spacecraft

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which studied the Martian atmosphere for 11 years, has been officially declared lost after losing contact in December 2025 when it disappeared behind Mars during a routine occultation. Telemetry fragments recovered later showed the spacecraft was spinning at 2.7 RPM, suggesting an unrecoverable power failure.

Impulse Space, a rocket engine startup founded by former SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller, raised $500 million in Series D funding to hire 200 new employees and develop its highly-maneuverable spacecraft, Mira and Helios. The company emphasizes human expertise over AI for hardware design.

AstroMind is a physics-grounded benchmark for evaluating large language models on spacecraft behavior reasoning tasks, including intent inference, maneuver parameter estimation, and threat assessment, using high-fidelity astrodynamics simulations and realistic sensor noise.

Comparison of Starship with the Space Shuttle, Orion, and Apollo command module, highlighting Starship's size and successful reentry from orbit.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft captured unfamiliar crescent views of Mars during a flyby, offering rare perspectives and calibration data for its instruments before its primary mission to asteroid Psyche.

A POV tweet from NASA Artemis describes the Orion spacecraft's crew module separating from the service module before reentering Earth's atmosphere at the end of Artemis II.