NASA is about to get a new crop of astronaut candidates. Start your Monday on a high note: www.youtube.com/watch?v=frX3...

An absolute banger of a story from @sarahscoles.bsky.social about Breakthrough Starshot and its dreams of interstellar travel, a decade after the big-deal project was announced, including what happened to that dazzling $100 million promise: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

House Appropriations has filed a CR that would keep the government open through November 21. appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Kind of a wild morning! First up some post-Starship analysis for the newsletter, with Elon's promise of reaching 100-ton payload capacity next year www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

SpaceX agrees to acquire EchoStar's AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses for up to $8.5B in cash and up to $8.5B in stock, resolving an FCC inquiry into EchoStar (Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

The Senate Commerce Committee's hearing on beating China to the moon is underway after a last minute witness reshuffle www.commerce.senate.gov

BREAKING: President Trump will announce Space Command will move from Colorado to Alabama, reversing a Biden-era decision, an AP source says.

Did a dive into the saga to transport a retired Space Shuttle to Houston. The story could have easily been twice as long, it's got so many wild parts www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Starship coming in for landing

Relatively clean Starship launch so far. Finally demonstrated payload deployment after not getting the chance for most of the year www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"Now let's talk about Mars" the hosts say on the SpaceX livestream, but let's not say a word about the $4 billion contracts we hold with NASA to send astronauts to the Moon

Musk voice jumpscare on today's Starship livestream. I guess we're getting a combined technical update and launch viewing experience today x.com/i/broadcasts...

After the mixed Starship test flights this year, SpaceX surged 20 percent of its Falcon engineering group to Starship for six months to help with testing and reliability. Now as the company heads into its next test flight, the pressure is on to show progress www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002, even as it’s received billions of dollars in federal contracts, according to internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times. nyti.ms/45wGKkn

The best response a reporter can possibly get to an interview request: "this is a topic I know a great deal about and have a lot of opinions on"

Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell has passed at 97 www.nasa.gov/news-release... One of my early young journalist memories was getting to interview him and Ron Howard on a red carpet in Austin for a screening of Apollo 13. I bragged about it for a while! (I'm the mop of brown curly hair)

I managed to get "All my SpaceXes Live in Texas" in our newsletter today, and I think I have to retire now www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

how do we report targeted attacks on bluesky

I keep getting pitched a story about how Gen Zers regularly have their moms talk to their boss, and I'm really considering having my mom tell them to stop pitching me

Ya can’t fool Mother Nature

Man, a hold and scrub at roughly T-1 minute for Crew-11's launch today. Particularly brutal for a crewed mission but the weather crept in at the last second www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-k_...

Beautiful shot of the Falcon 9 rocket tasked with launching Crew-11. Liftoff set for 12:09PM ET www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-k_...

And to celebrate the NISAR launch , a joint mission between NASA and ISRO...

ICYMI, late Friday night NASA released the estimated numbers of people leaving the agency through deferred resignation: nearly 4,000. That would drop the total workforce number down to roughly 14,000, the agency said www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

F9/Crew 11: SpaceX aborted a Falcon 9 1st stage engine test firing today at KSC pad 39A less than a minute before the 3:09pm EDT (1909 UTC) target time; no details yet on what might have triggered the abort or what impact, if any, it might have on NASA's plans to launch the mission Thursday

In 2022, Elon Musk ordered staff to shut off Starlink service in parts of Ukraine where troops were pushing into during a critical counteroffensive against Russia. Our story today examines this order, and Starlink's relationship with governments around the world since www.reuters.com/investigatio...

I wrote about Rubin again, this time about the telescope's capacity to find potentially dozens of interstellar objects. It's going to be wild, as one astronomer put it, "like old-fashioned astronomy: Find the thing, point telescopes at it, argue about it." www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

NEW: A draft executive order viewed by ProPublica directs the secretary of transportation to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses — a change Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others have long sought.

F9/TRACERS: The countdown to launch of NASA's TRACERS satellites was aborted at the T-minus 43-second mark due to "airspace concerns;" no other details were provided, but it could be the result of an aircraft straying into the launch safety zone; SpaceX plans to make another attempt tomorrow

Hundreds of NASA employees sign a letter to Sean Duffy expressing their "formal dissent" to the cuts being proposed to NASA's budget www.standupforscience.net/nasa-voyager...

What would I give If I could live In a world where they announce NASA administrator changes M-F 9-5

Today, *every* living prior leader of NASA's science directorate have released a joint letter condemning the proposed cuts to NASA science. These individuals every administration from Reagan to Biden, and all believe these cuts are insanely destructive: www.planetary.org/press-releas...

At the beginning of the administration, it seemed as if NASA's Space Launch System might finally be a goner, with the conditions in place to phase out the rocket. But then Sen. Cruz stepped in, while the Trump and Musk bromance fell apart www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

It's been a heartbreaking couple of days here in Central Texas

BREAKING: Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries sets the record for longest speech in the chamber as he delays the vote on Trump's tax bill by more than 8 hours.

Astronomers may have just discovered the third interstellar object passing through the Solar System! ESA’s Planetary Defenders are observing the object, provisionally known as #A11pl3Z, right now using telescopes around the world.

The bill most likely has plenty of space-related funding packed inside, including for more Artemis hardware, ISS, Gateway, and... potentially a Space Shuttle transfer

Looking forward to these two oscillating between friends and mortal enemies for the rest of the administration

It may not sound like it when reading it, but the "One Big Beautiful Bill" now directs NASA to remove space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and transfer it to Space Center Houston...

F9/Ax-4: Whitson and her crewmates floated into the space station's forward Harmony module a few minutes before 8:30am EDT (1230 UTC), welcomed with hugs and handshakes from the lab's seven long-duration crew members

Y'ALL brand new images from the @vrubinobs.bsky.social are STUNNING!! Revel in the beauty of the cosmos. Supporting basic research is worth it for so many reasons rubinobservatory.org/news/first-i...

My first story for National Geographic is out, and it's about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will spend the next decade scanning the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere, revealing all kinds of cosmic wonders: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

"Enhance 224 to 176" (I've zoomed in, slowed down etc. the Starship 36 footage) original source: D wise on the other site x.com/dwisecinema/...

Ship 36 experienced a RUD during preflight testing at Massey’s ahead of Starship Flight 10.

Why — and I say this rhetorically and grumpily — do a static fire in the middle of the night?

Happy Sally Ride launch-aversery

Meanwhile in Japan, Honda has joined the reusable first stage Launch and Landing fun :) source: global.honda/en/topics/20...

Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count. We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.

Love having Tory here to give us updates on today's Kuiper launch

Ax-4 indefinitely delayed as NASA and Roscosmos assess recent repairs to the Russian segment of the ISS that has been leaking. [Seems odd since the press release says "the segment now is holding pressure."] www.nasa.gov/blogs/spaces...