Space

Top 10 Space Stories: May 3 - May 10, 2026

Samantha Atkins

Samantha Atkins

— 14 min read

Executive Summary

The week of May 3-10, 2026 was unusually dense in narrative threads that connect launch infrastructure, planetary defense, exoplanetary science, and the politics of how the US chooses to fund space science. SpaceX cleared the most consequential remaining hardware milestone before Starship Flight 12 with a full-duration, 33-engine static fire of the Version 3 Super Heavy on May 7, while in Berlin on the same day ESA and JAXA signed a Memorandum of Cooperation that ratifies their joint authority over the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety. The two events share a logical structure: both are commitments to flight on hardware that has not yet flown, executed under tight calendar pressure, and both lock in architectural choices whose consequences will compound for a decade.

Astrophysics had a remarkable week. A Nature Astronomy paper led by Ben Forrest at UC Davis reported a massive, non-rotating galaxy at z~3, XMM-VID1-2075, that should not exist under standard hierarchical models — a "slow rotator" reached in less than two billion years. Less than a week later, a separate Nature Astronomy paper by Luis Salazar Manzano and collaborators announced an HDO/H2O ratio in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS that is roughly 30 times higher than that measured in any solar-system comet and 40 times that of Earth's oceans, the first deuterated-water measurement ever made in an interstellar object. Together these two papers represent the leading edge of what JWST and ALMA-class facilities are now doing routinely: turning single objects into stress tests of the standard models of galaxy assembly and protoplanetary chemistry.

On the rocky-exoplanet frontier, the JWST 5-12 micron emission spectrum of LHS 3844 b (arXiv 2605.00100, Kreidberg et al.) directly characterized the surface mineralogy of a tidally locked super-Earth for the first time, ruling out fresh powder and CO2/SO2 atmospheres and pointing to a dark, basalt-like, space-weathered crust. NASA's TESS mission released a complementary methodological breakthrough — the use of mutual eclipses in stellar binaries to surface 24 new candidate exoplanets that conventional transit-search geometry cannot detect — and the dynamic TOI-201 system was confirmed to host a third planet, TOI-201 d, whose orbital architecture is already evolving on human timescales due to von Zeipel-Kozai-Lidov oscillations.

US space policy entered an unusually loud phase. The House Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee on April 30 reported out a FY2027 bill that funds NASA at $24.438 billion — $5.609 billion above the President's request — but still cuts the Science Mission Directorate by 18 percent against the FY2026 enacted level. Full committee markup is scheduled for May 13. Commercial launch posted its strongest single week in some time: Rocket Lab disclosed its largest contract ever (five Neutron + three Electron flights to a confidential customer, baselined 2026-2029) on a Q1 earnings call that put backlog at $2.2 billion, and SpaceX flew its 54th mission of the year on May 3, deploying CAS500-2 and 44 other payloads from Vandenberg. Looking past the report window, NASA-SpaceX confirmed a May 12 target for CRS-34, the first ISS resupply mission to carry the new Space Weather Follow-On payload alongside the now-routine cadence of microgravity science.

The connective tissue across the week is institutional. Hardware pacing items (Starship V3, Roman delivery, Apophis 2029 flyby) are converging with policy decisions whose durability depends on whether the FY2027 appropriations process holds the line on science funding. Astrophysical results, in turn, are pressing harder on a set of telescopes whose successors are not assured. The next four weeks — Starship Flight 12, the May 13 House markup, Roman shipment to KSC, and BepiColombo's MTM separation in September — will determine whether the cadence holds.

1. SpaceX Completes 33-Engine Static Fire of Starship V3 Super Heavy, Clearing Path to Flight 12

On May 7, SpaceX conducted a full-duration, full-thrust static fire of Booster 19, the first Version 3 Super Heavy, igniting all 33 Raptor engines on Pad 2 at Starbase. The test was the most significant remaining hardware milestone before Flight 12, the maiden flight of Starship V3 and the first flight from the new Pad 2 launch mount, and it followed a successful six-engine static fire of the matching Ship upper stage on April 14 (Space.com, Friends of NASA). Industry trackers now have Flight 12 targeted no earlier than May 15, with the launch window depending on FAA license verification on the new pad (RocketLaunch.Live).

