A startup established three years ago to churn out a new class of high-power satellites has raised $250 million to ramp up production at its Southern California factory.
The company, named K2, announced the cash infusion on Thursday. K2’s Series C fundraising round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with additional funding from investment firms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. K2 has now raised more than $400 million since its founding in 2022 and is on track to launch its first major demonstration mission next year, officials said.
K2 aims to take advantage of a coming abundance of heavy- and super-heavy-lift launch capacity, with SpaceX’s Starship expected to begin deploying satellites as soon as next year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launched twice this year and will fly more in 2026 while engineers develop an even larger New Glenn with additional engines and more lift capability.
Welcome to Edition 8.22 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week concerns the decision by SpaceX founder Elon Musk to take the company public, via IPO, sometime within the next 12 to 18 months. Musk confirmed this after Ars published a story on Wednesday evening. This understandably raises questions about whether a future SpaceX will be committed more to AI data centers in space or Mars settlement. However, one of the company’s founding employees, Tom Mueller, said this could benefit the company’s Mars plans. Clearly this is something we’ll be following closely.
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.
Avio will build solid rocket motors in Virginia. The governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, announced Wednesday that Avio USA has selected his state to produce solid rocket motors for defense and commercial space propulsion purposes. Avio USA’s investment, which will be up to $500 million, is supported by its Italian parent Avio. The company’s factory will encompass 860,000 sq. feet.
__________________________ 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.
NASA has lost contact with one of its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty.
Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”
NASA said mission controllers are “investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.”
SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year, multiple outlets have reported, and Ars can confirm. This represents a major change in thinking from the world’s leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk.
The Wall Street Journal and The Information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday, and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting the company would target a $1.5 trillion valuation. This would allow SpaceX to raise in excess of $30 billion.
This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history occurred in 2019, when the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company began public trading as Aramco and raised $29 billion. In terms of revenue, Aramco is a top-five company in the world.
With a key Russian launch pad out of service, NASA is accelerating the launch of two Cargo Dragon spaceships in order to ensure that astronauts on board the International Space Station have all the supplies they need next year.
According to the space agency’s internal schedule, the next Dragon supply mission, CRS-34, is moving forward one month from June 2026 to May. And the next Dragon supply mission after this, CRS-35, has been advanced three months from November to August.
A source indicated that the changing schedules are a “direct result” of a launch pad incident on Thanksgiving Day at the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
Space agency is investigating after Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend
Nasa has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade, though the US space agency said it was trying to re-establish a communications link.
Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend. Nasa said this week that the spacecraft had been working fine before it went behind the red planet. When it reappeared, there was only silence. “Telemetry showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind [Mars],” Nasa said in a statement.
B-9 had Will Robinson. Twiki had Buck Rogers. And, of course, C-3PO and R2-D2 had Luke Skywalker. Now, in a scenario straight out of science fiction, MAPP will have whoever NASA names to the crew of the second Artemis mission to land on the moon.
The space agency has selected Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, to become the first robotic rover to operate on the moon alongside astronauts. Although its tasks will be far simpler than those of the robots seen on TV and in the movies, the autonomous four-wheeled MAPP will help scientists learn more about the crew’s surroundings. Science instruments on the rover will characterize the surface plasma and behavior of the dust in the lunar environment.
“The Apollo era taught us that the further humanity is from Earth, the more dependent we are on science to protect and sustain human life on other planets,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, in a statement. “By deploying these… science instruments on the lunar surface, our proving ground, NASA is leading the world in the creation of humanity’s interplanetary survival guide to ensure the health and safety of our spacecraft and human explorers as we begin our epic journey back to the Moon.”
Sending astronauts to the red planet will be a decades-long activity and cost many billions of dollars. So why should NASA undertake such a bold mission?
A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.
“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”
Near the end of the film A House of Dynamite, a fictional American president portrayed by Idris Elba sums up the theory of nuclear deterrence.
“Just being ready is the point, right?” Elba says. “It keeps people in check. Keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.”
There’s a lot that goes wrong in the film, namely the collapse of deterrence itself. For more than 60 years, the US military has used its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, constantly deployed on Navy submarines, at Air Force bomber bases, and in Minuteman missile fields, as a way of saying, “Don’t mess with us.” In the event of a first strike against the United States, an adversary would be assured of an overwhelming nuclear response, giving rise to the concept of mutual assured destruction.
Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets and launch pads didn’t fare so well. China’s launch industry celebrated several key missions. SpaceX was busy, too, with seven launches over the last two weeks, six of them carrying more Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. We expect between 15 and 20 more orbital launch attempts worldwide before the end of the year.
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.
Another Sarmat failure. A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe on November 28 on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet, Ars reports. Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border. A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site.
In recent months, it has begun dawning on US lawmakers that, absent significant intervention, China will land humans on the Moon before the United States can return there with the Artemis Program.
So far, legislators have yet to take meaningful action on this—a $10 billion infusion into NASA’s budget this summer essentially provided zero funding for efforts needed to land humans on the Moon this decade. But now a subcommittee of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology has begun reviewing the space agency’s policy, expressing concerns about Chinese competition in civil spaceflight.
During a hearing on Thursday in Washington, DC, the subcommittee members asked a panel of experts how NASA could maintain its global leadership in space over China in general, and more specifically, how to improve the Artemis Program to reach the Moon more quickly.
How do you top a highly detailed scale model of NASA’s new moon-bound rocket and its support tower? If you’re Lego, you make it so it can actually lift off.
Lego’s NASA Artemis Space Launch System Rocket, part of its Technic line of advanced building sets, will land on store shelves for $60 on January 1, 2026, and then “blast off” from kitchen tables, office desks and living room floors. The 632-piece set climbs skyward, separating from its expendable stages along the way, until the Orion crew spacecraft and its European Service Module top out the motion on their way to the moon—or wherever your imagination carries it.
“The educational LEGO Technic set shows the moment a rocket launches, in three distinct stages,” reads the product description on Lego’s website. “Turn the crank to see the solid rocket boosters separate from the core stage, which then also detaches. Continue turning to watch the upper stage with its engine module, Orion spacecraft and launch abort system separate.”
Private astronaut Jared Isaacman returned to Congress on Wednesday for a second confirmation hearing to become NASA administrator before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in Washington, DC.
