GoKawiil
Tech News
NASA faces a pivotal test of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft this year, according to reporting on the agency's crew transport plans. The report states that SpaceX's Crew Dragon is set to be retired, leaving NASA with fewer alternatives for ferrying astronauts to orbit.
Seven years after its founding, Starfish Space will send its first Otter spacecraft into orbit next month aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter mission. The demonstration flight, called SSPICY, is being conducted for NASA and will have Otter approach several defunct US-owned satellites to gather data on their spin rates and condition without docking.
NASA has expanded its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract with SpaceX, adding three additional crewed Dragon missions to the International Space Station through 2030. The new award is worth up to $946 million and brings SpaceX's total operational flights under the contract to 17, pushing its cumulative earnings from NASA to $5.92 billion. SpaceX shares ISS crew transport duties with Boeing, whose Starliner is set to begin crewed flights in 2027 after an unpiloted test flight.
NASA has created an emeritus status for Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, the commander and pilot of Artemis II, five months after their lunar mission splashdown. The designation lets them leave active astronaut duty and pursue outside careers—Glover is taking a leadership role at Cal Poly—while remaining available unpaid to train and advise NASA staff on Orion spacecraft systems.
European space startup The Exploration Company has secured $450 million in a Series C round, which it calls the largest ever raised by a European space company. The Germany-based firm, led by former Airbus and ArianeGroup executive Hélène Huby, plans to use the funds to develop a reusable heavy-lift launcher aimed at rivaling SpaceX. The company says it already has 10 missions booked and over $2 billion in contracts, including commitments from the European Space Agency and NASA.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, currently nearing the outer boundary of the solar system as it heads toward interstellar space, risks losing two of its scientific instruments at this critical juncture. The timing is significant because the probe is approaching a region where continuous data collection is essential for understanding the transition beyond the sun's influence.
A nonprofit team led by Starcloud co-founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden is developing the Fermi Explorer, a 1-kilogram, 10-centimeter cube meant to be the first human-made object aimed at another star system. The probe would spend 12 years spiraling closer to the sun to build speed before exiting the solar system in the early 2040s, then travel roughly 79,800 years before reaching Alpha Centauri.
NASA has entered the testing phase for its High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developed with Microchip Technology as the PIC64-HPSC chip. The system combines multi-core processing, fast networking, fault tolerance and AI capability into one radiation-hardened platform designed for missions from Earth orbit to deep space, promising over 100 times the performance-per-watt of current space computers.