V3 introduces a substantially redesigned booster and ship, including new heat-shield architecture, propellant transfer plumbing intended to support orbital refueling, and stage-one structural changes whose first integrated flight test this is. The lengthy gap between Flight 11 (October 2025) and Flight 12 partly reflects a destructive pressure-test failure of the original Flight 12 booster in November 2025, and partly the V3 redesign cycle itself. Flight 12 will be suborbital. Before Starship can fly an Artemis lunar lander mission, the architecture must demonstrate orbital insertion, in-orbit propellant transfer between two Starships, and life-support qualification — none of which Flight 12 alone resolves (Space.com).

The static fire's significance is therefore narrower than the public framing suggests but quite real for the cadence question: SpaceX cannot rely on V2 hardware for the Artemis III demonstration timeline, and every test on V3 that goes well compresses the schedule by eliminating one of the bottlenecks that program critics have flagged for the past year.

2. ESA and JAXA Sign Memorandum of Cooperation and Ramses Mission Agreement for Apophis 2029 Encounter

On May 7 in Berlin, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa signed a Memorandum of Cooperation on planetary defense alongside a dedicated agreement covering the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses). The signing occurred at the Embassy of Italy and was hosted in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency, reflecting OHB Italia's role as Ramses prime contractor (ESA, Space & Defense).

Ramses is targeted to launch in 2028 and rendezvous with asteroid (99942) Apophis several months before its April 13, 2029 close flyby of Earth at roughly 32,000 km — closer than geosynchronous satellites and one-tenth of the lunar distance. Under the new partition of responsibilities, ESA owns spacecraft design, integration, and operations, while JAXA contributes lightweight solar arrays, an infrared imager, and the launch on its H3 rocket. The contracts build on an OHB Italia development award worth €81.2 million signed in February 2026, bringing total Ramses value to roughly €150 million (ESA contract release, Phys.org).

Ramses will be the first mission to observe an asteroid before, during, and after a deep gravitational perturbation by a planet — an experiment that the natural Apophis flyby effectively forces the rock to perform on the spacecraft's behalf. Tidal stresses on a 375-meter rubble-pile body during a 32,000 km flyby of Earth are within the regime where structural reorganization, surface refresh, and possibly mass shedding may be detectable. The new ESA-JAXA agreement also formalizes ongoing collaboration on Hera, EarthCARE, and BepiColombo, signaling that planetary defense is being elevated alongside Earth science and planetary science as a third axis of routine European-Japanese cooperation.

3. JWST Finds a Massive, Non-Rotating Galaxy at z~3 That Standard Models Cannot Easily Produce

A Nature Astronomy paper published online May 4 by Ben Forrest (UC Davis) and the MAGAZ3NE team reports JWST resolved kinematics of three quiescent massive galaxies in the early universe, including XMM-VID1-2075. The headline result is that XMM-VID1-2075 — a several-Milky-Way-mass galaxy at less than 2 Gyr after the Big Bang — shows no detectable rotation and is dominated by random stellar motions. That kinematic state is characteristic of mature elliptical galaxies in the local universe, where it is interpreted as the long-term outcome of repeated mergers and dynamical heating (ScienceDaily, Phys.org, AZoQuantum, York University).

The team's preferred explanation is not a long merger history but a single counter-rotating major merger — observationally supported by a substantial offset light source adjacent to the system that is consistent with an in-progress companion. That hypothesis turns XMM-VID1-2075 from a curiosity into a constraint: it implies that at z~3, dispersion-supported, "dead" massive systems can be assembled in essentially one event, on a timescale much shorter than the merger-tree-driven evolution that current cosmological simulations assume. The two other galaxies in the sample — one rotating, one with disturbed kinematics — frame the observed range and make the result less easily dismissed as instrumental.

