The great technological leaps in American history have often featured influential industrialists who step forward as vanguards, leading the way to a better tomorrow while emerging as major players in extreme endeavors.

Spaceflight is no exception.

A new CNN documentary titled "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" shines a light on how a pair of visionary billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have been shaping and steering our country's space program and the bright future of private space enterprise.

Premiering on Sunday (Aug. 9) at 8 p.m. EDT/PDT on CNN, the documentary examines the contributions of the two men and how their considerable wealth have affected America's spaceflight efforts. It also features exclusive interviews with Chief Ambassador of The Planetary Society Bill Nye, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, journalist and CNN contributor Kara Swisher, Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson and many others.

"'Eclipsing Power' traces how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have transformed the future of space exploration, shifting what was once an endeavor primarily led by government into a race driven by private ambition," states the show's official synopsis.

"It follows the rise of SpaceX and Blue Origin, detailing how two of the world's most influential entrepreneurs have come to play an outsized role in America's space program. The hour looks at both the opportunities and the risks of NASA's growing reliance on private industry, the race to return humans to the moon, and what this new era of commercial spaceflight could mean for the future of humanity."

"What am I most excited about in space exploration?," Nye shares in our exclusive clip. "Well, for me, discovering evidence of life elsewhere. Maybe the rocks on Mars. Maybe under the ice on Europa, the moon of Jupiter with twice as much ocean water as Earth. Maybe Enceladus or Titan. It would change the course of human history. We’ll see you up there!"

CNN’s FlashDocs division offers provocative storytelling on topical issues shaping society and culture. Former FlashDocs programs have included "Bad Bunny and the Halftime Show: Rhythms of Resistance" and "Behind the Bob: Vogue's Anna Wintour."

Executive produced by Eric Johnson alongside CNN Studios' Amy Entelis and Katie Hinman, "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" will first stream exclusively at CNN.com/Watch and on the CNN app beginning on Friday (Aug. 7) and has its broadcast debut on Sunday at 8 p.m. EDT on CNN.

This rocket wasn't supposed to die so dramatically.

On Wednesday (Aug. 5) at about 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT), the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will slam into the moon, blasting out a crater about 89 feet (27 meters) wide.

The rocket body has been loitering lazily high above Earth for more than 18 months. What jolted it out of its unremarkable senescence and put it on a kamikaze course for the moon?

It didn't take much, as the rocket regularly crossed into the moon's neck of the woods.

The Falcon 9 launched in January 2025, carrying aloft two private robotic lunar landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, which was built by the Tokyo-based company ispace. (Blue Ghost landed successfully and carried out its historic mission, but Resilience crashed during its touchdown attempt.)

Falcon 9 first stages are famously reusable, but the vehicle's upper stages fly just once. SpaceX usually deorbits these rocket bodies shortly after launch, guiding them back for controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere. That wasn't possible on the Blue Ghost-Resilience launch, however, as getting the lunar probes to their distant deployment point used up almost all of the upper stage's fuel.

As a result, the 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) rocket body "was abandoned in a moon-crossing high-Earth orbit," according to a recent study about the coming impact led by Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

SpaceX performed "a different maneuver [than deorbiting] to ensure that the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said today (Aug. 3) during a press conference discussing the company's Crew-13 astronaut launch to the International Space Station, which is targeted for Sept. 12.

That maneuver did not lock the hunk of space junk into a stable location, however; natural forces still acted upon it and, it turns out, changed its trajectory.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said.

Astronomers and lunar scientists are looking forward to the upcoming impact, even though it will occur on the sunlit side of the moon and therefore likely won't be visible to most observers here on Earth (though skywatchers with good telescopes might be able to catch a glimpse of the resulting ejecta plume).

The event "provides an opportunity to test pipelines for measuring flash properties to locate impact events seismically, and to better understand the multi-modal hazards posed to future lunar infrastructure and astronauts from space debris impacting the moon," Fernando and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

Those hazards won't be purely hypothetical for much longer, if all goes to plan: NASA aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the coming decade via its Artemis program, and to keep that outpost staffed over the long haul. Scheiman said that SpaceX is looking into ways to minimize the chances that spent rocket bodies could rain down on an occupied moon in the future.

"It's one of the things that we're working in partnership with NASA and the other appropriate agencies," she said. "What is the best future disposal path for high-energy missions that are in the sun-Earth-moon system?"

This Falcon 9 won't be blazing an entirely new trail to the moon. The third stage of NASA's Saturn V moon rocket struck the lunar surface on multiple Apollo missions, for example. And, on March 4, 2022, a mysterious rocket body slammed into the moon, blasting out a weird double crater.

That shape revealed the impactor's identity — the upper stage of the Long March 3C rocket that sent China's uncrewed Chang'e 5-T1 mission around the moon in October 2014.

Cyberpunk is back in a big way, baby!

This summer, we've gotten two big doses of dystopian sci-fi: first with the recent San Diego Comic-Con trailer launch for Prime Video's upcoming "Blade Runner 2099" and now Apple TV's prestige series based on sci-fi guru William Gibson's 1984 cult novel, "Neuromancer."

The futuristic plotline centers around a burned-out computer hacker living in the overcrowded dystopian underworld of Japan's Chiba City who takes on a dangerous cyberspace gig that just might leave him dead. Its 10-episode debut season will be delivered beginning with a double chapter premiere, with subsequent installments airing each Friday through March 19, 2027.

Created by executive producer and showrunner Graham Roland, the mastermind behind "Dark Winds," "Neuromancer" powers up on Apple TV on Jan. 22, 2027 as also revealed during last week’s Southern California pop culture fiesta.

"Neuromancer's" four-decade road from page to screen has been long and arduous, with many A-list names in Hollywood attached to an adaptation of the acclaimed book at one time or another.

The ensemble cast stars "One Night Only's" Callum Turner as Case, Briana Middleton as Molly Millions, "Beef's" Joseph Lee as the ninja bodyguard Hideo, and Mark Strong in yet another in a seemingly infinite line of cold imposing villains, this time playing the shadowy figure called Armitage.

Additional cast members for this edgy sci-fi production include Clémence Poésy (Marie-France Tessier), Peter Sarsgaard (John Ashpool), Emma Laird (Linda Lee), Dane DeHaan (Peter Riviera), Max Irons (Jean Tessier-Ashpool), André De Shields (Julius Deane), Marc Menchaca (Dixie Flatline), Isabella Pappas (Mitchell), and Prasanna Puwanarajah (Darvin Mitnik).

"Neuromancer" kicks off exclusively on Apple TV on Jan. 22, 2027.

NASA's Europa Clipper is currently on a 1.8-billion-mile journey to Jupiter, tasked with assessing whether the icy moon of its namesake, Europa, could support life.

Based on data from the historic Voyager and Galileo missions, scientists know Europa hides a global ocean beneath its frozen crust, containing more than double the water of all Earth's oceans combined. During the Europa Clipper's planned 49 close flybys of the icy moon, planetary scientists hope the spacecraft detects giant water plumes or warm surface pockets supplied by this subterranean ocean, offering a convenient way to analyze the hidden ocean's chemistry from orbit.

A new study, however, suggests any shallow water the Europa Clipper detects may not necessarily be a direct window into Europa's ocean after all.

Research led by planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University indicates that Europa's icy shell acts as a far more formidable barrier than previously assumed. Computer simulations modeling the physics of water traveling through fractures in the ice reveal that liquid rising from the ocean would move turbulently, shed heat rapidly and freeze the cracks shut — often in a matter of hours — long before reaching shallow depths.

"There's an icy shell, there's water underneath, and there's all this speculation about how that water can come from deep underground and make its way all the way up without freezing en route," Ojha said in a statement. "That's really what we think we disproved."

To test this scenario, Ojha's team built computer simulations to evaluate whether ocean water could rise through fractures in the crust and collect in shallow reservoirs closer to the surface. Such reservoirs, if fed directly by the ocean, would be significantly easier for passing spacecraft to detect and analyze than an ocean buried miles below.

While earlier models assumed water would flow smoothly through these pathways, real-world physics creates a far more chaotic journey, according to the new study. Instead of a steady stream, rising water churns turbulently against the frigid walls of the fractures, rapidly losing heat.

"It's going to be left and right, it's going to be up and down, it's going to have a swirling motion," Ojha said in the statement. "And when that happens, that liquid water is going to cool very, very fast as it approaches the surface."

As the water rapidly cools, it remains liquid below its standard freezing point in a process called supercooling. This phenomenon, the study notes, triggers the formation of tiny, slushy ice crystals known as frazil ice that then quickly builds up and clogs the pathway.

While wider fractures could theoretically carry larger volumes of water, the results suggest that to prevent complete freezing, those channels would need to be "unrealistically long or occur in large numbers," the university statement read.

The findings could alter how scientists interpret incoming data from Europa Clipper, which is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030, as well as the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. JUICE is set to arrive in July 2031 to study Jupiter alongside three of its ocean-bearing moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

If these spacecraft do discover shallow liquid pools or similar surface features, Ojha's study suggests they are more likely created by localized melting inside the ice shell itself, rather than direct upwellings from the deep ocean.

"This helps future missions interpret what they find and better understand where to look for signs of habitability," Ojha said in the statement.

This research is described in a paper published July 23 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Three of Neptune's moons might have been born from the remnants of ancient icy worlds shattered by Neptune's largest moon, Triton, a new study finds.

These findings suggest further research of these moons might give researchers an unprecedented look at the innards of icy worlds.

"The interiors of large icy moons are normally permanently hidden from us, buried beneath thick shells of water ice," study lead author Ryleigh Davis, a planetary scientist currently at the University of California, San Diego, told Space.com. "Neptune's inner moons may be the only place in the solar system where we can directly observe that material, because a catastrophic event essentially turned those ancient worlds inside out."

Triton is by far the largest of Neptune's 16 known moons. More than 99 percent of the mass of all of Neptune's moons is concentrated in Triton, which is roughly the size of Pluto, Davis said.

Whereas the largest moons of the solar system's other giant planets all orbit their worlds in the same direction as those planets spin, Neptune's largest moon, Triton, orbits in the opposite direction. This unusual configuration suggests the Neptunian system evolved in a dramatically different way than those of its siblings. Instead of Triton forming around Neptune, as the largest moons of the other giant planets likely did around their worlds, Triton's backward orbit has led researchers to suspect "it was captured from the outer solar system," Davis said.

When Neptune captured Triton with its gravity, Triton may have acted like a giant wrecking ball, smashing many of the moons Neptune may have originally had, Davis said. However, much remained uncertain about what happened in the aftermath of this destruction.

To shed light on the mysteries of Neptune's history, scientists investigated Neptune's rings and three of its moons — Larissa, Galatea, and Proteus. Discovered in 1989 with the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune, these moons are small and close to Neptune, orbiting just outside the planet's main rings. Their locations and tiny sizes have made it difficult for astronomers to study them in detail from Earth.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed near-infrared light from those inner moons using the James Webb Space Telescope . This data helped reveal their chemical makeup for the first time.

The rings and two of the inner moons — Larissa and Galatea — possessed clay minerals previously unseen on the surfaces of bodies in the outer solar system beyond Jupiter. Specifically, they contain magnesium-rich phyllosilicates, commonly found in main belt asteroids and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.

"The most surprising thing is simply that we found clay minerals at all," said Davis, who conducted this research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "That was genuinely not on our list of things we expected to find."

These minerals require major prolonged heating to form. One likely place they were created was the deep interior of a large icy body, where heat might come from radioactive material and other sources.

As such, the researchers suggest these minerals are evidence Triton may have demolished Neptune's original moons. The rubble could then come together, forming Neptune's inner moons, with the clay minerals exposed on their surfaces.

Another possibility is that these clay minerals came from a dwarf planet similar in size to Pluto that passed too close to Neptune. Neptune's gravity might then have shredded this dwarf planet apart, Davis said.

These clay minerals only form in the presence of liquid water. Mysteriously, no water ice was detected in any of the three moons studied or the rings.

"That's really surprising because everything out in this part of the solar system is really icy," Davis said in a statement. "So, we're fairly confident that they had to come from deep inside something that was big enough to generate enough heat that it melted its water ice. We think the most likely place would be an original system of icy moons, although it's a bit of a mystery where the ice may have gone."

The scientists noted they did not see these clay minerals on Proteus, the biggest of the three moons they investigated. They suggested it might have formed from a clay-mineral-poor part of the debris, or experienced subsequent heating that destroyed any such minerals.

Curiously, the scientists found all three moons and the rings had a hydrated mineral the researchers were not able to identify. "Identifying it will likely require new laboratory measurements under outer solar system conditions, which is technically challenging but doable," Davis said.

To learn more about Neptune, a spacecraft dedicated to visiting the planet "is the obvious next step," Davis said. "We've had only a single flyby — Voyager 2 in 1989 — and these results make clear there's much more to learn. The main obstacle is time and resources: an ice giant mission was identified as a high priority in the most recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey, but these missions take decades to develop."

The scientists detailed their findings July 29 in the journal Science Advances.

New images reveal what astronomers believe is the first-known "trilobate" or three-headed asteroid in our solar system.

What is it?

These new images capture the asteroid known as (44) Nysa, or just Nysa, as it spins through the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. The images were captured with the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

Nysa was first observed in 1857, but it wasn't until the new images were captured when scientists were able to resolve its unique three-headed structure. The asteroid appears to be around 47 miles (75 kilometers) in circumference at its widest point, with two narrow "necks" that give it its odd "trilobate" shape.

Even more incredible, astronomers were also able to resolve that a 0.6-mile-wide (1-km-wide) moon seems to orbit Nysa. The tiny moon, currently known as S/2026 (44) 1, appears to orbit the asteroid at a distance of around 106 miles (170 km).

Why is it incredible?

Astronomers say these images reveal (44) Nysa to be unlike any other asteroid we've seen in our neck of the cosmic woods.

"The images reveal a remarkably unusual object," said Kate Minker of Arizona's Lowell Observatory in a statement announcing the discovery. "The most likely explanation is that Nysa is either a contact trinary, consisting of three connected components, or an extremely irregular coherent body unlike anything we've previously observed."

Scientists can study asteroids like Nysa to learn about how the planets of our solar system formed. Nysa belongs to a class of asteroids believed to have formed closer to the inner solar system and therefore may have a similar composition to the building blocks that would go on to form the inner planets.

On Aug. 3, 2004, NASA launched the MESSENGER spacecraft on a historic first mission to orbit the planet Mercury. The spacecraft's name stands for the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging mission.

It blasted off on a Delta II rocket that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:15 a.m. Eastern Time and spent the next six and a half years making its way to Mercury's orbit. Because Mercury is so close to the sun, a spacecraft travelling toward the planet speeds up as the sun's gravity pulls it in.

In order to slow down enough to avoid falling into the sun, MESSENGER utilized the gravitational pull of Venus and Mercury with multiple flybys along the way. It made 15 trips around the sun before it finally arrived in Mercury's orbit in 2011.

Why it mattered

Mercury is an odd planet. It is close to the sun, yet holds the promise of water ice on its surface. It completes one orbit every 88 days. But it can be a devil of a planet to reach with a spacecraft.

The launch of NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft was the first step to bring the rocky, craggy Mercury within tantalizing reach of scientists hoping for an upclose look at the planet. The spacecraft made some surprising discoveries, revealing that Mercury's core is huge — roughly 85% of its radius (Earth's core is only 50% of its own radius). The planet is also very flat, with less elevation changes than those found on Earth's moon and Mars. MESSENGER's greatest finds may have been extremely "radar-bright" deposits in craters at Mercury's poles, which are in permanent darkness and may hold pockets of water ice.

MESSENGER's primary mission at Mercury ended in 2012 and its mission was extended twice. In 2015, NASA ended the MESSENGER mission by crashing the probe into Mercury.

A new spacecraft is now headed for Mercury. The BepiColombo mission, a joint project by Japan and the European Space Agency, launched two different orbiters to Mercury in 2018 and is due to arrive at the planet in November.

Mention that a total solar eclipse is coming, and almost nobody will say, "Wow, we get to see the solar corona!" That's despite the sun's tenuous outer atmosphere being the number one sight during totality — a genuine jaw-dropper.

Instead, the focus on social media is always on the darkness during the day, arguably the least interesting — but easiest to grasp — aspect of a total solar eclipse. It's no wonder that many people misunderstand and underestimate them, and think of eclipse chasers as a little odd.

But that's not the half of it. There are dozens of things to see and experience during a total solar eclipse, so many that we've put together a checklist of things to see as you're swallowed by the moon's shadow. Here's what you may experience during the solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, roughly in the order they occur from first contact — when the moon begins to eclipse the sun — to fourth contact, when it departs.

1. Sunspots

Here's one everyone in both the partial and total eclipse zones can see on Aug. 12, 2026. As the moon's silhouette moves across the sun, look through your ISO-certified safe solar eclipse glasses/solar filters. With luck, you'll see the edge of the moon move across dark spots on the solar surface. These are sunspots, cool patches where the sun's magnetic field is concentrated and complex. They're where solar flares come from.

2. Planets

You'll often hear someone shout, "There's Venus!" during the totality phase of a total solar eclipse, to which your response should rightly be: "Who cares?" as you focus on the much rarer sight of the solar corona. The correct time to look for planets is about 15 minutes before totality, when — on Aug. 12, 2026 — Jupiter will appear about 11 degrees west-northwest, with tiny Mercury about 4 degrees beyond. Venus will be much farther away, about 46° east-southeast of the sun, but easy to see. Mars will be low in the west, but much more difficult to see.

3. Crescent-shaped shadows

Here's another one everyone can look out for during a deep partial solar eclipse. When over 50% of the sun is eclipsed, crescent-shaped shadows begin to appear on the ground beneath trees. It's sunlight passing through tiny gaps, which act like the aperture control on a camera. The best way to see them is to grab a colander or spaghetti spoon — or anything with small, defined holes. Failing that, cross your fingers in a waffle pattern and you'll project diffuse crescents.

4. Shadow bands

Here's one for eclipse chasers in Spain. About two minutes before and after totality, it's sometimes possible to see wavy lines on white surfaces. It's the reduced light from the crescent sun being refracted by atmospheric turbulence, and, for some reason, it's much more noticeable when the eclipse is low in the sky — as it will be from Spain. They're called shadow bands or "shadow snakes". Pack as large a white sheet as you can (or borrow one from your bemused hotel).

5. Plunging light and heat

As the partial eclipse reaches about 80%, you'll begin to notice it getting cooler. By the time it's just seconds before totality, it will be chilly as the light levels around you crash like nothing else you have experienced. "Darkness in the day" does not do it justice — it's as if the world is ending. Even experienced eclipse chasers get a knot in their stomach about now as a primordial fear kicks in. That feeling is not helped by looking at the others around you, who, in the eerie, silvery light, suddenly look almost ghoulish.

6. The moon's shadow

This is a tricky thing to see. The prelude to totality is the arrival of the moon's umbral shadow, which will race across observers at about 2,200 mph (Greenland and Iceland) to about 12,000 mph (in eastern Spain, where the shadow is by then oblique and about to skip off the Earth). You'll need an elevated position — perhaps the side of a valley — looking northwest for this sight, and preferably a relatively uniform landscape. It's something you can attempt to capture using a GoPro or similar.

