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet’s upper sulfuric acid clouds. Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, yet the chemical identity of the material responsible—the “unknown absorber”—remains unresolved. An international research team has now placed new quantitative constraints […]
China’s Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission appears on track for launch next year, dedicated to return to Earth Red Planet collectibles in 2031. A new video posted on Weibo is being shown by CNSPACE.dev, a website on China space development, noting that multi-site sampling by drone is not displayed in the video, only sampling done […]