There appeared to be no showstoppers during the hearing, in which Isaacman reiterated his commitment to the space agency’s Artemis Program and defended his draft plan for NASA, “Project Athena,” which calls for an assessment of how NASA should adapt to meet the modern space age.
During his testimony, Isaacman expressed urgency as NASA faces a growing threat from China to its supremacy in spaceflight.
China’s first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket may have ended in a fiery crash, but the company responsible for the mission had a lot to celebrate with the first flight of its new methane-fueled launcher.
LandSpace, a decade-old company based in Beijing, launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket for the first time at 11 pm EST Tuesday (04:0 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China.
Powered by nine methane-fueled engines, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket climbed away from its launch pad with more than 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The 216-foot-tall (66-meter) launcher headed southeast, soaring through clear skies before releasing its first stage booster about two minutes into the flight.
On Wednesday, three NASA astronomers released an analysis showing that several planned orbital telescopes would see their images criss-crossed by planned satellite constellations, such as a fully expanded Starlink and its competitors. While the impact of these constellations on ground-based has been widely considered, orbital hardware was thought to be relatively immune from their interference. But the planned expansion of constellations, coupled with some of the features of upcoming missions, will mean that at least one proposed observatory will see an average of nearly 100 satellite tracks in every exposure.
Making matters worse, some of the planned measures meant to minimize the impact on ground-based telescopes will make things worse for those in orbit.
Constellations vs. astronomy
Satellite constellations are a relatively new threat to astronomy; prior to the drop in launch costs driven by SpaceX’s reusable rockets, the largest constellations in orbit consisted of a few dozen satellites. But the rapid growth of the Starlink system caused problems for ground-based astronomy that are not easy to solve.
China's private launch firm LandSpace is preparing the debut flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket, aiming to become the country's first to land a reusable orbital-class booster using a Falcon-9-style return profile. Ars Technica reports: Liftoff could happen around 11 pm EST tonight (04:00 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. Airspace warning notices advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket's flight path suggest LandSpace has a launch window of about two hours. When it lifts off, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket will become the largest commercial launch vehicle ever flown in China. What's more, LandSpace will become the first Chinese launch provider to attempt a landing of its first stage booster, using the same tried-and-true return method pioneered by SpaceX and, more recently, Blue Origin in the United States.
Construction crews recently finished a landing pad in the remote Gobi Desert, some 240 miles (390 kilometers) southeast of the launch site at Jiuquan. Unlike US spaceports, the Jiuquan launch base is located in China's interior, with rockets flying over land as they climb into space. When the Zhuque-3 booster finishes its job of sending the rocket toward orbit, it will follow an arcing trajectory toward the recovery zone, firing its engines to slow for landing about eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff. At least, that's what is supposed to happen. LandSpace officials have not made any public statements about the odds of a successful landing -- or, for that matter, a successful launch... UPDATE: Chinese Reusable Booster Explodes During First Orbital Test
There’s a race in China among several companies vying to become the next to launch and land an orbital-class rocket, and the starting gun could go off as soon as tonight.
LandSpace, one of several maturing Chinese rocket startups, is about to launch the first flight of its medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket. Liftoff could happen around 11 pm EST tonight (04:00 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China.
Airspace warning notices advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path suggest LandSpace has a launch window of about two hours. When it lifts off, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket will become the largest commercial launch vehicle ever flown in China. What’s more, LandSpace will become the first Chinese launch provider to attempt a landing of its first stage booster, using the same tried-and-true return method pioneered by SpaceX and, more recently, Blue Origin in the United States.
By the time the second group of NASA astronauts reach the Moon later this decade, the space agency would like to have a lunar rover waiting for them. But as the space agency nears a key selection, some government officials are seeking an insurance policy of sorts to increase the program’s chance of success.
At issue is the agency’s “Lunar Terrain Vehicle” (LTV) contract. In April 2024, the space agency awarded a few tens of millions of dollars to three companies—Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Astrolab—to complete preliminary design work on vehicle concepts. NASA then planned to down-select to one company to construct one or more rovers, land on the Moon, and provide rover services for a decade beginning in 2029. Over the lifetime of the fixed-price services contract, there was a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion.
The companies have since completed their design work, including the construction of prototypes, and submitted their final bids for the much larger services contract in August. According to two sources, NASA has since been weighing those bids and is prepared to announce a final selection before the end of this month.
schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: In its war with the Ukraine, it appears Russia is still managing to obtain black market Starlink mini-terminals for use on its drones, despite an effort since 2024 to block access. [Imagery from eastern Ukraine shows a Russian Molniya-type drone outfitted with a mini-Starlink terminal, reinforcing reports that Russia is improvising satellite-linked UAVs to extend their communication and operational range.] SpaceX has made no comment on this issue.
According to the article, Ukraine is "exploring alternative European satellite providers in response, seeking more secure and controllable communications infrastructure for military operations." While switching to another satellite provider might allow Ukraine to shut Starlink down and prevent the Russians from using it within its territory, doing so would likely do more harm to Ukraine's military effort than Russia's. There isn't really any other service comparable at this time. And when Amazon's Leo system comes on line it will face the same black market issues. I doubt it will have any more success than SpaceX in preventing Russia from obtaining its terminals.
Overall this issue is probably not a serious one militarily, however. Russia is not likely capable of obtaining enough black market terminals to make any significant difference on the battlefield. This story however highlights a positive aspect of these new constellations. Just as Russia can't be prevented from obtaining black market terminals, neither can the oppressed citizens in totalitarian nations like Russia and China be blocked as well. These constellations as designed act to defeat the censorship and information control of such nations, a very good thing.
A Soyuz launch at Baikonur damaged Russia's only launchpad capable of sending astronauts and crucial propellant to the ISS. "The rocket itself headed to space without incident, taking three astronauts -- Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of Russia and Chris Williams of NASA -- to the space station," reports the New York Times. "But the force of the rocket's exhaust shoved a service platform used for prelaunch preparations out of its protective shelter. The platform fell into the flame trench below." From the report: Photos and videos of the launch site the next day showed the platform out of place and mangled. "It's heavily damaged," said Anatoly Zak, who publishes RussianSpaceWeb.com, a close tracker of Russia's space activities, "and so probably it will have to be rebuilt. Maybe some of the hardware can be reused. But it fell down, and it's destroyed."
