Tag: space

Trump signs order to ease commercial spaceflight regulations

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that he claimed would ease regulations that govern commercial rocket launches.

The order directs the US transportation secretary to eliminate or expedite environmental reviews for launch licenses given by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

“Inefficient permitting processes discourage investment and innovation, limiting the ability of US companies to lead in global space markets,” the executive order reads.

It also calls for the cancellation of “outdated, redundant or overly restrictive rules for launch and reentry vehicles,” according to a statement released by the White House.

Could the move benefit Elon Musk?

Trump’s latest executive order also states that “inefficient” permitting processes “discourage investment and innovation,” which in turn limits US companies’ ability to lead in global space markets.

The move could benefit private space companies such as SpaceX, the company owned by former Trump advisor Elon Musk, despite the two falling out publicly in recent months.

The company — which dominates the global private space launches market — plans missions to the Moon and Mars using its Starship rockets, which saw a series of setbackslastly in June as a routine test ended up in an explosion.

Environment groups slam executive order

Environmental groups have criticized Trump’s moves to deregulate commercial spaceflight.

“This reckless order puts people and wildlife at risk from private companies launching giant rockets that often explode and wreak devastation on surrounding areas,” Jared Margolis of the US-based nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.

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Something Massive Could Still Be Hiding in The Shadows of Our Solar System

Is there a massive undiscovered planet on the outer reaches of the Solar System? The idea has been around since before the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s.

Labelled as planet X, prominent astronomers had put it forward as an explanation for Uranus‘s orbit, which drifts from the path of orbital motion that physics would expect it to follow. The gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet, several times larger than Earth, was seen as a possible reason for the discrepancy.

That mystery was ultimately explained by a recalculation of Neptune’s mass in the 1990s, but then a new theory of a potential planet nine was put forward in 2016 by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology).

Their theory relates to the Kuiper Belt, a giant belt of dwarf planets, asteroids and other matter that lies beyond Neptune (and includes Pluto). Many Kuiper Belt objects – also referred to as trans-Neptunian objects – have been discovered orbiting the Sun, but like Uranus they don’t do so in a continuous expected direction.

Batygin and Brown argued that something with a large gravitational pull must be affecting their orbit, and proposed planet nine as a potential explanation.

This would be comparable to what happens with our own Moon. It orbits the Sun every 365.25 days, in line with what you would expect in view of their distance apart.

However, the Earth’s gravitational pull is such that the Moon also orbits the planet every 27 days. From the point of view of an outside observer, the Moon moves in a spiralling motion as a result. Similarly, many objects in the Kuiper Belt show signs of their orbits being affected by more than just the Sun’s gravity.

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The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert

If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force’s Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

Dozens of satellites are being launched each week, primarily by SpaceX to continue deploying the Starlink broadband network. The US military has advance notice of these launches—most of them originate from Space Force property—and knows exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.

That’s usually not the case when China or Russia (and occasionally Iran or North Korea) launches something into orbit. With rare exceptions, like human spaceflight missions, Chinese and Russian officials don’t publish any specifics about what their rockets are carrying or what altitude they’re going to.

That creates a problem for military operators tasked with monitoring traffic in orbit and breeds anxiety among US forces responsible for making sure potential adversaries don’t gain an edge in space. Will this launch deploy something that can destroy or disable a US satellite? Will this new satellite have a new capability to surveil allied forces on the ground or at sea?

Of course, this is precisely the point of keeping launch details under wraps. The US government doesn’t publish orbital data on its most sensitive satellites, such as spy craft collecting intelligence on foreign governments.

But you can’t hide in low-Earth orbit, a region extending hundreds of miles into space. Col. Raj Agrawal, who commanded Mission Delta 2 until earlier this month, knows this all too well. Agrawal handed over command to Col. Barry Croker as planned after a two-year tour of duty at Mission Delta 2.

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Space-Based Missile Interceptors For Golden Dome Being Tested By Northrop

Northrop Grumman is conducting ground-based testing related to space-based interceptors as part of a competition for that segment of the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Interceptors deployed in orbit are currently billed as a critical component of the overall Golden Dome plan, but actually fielding this capability presents significant technical challenges.

Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman’s CEO, highlighted the company’s work on space-based interceptors, as well as broader business opportunities stemming from Golden Dome, during a quarterly earnings call today. Golden Dome is presently envisioned as a multi-part anti-missile architecture incorporating a swath of existing and future capabilities in space and within the Earth’s atmosphere, which will start entering into operational service by 2028. Golden Dome was originally dubbed Iron Dome before the name was changed earlier this year. It is also now being managed by an office that reports directly to the deputy secretary of defense.

