Archive for the ‘Space News’ Category
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September 10th, 2026
Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission, speaking at the National Book Festival.
Image credit: Library of Congress/Shawn Miller
Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission in April, led humanity’s first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years — a nearly 10-day journey that looped around the moon and back. He told a standing room only audience at the National Book Festival on August 22 about what it looked and like inside the spacecraft.
For the video, go to:
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Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
China’s Tiangong space station has upgraded its in-orbit kitchen. During a space lecture to science class students, the Shenzhou-23 crew —Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying — covered the crew’s daily orbital meals and upgraded food-heating tools aboard the space station.
Lai, Hong Kong’s first payload specialist, explained the heating facilities, which enable astronauts to enjoy freshly heated meals in the microgravity environment.
“The space station is equipped with two heating devices. The lower microwave heating device works on the same principle as household microwaves and is mainly used for heating staple foods like rice. The upper hot-air heating device adopts 360-degree circulating hot air technology, allowing astronauts to have hot meals in less than half an hour,” Lai reported from space.
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Hot-air-baking
A newly added hot-air baking machine marks the biggest highlight of the upgraded space kitchen, Lai continued.
“The space station is now equipped with a hot-air baking machine. It has solved the challenge of oil fume purification in confined spaces and can raise the maximum heating temperature to 190 degrees Celsius. This allows us to bake chicken wings, pumpkins and cakes right in the space station,” Lai said.
Go to this China Central Television (CCTV) video at:
Image credit: CSIS/Inside Outer Space screengrab
On August 20, 2026, U.S. President Trump signed The National Space Transportation Policy presidential memorandum, which sets a target of enabling over 1,000 space launches and reentries annually by 2030 through expanded launch infrastructure and industrial base capacity.
What’s up with China’s plans for launch, and more recently, recoverable rocketry?
What are the challenges and opportunities facing the launch industry – from launch capacity and infrastructure modernization, to supply chain resilience, and to competitiveness and exportability?
Image credit: SpaceX
That’s the focus of a September 9 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)/HTK Series.
This conversation features Kari Bingen, director of the CSIS Aerospace Security Project, Tom Karako, director of the CSIS Missile Defense Project, and Heather Williams, director of the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues.
Take a view of this informative webcast at:
Artistic concept of lunar surface technologies and infrastructure capabilities.
Image credit: NASA
NASA is pressing forward on the plan to establish a Moon Base in the lunar South Pole region.
Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, NASA posted a NextSTEP-3 Broad Agency Announcement Appendix A.
The Lunar Enabling Infrastructure Accelerator solicitation aims to mature and demonstrate capabilities in five areas:
Vertical solar array technology that can provide consistent power generation, management, distribution, and energy storage.
In-situ resource utilization of oxygen to extract from the lunar regolith usable oxygen molecularly bonded to rock and dust covering the Moon’s surface.
Radioisotope Stirling generator, a type of nuclear energy technology that uses heat from fissile materials to produce electric power for operating spacecraft systems in the darkest, dustiest, and most remote places.
In-space advanced manufacturing to reduce reliance on resupply missions from Earth and to optimize mission flexibility and resilience on the Moon.
Innovative nanomaterials production to advance the commercial availability and quality of nanomaterials that can be used in lunar exploration.
For those responding to the solicitation, the offers are due on October 8, before 5:00 PM EDT.
To view the entire solicitation focused on a sustainable lunar presence, go to:
https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/9150228ad10e4d6dbf8a2f464147f8cf/view
Light it up! Artist’s rendering of the lunar South Pole region.
Image credit: NASA
Image credit: Weibo/Inside Outer Space screengrab
China is making progress on its Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission. It appears on track getting the trek underway next year, dedicated to bring back to Earth roughly 500 grams of Red Planet collectibles in 2031.
According to the China National Space Administration, the Tianwen-3 probe will have a lander, an ascender, a service capsule, an orbiter, and an Earth reentry module.
Grab the headlines
The Tianwen-3 mission will be launched around 2028 on two Long March-5 heavy-lift carrier rockets from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China’s southernmost island province of Hainan.
Explains a U.S. Mars expert: “China will not only grab the headlines but may be the first to find evidence of life on another planet.”
For more details, go to my new Space.com story — “China on track to launch Mars sample-return mission in 2028 – “If accurate, this represents a Sputnik moment” – at:
Image credit: Weibo/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek by Glen E. Swanson and Foreword by Margaret A. Weitekamp of the Air and Space Museum; 2025; 288 pages (Hardcover); $35.00
Put aside the issue of cranky sliding doors on the USS Enterprise. Level out those pointy Spock ears and discount your own troubling encounters with tribbles.
But live long and prosper by reading this book. Also, your timing is great: Star Trek was first launched on the NBC Television Network on Sept. 8, 1966 – 60 years ago!
Swanson, a former chief historian at the NASA Johnson Space Center, has detailed how NASA, the Smithsonian, and aerospace businesses helped shape, legitimize, and popularize the now-beloved television show Star Trek, even including looks at the merchandising of the TV show and its syndication.
This is a scholarly look at Star Trek’s helmsman, Gene Roddenberry, and the science fiction world he created that drew upon smart storylines, visual effects, as well as plausible science and technology.