7. Diamond rings and Baily's beads

These are trademarks of totality, but require care to see. As the eclipse nears totality, a spectacular drop of sunlight (the diamond ring) breaks into tiny so-called Baily's beads of light streaming through the moon's valleys. When the final bead vanishes, totality begins. The opposite happens a few minutes later at the end of totality, when a Baily's bead appears, then a few more, quickly coalescing into a second diamond ring. Do what experienced eclipse chasers do and ignore the first round — you'll just end up with an after-image in your eyes, which will affect your vision just as the corona pops into view. Besides, it's the second diamond ring that's the real "wow" moment that ends totality. Its arrival means it's time to put your solar eclipse glasses back on.

8. Solar corona

This is what you came to see. The sun's corona, its outer atmosphere, is where solar flares and coronal mass ejections come from. It's the hottest part of the sun. It's always there — but hidden from view by the much brighter surface of the sun, its photosphere. Only when the photosphere is blocked by the moon — totality — can the corona be seen. During this time, it's essential that you remove your solar eclipse glasses to see the tenuous halo around the silhouette of the moon. It's a surreal and remarkable sight. Should you bring binoculars just to look at the corona during totality, even if it's only for a few seconds? Yes! This may be the most beautiful thing you will ever see.

9. Solar chromosphere

Just after totality begins and just before it ends, a thin crimson line appears where the diamond ring just was and is about to be. This is the chromosphere, a layer of the sun's atmosphere just above the photosphere. It's a fleeting sight used by scientists to capture a "flash" spectrum that shows exactly what chemical elements are in the sun's atmosphere.

10. Solar prominences

One of the most surprising aspects of witnessing a total solar eclipse is a view of prominences during totality, bright pink spikes or loops that appear around the moon's silhouette. These are cool plasma structures extending from the chromosphere into the corona, usually lasting days or weeks. They're particularly obvious when the sun is close to solar maximum — as it is right now.

11. Totality 'sunset'

Totality will be short for many eclipse chasers on Aug. 12, 2026, but if you can take your eyes off the solar corona, glance at the colors in the sky close to the horizon — it looks like a 360-degree sunset. If it's cloudy and you miss the corona, the colors around you can be particularly memorable.

12. Meteors

By remarkable coincidence, the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, comes only a few hours before the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Expect about 20-40 "shooting stars" to be visible every hour around midnight and into the early hours of Aug. 13, though among eclipse chasers, those in rural Spain will have a better chance since there are more hours of darkness than in Iceland and Greenland. Could there be a "shooting star" during totality? It's possible — but to see it, you'd have to be looking away from the solar corona, which would be a mad thing to do.

13. Aurora borealis

Is it a long shot? Yes. Is it possible? Also yes. The specter of the aurora borealis appearing during totality in the skies above Iceland and Greenland during totality is getting eclipse chasers excited. The reality is that totality is never as dark as people think — it's a twilight — plus aurora on the day-side of Earth is not nearly as strong as on the night-side. It could happen — though more likely is a display of the northern lights late at night, particularly in Iceland, where the night sky does get sufficiently dark in mid-August, and auroras are commonly seen at that time of year.

Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe the violent outflow of material from a distant black hole. The observation once again shows that even the hungriest black holes are extremely messy eaters, while also revealing the "digestive processes" of these cosmic titans in unprecedented detail.

The research focuses on the black hole system Swift J1727.8−1613, located around 8,800 light-years away, and a violent bout of cosmic indigestion and the bright eruptions the system triggered back in 2023. That episode is what initially led to the discovery of Swift J1727.8−1613 in 2023, and it resulted in the system becoming one of the brightest X-ray sources in the sky over Earth.

A team of astronomers has now discovered that as this black hole greedily stripped a star of its stellar material, some of this matter was consumed, but other stellar material was blasted back into space as high-speed jets and powerful black hole winds. They also found that the most massive outflows of material happened when the black hole's feeding activity was much lower than previously thought. The upshot of this is the conclusion that black holes aren't quite the "bottomless pits" scientists had assumed, but are far more like complex cosmic digestive systems.

"People often imagine black holes simply swallowing everything around them," team leader Noel Castro Segura of the University of Warwick in the UK said in a statement. "What we're seeing is a much more complex process. Matter falls in, the system processes it, and a surprising amount is expelled again."

The changing face of a feeding black hole

Swift J1727.8−1613 consists of a black hole surrounded by a swirling platter of material pulled away from a companion star. This matter still has angular momentum, or rotation, so it can't directly fall to the black hole, but instead forms this structure, called an accretion disk.

The immense gravitational influence of the black hole generates intense tidal forces and friction in the accretion disk, superheating it and causing it to glow brightly.

The observations of this glowing disk conducted by Segura and colleagues differ from previous studies of black hole outbursts because their detailed study allowed them to watch the Swift J1727.8−1613 system change over time as it fed on a star.

The resulting "movie" of this feeding black hole revealed that as the cosmic titan blasted out jets, the accretion disk slowly feeding it underwent changes of its own.

That gives scientists a rare and fleeting insight into the connection that exists between matter falling to the maw of a black hole and the material being blasted out at near light-speed as jets of plasma.

The team also found that even after the feeding frenzy of this black hole had subsided, it seemed to still be powering black hole winds of dense gas. They suggest that the amount of material flung away by the black hole may eventually amount to the same mass as that consumed by the black hole, meaning half of its stellar meal was eventually lost to space.

"If black holes can continue shedding material even after their largest outbursts, it means they may be much less efficient eaters than we previously assumed," Segura added. "A significant fraction of the meal may never reach the black hole at all, changing our understanding of how binary stars in galaxies evolve."

The fact that this team was able to observe the entire feeding cycle of this black hole from its initial flare to its dramatic and rather windy end paints a clearer and more dynamic picture of this process than scientists have ever had access to before.

"We usually gravitate towards the dramatic fireworks when a black hole outburst begins, but our observations show that the finale can be just as intense," Kyle Solomons, Doctoral Researcher at the University of Cape Town, said.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 29) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

Spotting scopes are typically used by birders and for hunting, but under a dark sky, the Nocs Provisions Lite View reveals a different personality. With a 56mm objective lens and a versatile 9x-27x zoom range, this compact spotting scope is surprisingly capable when turned toward not just the moon, but bright star clusters, too.

Key to its attraction is its small size, carry case and shoulder strap, which makes it possible to sling over a shoulder. Its rugged, wave-textured housing and bright color options? Not so much. However, with just enough optical performance to satisfy casual astronomers — particularly those focused on lunar observing — it makes a good option for astro-travel. Is it a replacement for one of the best telescopes? Absolutely not — but for close-up views of the lunar disk (particularly lunar eclipses), Jupiter and its moons, and bright open star clusters such as the Pleiades — this lightweight scope offers an appealing balance between portability and power if, and only if, you mount it on a tripod.

Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope review

Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope: Design

• Compact, travel-friendly size
• Rugged rubberized grip
• Integrated tripod mount

What's immediately noticeable about the Lite View is its rubberized, wave-textured exterior, which feels solid and secure in the hand. It's impact-absorbing and confidence-inspiring — important if you're heading out to a field for a late-night lunar eclipse, perhaps — though it will jar with anyone used to the mono, metallic designs favored by telescope designers. As a bonus, the IPX4 water-resistant rating means it will tolerate drizzle and damp conditions, though it's not fully waterproof or fogproof. Are we fans of its two color choices, Ochre Yellow and Saguaro Green? Not so much, though; with the popularity of stargazing-themed travel, the differing tones of astronomy scopes and spotting scopes no longer make sense.

At 192 mm long and weighing 567 g / 1.2 lb, the Lite View lives up to its name. It's small enough to fit into a larger jacket pocket and comes with a protective carrying case and shoulder strap, making it ideal for grab-and-go observing sessions. Its focus wheel and eyepiece zoom ring are logically placed, but while the former can feel slightly stiff at first, the latter is much looser. After some use, the focus wheel loosens and becomes smoother to operate. Meanwhile, the twist-up eyecups offer 18 mm of eye relief, making it comfortable to wear with spectacles.

Crucially for astronomy, the scope includes an integrated tripod mount. At higher magnifications, it proves essential.

Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope: Performance

• Excellent lunar detail
• Visible Galilean moons of Jupiter
• Some chromatic aberration

Turn the Lite View toward a first-quarter moon, and it quickly justifies its place in a basic travel astronomy kit. At 9x magnification, the lunar disk appears crisp and bright against the night sky, with strong contrast across the dark maria and a pleasingly wide field of view that makes locating and centering it effortless. Increase the magnification to around 20x, and the view becomes more immersive, with crater chains and rugged terrain along the terminator snapping into satisfying relief as shadows sculpt the surface into dramatic texture.

At the full 27x magnification, crater rims and fissures become more pronounced, and for a 56mm spotting scope, the overall sharpness remains impressive. However, this is also where the scope’s limitations begin to surface. A trace of purple fringing and faint yellow coloration appear along the lunar limb in high-contrast areas, but it's not severe. Sharpness softens slightly compared to the sweet spot around 20x magnification, and in darker conditions, chromatic aberration becomes more noticeable around the moon.

Beyond the moon, it performs surprisingly well on bright deep-sky targets. The Beehive Cluster (M44) appears as a sparkling spray of stars, while the Orion Nebula (M42) shows a soft, misty glow under darker skies. The Pleiades (M45) particularly benefit from the generous field of view at lower magnifications, presenting a striking cluster framed against a black sky. Even Jupiter offers a rewarding sight. Though the planet remains small and surface detail is not visible, its four Galilean moons are clearly visible.

Optics-wise, the Lite View is not going to rival premium top-end ED-glass optics or a dedicated refractor telescope, but its HiFi fully multi-coated lenses and XDR roof prisms deliver bright, reasonably sharp views overall, particularly at mid-range magnifications. Overall, it meets expectations for its size and price.

Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope: Functionality

• Smooth zoom control
• Tripod use is essential
• Handy carry case

Key to the appeal of the Lite View are its 56mm objectives and 27x magnification, which you won't find in most lightweight binoculars. However, like large astronomy binoculars, this spotting scope — despite being very lightweight — is best used with some stability. While technically possible to use handheld at 9x, stability becomes an issue beyond 12x. At 27x, even slight movements blur the image significantly. For serious lunar observing, a tripod is mandatory. Annoyingly, the scope comes with a large rubber mount covering the undercarriage's tripod thread, which needs to be removed using an (included) Allen key. It appears to serve no purpose.

The great thing about the Lite View's zoom range is that it's smooth, flexible and allows the easy framing of the moon at low power before zooming in to better fit the field of view. Focusing at high magnification requires a gentle touch. The focus ring's resistance helps prevent accidental shifts, but fine adjustments demand patience. You'll also need to refocus slightly when changing magnification, which does somewhat interrupt the flow when observing.

Should you buy the Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope?

The Nocs Provisions Lite View Spotting Scope occupies an interesting niche. It's not a dedicated astronomical device, yet it performs impressively on the moon and bright objects. Its lightweight build, shoulder-ready pouch and integrated tripod mount make it ideal for travel, spontaneous observing sessions and lunar eclipses. Yes, there's some chromatic aberration. Yes, it softens slightly at 27x. However, when mounted steadily and aimed at Earth's natural satellite, it delivers detailed, rewarding views that exceed what its size suggests. For lunar lovers who value portability and simplicity, it's a compelling companion under the night sky.

How we tested the Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope

We tested the Lite View during multiple evening sessions under suburban skies and in darker rural conditions. Particular attention was given to lunar observing at various phases from crescent to gibbous and other bright objects in the night sky.

The scope was mounted on a stable tripod for all high-magnification observations. We evaluated sharpness, color fidelity, contrast and ease of focusing, as well as its ability to resolve Jupiter's Galilean moons and several bright deep-sky objects, largely bright open clusters of stars.

If the Nocs Provisions Lite View spotting scope isn't for you

If you're seeking significantly higher magnification and premium optical performance, consider the Celestron Regal M2 80 ED, which delivers outstanding clarity at a much higher price point. Astrophotographers may prefer a similarly priced entry-level smart telescope, such as the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini, which can capture excellent images of the moon and deep-sky objects. Another option is large stargazing binoculars like the Celestron SkyMaster 20x80 Pro, which offer greater light-gathering for fainter objects, though at the cost of added bulk.

Martin Halliwell is a Partner at NewSpace Capital, one of the world's first private equity firms devoted exclusively to growth-stage companies working in the space technology sector. He formerly served as Chief Technology Officer of SES, where he led global technology and R&D from 2011 to 2019. Halliwell contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices section.

There are now some 16,000 active satellites in orbit. Market intelligence firms like Novaspace say that up to 43,000 satellites will be built and launched over the coming decade. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, think as many as 70,000 new low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites could be launched in the next five years alone. The exact number is less important than what these predictions reveal: that satellite constellations are getting bigger.

This is a good thing. Space is a crucial enabling force in the modern world, touching just about every part of ordinary life. But as these constellations grow, it will become increasingly difficult for human operators to run them. A network of a few satellites can be managed from the ground; a network of hundreds, or even thousands, cannot be managed in the same way. These satellites must share data, avoid interfering with one another, meet changes in customer demand, and deal with technical problems. Some decisions must be made in seconds, without waiting for instructions from Earth. This is why onboard processing, automation and artificial intelligence are becoming all-important. Satellites will need to sift through and analyze more information in orbit, then act within clear limits set by human operators.

In-orbit processing

One major use for AI will be processing data in orbit. At present, most satellite data is sent back to Earth before it is cleaned, sorted and analyzed. Earth-observation companies, for example, may collect huge amounts of imagery to track weather, crops, disasters, land use or emissions. They must then process all of it on the ground before they can give customers useful information. If satellites can do more of this work in orbit, they can send back only the data that matters. This would cut costs and save time. In defense, where speed can decide the outcome, it could help people act much faster. Onboard processing could also reduce reliance on ground systems, which may themselves be attacked or disrupted. Satellites remain vulnerable, but moving some analysis into orbit could make the wider system more resilient.

Moving capacity

Satellites must be able to spot patterns, respond to changes and adjust their plans in near real time. This makes them well suited to AI. One important use is managing network capacity. Demand for satellite bandwidth is always changing. It may rise over cities at busy times, around major events, in disaster zones, on aircraft and ships or during military operations. AI could track these changes and decide where a satellite’s beams should point, how much power each beam should use and when capacity should be moved elsewhere. This would help satellite networks send more capacity to places where it is needed most, instead of sending the same amount to the same places all the time. The result would be a more efficient use of the satellite’s limited power and available spectrum.

What if AI gets it wrong?

The barriers are not only technical. They are also legal and organizational. Most laws, contracts, insurance policies and operating rules were written for systems controlled by people. They assume that a named person makes each important decision. AI makes responsibility less clear. If an AI system points a beam at the wrong place, disrupts another service or causes damage, it may be difficult to decide who is at fault: the satellite operator, the manufacturer or the software company. Operators must also decide how much control they are willing to give to AI. Many are happy for AI to offer advice. Fewer are ready to let it change a network or move capacity without human approval. For this reason, adoption is likely to be gradual. Operators will need clear rules about which decisions AI can make by itself and which must still be approved by a person.

Spacecraft design and manufacturing

AI will affect more than the way satellites are operated. It could also help engineers design and build them more quickly. Engineers can use AI to write code, search technical documents, test ideas and suggest solutions to design problems. It could produce early versions of spacecraft structures, antennas, power systems, payloads or mission plans. Human engineers would still need to check, test and improve the work, but they would not always have to start from scratch. This could shorten development times, cut costs and allow smaller teams to do work that once required much larger organizations. AI could also help in factories by spotting faults, predicting delays and showing when equipment needs maintenance. It will not replace skilled engineers. Its main value will be in doing routine work quickly, so people can spend more time on difficult decisions, safety and the hardest technical problems.

Building trust

To unlock AI’s full value, the industry will need secure, affordable environments in which organizations can train and deploy models without losing control of information. These environments need strong cyber security, clear access rules and ways to keep each organization’s data separate. Some models may need training inside company or government networks so sensitive data never leaves. Technical safeguards will help, but trust matters, too. The industry will also need better standards, clearer legal responsibility and reliable testing. The technology itself is advancing quickly. The harder task is creating the rules, safeguards and confidence needed to use it. AI may soon be ready to run more of a satellite network. The question is how quickly the industry will be ready to let it.

Microsoft and Xbox are currently facing all sorts of troubles (many of their own doing) in the shape of sweeping layoffs, studio cuts, and calls to boycott their products, to name a few. Extremely talented developers (who deserve much better) still put out exciting video games regardless, and with the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved out now, we look to Gears of War: E-Day, the series' first mainline entry since 2019.

While there are plenty of upcoming space games worth keeping tabs on, Gears of War's return feels special for a number of reasons. Although Gears 5 was not a flop – quite the opposite – there was a growing sentiment among the fanbase that Gears of War needed to reevaluate its future by revisiting its past. After a solid remaster of the original game last year, this next chapter is taking us back to where it all started: Emergence Day.

With gameplay systems, mechanics, controls, and visuals fully rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5, The Coalition aims to deliver the ultimate Gears of War experience with E-Day, and at least the atmosphere and tone seem pitch-perfect. But with nostalgia taking so many beloved franchises a few steps back in recent times, we must wonder if there's more to E-Day than reliving the series' glory days? Here's everything you should know about Gears of War: E-Day ahead of its launch.

When is Gears of War: E-Day coming out?

Gears of War: E-Day launches on October 6, 2026.

After a gameplay-less reveal in summer 2024, The Coalition went silent to continue work on the prequel. It was finally during the Xbox Games Showcase 2026 that we received confirmation Gears of War: E-Day would arrive before the year's end.

Is Gears of War: E-Day coming to PlayStation 5?

No, Gears of War: E-Day won't be releasing on PS5 despite last year's remaster of the first game marking the series' debut on Sony consoles.

Though rumors and leaked materials pointed to Gears of War: E-Day launching on Sony's console alongside Xbox, the full reveal in summer 2026 underlined it was an Xbox Series X/S console exclusive. It will, however, also launch on Windows via the Xbox app and Steam. As usual, Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will also get access to it day one.

Three editions will be available at launch, and you can pre-order them already:

• Standard ($69.99 / £59.99 / €69.99) – Base game.
• Premium ($99.99 / £89.99 / €99.99) – Base game with up to five days of early access, Bravo Squad Signature Weapon Pack, Emergence Customization Pack, Four Seasonal Customization Packs (released post-launch), and 1,000 iron (the game's premium in-game currency). A separate upgrade for Standard will also be sold.
• Collector's ($299.99 / variable regional pricing) – Everything in the Premium Edition plus physical items, including a collector's display box, a 15" statue, replica COG tags, an exclusive steelbook case, an art piece, and an art print & thank-you note from the studio.

All editions also benefit from pre-order bonuses that include open beta early access (on August 6), the Exfil weapon set, and Exfil Dom legendary character skin.

Gears of War: E-Day trailers

Xbox and The Coalition are sharing all sorts of short videos in the lead-up to launch, but if you want to only watch the trailers and gameplay demos, we have them right here:

Is Gears of War: E-Day the first game in the timeline?

Gears of War: E-Day is the first chapter in the Gears timeline. It tells the story of how the humans on the Earth-like planet of Sera came in contact with the bloodthirsty and relentless Locust Horde on what would later be called Emergence Day.

If you're planning to play the Gears of War games in order, this would be the perfect place to start moving forward. Though the original game and Judgment (a spinoff that was released for Xbox 360) gave us information on what happened during E-Day, we never really had a Rogue One-like prequel similar to Halo: Reach. Now, both veterans and newcomers will be able to experience the struggle humanity faced as a new conflict erupted.

Alongside a supporting cast of new and familiar faces, the story follows original trilogy protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dominic 'Dom' Santiago as they battle through the chaos of E-Day and push back against the subterranean invaders. For additional context, the war against the Locust kicks off only a few weeks after the 79-year conflict between human factions known as the Pendulum Wars, which explains why the COG wasn't in the best of conditions when the monsters attacked.