This is the latest embarrassment for the once-proud Russian space program, which the United States relied on from 2011 to 2020 to get NASA astronauts to orbit. The incident also raises questions about the future of the International Space Station if the launchpad cannot be quickly repaired. In a statement issued on Friday, Roscosmos, the state corporation in charge of the Russian space program, confirmed unspecified "damage" at the launchpad. "All necessary parts needed for repairs are at our disposal, and the damage will be dealt with in the near future," it said.
A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet.
Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border.
A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before it hit the ground, perhaps as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
It’s a critical time for companies competing to develop a commercial successor to the International Space Station. NASA is working with several companies, including Axiom Space, Voyager Technologies, Blue Origin, and Vast, to develop concepts for private stations where it can lease time for its astronauts.
The space agency awarded Phase One contracts several years ago and is now in the final stages of writing requirements for Phase Two after asking for feedback from industry partners in September. This program is known as Commercial LEO Destinations, or CLDs in industry parlance.
Time is running out for NASA if it wants to establish continuity from the International Space Station, which will reach its end of life in 2030, with a follow-on station ready to go before then.
A Soyuz rocket launched on Thursday carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, for an eight-month mission to the International Space Station. The trio of astronauts arrived at the orbiting laboratory without incident.
However, on the ground, there was a serious problem during the launch with the ground systems that support processing of the vehicle before liftoff at Site 31, located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
In a terse statement issued Thursday night on the social media site Telegram, the Russian space corporation that operates Soyuz appeared to downplay the incident: “The launch pad was inspected, as is done every time a rocket is launched. Damage to several launch pad components was identified. Damage can occur after launch, so such inspections are mandatory worldwide. The launch pad’s condition is currently being assessed.”
Around this time last year, officials at United Launch Alliance projected 2025 would be their busiest year ever. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters the company would launch as many as 20 missions this year, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and its replacement—the Vulcan rocket.
Now, it’s likely that ULA will close out 2025 with six flights—five with the Atlas V and just one with the Vulcan rocket the company is so eager to accelerate into service. Six flights would make 2025 the busiest launch year for ULA since 2022, but it would still fall well short of the company’s forecast.
Last week, ULA announced its next launch is scheduled for December 15. An Atlas V will loft another batch of broadband satellites for the Amazon Leo network, formerly known as Project Kuiper, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This will be ULA’s last launch of the year.
After nearly a decade of development, Russia’s newest launch vehicle is close to its debut flight. The medium-lift Soyuz 5 rocket is expected to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome before the end of the year.
The Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, has released images of final processing of the Soyuz 5 rocket at the Progress Rocket and Space Center in Samara, Russia, earlier this month before the booster was shipped to the launch site in Kazakhstan. It arrived there on November 12.
Although the Soyuz 5 is a new vehicle, it does not represent a major leap forward in technology. Rather it is, in many ways, a conventional reaction to commercial boosters developed in the West as well as the country’s prolonged war against Ukraine. Whether this strategy will be successful remains to be seen.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Nearly a century ago, scientists proposed that a mysterious invisible substance they named dark matter clumped around galaxies and formed a cosmic web across the universe. What dark matter is made from, and whether it is even real, are still open questions, but according to a study, the first direct evidence of the substance may finally have been glimpsed. More work is needed to rule out less exotic explanations, but if true, the discovery would go down as a turning point in the decades-long search for the elusive substance that is said to make up 27% of the cosmos.
"This could be a crucial breakthrough in unraveling the nature of dark matter," said Prof Tomonori Totani, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo, who said gamma rays emanating from the centre of the Milky Way appeared to bear the signature of the substance. [...] To search for potential dark matter signals, Totani analysed data from Nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which detects the most energetic photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. He spotted a pattern of gamma rays that appeared to match the shape of the dark matter halo that spreads out in a sphere from the heart of the galaxy. The signal "closely matches the properties of gamma-ray radiation predicted to be emitted by dark matter," Totani told the Guardian. Details are published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
If Totani has seen dark matter at work, the observations suggest it is made from elementary particles 500 times more massive than the proton. But far more work is needed to rule out other astrophysical processes and background emissions that could explain the signals. Totani said the "decisive factor" would be detecting gamma rays with the same spectrum from other regions of space, such as dwarf galaxies. According to Prof Justin Read, an astrophysicist at the University of Surrey, the lack of significant signals from such galaxies strongly argues against Totani having seen gamma rays emitted from dark matter particle annihilation. Prof Kinwah Wu, a theoretical astrophysicist at UCL, urged caution, saying: "I appreciate the author's hard work and dedication, but we need extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim," he said. "This analysis has not reached this status yet. It is a piece of work which serves as an encouragement for the workers in the field to keep on pressing."
An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched late Monday and linked up with the country’s Tiangong space station a few hours later, providing a lifeboat for three astronauts stuck in orbit without a safe ride home.
A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday). The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later.
Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 4, astronauts discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a damaged window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk. The crew members used a microscope to photograph the defect from different angles, confirming a small triangular area with a crack, Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told Chinese state media.
The commander of the military unit responsible for running the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida expects SpaceX to begin launching Starship rockets there next year.
Launch companies with facilities near SpaceX’s Starship pads are not pleased. SpaceX’s two chief rivals, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, complained last year that SpaceX’s proposal of launching as many as 120 Starships per year from Florida’s Space Coast could force them to routinely clear personnel from their launch pads for safety reasons.
This isn’t the first time Blue Origin and ULA have tried to throw up roadblocks in front of SpaceX. The companies sought to prevent NASA from leasing a disused launch pad to SpaceX in 2013, but they lost the fight.
The US space agency ended months of speculation about the next flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, confirming Monday that the vehicle will carry only cargo to the International Space Station.
NASA and Boeing are now targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, the space agency said. Launching by next April will require completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities, NASA added in a statement.
“NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in a statement.
The company that pioneered small launch has had a big year.
Rocket Lab broke its annual launch record with the Electron booster—17 successful missions this year, and counting—and is close to bringing its much larger Neutron rocket to the launch pad.
The company also expanded its in-space business, including playing a key role in supporting the landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission on the Moon and building two small satellites just launched to Mars.
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
The universe's expansion might not be accelerating but slowing down, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the finding would upend decades of established astronomical assumptions and rewrite our understanding of dark energy, the elusive force that counters the inward pull of gravity in our universe...
