Tag: space

How the Pentagon Is Quietly Turning Laser Communications Into the Backbone of Future Space Warfare

Military communications have long depended on radio waves bouncing invisibly across land, sea, air, and space. However, as satellites multiply in orbit and the electromagnetic spectrum grows increasingly contested, the limits of traditional radio-frequency links are becoming harder to ignore.

Now, a new empirical study suggests that a less visible—and far more powerful—alternative is edging closer to practical, operational use: laser-based communications that can adapt on the fly to harsh and unpredictable conditions.

In a paper published in Optical Engineering, researchers from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) describe the development and testing of a new optical receiver designed to support the SDA’s latest laser communication standard.

The research focuses on how to reliably receive laser signals that fluctuate wildly in strength as satellites race overhead—but its implications extend well beyond the lab.

At stake is whether the U.S. military can build a resilient, high-speed space communications backbone capable of supporting future defense operations.

The study focuses on the Space Development Agency’s Optical Communication Terminal standard, a set of specifications intended to ensure that laser communication systems built by different vendors can communicate with one another.

Interoperability is central to SDA’s “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture” (PWSA), a satellite architecture composed of hundreds of relatively small spacecraft operating together in low Earth orbit.

Laser links promise far higher data rates than radio systems and are inherently harder to jam or intercept. However, they also introduce new technical hurdles, especially when signals must pass through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.

“The Space Development Agency (SDA) has developed an Optical Communication Terminal standard to ensure system interoperability among a number of industry partners by defining critical technical specifications ranging from initial pointing, acquisition, and tracking to data modulation formats and error-correction protocols,” researchers explain.

That standard, now in its fourth major revision, adds support for what are known as burst-mode waveforms—signals that trade continuous transmission for short, intense pulses.

The appeal of burst mode lies in flexibility. When a satellite passes over a ground station, the strength of its laser signal can vary by roughly 20 decibels from start to finish due to changing distance, pointing geometry, and atmospheric distortion.

Rather than designing a system for worst-case conditions and accepting inefficiency the rest of the time, burst-mode signaling allows operators to dynamically sacrifice data rate in exchange for greater signal margin. To put it simply, the link can slow down when conditions are bad, rather than dropping out entirely.

To test how well this concept works in practice, researchers built and characterized a prototype ground receiver optimized for the SDA standard’s new burst-mode formats.

Unlike more complex coherent optical systems, the receiver relies on a large-area avalanche photodiode (APD) that can collect distorted light without the need for adaptive optics. That choice reflects a broader design philosophy: favoring robustness and simplicity over maximum theoretical performance.

“Burst-mode waveforms offer extended receiver power efficiency at the expense of data rate for longer range applications or size, weight, and power constrained terminals,” researchers explain.

For a mobile ground station, a ship at sea, or even an aircraft receiving data from space, maintaining a reliable link can matter more than pushing the highest possible throughput at every moment.

The experiments described in the paper show that the prototype receiver performs close to theoretical expectations across a wide range of operating conditions, particularly once front-end signal conditioning is applied.

While researchers stop short of claiming a fully fielded system, they describe it as an initial demonstration of an SDA-compliant burst-mode optical receiver—an important milestone for a standard intended to underpin real-world deployments.

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CONFIRMED: NASA’s Crew-11 To Make Early Return to Earth After ‘Serious Medical Condition’ With Astronaut 

Medical emergency in space.

Once again, an emergency in space makes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) change its plans in an urgent fashion, after two astronauts were left stranded in orbit by a faulty Boeing Starliner craft.

This time, a ‘serious medical condition’ with a crew member aboard the International Space Station will make NASA bring the astronaut and the three crewmates back to Earth months earlier than planned.

This is the first emergency of its kind in the ISS’ 25-year history.

Reuters reported:

“NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters on Thursday in a short-notice press conference in Washington that he and medical officials made the decision to return the astronaut, whom he did not identify, because ‘the capability to diagnose and treat this properly does not live on the International Space Station’.”

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A Mysterious “Medical Concern” in Space Caused NASA to Cancel a Spacewalk—Here’s Everything We Know

A concerning development began unfolding in orbit on Wednesday, as NASA officials revealed a health incident that led to the postponement of a planned spacewalk aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

“NASA is postponing the Thursday, Jan. 8, spacewalk,” read a portion of a statement that appeared on the official ISS blog on January 7, adding that NASA officials were “monitoring a medical concern with a crew member that arose Wednesday afternoon aboard the orbital complex.”

The unnerving news from NASA arrived in the middle of a week already filled with unrest related to a tragic incident in Minneapolis, which involved the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old woman by an agent with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In NASA’s initial update, few details were provided about the nature of the “medical concern” that led to the postponement of the spacewalk, citing privacy issues that the agency said made it inappropriate “for NASA to share more details about the crew member” at that time.

“The situation is stable,” the statement from NASA Communications added, noting that “NASA will share additional details, including a new date for the upcoming spacewalk, later.”

