Military space news from Cosmic Herald — Space Force, satellite warfare, GPS, missile warning, and the growing role of space in national defense.
In one week the European Defence Fund backed OSMOS X to lead a roughly 4.5 million euro study on answering threats in orbit, the UK MoD handed Astroscale a 15 million pound LEDA contract, and Shield Space pitched a space-based 'carrier strike' force.
Read the story →The Space Force is about to ask industry for off-the-shelf cislunar satellites, sensors, navigation gear and autonomous AI software that can be fielded by September 2029, part of a push driven by China and by the Pentagon's new view of the Earth-Moon region as a warfighting domain.
The Space Force activated SPACEFOR-SOC, its ninth component field command, on Oct. 7, more than 18 months after SOCOM revealed the plan and after Congress paused it. A formal ceremony is still to come, and the service has not yet named a commander.
Five days after an automated abort, a Falcon 9 lifted 21 Northrop Grumman Transport Layer satellites from Vandenberg on Oct. 10. That brings the Space Development Agency to 84 of the 126 data-relay satellites planned for Tranche 1, with five of nine launches still to go.
The NRO's first Falcon Heavy launch, NROL-97, lifted off Oct. 1 on side boosters that had flown NASA's Roman telescope a month earlier and a fairing from NROL-95, and it closed out SpaceX's first day with four booster landings.
SpaceX called off the Space Development Agency's T1TL-A launch of 21 Northrop Grumman data-transport satellites in the final minute of Monday's count at Vandenberg, and SpaceX is now targeting no earlier than Saturday, Oct. 10.
The RAF stood up No. III Space Effects Squadron on Sept. 23, 2026 — the UK's first unit built to disrupt, degrade and deny threats to British satellites, backed by £880 million in new funding.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told a September 14 conference that the US now operates "on-orbit space control weapons," the most direct public acknowledgment yet of an armed American presence in space.
In the first week of September 2026, U.S. Space Command ran its first live-fly exercise, moving real satellites across LEO, MEO and GEO to test maneuver warfare instead of just simulating it on paper.
MIT nuclear security researchers say the Pentagon's 'Brilliant Swarms' interceptor satellites would need to weigh 14 times more than proposed, blowing past Golden Dome's own affordability test.
Five months after killing the $6.27 billion OCX program, the Space Force is starting work on a new GPS ground-control architecture while a Lockheed Martin stopgap keeps the constellation flying.
Gen. Douglas Schiess became the Space Force's third Chief of Space Operations and first four-star general in a Sept. 3 ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, succeeding Gen. Chance Saltzman.
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