Space News & Blog Articles

A few years ago, asteroid mining was all the rage. With the commercial space sector rapidly growing, the dream of commercializing space seemed almost imminent. Basically, the notion of having platforms and spacecraft that could rendezvous and mine Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), then return them to space-based foundries, was right up there with sending commercial crews to Mars. After a great deal of speculation and ventures going under, these plans were placed on the back burner until the technology matured and other milestones could be accomplished first.

Black holes are often referred to as cosmic vacuum cleaners, indiscriminately swallowing everything that strays too close. The bigger they are, the hungrier they should be. But observations of seven nearby galaxy mergers have revealed something strange: even when presented with gas clouds, supermassive black holes often ‘refuse to eat.’

Beneath the Moon’s cratered surface lie networks of lava tubes and deep pits, natural caves that could shelter future lunar bases from cosmic radiation and wild temperature swings. These underground structures represent some of the most scientifically valuable areas in the Solar System, but they come with the very real challenge of simply getting there!

A thousand light years from Earth, something enormous is happening. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed, a swirling mass of gas and dust that spans nearly 640 billion km. To put that in perspective, it’s 40 times wider than our entire Solar System, from the Sun to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt where comets drift in the darkness.

At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.