Space Weekly Review 2026-07-11

Week In Review

This week made a strong case that the “reusable rocket” era is no longer a one-country story. On July 10 China’s Long March 10B stuck a first-stage recovery on its maiden flight, becoming only the second nation to routinely recover an orbital-class booster, as covered in China becomes second country to recover orbital booster with Long March 10B. The day before, SpaceX flew the same Falcon 9 booster for the 36th time — a new record documented in SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rocket on record-breaking 36th flight — while a static fire on Booster 20 kept the next Starship V3 test on track, described in SpaceX ignites all 33 powerful engines on Starship booster ahead of Flight 13 launch. Add United Launch Alliance’s continued build-out of Amazon’s Kuiper-successor constellation in Atlas V rocket launches 29 Amazon Leo broadband satellites to orbit from Florida, and the launch cadence is starting to feel like an industrial supply chain rather than a series of individual events.

Asteroid science had an unusually rich week. On July 5 JAXA’s Hayabusa2 executed a high-speed flyby of Torifune, returning close-up imagery of a “two-lobed” body, detailed in Hayabusa2 captures images of asteroid Torifune. Roughly a day later CNSA’s Tianwen-2 released the first close-up of Earth’s quasi-moon Kamoʻoalewa from a station-keeping distance of only 20 km, ahead of a sample-collection attempt described in Tianwen-2 arrives at asteroid Kamoʻoalewa, first image revealed. Two independent Asian sample-return campaigns operating simultaneously at small near-Earth bodies would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

The observational-cosmology beat pushed on two fronts. ESA’s Euclid mission surfaced 31 new quasars from the first half-billion years of cosmic history — more than doubling the known census at those redshifts — reported in ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope finds universe’s most ancient quasars. And an Argonne-led team released a five-year South Pole Telescope catalog of more than 7,000 galaxy clusters selected via the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect, described in South Pole Telescope analysis yields catalog of more than 7,000 galaxy clusters. Both surveys sharpen the tension between what early-universe theory predicts and what wide-field instruments are actually finding.

Finally, two items reframed what “habitable” and “observable” mean going forward. Tabletop mantle-convection experiments described in Could exoplanets locked in eternal day and endless night support life? suggest tidally locked rocky worlds may sustain twilight-zone climates even under brutal day/night contrasts. And NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope moved vertical inside Kennedy’s clean room this week, one of the milestones tracked in Telescope Milestone: NASA’s Roman moves vertical ahead of processing — a reminder that the wide-field instrument that will eventually check those exoplanet predictions is now weeks, not years, from launch.

Items

Euclid Discovers 31 of the Oldest Known Quasars

Astronomers using ESA’s Euclid space telescope announced this week the identification of 31 quasars from the first billion years of cosmic history, including the two most distant ever confirmed. The highest-redshift object in the sample, EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, has a redshift of 7.77 — meaning its light left the accretion disk when the universe was roughly 670 million years old, or about 5% of its current age. The previous record-holder from 2021 sat at redshift 7.64.

Quasars are the intensely luminous cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes actively accreting gas. Finding one at redshift 7.77 does not merely add a data point: it forces theorists to explain how a black hole massive enough to shine like a trillion Suns could have assembled that quickly after the Big Bang. Current formation channels — direct-collapse black holes, rapidly-growing stellar-mass seeds, dense cluster mergers — all become harder to reconcile the further back these objects are pushed.

The sample effectively doubles the number of confirmed quasars from that era, giving statisticians a real distribution to work with instead of a handful of outliers. Euclid’s advantage here is field of view: it can survey vast patches of sky in the near-infrared where these highly redshifted objects show up, and then hand off candidates to instruments like JWST for spectroscopic confirmation. The mission’s core science targets — dark matter and dark energy via weak lensing and galaxy clustering — are unfolding in parallel, but its by-product surveys are already producing headline results.

