This is the first time the space agency has hired a private company to lift one of its space telescopes to a higher orbit, allowing the observatory to continue operations beyond its expected lifespan. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, with the ability to swiftly point at ephemeral space events like gamma ray bursts. The spacecraft has been pulled back toward Earth and needs to be pushed back up to a higher orbit to continue doing its job. The LINK spacecraft was launched into space on July 3 on board a Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket. Over the past several weeks, flight controllers have worked to commission the spacecraft, activating its various systems before it heads off to rendezvous with Swift. However, the spacecraft suffered issues controlling itself and began spinning over the weekend. According to NASA, the spinning has resulted in 'sporadic communications' with the satellite, likely because its antenna flips away from the planet. Two of the three reaction wheels that control the spacecraft's alignment have failed, and there are problems with one of the spacecraft's thruster systems....

SpaceX's plans to launch a fleet of orbital data centers to perform AI inference tasks are the main driver behind the company's 2-trillion-dollar valuation. Bullish analysts say that the potential for that processing power to fuel SpaceXAI's models or act as an orbital neocloud are unprecedented in the AI boom. But when you talk to subject-matter experts ' whether it's the entrepreneurs behind other space data center startups, the team at Google developing that company's orbital compute project, or engineers who have done the numbers for fun ' you find the same answer: This isn't going to make a big dent until we have much cheaper rockets and the ability to produce high-powered satellites at low cost, en masse. Musk's answer to this is easy to predict: Starship, SpaceX's huge new rocket, is expected to make its 13th test flight as soon as July 16. If Musk's team can get that vehicle to the point where it flies again and again, the data center business case could close. But even if the company successfully recovers both stages of the rocket on this test flight, operational reusable flight will still likely be years away, and space data center launches will likely take a back seat to SpaceX's commitments to NASA and to building out its own Starlink network....

Researchers found a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose in a cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way (image from Spitzer Space Telescope shown here).Credit: NASA, Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC, Caltech) Call it an extra-sweet discovery. A group of astronomers has detected a sugar molecule swirling inside a cloud of gas and dust near the centre of our galaxy. They are calling the molecule ' a compound with four carbon atoms called erythrulose ' the first true sugar spotted in 'interstellar' space. The findings, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy1, could help clarify how life on Earth began. 'This is an incredibly exciting result,' says Brett McGuire, an astrochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. 'Astronomers have, for a very long time, been pushing to detect sugars in space.' That's because they've already seen hints that sugars on Earth that are essential to life originated in outer space. For instance, the five-carbon sugar ribose was previously found in some multi-billion-year-old meteorite samples2,3, suggesting that space rocks might have smashed into Earth and delivered this and other sugars....

The demonstration on Friday shows that China's Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) is poised to match the advance that catapulted SpaceX to the top of the heap: reusing the same booster again and again to drive down the cost of launching spacecraft. CASC said it would attempt to reuse the booster, which can carry about as much payload as SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, by the end of the year. Instead of unfolding landing legs to settle onto a floating platform, as the Falcon 9 does, China's approach uses netting strung across a large frame onboard a recovery ship to capture the descending rocket. The ability to get the rocket back to the ship in a controlled flight, however, depends on sophisticated guidance software and sensors, along with engines that are reliable enough to restart and rugged enough to survive the descent back through the atmosphere. SpaceX is currently breaking launch records on an annual basis with its fleet of reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters. The vehicle underpins the company's Starlink satellite network, which depends on cheap, regular space access, as well as its work for NASA and the U.S. Space Force....