“As a baby boomer, Star Trek was a big part of my childhood,” an inspirational adventure, Swanson explains. “But little has been published about how Star Trek itself was inspired.”
Within its solid eight chapters, the author notes the role of the RAND Corporation, the military and nationalism in Star Trek, as well as the roles the aerospace industry, NASA and the Smithsonian played, leading to the show’s “vindication through syndication.”
Spock ears in a box handmade by Leonard Nimoy.
Image credit: Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
There is a wealth of well-researched facts and foundational observations offered in this book, replete with incredible endnotes and bibliography – assets that make this volume indispensible, not just for Star Trek fans, but those that deep dive into the meaning of space exploration.
Writes Swanson: “Is Star Trek an anomaly like the Apollo program? Both were products of the same decade. Apollo was the opening act to a period of time when our species could and did leave this world to venture out and explore another. Apollo was our first giant leap into space, and Star Trek was there to remind us not to get discouraged.”
So boldly go and get this terrific account of Star Trek’s beginnings and the evolving legacy it projects today.
For more information on this book, go to:
https://schifferbooks.com/products/inspired-enterprise
Also, you can test your Star Trek knowledge at this site, courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum’s Air and Space Quarterly at:
https://airandspace.si.edu/air-and-space-quarterly/issue-20/star-trek-museum-quiz
The Oscar- and Emmy-nominated documentarist Nanette Burstein working with co-screenwriter and editor Tal Ben-David, brings to life the story of Carl Sagan.
The new National Geographic documentary film, Carl Sagan: We Are Made Of Star Stuff, made its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
The 53rd Telluride Film Festival was held September 4 through September 7.
Sagan archive
Gaining access to Sagan’s archive, including audio recordings made at the end of his life, “Burstein draws together these accomplishments with events in Sagan’s personal life: a painful and highly public divorce, an enduring love affair, life-threatening health crises, professional rivalries,” reports the Telluride Film Festival’s program guide.
For a review of the documentary, go to:
Image credit: Telluride Film Festival
What’s going on down there? NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite images the entire sunlit side of Earth from one million miles away.
Image credit: NASA
We are a “planet-based” species – all of us on a spin-filled Earth now housing 8.3 billion people.
That’s the gravity of the situation.
But we’re also a world of floods, typhoons, earthquakes, heat and cold calamities, volcanic eruptions, even encounters with Sun-caused aurora and bruises from incoming space rocks.
It’s quite a world worth watching – and for decades that’s what spacecraft have been doing.
But what do they view and who’s on the other end of the space-based microscopes capturing our daily doings, faults and all, down here on terra firma?
Go to my new Space.com story – “The future of Earth observation: Private satellites and AI bring benefits but also pose risks – Observing Earth from orbit is an increasingly private affair” – at:
Image credit: Deloitte
Could Earth’s Moon be a witness plate, peppered with extraterrestrial material evidence of past extraterrestrial technology?
“Whereas electromagnetic SETI is restricted to contemporaneous transmitters, searches for artificially generated particles integrate over gigayear timescales and are therefore sensitive to technomaterial released by civilizations long extinct.”
The idea is that technogenic artifacts may survive natural interstellar transport and accumulate on solar system surfaces, such as our Moon.
Given that the lunar landscape’s minimal geochemical alteration and billions of years of exposure history, our Moon may well be an exceptionally stable long-duration collector of such material.
That’s the view from Lewis Pinault of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
As human explorers visit the Moon on a recurring basis, time to keep an eye out for ET artifacts?
Image credit: NASA
Exo-archaeology
Pinault and colleagues suggest that identifying anomalous grains within a well-characterized natural background of the Moon, particulate technosignatures found could become an accessible form of exo-archaeology – and, in favorable cases, yield direct material evidence on the technological history of the Galaxy.
The possibility that the Moon may preserve material evidence of past extraterrestrial technology “strengthens the case for systematic, well-characterized regolith sampling,” the researchers explain.
Sifting through that lunar topside may offer the answer to one of astrobiology’s central questions: “whether technological life has ever arisen elsewhere in our Galaxy,” they report.
The exploratory paper, “Micron-Scale Technosignatures: How a Cubic Metre of Lunar Regolith May Begin to Constrain the Number of Past Technological Civilisations in the Galaxy” — a preprint version of which has been submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology –– can be reviewed at:
Image credit: European Space Agency’s Planetary Defense Office/Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center
The European Space Agency’s Planetary Defense Office/Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center has published the following Imminent Imactor based on 11 observations:
Imminent Impactor: CERNQ52
The Imminent Impactors page contains a list of the confirmed impacting objects detected by ESA’s Meerkat monitoring system in the last 15 days.
Meerkat computes impact solutions using the systematic ranging method. For each impactor, the table provides the nominal impact time, the nominal magnitude of the asteroid, and its nominal diameter based on an assumed albedo between 0.05 and 0.25. Additionally, the image displays the discovery station, the first and last observation, the number of observations processed, and the median impact time with its time range.
Nominal impact date and time: 2026-09-06 16:12:15 UTC
Diameter range in meters: 0.6 – 1.2
Please note: In a new posting, there are now 13 observations. The chart used in this imminent impactor states “Object is not confirmed. Do not distribute” while a line in the original posting says “Please feel free to forward this notification to potentially interested parties.” So pick one…