Will Gears of War: E-Day have co-op and competitive multiplayer?

Gears of War: E-Day is a third-person, cover-based shooter in the style of the previous games and, as such, both co-op and competitive multiplayer are back alongside the single-player experience.

The main story campaign can be played in single-player, or with up to four players online or two players locally via split screen. It must be noted the PC version of the game won't feature local co-op. These player counts also apply to the series' famous Horde Siege PvE survival mode, which pits players against waves of enemies as they select different classes and loadouts.

Versus PvP multiplayer for online competition also returns with all-new maps and both Social and Ranked matches. While the post-launch support hasn't been fully detailed, it feels likely more maps will be added in the future at no extra cost.

Is there a Gears of War: E-Day demo?

There's no Gears of War: E-Day demo announced at the time of writing. However, players can look forward to a multiplayer open beta happening in the coming weeks. More specifically, those who pre-order or have active Game Pass Ultimate subs can access the test early, from August 6 to 10. The second – and fully open – weekend will happen at a later date, probably the following week.

A cutting-edge hypersonic vehicle just hit a big flight milestone.

Stratolaunch's reusable, autonomous Talon-A craft now has more than 10 successful flights under its belt, the California-based company announced late last month.

"Reaching more than 10 successful hypersonic flights with Talon-A is a testament to our team's dedication and the robustness of our technology," Stratolaunch President and CEO Zachary Krevor said in a July 22 statement. "We are transforming hypersonic testing from a rare event into a routine service, empowering our customers to innovate at unprecedented speed."

Stratolaunch has two Talon-A vehicles, each of which is about 28 feet (8.5 meters) long with a wingspan of 11.3 feet (3.4 m). The craft can travel through Earth's atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) — the definition of hypersonic flight.

Talon-A missions start beneath the belly of a carrier plane, which hauls the robotic vehicle into the sky and drops it down. Stratolaunch has two such carriers — a modified Boeing 747 called Spirit of Mojave and Roc, a custom-built vehicle that measures a whopping 385 feet (117 m) from wingtip to wingtip, the biggest wingspan in aviation history.

Roc and Spirit of Mojave lift off from Mojave Air and Space Port in southeastern California and tend to drop Talon-A over the Pacific Ocean. After completing its hypersonic flight, the vehicle comes back for a runway landing in California, generally at Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the state's scenic central coast.

These jaunts test sensors and advanced new materials in the hypersonic flight environment, among other tasks. Details about Talon-A's payloads tend to be sparse, likely because many Stratolaunch customers — the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, for example — are tight-lipped by nature.

Indeed, military agencies around the world are increasingly interested in hypersonic tech. Superfast, maneuverable vehicles like Talon-A are tougher to track and intercept than ballistic missiles, which follow predictable trajectories despite moving fast. (To be clear: Talon-A itself is not a weapon or weapon-delivery system; it's a technology testbed.)

Stratolaunch isn't the only company that gives customer payloads hypersonic rides. Rocket Lab provides this service with HASTE, a suborbital version of its workhorse Electron rocket.

HASTE debuted in June 2023 and now has nine flights under its belt. But the vehicle's cadence will likely increase soon; in March, Rocket Lab signed a $190 million contract to conduct 20 HASTE missions for the U.S. military.

On Aug. 2, 1971, a lunar liftoff was televised for the first time. Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin spent three days on the moon before departing in the lunar module, named "Falcon."

An RCA TV camera was mounted onto their lunar rover, which Scott parked about 300 feet away with the camera pointed at Falcon. Flight controllers in Mission Control Houston had the option to move the camera, but because of some technical difficulties, they opted to leave the camera pointed in the same direction during liftoff. from the moon. Following a quick pop and a bunch of sparks, Falcon quickly disappeared from sight. Shortly afterward, Falcon joined the command module "Endeavour," and Apollo 15 began its journey back to Earth.

• Apollo 15 in Photos: A Moon Landing and the 1st Lunar Car for Astronauts

The Apollo 15 mission launched to the moon on July 26, 1971. The mission was commanded by David Scott, with James Irwin as lunar module pilot. Astronaut Al Worden served as command module pilot and remained aboard Endeavour as Scott and Irwin explored the moon's surface. The Apollo 15's Falcon lunar lander touched down on the moon on July 30. Orwin and Scott performed three moonwalks and test drove NASA's new lunar rover before lifting off on Aug. 2.

The Apollo 15 crew remained in lunar orbit until Aug. 4, when they departed for Earth. The mission ended with a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean on Aug. 7.

Why it mattered

When Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon, their first lunar steps were broadcast to the world live. But their liftoff, not so much.

But capturing a liftoff live from the moon was the next logical step to chronicle NASA's lunar exploration in real-time. The TV camera mounted on Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle, which also made a moon debut on this mission, and was remote controlled by flight controllers on Earth, pioneering a process that is commonplace today on the International Space Station. It also allowed engineers to see how a lunar module actually behaved during liftoff in the moon's one-sixth gravity.

That legacy of live video from the moon took center stage in April 2026 during NASA's Artemis II mission, which sent the first astronaut to visit the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The Artemis II Orion spacecraft was covered in cameras, both inside and out, allowing NASA to livestream the entire voyage to the moon and back, nonstop.

While Hardspace: Shipbreaker does an excellent job of capturing the dystopian perils of unchecked hypercapitalism, the real fun in this space game comes from carving up massive capital ships with space lasers and explosives.

Floating in zero gravity, players slice derelict spacecraft into salvageable chunks, while also contending with unruly physics, pressure, and profit margins. It's a compelling fantasy: orbital blue-collar labor, where yesterday's spacecraft become tomorrow's raw materials.

As satisfying as the simulation is, the real-world challenge of space debris removal is both more constrained and more urgent.

Christian Steimle is the Project Manager of the European Space Agency's (ESA) ClearSpace-1 mission, the first ever aimed at removing a piece of debris (in this case, a satellite called PROBA-1) from low-Earth orbit.

We spoke to him to get a sense of how actual space junk removal will happen in the future, and how it stacks up to the representations we see in sci-fi games like Shipbreaker.

The fantasy of orbital demolition

Games like Hardspace: Shipbreaker, ΔV: Rings of Saturn, and other space cleanup simulators tend to emphasize three core ideas: that debris can be dismantled piece by piece, that tools can safely cut or break apart structures in orbit, and that salvage is economically driven and scalable.

While they may be necessary assumptions to make for engaging gameplay, they diverge pretty significantly from current realities.

The main issue is fragmentation. Breaking apart a defunct satellite, even under the most carefully controlled and monitored conditions, risks generating thousands of high-velocity fragments. Some of those generated would be too small to feasibly track, yet large enough to destroy operational spacecraft, satellites, or stations. This is the nightmare scenario behind the Kessler syndrome, a cascading chain of collisions that could render entire orbital pathways unusable.

As Christian Steimle, Project Manager for the European Space Agency's ClearSpace-1 mission, explains, "The common agreement between all of these missions is that objects to be removed shall not be broken up or damaged… especially to avoid creating smaller debris which is more difficult to track."

That means that the core mechanic of many space salvage games (cutting or exploding things into smaller bits) is precisely what real missions are designed to avoid.

How real debris removal works

ClearSpace-1 takes a more holistic approach. Instead of dismantling debris, the mission aims to capture PROBA-1 with as little initial damage as possible, then guide it to destruction in Earth's atmosphere.

"ClearSpace-1 will be launched into a position slightly below PROBA-1 by a dedicated launch," Steimle says. "After successful commissioning, the ClearSpace-1 servicer will inspect PROBA-1 in a number of fly-around manoeuvres."

These inspection passes are not just reconnaissance. They validate visual navigation systems and analyze how the target object is tumbling so the capture vehicle can respond appropriately.

The capture itself is a delicate operation. "The ClearSpace-developed capture system will encompass the client satellite, first forming a cage around PROBA-1, then closing the cage carefully to avoid damaging the client," Steimle explains.

Once secured, the combined spacecraft must be stabilized before any orbital change. Only then can the system lower its orbit, ensuring both objects burn up safely during re-entry. "ClearSpace-1 is designed to demise during re-entry, ensuring on-ground safety and disposal at the same time."

The process more closely resembles a surgical extraction of potentially hazardous material than scrapyard demolition.

What games get right

Despite their liberties, space cleanup games do hit the mark in a number of areas. One is the importance of orbital mechanics. Many games emphasize inertia, momentum, and the difficulty of stopping or redirecting large masses. Real active debris removal (ADR) missions face similar constraints, where even small velocity mismatches can lead to mission failure or damage to the capture vehicle or target.

The danger of uncontrolled motion is also well represented. Tumbling objects are among the hardest targets in space operations. Synchronizing with them requires precise, multi-axis propulsion and control systems. As Steimle notes, future vehicles must "synchronise [their] motion with a potentially tumbling space object and apply the proper control to detumble." One of the main challenges in games like Shipbreaker is avoiding being clobbered by moving debris, especially after you've detonated some explosives, or matching the speed of a rotating component long enough to cut it apart.

Third, specialization is key. Your toolkit and how you use it in games like Shipbreaker is key, and real missions rely on highly tailored capture systems. Each target may require a different approach, from robotic arms to nets, harpoons, or enclosure systems like ClearSpace's.

Where the simulations fall short

The biggest gap between games and reality isn't the tech, it's risk tolerance.

In games, mistakes are recoverable. In orbit, a single error can generate long-lived debris fields traveling at roughly 7–8 kilometers per second, turning tiny fragments into deadly kinetic weapons.

Games also tend to assume an eventual salvage economy, where materials are recovered and reused in space. While in-orbit manufacturing and recycling are active areas of research, current debris removal efforts aren't about profit. They're about mitigation.

"The overarching requirement is to preserve the space environment around the Earth for use by future generations," Steimle says. "Removing large objects before first collisions occur is key."

There are also orbital regime differences that games rarely address. In geostationary orbit (GEO), for instance, debris is not deorbited but moved to a higher "graveyard orbit" due to the prohibitive energy cost of re-entry. This kind of orbital zoning has no real analogue in most gameplay systems.

The future of orbital cleanup

Looking ahead, the field of in-orbit servicing and debris removal is diversifying rapidly. Steimle says agencies and private companies across Europe, the United States and Japan are developing competing capture technologies and mission architectures.

Low-Earth orbit operations will likely favor agile, highly maneuverable vehicles capable of complex rendezvous and stabilization tasks. GEO missions, by contrast, will involve larger, less dynamic spacecraft performing long-duration servicing and relocation.

What remains consistent is the guiding principle: do no harm to the orbital environment. There's little room for the improvisational cutting and explosive decompression you see in most space salvage games. Instead, the future of orbital cleanup will depend on autonomy, precision guidance, and tightly controlled interactions with fragile, often unpredictable objects.

Fiction vs. necessity

Perhaps tellingly, most space cleanup games focus on the economy of salvage. You're tasked with generating profit, or feeding it into a progression system to purchase new tools or more efficient methods of destruction. In reality, the immediate challenge is more conservative and more urgent: preventing a runaway cascade of collisions that could close off access to space altogether.

If anything, the contrast highlights just how precarious Earth's orbital environment has become. The fantasy is not that we can break things apart in space; it's that we can continue to use space safely without cleaning up the vast constellations of trash we've already left behind.

German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) just put the brakes on its first launch.

While testing its RFA One rocket on the launch pad at the U.K.'s SaxaVord Spaceport on the Shetland Islands in Scotland, the company found "an issue with the vehicle that requires further investigation," RFA wrote on X on Wednesday (July 28). Previously, the launch had been expected to happen in August or September, but RFA did not disclose a new launch date.

RFA did not disclose the nature of the issue, but said it would de-stack the staged rocket and that it would provide more details as the investigation continues. The situation means that the U.K. will need to wait at least a few more weeks to attempt its first-ever vertical launch from the region, amid global constraints in launch capacity and calls for increased European spaceflight autonomy.

RFA One, a smaller rocket designed to launch smaller satellites, is a three-stage rocket that will eventually include a reusable first stage in an effort to push down cost and to increase launch cadence. It will target a range of orbits, with examples including geosynchronous (where a satellite can constantly look at one area of the Earth), polar (allowing satellites to scan the whole Earth, as the planet orbits underneath) or sun-synchronous (which gives consistent lighting conditions.)

It's common for new rockets to encounter issues during development, including in later stages such as integrated pad testing or even during the first launch, because spaceflight is inherently hard. That said, there is more pressure on startup launching companies than ever to achieve their goals quickly, for commercial and defense reasons.

Rockets are in high global demand in large part due to constantly launching satellite batches for large satellite constellations, most especially SpaceX Starlink, and planned orbital data centers. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Defense is asking companies to launch more often for security missions, such as the quick-turnaround VICTUS HAZE mission that Rocket Lab launched in June only 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving the military's request.

Conflicts in Ukraine and Iran and other defense activities, meanwhile, have pushed other countries into more sovereign launch work that is accelerating already ongoing spaceport construction, in jurisdictions such as the U.K., Europe and Canada.

RFA has been trying to position itself as one of the leading new companies in Europe, on the back of receiving a spaceflight operator license in January, from the UK Civil Aviation Authority, for the SaxaVord spaceport launch. Meanwhile, SaxaVord is working to become an alternative to older, busier launch ports (especially Kourou's Guiana Space Centre, a popular location for high-profile launches such as the James Webb Space Telescope.)

"This is a groundbreaking moment for RFA and for Europe's space industry," Jörn Spurmann, RFA chief commercial officer, said in a statement released shortly after his company obtained the license. "Securing the first-ever launch license outside the European Space Agency's established site in Kourou is not just a regulatory milestone—it's a powerful endorsement of our technical excellence and a turning point for European space innovation."

Rumors are also abounding in the industry that the popular SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which companies worldwide use for rideshare missions, might not be accepting slots for its popular Transporter series beyond 2028 or 2029. If this happens, the demand in launch capacity transferring from SpaceX might lead to more opportunities for companies such as Rocket Lab and RFA One, assuming more rockets are ready in time.

The excitement of the new moon mission has potentially helped create a new generation of stargazers, just like the Apollo program did 60 years ago. These new observers will be looking for a beginner’s telescope that is easy to use and which can show them the craters on the moon in particular. The Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian could be the perfect entry point for them. It has a superb price-point for its aperture, and is capable of bringing not only the moon, but double stars, the brighter galaxies and nebulas and the moons of Jupiter to your backyard.

The Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian comes equipped with 8mm and 20mm eyepieces, one of which is intended specifically for the moon, as well as a red-dot finderscope, a moon filter, a moon-map poster and free access to download the Starry Night planetarium software and Celestron’s SkyPortal app, which is powered by SkySafari.

All in all, it will make an excellent package for someone to get started enjoying the night sky. Though the optics and accessories are not perfect, for the price their drawbacks can be overlooked, and as an entry-level telescope it paves the way for the user to graduate to increasingly more sophisticated telescopes at a later date.

Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian review

Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian: Design

• Quick and simple set-up
• Portable

The Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian comes out of its box complete, other than its eyepieces and red-dot finderscope in plastic bags. Set-up takes literally minutes — remove the plastic cap over the aperture and the cap on the focuser, insert your eyepiece of choice, screw on the finderscope and you are ready to go. No tools such as screwdrivers or Allen keys are needed— it is just a matter of unscrewing thumbscrews.

We found the finderscope went on easily — more about that later. However, the tiny thumbscrews that lock in the eyepiece were incredibly tight. Pliers didn’t help much and risked damaging the screw. In the end, we found elbow grease was just about enough to unscrew them, but if our review model is typical, then children will definitely need the help of an adult to unscrew these. Once they are unscrewed, they can be tightened to more forgiving tolerances.

Overall we can recommend the build quality of the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian. Everything is sturdily made, from the Dobsonian base, the optical tube, the easily adjustable tilt and focuser knobs. The mount has a single arm and rotates on a ‘lazy Susan’ turntable.

Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian: Performance

• Three
• Bullet
• Points

This is where we thought that the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian excelled. For such a small telescope, it was decently versatile.

For example, on the night of April 5, our first target was Jupiter, which was bright in Gemini, and unmistakable as it lay not far from the constellation’s twin stars Castor and Pollux. Jupiter appeared as a bright disk, with perhaps the merest hint of its banding — or was that our imagination? What certainly were real were the four Galilean moons: Io and Europa on one side, Ganymede and Callisto on the other. It was a sight sure to impress beginners and casual observers.

We moved the Celestron Moon Mission’s view towards the multiple star Castor, and the telescope capably split the main binary pair as two close, white stars using the 20mm eyepiece. Another popular multiple star is Mizar and Alcor in Ursa Major. Of course, Mizar and Alcor can be split with the naked eye, but the third visible star in the system is for telescopes only, and again the Celestron Moon Mission showed the three stars clearly.

Slewing east, Arcturus — the second brightest star visible from the U.K., and fourth brightest in the entire sky — appeared a glorious red, evoking its nature as a red giant.

While waiting for the moon to rise (and before taking some time out to watch the Artemis II coverage), we decided to track down some faint fuzzies. The box that the Celestron Moon Mission comes in highlights the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda Galaxy as two deep sky objects that the telescope can see. At the time of testing, the Orion Nebula was too low in the west, while the Andromeda Galaxy was not visible. Instead, we hunted down two other nearby galaxies, M81 and M82, in Ursa Major.

Searching for these two galaxies, which are located next to each other in the same field of view, is where the real challenge of using the finderscope, as we described in the Functionality section, really reared its head. In the end, we decided to star hop to the galaxies and struck out in roughly the right direction. Soon the telescope alighted on the two galaxies, visible as two fuzzy patches of light. Looking at them straight on, we found it difficult to discern their shape, but by using averted vision as we looked through the 20mm eyepiece of the Celestron Moon Mission, we could make out the broad disk-shape of the spiral M81, and the elongated cigar shape of M82, and even caught hints of mottling with brighter spots in the edge-on M82 that are better seen in images.

After we watched the live NASA feed of Artemis II going around the far side of the moon, the moon finally rose from our location after midnight. Its phase was a waning gibbous three days after full. As such, the moon appeared bright and reddish, being low to the horizon. Through the 20mm we could see the whole disk, though the phase meant that for most of the lunar surface there was no contrast, making it harder to distinguish craters except for at the terminator.

Adding the 1.25-inch moon filter — more properly known as a neutral density filter that dims the incoming light — helped to limit the contrast and make the details stand out more. Switching to the 8mm eyepiece, with a magnification of 50x, the view jumped closer to the moon and the lunar surface filled the field of view, with bright crater rays visible on dark lunar mares.

Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian: Functionality

• Finderscope is awkward to use when pointed at the zenith
• Focusing is adequate
• Simple to use

The tabletop nature of the telescope poses some challenges for adults using it. As its name suggests, the telescope is designed to go on the top of a table. Usually when we think of Dobsonian telescopes, we think of very large instruments with very large apertures, and eyepieces close to standing height. This Dobsonian, on the other hand, is very small, and without a very tall table we found that we spent a lot of our time bent double looking through the eyepiece. Of course, this also means it is the perfect height for a child.

We found it did pose a problem when using the finderscope. For objects at low elevations, such as Jupiter in Gemini during spring 2026, we found it wasn’t too bad. However, when we wanted to direct the telescope towards Ursa Major at the zenith, the only way we could look through the finderscope was by literally getting on the floor to look through it. This is a problem with all tabletop telescopes, not just the Celestron Moon Mission, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise — but it is a problem nonetheless.

