spacecraft

The Department of War has awarded $161 million to AntaresNuclear, a Los Angeles nuclear startup, to demonstrate a nuclear reactor integrated with spacecraft for persistent high-power operations in orbit.

NASA's Orion spacecraft heat shield, initially problematic during Artemis I, performed well in Artemis II after adjusting the reentry profile, with future missions planned to use a more permeable material for enhanced capability.

A non-profit organization called The FermiExplorer Mission has been founded to launch the first spacecraft to another star, Alpha Centauri, by 2029, aiming to make interstellar travel a reality and address the Fermi Paradox.

Due to an ongoing attitude control issue, the LINK spacecraft will not boost NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory as planned, but will still attempt rendezvous operations to demonstrate satellite servicing capabilities for future space exploration.

SpaceX Recovery team has successfully guided the Starship vehicle to a location off Christmas Island after 24 days at sea. Engineers are en route to analyze the vehicle before attempting to return it.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg says Starliner's propulsion redesign is going well, and the spacecraft could launch a cargo test flight to the ISS this year, pending port availability. A crewed mission might follow in late 2027 if the cargo flight succeeds.

SpaceWASM is an open-source WebAssembly interpreter from NASA/JPL designed for on-board spacecraft sequencing, with a focus on deterministic memory usage and streaming capabilities for resource-constrained environments.

This paper explores deep reinforcement learning for attitude control of spacecraft during hypersonic re-entry. It demonstrates that state-of-the-art RL and hybrid controllers can outperform traditional PID controllers with gain scheduling, especially when dynamics randomization is used to improve robustness and generalization.

This paper investigates memory-efficient meta-reinforcement learning architectures for adaptive safety-critical control in adversarial spacecraft proximity operations, finding that state space models like Mamba with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel savings compared to LSTM and GRU.

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.