Last year, a consortium of hundreds of researchers using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, developed the largest ever 3D map of the universe. The observations hinted at the fact that dark energy may be weakening over time, indicating that the universe's rate of expansion could eventually slow. Now, a study published November 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society provides further evidence that dark energy might not be pushing on the universe with the same strength it used to. The DESI project's findings last year represented "a major, major paradigm change ... and our result, in some sense, agrees well with that," said Young-Wook Lee, a professor of astrophysics at Yonsei University in South Korea and lead researcher for the new study....
To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed a sample of 300 galaxies containing Type 1a supernovas and posited that the dimming of distant exploding stars was not only due to their moving farther away from Earth, but also due to the progenitor star's age... [Study coauthor Junhyuk Son, a doctoral candidate of astronomy at Yonsei University, said] "we found that their luminosity actually depends on the age of the stars that produce them — younger progenitors yield slightly dimmer supernovae, while older ones are brighter." Son said the team has a high statistical confidence — 99.99% — about this age-brightness relation, allowing them to use Type 1a supernovas more accurately than before to assess the universe's expansion... Eventually, if the expansion continues to slow down, the universe could begin to contract, ending in what astronomers imagine may be the opposite of the big bang — the big crunch. "That is certainly a possibility," Lee said. "Even two years ago, the Big Crunch was out of the question. But we need more work to see whether it could actually happen."
The new research proposes a radical revision of accepted knowledge, so, understandably, it is being met with skepticism. "This study rests on a flawed premise," Adam Riess, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and one of the recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, said in an email. "It suggests supernovae have aged with the Universe, yet observations show the opposite — today's supernovae occur where young stars form. The same idea was proposed years ago and refuted then, and there appears to be nothing new in this version." Lee, however, said Riess' claim is incorrect. "Even in the present-day Universe, Type Ia supernovae are found just as frequently in old, quiescent elliptical galaxies as in young, star-forming ones — which clearly shows that this comment is mistaken. The so-called paper that 'refuted' our earlier result relied on deeply flawed data with enormous uncertainties," he said, adding that the age-brightness correlation has been independently confirmed by two separate teams in the United States and China... "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," Dragan Huterer, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said in an email, noting that he does not feel the new research "rises to the threshold to overturn the currently favored model...."
The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which started operating this year, is set to help settle the debate with the early 2026 launch of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, an ultrawide and ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe made by scanning the entire sky every few nights over 10 years to capture a compilation of asteroids and comets, exploding stars, and distant galaxies as they change.
Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.
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.
Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.
During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.
The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign, it said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”
That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.
LAUNCH COMPLEX 14, Cape Canaveral, Fla.—The platform atop the hulking steel tower offered a sweeping view of Florida’s rich, sandy coastline and brilliant blue waves beyond. Yet as captivating as the vista might be for an aspiring rocket magnate like Andy Lapsa, it also had to be a little intimidating.
To his right, at Launch Complex 13 next door, a recently returned Falcon 9 booster stood on a landing pad. SpaceX has landed more than 500 large orbital rockets. And next to SpaceX sprawled the launch site operated by Blue Origin. Its massive New Glenn rocket is also reusable, and founder Jeff Bezos has invested tens of billions of dollars into the venture.
Looking to the left, Lapsa saw a graveyard of sorts for commercial startups. Launch Complex 15 was leased to a promising startup, ABL Space, two years ago. After two failed launches, ABL Space pivoted away from commercial launch. Just beyond lies Launch Complex 16, where Relativity Space aims to launch from. The company has already burned through $1.7 billion in its efforts to reach orbit. Had billionaire Eric Schmidt not stepped in earlier this year, Relativity would have gone bankrupt.
One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a roadmap on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability.
These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website. The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.
A bigger beast
The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage four BE-3U engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage.
A little more than a century ago, the US Army Air Service came up with a scheme for naming the military’s multiplying fleet of airplanes.
The 1924 aircraft designation code produced memorable names like the B-17, A-26, B-29, and P-51—B for bomber, A for attack, and P for pursuit—during World War II. The military later changed the prefix for pursuit aircraft to F for fighter, leading to recognizable modern names like the F-15 and F-16.
Now, the newest branch of the military is carving its own path with a new document outlining how the Space Force, which can trace its lineage back to the Army Air Service, will name and designate its “weapon systems” on the ground and in orbit. Ars obtained a copy of the document, first written in 2023 and amended in 2024.
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.
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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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At the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, surrounded by the tech giants Google, Apple, and Microsoft, sits the historic NASA Ames Research Center. Its rich history includes a grab bag of fascinating scientific research involving massive wind tunnels, experimental aircraft, supercomputing, astrobiology, and more.
Founded in 1939 as a West Coast lab for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA Ames was built to close the US gap with Germany in aeronautics research. Named for NACA founding member Joseph Sweetman Ames, the facility grew from a shack on Moffett Field into a sprawling compound with thousands of employees. A collection of 5,000 images from NASA Ames’s archives paints a vivid picture of bleeding-edge work at the heart of America’s technology hub.
Wind tunnels
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER ARCHIVES
A key motivation for the new lab was the need for huge wind tunnels to jump-start America’s aeronautical research, which was far behind Germany’s. Smaller tunnels capable of speeds up to 300 miles per hour were built first, followed by a massive 40-by-80-foot tunnel for full-scale aircraft. Powered up in March 1941, these tunnels became vital after Pearl Harbor, helping scientists rapidly develop advanced aircraft.
Today, NASA Ames operates the world’s largest pressurized wind tunnel, with subsonic and transonic chambers for testing rockets, aircraft, and wind turbines.
Pioneer and Voyager 2
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER ARCHIVES
From 1965 to 1992, Ames managed the Pioneer missions, which explored the moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. It also contributed to Voyager 2, launched in 1977, which journeyed past four planets before entering interstellar space in 2018. Ames’s archive preserves our first glimpses of strange new worlds seen during these pioneering missions.
Odd aircraft
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER ARCHIVES
The skeleton of a hulking airship hangar, obsolete even before its completion, remains on NASA Ames’s campus.
Many odd-looking experimental aircraft—such as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, jets, and rotorcraft—have been developed and tested at the facility over the years, and new designs continue to take shape there today.
