Image (Credit): The SpaceX Dragon, with its nose cone open and carrying four Crew-13 members, approaches the International Space Station for a docking yesterday evening. (NASA)
A new ISS crew was launched from Cape Canaveral at 11:10 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 1, 2026 . Crew-13, consisting of NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The ride to the space station was scheduled to be about 8 hours. The SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the crew safely docked with the ISS at 9:19 p.m. EDT.
The new crew will replace Crew‑12 consisting of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. These four crew members will be returning to Earth as soon as Monday, weather permitting.
Image (Credit): From left to right, Crew-13 NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, CSA astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. (NASA)
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.
An unpiloted Russian Progress cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station Saturday carrying supplies and equipment for the orbiting outpost. The Progress M-25 docked at the space-facing port of Russia’s Poisk module at 9:44 a.m. EDT (1344 UTC). It circled the station before making its final approach using the automated Kurs rendezvous system. Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina were standing by to take manual control of the approach using remote controls, but everything went smoothly as the craft closed in, 260 miles above the Black Sea. A series of hooks inside the docking mechanism were driven closed to complete the docking operation.
Astronomers have confirmed the youngest known planet yet, a world less than 1 million years old that is still surrounded by the gas and dust from which it formed. The planet, called Elias 2-24 b, was identified using observations preserved in NASA-funded archives. It is still orbiting within its young star’s dusty disk, giving scientists a rare opportunity to study planet formation while it is still happening.
French President Emmanuel Macron wants Europe to develop its own way of sending astronauts into space within a decade. Europe already builds rockets and satellites and sends astronauts to the International Space Station – but it still relies on American spacecraft to get them there. As the global space sector expands, the question is whether Europe should invest in closing that gap, and what it would take to do so.
SpaceX’s next astronaut mission to the International Space Station won’t launch on Sept. 12 after all. That flight, known as Crew-13, has been delayed due to an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, NASA announced on Saturday (Aug. 29). Joint NASA and SpaceX teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework prior to launch,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Saturday. “A new target date will be announced once available.”
Nearly every large galaxy keeps a giant black hole at its center. Some of those giants already weighed a billion Suns when the universe was less than 700 million years old. Astronomers have struggled for decades to explain how anything grew that heavy that fast. A new study built on James Webb Space Telescope observations suggests one possible answer. The researchers describe a young black hole wrapped in gas so dense that the whole object shines like a single enormous star. Astronomers call objects like it black hole stars. The light from this one has been traveling for 13 billion years, since a moment just 660 million years after the Big Bang, and no earlier example has been found.
Based on gravitational measurements that give clues to the Red Planet’s interior structure, Mars’s interior southern hemisphere is around 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the northern half of the planet and partially molten. The surprising finding adds additional context to Martian history and the periods of time in which it may have hosted conditions favorable for life. The research was led by Caltech alumnus Alexander Berne (PhD ’26), who is now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Arizona. The findings are reported in a paper appearing in the journal Nature on August 27.
For years, satellites around Mars kept finding mysterious, spider-like geological structures. Mars spiders, scientifically known as araneiform terrain, are unique geological formations predominantly found in the southern hemisphere of Mars. They appear as branching, spider-like channels etched into the Martian surface, sometimes spanning over a kilometer in length. In 2024, NASA-led lab experiments pinned down the likeliest way these “spiders” form: seasonal CO₂ ice. Now, a 2026 follow-up showed that the soil beneath the ice can make or break the process, and that these structures could hold clues to Mars’ wet past.
Astronauts have complained about constipation for as long as people have flown to space. Nobody could say exactly why. Researchers have long suspected that living without gravity changes how quickly food moves through the gut. Blood drawn from crew members on long stays aboard the International Space Station now points to an answer. Giorgia La Barbera, a joint first author of the study and an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, led the work with NASA. “We see changes in astronauts’ blood samples that indicate that the gut bacteria begin to ferment protein to a greater extent than usual within weeks after the astronauts arrive in space, and this change continues until they are back on Earth,” La Barbera said.
A Chinese rocket set to launch a satellite into orbit blew-up seconds after liftoff Monday, marking the relatively rare failure for a rocket considered a workhorse of Beijing’s space program. The Long March 7A rocket erupted into a massive fireball just 85 seconds after blasting off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan on Monday night, video showed. Unlike other successful launches, the incident appears to have been downplayed on China’s state media with scant mention of the explosion.