For the user with strong prior interests in distributed-systems analogues to physical structure, the more interesting implication is methodological: JWST's NIRSpec IFU is now a kinematic instrument at z>3, not just a photometric and SED-fitting one. The MAGAZ3NE collaboration's approach of cross-validating Keck observations with JWST IFU spectroscopy is becoming a template for early-universe morphology studies, and the 1-event-vs-many-event ambiguity will be progressively resolved as the sample size grows and simulation predictions for non-rotators at high z are sharpened.

4. ALMA Measures HDO/H2O in Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS at 30x Solar-System Levels

A Nature Astronomy paper led by Luis E. Salazar Manzano (University of Michigan) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory team reports the first measurement of the deuterated-water-to-water ratio in an interstellar object. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the team measured an HDO/H2O ratio in 3I/ATLAS approximately 30 times higher than the value found in solar-system comets and roughly 40 times the ratio in Earth's oceans (NRAO release, Phys.org, ScienceDaily; paper DOI 10.1038/s41550-026-02850-5).

The D/H ratio in cometary water is one of the most direct chemical fingerprints of the temperature and shielding conditions in the protoplanetary disk where ices froze out: deuterium fractionation increases as temperature drops below ~30 K and as gas-phase ion-molecule chemistry runs longer in cold, dense conditions. A 30-fold elevation over solar-system comets means 3I/ATLAS's parent system either had a substantially colder ice-formation reservoir, longer pre-stellar chemical evolution timescales, or both. This is the third interstellar interloper to yield substantial chemistry (after 1I/'Oumuamua's structural anomalies and 2I/Borisov's CO/H2O ratio) and the first to deliver a quantitative thermodynamic constraint on its birth environment.

The measurement also stresses the ALMA observing model: the team had to detect HDO at a faint, evolving point source whose orbital geometry was changing rapidly during the observing window. The result complements ESA's Juice flyby characterization of 3I/ATLAS earlier in the year (ESA Juice), and together they make 3I/ATLAS the most thoroughly characterized interstellar object to date.

5. JWST Mid-Infrared Spectrum Pins Down the Surface Mineralogy of LHS 3844 b

In arXiv 2605.00100 (Kreidberg et al., posted April 30 and widely covered in the first week of May), the JWST team reports a 5-12 micron thermal emission spectrum of the tidally locked super-Earth LHS 3844 b. The spectrum is best fit by a dark, low-silica surface — basalt or other olivine-rich material — rather than fresh powder, and the data set 5-sigma upper limits of ~100 mbar on CO2 and 3-sigma upper limits of ~10 microbar on SO2 in any residual atmosphere. Space-weathering darkens fresh powder enough to be consistent with the spectrum, so an ancient, processed crust without an atmosphere is the favored picture (arXiv 2605.00100, Astrobiology.com, Space.com, ScienceDaily).

The result is a methodological inflection point for rocky exoplanet science. Until now, characterization has consisted of indirect inferences from secondary eclipse depths and dayside brightness temperatures, with strong degeneracies between surface composition and atmospheric structure. The MIRI/MRS-class wavelength coverage that produced the LHS 3844 b spectrum directly resolves silicate features and Christiansen frequencies that distinguish basalt, granite, and feldspar surfaces. The team explicitly states that the same technique should now extend to a broader sample of M-dwarf rocky planets, of which there are several dozen accessible to MIRI within reasonable observing time.

For the user's purposes the result also closes a long-running question about LHS 3844 b specifically: a 2019 Spitzer phase curve had been ambiguous as to whether the planet had a thin atmosphere or none. The JWST upper limits effectively rule out anything but a trace exosphere, leaving LHS 3844 b as a clean, atmosphere-free reference target for surface-spectroscopy modeling.

6. House CJS Subcommittee Approves NASA FY2027 Bill at $24.438B; Full Committee Markup May 13

On April 30, the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee approved its FY2027 bill on a party-line vote (8-6). The bill funds NASA at $24.438 billion — equal to the FY2026 enacted level and $5.609 billion above the $18.829 billion President Trump requested. Within the topline, the Science Mission Directorate is funded at $6.0 billion, $1.3 billion below the FY2026 enacted level of $7.3 billion but well above the $3.9 billion the request would have allowed (a 46 percent cut). Human Exploration is funded at $8.926 billion, roughly $400 million above the request, reflecting the bipartisan post-Artemis II shift toward lunar program acceleration (SpacePolicyOnline, Planetary Society).

