All articles
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Military Space
The Space Force Just Tripled Its Commercial Launch Contract Ceiling to $17 Billion
The Space Force tripled its NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 ceiling to $17 billion across seven launch providers on July 17, 2026 — but a GAO report showing commercial launches at federal ranges have more than quadrupled since 2021 suggests the real bottleneck isn't rockets, it's the ground beneath them.
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Astronomy
The Case of the Sun's Missing Silver Is Closed — the Model Was Wrong, Not the Sun
Uppsala researchers found the Sun holds 55% more silver than the reference value — not from new observations, but from a 3D non-LTE model that finally accounts for the photosphere's turbulence, closing a decades-old gap with meteorites from 0.25 dex to 0.06.
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Science & Discovery
Webb's Next Target Just Got Interesting: A Rocky Habitable-Zone World Is Leaking Helium
A Science paper reports the first atmosphere detected on a rocky, habitable-zone exoplanet: helium is escaping the super-Earth LHS 1140b. The signal was time-variable — seen in 2024, gone in 2025 — hinting at an active, replenishing atmosphere.
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Missions
Before the Metal World: Psyche's Mars Flyby Wakes Up Its Instruments
NASA released the science haul and a time-lapse from Psyche's May 15 Mars gravity assist — a free 1,000 mph boost that doubled as a full instrument checkout, including a live test of a Lawrence Livermore-built gamma-ray sensor, three years before the spacecraft reaches its metal asteroid.
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Military Space
A Confirmation Hearing So Quiet It Was Called a Compliment: Schiess Set to Become Space Force's Third Chief
Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess faced few questions and even fewer skeptics at his July 16 Senate hearing to lead the Space Force, telling lawmakers that China's rapid military-space buildup justifies a roughly $71 billion budget and a service set to more than double in size.
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Commercial
India Joins the Private-Orbit Club: Skyroot's Vikram-1 Aces Its Debut
On July 18, 2026, Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 reached a ~450 km orbit on its first flight from Sriharikota — the first orbital launch by a private Indian company, making India the third nation where a private firm has reached orbit.
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Astronomy
Webb Watches Gas Fall From Cluster Scales Into a Black Hole's 800-Light-Year Feeding Disk
JWST resolved a rotating, multiphase disk about 800 light-years wide feeding the black hole in NGC 4696, and traced a filament funneling gas into it — the clearest look yet at the "missing link" between cluster-scale cooling and accretion.
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Science & Discovery
The asteroid that wasn't: 1998 SH2 outed as an active comet
A NASA/JPL-led study in Nature Astronomy has reclassified near-Earth object 1998 SH2 as an active comet — now P/1998 SH2 — after tiny outgassing-driven accelerations and a faint tail gave it away during a 2025 close pass.
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Astronomy
Beta Pictoris d: The Faintest Exoplanet Ever Directly Imaged From Earth
Astronomers pulled a third giant planet, Beta Pictoris d, out of 11 years of VLT data and confirmed it with JWST — at ~2.4 Jupiter masses and 100x fainter than Beta Pic b, it's the faintest planet ever directly imaged from the ground.
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Military Space
A CubeSat That Sniffs for Neutrons: The First Peer-Reviewed Way to Catch a Nuke Hiding in Orbit
MIT physicist Areg Danagoulian's new Nature paper describes a 9U CubeSat that hunts spallation neutrons from fissile material, offering the first peer-reviewed method to detect thermonuclear warheads secretly parked in Earth orbit.
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Missions
NASA Bolts Starlink Lasers to Orion as Artemis III Becomes a Docking Rehearsal
NASA has tapped SpaceX to mount two Starlink mini laser terminals on Orion for Artemis III, beaming 4K docking-test footage to Houston over infrared light as the mission is reframed into a 2027 low-Earth-orbit rehearsal of crewed lander rendezvous ahead of a 2028 Moon landing.
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NASA & Agencies
Serbia Signs the Artemis Accords, Becoming the 69th Nation — and the Latest to Straddle Two Rival Lunar Camps
Serbia became the 69th Artemis Accords signatory on July 16, 2026, and the 10th nation to join this year — while also holding membership in China's rival lunar station program, a growing pattern of dual participation.
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