Vintage illustrations
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER ARCHIVES
Awe-inspiring retro illustrations in the Ames archives depict surfaces of distant planets, NASA spacecraft descending into surreal alien landscapes, and fantastical renderings of future ring-shaped human habitats in space. The optimism and excitement of the ’70s and ’80s is evident.
Bubble suits and early VR
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER ARCHIVES
In the 1980s, NASA Ames researchers worked to develop next-generation space suits, such as the bulbous, hard-shelled AX-5 model. NASA Ames’s Human-Machine Interaction Group also did pioneering work in the 1980s with virtual reality and came up with some wild-looking hardware. Long before today’s AR/VR boom, Ames researchers glimpsed the technology’s potential—which was limited only by computing power.
Decades of federally funded research at Ames fueled breakthroughs in aviation, spaceflight, and supercomputing—an enduring legacy now at risk as federal grants for science face deep cuts.
A version of this story appeared on Beautiful Public Data (beautifulpublicdata.com), a newsletter by Jon Keegan that curates visually interesting data sets collected by local, state, and federal government agencies.
The pendant on Rebecca Jensen-Clem’s necklace is only about an inch wide, composed of 36 silver hexagons entwined in a honeycomb mosaic. At the Keck Observatory, in Hawaii, just as many segments make up a mirror that spans 33 feet, reflecting images of uncharted worlds for her to study.
Jensen-Clem, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, works with the Keck Observatory to figure out how to detect new planets without leaving our own. Typically, this pursuit faces an array of obstacles: Wind, fluctuations in atmospheric density and temperature, or even a misaligned telescope mirror can create a glare from a star’s light that obscures the view of what’s around it, rendering any planets orbiting the star effectively invisible. And what light Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t obscure, it absorbs. That’s why researchers who study these distant worlds often work with space telescopes that circumvent Earth’s pesky atmosphere entirely, such as the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope.
But there’s another way over these hurdles. At her lab among the redwoods, Jensen-Clem and her students experiment with new technologies and software to help Keck’s primary honeycomb mirror and its smaller, “deformable” mirror see more clearly. Using measurements from atmospheric sensors, deformable mirrors are designed to adjust shape rapidly, so they can correct for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere on the fly.
This general imaging technique, called adaptive optics, has been common practice since the 1990s. But Jensen-Clem is looking to level up the game with extreme adaptive optics technologies, which are aimed to create the highest image quality over a small field of view. Her group, in particular, does so by tackling issues involving wind or the primary mirror itself. The goal is to focus starlight so precisely that a planet can be visible even if its host star is a million to a billion times brighter.
In April, she and her former collaborator Maaike van Kooten were named co-recipients of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation’s New Horizons in Physics Prize. The prize announcement says they earned this early-career research award for their potential “to enable the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets” through a repertoire of methods the two women have spent their careers developing.
In July, Jensen-Clem was also announced as a member of a new committee for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a concept for a NASA space telescope that would spend its career on the prowl for signs of life in the universe. She’s tasked with defining the mission’s scientific goals by the end of the decade.
The Keck Observatory’s 10-meter primary mirror features a honeycomb structure with 36 individual mirror segments.
ETHAN TWEEDIE
“In adaptive optics, we spend a lot of time on simulations, or in the lab,” Jensen-Clem says. “It’s been a long road to see that I’ve actually made things better at the observatory in the past few years.”
Jensen-Clem has long appreciated astronomy for its more mind-bending qualities. In seventh grade, she became fascinated by how time slows down near a black hole when her dad, an aerospace engineer, explained that concept to her. After starting her bachelor’s degree at MIT in 2008, she became taken with how a distant star can seem to disappear—either suddenly winking out or gently fading away, depending on the kind of object that passes in front of it. “It wasn’t quite exoplanet science, but there was a lot of overlap,” she says.
“If you just look up at the night sky and see stars twinkling, it’s happening fast. So we have to go fast too.”
During this time, Jensen-Clem began sowing the seeds for one of her prize-winning methods after her teaching assistant recommended that she apply for an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, she worked on a setup that could perfect the orientation of a large mirror. Such mirrors are more difficult to realign than the smaller, deformable ones, whose shape-changing segments cater to Earth’s fluctuating atmosphere.
“At the time, we were saying, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be really cool to install one of these at Keck Observatory?’” Jensen-Clem says. The idea stuck around. She even wrote about it in a fellowship application when she was gearing up to start her graduate work at Caltech. And after years of touch-and-go development, Jensen-Clem succeeded in installing the system—which uses a technology called a Zernike wavefront sensor—on Keck’s primary mirror about a year ago. “My work as a college intern is finally done,” she says.
The system, which is currently used for occasional recalibrations rather than continuous adjustments, includes a special kind of glass plate that bends the light rays from the mirror to reveal a specific pattern. The detector can pick up a hairbreadth misalignment in that picture: If one hexagon is pushed too far back or forward, its brightness changes. Even the tiniest misalignment is important to correct, because “when you’re studying a faint object, suddenly you’re much more susceptible to little mistakes,” Jensen-Clem says.
She has also been working to perfect the craft of molding Keck’s deformable mirror. This instrument, which reflects light that’s been rerouted from the primary mirror, is much smaller—only six inches wide—and is designed to reposition as often as 2,000 times a second to combat atmospheric turbulence and create the clearest picture possible. “If you just look up at the night sky and see stars twinkling, it’s happening fast. So we have to go fast too,” Jensen-Clem says.
Even at this rapid rate of readjustment, there’s still a lag. The deformable mirror is usually about one millisecond behind the actual outdoor conditions at any given time. “When the [adaptive optics] system can’t keep up, then you aren’t going to get the best resolution,” says van Kooten, Jensen-Clem’s former collaborator, who is now at the National Research Council Canada. This lag has proved especially troublesome on windy nights.
Jensen-Clem thought it was an unsolvable problem. “The reason we have that delay is because we need to run computations and then move the deformable mirror,” she says. “You’re never going to do those things instantaneously.”
But while she was still a postdoc at UC Berkeley, she came across a paper that posited a solution. Its authors proposed that using previous measurements and simple algebra to predict how the atmosphere will change, rather than trying to keep up with it in real time, would yield better results. She wasn’t able to test the idea at the time, but coming to UCSC and working with Keck presented the perfect opportunity.