Once we addressed the tightness of the focuser thumbscrews, we could switch the eyepieces in and out with ease. We found the focuser to be perfunctory. It provides only coarse focusing, with no careful fine-tuning, and sometimes it was tricky to find the sweet spot. Additionally, Newtonian reflectors like this one require collimating for perfect pin-sharp images. Collimating refers to adjusting the secondary mirror (the primary mirror is fixed at the base of the optical tube) so that it aligns and focuses light reflected from the primary just so. It’s also a fact that astronomers hate collimating, as it is a finicky procedure.

Out of the box, the collimation wasn’t bad, and we felt it was also unreasonable to expect beginners and children, whom this telescope is undoubtedly aimed at, to collimate the instrument with no guidance or tools included. Therefore, we reviewed the telescope as it came out of the box, to replicate the experience that beginners and children would receive. Had we collimated the telescope, then it probably would have improved the image a tad.

We found that actually using the telescope, in terms of positioning and pointing, was very simple. It’s worth remembering that Newtonian reflectors reverse their image (up becomes down), and after using smart telescopes, GoTo telescopes and Celestron’s StarSense telescopes with directions provided by a smartphone for so long, that took a little getting used to again! It may confuse beginners and children, but before the days of smart telescopes and GoTo, everybody had to get used to navigating across the sky using a reversed image, so it’s no bad thing.

Should you buy the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian

If you want to introduce your children to astronomy, then the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian is the perfect instrument. It is safe to use, with no risk of knocking something heavy over, as it weighs about the same as a bag of sugar, which is amazing really. It is simple to use, in the sense that it is just a matter of pushing and turning, although children might need assistance in pinpointing the location of targets. It’s also a fair all-rounder, as all Dobsonians are – it excels at showing the moon, displays the planets very well, and shows deep-sky objects as best it can for a 100mm-aperture telescope

If you want to see fainter galaxies and nebulae, then you will need a telescope with a larger aperture. If you want to do imaging, then you will need a telescope with a motorized equatorial drive to enable you to track the objects while imaging.

And if you want assistance in finding celestial objects without having to star-hop, then a GoTo or smart telescope might be best for you.

If the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian isn't for you

If you're looking to spend less, Celestron offers a smaller Dobsonian, the Celestron Firstscope 76. For a more flexible telescope, take a look at the Celestron Inspire 100Z. Or if neither fits the bill, we've rounded up the best telescopes and best beginner's telescopes.

How we tested the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian

We used the Celestron Moon Mission 100mm Tabletop Dobsonian during the occasional clear nights in the first two weeks of April 2026 from our south-facing garden in the United Kingdom. The temperature was clement, about 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), with some modest light pollution to the north and dark skies to the south looking towards a more rural area.

We began observing after 10 pm, with the skies completely dark. The moon was near full at the time of testing — in fact, quite fittingly, one of the nights was the same night that the Artemis II mission went around the moon. However, the moon remained low the entire night, meaning it could only be viewed near moonrise after midnight, close to the horizon, before it became hidden behind a nearby bank of trees for the rest of the night.

As evidenced by Paramount's live-action "Transformers" movies and the recent "Masters of the Universe" film released by Amazon MGM Studios, nostalgic toy lines can serve as fertile grounds for a variety of engaging Hollywood projects leaning into vintage intellectual properties.

With Mattel ramping up their own film production efforts and toy-to-screen endeavors after enormous success with "The Barbie Movie" and hi-octane plans for Hot Wheels movies rolling into theaters, the toys-to-silver screen craze shows no sign of slowing down. What could be next? We think there's a perfect choice hiding in the Mattel goldmine that might just become the next big thing.

We're of course talking about Major Matt Mason, that Plastisol astronaut action figure and kids' playset product line from the 1960s, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

Born during the heat of America's space race with NASA's Apollo program aiming for the lunar landing by the end of the decade, Mattel's design masterminds found inspiration in visionary space concept artists' wild dreams of futuristic moon bases, lunar buggies, and space vehicles.

Major Matt Mason was one of the first serious space toys to exist in the marketplace, first hitting the shelves of toy shops and department stores across the country in 1966.

Capitalizing on the daily news stories of Gemini missions and Apollo moon-walking dreams, this spacefaring fellow and his astronaut pals let kids everywhere imagine their own colorful cosmic adventures.

Back in 2019, Variety reported that Tom Hanks was attached to star in a Major Matt Mason live-action film being set up at Paramount Pictures with Akiva Goldsman ("A Beautiful Mind," "The Da Vinci Code") hired to write the screenplay.

Hanks is an enthusiastic advocate of NASA history after starring in "Apollo 13" and co-executive producing the Emmy Award-winning HBO docuseries "From The Earth To The Moon" alongside "Band of Brothers" super producer Graham Yost. Despite the heavy hitters attached, momentum has since stalled on the sci-fi project and it's sadly been shelved for the immediate future.

Matt Mason's line-up of bendy 6-inch astronaut action figures was developed as a competitor to Hasbro's 12-inch G.I. Joe toys that ruled the marketplace in the mid-60s.

Along with Matt's fellow rubberized space buddies — available in a variety of color-accented spacesuits — Mattel also offered a complete universe to create your own space outpost and ramped lunar headquarters, alongside accessory vehicles, moon gear, expansive playsets, and Matt's "allies from the stars": A purple-and-pink creature called Scorpio, and a green-skinned friendly Jovian alien called Callisto.

With the Vietnam War raging in Southeast Asia and televised on the nightly news, Major Matt Mason blasted into Sears and JCPenney catalogs when soldier action figures were losing their appeal.

He wasn't a gun-toting commando but a heroic explorer "ready and able to cope with any space task or fierce danger." In addition to the action figures and peripheral playsets, Matt Mason became a pop culture phenomenon with his own board game, coloring books, lunch boxes, and puzzles.

Named after Mattel's co-founder Harold "Matt" Matson, the Matt Mason line carried a certain air of authenticity as many of its designers happened to be former aerospace engineers. Some of the toys' far-out designs were taken straight out of NASA conceptual art and prototypes seen by millions in the pages of Popular Mechanics, Life, and National Geographic magazines.

But, the general public is difficult to please for any extended period of time and following the triumphant Apollo 11 moon landing in July of 1969, space toys faded in interest. Just one year later, Major Matt Mason was no more, destined only to be coveted decades down the line as valuable collectors items .

As NASA ramps up their Artemis program with 2027's Artemis 3 mission, before an Artemis 4 moon landing set for 2028, and the space agency doubling down on plans for a recently announced permanent lunar base, can there be any better time for Hollywood moguls to resurrect this cool project for a fantastic, retro-styled Major Matt Mason movie or TV series?

It's certainly a better idea than a Matchbox movie.

On Episode 221 of This Week In Space, Tariq Malik and guest host Rick Jenet of the National Space Society talk about SpaceX's Starship Flight 13, which deployed new Starlink V3 satellites and stunned viewers when the ship survived reentry intact enough to float in the ocean for days afterward.

They also discuss NASA's Roman Space Telescope, now just a month from launch, and an in-progress emergency effort to save the ailing Swift Space Observatory using a servicing spacecraft that is itself now experiencing technical trouble. Finally, they look into Boeing's continued Starliner delays and India's first successful private orbital launch via Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket. Tune in!

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

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Space news of the week

• SpaceX's Starship megarocket makes the 'softest splashdown' ever after launching next-gen Starlink satellites in Flight 13 test
• X: Landing burn and splashdown of Starship on Flight 13
• X: The Starship Recovery team has continued gathering imagery of the vehicle, which is still afloat in the Indian Ocean
• Experts warn current Starship heat shield tech is a “dead end” for rapid reuse
• SpaceX wins $1.6 billion in launch orders for military satellite networks
• 'It's going to do things that currently are impossible': The Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next great observatory, is ready to launch Aug. 30
• NASA Fuels Roman Space Telescope for Late August Launch
• Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year
• 'The dawn of a new space era': Vikram-1, India's 1st private orbital rocket, aces debut launch
• Should Artemis IV astronauts actually land near the moon's south pole? Artemis II pilot says the lunar equator might be better
• Astronomers may have discovered the 1st moon outside of our solar system — or is it something weirder?
• A SpaceX rocket will crash into the moon next week, and scientists aren't sure what to expect
• An 'almost blood moon' is coming on Aug. 27 and it'll be the best lunar eclipse until NYE 2028
• Perseid meteor shower 2026 — When, where and how to see it

Model Falcon 9!

Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners collectSPACE.com.

About This Week In Space

This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.

On Aug. 1, 1968, NASA canceled the production of its Saturn V moon rocket. At the time, the giant rocket was the only launch vehicle to have ever carried astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, and it was then the largest, most powerful rocket ever.

NASA built 15 of these rockets but only flew 13 of them. When NASA made the decision to stop building the Saturn V, it was almost a year before Apollo 11 astronauts would walk on the moon for the first time.

• 10 Surprising Facts About NASA's Mighty Saturn V Moon Rocket

A federal budget deficit and the rising costs of the Vietnam War led Congress to slash nearly three-quarters of the funding that President Lyndon Johnson had allotted for the Apollo program.

The last Saturn V launched in 1973, and it was originally supposed to send Apollo 18 to the moon. However, that mission was canceled, and that Saturn V launched the Skylab space station instead.

Why it mattered

From start to finish, NASA spent a reported $9.4 billion on the Saturn family of rockets (which would be an estimated $118 billion in today's dollars) to develop the Saturn V. That includes the Saturn I and Saturn IB blocks. But the decision to shut production down in 1968 over those costs spelled the end of NASA's Apollo program to send astronauts to the moon a year before the Apollo 11 astronauts even walked on the moon in 1969.

Without a steady supply of heavy-lift rockets (the Saturn V was the most powerful of its day), NASA only had a limited number of moonshots left. The final Saturn V rocket to carry astronauts sent the Apollo 17 astronauts to the moon in 1972. The Skylab mission flew a year later, with the final Saturn IB rocket launching an Apollo command module on the Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975.

It would not be until 2022, when NASA launched the first Space Launch System on the Artemis I mission, that the space agency had another megarocket to rival the Saturn V. In April 2026, that new rocket launched NASA's Artemis II astronauts around the moon.

SpaceX has developed a new megarocket that is even more powerful than the Saturn V, with its Starship and Super Heavy booster.

Scientists once suspected that a brutal, years-long winter starved the dinosaurs following an asteroid impact 66 million years ago. New evidence suggests a more violent end: widespread firestorms that may have burned even thick-skinned dinosaurs to a crisp within hours.

The roughly six-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) asteroid struck Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, excavating the Chicxulub crater and vaporizing enormous quantities of rock. Some of that material condensed into tiny droplets called spherules, which spread around the planet before falling back through Earth's atmosphere at several miles per second.

As the spherules slowed, their kinetic energy became heat, producing an intense pulse of thermal radiation. Earlier models suggested the effect would have resembled a worldwide broiler that was potentially deadly to exposed, thin-skinned animals, but not powerful enough to ignite vegetation across the globe.

A new study argues that those calculations overlooked a crucial ingredient: a thick layer of fine silicate dust formed from rock vapor that did not initially condense into spherules. Evidence for that dust emerged in 2023 from the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota, where researchers identified a layer of extremely fine, impact-derived material deposited above the spherules. A similar dust layer has since been documented at the K–Pg boundary (which divides the "age of reptiles" and the "age of mammals") in Raton Basin across the Colorado–New Mexico border.

"It reinvigorated my interest in what happened to the leftover vapor — that's where this work started," lead author Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, said in a statement.

The dust would have acted like an insulating blanket, preventing thermal radiation from escaping into space and redirecting more heat toward Earth’s surface. The researchers estimated that the surface heat pulse could have been about 3.5 times more intense than what was suggested by models considering the falling spherules alone. "We're in the realm where we might be essentially killing off everything within that first hour or two," Johnson said.

The radiation may not have directly ignited thick pieces of wood, but it exceeded ignition thresholds for grass, lichen, and pine needles, which could have fueled larger fires. The study also found that exposed terrestrial animals may have received about 17 times the thermal dose considered lethal to humans.

Animals sheltering underground or in water would have had a better chance of surviving the initial heat pulse. Afterward, the same dust may have blocked sunlight for years, triggering the prolonged "impact winter" more typically blamed for the dinosaurs' extinction.

There is, however, a missing element: the wildfire evidence that supports this dust-caused inferno theory has only been found in North America. "It could be that we will eventually find the record of completely global wildfires," said Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at University College London who was not involved in the study. "We just don't have it so far."

The study was published on July 28 in the journal JGR Biogeosciences.

Despite Han Solo's protestations to the contrary, travelling faster than light on screen is usually just as straightforward as dusting crops. So whether you're in "Star Wars", "Star Trek" or "Battlestar Galactica", jumping to hyperspace, going to warp or spooling up the FTL really is as simple as popping out to the store.

In fact, Albert Einstein's time-dilating general theory of relativity tends to be little more than an afterthought, with films highlighting the inconveniences of interstellar travel definitely in the minority. For this reason, the very existence of "Flight of the Navigator" is even more improbable than its premise.

The Disney family movie — which celebrates its 40th anniversary this weekend — sends an ordinary kid on an unlikely journey that's part "Interstellar", part "Back to the Future".

On July 4, 1978, 12-year-old David Scott Freeman is briefly knocked unconscious after he falls into a ditch near his Florida home. When he wakes up — seemingly moments later — he finds strangers living in his house, and gradually comes to realize that eight years have passed for everybody else. In the meantime, David has been declared dead, his little brother is now his big brother, and — perhaps weirdest of all — music videos are now a very big thing on MTV.

He doesn't know it yet, but much like Matthew McConaughey's Cooper in "Interstellar", David has been caught in the crosshairs of relativity. It turns out that he's unwittingly taken a ride in a Trimaxion drone ship, making the round trip to the planet Phaelon (some 560 light years away) in a mere 4.4 solar hours.

NASA scientists explain away the eight-year time slip as a consequence of "light speed theory", the idea that "time slows down as you approach the speed of light". And if that sounds like a big concept for "Flight of the Navigator"'s target audience to grasp, the filmmakers weren't particularly worried.

"I think kids can understand it," director Randal Kleiser said back in 2020. "'Back to the Future' was sort of like that, and kids are smarter than most people think. You just tell them that you’re going at the speed of light and time slows down, and they get it."

Kleiser was best known for the musical smash hit "Grease", the highest-grossing movie of 1978, when he got the "Flight of the Navigator" gig. When he came on board, the film's paymasters were already disagreeing about the direction they wanted to take Mark H Baker's story.

Disney, unsurprisingly, were shooting for a family movie "with dancing little animals", while their production partners at Producers Sales Organization (PSO) were looking for something a little edgier. "They wanted to have the army come in and shoot down the spaceship," Kleiser recalled.

Eventually, a gun-free compromise was found, though the opening act of the movie would remain surprisingly bleak and emotionally complex. Now living in 1986, David has to come to terms with his new reality as a human guinea pig in a world where his family looks familiar, but he no longer really knows them. Also, how did his brain come to be filled with weird alien languages and complex star maps?

The role was always going to ask a lot of its actor, and Kleiser ultimately selected a young Vancouver native named Joey Cramer. Cramer beat hundreds of other kids to the role, including future Hollywood stars Chris O'Donnell and Joaquin Phoenix, who appeared in "Space Camp" the same year.

"Joey was so easy to get to cry," Kleiser said of his casting decision. "For him to be able to do it in the audition — and be also so personable and likeable — was the thing that put him over the top."

Cramer's main co-star would prove even more difficult to find, however, seeing as faster-than-light spacecraft from distant worlds called Phaelon don't — as far as we know — exist.

In the second half of "Flight of the Navigator", David makes a credibility-stretching escape from a top-secret NASA facility — seriously, where did they find such a negligent bunch of security guards? — to hitch a ride on board the aforementioned Trimaxion ship.

Nicknamed Max and voiced by Pee-wee Herman star Paul Reubens (credited here as Paul Mall), the spacecraft reveals that David is one of several alien species taken to Phaelon for study; we also meet a menagerie of puppets on board, including a hungry little guy who eats David's hat, and the pocket-sized, implausibly cute Puckmaren.

Max would usually return the test subjects back to the time and place he found them, but says that David's human physiology is too fragile to make the journey back to 1978. In the meantime, he also needs to access the maps he uploaded to the human kid's brain, seeing as a collision with some electricity pylons has damaged his navigational databanks. It's here that the movie evolves into childhood wish-fulfilment fantasy, as David and the fast-learning AI become BFFs on the run from the authorities.

The spaceship exterior, meanwhile, is arguably the most groundbreaking thing about the film, a mirrored, shapeshifting update of the classic flying saucer design popularized by "The Day the Earth Stood Still".

Kleiser persisted with that shiny surface, despite the advice of a former University of Southern California classmate (a certain George Lucas) who told him that all those reflective surfaces would make the ship "more trouble than it's worth". (By the time "The Phantom Menace" was released 13 years later, Lucas had clearly changed his mind, so maybe "Flight of the Navigator" had a tiny bit of influence on a galaxy far, far away.)

"I wanted to find something different that hadn’t been done before," Kleiser explained. "I was driving down the freeway behind a big silver truck, and I could see my car reflected behind it. And I thought, 'Wow, I've never seen a spaceship like that.' It took a while till we figured out how to do it!"

After several unsuccessful experiments involving silver paint and mylar glued to paper plates, salvation came courtesy of Kleiser's brother Jeff, who'd worked on the VFX for "Tron" and was a pioneer in the nascent field of computer graphics. And while the liquid metal effects aren't quite as, ahem, polished as James Cameron's genre-defining efforts in 1991's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", "Flight of the Navigator" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath.

Despite having an innovative spaceship and a considerably happier ending than "Interstellar" (spoiler: David does eventually make it home), "Flight of the Navigator" struggled at the box office. It eventually found its audience on home video, however, and deservedly so, seeing as it's an inventive, witty, and surprisingly sophisticated family movie that refuses to talk down to its audience.

"When it first came out, I think maybe it just wasn’t marketed properly," said Kleiser, "but the fact that it’s become kind of a cult classic is nice. I run into people all the time who say that it's their favourite movie. [Lots of them] really like the fact that it explored how time travel could change a sibling relationship."

As we said, "Flight of the Navigator" really is "Back to the Future" and "Interstellar" rolled into one.

'Flight of the Navigator' is available to stream on Disney+ in the US and Prime Video in the UK. 'Life After the Navigator', a documentary about the film, is also available on Prime Video in the UK.

SpaceX has sent yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Friday (July 31) at 11:08 p.m. EDT (8:08 p.m. local time; 0308 GMT on Aug. 1).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 26th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1081.

The 24 Starlink satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO) 61.5 minutes after liftoff as planned, SpaceX confirmed via X.

They're joining more than 10,800 other spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

SpaceX has now launched 89 Falcon 9 missions in 2026, 69 of which have been dedicated Starlink flights.

The company also has three other liftoffs under its belt this year — one launch of its powerful Falcon Heavy vehicle and two test flights of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

We just got an amazing new view of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, thanks to one of the company's next-gen Starlink satellites.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, launched on its 13th test flight from South Texas last Friday (July 24). The suborbital jaunt was similar in many respects to past Starship test missions, with one big exception: This time, the vehicle deployed a batch of functional, next-gen Starlink internet satellites into space.

Six of those "Starlink V3" spacecraft carried cameras, so that SpaceX could get good views of the heat shield on Starship's upper stage, which is known as Starship, or simply Ship. The satellites did that job and more, capturing amazing views of Ship as it cruised away from them high above Earth.

