Latest articles on AI, technology, and software development.
The small-launch shakeout everyone predicted looks different than expected: instead of merging or dying, each surviving player is escaping the small-launch business entirely, just in a different direction.
Falling launch costs and a wave of 2026 funding rounds — from Meta's gigawatt reservation with Overview Energy to ESA's SOLARIS program — are turning a decades-old physics thought experiment into a real, if narrow, energy business.
Two competing satellite-to-cell networks are now live in the United States, using opposite engineering strategies to solve the same problem. Neither replaces terrestrial coverage yet, but the dead-zone experience most phone users have lived with for two decades is already changing.
Northrop Grumman and Starfish Space are running commercial life-extension missions on real satellites for real money. Actual debris removal remains a government-funded demo, still years from its first paid contract.
Tianwen-2 arrived at quasi-moon Kamoʻoalewa while Hayabusa2 flew past the contact-binary asteroid Torifune — a rare overlap that revealed both objects are stranger than predicted.
Varda Space Industries has now flown and safely reentered six orbital manufacturing missions, while UK startup Space Forge has grown plasma at 1,000°C aboard a free-flying satellite. Neither is a demo anymore — both are building toward regular commercial production.
Astroscale, Orbit Fab, and Northrop Grumman are moving from PowerPoint pitches to actual fuel transfers in orbit. A Space Force refueling mission this summer marks the point where on-orbit servicing stops being an experiment and starts being infrastructure.
With 50,000 pieces of debris in orbit and over 1.2 million satellite slots proposed, Low Earth Orbit is a shared resource with no binding governance. The Kessler cascade that could trap us on Earth is not science fiction — it is a policy failure in progress.
The International Space Station deorbits in 2030. NASA has no government replacement planned. Instead, four private stations are under active development — with commercial research, manufacturing, and tourism as the business model. Here is where each program actually stands.
After a string of dramatic explosions and regulatory setbacks, SpaceX's Starship completed its first fully successful orbital flight in late 2025 — catching the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower's mechanical arms and proving the full reuse architecture works end-to-end.
NASA's Artemis program was supposed to return humans to the Moon by 2024. Artemis 2 has still not launched, Artemis 3 has slipped to 2027 at the earliest, and SpaceX's Starship — the planned lunar lander — is still not human-rated. Here is an honest accounting of where the program stands, what is actually working, and what still needs to go right.
For most of the 2020s, SpaceX ran the global launch market almost unchallenged. In 2025 and 2026, Blue Origin's New Glenn, ULA's Vulcan Centaur, and Rocket Lab's growing fleet have changed the picture — not by beating SpaceX, but by being real alternatives for the first time.