Around this time, Jensen-Clem invited van Kooten to join her team at UCSC as a postdoc because of their shared interest in the predictive software. “I didn’t have a place to live at first, so she put me up in her guest room,” van Kooten says. “She’s just so supportive at every level.”
After creating experimental software to try out at Keck, the team compared the predictive version with the more standard adaptive optics, examining how well each imaged an exoplanet without its drowning in starlight. They found that the predictive software could image even faint exoplanets two to three times more clearly. The results, which Jensen-Clem published in 2022, were part of what earned her the New Horizons in Physics Prize.
Thayne Currie, an astronomer at the University of Texas, San Antonio, says that these new techniques will become especially vital as researchers build bigger and bigger ground-based facilities to capture images of exoplanets—including upcoming projects such as the Extremely Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory and the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile. “There’s an incredible amount that we’re learning about the universe, and it is really driven by technology advances that are very, very new,” Currie says. “Dr. Jensen-Clem’s work is an example of that kind of innovation.”
In May, one of Jensen-Clem’s graduate students went back to Hawaii to reinstall the predictive software at Keck. This time, the program isn’t just a trial run; it’s there to stay. The new software has shown it can refocus artificial starlight. Next, it will have to prove it can handle the real thing.
And in about a year, Jensen-Clem and her students and colleagues will brace themselves for a flood of observations from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which recently finished measuring the motion, temperature, and composition of billions of stars over more than a decade.
When the project releases its next set of data—slated for December 2026—Jensen-Clem’s team aims to hunt for new exoplanetary systems using clues like the wobbles in a star’s motion caused by the gravitational tugs of planets orbiting around it. Once a system has been identified, exoplanet photographers will then be able to shoot the hidden planets using a new instrument at Keck that can reveal more about their atmospheres and temperatures.
There will be a mountain of data to sort through, and an even steeper supply of starlight to refocus. Thankfully, Jensen-Clem has spent more than a decade refining just the techniques she’ll need: “This time next year,” she says, “we’ll be racing to throw all our adaptive optics tricks at these systems and detect as many of these objects as possible.”
Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences.
Something is rotten in the city of Nunapitchuk. In recent years, a crack has formed in the middle of a house. Sewage has leached into the earth. Soil has eroded around buildings, leaving them perched atop precarious lumps of dirt. There are eternal puddles. And mold. The ground can feel squishy, sodden.
This small town in northern Alaska is experiencing a sometimes overlooked consequence of climate change: thawing permafrost. And Nunapitchuk is far from the only Arctic town to find itself in such a predicament.
Permafrost, which lies beneath about 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, is defined as ground that has remained frozen for at least two years. Historically, much of the world’s permafrost has remained solid and stable for far longer, allowing people to build whole towns atop it. But as the planet warms, a process that is happening more rapidly near the poles than at more temperate latitudes, permafrost is thawing and causing a host of infrastructural and environmental problems.
Now scientists think they may be able to use satellite data to delve deep beneath the ground’s surface and get a better understanding of how the permafrost thaws, and which areas might be most severely affected because they had more ice to start with. Clues from the short-term behavior of those especially icy areas, seen from space, could portend future problems.
Using information gathered both from space and on the ground, they are working with affected communities to anticipate whether a house’s foundation will crack—and whether it is worth mending that crack or is better to start over in a new house on a stable hilltop. These scientists’ permafrost predictions are already helping communities like Nunapitchuk make those tough calls.
But it’s not just civilian homes that are at risk. One of the top US intelligence agencies, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), is also interested in understanding permafrost better. That’s because the same problems that plague civilians in the high north also plague military infrastructure, at home and abroad. The NGA is, essentially, an organization full of space spies—people who analyze data from surveillance satellites and make sense of it for the country’s national security apparatus.
Understanding the potential instabilities of the Alaskan military infrastructure—which includes radar stations that watch for intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as military bases and National Guard posts—is key to keeping those facilities in good working order and planning for their strengthened future. Understanding the potential permafrost weaknesses that could affect the infrastructure of countries like Russia and China, meanwhile, affords what insiders might call “situational awareness” about competitors.
The work to understand this thawing will only become more relevant, for civilians and their governments alike, as the world continues to warm.
The ground beneath
If you live much below the Arctic Circle, you probably don’t think a lot about permafrost. But it affects you no matter where you call home.
In addition to the infrastructural consequences for real towns like Nunapitchuk, thawing permafrost contains sequestered carbon—twice as much as currently inhabits the atmosphere. As the permafrost thaws, the process can release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That release can cause a feedback loop: Warmer temperatures thaw permafrost, which releases greenhouse gases, which warms the air more, which then—you get it.
The microbes themselves, along with previously trapped heavy metals, are also set dangerously free.
For many years, researchers’ primary options for understanding some of these freeze-thaw changes involved hands-on, on-the-ground surveys. But in the late 2000s, Kevin Schaefer, currently a senior scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, started to investigate a less labor-intensive idea: using radar systems aboard satellites to survey the ground beneath.
This idea implanted itself in his brain in 2009, when he traveled to a place called Toolik Lake, southwest of the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. One day, after hours of drilling sample cores out of the ground to study permafrost, he was relaxing in the Quonset hut, chatting with colleagues. They began to discuss how space-based radar could potentially detect how the land sinks and heaves back up as temperatures change.
Huh, he thought. Yes,radar probably could do that.
Scientists call the ground right above permafrost the active layer. The water in this layer of soil contracts and expands with the seasons: during the summer, the ice suffusing the soil melts and the resulting decrease in volume causes the ground to dip. During the winter, the water freezes and expands, bulking the active layer back up. Radar can help measure that height difference, which is usually around one to five centimeters.
Schaefer realized that he could use radar to measure the ground elevation at the start and end of the thaw. The electromagnetic waves that bounce back at those two times would have traveled slightly different distances. That difference would reveal the tiny shift in elevation over the seasons and would allow him to estimate how much water had thawed and refrozen in the active layer and how far below the surface the thaw had extended.
With radar, Schaefer realized, scientists could cover a lot more literal ground, with less effort and at lower cost.
“It took us two years to figure out how to write a paper on it,” he says; no one had ever made those measurements before. He and colleagues presented the idea at the 2010 meeting of the American Geophysical Union and published a paper in 2012 detailing the method, using it to estimate the thickness of the active layer on Alaska’s North Slope.