SpaceX shared one such view on X Friday evening (July 31) — a 65-second video that stitches together imagery taken by four different cameras on a single Starlink V3 satellite.

The video starts with an up-close view of the shiny, 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship. We see more of the vehicle as the footage rolls and the two spacecraft get farther and farther apart. Toward the end, we see Ship in its entirety, and we get a sense of its activity; three of its six Raptor engines are firing, and small puffs of white vapor indicate that the vehicle is engaging its fine-tuning reaction control thrusters.

Like all Starship test missions to date, Flight 13 targeted a suborbital trajectory. So the 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the first ever to reach space, did not stay up for long; they came back down to Earth about 20 minutes after deploying into the final frontier.

Their successors will get higher — and there will be many of them. According to a filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX wants to operate a megaconstellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 satellites.

Starship will be key to building and maintaining this constellation, which will require many launches of the brawny, fully reusable rocket. (SpaceX currently operates a constellation of nearly 11,000 Starlink satellites, but those V2 craft are considerably smaller than the 4,400-pound V3 iteration.)

Ship seems to have checked all of its boxes on Flight 13. After deploying the satellites and successfully reigniting one of its Raptors in space, it splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia about 65 minutes after liftoff.

The vehicle survived its harrowing return trip through Earth's atmosphere in one piece and remains intact today, as far as we know; SpaceX recently shared a photo of the vehicle bobbing in the Indian Ocean five days after splashdown.

But Starship's giant first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, had a few issues on Flight 13. Its landing burn employed only five of a planned 13 Raptor engines, for example, and the booster hit the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at a higher velocity than intended. (Super Heavy has a total of 33 Raptors, all of which fire at liftoff.)

Starship remains in the development phase, but SpaceX wants to get the megarocket operational soon. It's slated to fly on NASA's Artemis III astronaut mission to low Earth orbit in mid-2027 and to land a crew near the moon's south pole on Artemis IV in late 2028.

Some of the brightest objects in the universe may also hold the key to understanding how galaxies evolve — especially when gravity transforms them into giant cosmic magnifying glasses.

Using artificial intelligence to search through data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), astronomers have identified seven promising candidates for quasars acting as gravitational lenses — natural cosmic magnifying glasses created when a massive object's gravity bends and magnifies light from a more distant object.

These unusual systems could help researchers better understand how actively growing supermassive black holes evolve, according to a statement from Ohio State University.

"Quasars are like the baby pictures of a supermassive black hole," Everett McArthur, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University, said in the statement. "So exploring how we get from quasars to those black holes is really important."

Quasars are the intensely bright centers of galaxies powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes. Studying these objects can help researchers understand how black holes evolve into the enormous ones found throughout the modern universe. But as these black holes pull in gas and dust, they release so much energy that they can outshine their entire host galaxies, making those galaxies difficult to study.

Rare cases where a quasar acts as a gravitational lens offer a way around that problem, giving astronomers a unique opportunity to observe both the quasar and the distant galaxy whose light is magnified by its gravity.

However, finding these rare alignments can be exceptionally challenging. To uncover them, the research team began with a catalog of roughly 800,000 quasars identified by DESI and used a machine-learning model to search for subtle signatures of gravitational lensing.

Because so few quasars acting as gravitational lenses are known, researchers had little real-world data to train their AI model. Instead, they generated simulated examples of these cosmic alignments, allowing the algorithm to learn what to look for before searching the DESI catalog. The algorithm narrowed the search to about 200 candidates, which researchers then reviewed manually. That process resulted in seven new quasar lens candidates.

The discoveries roughly double the number of known systems found through similar survey searches, according to the statement.

While artificial intelligence played a key role in finding the candidates, the discoveries highlight the scientific potential hidden within the massive datasets produced by modern astronomy. DESI is mapping millions of galaxies and quasars, creating an enormous archive that would be nearly impossible to search by hand.

Follow-up observations will be needed to confirm the newly identified quasar lenses and study their properties in greater detail. If verified, they could offer astronomers a powerful new way to investigate how supermassive black holes shaped the galaxies around them while demonstrating how AI can uncover rare cosmic phenomena hidden within the enormous datasets produced by modern sky surveys.

Their findings were published July 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The summer is slowly waning as we soon turn the calendar page to August and back to school supplies are already cluttering store shelves, but Hollywood still has a pocketful of of possible surprises hitting the silver screen. My prediction for "Masters of the Universe" as a summertime sleeper hit did not come to pass, though it was a totally enjoyable nostalgic romp, if not about 20 minutes or so too long.

Recent teasers and trailers starring Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway and their suburban family have them sprinting for their lives after a strange cosmic event whisks their placid American neighborhood seemingly back to prehistoric times when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Think "The Twilight Zone" meets "Jurassic Park" with a dash of "A Quiet Place" and you’ll be pretty close to the wild narrative that will unfold when the "running and screaming" begins.

This all seems like the perfect recipe for a fun cocktail of primeval creatures rampaging across driveways and lawns while residents fight back with guns and garden tools. "I think our house, our neighborhood, our whole street, has moved," Hathaway's Denise Platt explains to her children in the first teaser that dropped in March and racked up a hefty 30 million views.

While "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" is surely destined to become a global sensation, we’d like you to redirect your cinematic radar to "The End of Oak Street," a cool little sci-fi fantasy film brought to life by executive producer J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot ("Lost," "Cloverfield," "Star Trek," "Star Wars: The Force Awakens").

Stomping into theaters on Aug. 14, 2026, it's written, produced, and directed by David Robert Mitchell ("It Follows") who brings his twisted sensibilities to the surreal survival material.

Fans of "The Outer Limits" might recall a similar theme, minus the feathered dinos of course, playing out in the 1964 episode, "A Feasibility Study," where aliens abduct a 6-block suburban neighborhood to their planet Luminos to study them as candidates for enslavement. Whether or not aliens are involved in this plot is unclear and Warner Bros. is now keeping that tightly under wraps.

Also starring Maisy Stella and Christian Convery and produced by Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, Matt Jackson and Tommy Harper, "The End of Oak Street" thunders into multiplexes on Aug. 14, 2026 and is our best bet for a late summer smash before the kiddies return to school!

If you've not seen the Milky Way this year from the Northern Hemisphere, it's time to make a plan. August's dark sky window opens around Aug. 6, when the moon begins to rise late at night as a waning crescent, meaning dark moonless skies for about 10 nights. That's when to see the Milky Way (and if you can time it for Aug. 12/13's Perseid meteor shower peak, all the better).

Five things are required to successfully see the Milky Way:

• the correct time of year (The brightest part is visible March-October)
• the correct moon phase (last-quarter moon through slim crescent moon)
• a dark sky away from light pollution
• dark-adapted eyes (stand in total darkness for 25 minutes)
• an idea of what you're going to see

The best way to dark-adapt your eyes is to start stargazing. Look south and begin picking out stars you know, paying special attention to the Summer Triangle. These three stars — Vega, Deneb and Altair — are your major signpost for finding the dense arc of starlight that will gradually emerge. Specifically, focus on the sky from Deneb through Altair — the left-hand side of the Summer Triangle — and you'll slowly see not only the Milky Way, but something else in front of it that few stargazers properly appreciate.

Sure, you can see the bright halo of gas and stars that indicate the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is particularly bright below the Summer Triangle in the Sagittarius constellation. The closer you are to the equator, the higher in the sky, and the brighter, this region — known as the Galactic Center — will be.

Now look again. See those dark patches within the arc winding from Deneb to Altair? That's the Great Rift, so named because it appears to tear the Milky Way in half. It's an interstellar cloud of gas and dust (dark nebulas) between the solar system and the bright center of the Milky Way, which blocks and scatters visible light, essentially covering up bright stars and nebulas from our point of view. It looks like someone has spilled black ink across the Milky Way.

There are two ways of seeing the Great Rift. The most modern way is to observe it in infrared and radio light, which passes through the dust without being absorbed. This is exactly what some observatories are built to do, from radio dishes to the James Webb Space Telescope, which can probe the inner Milky Way — including the billions of stars in the center of our galaxy — which are on the other side of the Great Rift. Meanwhile, the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun observing the entire visible southern sky every few nights over the course of a decade, mapping the Milky Way (including the Great Rift) to answer questions about its structure and formation.

The second way to see the Great Rift is to see it for what it is. Astronomers call the section we're looking at the Cygnus Rift, also called the Northern Coalsack, 1,000-3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. It's just below Deneb (which is 1,500 light-years distant), slightly outside of the Summer Triangle over an otherwise bright, dense region of stars called the Cygnus Star Cloud (around 2,600 light-years away). About six degrees in diameter, the Northern Coalsack blocks the light of background stars. However, it's just the northern tip of the Great Rift, which stargazers also call The Dark River or Dark Cloud.

Beyond the Northern Coalsack, however, the Great Rift is something to travel to see more of. It stretches across about 120 degrees of the night sky from Cygnus and Sagittarius in the Northern Hemisphere to Centaurus in the Southern Hemisphere. The latter is home to the famous Southern Cross and, besides its star Acrux, the original Coalsack Nebula. Another reason to travel to see more of the Milky Way is to appreciate how Southern Hemisphere cultures view the Great Rift. While modern astronomers see it as a dark cloud that needs to be peered through, indigenous cultures see its shapes. The Wiradjuri in Australia see the silhouette of an emu (its head is the Coalsack Nebula) and use its position in the night sky as a seasonal calendar. Meanwhile, the Inca in South America saw a llama (and, beside it, a baby llama).

The Great Rift is one of my favorite things to see, because it reveals what we're doing when we see that arc of light stretch across a summer night sky — we're looking at a galaxy from the inside, with all of its depth and complexity.

How and when I'm watching it

You do need perfect darkness and excellent timing. With that in mind, I'm trying out a new app called Milky Way Tonight, which is built around a useful question: is tonight actually worth the effort? It checks when the Milky Way core is above the horizon, then weighs that against moon phase, moonrise and moonset times, the local cloud forecast and the Bortle rating for your location. That last part matters. A technically clear night in a bright suburb is still a bad Milky Way night. The app also has a dark-sky finder, which is the feature I suspect I will use most.

Although the Milky Way has to be enjoyed as a naked-eye sight, it's also worth bringing along some binoculars to let you sweep across the dense star fields right up to the edges of the Great Rift.

Stargazer's corner: July 31-August 7, 2026

This is a good week to plan a trip to see the Milky Way and the Great Rift, but not to actually take that trip. Since the moon was recently full, our galaxy will be badly washed out for much of the night. That will make it difficult to see much of the Southern Delta Aquariids peak around July 30-31, as well as the now-active Perseids building toward their August peak. Saturn is worth a pre-dawn look, and Venus remains bright low in the evening sky if the horizon is clear, but if you're an astrophotographer or you have a smart telescope, you can use light-pollution filters to take advantage of nebula season — with key deep-sky sights being the Lagoon and Trifid Nebula (M8 and M20), the Little Sagittarius Star Cloud (M24) and the Wild Duck star cluster (M11).

Asterism of the week: The Coathanger/Brocchi's Cluster

The Coathanger looks exactly like its name. Also known as Brocchi's Cluster, it's a pattern of 10 stars in the small constellation Vulpecula, with six forming a straight bar and four making a curved hook. First find the Summer Triangle — Vega, Altair and Deneb — then scan roughly halfway between Vega and Altair. The small constellation Sagitta, the Arrow, points nearby, with the Coathanger just to its north. Dark skies may reveal it to keen naked eyes, but binoculars are the best way because they show the whole shape at once. One last thing: it's not a real coathanger! Once thought to be a cluster of stars born together, the shape is now known to be a chance alignment of unrelated stars at different distances — yet another cosmic illusion.

We've seen things you people wouldn't believe!

The script is flipped in Prime Video's upcoming "Blade Runner 2099" series where replicants have rebelled and seized power from human beings in a massive uprising. An arresting new trailer was unleashed during the annual San Diego Comic-Con pop culture pageant and it's an atmospheric return to the futuristic realm of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" universe 80 years later.

"The old world forever fights to come back," Olwen tells Cora in this interesting first peek at the limited series that arrives Nov. 25, 2026. "Humans want what was taken from them. But it's our time now."

"Blade Runner 2099" stars Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh ("Everything Everywhere All At Once") as an aging replicant Blade Runner named Olwen and Hunter Schafer ("Euphoria") playing Cora, a fugitive human trying to escape pursuing Blade Runners. It's more or less a tangential sequel to director Denis Villeneuve’s "Blade Runner 2049" set in the same neon-drenched dystopian world with a team-up element between natural and artificial beings, we're also going into outer space!

We first heard word of series executive producer Ridley Scott developing a "Blade Runner" TV show back in early 2022 and we're finally on the threshold of its 8-episode release this fall, which is helmed by showrunner and executive producer Silka Louisa ("Shining Girls").

"Fifty years after the events of 'Blade Runner 2049,' Los Angeles has been reborn, just not by humanity," states the official synopsis. "Cora, a fugitive in a final bid to stop running, takes on one last identity: a Blade Runner. Forced to partner with Olwen, a Replicant days from dying, she hunts down a runaway hiding a truth that could collapse their fragile city."

Yeoh and Schafer share cyberpunk cityscapes with Dimitri Abold ("The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes") and Lewis Gribben ("Somewhere Boy"). Guest stars include Katelyn Rose Downey ("The Nun II"), Daniel Rigby ('Renegade Nell"), Johnny Harris ("A Gentleman In Moscow"), Amy Lennox ("Only Child"), Sheila Atim ("The Woman King") and Matthew Needham ("House of the Dragon").

"I am so excited for people to see it," Louisa told EW last week. "There is so much legacy with 'Blade Runner.' Every person who touched the show in any way is a huge fan. Everyone was very well aware of the weight of what we were doing, and we did it with great care. And when you're taking on something like this, you're very thoughtful and deliberate about each step. That is why it has taken so long, because we wanted to make sure we got it right.

"We stayed very true to the noir principles of 'Blade Runner.' And there's a mystery at the heart of the show that looks both forwards and backwards in terms of mythology that fans are gonna be very excited about."

Also executive produced in collaboration with David W. Zucker and Clayton Krueger of Scott Free Productions. "Blade Runner 2099" will appear on Prime Video Nov. 25, 2026.

NASA is planning to send two maneuverable probes to lunar orbit in order to learn how spacecraft are affected by the complex gravitational environment near the moon.

The mission, known as CAPSTONE 02, is currently aiming to launch in 2027. It will see the two probes maneuver in close proximity to one another and fly in "formation" so mission operators can better understand the gravitational effects spacecraft experience in cislunar space. This area of space is under the influence of both Earth's gravity and the moon's, meaning spacecraft operating there will have to navigate what are known as "three-body orbits."

While testing spacecraft maneuverability in these complex orbits, CAPSTONE 02 will also study communication and navigation systems that will be used in NASA's planned Artemis missions of lunar exploration and moon base construction. "This mission represents an important step in the maturation of cislunar capabilities," said NASA's Sean Fuller, Moon Base CAPSTONE manager, in an agency statement. "CAPSTONE 02 lays the foundation for lunar infrastructure and commercial services that support Artemis, Moon Base, and future missions to deep space."

The two CAPSTONE 02 probes are being built by Terran Orbital Systems, Inc. Once in space, they will alternate jobs while flying in formation, switching between what NASA calls "chaser" and "target" roles.

The spacecraft pair will use celestial navigation, optical sensors and data collected by telescopes on the ground during these maneuvers. This is similar to how NASA will use a variety of data to help its Orion spacecraft meet up with a lunar lander en route to the moon.

On the upcoming Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2027, NASA will test some of these techniques as Orion will rendezvous with both Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander and SpaceX's Starship, if all goes according to plan.

"Transporting crew to the lunar surface from cislunar orbit depends on knowing how well navigation systems will perform during these operations. Since these conditions can't be fully recreated on Earth, they must be tested in space," NASA wrote in its statement outlining the CAPSTONE 02 mission.

As its name implies, this will be the second mission under NASA's CAPSTONE program, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. The first CAPSTONE probe launched in 2022 and operated for four years before NASA officially concluded its mission in June 2026.

That microwave-oven-sized CAPSTONE spacecraft tested communications tech and became the first spacecraft to test three-body orbits around the moon, according to a NASA statement.

CAPSTONE was tested in what is known as a near rectilinear halo orbit. This is a fairly gravitationally stable orbit, thanks to the nearly equal pulls of both Earth's gravity and the moon's.

It was Lucky 13 for SpaceX, as new videos show just how much work came into getting the latest flight of Starship’s upper stage softly down into the ocean.

After Starship made its 13th launch on Friday (July 24) from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, the upper stage achieved all major milestones: putting 20 next-gen Starlink satellites aloft to watch it go, reigniting a Raptor engine in space, and then the soft splashdown off the coast of Western Australia.

While the lower stage of Starship faced engine issues, fresh video shows some incredible views of the successful upper stage. Starlink satellites, ferrying signal from a buoy in the Indian Ocean, helped create a video on X showing the 171-foot (52-meter) upper stage roaring above the water, then generating steam as the engines swiveled to make a gentle splashdown.

Getting down that way was no easy feat, as SpaceX posted another video on Tuesday (July 28) showing Starship swaying dramatically in midair to achieve a near-vertical orientation above the water. If you don’t mind a bit of vertigo, SpaceX also provided an on-ship view of the splashdown, complete with dramatic swings and ocean steam.

The upper stage's ocean arrival was so soft, in fact, that days after launch on July 28 the 171-foot (52-meter) stage was reported as still afloat in the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said on X, adding that its Starship recovery team is continuing to gather imagery of the vehicle at sea.

Starship's Version 3 (which flew on Friday) is a 408-foot-tall stacked system including the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage, also known as Starship (or Ship). SpaceX aims to make this system rapidly reusable for applications ranging from astronaut moon missions to launching even more powerful and larger Starlinks.

That said, SpaceX still needs to notch some goals ahead of its expected participation for docking during the Artemis III astronaut mission scheduled for next year, and to possibly bring astronauts to the moon's surface during Artemis IV.

And Ars Technica (quoting experts) recently raised concerns about the Starship heatshield, noting more changes will be required for reusability.

Sometimes to go to the moon, you first have to go underwater.

NASA is currently developing the training program for NASA's Artemis astronauts, some of whom could set foot on the moon during the agency's planned Artemis IV mission. As part of that development, two agency scientists recently donned Artemis moonsuits and took to NASA's underwater training facility.

What is it?

These photos show two NASA exploration geologists and Artemis science officers practicing using the same types of geology tools that astronauts might use when they explore the moon.

The scientists also "deployed a mock lunar payload under low-angle lighting conditions," according to a NASA statement accompanying the photo. NASA is currently aiming to place astronauts at the lunar south pole, where many areas remain in permanent shadow. As such, future lunar explorers may have to operate in near-total darkness and learn how to carry out their missions with very little light.

Why is it incredible?

The fact that NASA is preparing to send humans back to the moon is incredible in itself. Humanity hasn't set foot on our natural satellite since 1972. While NASA still has many technical hurdles to cross when it comes to developing and selecting a moon lander, the agency is pushing ahead with developing the training it will use to prepare its astronauts to explore the lunar surface.

For this particular part of Artemis training development, NASA placed two scientists in its Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), a 40-foot-deep (12-meter) pool at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The particular test in these photos was "the first time that two geologists were suited up simultaneously for lunar geology training in the NBL," according to NASA's statement.

For these tests, a portion of the underwater laboratory was outfitted with soil and rocks that simulate the surface of the moon. The buoyancy of the pool can be manipulated in order to simulate different levels of gravity, helping astronauts train for spacewalks or for exploring other worlds like the moon.