Expedition 74 Sees an Interruption

The developments aboard the ISS arrived as NASA’s Expedition 74 crew had been completing final preparation for what would have been its first spacewalk of 2026.

According to initial plans, astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman were scheduled to conduct a six-and-a-half-hour excursion that would begin a series of power system upgrades, including installing hardware and routing cables for future roll-out solar arrays.

In addition to plans related to the spacewalk, the ISS crew has been involved in research this week that includes physics and microbiology experiments, with additional research involving Earth observation, studies on cryogenic fluid storage, ultraviolet microbial disinfection, and AI-assisted transcription of crew activity logs.

Amid the Expedition 74 team’s work, international crew members were also providing support for their operations, according to an update issued at the ISS blog earlier on the same day that the medical situation was later revealed. At that time, NASA officials said support teams had continued to undertake overnight imaging of Earth and maintenance of station systems, operations which were expected to continue during Thursday’s planned spacewalk.

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BACK TO THE MOON: NASA’s Artemis II Set To Send Astronauts Into Lunar Orbit as Soon as February

During the second year of Donald J. Trump’s second term, the US is going to make the moon great again.

This elusive goal, that no nation has attained since way back in 1972, is the number one priority of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), pushing the Mars mission further down the line.

The Artemis’ mission is to return American astronauts to the moon and establish a permanent lunar base — and it is finally about to launch its first crewed flight.

CNN reported:

“The landmark mission, dubbed Artemis II, is on track to lift off as soon as February. The highly anticipated endeavor will mark the first time astronauts have ventured beyond the bounds of near-Earth orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

Artemis II will send a group of four astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen — on a trip around the moon.”

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Trump signs order to put Americans on the moon by 2028. But is it feasible?

President Trump issued an executive order on Thursday urging NASA to put Americans on the moon by 2028, signing it the same day NASA’s new Senate-confirmed administrator Jared Isaacman took office. 

The order, titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” emphasizes the role of the upcoming Artemis missions for Americans to journey to the moon and Mars.

NASA has targeted April 2026 for the launch of Artemis II. It would take the American astronauts in orbit around the moon — the furthest mission into deep space in human history. 

Artemis III would put people on the surface of the moon for the first time in the 21st century. NASA’s website has listed a mid-2027 launch date. 

But former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the Senate Commerce Committee in a September hearing he doesn’t think the U.S. will be able to land astronauts on the moon by that date, nor by China’s stated goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2030. 

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Orbital Data Centers Will “Bypass Earth-Based” Constraints

Last week, readers were briefed on the emerging theme of data centers in low Earth orbit, a concept now openly discussed by Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, as energy availability and infrastructure constraints on land increasingly emerge as major bottlenecks to data center buildouts through the end of this decade and well into the 2030s.

Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud has released a white paper outlining a case for operating a constellation of artificial intelligence data centers in space as a practical solution to Earth’s looming power crunch, cooling woes, and permitting land constraints.

Terrestrial data center projects will reach capacity limits as AI workloads scale to multi-gigawatt levels, while electricity demand and grid bottlenecks worsen over the next several years. Orbital data centers aim to bypass these constraints by using near-continuous, high-intensity solar power, passive radiative cooling to deep space, and modular designs that scale quickly, launched into orbit via SpaceX rockets.

“Orbital data centers can leverage lower cooling costs using passive radiative cooling in space to directly achieve low coolant temperatures. Perhaps most importantly, they can be scaled almost indefinitely without the physical or permitting constraints faced on Earth, using modularity to deploy them rapidly,” Starcloud wrote in the report.

Starcloud continued, “With new, reusable, cost-effective heavy-lift launch vehicles set to enter service, combined with the proliferation of in-orbit networking, the timing for this opportunity is ideal.”

Already, the startup has launched its Starcloud-1 satellite carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU, the most powerful compute chip ever sent into space. Using the H100, Starcloud successfully trained NanoGPT, a lightweight language model, on the complete works of Shakespeare, making it the first AI model trained in space.

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New Warp-Drive Propulsion Concept Moves Fictional Starships Closer to Engineering Reality

A new warp-drive study proposes a novel segmented design that could sidestep many of the problems in the original decades-old concept, bringing the possibility of hyper-fast space travel one step closer to becoming a reality.

Warp drive theory has quickly evolved since the mid-90s, when a concept developed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre was first described in a landmark paper that provided a scientific basis for hyper-fast travel within general relativity.

While the concept of warp drives was initially popularized in the futuristic realm depicted in Star Trek, Alcubierre took the idea to paper, shaping the fictional idea into a conceptual reality—one that, someday, could potentially also be realized through advanced engineering.

“The resulting distortion,” Alcubierre wrote at the time, “is reminiscent of the ‘warp drive’ of science fiction,” though adding that “just as it happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.”

Since that time, aerospace engineer and applied physicist Harold “Sonny” White has been chipping away at the problem Alcubierre first posed. Now, White and his colleagues at Casimir have proposed a bold reimagining of faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive geometry, one that replaces the classic smooth “warp ring” with a set of discrete cylindrical structures, called warp nacelles, as he and his colleagues describe in a new paper. 

Building off of Alcubierre’s foundation of a spacetime “warp bubble,” White introduces a new framework that pinpoints exotic energy in tunable, engine-like structures, while the interior of the bubble remains stable and habitable to a prospective pilot.

“The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries that are both interior-flat and structurally segmented into cylindrical ‘nacelles,’” White told The Debrief in an email.

However, White’s newest take on the warp drive concept bears more than just a passing similarity to its fictional forebear.

“The resemblance to the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic,” White told The Debrief, “but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.”

“From my earlier work with the Alcubierre metric, I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles based on a nacelle-like topology,” White said. “The historical IXS Enterprise design was an early step in that direction. We envisioned that two warp rings placed in close proximity could generate a capsule-shaped warp bubble rather than the standard sphere.”

“That thought process showed how two distinct topological elements, in that case two rings, could be used to reshape and elongate a spherical bubble,” White added.  

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Hypersonics, AI, Space Weapons, & Directed Energy: Lawmakers Release Defense Bill As Expiring Obamacare Subsidies Marinate On Back-Burner

With Congress in its second-to-last week in session for this year, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee released the final bill text of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Sunday night, which allocates a topline of roughly $8 billion over the $892.6 billion the Department of Defense had requested, and what the House version of the NDAA provided which stuck to the Pentagon’s request. 

The NDAA is the annual law passed by Congress that sets the budget, policies, and legal authorities for the U.S. military and national defense programs. It shapes everything from troop pay to weapons development and foreign military aid.

“This year’s National Defense Authorization Act helps advance President Trump and Republicans’ Peace Through Strength Agenda by codifying 15 of President Trump’s executive orders, ending woke ideology at the Pentagon, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base, and restoring the warrior ethos,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in a Sunday statement. 

The $8B increase is a ‘compromise‘ – as the Senate tried to jack the budget up by $32 billion over the department’s request. According to Breaking Defense, Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, noted that appropriators would have the last word on the final budget, but was optimistic that the $8 bullion figure was in the ballpark.

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‘Ice Volcanoes’ Are Erupting All Over 3I/ATLAS, as Scientists Say the Alien Visitor “May be a Primitive Carbonaceous Object”

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be showing signs of active eruptions from “ice volcanoes” on its surface, according to new analysis of the unusual space object.

The discoveries, which build on observations that have revealed the comet’s surprisingly metal-rich interior, add to a growing number of factors that have prompted revised thinking on how comets form, and what future discoveries may await with the ongoing detection of similar interstellar objects in the years ahead.

3I/ATLAS, first discovered in July of this year, has been continuously tracked by astronomers throughout its visit through our solar system. These observations offered scientists a rare glimpse of a truly alien object, whose mysterious origins far beyond the gravitational or radiative influence of our Sun led it to exhibit several behaviors unique among comets.

Of key significance to observations of 3I/ATLAS is that its unusual behaviors offered clues to astronomers about how objects might exist in their natural state under cosmic conditions in which they formed billions of years ago.

The fact that the comet’s behaviors align with our expectations for how such pristine celestial objects would react once subjected to heat from a star like our Sun makes 3I/ATLAS a unique learning opportunity for studying not only interstellar comets, but also the chemistry and physics of distant planetary systems.

A Massive Surge in Ice Activity

Now, according to a new study by researchers Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, Maria Gritsevich, and Jürgen Blum, which recently appeared on the arXiv preprint server, photometric observations of the comet have revealed a significant sustained increase in brightness that occurred as the object approached approximately 2.5 astronomical units from the Sun.

This unique behavior was sudden, but it was hardly fleeting—the explosive outburst appeared to be long-lasting, and seemingly points to the activation of water ice as the comet was warmed during its approach toward the Sun.

However, the recent observations reveal more than just sudden evaporation due to ice melt, suggesting something even more fascinating may have been occurring: cryovolcanism.

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New Theory Suggests We’ve Been Wrong About Black Holes for 60 Years

How confusing inevitability with reality built decades of paradox.

What if general relativity never actually tells us that black holes already exist, but only that their formation is inevitable in an infinite future we can never observe? In a new theory, Daryl Janzen, a physicist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, questions whether we’ve mistaken mathematical inevitability for physical reality, and shows how much of our black hole story rests on that quiet leap.

Black holes are among the most captivating and scientifically intriguing phenomena in modern physics, inspiring both scientists and the public alike.

But do they really exist? What if they are only ever forming, never formed?

Just imagine — what if the whole edifice of black hole physics is built on an invalid logical inference that’s gone unnoticed (or unacknowledged?) for the better part of a century?

Inevitability is not actuality — that’s obvious enough. Yet for sixty years physicists have ignored relativity’s most basic rule, and we’ve taken for granted that the latter is implied by the former. Like fools walking around imagining we’re all dead because someday we’ll die, they look at the evidence that nothing can stop black holes from collapsing toward their horizons and imagine that a process which remains forever incomplete has already come to its end.

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