Every Cosmic Herald story on European Space Agency — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
SWISSto12 raised $70 million on July 16 to scale HummingSat, a 3D-printed, washing-machine-sized GEO satellite — backed by $500M in contracts, $140M in 2025 revenue, orders from SES and Intelsat, and 73 million euros of ESA member-state money betting on European space sovereignty.
Read the story →No single method measures the universe. Astronomers climb a ladder — parallax, then pulsing Cepheid stars, then exploding white dwarfs, then redshift — each rung calibrating the next, and a crack near the top is now cosmology's biggest open problem.
ESA's Euclid telescope has found 31 new quasars from the cosmic dawn, including two record-breakers at redshifts 7.77 and 7.69, more than doubling the known sample from that era.
The Exploration Company opened a Houston lab with a full-scale Nyx Crew mockup and formed TEC Federal to chase U.S. government contracts, backed by ESA's LEO Cargo Return funding.
A Gaia-based survey of 110 Milky Way star clusters finds the stellar initial mass function's 'break mass' shifts with cluster age, undermining decades of assuming one universal recipe for how stars of different sizes form.
ESA's Euclid mission has spotted 31 quasars from the universe's first billion years, including two record-holders shining with a trillion Suns' worth of light just 670 million years after the Big Bang.
ESA's Euclid telescope has spotted 31 quasars from the early universe, including two dating to just 670 million years after the Big Bang, deepening a puzzle over how supermassive black holes grew so fast.
ESA and EUMETSAT have opened media accreditation for the late-August 2026 Ariane 6 launch of MTG-I2, a geostationary weather satellite whose Lightning Imager will watch storms form across 80% of the planet in real time.
Planet Labs Germany will fly a Pelican imaging satellite on Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket within a year — a milestone all-German mission riding on a launcher that has yet to reach orbit.
Using dust-scattered X-ray light echoes from three gamma-ray bursts, astronomers re-measured two of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms and found them up to 10% farther from the galactic center than assumed.
On June 30, 2026, the UN-sanctioned Asteroid Day arrives at a hinge point: DART proved we can nudge an asteroid, and ESA's Hera spacecraft is due at Didymos-Dimorphos by year's end to inspect the wreckage.
Hubble's June 2026 image of NGC 6723, the 'Chandelier Cluster,' shows its 10-billion-year-old stars formed in two closely spaced bursts — the second within 634 million years of the first — undercutting the old idea that globular clusters are single-age populations.
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