On July 31, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts drove on the moon for the first time.

David Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, and James Irwin, the lunar module pilot explored the moon for three days by driving around in the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden remained in orbit around the moon. This moon buggy was folded up and stowed inside the lunar module and deployed after landing. Unpacked, it measured about 10 feet long, 7 feet wide and 45 inches high.

The lunar rover could travel up to 8.6 miles per hour and allowed the astronauts to venture farther from their landing site than previous Apollo astronauts could. For their first drive, Scott and Irwin went to Elbow Crater to gather samples and take photos. Throughout their stay on the moon, they drove more than 17 miles.

• Apollo 15 in Photos: A Moon Landing and the 1st Lunar Car for Astronauts

The Apollo 15 mission launched to the moon on July 26, 1971. The mission landed on July 30, with Scott and Irwin ultimately performing three moonwalks in addition to their lunar rover test drive. The Apollo 15 crew left the moon's surface on Aug. 2 and left lunar orbit on Aug. 4. They returned to Earth on Aug. 7, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Why it mattered

Apollo 15's moon rover made space history as the first human-driven rover on the moon, let alone another world entirely.

While developing the rover, NASA had to wrangle many issues at once. How do you build a rover light enough to land on the moon with the Apollo 15 lunar lander? How do you make it compact as well?

• Driving on the Moon: Photos of NASA's Lunar Cars

The result was an aluminum, foldable moon car built by Boeing and powered by batteries that could carry up to 1,080 pounds (490 kg) of cargo — about twice its own weight — while carrying two astronauts. The rover design flew on Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. Those three rovers are still on the lunar surface awaiting fresh batteries.

Today, NASA is looking to new companies to build unpressurized rovers like the Lunar Roving Vehicle, as well as pressurized vehicles that would allow crews to drive without a spacesuit on. Those rovers will be a critical asset for Artemis astronauts as they build a permanent moon base, NASA has said.

Looking forward to the 2026 solar eclipse, happening on Aug. 12? I know I am and even though it's not a total solar eclipse here in the UK (the path of totality crosses Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain), we'll still get to watch the moon obscure around 90% of the Sun, a sight that terrified our ancient ancestors.

However, you'll need proper eye protection, such as solar eclipse glasses, to watch the eclipse safely. Sunglasses are not sufficient for a solar eclipse; instead, you need eclipse glasses that follow ISO 12312-2:2015, the standard for solar viewers. If that number's not somewhere on the glasses, you're at risk of damaging your eyesight, maybe even permanently.

So, read on as we round up the best solar eclipse glasses to buy in the UK. Want a slightly better view? Here are the best places in the UK to see the partial solar eclipse.

• We've got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

Venus dominates the evening sky throughout August, but early risers have a special treat too, as Mercury and Jupiter draw together in a beautiful dawn conjunction around mid-month.

From our vantage point on Earth, Venus reaches the end of its tether to the sun on the evening of Aug. 15, when it is at greatest elongation 46 degrees to the east of the sun. And yet, paradoxically, instead of appearing high up in the west, Venus is getting noticeably lower to the west-southwest horizon as the month progresses. This is because its declination in the sky is taking it well to the south of the sun. In fact, Venus's greatest elongation coincides with the time that it sets right at the end of evening twilight.

During the second half of August, into September, Venus will no longer be setting in a dark sky, but rather in a progressively brighter twilight sky. This is all due to its increasing southerly declination and the fact that the ecliptic — the apparent path of the sun, moon and planets through the zodiacal constellations — appears to slope closer to the western horizon at sunset during late summer and early fall.

The planet best positioned for telescopic observation this month is the "Lord of the Rings," Saturn, which comes up during late evening and is in a commanding position, well up in the south-southeast at the break of dawn.

Mars becomes evident a few hours before sunrise. During August, Earth approaches it at an average daily rate of 425,800 miles (685,100 kilometers). Still, even at month's end, Mars will be 172.2 million miles (277.1 million km) away, so while it continues to brighten, that process will still be quite slow.

Mercury and Jupiter are morning objects. Mercury will be evident during the first half of August, low in the east-northeast within about an hour of sunrise. It will be joined at midmonth by Jupiter as that big world emerges into view out of the glare of the rising sun.

In our schedule, remember that when measuring the angular separation between two celestial objects, your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees. Here, we present a schedule below which provides some of the best planet viewing times while directing you as to where to look to see them

Mercury

Mercury reaches greatest elongation from the Sun (19 degrees) on the morning of Aug. 2; it should be an obvious, +0.2-magnitude point low in the east-northeast if you look 50 minutes before sunrise. About a week later, look for Mercury very low in the east-northeast about an hour before sunrise. This small fleet world gets lower each dawn in early August, but it also rapidly brightens, from magnitude -0.7 on Aug. 9 to -1.3 (a trifle fainter than the brightest star, Sirius) by Aug. 16.

Also on Aug. 9, Castor and Pollux, the "Twin Stars" of Gemini, point directly toward Mercury. Just extend an imaginary line twice the distance between these two stars, down toward the east-northeast horizon and you'll come to Mercury. Early on the morning of Aug. 11, an exceedingly thin crescent moon — just 2% illuminated and about 32 hours from new (and a solar eclipse) — will lie about 2 degrees to the upper left of Mercury. From Aug. 13 through Aug. 17, Mercury will engage in a close interaction with Jupiter. Mercury arrives at superior conjunction with the sun on Aug. 27 and transitions into the evening sky.

Venus

Venus continues to outshine August's other evening stars and planets by a huge margin, brightening from magnitude -4.2 to -4.5 over the course of the month. It reaches its greatest elongation from the sun (46 degrees) on the evening of Aug. 15 and now resembles a roughly half-moon phase (48% illuminated) through a telescope. On the same evening, a three and a quarter day old crescent moon is poised to the lower right of Venus.

Mars

Mars rises around 2 a.m. local daylight time. When dawn breaks just over two hours later, it will stand 20 degrees above the east-northeast horizon. On the morning of Aug. 9, it can be found about 4.5 degrees to the right of a waning crescent moon.

Jupiter

Jupiter was in conjunction with the sun on July 29 and on Aug. 5, it is still too close to the sun to be visible without optical aid. But Jupiter appears two-thirds of a degree higher each morning and by Aug. 12, it should be visible about 5 degrees to Mercury's lower left shortly before sunrise, appearing dim in the bright twilight even though it shines at magnitude -1.8. Jupiter and Mercury shine less than 4 degrees from each other from Aug. 13 through Aug. 17.

Early on the morning of Aug. 15, the smallest and largest planets will meet in a close conjunction, with Jupiter shining about twice as bright as Mercury and separated by less than 0.6 degrees. However, seeing this tight pairing will be a challenge, as the duo lies just 12 degrees west of the sun and are up just 65 minutes before sunrise as seen from mid-northern latitudes. This majestic pair is about 10 degrees above the east-northeastern horizon at sunrise. You probably are going to need binoculars to fish them out against the brightening twilight sky. Still, it's worth the effort. After that, Jupiter moves rapidly off to Mercury's upper right, climbing into better morning view as its year-long apparition gets underway.

Saturn

Saturn rises a few hours after sunset, brightening in a lonely spot near the Cetus-Pisces border. In a telescope, its rings are tilted enough for good viewing; they narrow somewhat in the months ahead. Late on the evening of August 3rd, you'll find Saturn shining to the lower right of a gibbous moon.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals are here to help. Interested in capturing the night sky? Check out our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

Playmobil is known for crafting imaginative playsets, taking kids (and adults) on big adventures from the comfort of their homes. When it comes to the exploration of space, they've got a lot to offer. Not only has Playmobil created two mega Star Trek sets, releasing the Playmobil USS Enterprise long before LEGO released its own version and the Playmobil Klingon Bird of Prey back in 2023 (both of which we've reviewed and loved), but they've even collaborated with the real-life European Space Agency (ESA).

As Nadia Lüders, ESA's partnership and brand licensing officer, said in a statement: “This partnership ensures that the curiosity and wonder of space continue to spark young imaginations — nurturing a new generation ready to explore, innovate and shape the Europe of tomorrow.”

Playmobil's dedication to weaving space exploration and learning into imaginative play is demonstrated in the sheer amount of space and sci-fi sets they have to offer, of which we'll jump into all 13 of them below. Ranging in price from the Playmobil Space Ranger for $15 to the Star Trek USS Enterprise for $354, there are playsets for a range of ages, interests, and budgets.

Not a fan of Playmobil, or can't find the right set? We've also rated and ranked the best Lego Star Wars, Lego space, and Lego Marvel sets you can buy.

The best Star Trek Playmobil sets we recommend 2026

Playmobil USS Enterprise

Playmobil launched the Star Trek USS Enterprise years ahead of LEGO’s November 2025 release date, and it made us ask the question: Playmobil versus Lego, which is the best USS Enterprise set? For starters, the Playmobil set comes in cheaper. And while it’s got 150 pieces in comparison to Lego’s 3,600, it’s still a lot bigger, measuring over 3 feet (1 meter) in length.

When our expert testers gave the Playmobil Star Trek USS Enterprise a full review, it earned a whopping 4 ½ stars, delighting with its authentic light and sounds, and an ease of build that results in a gorgeous replica. Yes, it’s expensive and it has a lot of stickers, but if you’re a fan of both Star Trek and Playmobil, it’s an excellent model you can keep in your home forever. Recommended for ages 10 years and up.

Playmobil Klingon Bird of Prey

Playmobil followed up its Star Trek USS Enterprise with another impressive model, the Klingon Bird of Prey. Now considered a collectible, it’s a little harder to get your hands on, though we found it at an online toy store for $350.

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth the investment, in our expert Playmobil Klingon Bird of Prey review, we called this set “among the most impressive toys and models Space.com has had the pleasure of reviewing.” Impressive detail, great lights and sounds, and figurines that are a lot of fun are just some of the reasons we gave it 4.5/5 stars. And after the build is done, it looks fantastic on its included display.

It’s on the larger side, though (19.5 x 23 x 7.25 inches / 50 x 58 x 18 cm), so make sure you have room to display it before you buy. Recommended for ages 10 years and up.

Playmobil Star Trek figures

To accompany your Star Trek investments, or just to have as part of a wider Playmobil space collection, you can also secure the four Playmobil Star Trek figurines. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Leonard McCoy and Nyota Uhura all come in this pack alongside individual accessories.

Kirk comes with his phaser, Spock a tricorder disguised as a bag, McCoy with a so-called hypospray and Uhura with a skirt to change outfits. For any Trekkies, it's an affordable addition for any ultimate fan's collection. This one's recommended for ages 10 and up.

The best space ESA-collaborated Playmobil sets we recommend 2026

Playmobil ESA Starter Pack Space Mission

Playmobil and ESA have built a partnership, and an accompanying six different play sets, to inspire a love of intergalactic exploration. And the Starter Pack Space Mission is a great introduction to building out a Playmobil collection dedicated to all things space, especially as the sets can be mixed, matched and expanded.

In the pack, you get an astronaut figure, lunar rover with two lights, antenna, solar panel, satellite dish, rock samples and other accessories. Recommended for ages 4 years old and up, it's a gift for any space lover, whether they're a kid or adult.

There's also a nod to the ESA with the organization's logo emblazoned on both the rover and astronaut's spacesuit. As the production description states: "The astronaut discovered unusual soil samples during a tour with the lunar vehicle. The samples now have to be analyzed very quickly in the mobile station and the results transmitted via satellite. What will the results be?"

Playmobil ESA Astronaut with Robot

A smaller set that works alongside the others in the Playmobil/ESA range, the Astronaut with Robot is a two-figure build consisting of 42 pieces. As the pack explains: “Together with his reliable companion robot and a nimble Mars crawler, the astronaut collects fascinating soil samples on the Red Planet.”

And you don’t only get a robot and astronaut (able to sit and stand) with the set, but a backpack, ground scanner analysis station, rock samples, base plate, gripper arm and more, too. Suitable for young explorers from age 4 years and up, it's an excellent addition to the larger Mars mission, working alongside the rest of the themed Playmobil sets.

Playmobil ESA Mars Exploration Rover

With the Playmobil ESA Mars Rover, you can launch your own mission to Mars in this 76-piece set. It comes with drill, cameras and high-tech sensors, as well as rock samples and other accessories to build your great space exploration adventure. And it's also focused on the types of powerful scientific instruments you'd find on the actual Mars Rover, as well as reenacting the way you'd store and analyze the samples.

As with any of these sets, imagination is key, but that's helped along with the inclusion of everything you need to bring authentic space exploration to life. The Playmobil ESA set is perfect for fans and includes rotating drills, movable cameras and a sturdy six-wheel drive to make discovery possible.

Playmobil ESA Space Glider

This speedy space glider is the perfect way to zip around on the surface of Mars, using its in-built claw to retrieve rock samples and even crystals. With a rotating turret and powerful blasters, there's a lot of fun to be had at only $25.

The set comes with a female astronaut, accessories, tools, projectiles, a gripper arm and glowing rock samples to dream up your own adventure. One of the smaller Playmobil ESA collaboration playsets, it has 48 pieces and is recommended for ages 4 years and up.

Playmobil ESA Mars Expedition

Less widely available is the Playmobil Mars Expedition playset. Recommended for ages 6 and up, it's an older playset with plenty to do, with 173 pieces and a whole lot of accessories.

Inside the playset, you get a full Mars Rover with drill attachment and various other tool attachments, including an extendable, moveable arm, gripper and blaster. The rover also includes functioning light and sound effects, as well as gripper arm action, driving sounds and an alarm.

The best space Playmobil sets we recommend 2026

Playmobil Mars Research Vehicle

Alongside Playmobil's ESA collaboration and the Star Trek playsets, Playmobil also has its own themed collection dedicated to space, including their own Mars Research Vehicle. Thanks to a removable roof, you can get inside the vehicle with space for four adult figures. You can also enter and exit the side via the ramp, and the movable arm can hold three different attachments, including a claw gripper, drill and laser gun.

Recommended for ages six and up, there are 74 pieces to build, as well as the opportunity to enjoy the functioning lights and sound effects (though you'll need to buy 2 x AAA batteries separately).

Playmobil Mars Mission Play Box

Not to be confused with the ESA Space Mission set, the Mars Mission Play Box comes with a large research station that can be opened via two front panels, with an accompanying astronaut and robot who work together to study the water crystals found on Mars.

The beauty of this playset is that it’s ready for on-the-go play as all the pieces can be stored inside the research station, while the top can be used as a handle. As well as the figures, it also comes with a satellite, walkie-talkie and other accessories. Recommended for ages 4 years and up.

Playmobil Mission Space Drone

The Mission Space Drone set comes with a space drone, astronaut figure with spacesuit and space shoes, space rock and other accessories for a full space flight adventure. Even better, under the drone are two fully-functioning cannons which shoot out launch missiles.

Create your own space mission by exploring alien planets with your astronaut and space drone at the ready. With 57 pieces, it's recommended for ages 4 years and up, meaning space exploration can start early. Right now, it's on offer at Amazon, but at time of writing, there were only 4 left in stock.

Playmobil Satellite Meteoroid Laser

With an astronaut quite similar to the Mission Space Drone set, instead of a drone, you're equipped with a functioning meteoroid laser. As the pack says: “Keep the mission on track and destroy any space debris that blocks your way with the satellite meteoroid laser!”

To use, you lay the meteoroid in front of the laser, simultaneously pressing in the center on both sides to shatter it into pieces. You can even connect your astronaut straight to the vessel with a connected arm attachment. The set includes an astronaut, satellite, break-apart meteoroid, laser darts and other accessories. Recommended for ages 4 years and up.

Playmobil Space Ranger

Expand your Playmobil space sets with this affordable Space Ranger kit, consisting of 64 pieces and recommended for ages 4 years and up. The set includes one figure, speedster, helmet, vest and lots of other space gear for your other figures to wear and play with.

When you're ready to fly the speedster, Playmobil has even designed it so the landing feet fold up, ready to make it as streamlined as possible for flight. As a gift set, it has a label that can even be personalized to the space fan in your life.

A new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposal says the agency wants to speed up commercial space licensing for rocket launches and spacecraft re-entries by removing "unnecessary" environmental regulations.

The proposed FAA rule, released yesterday (July 29), has a 30-day period for comment and if approved, would apply to rocket launches, re-entering spacecraft, and the sites at which launches and re-entries take place. The FAA proposes to "waive requirements of laws of the U.S. for a license or permit, after consultation with the head of the appropriate executive agency, when the requirement is not necessary to protect the public health and safety, safety of property, and national security and foreign policy interests of the United States," the text of the proposal reads, in part.

The Department of Transportation stated that the proposal, if implemented, would allow the agency to waive what it calls "unnecessary environmental laws and regulations" that it claims are "slowing American innovation." However, the proposal will still require the FAA to ensure that launches do not impede on public health and safety, or U.S. national security or foreign policy.

To do so, the FAA plans to remove 13 federal laws from applying to "certain commercial space licenses and permits", with examples including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, parts of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.

The proposal takes place as the United States is seeing unprecedented demand on its limited spaceports for commercial launches, fueled by broadband satellite constellations like SpaceX Starlink, as well as emergent orbital data centers. Earlier this month, the U.S. government proposed moving some launch operations offshore to ease the demand backlog. More rocket launches, according to peer-reviewed research, could cause environmental issues.

The proposal also appears to build on two recent Trump administration executive orders. The first, from December 2025, saw the administration aim to redirect a wide swath of space policy — including boosting the number of rocket launches and landings. (These already were at unprecedented levels last year, mostly on the back of SpaceX.) The second one, in August, focused on streamlining launch licensing and accelerating spaceport construction.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is trying to procure a federal land swap in south Texas, mostly for Starship operations, but its proposal prompted an emergency injunction last week filed by a coalition of conservation and tribal groups.

The groups allege this proposal would degrade the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge — from which the land is coming from — with legal implications as well, but the court has not yet ruled on a lawsuit the coalition raised in June.

Scientists have found the first triple-lobed asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — and it has a small moon to boot.

The asteroid in question is 44 Nysa, which was discovered all the way back in 1857. Of course, back then it was just a pinprick of light in the sky, and subsequent observations — including some from the Hubble Space Telescope — had failed to tell us much about Nysa. Those previous observations suggested Nysa might be bi-lobed, like many asteroids and comets such as asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, which NASA's Lucy mission flew past in 2025.

However, new joint observations by the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham in Arizona and the Very Large Telescope (VT) on Paranal mountain in Chile have revealed that this asteroid actually seems to have three lobes, the first such object ever seen.

"The images reveal a remarkably unusual object," said lead researcher Kate Minker of Arizona's Lowell Observatory in a statement. "The most likely explanation is that Nysa is either a contact trinary, consisting of three connected components, or an extremely irregular coherent body unlike anything we've previously observed."

Obtaining the detailed images of Nysa was not easy. Key to the success were two high contrast imaging devices, the Italian-built SHARK-VIS on the LBT and SPHERE and its ZIMPOL polarimeter on the VLT, used in conjunction with adaptive optics that counteract the blurring effect of the atmosphere.

"These observations had to be combined with specially developed image-processing techniques to further sharpen the images and remove the bright halo surrounding the asteroid, potentially hiding faint companions," said Anthony Berdeu of the European Southern Observatory.

The images showed an irregular-shaped body 47 miles (75 kilometers) at its widest point, with two notable valleys or "colli" that wrap around the asteroid's circumference and which Minker's team interprets as being the necks of the different lobes. Furthermore, the images revealed a 0.6-mile-wide (1-km-wide) moon orbiting Nysa at a distance of at least 106 miles (170 km). The moon has been designated S/2026 (44) 1 for now. And, because it was seen independently during two different observing campaigns, it was possible to observe its motion around Nysa.

