Verge Science is here to bring you the most up-to-date space news and analysis, whether it’s about the latest findings from NASA or comprehensive coverage of the next SpaceX rocket launch to the International Space Station. We’ll take you inside the discoveries of new exoplanets, space weather, space policy, and the booming commercial space industry.
NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation plan to launch the satellite on July 30th. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission is supposed to track ice melt and land deformation, helping scientists better understand the impacts of flooding, earthquakes, and more.
[science.nasa.gov]
Amazon’s third batch of Project Kuiper satellites has launched into space on Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket. The deployment of 24 Kuiper satellites comes just three hours after 26 Starlink satellites were deployed. Jeff Bezos plans to light up his space Internet service later this year with help from launch partners ULA, Arianespace, and yes, his own Blue Origin. The Kuiper constellation will eventually consist of more than 3,200 satellites, less than half of what Starlink already has operating, with more competitors to come.
“Each one of these new satellites is designed to provide over a terabit per second of downlink capacity (> 1,000 Gbps) and over 200 Gbps of uplink capacity to customers on the ground,” Starlink says. “This is more than 10 times the downlink and 24 times the uplink capacity of the second-generation satellites.”
Starlink is also touting how speed and latency have “radically improved.”
After years of working as NASA’s film liaison, Bert Ulrich is reportedly heading to Space 11 Corp — a studio focused on making cinematic projects about and sometimes set in outer space — where he will serve as executive vice president of production development and communications.
It’s bleeding senior-level talent with at least 2,145 employees taking buyouts, deferred resignations, and early retirement offers, Politico reports.
The Trump administration wants to cut thousands more jobs at NASA as part of its efforts to decimate the federal workforce. The Supreme Court just issued a decision yesterday that allows Trump to move forward with mass layoffs while a lawsuit challenging that plan plays out in lower courts.
Apparently following through on his threat to challenge Republicans who supported Donald Trump’s budget bill, Musk tweeted, “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” He also said it will be ready next year -- a “consistently proven wrong” theme for Musk.
“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” to hold a deciding vote on “contentious laws,” said Musk on Friday.
The H.R.1 spending bill Trump signed Friday that expands mass deportations, cuts social services, and stalls clean energy projects also includes a requirement for a “Space Vehicle Transfer.”
The target is Space Shuttle Discovery, which Texas senators are attempting to snatch from the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian estimates moving it could cost more than $300 million, and there’s the small detail that the modified Boeing 747 used to transport the shuttles is no longer available.
Jenna Shumway, a former manager at SpaceX, accuses the company of failing to pay her as much as her male counterparts for similar work, as reported by TechCrunch.
In the lawsuit, Shumway also claims that one of her superiors, Daniel Collins, fostered a hostile work environment by beginning “a campaign of harassment and retaliation,” while also making “concerted efforts to terminate” her employment.
Another batch of Jeff Bezos’ Kuiper broadband satellites are now operating in low Earth orbit as Amazon prepares to light up its high-speed low-latency Starlink competitor later this year. It comes almost two months after Kuiper’s inaugural launch of 27 satellites on April 28th.
For those keeping score: that other billionaire is launching a few dozen broadband satellites every two days.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released the first images taken by its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera — the largest digital camera ever made — ahead of starting its 10-year survey of the southern sky. You can read up on details about these shots in PetaPixel’s report, and more images and video will be released later today following a Rubin Observatory livestream at 11AM ET.
SpaceX rival Blue Origin had been planning a launch in “late spring,” following a successful first test in April, but CEO Dave Limp now says the target is August 15th. This time one of the key aims is to land and recover the booster, named “Never Tell Me The Odds” — one of the few points of failure from the first time out.
[x.com]
An update on how the extremely public political breakup is going today, as protestors face off with federal immigration agents in Los Angeles.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is surging ahead in the race to cover the planet with fast, low-latency internet beamed down from space. Xi Jinping and Jeff Bezos are just getting started while Europe, to nobody’s surprise, is mired in bureaucracy and woefully behind despite launching its first internet satellites back in 2019.
Can a move-fast-and-break-things approach create the next-gen rocket?
For the third time in a row, a Starship test ended in a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” after tumbling toward the Indian Ocean rather than making the planned controlled descent and soft splashdown.
As noted by Space.com, this mission ran into issues trying to achieve several goals: the reused Super Heavy booster rocket broke up about six minutes into the flight instead of splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, they were unable to test deploying eight Starlink satellite dummies, and then the ship lost control about a half-hour after launch due to a leak in its fuel tank systems.
At 7:30PM ET, an hour-long launch window is scheduled to open for the ninth test of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. After the seventh and eighth flight tests ended in massive explosions, the FAA has expanded the hazard area and required SpaceX to schedule its launch during “non-peak transit periods.”
Soon we’ll find out if the extra precaution is necessary for this flight. (Update: It launched, but experienced another rapid unscheduled disassembly.)
The Information reports that three years ago, Musk offered Apple an 18-month exclusive connection via SpaceX in return for $5 billion up front, and $1 billion per year after that to support satellite-connected iPhone features. If Apple didn’t take it within 72 hours, he threatened to announce a competing feature.
Apple went forward with Globalstar (the report also mentions a canceled “Project Eagle” effort with Boeing that would’ve delivered full-blown internet service), and before the iPhone 14 launched, Starlink announced a deal with T-Mobile. Later that year, Musk and Cook met at Apple HQ to discuss Twitter’s App Store presence, “among other things.”
[theinformation.com]
No, not those sorts of drugs, the kinds that could save your life.
Humanity lives to fight another day after the failed Soviet lander re-entered our atmosphere at 2:24AM ET on Saturday before harmlessly splashing down in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, according to Russia’s space agency Roscosmos. Kosmos 482 became trapped in Earth’s orbit shortly after launching in 1972 and has been circling the planet for more than five decades.
The new gate-to-gate experience offers blistering fast Wi-Fi speeds, slower upload speeds, and low enough latency to make video calls possible (but not encouraged).
Even if Musk plans to take a step back from DOGE, his influence grows with each Starlink launch. Space is getting crowded with satellite internet companies vying to control the future of our information flows. Musk is crowding out the competition.
“Musk is clearly imagining a future in which neither his network nor his will can be restrained by the people of this world,” Ross Andersen writes in The Atlantic.
[theatlantic.com]
It’s slightly smaller than the 2,354-piece Discovery set that debuted in 2021, but Lego’s new Space Shuttle Enterprise is part of a larger 2,417-piece set that includes a buildable replica of the Boeing 747 that NASA used for testing and moving its shuttles around the country.
The $229.99 Lego Icons Shuttle Carrier Aircraft will be available for purchase starting on May 15th for Lego Insiders, and May 18th for everyone else.
In a video posted by the Amazon Project Kuiper LinkedIn account, we see what Ars Technica calls the first look at the low-Earth orbit satellites Amazon launched earlier this week to face off with Starlink.
Ars draws some conclusions about them based on the fuzzy video, noting that their trapezoidal design is comparable to SpaceX competitor Eutelsat’s OneWeb satellites.