Source: NASA Science

Tianwen-2 Arrives at Kamoʻoalewa and Returns First Close-Up

China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft has reached its target — the near-Earth quasi-satellite 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3) — and released a first close-up image from a distance of about 20 km. The mission launched on 29 May 2025 and traveled roughly one billion kilometers over about 400 days to arrive, initially closing to 30,000 km on June 7 and 2,000 km on June 19 before settling into its current station-keeping position.

Kamoʻoalewa is a peculiar object. It’s a “quasi-moon” of Earth: gravitationally bound to the Sun but caught in an orbit that appears to loop around our planet from a co-rotating perspective. It is also very small — estimates put it at roughly 20 meters across — and elongated. There is a live scientific debate about whether it is a fragment ejected from the Moon by an ancient impact, a hypothesis that a sample return could definitively test.

Tianwen-2 is expected to spend months mapping the asteroid’s shape, composition, and internal structure before attempting a sample collection. The spacecraft carries three sampling techniques — hover sampling, touch-and-go, and an “anchor-and-attach” mode — chosen based on the surface it actually encounters. Departure from Kamoʻoalewa is expected in April 2027, with the return capsule landing on Earth in late November 2027. If successful, it will be China’s first sample return from beyond the Earth–Moon system and only the second sample return from an asteroid smaller than 100 meters.

Source: SpaceNews

Hayabusa2 Flies By Asteroid Torifune

On 5 July 2026 at 18:30 JST, JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft completed a high-speed flyby of asteroid 2001 CC21, informally named Torifune. The encounter took the probe within about 1 km of the target at a relative velocity of roughly 5 km/s. JAXA released optical navigation camera imagery showing an elongated, two-lobed body that observers have compared to a snowman — a shape common among small near-Earth asteroids and likely the product of a slow low-energy contact between two smaller objects.

Torifune belongs to the Apollo group of near-Earth asteroids and is currently about 100 million km from Earth. It measures roughly 450 m on its long axis, rotates once every five hours, and completes a solar orbit every 383 days. Being able to characterize it up close at that flyby geometry is a scientific bonus: Hayabusa2 was originally designed for and completed its primary mission at Ryugu, returning samples in December 2020.

Alongside the images, the spacecraft’s near-infrared spectrometer (NIRS3), thermal infrared imager (TIR), and LIDAR ran observations starting about an hour before closest approach. Those datasets will help constrain Torifune’s mineralogy, surface temperature distribution, and topography. The flyby is a waypoint on Hayabusa2’s extended mission, which is ultimately headed for a rendezvous with a different asteroid later in the decade. That JAXA is squeezing this much additional science out of a spacecraft whose “main mission” ended more than five years ago is worth flagging on its own.

Source: JAXA

China’s Long March 10B Recovers Its First Stage on Maiden Flight

On July 10 China’s Long March 10B, a 63-meter two-stage rocket capable of delivering 16,000 kg to low Earth orbit, flew its debut mission from the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site on Hainan and — critically — landed its first stage on a downrange sea platform. It is the first time a Chinese vehicle has recovered an orbital-class booster, and the reports frame it as the first time any operator has done so on a rocket’s inaugural flight.

The recovery method is worth understanding. Rather than the propulsive vertical landing SpaceX pioneered on a drone ship or Blue Origin uses on New Glenn, Long March 10B flies the returning booster into a large sea-based capture net. The net absorbs the terminal energy, and the stage is then recovered by ship. It is mechanically simpler than a hoverslam landing but requires precise atmospheric guidance to hit the net at all.

Strategically, this puts China on a plausible path to Falcon 9-like launch cadence and cost economics later this decade. Long March 10B is intended to be the workhorse for both large satellite constellations and — eventually — crewed lunar missions in a three-launch architecture. Its recoverable variant is a piece of the broader Chinese human-lunar-return timeline. The Falcon 9 remains vastly more mature, but there are now three organizations on Earth that have flown and recovered an orbital first stage, and one of them just did it on the first try.

