Axiom wins fifth private astronaut mission to space station. NASA has selected Axiom Space for its fifth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for 2027. The Ax-4 Crew Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station in 2024.

Terran Orbital Corporation, a US-based manufacturer of small satellites and satellite subsystems, advances the comprehensive portfolio of spacecraft platforms designed to support a wide range of commercial, civil and defense space missions. The company’s spacecraft platforms are already in operational use and are engineered to address evolving requirements across Earth observation, communications, technology demonstration and national security applications. Through standardized and configurable designs, Terran Orbital enables customers to deploy scalable and mission-ready space systems with predictable performance and integration efficiency.

Terrasat Communications enhances the portfolio of Block Up Converters (BUCs), underscoring the company’s role in supporting reliable and high-performance satellite uplink operations across commercial, government, and defense SATCOM networks. Already deployed across a wide range of ground infrastructures, Terrasat’s BUC products are designed to meet the practical and technical demands of modern satellite communications, including high data rates, multi-band operation and long-term field reliability. Terrasat’s Block Up Converters are developed to translate intermediate frequency (IF) signals to the appropriate radio frequency (RF) uplink bands with high spectral purity and stable output power.

Arianespace announced at the European Space Conference in Brussels the signature of the launch contract with the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), under the delegation of the European Commission, to orbit the second pair of second-generation satellites of the Galileo constellation (Galileo L18) on board an Ariane 6 launcher. The launch of Galileo L18 will represent Ariane 6's fifth mission for Europe's high-precision global navigation satellite system. On December 17th, 2025, Ariane 6 successfully orbited for the first time, and with the utmost accuracy, a pair of satellites for Galileo (Galileo L14). Two other Ariane 6 launches are scheduled to complete the first-generation of Galileo satellites with the launch of the Galileo L15 and Galileo L16 missions. The fourth Galileo Ariane 6 flight will put into orbit the first pair of second-generation Galileo satellites (Galileo L17).

Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope) is an X-ray space telescope integrated into a 6U CubeSat bus by Kongsberg NanoAvionics (NanoAvionics) to detect and study high-redshift Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) that happen when massive stars collapse into black holes or when neutron stars collide. BlackCAT expects to detect dozens of GRBs each year, pinpoint their locations, and transmit real-time alerts to the ground via the Iridium satellite network. These alerts will allow rapid follow-up by other observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will help scientists to: ● map cosmic reionization, a period when the universe transitioned from darkness to light. ● measure ionizing radiation escaping from early galaxies. ● study how metals formed in the early universe. BlackCAT will also help locate electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events, complementing research from facilities such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Capturing the bright afterglow from X-rays to radio waves will enable “multimessenger” studies, combining signals across different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to reveal the physics behind these rare cosmic events.

Two Northrop Grumman five-segment solid rocket boosters will launch the first crewed flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, as early as February 6, 2026, as part of the Artemis II mission. The SLS boosters are the world’s largest and most powerful solid rocket boosters to ever be flown on a human spaceflight mission, standing 177 feet tall and producing 3.6 million pounds of thrust each. Evolved from the four-segment shuttle-era design, the boosters contributed over 75 percent of the SLS rocket’s thrust and performed as twins during Artemis I, the successful first launch of the rocket and uncrewed Orion spacecraft.

Lockheed Martin's ninth GPS III space vehicle (SV09) launched in orbit, adding a capability that enables people to connect, gives warfighters the ability to operate in harsh conditions, and demonstrates the power of American innovation. The satellite launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 11:53 p.m. ET aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It achieved signal acquisition shortly thereafter and is now under operational control at Lockheed Martin's Denver Launch & Checkout Operations Center until its official acceptance into the GPS operational control network. For the military, GPS III SV09 delivers advanced security and anti-jamming features, which bring uninterrupted, precise navigation and timing in contested or denied environments, safeguarding national security and defense missions. Overall, GPS III satellites deliver three-times better accuracy, eight-times improved anti-jamming capabilities, and M-code navigation signals for warfighters globally.