When they did, they helped start a new subfield that grew as large-scale data sets started to become available around 5 to 10 years ago, says Roger Michaelides, a geophysicistat Washington University in St. Louis and a collaborator of Schaefer’s. Researchers’ efforts were aided by the growth in space radar systems and smaller, cheaper satellites.
With the availability of global data sets (sometimes for free, from government-run satellites like the European Space Agency’s Sentinel) and targeted observations from commercial companies like Iceye, permafrost studies are moving from bespoke regional analyses to more automated, large-scale monitoring and prediction.
The remote view
Simon Zwieback, a geospatial and environmental expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, sees the consequences of thawing permafrost firsthand every day. His office overlooks a university parking lot, a corner of which is fenced off to keep cars and pedestrians from falling into a brand-new sinkhole. That area of asphalt had been slowly sagging for more than a year, but over a week or two this spring, it finally started to collapse inward.
Kevin Schaefer stands on top of a melting layer of ice near the Alaskan pipeline on the North Slope of Alaska.
COURTESY OF KEVIN SCHAEFER
The new remote research methods are a large-scale version of Zwieback taking in the view from his window. Researchers look at the ground and measure how its height changes as ice thaws and refreezes. The approach can cover wide swaths of land, but it involves making assumptions about what’s going on below the surface—namely, how much ice suffuses the soil in the active layer and permafrost. Thawing areas with relatively low ice content could mimic thinner layers with more ice. And it’s important to differentiate the two, since more ice in the permafrost means more potential instability.
To check that they’re on the right track, scientists have historically had to go out into the field. But a few years ago, Zwieback started to explore a way to make better and deeper estimates of ice content using the available remote sensing data. Finding a way to make those kinds of measurements on a large scale was more than an academic exercise: Areas of what he calls “excess ice” are most liable to cause instability at the surface. “In order to plan in these environments, we really need to know how much ice there is, or where those locations are that are rich in ice,” he says.
Zwieback, who did his undergraduate and graduate studies in Switzerland and Austria, wasn’t always so interested in permafrost, or so deeply affected by it. But in 2014, when he was a doctoral student in environmental engineering, he joined an environmental field campaign in Siberia, at the Lena River Delta, which resembles a gigantic piece of coral fanning out into the Arctic Ocean. Zwieback was near a town called Tiksi, one of the world’s northernmost settlements. It’s a military outpost and starting point for expeditions to the North Pole, featuring an abandoned plane near the ocean. Its Soviet-era concrete buildings sometimes bring it to the front page of the r/UrbanHell subreddit.
Here, Zwieback saw part of the coastline collapse, exposing almost pure ice. It looked like a subterranean glacier, but it was permafrost. “That really had an indelible impact on me,” he says.
Later, as a doctoral student in Zurich and postdoc in Canada, he used his radar skills to understand the rapid changes that the activity of permafrost impressed upon the landscape.
And now, with his job in Fairbanks and his ideas about the use of radar sensing, he has done work funded by the NGA, which has an open Arctic data portal.
In his Arctic research, Zwieback started with the approach underlying most radar permafrost studies: looking at the ground’s seasonal subsidence and heave. “But that’s something that happens very close to the surface,” he says. “It doesn’t really tell us about these long-term destabilizing effects,” he adds.
In warmer summers, he thought, subtle clues would emerge that could indicate how much ice is buried deeper down.
For example, he expected those warmer-than-average periods to exaggerate the amount of change seen on the surface, making it easier to tell which areas are ice-rich. Land that was particularly dense with ice would dip more than it “should”—a precursor of bigger dips to come.
The first step, then, was to measure subsidence directly, as usual. But from there, Zwieback developed an algorithm to ingest data about the subsidence over time—as measured by radar—and other environmental information, like the temperatures at each measurement. He then created a digital model of the land that allowed him to adjust the simulated amount of ground ice and determine when it matched the subsidence seen in the real world. With that, researchers could infer the amount of ice beneath.
Next, he made maps of that ice that could potentially be useful to engineers—whether they were planning a new subdivision or, as his funders might be, keeping watch on a military airfield.
“What was new in my work was to look at these much shorter periods and use them to understand specific aspects of this whole system, and specifically how much ice there is deep down,” Zwieback says.
The NGA, which has also funded Schaefer’s work, did not respond to an initial request for comment but did later provide feedback for fact-checking. It removed an article on its website about Zwieback’s grant and its application to agency interests around the time that the current presidential administration began to ban mention of climate change in federal research. But the thawing earth is of keen concern.
To start, the US has significant military infrastructure in Alaska: It’s home to six military bases and 49 National Guard posts, as well as 21 missile-detecting radar sites. Most are vulnerable to thaw now or in the near future, given that 85% of the state is on permafrost.
Beyond American borders, the broader north is in a state of tension. Russia’s relations with Northern Europe are icy. Its invasion of Ukraine has left those countries fearing that they too could be invaded, prompting Sweden and Finland, for instance, to join NATO. The US has threatened takeovers of Greenland and Canada. And China—which has shipping and resource ambitions for the region—is jockeying to surpass the US as the premier superpower.
Permafrost plays a role in the situation. “As knowledge has expanded, so has the understanding that thawing permafrost can affect things NGA cares about, including the stability of infrastructure in Russia and China,” read the NGA article. Permafrost covers 60% of Russia, and thaws have affected more than 40% of buildings in northern Russia already, according to statements from the country’s minister of natural resources in 2021. Experts say critical infrastructure like roads and pipelines is at risk, along with military installations. That could weaken both Russia’s strategic position and the security of its residents. In China, meanwhile, according to a report from the Council on Strategic Risks, important moving parts like the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, “which allows Beijing to more quickly move military personnel near contested areas of the Indian border,” is susceptible to ground thaw—as are oil and gas pipelines linking Russia and China.
In the field
Any permafrost analysis that relies on data from space requires verification on Earth. The hope is that remote methods will become reliable enough to use on their own, but while they’re being developed, researchers must still get their hands muddy with more straightforward and longer tested physical methods. Some use a network called Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring, which has existed since 1991, incorporating active-layer data from hundreds of measurement sites across the Northern Hemisphere.
Sometimes, that data comes from people physically probing an area; other sites use tubes permanently inserted into the ground, filled with a liquid that indicates freezing; still others use underground cables that measure soil temperature. Some researchers, like Schaefer, lug ground-penetrating radar systems around the tundra. He’s taken his system to around 50 sites and made more than 200,000 measurements of the active layer.