"We borrowed a specialized technique from another field of astronomy, known as high-contrast imaging, to detect the small moon whose faint light was overwhelmed by the intense brightness of the primary asteroid," said Gianluca Li Causi of the SHARK-VIS team at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).

Nysa is named after the mythical land where the ancient Greek god Dionysus was raised by nymphs. Al Conrad of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory finds the name fitting because Dionysus was the Greek god of theater, which for the ancient Greeks often involved wearing masks and hiding one's true identity.

"We're finally unmasking the asteroid's true nature, long after it was discovered," said Conrad.

How such a bizarre object formed remains uncertain, but Minker's team does have a couple of ideas.

The team's preferred explanation is that Nysa is a contact trinary — three asteroid bodies being held together loosely by gravity. The best alternative, the researchers say, is that Nysa once upon a time had a close encounter with a much larger asteroid that slammed into it, thereby deforming it. In these situations, modeling suggests that gravitational tidal forces could have deformed Nysa's mantle, creating Nysa's odd shape and even ripping it apart into a bunch of fragments in a string-of-peals configuration. If this is the case, then where did the other fragments go? Such events usually produce a family of asteroids all sharing the same composition, but Nysa seems to be alone (barring its moon, of course).

There could be a way to distinguish between the two possible origins. By tracking the moon's orbital velocity and period, astronomers will be able to pin down the exact mass and density of Nysa and then see which model matches it best.

Nysa has been a subject of study because it can also tell us about the birth of our own planet Earth. Nysa is more reflective than many other asteroids thanks to its surface composition that is abundant in a silicate mineral called enstatite, which lacks iron. Asteroids like this are generally called E-types, and Nysa is the largest and brightest of all of them. E-type asteroids are thought to have formed close to the sun and therefore have been identified as potential building blocks of the inner planets. If Nysa is a relic of that time, it could tell us a great deal about conditions in the inner solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

The findings can be read on the arXiv archive, and have been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Trailers and teasers for HBO’s upcoming "Lanterns" series have been suspiciously devoid of much outer space footage for the intergalactic cops known as the Green Lanterns, but that's all history now with this exhilarating new preview.

Beware the power of this illuminating peek that not only delivers generous doses of Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) mentoring his young apprentice, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), but also tosses in cool shots above an alien planet, a prison world, and what could be barren Mars.

And there's green galore via electrifying emerald constructs (including a beer opener) emanating from the cosmic peacekeepers' trusty power rings. Plus we're treated to a severe warning by the normally-wisecracking Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) as a serious but satisfying bonus.

"Lanterns" is an 8-episode limited series arriving Aug. 16, 2026 courtesy of DC Studios and heralding from executive producers Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King.

From this latest trailer it's apparent that weird shape-shifting Manhunters will be primary antagonists alongside the crimson-skinned criminal Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) and that has piqued our interest. It delivers a well-rounded depiction of the series' story arc and motivational beats that follow an older generation of Lanterns giving way to a younger law enforcement recruit.

"Manhunters are the most dangerous beings to ever exist in the galaxy," Paul Ben-Victor's extraterrestrial truth-seeker, Antaan, explains. "And it can take the form of any species."

This grounded, mystery-driven miniseries showcases one of DC Comics' most honored creations, the Green Lantern Corps, and their oath-reciting, ring-bearing brethren across the cosmos, here investigating odd murders in rural Nebraska.

Landing from DC Studios, Warner Bros. Television, and HBO, "Lanterns" debuts Sunday, Aug. 16 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and later streaming on HBO Max.

On July 30, 1610, the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei became the first to observe rings around the planet Saturn.

Shortly after the telescope was invented in 1608, Galileo peered out into the solar system and saw the amazing ring system. At first he didn't actually think they were rings.

Instead, Galileo thought Saturn might have planetary "love handles" that gave it a weird shape. He also wondered if perhaps he was looking at two very large moons on either side of the planet. It wasn't until 1659 that another astronomer named Christiaan Huygens figured out that these weird features were actually Saturn's rings.

Why it mattered

Today, we may take Saturn's rings for granted. After all, it IS known as the "ringed planet" and the jewel of our solar system. But there was a time when we didn't know planets had rings at all, and that's where Galileo's discovery came in.

The telescope was a brand new technology, just two years old, when Galileo took it from a seafaring and distance tool and turned it into an essential item for astronomy. It helped him discover the major moons of Jupiter (we call them the Galilean moons for a reason) and also Saturn's rings. In time, astronomers discovered rings around other large planets in our solar system (Jupiter has them, and Uranus, too), revealing them to be made up of tiny pieces of what may have been torn apart moons.

The study of Saturn's rings has allowed astronomers to see the raw materials of the early solar system. They're made mostly of water ice and shaped by so-called shepherd moons, tiny satellites that orbit Saturn in between ring bands. Saturn's rings even have "kittens," distinct formations scientists are only now starting to understand.

NASA's Pioneer 11 passed through Saturn's ring plane in 1979, with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes visiting in the 1980s. The Cassini spacecraft was the first to orbit Saturn, ultimately passing through the rings several times in 2017 before ending its mission in a "grand finale" with a crash into Saturn itself.

The diets of penguins on Antarctica's Danger Islands can be seen from space. At least indirectly.

Using satellite images captured by the Landsat 8 spacecraft operated by NASA and the United States Geological Survey, scientists can track changes in Adélie penguins' diets based on the color of their guano, or droppings.

What is it?

The image above shows pinkish-orange guano staining large sections of some of the Danger Islands, Heroína Island and Beagle Island. The penguins that live there eat a diet rich in krill, small marine crustaceans that are bright pink in color due to a specific type of algae upon which they feed.

The bright pink color of the penguins' droppings stands out in satellite imagery, allowing researchers to monitor the birds' populations from space. But scientists wanted a closer look, and collected drone imagery as well, as seen in the image below.

Why is it incredible?

It's pretty amazing that the diet of a specific population of birds can be monitored from 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth's surface. The imagery collected by Landsat-8 helped scientists locate where the penguin colonies might be, allowing them to find them in-person and collect guano samples. Those samples contained evidence of what the penguins were eating over time.

Researchers are using those satellite images and samples to track how the penguins' diet might be affected by changes in sea ice conditions, according to a NASA statement.

"Sea ice is such a hugely important factor in the Antarctic marine environment," said Clemson University biologist Casey Youngflesh who led a study comparing the penguins' diet and sea ice conditions. "The structure of the region's food web is changing in response."

"Doctor Who" may have a reputation for making kids hide behind the sofa, and the "Alien" franchise famously sold itself on the futility of screaming in outer space, but "Star Trek"'s traditional "story of the week" format has also provided numerous opportunities to bring sci-fi scares to starship corridors.

But few of the franchise's horror outings have been quite as overt as "The Griffin Incident", the latest episode of "Strange New Worlds". In it, Spock (Ethan Peck), La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and James T Kirk (Paul Wesley) are making their way back from the Future Federation Leaders Retreat (sounds like a blast) when they receive a mysterious signal in uncharted space.

SPOILERS AHEAD! ANYONE YET TO WATCH "THE GRIFFIN INCIDENT" SHOULD PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO AVOID VIOLATING TEMPORAL PRIME DIRECTIVES.

It turns out the communication originated from the USS Griffin, a starship that went missing with 300 souls on board nine years earlier, so — being the conscientious Starfleet officers they are — the trio beam aboard to investigate. It's a decision they quickly come to regret, as they realize they've stumbled on a haunted house floating through the darkness…

This unashamed ghost story soon becomes a chilling mix of psychological terror and body horror, as Kirk hears the cries of his young son David, Spock unexpectedly comes face-to-face with his spurned fiancée, T'Pring, and La'an becomes closely acquainted with the Griffin's ghostly chief security officer, Rose Harper (Sorika Wolf).

As in "Event Horizon" (originally pitched as "'The Shining' in space"), the ship is a malevolent force preying on its victims' insecurities: for Kirk, it's the fear of being an absent father; for Spock, it's the conflict between his human and Vulcan heritage; and for La'an it's the growing fear that her previously latent Noonien-Singh DNA might be stirring something dark within her.

In the tradition of many of "Star Trek"'s scariest missions, "The Griffin Incident" puts a sci-fi spin on classic tropes. Indeed, as far back as "The Man Trap" (the very first Original Series episode aired), the franchise has been transporting recognizable genre conventions light years beyond the confines of planet Earth.

"The Man Trap" is essentially a vampire story, albeit with a "monster" that feasts on salt rather than blood. Meanwhile, "The Enemy Within" (which materialized a few weeks later) is a 23rd-century take on "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", in which a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into a good and bad version of himself — two William Shatners for the price of one.

There have also been several captain's log entries concerning close encounters of the zombie kind, from the re-animated corpses of "Strange New Worlds"' "Shuttle to Kenfori", to the Borg in "Star Trek: First Contact" — despite their quest for technologically enhanced perfection, the movie's cyborg hordes wouldn't look out of place in "The Walking Dead".

And the horror callbacks don't end there. The parasites who infiltrate the upper echelons of Starfleet in "The Next Generation"'s "Conspiracy" are "The Wrath of Khan"'s Ceti Eels given "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" delusions of grandeur. And "Deep Space Nine"'s own enemy-within episode, "The Adversary", features a shapeshifting Founder hiding in plain sight — think "The Thing", but with less of the ick.

But the franchise's move to streaming has undoubtedly allowed "Trek" to become more extreme than it was in the syndication/network days of the '80s, '90s and '00s. That's not to say "Trek" didn't push the censors' limits back then — the aforementioned "Conspiracy" was heavily edited by the BBC in the UK, who decided a "Scanners"-like exploding head wasn't suitable for teatime viewing.

In the main, however, the horror was more likely to be built on psychological scares than full-on gore — REM sleep deprivation driving everybody mad in "TNG"'s "Night Terrors", for example, or crews becoming alien test subjects in "TNG"'s "Schisms" and "Voyager"'s "The Scientific Method" — the latter storylines could almost have been lifted from "The Twilight Zone". Even the Vidiians, a race of aliens who borrow heavily from the David Cronenberg playbook with their frequent body modifications, are portrayed in a resolutely PG way.

Fast forward to the present, and "Strange New Worlds" has given the Gorn — who famously looked like a guy in a crocodile suit in the Original Series — a new lifecycle, including an "Alien"-style penchant for impregnating humans with their parasitic offspring. An unwanted Gorn infestation subsequently paves the way for Captain Marie Batel to become the Beholder, protecting the galaxy from the horror movie-worthy Vezda.

"The Griffin Incident" is a continuation of this push towards R-rated horror territory, in which T'Pring cuts off the tips of Spock's ears with scissors, and La'an stabs Kirk so enthusiastically you'd think she was auditioning for the next "Scream" movie.

Crucially, however, "Trek"'s latest mission makes a significant departure from most of its horror predecessors in not attempting to provide a quasi-scientific explanation for the Griffin's transformation into the scariest destination in the entire Alpha Quadrant. Instead, Captain Pike delegates the investigation to Division 12, a mysterious branch of Starfleet that specializes in unexplained phenomena.

Expect the descendants of Agents Mulder and Scully to have a field day with this one — assuming, of course, that the truth really is out there.

New episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.

The full Buck Moon rose to delight and dazzle stargazers with a spectacular display of moonlight on July 29 and we've got the photos to prove it!

July's moon is also known as the full "Buck Moon" — a traditional name used by Native American tribes to reflect the time of year when young deer grow out their antlers. Sadly, the name didn't herald any dramatic transformation in the appearance of the moon, but it still made for a spectacular sight — and photo opportunities — as it climbed above the eastern horizon at sunset on July 29.

Here's a selection of spectacular photos of the July Buck Moon 2026 captured alongside gorgeous natural landscapes, terrifying wildfires and stunning cityscapes from around the world.

Best photos of the July 2026 full Buck Moon

Our first photo of the full Buck Moon comes courtesy of Mesut Karaduman, who captured a gorgeously framed view of a ballerina performing in front of the yellow-orange lunar disk on a hillside close to the city of Tekirdağ in northwestern Türkiye on July 29.

Sadly, the rising of the full Buck Moon was not a tranquil occasion for some in Europe, where its color was stained a deep crimson by the smoke from wildfires, which continue to ravage vulnerable areas in the wake of a prolonged heatwave.

Photographer Sergen Sezgin captured one such scene firsthand, as the moon rose over a smouldering hillside close to the Turkish city of Balıkesir, a few hundred miles south of Tekirdağ.

Kevin McCarthy captured this photo of the full Buck Moon as it glowed in the skies over North Carolina, with the dark profiles of lunar seas and bright pockmarks of craters scarring the lunar surface.

"I stepped out onto my driveway in Charlotte, North Carolina, at 11:15 p.m. to capture tonight's full Buck Moon," McCarthy told Space.com in an email. "The moon has a definite warm tint likely caused by its low position in the sky, causing the light to pass through thicker layers of the atmosphere. "

That same moon appeared warped by atmospheric disturbances when it rose above the city of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on that same night, as a flock of birds flitted across its ancient surface in this photo from Tayfun Coskun.

Coskun captured another gorgeous scene of the moon rising over San Francisco on July 28, as the last of the day's sunlight kissed the tops of the surrounding hills, along with the tallest of the city's skyscrapers.

Mert Alper captured another image of moonrise being watched by a couple from Woodbine Beach in Toronto, Canada, as the lunar disk emerged from behind a dense cloud bank to brighten the evening sky.

Gary Hershorn, meanwhile, captured this magnificently timed view of the full Buck Moon as it shone at the pinnacle of Manhattan's One World Trade Center in New York on July 29 while looking over the Hudson River from New Jersey.

Our next atmospheric shot was taken with the aid of a telephoto lens by Ismail Kaplan during moonrise, as the lunar disk shimmered alongside Ankara Castle in the capital city of Türkiye.

This beautiful photo of the moon shining in the wheel of a young boy's bicycle was taken as the moon rose over the Zemplen Hills close to the Hunfarian town of Telkibánya that same night.

Finally, Izhar Khan was able to capture this impressive view of a bat's silhouette darkening the Sea of Tranquility and the Sea of Serenity as it flew through the night sky over Sydney, Australia.

The July 29 full moon is just the opening act for a spectacular month of skywatching events, kicking off with a jaw-dropping total solar eclipse on Aug. 12 that will be seen from Spain, Iceland and Greenland, which coincides with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower.

That's followed just two weeks later with a spectacular lunar eclipse that sees the moon fall deep into our planet's shadow, painting it a rusty-orange hue, weather permitting.

Be sure to check out our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography to ensure that you're ready to capture next month's action-packed calendar of skywatching events, along with our guide to the best solar viewing gear available in 2026.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

On Aug. 5, Earth's moon is due for a human-made, high-speed impact from an identified flying object: a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. The event will lead to a literal "dust up" on the lunar landscape.

That Falcon 9 upper stage is a leftover from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025. Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.

And according to a new study by an international team published on the open-source arXiv server, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon's edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes.

This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets. Indeed, putting aside all the unknowns and modeling uncertainties, some specialists suggest if you've got the time and observational prowess, it might be worth a look.

Visible ejecta spike

Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude.

"Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact," Jo told Space.com. "So the plume should be visible, though I'd stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn't really the story here."

Jo emphasized that there's great slam-dunk science to be had. "Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon," Jo said.

Implications for future moon missions

According to new research led by Benjamin Fernando of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the impact flash and resultant ejecta plume are "potentially observable" from ground- and space-based observational facilities.

"This event provides an opportunity to attempt the recording of an artificial impact in real-time; although many of the properties of the event (such as visual magnitude) are imprecisely predicted at present," Fernando and colleagues report.

Moreover, this rocket stage meets moon occasion yields an opportunity to test a pipeline for localizing impacts on the lunar surface for future seismic experiments, investigating the dust and plume dynamics from impact events on the moon, and considering hazards from artificial space debris impacts that future astronauts on the lunar surface might have to avoid, Fernando and team members point out.

"The maximum ballistic range of resolved particles is found to be slightly under 1,000 km, which is far enough to be significant from the perspective of presenting a hazard to future astronauts or infrastructure across much of the lunar surface," Fernando et al wrote in the study.

Before and after

Brent Garry is a project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LRO will be passing over the projected rocket stage crash site about seven days prior to the impact and about seven days after the impact, Garry explains.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," said Garry, as noted in earlier Space.com reporting.

Meanwhile, Jo at the University of Texas, Austin underscores the fact that a spent rocket stage is a hollow, spacecraft-like body, and there are very few impact models for human-made objects like it. They seem to produce very different plumes than natural impactors, like asteroids or comets do. But Jo stresses that the real scientific contributions will come by studying the moments after the impact.

"My concern is that most observers will stop at the sub-second flash and never track down the ejecta, which is the part that should actually be visible, and where the science is."

A major space observatory is just one month away from leaving this planet.

NASA scientists got together Wednesday (July 29) to share a status update on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — the agency's next great observatory that will soon join the ranks of absolute legends like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

And that press conference was overflowing with good news. The $4 billion Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). That's nine months ahead of schedule according to the team.

"In 30 days, we're going to be launching Roman, testing it out, opening the deployable aperture cover, looking at the sky, and sending data down to the ground for the first time," Jeremy Perkins, Roman's telescope integration and test scientist, said during the press conference at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Wednesday's update comes just days after NASA announced Roman is loaded up with hydrazine fuel, a kind of fuel that's known to be very efficient — though at the cost of being toxic and unstable. For that reason, the agency is looking for ways to move away from this kind of fuel, but it's still used often until a suitable replacement becomes available.

And with Roman, a lot of hydrazine is necessary. This is for a few reasons, as Perkins explained.

First, it's important to know that Roman's headed to what's known as Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point a million miles away, between Earth and the sun. This is a popular location for observatories because it allows spacecraft to be oriented in such a way that their instruments remain safe from heat while their solar panels can still receive sunlight for power. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), for instance, is at L2 as well.

On the way to L2, Roman needs to use some its fuel to course correct and make sure it's headed to the correct destination.

"We do a final orbit insertion around day 100 to get into our final orbit around L2," Perkins said. "After that, we have enough fuel to do all of the momentum dumps and the station keeping maneuvers that we need to do for five years and more."

Now that Roman's fueled up, the next step will be to get it attached to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that'll carry it beyond our planet.

"Encapsulation, which is when the observatory is installed into the fairing that will carry us to orbit, that happens in three short weeks," Jackie Townsend, Roman's project manager, said during the conference.

Townsend also added that, all in all, the whole Roman team is ready to go: "The Roman dream team continues to do mighty things, and I am delighted to say yet again, Roman is ready for launch."

As for what comes after launch, well, there's one way to put things into perspective.

To compare Roman to the Hubble Space Telescope, consider that scientists expect Roman to produce over 500 terabytes of data per year. In its approximately 35 years of service, Hubble has produced 400 terabytes of data in total.

"Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but we survey the sky much faster, so that one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with with Hubble," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist said during the conference.

"We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image from our largest survey," McEnery said. "To understand the scale, these TVs would cover 45 Manhattan city blocks."

What about comparing Roman to the JWST? While the Roman Space Telescope does have some near-infrared capabilities, thanks to its impressive Wide-Field Instrument (WFI). However, it doesn't quite stack up to the JWST's ultrasensitive infrared sensors. Where it does have an advantage, though, is when it comes to its panoramic view. A Roman image would be about 50 times wider.

"Webb is designed to be able to probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity into the universe so we can find rare things in the early universe," McEnery said of the JWST. "But you need Roman to find rare things in the more nearby universe."