Varda Space Industries, the leader in orbital pharmaceutical processing and hypersonic reentry systems, announced the successful reentry of its W-5 capsule. This milestone marks the first time Varda has utilized its own vertically integrated satellite bus to support a full mission lifecycle, from orbital operations to atmospheric reentry. The W-5 mission carried a payload for the U.S. Navy and landed safely within the designated recovery zone at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, operated by Southern Launch. This is the company's first reentry of 2026 and underscores Varda's transition toward full-stack autonomy and its growing role as a critical partner for national security and defense applications. The W-5 capsule carried a specialized payload for the U.S. Navy, focusing on data collection during reentry. Varda's ability to provide fixed-cost, routine reentry offers the Department of War a unique, cost-effective platform for iterative testing of hypersonic flight characteristics. The Varda capsules endure extreme environments when they reenter at speeds exceeding Mach 25.

Satellogic, a vertically integrated geospatial company delivering high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) at unprecedented scale and economics, announced an extension of its existing agreement with the Government of Albania to continue country-wide, high-frequency satellite monitoring using its NewSat constellation. The 11-month contract extension builds on a previously signed three-year agreement that provided Albania with dedicated satellite capacity and the naming of two satellites, Albania-1 and Albania-2. Under the extended agreement, Albanian government agencies will continue to receive frequent, high-resolution (50 cm) imagery covering the country’s entire territory, enabling persistent oversight and a centralised stream of intelligence across national priorities.

JWST has revealed a strange early universe filled with ultra-bright “blue monster” galaxies, mysterious “little red dots,” and black holes that seem far too massive for their age. A new study proposes that dark stars—hypothetical stars powered by dark matter—could tie all these surprises together. These exotic objects may have grown huge very quickly, lighting up the early cosmos and planting the seeds of supermassive black holes. UHZ1, a record-breaking galaxy 13.2 billion light-years away, seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age.

SWISSto12 has secured 73 million euros in financial support from European Space Agency (ESA) member states through the HummingSat ARTES partnership project, reinforcing development and industrialization of its compact geostationary telecommunications platform. The company now has more than 100 million euros in total recent funding after combining this institutional backing with additional capital from European private investors raised in the second half of 2025. The new ESA investment will accelerate maturation of the HummingSat product line and the associated manufacturing ramp up needed to meet growing demand for cost effective, agile and sovereign satellite communications. SWISSto12 plans to use the funding to expand its production capacity and speed up introduction of new payload and platform innovations that target both government and commercial operators.

Nuclear propulsion and power technologies could unlock new frontiers in missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA has reached an important milestone advancing nuclear propulsion that could benefit future deep space missions by completing a cold-flow test campaign of the first flight reactor engineering development unit since the 1960s. Teams at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, conducted more than 100 tests on the engineering development unit over several months in 2025. The 44-inch by 72-inch unit, built by BWX Technologies of Richmond, Virginia, is a full-scale, non-nuclear, flight-like development test article the size of a 100-gallon drum that simulates propellant flow throughout the reactor across a range of operational conditions.

Alpha Impulsion, a space startup based in Toulouse and Naples, has received a 950000 euro award from the European Union for a major innovation in space propulsion aimed at more economical, efficient, and debris free access to orbit. The company has been recognized as the first enterprise to gain international acknowledgment for a propulsion solution that from the outset addresses sustainable use of Earth orbit, competitiveness, and European sovereignty in space activities. In an autophage rocket, the vehicle fuselage is consumed by the engine as fuel during ascent, so the vehicle effectively burns and shortens like a candle and does not leave a discarded upper stage or large structural elements in orbit after operations. This architecture reduces deadweight throughout flight and is reported to deliver about a 40 percent reduction in liftoff mass compared with conventional launch systems, which translates directly into an estimated 40 percent reduction in launch costs.

Astronomers have carried out the most extensive observational study so far of massive runaway stars in the Milky Way, combining detailed measurements of how fast these stars move, how rapidly they spin, and whether they live alone or in binary systems. Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), working with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), focused on a large sample of O-type stars, the most massive and luminous stellar objects in our galaxy. The study analyzed 214 O-type stars, building the largest sample of galactic O-type runaway stars with combined information on rotation and binarity. The researchers derived the stars' space velocities from Gaia data and obtained their projected rotational velocities and binarity status from the spectroscopic observations. By bringing these measurements together, they were able to link different runaway properties to specific formation pathways. The results show that most runaway stars rotate slowly, indicating that high space velocity does not necessarily go hand in hand with rapid rotation. However, the subset of runaway stars that do rotate more quickly is more likely to be associated with the supernova scenario, in which a star is spun up and then kicked when its binary companion explodes. This connection suggests that stellar rotation carries a clear imprint of a past binary interaction and supernova event.