The field-ready ground-penetrating radar comes in a big box—the size of a steamer trunk—that emits radio pulses. These pulses bounce off the bottom of the active layer, or the top of the permafrost. In this case, the timing of that reflection reveals how thick the active layer is. With handles designed for humans, Schaefer’s team drags this box around the Arctic’s boggier areas.
The box floats. “I do not,” he says. He has vivid memories of tromping through wetlands, his legs pushing straight down through the muck, his body sinking up to his hips.
Andy Parsekian and Kevin Schaefer haul a ground penetrating radar unit through the tundra near Utqiagvik.
COURTESY OF KEVIN SCHAEFER
Zwieback also needs to verify what he infers from his space data. And so in 2022, he went to the Toolik Field station, a National Science Foundation–funded ecology research facility along the Dalton Highway and adjacent to Schaefer’s Toolik Lake. This road, which goes from Fairbanks up to the Arctic Ocean, is colloquially called the Haul Road; it was made famous in the TV show Ice Road Truckers. From this access point, Zwieback’s team needed to get deep samples of soil whose ice content could be analyzed in the lab.
Every day, two teams would drive along the Dalton Highway to get close to their field sites. Slamming their car doors, they would unload and hop on snow machines to travel the final distance. Often they would see musk oxen, looking like bison that never cut their hair. The grizzlies were also interested in these oxen, and in the nearby caribou.
At the sites they could reach, they took out a corer, a long, tubular piece of equipment driven by a gas engine, meant to drill deep into the ground. Zwieback or a teammate pressed it into the earth. The barrel’s two blades rotated, slicing a cylinder about five feet down to ensure that their samples went deep enough to generate data that can be compared with the measurements made from space. Then they pulled up and extracted the cylinder, a sausage of earth and ice.
All day every day for a week, they gathered cores that matched up with the pixels in radar images taken from space. In those cores, the ice was apparent to the eye. But Zwieback didn’t want anecdata. “We want to get a number,” he says.
So he and his team would pack their soil cylinders back to the lab. There they sliced them into segments and measured their volume, in both their frozen and their thawed form, to see how well the measured ice content matched estimates from the space-based algorithm.
The initial validation, which took months, demonstrated the value of using satellites for permafrost work. The ice profiles that Zwieback’s algorithm inferred from the satellite data matched measurements in the lab down to about 1.1 feet, and farther in a warm year, with some uncertainty near the surface and deeper into the permafrost.
Whereas it cost tens of thousands of dollars to fly in on a helicopter, drive in a car, and switch to a snowmobile to ultimately sample a small area using your hands, only to have to continue the work at home, the team needed just a few hundred dollars to run the algorithm on satellite data that was free and publicly available.
Michaelides, who is familiar with Zwieback’s work, agrees that estimating excess ice content is key to making infrastructural decisions, and that historical methods of sussing it out have been costly in all senses. Zwieback’s method of using late-summer clues to infer what’s going on at that depth “is a very exciting idea,” he says, and the results “demonstrate that there is considerable promise for this approach.”
He notes, though, that using space-based radar to understand the thawing ground is complicated: Ground ice content, soil moisture, and vegetation can differ even within a single pixel that a satellite can pick out. “To be clear, this limitation is not unique to Simon’s work,” Michaelides says; it affects all space-radar methods. There is also excess ice below even where Zwieback’s algorithm can probe—something the labor-intensive on-ground methods can pick up that still can’t be seen from space.
Mapping out the future
After Zwieback did his fieldwork, NGA decided to do its own. The agency’s attempt to independently validate his work—in Prudhoe Bay, Utqiagvik, and Fairbanks—was part of a project it called Frostbyte.
Its partners in that project—the Army’s Cold Regions Research Engineering Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory—declined requests for interviews. As far as Zwieback knows, they’re still analyzing data.
But the intelligence community isn’t the only group interested in research like Zwieback’s. He also works with Arctic residents, reaching out to rural Alaskan communities where people are trying to make decisions about whether to relocate or where to build safely. “They typically can’t afford to do expensive coring,” he says. “So the idea is to make these data available to them.”
Zwieback and his team haul their gear out to gather data from drilled core samples, a process which can be arduous and costly.
ANDREW JOHNSON
Schaefer is also trying to bridge the gap between his science and the people it affects. Through a company called Weather Stream, he is helping communities identify risks to infrastructure before anything collapses, so they can take preventative action.
Making such connections has always been a key concern for Erin Trochim, a geospatial scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. As a researcher who works not just on permafrost but also on policy, she’s seen radar science progress massively in recent years—without commensurate advances on the ground.
For instance, it’s still hard for residents in her town of Fairbanks—or anywhere—to know if there’s permafrost on their property at all, unless they’re willing to do expensive drilling. She’s encountered this problem, still unsolved, on property she owns. And if an expert can’t figure it out, non-experts hardly stand a chance. “It’s just frustrating when a lot of this information that we know from the science side, and [that’s] trickled through the engineering side, hasn’t really translated into the on-the-ground construction,” she says.
There is a group, though, trying to turn that trickle into a flood: Permafrost Pathways, a venture that launched with a $41 million grant through the TED Audacious Project. In concert with affected communities, including Nunapitchuk, it is building a data-gathering network on the ground, and combining information from that network with satellite data and local knowledge to help understand permafrost thaw and develop adaptation strategies.
“I think about it often as if you got a diagnosis of a disease,” says Sue Natali, the head of the project. “It’s terrible, but it’s also really great, because when you know what your problem is and what you’re dealing with, it’s only then that you can actually make a plan to address it.”
And the communities Permafrost Pathways works with are making plans. Nunapitchuk has decided to relocate, and the town and the research group have collaboratively surveyed the proposed new location: a higher spot on hardpacked sand. Permafrost Pathways scientists were able to help validate the stability of the new site—and prove to policymakers that this stability would extend into the future.
Radar helps with that in part, Natali says, because unlike other satellite detectors, it penetrates clouds. “In Alaska, it’s extremely cloudy,” she says. “So other data sets have been very, very challenging. Sometimes we get one image per year.”
And so radar data, and algorithms like Zwieback’s that help scientists and communities make sense of that data, dig up deeper insight into what’s going on beneath northerners’ feet—and how to step forward on firmer ground.
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