technical updates

Starship just reached orbit for the first time, carrying satellites for SpaceX's Starlink program. Analysts disagree on whether that's a detour or the destination — and what of the company's plans for the Red Planet? Ten years ago, Elon Musk stood on stage at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, and unveiled plans for a giant spaceship to carry people to Mars. This past Sept. 28 — a decade and a day later — the descendant of that vehicle reached orbit for the first time , on Starship's 14th-ever test flight. The designs and hardware evolved greatly over those 10 years. For example, the 2016 design , called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), employed carbon fiber, but this gave way to the stainless-steel Starship, which SpaceX began testing in 2019 with short hops from its Texas site. Prototypes flew to high altitude and landed, and som...

NEW YORK — Set your phasers to back-to-school, space fans. Star Trek is going back to Starfleet Academy for season 2, and we finally have a release date. The sophomore season of " Star Trek: Starfleet Academy " will warp back to the small screen in March 2027 when the limited series returns for its final season on Paramount+ . The series, which follows a class of cadets balancing Starfleet classes, space adventures (and yes, some love) in the 32nd century, will return with its full cast and even add new faces, showrunners announced at a panel at New York Comic Con 2026 on Saturday (Oct. 10). "Season one is about letting go of who you were in the past to start again at Starfleet Academy," executive producer and co-showrunner Noga Landau said in the Star Trek panel. "Season two is about thinking that you knew who you were, only to realize that as you grow older, your life...

Vision (Paul Bettany) is laying low, working the pumps at an Edinburgh pub at the outset of new eight-part Marvel Television entry "VisionQuest", and understandably so given how much the synthezoid has been through. Resurrected and restored after being sacrificed for the greater good in "Avengers: Infinity War", albeit as an ever-more-disconnected version of what came before, he now spends every other waking hour retreating into a big white house deep within his mindspace, to chew the fat with AI agents J.A.R.V.I.S. (Brian D’Arcy), F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), D.U.M-E (Henry Lewis), U (Jonathan Sayer) and E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), and a wisecracking Ultron (James Spader). However, the threat posed by bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick) and the prospect of a reunion with his son conspire to draw him out of his stupor. Below, we explain the cheapest ways to stream "Vis...

SpaceX just broke an uncharacteristically long Starlink launch drought. The company sent 27 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) today (Oct. 12), launching them atop a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 8:28 p.m. EDT (5:28 p.m. local time; 0028 GMT on Oct. 13) It was the first Starlink mission for a Falcon 9 since Sept. 19 , which was another 27-satellite liftoff from Vandenberg. For some perspective on this recent gap: Between Aug. 19 and Sept. 6, a span of 19 days, SpaceX launched seven Starlink missions with Falcon 9s. The Falcon 9's first stage rests on the deck of a ship at sea shortly after the Oct. 12 launch. (Image credit: SpaceX) SpaceX did loft a batch of Starlinks after that, but it wasn't aboard a Falcon 9. The company's Starship megarocket carried 26 next-gen Starlink V3 craft on its 14th test flight, which to...

SpaceX will launch its latest cargo mission to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning (Oct. 13), and you can watch the action live. A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch a robotic Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday at 6:33 a.m. EDT (1033 GMT). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, starting at 6:15 a.m. EDT (1015 GMT). A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the company's Dragon spacecraft on the CRS-34 cargo mission to the ISS from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 15, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX) The launch will kick off the CRS-35 mission, so named because it will be the 35th that SpaceX flies under a Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. If all goes according to plan, Dragon will reach the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday (Oct. 15), docking autonomous...

Using the NASA X-ray spacecraft Swift combined with radio observations, astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole burping radio jets 300 days after a heavy cosmic meal. The team was also able to roughly estimate the mass of this feeding cosmic titan, which sits at the heart of the Perseus Cluster, a massive collection of thousands of galaxies. The black hole sits at the center of the galaxy NGC 1275, located around 225 light-years away, and is the brightest galaxy of the Perseus Cluster . The supermassive black hole first flared in X-rays, which indicated an increase in the rate at which it was accreting matter. Actively feeding supermassive black holes sit in regions called active galactic nuclei (AGNs), with their immense gravity heating surrounding matter, causing them to glow brightly. These emissions are boosted by material channeled to the poles of the central black hole, from w...