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Explore the latest space news, missions, and discoveries.
SpaceX's planned $100 billion Starship spaceport on Louisiana's coast is examined through its 10-launch-pad design, tax incentives, local payments, and the FAA environmental review still ahead.
A University of Adelaide research team has published a new electrochemical method in Nature Synthesis that converts urea from urine and table salt into hydrazine. Unlike the dangerous oxidant-dependent industrial process that has dominated for 120 years, the new aqueous, room-temperature method achieves more than 10 times the current density and 240 hours of stable operation.
A Rice University team has demonstrated for the first time that sub-nanometer wrinkles in graphene produce spontaneous electric polarization. The finding opens a path to controlling graphene's electrical properties through curvature alone, without chemical modification, with polarization density up to seven orders of magnitude larger than in conventional systems.
JWST has discovered a mysterious object in the early universe called "MoM-BH*-1," which turned out to be a "black hole star"—shining like a giant star while harboring a black hole 100,000 times the mass of the Sun at its center. It serves as direct evidence for how supermassive black holes achieved rapid growth in the immediate aftermath of the universe's birth.
The strongest solar particle event on record, from 1956, could raise radiation levels at airliner cruising altitude to 1,000 times normal. Based on this quantitative assessment, a research team at the Surrey Space Centre has proposed a six-level "Atmospheric Radiation scale" tailored specifically to aviation operations. It aims to resolve the structural problem of current space weather alerts producing false alarms more than nine times out of ten, and to offer, for the first time, a clear criterion for deciding when to halt flight operations.
SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6, which tied GPT-5.6 Sol on the overall index. This article separates individual evaluations, execution conditions, and per-task unit costs to organize the decision criteria for adopting agents.
The free-electron laser EUV light source that Elon Musk hinted at on X isn't an immediate threat to ASML's monopoly, but it is a technical stone thrown at the idea of turning light sources from equipment components into factory infrastructure. This piece reconstructs the timeline of the X post minute by minute and estimates the gap between the scale of government investment in xLight and the Terafab investment amount.
Rocket Lab has unveiled GHOST, a system that transports everything from the rocket to launch site control in standard containers. Operations in Alaska in 2027 will demonstrate rapid deployment capability outside fixed launch sites.
Terafab, the plan from SpaceX and Tesla, touts over 100 million square feet of manufacturing space. However, this figure doesn't directly indicate a building's footprint or production capacity—disclosure of design and mass-production metrics will determine how it's judged.
SpaceX and Tesla's planned semiconductor plant Terafab has selected Grimes County, Texas as its construction site. We examine the initial $16.8 billion investment and the conditions that remain before mass production can begin.
