High above the Utah desert a high-altitude balloon released Sierra Space’s compact reentry vehicle carrying a bottle of whiskey and a software-defined radio. Both items reached the ground intact after falls from 35,000 feet and 68,500 feet, and recovery crews located them quickly. Those flights in May formed the first live tests in nearly two years for Sierra Space Ghost, a decelerator built to move cargo from orbit to any point on Earth in roughly ninety minutes.
Monday morning at Starbase on the Texas coast, a 407-foot stack of stainless steel left the pad at 7:48 local time with 33 Raptor engines burning methane underneath. Flight 14 carried a clearer assignment than the thirteen tests before it. Earlier flights stayed on suborbital arcs. This one was meant to stay up, place real satellites in orbit, and come back down on a controlled path.
Scott Manley teaches orbital mechanics through Kerbal Space Program, and he also DJs. For his latest project, he wired those two lives together on a whim, writing a small Python program that reads MIDI events from a portable mixer and turns them into spacecraft commands. The question he set out to answer was simple enough to print in all caps: can you fly a spaceship using a DJ mixer? After one messy airplane test and one surprisingly clean lunar landing, the answer was yes.
Fermi Explorer Mission is a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Redmond, Washington with a four-line spec that reads like a dare. Launch a spacecraft toward another star before the end of 2029. Keep design, build, launch, and operations under $15 million. Carry at least one kilogram inside a 10-by-10-by-10-centimeter box. Close at least 99 percent of the present gap to Alpha Centauri inside 80,000 years.
Sunday morning over Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center looked almost too calm for a rocket that would soon make more than five million pounds of thrust. At 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lit all 27 Merlin engines and carried NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope off the pad through blue Florida sky and a thin scatter of cloud. Weather had sat at 50 percent “go” overnight on cumulus and surface-electric-field rules, then improved to 70 percent in the last hour. Launch manager Denton Gibson polled the room and sent it.
SpaceX spent seven years looking for a stretch of Earth quiet enough, empty enough, and rich enough in natural gas to fly Starship the way airliners leave a busy airport. On Tuesday, August 25, company leaders and Louisiana officials said they found it on about 125,000 acres of Gulf marsh near Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, a former Exxon property roughly 50 miles south of Lafayette and about 200 miles west of New Orleans. They are calling the place Starbase Louisiana.
Spanish startup Kreios Space just named Kongsberg NanoAvionics as the builder of the platform that will carry its experimental thruster into space. The goal is straightforward and ambitious: prove that a satellite can collect residual atmospheric gases at extremely low altitudes and turn them into continuous thrust, staying aloft where conventional craft fall quickly.
After drifting aimlessly for more than a year and a half, a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage finally ran out of empty space on Wednesday. The four-ton cylinder, roughly the size of a school bus and more than 40 feet long, slammed into the Moon at 5,400 miles per hour near Einstein Crater on the sunlit western limb.
SpaceX sent its towering Starship stack skyward from Starbase in South Texas late on July 24, 2026, and brought the upper stage home in a way no previous flight had managed. The vehicle climbed on 33 Raptor engines, released a fresh batch of Starlink satellites, restarted an engine in space, and then settled gently onto the waves of the Indian Ocean still in one piece. For a program that has spent years watching its ships break apart or vanish in fireballs, that quiet float marked a real turning point.