Full committee markup is scheduled for May 13, the first major test of whether the subcommittee's restoration holds against floor amendments. The Senate, which held its hearing with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on April 28 (SpacePolicyOnline), is expected to release its CJS bill text in May or June. Ranking Member Grace Meng (D-NY) flagged that the SMD figure remains an 18 percent reduction against current spending — meaning that even the "restored" version of the bill represents a structural shrinkage of NASA's science portfolio relative to the FY2025-FY2026 baseline.

The substantive consequences are visible in the spreadsheet but not yet in the program structure. Roman remains funded for September 2026 launch, Mars Sample Return remains effectively cancelled by the January 2026 reconciliation language but with $110 million preserved for "Mars Future Missions" technology, and the Ignition initiatives announced in March (Space Reactor-1 Freedom nuclear electric propulsion to Mars by 2028, among others) are accommodated within the human exploration line. The subcommittee text frames Artemis II's success and Artemis III's compressed schedule as the principal political insurance for the topline restoration; whether that holds at full committee will turn on whether the cuts to NOAA, OSTEM, and the broader CJS title can be negotiated separately.

7. Rocket Lab Books Largest Launch Contract in Company History: 5 Neutron + 3 Electron Flights to Confidential Customer

On a May 7 Q1 2026 earnings call, Rocket Lab announced a multi-launch agreement with an unnamed customer covering five dedicated Neutron launches and three dedicated Electron launches, baselined for 2026-2029 from both Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand and Launch Complex 3 in Wallops, Virginia. The contract pricing aligns with Rocket Lab's average selling price for both vehicles, putting the deal value above the prior record of $190 million for 20 HASTE suborbital flights for the DoD. Total backlog as of quarter end stood at approximately $2.2 billion, with launch services accounting for 41.5 percent of that (Spaceflight Now, GlobeNewswire, Aviation Week).

CEO Peter Beck confirmed Neutron remains targeted for first launch in Q4 2026 on what he characterized as an "aggressive schedule," with progress benchmarks tied to "placing of items on test stands" — most consequentially the Archimedes engine, which is currently in extensive testing at NASA Stennis with full-duration burns, vacuum hot fires, and TVC sweeps in both test cells. Neutron is designed for ~1.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff (nine Archimedes engines), comparable to a Falcon 9 (~1.7 Mlbf), and the company is targeting one launch in year one, three in year two, and five in year three of operations — replicating the cautious Electron rollout cadence.

The deal lands at a moment where Rocket Lab has booked more launches in Q1 2026 alone than it sold in all of 2025, with 31 new launch contracts year-to-date. Combined with Vulcan's slow return to flight and ULA's continued government-mission focus, this consolidates Rocket Lab as the most credible non-SpaceX domestic medium-lift entrant. The Q4 2026 first flight is the rate-limiting variable; if it slips to 2027, the multi-year backlog ramp becomes harder to convert.

8. SpaceX Falcon 9 Delivers South Korean CAS500-2 and 44 Rideshare Payloads from Vandenberg

On May 3 at 07:00 UTC, a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 4E deployed the South Korean CAS500-2 high-resolution Earth-observation satellite alongside 44 rideshare payloads, including Lynk Tower 7-8, NuSpace NuLink-1/2, Planet Labs Pelican-7/8/9, the WSU SNAPPY solar-neutrino measurement CubeSat, the BMFTR QUBE-II quantum-key-distribution demonstrator, EMTECH SPACE SELENE, and NCU PEARL-1A/1B (Spaceflight Now, Space.com, AIAA).

CAS500-2 was originally manifested for a 2022 launch on a Russian Soyuz before the post-2022 Western pullout from Russian launch services rerouted it to Falcon 9; it is the second of the Korean Compact Advanced Satellite 500-class observation satellites and provides 0.5 m ground sample distance imagery for South Korean civil and ministry users. The mission was the 54th SpaceX flight of 2026, putting the company on track for roughly 160 orbital launches this year (it had previously projected 170 with the now-delayed Starship cadence). All but one 2026 mission to date have been Falcon 9; the other was Falcon Heavy's April 29 ViaSat-3 APAC return-to-flight after an 18-month gap.