Source: SpaceNews

SpaceX Sets New Reuse Record With 36th Flight of a Falcon 9 Booster

On July 9, SpaceX launched the Starlink 10-42 mission with a first-stage booster on its 36th flight — a new industry record for orbital rocket reuse. The mission added 29 broadband satellites to the Starlink low Earth orbit constellation and recovered the booster once again for further reuse. Each successful re-flight pushes the marginal cost of a Starlink launch closer to the cost of fuel plus refurbishment.

The reuse question has been theoretically settled for years: the interesting number now is how many flights a given booster can absorb before retirement. SpaceX has been steadily extending that ceiling from an original design target of 10 flights, to an eventual internal goal in the 20s, and now to the mid-30s in practice. Some of that improvement comes from operational learning — better inspection and refurbishment procedures — but a lot of it comes from the boosters simply being over-engineered relative to the loads they actually experience.

For the wider industry the record matters mainly as a benchmark. Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and China’s Long March 10B are all designed around reusability from day one. None of them are anywhere near 36 flights on a single vehicle — but each of them exists because SpaceX’s operational data made the business case unarguable. The interesting question at this point isn’t whether reuse works: it’s how the second and third movers close the gap in refurbishment throughput.

Source: Spaceflight Now

Atlas V Launches Another Batch of Amazon Leo Broadband Satellites

United Launch Alliance flew an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral on July 2 carrying 29 additional Amazon Leo internet satellites, continuing the buildout of Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation. The launch is one of a scheduled series across multiple rocket families — Atlas V, Vulcan Centaur, Falcon 9, and Ariane 6 — that together are meant to bring the constellation to operational scale.

Amazon Leo is the renamed successor to Project Kuiper, and its go-to-market is a genuine competitor to Starlink for consumer and enterprise satellite internet. Getting the constellation into orbit is a supply-chain problem more than a technical one: Amazon has enough satellites in production to keep launching, but each rocket flight only places a few dozen at a time, and the target constellation is thousands of satellites. Multi-vendor launch procurement is Amazon’s way of hedging against any single launch provider setting a bottleneck.

For ULA specifically, the Atlas V portion of the manifest is a legacy commitment: the Atlas V is in the process of being retired, and each remaining flight is one of a finite number. Vulcan Centaur is expected to pick up the Amazon Leo cadence as Atlas V winds down. The broader signal is that low-Earth-orbit broadband has stopped being a Starlink monopoly — a real second network is being deployed, and the launch industry is being paid to make it happen quickly.

Source: Space.com

Roman Space Telescope Moves Vertical at Kennedy Ahead of Launch

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was raised into its vertical processing stand this week inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center — one of the last major hands-on milestones before final integration with the Falcon Heavy that will launch it. Roman arrived at Kennedy by barge from Goddard on June 21 after completing integration and testing in Maryland, and NASA is targeting a launch no earlier than August 30.

Roman is best understood as a very-wide-field companion to JWST. Where JWST is a jewel-box instrument with an extraordinary sensitivity per pointing, Roman has a field of view roughly 100 times larger at similar image quality. That difference in geometry is what makes Roman the right tool for surveys of dark energy via weak lensing and baryon acoustic oscillations, wide-field microlensing surveys for exoplanets in the galactic bulge, and the kind of population studies that only make sense when you can image thousands of galaxies at once.

The vertical-integration milestone is not scientifically exciting on its own, but it is what a real launch campaign looks like: the observatory is now being fueled, tested, and prepared for encapsulation. Roman has spent years as a program under funding pressure and repeated redesigns, and there is a nonzero chance it becomes the most-productive space telescope of the decade purely on survey volume. Getting it onto the rocket is the last big risk to close.

