Space News and Discussions

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Trump orders relaxed rules for rocket launches, appearing to benefit Musk and Bezos

Source: The Guardian

Wed 13 Aug 2025 20.50 EDT
Last modified on Wed 13 Aug 2025 20.51 EDT

Donald Trump is looking to relax environmental rules for commercial spaceship companies. In an executive order titled “enabling competition in the commercial space industry” that he signed on Wednesday, he said it’s imperative to national security that the private rocket-ship industry increase launches “substantially” by 2030.

That would mean, according to the executive order, that those companies may be able to forgo the environmental reviews that are required under the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa). Private space companies are required to get launch permits from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). And, as part of that process, companies are subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Sean Duffy, the US secretary of transportation, which oversees the FAA, called Trump’s executive order “visionary”. The FAA has faced criticism from space companies for taking too long to review launch permits while environmental groups have lambasted the agency for not using Nepa reviews to require more protections at launch sites.

These environmental reviews are required because rocket launches and landings can be massively disruptive to local towns and residents, along with the natural surroundings. Exhaust, smoke plumes and sonic booms created at launch can injure and kill endangered species, and detritus from exploded rocket parts returning to Earth can harm fish and marine animals with hazardous material spills, fuel slicks and falling objects.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... musk-bezos

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Meet Chrysalis, The Generational Ship Designed to Take Humans on A 400-Year Trip to Alpha Centauri
By James Felton
August 12, 2025

Introduction:

(IFL Science) For beings of our size and lifespans, space is pretty big. So big, in fact, that to make it to our nearest star system you would need to factor in the fairly sizeable downside that you will die of old age before you get there.

Humanity has focused on making our spaceships more speedy, as well as the possibility of sending smaller, uncrewed lightweight ships to the system potentially within human lifespans. But if we want to send humans to the star system in the future (or go on other long-distance trips) we may have to accept that it will take several human lifespans to get there.

With the restraints placed upon them by physics, sci-fi writers have imagined "generational ships" for decades. The idea is pretty simple: creating a ship that will sustain a small society of humans for however many generations it takes to get to the intended destination. But in practical terms, such a mission would be pretty complex.

For a new competition exploring the practicalities of generational ships, dubbed Project Hyperion, scientists competed to design their own ship which could feasibly take humans to a hypothetical habitable planet at least 250 years away in terms of travel time. The winning team went one step further, designing a spaceship named "Chrysalis" which they propose could deliver thousands of people to Alpha Centauri, a trip taking over four centuries.

From the outside, the ship has a very simple design, looking like a giant tube. While other entries were more elaborate, the team chose this design to ensure safety for the occupants during acceleration at speeds up to 0.01 percent of the speed of light (c).

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/meet-chrysa ... ri-80373

[firestar464]

Tbf by then we'd have ASI to explore other planets; for the most part it would be more economic to upload ourselves to the Matrix and live there while the real world is filled with datacenters

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Forget Planet X! Beyond Neptune, There Might Be An Earth-Sized Planet Y
By Dr. Alfredo Carpineti
August 22, 2025

Introduction:

(IFL Science) The Solar System does not have a clear border. The influence of the Sun in certain domains is small enough for the Voyager probes to have escaped into interstellar space, but there are comets and larger worlds orbiting our Sun at incredibly far distances. Astronomers have been wondering what might lurk in those dark regions, where the Sun is but another star in the sky. A team has now suggested the presence of a potential new planet, but not the one you may be thinking of.

This is not the famous Planet 9, a world larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune that has been hypothesized to exist at least 300 times further out than Earth, if not farther. The idea of more unidentified planets in the Solar System is very old. Before the Planet 9 hypothesis, when Pluto was not yet demoted to dwarf planet, the idea took the name of Planet X – a joke on the meaning of X as 10 in Roman numerals and as the mathematical unknown.

Planet X has now been linked to Planet 9; hence, the team's suggestion to call this new hypothetical world Planet Y in a new preprint paper accepted for publication. The suggested evidence for the presence of this hypothetical object comes from the warp in the plane of trans-Neptunian objects.
Basically, their orbit seems consistently skewed compared to the plane of the Solar System.

There are many known trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, and likely many more await discovery. The team used planets that orbit the Sun between 50 and 400 astronomical units (the distance between the Earth and the Sun) away. They carefully removed TNOs whose orbits are in resonance with Neptune (like the one doing one orbit every 10 orbits of the ice giant planet) and looked at the distribution of the rest.

There is no warp in TNOs between 50 and 80 astronomical units, but between 80 and 200, and 80 and 400, there is statistical evidence of a warp of about 15 degrees. There is only a 2 percent chance that the warp found here is a fluke, and if that is the case, more TNO discoveries should show it.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/forget-plan ... -y-80531

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https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/r ... rtant-step

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Northrop Grumman Launches First Cygnus XL Cargo Ship to ISS With 30% More Cargo
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched Sept. 14 at 6:11 p.m. ET.
By Jon Martindale September 15, 2025

Northrop Grumman has completed the first successful launch of its upgraded cargo hauler, the Cygnus XL. Based on the Enhanced Cygnus design, which debuted in 2015, this new model is almost double the size and more than double the payload volume of the original Cygnus design from 2013. This is the first successful Cygnus spacecraft launch since August 2024, due to several delays and postponements.

