Space & Aerospace

UK startup Pulsar Fusion demonstrated the first-ever plasma ignition inside a nuclear fusion rocket exhaust system, streaming the test live from Bletchley to Amazon's MARS Conference in California.

NASA's Ignition initiative pauses the Lunar Gateway to redirect $20 billion over seven years toward building a permanent moon base, while repurposing Gateway hardware into SR-1 Freedom, a nuclear-powered spacecraft that will carry Ingenuity-class helicopters to Mars before the end of 2028.

Two March discoveries reveal a 10-billion-year-old lava world with a thick atmosphere and a sulfur-dominated planet unlike anything in existing classification systems.

NASA's Perseverance rover gains autonomous navigation and AI-planned driving while the ESCAPADE twin spacecraft head for Mars orbit, but Congress's cancellation of Mars Sample Return hands the prize of returning Martian rocks to China's Tianwen-3 mission.

Amazon has asked the FCC for a two-year extension on its satellite deployment deadline, citing a rocket shortage, while Eutelsat orders 340 new OneWeb satellites and Telesat adds military Ka-band to Lightspeed as competitors carve out niches against Starlink's 10-million-subscriber lead.

The FAA formally withdrew its proposed 25-year upper stage disposal mandate in January 2026 after industry opposition led by SpaceX, even as startups Astroscale, Portal Space, and Paladin Space announced competing debris removal services targeting operations by 2027.

Three separate satellite programs are converging in 2026 to transform wildfire detection from space, while university researchers benchmark AI models that could process the flood of new orbital data.

SpaceX reached 10,020 active Starlink satellites on March 17, constituting two-thirds of all active spacecraft, while NASA warns 500,000 satellites would contaminate nearly every telescope image.

Joby Aviation began flight-testing its first FAA-conforming eVTOL in March 2026, entering the final certification phase as Archer acquires Lilium's patents and six companies prepare for live airspace trials this summer.

The joint ESA-Chinese Academy of Sciences SMILE spacecraft reached French Guiana after a two-week ocean voyage and is preparing for an April launch on a Vega-C rocket. It will be the first mission to image Earth's magnetosphere in soft X-rays.

A University of Washington team identifies signs of a catastrophic planetary collision around star Gaia20ehk, offering the first real-time analog of the giant impact that created Earth's Moon 4.5 billion years ago.

The 1,300-pound radiation belt spacecraft burned up over the eastern Pacific Ocean on March 11, ending a 14-year journey that began with a two-year mission and yielded the discovery of a transient third radiation belt around Earth.