As an example, McEnery pointed out the "little red dots," elusive objects that seem to repeatedly appear in JWST images of the ancient universe. The key to understanding what these objects are is to find as many as possible. However, with the JWST's extremely zoomed in images focused on the deep, deep universe, it can't exactly map that many at once. But Roman is built to do just that.

Once all this data is in hand, the possibilities for what we may find are endless. One of Roman's instruments called a coronagraph is expected to revolutionize exoplanet research while WFI scans the cosmos to image around 2 billion galaxies during the telescope's main survey.

"I think of this as doing magic with physics. We're taking advantage of the wave properties of light to cancel out the light from a star, so that we can image planets next to it," McEnery said.

Understanding the dynamics of as many galaxies as possible will help scientists decode the intricacies of dark matter and dark energy. We can't see the dark universe, but we can see how it affects its observable counterpart. And these are just a few of the expected outcomes of Roman's survey. As the team has continuously suggested — in fact, as most observatory teams tend to suggest — the best discoveries will be the surprises.

Even when you think about other technological advances, the principle holds true. When the internet was first invented, its inventors probably didn't expect it to lead to innovations like Facebook or Spotify and when the first video game was invented, the concept of an open world RPG maybe seemed beyond our means.

"When we built Hubble and Webb, we were chasing far off galaxies in the farthest corners of the universe. But because we have a Hubble and Webb, we're able to track asteroids that would pose a threat to Earth or to future lunar outposts on on the lunar surface," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters said during the conference. "Those were impossibilities that are now just possible and sometimes routine."

Perhaps whatever Roman has in store for us will lead to the next generation of its namesake, Townsend pondered.

Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, a pioneer in her field who was the first female executive at NASA as well as the agency's first chief of astronomy. She's sometimes called the "mother of Hubble" because of her major contributions to the telescope and is famous for breaking ground in research about satellites. She also helped form the foundation for exoplanet science decades before the first exoplanet discovery.

"The next Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, sitting in a classroom somewhere next year, will be studying our data and hopefully catch the science bug and go on to transform the world in the same way that Dr. Nancy Grace Roman did," Townsend said.

"I could not be prouder to be part of this project."

Nostalgia is a powerful elixir as demonstrated by Paramount's moving "Star Trek" tribute video created for the franchise's big 60th anniversary this year and revealed last weekend at San Diego Comic-Con during a Star Trek Universe presentation at Hall H.

It's a sentimental journey into the final frontier that chronicles the popular space opera property from its infancy as "Star Trek: The Original Series" in 1966, through 14 Hollywood feature films and numerous small screen iterations like "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager," "Enterprise," "Discovery," "Picard," "Strange New Worlds," "Below Decks," "Prodigy," and even "Starfleet Academy."

"We are all explorers, driven to know what's over the horizon," declares Scott Bakula's Captain Archer from Enterprise in this misty celebratory mission down memory lane.

San Diego Comic-Con fans attending the annual pop culture extravaganza were also treated to a packed panel featuring "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 stars Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, and Paul Wesley, in addition to executive producers Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, and Alex Kurtzman. The cast and creators offered up an extended peek at the new season and teased the fifth and final season being released in 2027.

An impressive roster of "Star Trek" luminaries made appearances to discuss Gene Roddenberry's hopeful vision of the future and the franchise's enduring legacy, including Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry, Michael Dorn, Robert Picardo, Connor Trinneer, Cirroc Lofton, Doug Jones, Michelle Hurd, Jerry O'Connell, Christina Chong, Karim Diané, and George Takei.

"For 60 years, 'Star Trek' has carried us beyond galaxies out of reach, to the very core of what it means to be human," "Discovery's" Sonequa Martin-Green states in the tribute's narration. "It began with a bold idea that the future could be united."

Stay tuned for more "Star Trek" 60th anniversary news and events this September!

Things aren't going so well for NASA's latest satellite rescue mission.

NASA launched the Swift Boost mission on July 3, sending a specialized spacecraft to low Earth orbit on a Northrop Grumman air-launched Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft is called LINK and was built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. LINK was sent to orbit to try and link up with NASA's Swift observatory, a highly successful scientific satellite designed to search for gamma-ray bursts, some of the most energetic events in the universe.

But it looks like just a few weeks after launch, LINK is experiencing some issues. "Katalyst's LINK servicing spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications," NASA wrote in an update on Tuesday (July 28). Despite the malfunction, however, the space agency says the rest of the spacecraft is functioning normally and remains in otherwise good health.

According to preliminary analysis of the issue, two of the LINK spacecraft's three reaction wheels are not operating. In addition, there is "some loss of functionality" in LINK's cold gas thruster system.

The failure with the LINK spacecraft's reaction wheel is slightly ironic, given that the Swift observatory itself once had issues with its own reaction wheels. In 2022, NASA placed the observatory in safe mode when one of its reaction wheels caused minor issues with the spacecraft's movements.

Mission teams will now try to use the spacecraft's electric propulsion system to stop the spinning and regain control. If that can be done, NASA and Katalyst will then have to evaluate if the mission can proceed as planned.

Swift's orbit has been decaying for years, and the observatory is unable to boost its orbit on its own. Thus, LINK was designed to meet up with Swift in low Earth orbit and spend some time studying the observatory to determine how best to grab onto it with three robotic arms. Once it has linked up with Swift, LINK should be able to use its own thrusters to boost the observatory to a higher orbit and extend Swift's life.

The Swift observatory, officially known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, was launched in 2004 at a cost of $250 million. The Swift Boost mission only cost NASA $30 million.

Over the last 22 years, Swift has been searching the sky for gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy astrophysics phenomena in the cosmos. In 2022, the observatory spotted a gamma-ray burst nicknamed the "BOAT," short for Brightest of All Time. At the time of discovery, it was the most powerful space explosion ever seen.

SpaceX launched a secret reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government early on Thursday morning (July 30).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, kicking off the mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-95.

The launch occurred at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 GMT).

We know very little about NROL-95; the NRO, which operates the country's fleet of spy satellites, has provided no details about the payload or its activities.

The agency has revealed the NROL-95 mission patch. It depicts a snarling ferret with a nighttime sky in the background and the words "We are the Champions" on the emblem's lower border.

"The ferret, a clever creature, embodies agility and resilience — key traits for exploration. Its confident grin and bright eyes reflect a spirit of victory in a realm where determination meets adventure," NRO officials said in an NROL-95 mission description.

"The bold phrase 'We are the Champions' encapsulates the camaraderie and pride shared among those on this purposeful mission," they added.

NROL-95 was the fourth NRO launch of 2026. The other three — NROL-105 in January, NROL-172 in May and NROL-179 in June — also flew aboard Falcon 9s, but from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Those three other missions were devoted to building out the NRO's "proliferated architecture" constellation, which will consist of hundreds of relatively small, cost-efficient reconnaissance satellites in Earth orbit.

On Thursday, the Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a landing at Cape Canaveral about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the seventh mission for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

SpaceX cut off its livestream shortly thereafter, at the request of the agency.

The best smart telescopes have transformed astrophotography over the past few years, combining small telescope optics and automated mounts with dashcam-style camera sensors and image-processing software. The result? Compact devices that can be controlled entirely from a smartphone. Impressively, the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini pushes that concept even further.

Roughly the size of a thick paperback book, it’s one of the smallest smart telescopes yet produced — tiny enough to fit in a jacket pocket while still capable of imaging nebulae, star clusters, the moon and even sunspots. It's also one of the best telescopes for beginners.

Positioned below the larger Dwarf 3 in DwarfLab’s lineup, the Mini sacrifices aperture and resolution for portability. It uses a 30mm refractor paired with Sony’s IMX662 sensor and relies on automated stacking to gradually reveal deep-sky objects. The telescope connects to a phone via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and handles alignment, tracking and imaging automatically through the DwarfLab app.

With built-in filters, optional equatorial tracking, and advanced software features such as Mega Stack and Stellar Studio processing, the Dwarf Mini is aimed at beginners and traveling astrophotographers who want a compact, automated imaging system that doesn’t require lots of extra kit — and works well even in light-polluted cities.

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope review

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini: Design

• Ultra-compact 30mm refractor telescope
• Internal motorized filter wheel
• Magnetic solar filter
• Lightweight design
• Ideal for travel and eclipse chasing

The defining characteristic of the Dwarf Mini is its size. The body includes a 360-degree rotating base and an articulating lens arm that moves through 225 degrees, allowing the telescope to cover most of the sky. It's significantly smaller than its competitors, including the larger Dwarf 3, making it easy to pack for travel. In fact, it’s easily small enough to slip into a camera bag or carry-on luggage, making it an appealing option for traveling astrophotographers — perhaps including eclipse chasers preparing for the upcoming trio of total solar eclipses beginning in 2026, since a magnetic solar filter is included in the box. Nice touch!

The telescope itself is a 30mm f/5 refractor with a focal length of 150mm. This produces a field of view of about 2.4 degrees, roughly five times the apparent diameter of the full moon. That optical system is paired with a Sony IMX662 sensor, a 1/2.8-inch sensor capable of 2.1MP resolution (1080p). This sensor is all about low noise and sensitivity, making it well-suited to short astrophotography exposures, but not to high-resolution images. Compared with the Dwarf 3’s Sony IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor, which delivers 8.3MP and 4K resolution, the Mini is a step down in terms of detail. However, in practice, the difference is smaller than expected, particularly after image stacking and processing.

The device also features a motorized internal filter wheel, allowing users to switch between broadband and dual-narrowband filters directly in the app to mitigate light pollution and better image nebulae. This avoids the need to install external filters, which are an add-on accessory with some smart telescopes.

The box includes a magnetic solar filter, a USB-C charging cable and a lens cloth. However, a small tripod is not included in the box, which feels like an omission given the Mini’s travel-friendly design. That's not a deal-breaker since any small tabletop (or full-size) tripod can be used, but the all-in-one feel is sacrificed.

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini: Performance

• Reveals deep-sky objects even under light pollution
• Plate-solves stars and stacks short exposures
• Mega Stack combines data from multiple sessions

The Dwarf Mini performs surprisingly well considering its small optics. During testing, it proved capable of capturing bright deep-sky targets such as the Orion Nebula (M42) and the Pleiades (M45), as well as open clusters like M44, even from suburban skies.

Smart telescopes compensate for small apertures by stacking many short exposures over time, gradually building up a deeper image. In standard alt-az mode, exposures are typically limited to around 10-15 seconds to prevent field rotation (which can cause blur). This technique allows the telescope to perform well even under heavy light pollution and/or strong moonlight, making it particularly useful for urban astronomers, where the chance of seeing faint nebulae is virtually zero.

One particularly useful feature is Mega Stack, which combines multiple imaging sessions of the same targets. Instead of capturing everything in a single session, data from several shorter sessions can be added later — even months or years later — to produce deeper images. That's handy when windows of clear skies are few, or if you plan occasional trips to dark skies where better data might be possible.

For more advanced imaging, the telescope also supports an equatorial (EQ) tracking mode, something professional astrophotographers insist upon. EQ mode may not be essential on a travel-friendly smart telescope like this, but its inclusion is impressive. It requires the purchase of an equatorial wedge, such as Dwarf Mini’s Mini Tripod accessory, which we were not able to test during this review. After a simple alignment with Polaris, the mount tracks the sky’s rotation, allowing exposures of up to 90 seconds. It can make a marked difference with very faint targets — though it’s not an essential feature on a smart telescope aimed at beginners.

Daytime performance is also strong. With the included solar filter, the Mini easily captured sunspots and solar activity, while lunar images also showed impressive crater detail.

The main limitation is resolution. The 2MP sensor produces images that look excellent on smartphones and social media, but they lack the detail needed for large prints or serious astrophotography. But for a telescope this small, the results are genuinely impressive.

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini: Functionality

• Smartphone control via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
• Sky Atlas feature for automatic target selection
• Manual pointing and mosaic imaging modes

The Dwarf Mini is designed to be controlled entirely through the DwarfLab smartphone app, which connects via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Once connected, users can browse a built-in sky atlas, which displays objects currently visible from their location. Selecting an object prompts the telescope to plate-solve the surrounding stars, automatically align itself, slew to the target and begin stacking exposures. Imaging sessions can be stopped at any point if you’re happy with the result so far. The app also displays session details such as exposure count and total integration time.

For users who want more control, the telescope can also be manually aimed at any patch of sky, which is particularly useful when imaging newly discovered comets or objects not yet included in the atlas database. For objects larger than its field of view, such as the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), Mini has a mosaic mode, which allows the telescope to capture multiple adjacent frames and stitch them together.

Captured images can then be processed using Stellar Studio, DwarfLab’s built-in image processing software, which is very good at removing noise and adding contrast. Images can be saved in JPG, TIFF or FITS formats, giving beginners a set of sharing-friendly options and more advanced users the chance to download files into desktop processing software.

It’s all remarkably easy to operate once you’re comfortable with how the app works. Beginners can capture solar, lunar and deep-sky images within minutes of set-up, while more experienced astrophotographers can still access advanced features such as EQ tracking and mosaic imaging.

Firmware updates are frequent and install easily through the app, so it’s worth connecting the telescope to your home Wi-Fi before heading to a dark-sky site — you never know when new features will appear!

Should you buy the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope?

The DwarfLab Dwarf Mini offers a tempting combination of portability, automation and surprisingly capable astrophotography performance. It won’t replace a full astrophotography setup, but for beginners, urban astronomers, travelers and eclipse chasers, it provides an easy way to capture the night sky — and the sun — without bulky and expensive equipment.

If the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope isn't for you

If you're after something with a little higher resolution, the DwarfLab Dwarf 3 is a larger, more powerful version with a 4K sensor and a slightly larger aperture.

ZWO Seestar S30 is a similar smart telescope with automated tracking and an included tabletop tripod, though it's recently been surpassed by the slightly pricier ZWO Seestar S30 Pro, a higher-resolution alternative that boasts superior optics and imaging.

For an overview of the top telescopes in this category, read our 2026 guide to the best smart telescopes.

User reviews

Online reviews of the Dwarf Mini often highlight its portability, simplicity and image quality. One reviewer described it as a “great piece of kit for deep space astrophotography.”

Another wrote: “I had no trouble getting it imaging within a few minutes out of the box,” praising the image quality, autofocus, GoTo accuracy, tracking, and the app. “It's a brilliant piece of kit,” said another user.

However, several users also reported poor quality in planetary images — and that’s certainly true (though it can find the moons of Jupiter).

How we tested the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope

Our observations took place on a few clear nights during February and March 2026, in temperatures down to lows of 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) and highs of about 54 F (12 C). Light pollution was between 5 and 6 on the Bortle scale — urban conditions with bright city lighting. Battery life averaged around 4 hours, though longer imaging sessions were supported using an external USB power bank connected to the telescope's USB-C slot.

SYFY’s optimistic space opera series, "The Ark," embarks upon its third thrilling season today, occupying a unique entertainment spot as the only weekly scripted sci-fi series currently on regular broadcast television.

With an impressive creative resume featuring executive producers Dean Devlin ("Stargate," "Independence Day") and Jonathan Glassner ("Stargate SG-1") and a hopeful premise about humanity’s search for a new home amid the stars, it’s a refreshing show perfect for a laidback, summertime watch.

Season 3 delivers more dangerous exoplanets inhabited by ravenous toothy monsters, the mystery of an alien stone tablet, and Captain Sharon Garnet’s Ark One searching for long-lost colonists. We caught up with Devlin to find out more about this third outing.

"We got so lucky with this cast," Devlin tells Space. "Some were cast from Canada, some from Spain, from England, and a lot of them were from Serbia. You never know if they’re going to gel, if they’re going to get along, if there's going to be any egos. It's truly an amazing group of individuals."

Talking more on the unique shooting location, Devlin notes, "I do also believe that because we shoot this show in Serbia, it kind of forces them to live together in a way. They work together, they go out to dinners together. They really spend all their time together, and I think it's created a bond off-screen that you can really see on screen."

Season 3 accelerates all the careful plot mechanisms set up in the previous outings, and the result is a colorful blend of space fantasy action and interpersonal melodrama that makes for good old-fashioned fun.

"Season one had been this crazy hit, and it did so much better than anyone thought," he explains. "While we were making season two, we had discussions about maybe splitting the show into two shows. And that one show takes place on the new colony, and the other show takes place rescuing people. When the season was over, we thought maybe we’d just stick with one show. Then suddenly I had two shows I had to cram into one show. It became twice as big with more locations, more cast, and more adventures.

"We went nuts. We went wildly over budget and just made the biggest, craziest season we could possibly imagine. Our industry has moved so far into streaming, which is great in so many ways. But the weekly viewing on cable is still something that I really treasure and really am grateful that I have a chance to do that. We have two shows doing that this summer [with TNT's "The Librarians: The Next Chapter"] and in both situations we're the only scripted show on each network."

Devlin hints that viewers are going to be shocked at some of the unexpected surprises this season and where it goes on a character level.

"That's always been the strength of this show," he adds. "These characters and bringing out new information about them and seeing how that causes conflicts amongst our group and how they overcome those conflicts. 'The Ark' always has had a mystery element, but this year the mystery box is enormous.”

One thing that’s immediately noticeable is the impressive range of visual effects on 'The Ark' this year, and Devlin admits that this is where a good chunk of the budget-busting occurred.

"The main VFX team is in Serbia, a company called Fried, and they’ve been with us this whole time. I put another team together in Los Angeles that used to be part of our Electric Entertainment effects company. So we basically had two houses because we wanted to step it up; we had a lot more shots to do, and we split the work between us. I’m really proud of the collaboration. In season one, I promised everybody that there were no aliens on 'The Ark,' but maybe down the line. Well, I guess we’re down the line.

"This is a season where if you've never seen the show before, you can jump right in. But if you have been with us for the whole journey, you're going to get some extra love by the time we get to the end of the season. This may be the most emotional ending of a season we've ever done, and I'm anxious to watch people go on that ride with us.”

Starring Christie Burke, Reece Ritchie, Richard Fleeshman, Pavle Jerinic, Stacey Read, Samantha Glassner and Ryan Adams, SYFY's "The Ark" Season 3 launches weekly starting Wednesday, July 29, 2026.

SpaceX's Starship V3 looks absolutely seaworthy in this new photo taken days after its most recent flight test.

What is it?

SpaceX launched its Starship vehicle on July 24, sending the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) Starship Version 3 (V3) rocket on a suborbital trajectory that saw the rocket's upper stage make its softest splashdown yet.

In fact, the landing was so smooth that Starship is still floating off the coast of Western Australia. SpaceX shared the photo of Starship on Tuesday (July 28), posting on X that the vehicle is "still afloat in the Indian Ocean."

The scorch-streaked 171-foot (52-meter) Starship upper stage resembles an orca or a submarine in the photo, resting mostly out of the water.

Why is it incredible?

It wasn't just the splashdown that was so stunning. Video taken from aboard Starship and from the Starlink satellites that were deployed alongside the upper stage during Flight Test 13 truly looks like the stuff of sci-fi.

Starship, which consists of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and the somewhat-confusingly-named upper stage known as Starship (or Ship), is designed to be rapidly reusable. That means, if all goes according to plan, SpaceX will eventually be able to land both stages and have them refueled, inspected and ready for flight again in a matter of days.

But there are still major hurdles to cross before that goal is ever reached. SpaceX will have to figure out how to make Starship's heatshield more durable and reusable, a feat some experts call a "dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability," according to Ars Technica.

Nevertheless, having a fully intact second stage rocket floating on the ocean four days after a flight test is quite a feat.