“As we look to Golden Dome for America, we see Northrop Grumman playing a crucial role in supporting the administration’s goal to move with speed and have initial operating capability in place within the next few years,” Warden said today. “This includes current products that can be brought to bear, like IBCS [Integrated Battle Command System], G/ATOR [AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar], Triton [drones], and programs in our restricted portfolio, just to name a few. It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now.”

“These are ground-based tests today, and we are in competition, obviously, so not a lot of detail that I can provide here,” Warden added. “It is the capability that we believe can be accelerated and into the time frame that the administration is looking for.”

Warden declined to respond directly to a question about how the space-based interceptors Northrop Grumman is developing now will actually defeat their targets. TWZ has reached out to the company for additional information.

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Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?

Today I co-authored an intriguing new paper with the brilliant collaborators Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in London, UK. The paper is accessible here.

One of the solutions to Enrico Fermi’s question about extraterrestrials: “where is everybody?” is offered by the dark forest hypothesis, popularized by Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel “The Dark Forest.” This hypothesis proposes that our cosmic neighborhood is dangerous, filled with intelligent civilizations that are hostile and silent to avoid detection by potential predators. In this context, the silence in searches for radio signals by the SETI community is not caused by the lack of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations, but is instead a consequence of them fearing mutual destruction.

Our paper explores the possibility that the recently discovered interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, may provide evidence in support of the dark forest hypothesis. This new interstellar interloper has displayed a number of anomalous characteristics, some of which were summarized in an essay that I wrote shortly after its discovery. In particular:

1. The retrograde orbital plane (defined by the orbital angular momentum vector) of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth — the so-called ecliptic plane. The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%.

2. As I showed in a recent paper, the brightness of 3I/ATLAS implies an object that is ~20 kilometers in diameter (for a typical albedo of ~5%), too large for an interstellar asteroid. We should have detected a million objects below the ~100-meters scale of the first reported interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua for each ~20-kilometer object.

3. No spectral features of cometary gas are found in spectroscopic observations of 3I/ATLAS. The detected reddening of reflected sunlight could originate from the surface of the object. Related data can be found here and here. The fuzz observed around 3I/ATLAS (see images here, here and here) is inconclusive given the motion of the object and the inevitable smearing of its image over the exposure time.

4. For its orbital parameters, 3I/ATLAS is synchronized to approach unusually close to Venus (0.65au where 1au is the Earth-Sun separation), Mars (0.19au) and Jupiter (0.36au), with a cumulative probability of 0.005% relative to orbits with the same orbital parameters but a random arrival time.

5. 3I/ATLAS achieves perihelion on the opposite side of the Sun relative to Earth. This could be intentional to avoid detailed observations from Earth-based telescopes when the object is brightest or when gadgets are sent to Earth from that hidden vantage point. The retrograde trajectory at a perihelion speed of 68 kilometers per second, opposite to the direction of motion of the Earth around the Sun at 30 kilometers per second, makes the velocity difference between Earth and 3I/ATLAS 98 kilometers per second. It is therefore impractical for earthlings to land on 3I/ATLAS at closest approach by boarding chemical rockets, since our best rockets reach at most a third of that speed.

6. The optimal point for a reverse Solar Oberth maneuver to become bound to the Sun is at perihelion. In an Oberth maneuver, the thrust of a spacecraft is applied at its maximum orbital speed, namely at periapsis, so as to maximize the resulting change in kinetic energy. This applies both to accelerating to achieve Solar System escape, or alternatively to slow down from a high speed (a `reverse Oberth maneuver’) in order to break, stay bound to the Sun and potentially visit a planet like Earth. It is this optimal breaking point for 3I/ATLAS that is obscured from our view by the Sun.

7. The direction from where 3I/ATLAS is coming is oriented towards the bright Milky-Way center, where crowding by background stars made its detection difficult prior to July 2025. Figures 1 and 2 in our paper show that if astronomers were to detect 3I/ATLAS more than a year earlier, then we would have had an opportunity to launch a spacecraft that could have intercepted 3I/ATLAS along its path. By now, such an interception is not feasible with chemical rockets.

8. The velocity thrusts needed for launches of gadgets out of 3I/ATLAS to intercept Venus, Mars, or Jupiter are smaller than 5 kilometers per second, achievable by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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Astronomers say new interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS is ‘very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen’

The recently discovered interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS may be one of the oldest comets ever seen by humanity.

The object was already exciting to astronomers as only the third space object seen entering the solar system from beyond its limits, the other two being 1I/’Oumuamua seen in 2017 and 2I/Borisov detected in 2019.

However, new research has shown this potentially “water ice-rich” visitor could be even more extraordinary than initially believed. 3I/ATLAS could be around 3 billion years older than our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and thus any comet ever before observed.

University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins is part of a team of scientists that think 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope, is around 7 billion years old.

