Malindi station, Kenya

NASA’s Swift has concluded operations, leaving behind a legacy of innovation and a treasure trove of science observations.

PAVE Space announced plans to launch a demo mission of its IBEX spacecraft—a highly maneuverable platform for commercial and defense payloads.

Swift is expected to crash back to Earth in the next few days.

The cost of operating amid debris

ESA’s Space Environment Report warns that growing space debris is threatening the sustainability of Earth’s orbit.

An inactive Soviet weather satellite has broken apart above Earth. The satellite breakup has added tens of debris fragments to an already crowded low-Earth orbit.

ClearSpace UK's robotic spacecraft with giant claws will chase down dead satellites at 17,000 mph, with a 2029 launch from Scotland planned.

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absurd_res ambiguous_gender anthro biped blep book claws comic cross-popping_vein cyndaquil dialogue duo ear_piercing ear_ring english_text finger_claws generation_2_pokemon glowing greyscale hi_res inside jewelry lian_(spacejunk) library lito_(spacejunk) looking_at_another monochrome nintendo piercing pokemon pokemon_(species) pokemon_mystery_dungeon quilava ring_piercing scar semi-anthro shaded shoulder_scar spacejunk speech_bubble spike_chunsoft talking_to_another text toe_claws tongue tongue_out

In August, a stray upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 struck the moon. Roughly the size of a school bus and weighing 4 metric tons, it hit the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at approximately 5,400 miles per hour, carving out a substantial new crater. Had a similarly massive piece of debris survived reentry and struck a populated area on Earth, it would have caused significant damage and loss of life. And, just last week, large pieces of space debris fell on land in both Minnesota and Indonesia, presumably from a Chinese rocket launched on 14 October. These events highlight an increasingly visible problem of space exploration: Satellite mega-constellations aren’t only transforming our night skies. Humanity’s expansion into space is beginning to reproduce the same take-make-waste model that has caused significant environmental damage on Earth. The number of objects in Earth’s orbit has risen dramatically and is likely to increase several-fold again over the coming decade. In 2010, the active satellite population was roughly 1,000. Today, space surveillance networks track approximately 40,000 objects in the Earth’s orbit. But only around 17,000 of these are still active payloads; the rest are retired satellites, spent rocket parts, and other fragments. When...

The photo, snapped by Vantor, shows how commercial satellites are already becoming possible targets.