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.
SpaceX just released a new documentary that drops straight into the control rooms and launch site during the final stretch before its biggest rocket flew again. Titled Critical Path, the 34-minute film follows engineers at Starbase in Texas through the intense days leading up to Flight 12 on May 22. It is the second episode in their ongoing series and stays tightly focused on the real work required to get the first Version 3 Starship and Super Heavy off the ground.
A short exchange on X pulled antimatter propulsion back into view. Elon Musk posted that in the future a trillion times a trillion dollars will go toward making antimatter so people can travel to other star systems. He added that later civilizations may measure wealth in mass and energy rather than currency. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman replied that he supports antimatter propulsion.
NASA picked Lunar Outpost to deliver a new crewed rover called Pegasus for the Artemis program. Astronauts will drive it across the lunar south pole starting around 2028. The vehicle brings a clear step up in what crews can accomplish during surface operations. It offers the range, endurance, and flexibility needed to support longer stays and the groundwork for a permanent outpost.
