All articles
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Stargazing
X1.3 Flare and Surprise G3 Storm Send Aurora Across 30 US States for July 4th Weekend
A CME-driven G3 storm outperformed its own forecast to paint aurora across 30-plus US states on July 4, then a fresh X1.3 flare from newly numbered AR4482 kept the sun's holiday fireworks going.
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Commercial
The Ultimate Egg-Drop Challenge: A Startup Rides SpaceX's Falcon 9 Boosters to Test Manufacturing Chips in Space
Besxar Space Industries flew two reusable test pods on a Falcon 9 booster's suborbital round trip on July 5, betting that surviving launch vibration and reentry heat is the first step toward manufacturing semiconductors in orbit.
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NASA & Agencies
How Do You Teach an Astronaut to Fall Safely? ISRO Test-Fires the Rocket Built to Find Out
ISRO ground-fired the SOLVE solid motor for 10 hours at Sriharikota on July 3, 2026, clearing a key checkpoint for the sub-orbital vehicle that will validate Gaganyaan's 10-parachute descent system.
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Military Space
Guardians and Airmen Just Let AI Run Battle Management for the First Time — and It Did Five Jobs at Once
In a two-week Las Vegas exercise called MASH, Space Force Guardians and Air Force Airmen wired six competing AI vendors into one battle-management workflow, and an operator reported doing five to six taskings in the time one used to take.
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Missions
Tianwen-2 Reaches Kamoʻoalewa: China's Sample-Return Probe Begins Its Close Study of Earth's Quasi-Moon
After a 13-month, roughly 1-billion-kilometer chase, China's Tianwen-2 has closed to within 20 km of quasi-moon Kamoʻoalewa, kicking off nine months of study before it attempts to grab a piece of what may be a lunar fragment.
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Science & Discovery
A Warm, Wildly Eccentric Jupiter Just Showed Up in the Gap Where Few Giant Planets Are Found
NGTS-39 b, a 58-day, wildly eccentric Jupiter-mass world spotted by TESS and confirmed by NGTS, fills in a notoriously empty stretch of exoplanet demographics — and hints at a hidden companion tugging its orbit.
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Military Space
VICTUS HAZE: How a 16-Hour Launch and a 61-Hour Chase Just Rewrote the Rules of Space Warfare
Over the July 4th weekend, Rocket Lab launched a Space Force satellite in 16 hours 42 minutes, then True Anomaly's autonomous JACKAL-0004 found and imaged it in 61 hours — the first commercial orbital intercept in history.
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Science & Discovery
A New Earth-Sized Neighbor: Astronomers Refine GJ 3378b's Mass in the Habitable Zone
A UC Irvine-led team cut the mass estimate for nearby exoplanet GJ 3378b roughly in half, from about 5 to 2.3 Earth masses, bolstering the case that it's a rocky, potentially habitable world just 25 light-years away.
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Missions
Hayabusa2 Threads the Needle: A 5-Kilometer-Per-Second Flyby of Asteroid Torifune
On July 5, 2026, JAXA's Hayabusa2 extended mission buzzed near-Earth asteroid Torifune from roughly a kilometer away at 5 km/s, testing precision-guidance tech relevant to planetary defense ahead of its 2031 rendezvous with tiny asteroid 1998 KY26.
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Stargazing
Mars and Uranus Just Had Their Closest Meeting Until 2053
Before dawn on July 4, 2026, Mars and Uranus squeezed to just 0.1° apart in Taurus — their tightest conjunction until 2053 — with bright Mars acting as a signpost to the far dimmer ice giant.
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Commercial
NASA's $30 Million Gambit to Save the Falling Swift Observatory
A commercial spacecraft built in nine months just launched to catch a decaying NASA telescope before it burns up — the first attempt ever to dock with a government satellite never designed for servicing.
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Missions
In the Land of the Polygons: Curiosity Hunts Nickel-Rich 'Meteorite' Candidates in a Martian Honeycomb
Curiosity is picking through a honeycomb-textured slice of Gale Crater, probing dark, nickel-bearing rocks that might be meteorites, distant impact debris, or just weird Mars rock.
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