The CAS500-2 manifest is also notable for what it says about commercial rideshare maturity: 44 secondary payloads is one of the larger single-rideshare deployments to date for a non-Transporter-class mission, and the SNAPPY CubeSat in particular — a solar-neutrino measurement experiment from Wichita State — is the kind of low-cost, high-novelty science payload that the rideshare model now reliably accommodates.

9. TESS Stellar-Eclipse Method Surfaces 24+ New Exoplanet Candidates as TOI-201 d Confirmed in Dynamic Three-Planet System

A NASA Science Mission Directorate announcement on May 4 highlighted a new technique applied to TESS data that uses mutual eclipses between binary stars to surface previously hidden exoplanet candidates. The method searches for the small additional dimming events caused by a circumstellar planet during a stellar mutual eclipse, when the host star's light contribution is geometrically modulated by its companion. The team has so far surfaced more than 24 candidate planets, in addition to TESS's 885 confirmed exoplanets and 7,900-plus candidates from conventional transit detection (NASA Science, Astrobiology.com).

In parallel, the May 7 NASA Exoplanet Archive update confirmed TOI-201 d, the third planet in the dynamic TOI-201 system, alongside seven other new planets including TIC 183374187 b, TOI-1752 b/c, and TOI-5624 c/d/e/f (Exoplanet Archive, NASA TOI-201 d). The TOI-201 system, characterized in detail by Vissapragada and colleagues in Science Advances on April 15, contains a co-transiting super-Earth, warm Jupiter, and a 2900-day massive companion — together executing von Zeipel-Kozai-Lidov oscillations driven by mutual inclination. The system's current co-transiting configuration is calculated to end within roughly 200 years, with the next transit of TOI-201 c predicted for March 26, 2031 (Science Advances paper, arXiv 2604.23929, IAC release).

The two stories together reframe TESS's late-mission scientific yield. TESS's prime mission ended in 2020 and the spacecraft has been operating in extended phases for over six years; the stellar-eclipse method is a software-and-archives win that directly converts the existing photometric corpus into new candidates without additional observation time. The TOI-201 system, meanwhile, is one of the cleanest natural laboratories for ZKL dynamics yet identified — a system that is visibly evolving on observable human timescales is the kind of object that decadal observing programs are designed to capture.

10. NASA-SpaceX Set May 12 for CRS-34 Resupply Mission with Space Weather Follow-On Payload

NASA and SpaceX confirmed a launch target of 7:16 p.m. EDT on May 12 for CRS-34, the 34th Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station, lifting off from Cape Canaveral SLC-40 (NASA, NASA news releases, Kennedy Space Center). The Cargo Dragon will deliver science investigations, crew supplies, station hardware, and external payloads to the orbital lab.

CRS-34's principal external payload manifest includes the next Space Weather Follow-On instrument suite, returning external riders to ISS for in-situ ionosphere and thermosphere measurement that complements NOAA's growing space-weather observation portfolio. This continues the broader trend of using ISS as an in-orbit testbed for instruments whose host satellites are still in development — a pattern that has accelerated since the Space Weather Workshop in Boulder April 27 - May 1 reaffirmed the bipartisan space-weather operational priority. Internal cargo includes microgravity biology experiments under the ongoing ISS National Lab portfolio, hardware for upcoming spacewalks, and provisions for the Crew-12 expedition.

In parallel, the Zvezda PrK micro-leak from the Russian segment remains under root-cause investigation as reported in the April 29 ISS Advisory Council update; CRS-34 cargo includes additional repair hardware that has been progressively manifested across recent resupply flights as the leak management strategy has shifted from sealing to hatch-isolation discipline. CRS-34 will also be the first resupply mission to operate under the post-Artemis II ISS sequencing changes, with Crew-13's September 2026 launch overlapping Crew-12's planned November departure.

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