A research team has developed a method to reduce uncertainties in measurements of cosmic birefringence, a subtle rotation in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background that may hold clues to new physics beyond the standard model. The work, published January 27 in Physical Review Letters, provides the first quantitative treatment of uncertainty in the birefringence angle, a key observable that could point to unknown physics breaking the universe's left right symmetry and help clarify the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Cosmic birefringence refers to a small rotation in the polarization direction of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang that preserves information about the early universe. Recent observations have hinted that the polarization of this ancient light is rotated, and this rotation is thought to be associated with hypothetical elementary particles known as axions that couple to light. To probe this effect, researchers analyze a signal called the CMB EB correlation, which encodes information about the rotation angle of the polarization plane.

A team of astronomers has used a new artificial intelligence assisted technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena in archived data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. They sifted through nearly 100 million small image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each only a few dozen pixels across, and identified more than 1,300 unusually shaped objects in just two and a half days, including over 800 that had never been documented in scientific literature.

Scientists have produced the most detailed map yet of the dark matter that threads through the Universe, revealing how this invisible component has guided the formation of galaxies, stars and planets over cosmic time. The new map, created with observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and published in Nature Astronomy, traces dark matter in a region of sky in the constellation Sextans covering an area about 2.5 times larger than the full Moon. The study, jointly led by Durham University in the UK, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne in Switzerland, uses Webb data to confirm earlier dark matter measurements and to add finer structure and new clumps not seen before. Astronomers think that when the Universe began, both dark matter and normal matter were sparsely distributed, but dark matter clumped together first under its own gravity and then pulled in ordinary matter, setting up the large-scale structure in which galaxies could form. Dark matter does not emit, reflect, absorb or block light and passes through normal matter largely unnoticed, but its presence reveals itself through gravity, which curves space and deflects light from background galaxies.

The first images from Europe s pioneering meteorological infrared sounder were unveiled at the EU Space Conference in Brussels, marking a significant advance in observing the atmosphere in three dimensions ahead of severe weather. The new data come from the Infrared Sounder instrument on Meteosat Third Generation Sounder 1, the first European geostationary satellite to carry a hyperspectral infrared sounding capability designed specifically for meteorology. From its geostationary orbit, the Infrared Sounder scans the atmosphere over Europe and adjacent regions every 30 minutes across nearly 2,000 narrow infrared channels, retrieving vertical profiles of temperature, humidity and trace gases throughout the troposphere and lower stratosphere. These three dimensional measurements allow meteorologists to detect subtle changes in temperature and moisture that signal atmospheric instability, often hours before clouds develop, providing earlier insight into where thunderstorms and other hazardous weather systems may form.

The U.S. Space Force is positioning its Space Warfighter Operational Readiness Domain, or SWORD, as a cornerstone for maintaining space superiority in an increasingly contested domain. SWORD, the Space Force’s primary synthetic training environment, is a cloud-enabled, digital simulation platform designed to replicate contested space operations, including orbital dynamics, electronic warfare, cyber effects and adversary tactics. It allows guardians to train in realistic scenarios without relying solely on live, on-orbit assets or centralized facilities. The platform has been demonstrated in large-scale exercises like Space Flag, supporting hundreds of guardians in realistic training, and is being scaled for broader enterprise use.

NewOrbit Space, a UK-based space technology company focused on in-orbit servicing and space logistics, is highlighting the NEO-1 orbiting satellite, a mission designed to demonstrate practical on-orbit capabilities that support inspection, proximity operations and future servicing concepts. NEO-1 represents a concrete step in the company’s roadmap toward enabling more sustainable, flexible and responsive satellite operations in Earth orbit. The satellite focuses on controlled maneuvering, rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) and on-orbit inspection tasks, which are essential building blocks for future missions involving satellite servicing, relocation and end-of-life support. By flying these capabilities on a dedicated mission, NewOrbit Space aims to mature technologies that can be adapted to a wide range of commercial and institutional use cases. The NEO-1 spacecraft architecture is built around agility, precision and operational flexibility. Its design supports accurate attitude control and orbital maneuvering, enabling the satellite to approach, observe and operate safely near other objects in orbit. The platform integrates propulsion, guidance, navigation and control subsystems optimized for proximity operations, along with avionics and power systems sized for sustained on-orbit activity. This architecture allows NEO-1 to execute complex maneuver sequences while maintaining predictable performance and safety margins.