NASA and Orbital Sciences originally developed the Cygnus for cargo hauling to the International Space Station. It has since been upgraded several times to increase its haulage capacity and allow for expanded capabilities, such as boosting the ISS' orbit and performing secondary missions after undocking from the space station. As an expendable craft, it's always de-orbited to destruction after completing its deliveries.

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/n ... th-30-more

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Report Suggests China May Take the Lead in Space Technology in 5-10 Years
The key takeaway? It's only getting faster.
By Jon Martindale September 17, 2025

China's space programs, investments, and cooperative endeavours with third parties have accelerated so much in the past 10 years that a new report from the Commercial Space Federation indicates it's poised to become the leading country in aerospace technology. Called "Redshift," the report outlines the key areas in which China has made significant progress and claims that said progress is only accelerating. This could mean China becomes the most advanced space-bound nation in less than a decade, the report suggests.

The report outlines how Chinese commercial investments in space have grown to several billion dollars a year in just the past few years. Half a dozen spaceports are now in operation, and plans exist to increase their number and scale to rival US companies like SpaceX within just a few years. China has over 12 launch companies, many building the kind of lift vehicles that could soon rival SpaceX's Falcon 9 workhorse. It also highlights how China continues to hit its milestones for lunar and Mars missions in the coming decade, while NASA's Artemis plans keep slipping.

"The key takeaway here is that there is an acceleration," said Dave Cavossa,

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/r ... 5-10-years

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[wjfox]

Astronomers find 'bridge' of gas between galaxies (VIDEO)

Professor Lister Staveley-Smith explains the discovery of a bridge of gas between two galaxies

https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/1093416



Credit: ICRAR and D.Lang (Perimeter Institute).

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Private Spacecraft to Boost NASA Telescope's Orbit for the First Time
It's another example of NASA relying more on private enterprise for its orbital infrastructure and maintenance.
By Jon Martindale September 26, 2025

NASA has announced that for the first time, it will contract out a private spacecraft to reboost one of its falling satellites: the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The observatory has spent the past 20 years searching for gamma-ray bursts. The commercial company will launch a new reboosting spacecraft in spring 2026, hoping to raise the ailing satellite's orbit and help it continue its work for many years to come.

NASA has reboosted its own satellites and spacecraft before, but it's never contracted that job out to a private entity without it being part of the original mission parameters. Next year, though, that's exactly what it's going to do in an effort to keep this telescope working. Opting for someone else to do it is partially a matter of funding, but also of turnaround time. The contractor, Arizona's Katalyst Space Technologies, could do it on a reasonable timeline, where NASA wouldn't have been able to hit the target on its own.

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/p ... first-time

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Europe needs reusable rockets to catch Musk's SpaceX: ESA chief

European Space Agency director Josef Aschbacher is calling on Europe to pay up to compete in a booming space economy.

Europe must quickly get its own reusable rocket launcher to catch up to billionaire Elon Musk's dominant SpaceX, European Space Agency director Josef Aschbacher told AFP in an interview.

While the US company has an overwhelming lead in the booming space launch industry, a series of setbacks, including Russia's withdrawal of its rockets, left Europe without an independent way to blast its missions into space.

That year-long hiatus ended with the first launch of Europe's much-delayed Ariane 6 rocket in July 2024. But the system is not reusable, unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 workhorse.

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-europe-re ... pacex.html

Probably the worse mistake of nasa and the major space agencies of the past 60 years is not developing reusable rockets. Musk did it and that is why he is winning.

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NASA opens SpaceX's moon lander contract to rivals over Starship delays

Source: Reuters

October 20, 2025 6:58 PM EDT Updated 10 hours ago

WASHINGTON, Oct 20 (Reuters) - NASA said on Monday it was opening the marquee U.S. moon landing contract to other bidders because Elon Musk's SpaceX has experienced mounting delays with its Starship lunar lander. The move paves the way for rivals such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to snatch a high-profile mission to land the first astronauts on the moon in half a century.

"I'm in the process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others," the U.S. space agency's acting chief Sean Duffy, who also serves as U.S. Transportation Secretary, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.

Duffy's comments follow months of mounting pressure within NASA to speed up its Artemis lunar program and push SpaceX to make greater progress on its Starship lunar lander, while China progresses toward its own goal of sending humans to the moon by 2030.

It represents a major shift in NASA's lunar strategy, starting a new competitive juncture in the program for a crewed moon lander just two years before the scheduled landing date. Blue Origin is widely expected to compete for the mission, while Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) has indicated it would convene an industry team to heed NASA's call.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/science/us-seek ... 025-10-20/