“All non-interstellar comets, such as Halley’s comet, formed at the same time as our solar system, so they are up to 4.5 billion years old,” Hopkins said in a statement. “But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far, our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen.”

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China’s Space “Dogfighters” and Kill Mesh: Practicing to Destroy U.S. Satellites and Ships at Sea

China is conducting increasingly sophisticated satellite maneuvers in orbit, essentially rehearsing attacks on U.S. space-based infrastructure critical for navigation, communication, and missile targeting. China’s expanding space capabilities also extend to what military officials call a “kill mesh”, a networked targeting system that connects multiple sensors, platforms, and weapons in a decentralized web where data flows in multiple directions and engagements can occur from several nodes simultaneously. Apart from disrupting U.S. satellites and space assets, this kill mesh can also be used to target U.S. ships at sea.

At the McAleese defense conference in March 2025, U.S. Space Force Vice Chief of Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein reported that five Chinese space objects, three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two Shijian-6 intelligence-gathering spacecraft, were observed executing synchronized, controlled maneuvers in low Earth orbit.

These exercises, described by Space Force as “dogfighting in space,” are not routine operations. “They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to conduct on-orbit operations from one satellite to another,” Guetlein warned. In the general’s estimation, these satellites are training to disable or destroy American space assets.

Beyond physical attacks, China has also expanded its electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Its arsenal includes jamming systems targeting GPS, radar, and multiple communications platforms. In 2015, China used GPS jamming to interfere with U.S. surveillance flights over the Spratly Islands, an early example of its willingness to disrupt American drone networks and space-based positioning systems.

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Lockheed Martin offers to rescue Mars mission from budget death

NASA’s beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission may get a reprieve from an unexpected source. Lockheed Martin has proposed a streamlined, lower-cost alternative that could slash the mission’s price tag by more than half.

Facing significant funding cuts across multiple programs, NASA’s ambitious international effort to retrieve Martian samples and return them to Earth is under threat. Already jeopardized by Russia’s withdrawal from the program following its invasion of Ukraine, the mission now faces potential cancellation due to shifting priorities within the current US administration.

Under new agency guidelines, NASA has been ordered to focus more on deep-space crewed missions to the Moon and Mars, along with other endeavors involving cutting-edge technology, while axing projects that have been marked by massive spending without a proportionate scientific return.

One prime candidate for the chop is the Mars Sample Return mission, which is a staggeringly ambitious international program involving many nations that is tasked with using multiple spacecraft to collect samples from the surface of Mars and then return them to Earth for in-depth laboratory analysis.

The mission’s first phase is already underway, with NASA’s Perseverance rover exploring the surface of Mars. As it traverses the dunes and dead river beds that last saw water two billion years ago, it’s been collecting drilling samples that have been sealed in special container tubes left behind on the ground like a paper trail in a cosmic game of Hares & Hounds.

The idea is that a second lander will eventually set down in the vicinity of the first and deploy a second rover that will follow the path blazed by the nuclear-powered Perseverance and collect the tubes. These will be stored in a special sealed container, which will be placed in a small rocket that will be fired into orbit around Mars where it will rendezvous with yet another spacecraft for return to Earth.

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NASA confirms that mysterious object shooting through the solar system is an ‘interstellar visitor’ — and it has a new name

NASA scientists have confirmed that a mysterious object shooting toward us through the solar system is an “interstellar object” — only the third of its kind ever seen. Experts have also given the cosmic interloper an official name, and revealed new information about its origins and trajectory.

News of the extrasolar entity, initially dubbed A11pl3Z, broke on Tuesday (July 1), when NASA and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) both listed it as a confirmed object. It was first discovered in data collected between June 25 and June 29 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which automatically scans the night sky using telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa. Multiple telescopes across the world have subsequently spotted the object in observation data that date back to June 14.

The object is traveling toward the sun extremely fast, at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h), and observations suggest that it is set on an extremely flat and straight trajectory, unlike anything else in the solar system. This led many experts to speculate that it originated from beyond the sun’s gravitational influence and has enough momentum to shoot straight through our cosmic neighborhood without slowing down.

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Planetary Defenders Track Fast-Moving “Interstellar Object” Through Solar System

On Wednesday, the European Space Agency revealed that its Planetary Defenders are tracking a fast-moving “interstellar object” zipping through the solar system. While some might hope it’s an alien spacecraft—finally giving Paul Krugman a win—chances are it’s just another space rock. 

“Astronomers may have just discovered the third interstellar object passing through the Solar System!” ESA said, adding, “ESA’s Planetary Defenders are observing the object, provisionally known as A11pl3Z, right now using telescopes around the world.” 

It’s still unclear whether A11pl3Z is a rocky asteroid, an icy comet, or something else entirely. Its size and shape also remain unknown. NASA has confirmed it is actively tracking the object, while astronomers say more observations are needed to determine its origin. 

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