Source: NASA Science (Roman blog)

Tidally Locked Rocky Worlds May Redistribute Heat Enough to Be Habitable

A new laboratory-and-modeling study argues that tidally locked rocky exoplanets — worlds that keep the same face permanently toward their star — may be significantly more habitable than atmospheric-collapse arguments have suggested. Using tabletop convection experiments as an analog for planetary interiors, and calibrating to the parameters of the well-studied hot exoplanet LHS 3844 b, the researchers show that the mantle itself can carry heat from the dayside to the nightside efficiently enough to keep the terminator — the twilight ring between the two hemispheres — thermally moderate.

The conventional worry about tidally locked planets is that the nightside gets cold enough for the atmosphere to freeze out onto the surface, leaving the dayside as a bare rock and the whole planet uninhabitable. This new work does not eliminate that risk, but it changes the calculation: if internal mantle circulation moves substantial heat laterally, then a habitable strip could exist at the edges of the illuminated hemisphere even without an intact atmosphere.

The framing matters because most nearby potentially-habitable planets around M-dwarf stars are tidally locked. That includes the TRAPPIST-1 planets, LHS 1140 b, and many others expected in Roman’s and PLATO’s forward pipeline. If terminator habitability is a real phenomenon, then the pool of accessible targets for atmospheric characterization by JWST and future direct-imaging missions is a lot larger than it looked a year ago.

Source: Phys.org

SpaceX Static-Fires Super Heavy Booster Ahead of Starship Flight 13

SpaceX static-fired Super Heavy Booster 20 at Starbase on July 10, one of the final pre-flight tests before Starship Flight 13. Booster 20 was rolled to the pad the day before and mounted onto its launch stand using the launch tower’s “Mechazilla” catch arms — the same mechanism that will eventually be used to catch returning boosters mid-air. Flight 13 is currently targeting July 15 and will fly the same V3 vehicle configuration that debuted in the suborbital test flight on May 22.

The V3 configuration is a substantial redesign relative to the V2 vehicles SpaceX flew through 2024. It has more Raptor engines, a stretched propellant tank, and the payload volume needed to be operationally useful for Starlink deployments and, eventually, tanker missions in support of Artemis. The May 22 debut had engine glitches and did not soft-splash the booster as planned, but SpaceX classified the flight as a success for reaching its main flight-envelope test points.

Flight 13 is meant to close out the remaining V3 test items — engine transient behavior, guided-descent margins, and a controlled water landing for the booster — before moving to full orbital demonstrations later this year. In parallel, SpaceX is racing to finish the Florida Starship launch site, with structural steel now complete and the doors being installed. The pace is aggressive, and it is what has to happen for Starship to carry payloads on any realistic Artemis-adjacent timeline.

Source: Space.com

South Pole Telescope Releases Catalog of More Than 7,000 Galaxy Clusters

An Argonne-led international team released a new catalog this week containing 7,190 confirmed galaxy clusters, drawn from five years of observations with the SPT-3G camera on the South Pole Telescope. It is one of the deepest cluster catalogs ever assembled and covers roughly 1,600 square degrees of sky — about 4% of the celestial sphere — with about 1,800 of the clusters dating back more than 7.8 billion years.

The technique is elegant. Galaxy clusters contain very hot ionized gas, and when photons from the cosmic microwave background pass through that gas they scatter off the high-energy electrons, subtly shifting their frequency. That fingerprint — the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect — lets radio and microwave telescopes locate clusters purely by mapping distortions in the CMB, without needing to see the galaxies themselves. Because the effect scales with cluster mass rather than distance, SZ surveys can find very high-redshift clusters that optical surveys would miss entirely.

Cluster catalogs of this depth are load-bearing infrastructure for cosmology. They constrain the growth rate of large-scale structure, which in turn constrains dark energy models and the sum of neutrino masses. They also anchor the abundance-based tests that keep coming up in the wider “early universe looks too mature too quickly” tension exemplified by the Euclid quasars result. Having 7,000 well-measured clusters spanning most of cosmic time to compare against simulations is the kind of dataset that quietly moves the field forward for years.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory