Space Weekly Review 2026-07-18

Week In Review

The past week’s space news was dominated by two very different demonstrations of what small-scale, reusable, and privately-funded spaceflight can now do. In Hainan, China caught the first stage of a Long March 10B in a net strung across a ship at sea, joining the United States as the only country to bring an orbital-class booster home intact. In Andhra Pradesh, Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 became India’s first privately-built orbital rocket to attempt the climb to space. Both efforts underline how quickly the club of nations and companies with credible launch capability is expanding.

Deep-space exploration produced two headline images almost simultaneously. China’s Tianwen-2 returned its first close-up of the quasi-satellite Kamoʻoalewa after a billion-kilometer chase, and Japan’s Hayabusa2 released detailed pictures of the “snowman-shaped” contact-binary asteroid Torifune taken during its extended-mission flyby. Meanwhile a two-team announcement of the third planet in the Beta Pictoris system — spotted at the VLT and confirmed by Webb’s spectroscopy — demonstrated a new way to find directly-imaged worlds via their atmospheric fingerprints, rather than by picking out a bright dot beside a bright star.

Human spaceflight and space-based servicing were both active. Anil Menon rode Soyuz MS-29 to the ISS on his first mission, while Katalyst Space’s LINK vehicle continued its month-long chase of the aging Swift observatory — a rendezvous that, if successful, will be the first commercial docking with a government satellite never designed to be serviced. Closer to home, SpaceX prepped Starship Flight 13 to fly its first V3 Starlink test satellites after an engine-start scrub, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope cleared a key solar-panel inspection milestone ahead of its August launch, and the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer-E added another 21 satellites to its Proliferated Warfighter constellation. Taken together, the week showcased a rapidly diversifying launch base, an unusually productive stretch of small-body science, and a maturing culture of on-orbit servicing.

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James Webb and the VLT Find a Hidden Third Planet Around Beta Pictoris

Two independent teams — one using ground-based infrared imaging at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the other spectroscopy from the James Webb Space Telescope — simultaneously announced on 15 July that a third giant planet, Beta Pictoris d, orbits one of the most-studied planetary systems in the galaxy. Beta Pictoris was already known to host two directly-imaged giants; the addition of a third makes it only the second system with three imaged planets.

What sets the discovery apart is method. Beta Pictoris b and c were both first identified as bright specks beside their star. Beta Pictoris d was pulled out of Webb’s data primarily by the chemical fingerprint of its atmosphere in moderate-resolution spectroscopy, then cross-checked against a decade of ground-based imagery. This is the first directly-imaged planet found principally by spectroscopy, and it opens a route to detecting worlds too faint or too close to their star for traditional coronagraphic imaging to catch.

Modeling suggests the planet is at least twice the mass of Jupiter — the smallest of the three known giants in the system — and orbits at roughly 30 astronomical units, comparable to Neptune’s distance from our own Sun. Researchers now expect similar spectroscopy-first searches around other young, dust-rich systems, potentially uncovering a large hidden population of Jupiter-analog planets.

Source: NASA Science

China Catches a Long March 10B Booster in a Net at Sea

On 10 July, a Long March 10B lifted off from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site on its maiden orbital flight. The first stage separated, flew a controlled descent, deployed four hooks, and let itself be caught by a large net strung across the deck of a waiting recovery ship. With that catch China joined the United States as one of only two countries to have recovered an orbital-class booster intact.

The recovery approach — a net rather than landing legs and a droneship — is a genuine engineering departure from SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s methods. It sidesteps some of the mass and complexity of propulsive landing legs, at the cost of demanding very precise guidance into a comparatively small target. State-owned CASC has said it plans to refly the same stage before the end of the year, an aggressive turnaround that will be the true test of whether the vehicle is meaningfully reusable.

Long March 10B is the heavy variant of the family CASC is developing to support China’s crewed lunar plans in the early 2030s. A reusable first stage would materially lower the marginal cost of the crewed and cargo flights that program requires, and would give China a domestic answer to the workhorse role that Falcon 9 now plays in the U.S. launch market.

Source: SpaceNews

Skyroot’s Vikram-1 Attempts India’s First Private Orbital Launch

Skyroot Aerospace’s four-stage, seven-story-tall Vikram-1 rocket lifted off in the early hours of 18 July from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on a mission the company called Aagaman (“Arrival”) — India’s first attempt at a fully privately-built orbital launch. The vehicle is a small-satellite launcher rated for roughly 350 kilograms to low Earth orbit, using an all-carbon-composite airframe and partially 3D-printed engines.

Skyroot, based in Hyderabad, made history in 2022 when its suborbital Vikram-S became the first Indian private vehicle to reach space. Vikram-1 is the operational step-up: the maiden flight was carrying commercial customer payloads that were to be deployed at around 450 kilometers altitude. Success would put India in the small club of nations with a homegrown private orbital-class rocket, joining the U.S. and, to a limited extent, China.

The launch continues a broader Indian shift begun in the early 2020s, in which ISRO increasingly hands off routine launch business to a competitive domestic private sector while itself focusing on interplanetary and human spaceflight. If Skyroot can deliver reliable orbital service at competitive prices, the country’s small-satellite market — including Earth observation constellations and university payloads — has a plausible in-country alternative to foreign providers for the first time.

Source: Space.com

Tianwen-2 Sends Back the First Close-Up of a Quasi-Moon

China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft arrived within about 20 kilometers of the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa on 6 July, after a 400-day, roughly one-billion-kilometer cruise, and the China National Space Administration released its first close-up image shortly afterwards. The body — one of a small population of “quasi-satellites” that co-orbit the Sun with Earth — turns out to be far smaller than pre-encounter estimates suggested: perhaps just over 20 meters across, rather than the 40 to 100 meters implied by ground observations.

Kamoʻoalewa is scientifically interesting because 2021 spectroscopy suggested a composition closely matching Apollo lunar samples, hinting the object could be a fragment blasted off the Moon. New Webb data reported this year has begun to cast doubt on that lunar-origin theory, so returned material has particular value. Tianwen-2 is designed to survey the asteroid for several months, collect samples, and deliver them to Earth in a capsule during a 2027 flyby.

After the sample return, the mothership continues on to a second, very different target: the main-belt comet 311P/PanSTARRS, which it is scheduled to reach in January 2035. If both legs succeed, Tianwen-2 will become the first mission to return material from a quasi-satellite and the first to study a main-belt comet in situ.

Source: SpaceNews

Hayabusa2 Reveals the Snowman Shape of Asteroid Torifune

JAXA’s Hayabusa2, on its extended mission after returning samples from Ryugu in 2020, performed a 5 kilometer-per-second flyby of the S-type near-Earth asteroid Torifune on 5 July and released detailed imagery this week. Approaching to within roughly 800 meters, the spacecraft used its Optical Navigation Camera, thermal infrared imager, and LIDAR to capture optical, thermal, and topographic data of the 450-meter body.

The images show that Torifune is a contact binary — two once-separate asteroids gently fused into a single elongated, double-lobed structure that resembles a snowman. Contact binaries appear to be common in small-body populations, but each direct look at one adds important constraints on how such objects form and evolve. Torifune orbits the Sun every 383 days and rotates every roughly 5 hours; the encounter took place about 100 million kilometers from Earth.

Beyond the science, the flyby was a technology demonstration: it exercised high-precision autonomous navigation that would be needed for kinetic-impactor planetary defense missions of the kind demonstrated by NASA’s DART. The next extended-mission target for Hayabusa2 is asteroid 1998 KY26, a much smaller and faster-rotating body it is scheduled to rendezvous with in 2031.

Source: JAXA

Soyuz MS-29 Delivers Anil Menon and Crewmates to the ISS

Soyuz MS-29 lifted off from Site 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 14:47 UTC on 14 July, carrying NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina to the International Space Station. Following a two-orbit, three-hour rendezvous, the spacecraft performed an autonomous docking to the nadir port of the Prichal module at 17:52 UTC. The crew will spend roughly eight months on orbit as part of Expeditions 74 and 75.

The flight is Menon’s first, ten years after he applied to NASA’s 2021 astronaut candidate class. Among the research he is assigned to lead is work on refining in-space production of semiconductor crystals — a technology whose microgravity growth environment may allow larger, defect-free crystals than are achievable on Earth, with applications in high-performance computing, AI hardware, and medical imaging. Menon is also scheduled to test an augmented-reality-guided ultrasound system that combines AI image interpretation with headset-based guidance, aiming to enable crews to perform diagnostic imaging without real-time expert support from Earth.

MS-29 is notable politically as well as scientifically: it is another routine execution of the Soyuz-based crew swap that has continued to run through eight years of otherwise-frozen U.S.-Russian civil cooperation, and one of the mechanisms keeping the ISS operating through its planned 2030 retirement.

Source: Space.com

Starship Flight 13 Preps to Fly V3 Starlink Test Satellites

SpaceX rolled Starship Flight 13 to the pad at Starbase this week for a launch now targeting 20 July, after an engine-start automatic abort scrubbed the 16 July attempt. Musk said two of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines needed to be replaced following the abort; the launch window opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 UTC) and runs for 90 minutes.

Flight 13 is the first Starship test to carry payloads that even approximate operational hardware: 20 V3 Starlink satellites. The V3 design is substantially larger than the current Starlink generation, with expanded solar arrays and antennas and inter-satellite laser links intended to support very high-capacity backhaul and, at scale, the direct-to-cell service SpaceX has been steadily rolling out. On this flight, the satellites will fly a suborbital trajectory and burn up on reentry — the mission is a check on deployment mechanics and communications, not an operational insertion.

The scrub is a reminder that Starship remains a development program: SpaceX has spent 2025-26 iteratively debugging engine, thermal, and reentry problems, with a mixed record. But the first flight of realistic V3 hardware is the clearest sign yet that the vehicle is moving toward the constellation-buildout role for which it is being optimized — and, longer-term, the crewed lunar and Mars missions that depend on very high launch cadence at low marginal cost.

Source: Space.com

The Roman Space Telescope Clears a Solar-Panel Inspection Milestone

NASA’s next flagship optical observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is now in Florida undergoing pre-launch processing for a target liftoff no earlier than 30 August aboard a Falcon Heavy. On 8 July the team completed pre-launch cleaning and inspection of the solar array wings that will power the observatory, and continued a series of integrated tests through 16 July, according to a NASA blog update this week.

Roman is designed to combine a Hubble-quality mirror with a field of view roughly 100 times larger, using that wide-field advantage to run deep, systematic surveys of the sky. Its primary science goals include mapping the geometry of dark energy through weak gravitational lensing and Type Ia supernovae, censusing exoplanets via microlensing of bulge stars, and imaging the outskirts of nearby galaxies. Together these surveys are expected to produce a public dataset that will support astronomy work for decades.

The August launch date, and the healthy pace of pre-launch checkouts this month, matters because Roman is the last of the “great observatories” of the 2020s slate to reach the pad. Its arrival on orbit will complete a set of tools — with Webb, Euclid, and Rubin — that will collectively drive the next decade of observational cosmology and exoplanet science.

Source: NASA Roman Blog

Katalyst’s LINK Closes on the Swift Observatory in the First Commercial Rescue Docking

The LINK servicing spacecraft, built and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, was released from a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket over the Marshall Islands on 3 July and is now roughly two weeks into a month-long transfer toward NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. By late July, LINK is planned to close to within about 10 kilometers before beginning proximity operations, capture Swift with three robotic arms fitted with hand-like grippers, and boost it to roughly 600 kilometers over about 60 days.

Swift is a gamma-ray-burst monitor launched in 2004 that detects about 100 bursts per year and cues follow-up observations across the world’s observatories. Its orbit had decayed to the point that an uncontrolled reentry was expected by the end of 2026 — an operational and safety concern given the spacecraft’s size. Without the boost, Swift is out of options: it was never designed for on-orbit servicing, has no docking port, and no cooperative grappling fixtures.

If LINK succeeds, it will be the first commercial spacecraft ever to dock with a government satellite that was not built for servicing. That capability matters well beyond Swift: dozens of scientifically valuable satellites launched over the last two decades face the same end-of-life orbit decay problem, and a proven rescue-boost service would materially change the calculus of when and how expensive space assets are retired.

Source: NASA Swift Blog

SpaceX Adds 21 Satellites to the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Constellation

A Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 1:32 p.m. PDT on 16 July, carrying 21 satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer-E (T1TL-E) mission. The satellites join the second batch of operational spacecraft in the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a low-Earth-orbit constellation designed to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency communications to U.S. military users.

The SDA architecture is a deliberate move away from a handful of large, high-value geostationary birds toward hundreds of smaller satellites in LEO, delivered under fixed-price contracts to multiple prime contractors and refreshed on a two-year “tranche” cadence. The T1TL constellation is the transport-layer piece — the on-orbit backbone that will move data between sensor satellites, ground stations, and users — and is being built up alongside a tracking layer for missile warning and a data-transport layer for tactical messaging.

For the commercial space industry the interest is less in the specific payload and more in the model: SDA is one of the largest anchor customers now buying dozens of small satellites per year on aggressive schedules, providing a durable revenue stream for the small-satellite bus makers and launch providers that have grown up over the last five years. Regular Falcon 9 tranche launches are now a routine but substantial part of the U.S. national security space budget.

Source: Spaceflight Now