Energy

The Brussels law meant to shield European space companies from American dominance contains a built-in legal trap — US companies cannot comply without breaking US federal law. And Europe's own startups are caught in the blast radius.

Intelsat bought its satellite bus from K2 Space, a company founded in 2023. Boeing was not the supplier. This happened across three Space Force programs — and it is not a story about startups winning. It is a story about who the primes have become customers of.

TakeMe2Space has 17 employees and a cubesat bolted to its launch vehicle. To make a 50kW orbital data center pencil out, launch costs must drop 17x — from $3,600/kg to $200/kg. Starship is the bet. The $5M seed round is not the capital stack for that bet.

HETDEX catalogued 33,612 hydrogen halos around early galaxies. Nearly half required a two-component model the field had never systematically applied — and researchers say better instruments would likely reveal the same structure in every single one.

AI labs are hitting a power wall — and the physics of heat is proving harder to solve than the software.

NASA says the commercial LEO market doesnt exist. Three companies just submitted 390 pages of evidence and their own revenue history to prove it is — and the real fight is over who controls the transfer of the 3B the U.S. spends on ISS operations every year.

Taiwan wants democracies to trust it with their military communications. The problem: the island’s semiconductor fabs — the reason the world cares about Taiwan — sit within artillery range of the mainland it must defend.

NASA certifies spacecraft materials with Earth fire tests — but nobody has burned anything on the Moon to verify those tests work at 1/6g. An experiment to answer this launches late 2026, after crewed landings. Lunar gravity may let fires burn far longer than on Earth.

ADEOS-II died 10 months after launch in 2003. Nobody knows why. In 2027, a Japanese inspection spacecraft will fly within meters of the wreckage — and the answers have been sitting there for 23 years.

Blue Origin hot-fired its first reflown New Glenn booster Thursday, becoming the second company after SpaceX to reflown an orbital booster. But all seven BE-4 engines were replaced. The booster flew again; the engines did not. That matters for launch costs, NASA scheduling, and whether Blue Origi...

Voyager invested in Max Space because a 350m3 habitat fits on one Falcon 9. The 2026 launch is a 20m3 demo. Thunderbird Station at 350m3 is a 2029 target. NASA studies peg minimum viable at ~317m3 per module.