“Every piece of this mission in Earth orbit is designed to reduce risk before we put astronauts back on the Moon…We’re launching three spacecraft on three different rockets and testing how they operate together — something NASA has never attempted. Every lesson we learn here gets us closer to landing on the Moon in 2028.”
–Statement by Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, regarding a planned 14-day test in 2027 of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, SpaceX’s Starship, and NASA’s Orion capsule using three different rockets (Blue Origin’s New Glenn, SpaceX’s Starship, and NASA’s Space Launch System). See the NASA image above to understand the complexity of what is planned. You can also find more information about the mission here.
Image (Credit): Suspected space junk discovered in Minnesota on October 14, 2026. (Stevens County Minnesota Sheriff’s Office)
US farmers have it tough enough these days without the added fear of space junk falling on their heads, yet that is what appears to be the case in a Minnesota cornfield. The farmer bumped into the debris, about 11 feet in diameter, while harvesting his crop.
So where did it come from? One astrophysicist believes it is the upper stage of a Zhuque-2E rocket launched from China in last month. These rockets belong to a Chinese commercial space company called LandSpace, which successfully launched 10 satellites into orbit on September 15th.
What is surprising is that this doesn’t happen more often given the increased number of launches around the world as well as the debris tossed over the side of the International Space Station (ISS). The New York Times reported this summer that in 2025 the US Space Force issued alerts related to about 820 pieces of debris falling to Earth. Fortunately, most of it burns up during reentry or hits the ocean.
Should you be a worried farmer, or just someone interested in what is coming down in the near future, you can visit the Satellite Re-entry Tracker. The image below shows the rocket bodies currently in orbit being tracked by the site.
Image (Credit): Rocket bodies being tracked by the Satellite Re-entry Tracker as of October 21, 2026. (Satellite Re-entry Tracker)
“In accordance with Executive Order 14434, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence, this solicitation uses the terminology “Super Intelligence (SI)” exclusively. This includes SI-enabled capabilities such as machine learning, large language models, and foundation models. Please note that certain existing governmental reference materials and documents predating this solicitation may still contain legacy terminology, as they were previously issues before the establishment of Executive Order 14434.”
-Statement in the cover letter to with the subject line “Request for Proposal (RFP), Solicitation No. 80JSC027R0004, for Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Destination Contract (CLDC) Asquisition.” Basically, NASA is looking for someone to build a space station but it is not allowed to acknowledge the term AI because the White House has a new name for it. It is bad enough NASA cannot say “space station,” but now it is unable to use common industry language when asking for help building one. There is little sign of SI, or any intelligence for that matter, at work in the government these days.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) skimmed the very outer edge of Earth’s atmosphere on 28 September, using the gravity of our home planet to alter its route to Jupiter using very little fuel. The flyby deflected Juice by an angle of 20° compared to its pre-flyby path and increased its velocity by 3.5 km/s. In the four weeks before the flyby, spacecraft operators only had to give Juice one tiny nudge (out of six opportunities set aside) to put it on exactly the right approach trajectory to make the most of Earth’s gravity. They have been tracking the spacecraft extra carefully since 17 August, and will continue to do so until 10 October.
SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket blasted off from Texas Monday morning on its most ambitious test flight yet, aiming for a roughly 10-hour mission that would have sent the spacecraft around Earth six times, though the company ultimately decided to end the flight earlier than planned…The launch marks Starship’s 14th test flight and its first attempt to reach orbit, a major step beyond previous suborbital missions that ended with splashdowns about an hour after liftoff.
NASA is working with Boeing to launch an unpiloted Starliner capsule in the December-to-January time frame to test upgrades and improvements ordered in the wake of a 2024 mission that suffered multiple propulsion system failures, stranding two astronauts on the space station for more than nine months. If the unpiloted test flight goes well, NASA and Boeing hope to launch a piloted Starliner flight in the mid-2028 time frame, officials said Monday, incorporating redesigned propulsion system valves, more robust subsystems and other modifications expected to prevent the sort of failures that occurred in 2024. Veteran astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg will command the mission.
It’s a question that has perplexed planetary astronomers for decades: Why does Venus — so similar in size to Earth and not all that far from Earth’s orbit — have no moon, while our planet has such a relatively large one? Earth’s Moon likely formed after a massive collision early in solar system history. But according to calculations, Venus should have been even more likely than Earth to have experienced such a catastrophic crash during its formative years. Yet today it has no moon at all. Now, a series of simulations published in the September 20th Astrophysical Journal, have demonstrated that Venus might once have had a moon — but the planet’s relative proximity to the Sun and its massive atmosphere both created conditions under which no moon could have survived. If there ever was a moon, it would have disintegrated and fallen back to the surface long ago.
On this day in 2008, SpaceX had a successful launch of its Falcon 1 rocket after three earlier failures. Launched from Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands, the rocket would fly only one more mission before being retired. It was replaced by the Falcon 9, which is still in service today.
After the third failure of the Falcon 1 in August 2008, Elon Musk stated:
The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. I have also given the go ahead to begin fabrication of flight six. Falcon 9 development will also continue unabated, taking into account the lessons learned with Falcon 1. We have made great progress this past week with the successful nine engine firing.
