Energy

Interstellar clouds hold enough frozen water to deliver oceans to multiple solar systems as they form — not rare delivery, routine supply line. SPHEREx mapped this across 600 light-years of galactic molecular clouds for the first time.

Eight years. Three comets. And astronomers still can't prove what they came to prove.

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.