Photo credit: Maxar Technologies | DIA
A commercial imaging satellite snapped China’s secretive reusable spaceplane from about 56 miles away in 2024, and the Defense Intelligence Agency included that view in an unclassified report released late last month. The picture shows a compact winged vehicle with its payload bay doors open and solar arrays stretched out from a rear service module, the whole assembly hanging against the black of space. Resolution reaches roughly 1.8 inches per pixel, clear enough to resolve panel lines and the shape of the delta wings. Earlier public images had been grainy telescope shots or brief lower-resolution frames; this one gives the first detailed public look at the underside and how the power systems are arranged.

Virgin Galactic has given its next spaceship a name drawn from ancient Greek for the boundless. Apeiron (pronounced App-Err-On) emerged from a public vote that drew thousands of responses from 83 countries across six continents. Michael Colglazier, the company’s chief executive, said the choice captures the ambition of human spaceflight and the possibilities it opens for people who share the drive to go higher.

NASA’s Space Reactor-1 Freedom keeps moving toward a late-2028 launch as the first spacecraft ever built to run fission power beyond Earth’s orbit. Announced back in March during the agency’s Ignition event, the mission pairs a compact reactor with hardware already under construction for the canceled lunar Gateway station. That reuse lets engineers hit the next Mars transfer window instead of waiting years for a clean-sheet design.

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.

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.