SpaceX
Every Cosmic Herald story on SpaceX — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Commercial
Ariane 6 Just Lifted the Heaviest Payload in European Launch History. It Was Full of Amazon Satellites.
On June 17, an Ariane 64 rocket lifted 36 Amazon Leo broadband satellites to orbit — the heaviest payload ever lofted by an Ariane rocket, and the debut of upgraded P160C solid boosters that give the vehicle a 10% thrust increase. Europe's commercial heavy lifter is finding its stride.
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Commercial
Relativity Space Wants to Build a Mars Orbiter — And It's Not Waiting for NASA to Ask
Relativity Space announces plans to privately develop a Mars orbiter, signaling that commercial ambitions in deep space are no longer theoretical.
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Missions
SpaceX Dragon Returns From ISS With Bioprinted Tissues and Cancer Research Data
SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule undocked from the ISS on June 16, returning nearly 6,500 pounds of research including bioprinted organ tissues, cancer treatment compounds, and critical stem cell samples requiring immediate ground analysis.
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Military Space
The Air Force Wants to Launch and Catch Rockets from Old Oil Platforms at Sea
A new Air Force initiative would transform decommissioned offshore oil rigs into sea-based rocket recovery stations — extending Space Force launch flexibility and reducing dependence on a handful of fixed land-based pads.
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Military Space
Combat Surgeon, Record-Setter, Next: Army's Col. Rubio Named to Artemis III Earth Orbit Test Crew
Col. Frank Rubio — who shattered the U.S. record for longest single spaceflight — has been named to the 2027 Artemis III crew alongside ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, in a mission that will test lunar lander docking in Earth orbit as the final dress rehearsal before the Moon.
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Military Space
One Outage Stopped Navy Drone Tests. The Pentagon's SpaceX Problem Is Bigger Than That.
When a Starlink outage last August left Navy unmanned surface vessels bobbing uselessly off the California coast, it crystallized a strategic anxiety the Pentagon had been managing quietly: the U.S. military is profoundly dependent on a commercial satellite network it does not own or control.
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Commercial
The Upper Stage Problem: Why Reusable Second Stages Are Harder Than They Look
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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Military Space
Space is already a battlefield. Ukraine showed us what that looks like.
The war in Ukraine has been the first large-scale test of satellite capabilities in peer conflict. GPS jamming, Starlink dependence, reconnaissance satellites, and Russian anti-satellite threats have all featured — and the lessons are reshaping military space doctrine worldwide.
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Commercial
Low Earth orbit has a garbage problem. Here's who's trying to clean it up.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, and hundreds of thousands more too small to track. Two companies — Astroscale and ClearSpace — are building the first commercial debris removal spacecraft. The engineering is harder than it sounds.
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Commercial
Private companies are landing on the Moon. Here's what the scoreboard actually looks like.
NASA's CLPS program has funded multiple private lunar landers with mixed results. Intuitive Machines stuck the landing sideways; Astrobotic's Peregrine did not reach the surface. A clearer picture of commercial lunar capability is forming, and it's more complicated than press releases suggest.
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Commercial
People keep saying we'll manufacture things in space. Here's what's actually happening.
The promise of manufacturing in microgravity has been discussed for decades — purer crystals, exotic alloys, biological structures that can't be made on Earth. In 2026, that promise is starting to become a real, if small, industry. This is what's actually coming off the production line.
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Commercial
Rocket Lab is building a reusable rocket. Why Neutron is harder than it looks.
Rocket Lab has built a successful small launch business on the back of its expendable Electron rocket. Now it's attempting something far more difficult: a medium-lift reusable launch vehicle called Neutron, aimed directly at SpaceX's market.
