June 2026

This Month's Additions

Date	Title
6-05	NASA's X-59 quiet supersonic jet finally breaks the sound barrier: Mach 1.1, 713 mph, 43,400 feet
6-05	Astronomers Detect Long-Sought Wind From Milky Way's Central Black Hole
6-05	ISS Crew Shelters in SpaceX Dragon as Cosmonauts Work to Seal Years-Long Air Leak
6-05	MAVEN's Final Fall: NASA Estimates the Dead Mars Orbiter Will Plunge into the Red Planet Within 50 to 100 Years
6-05	SpaceX sets IPO price at 135 dollars, valuing company at 1.77 trillion and trading June 12 on Nasdaq as SPCX
6-05	Long March 8 launches 12th Qianfan batch from Hainan commercial spaceport
6-05	JWST Detects Methane on Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS for the First Time
6-04	Starlink 10-43 Completes Cape Canaveral Make-up Launch Outside 24-Hour Window: SpaceX Logs 619th Booster Recovery
6-04	3I/ATLAS is not an alien spacecraft: SETI technosignature search comes up empty
6-04	Long March 6A Modified Launches 18 Qianfan Polar-11 Satellites, Marking 648th Long March Flight
6-04	Sahara Meteorite NWA 12774 Reveals Evidence of a Lost Solar System World: Aluminum-Rich Clinopyroxene Pushes the Angrite Parent Body Toward Lunar Mass
6-04	Euclid Telescope Finds a Missing Patch of Stars in Globular Cluster NGC 6397: Evidence of the Partially-to-Fully Convective Transition in Red Dwarfs
6-04	NASA Administrator Isaacman: Blue Moon Landers to Be Decoupled from New Glenn, New Launcher Sought
6-04	China's reusable-rocket test campaign enters a dense phase: Zhuque-3 Y2, Xingyun-1 and Long March 10B queued for recovery attempts
6-03	Beijing Yizhuang convenes space-computing symposium with BOE, Galaxy Space, LandSpace and others to operationalize its new space-computing innovation center
6-03	Primordial Black Holes May Turn Into White Holes: Penn State Team Pinpoints the Minimum Mass Threshold
6-03	Roman Space Telescope's Primary Mirror Passes Its Final Inspection, Clearing the Way for an Aug. 30 Launch
6-03	Sun Unleashes 3 Major Solar Flares in 24 Hours: M9.3, M7.9, X1 From Region 4455 Trigger G3 Geomagnetic Storm Watch
6-03	NASA Officially Ends MAVEN Mars Mission: After 6 Months of Silence NASA Gives Up Recovery, Mars Orbiter Fleet Shrinks to Two
6-03	Starlink 10-43 Scrubbed for Weather: SpaceX Cape Launch Slips to June 4 Window
6-02	Northeastern US Boom on May 30 Was a Meteor Explosion Equal to 300 Tons of TNT, NASA Confirms
6-03	TESS Uncovers a Rare Coplanar Triple Star System That Triggers Triple Eclipses
6-03	Mars Samples Should Be Quarantined on the Moon First, Scientists Argue in New Policy Paper
6-02	SpaceX Wins $4.16 Billion Space Force Contract to Build a Space-Based Air-Tracking Constellation
6-02	Twenty-Year Radio Mystery Solved: Astronomers Pin Long-Period Radio Bursts on a 'Vampire' White Dwarf Feeding on Its Companion
6-02	Exoplanets Have Magnetic Fields After All: Hot-Jupiter Wind Speeds Reveal the First Direct Measurement of Alien Magnetospheres
6-03	Blue Origin Vows to Resume New Glenn Flights by Year's End: LC-36 Propellant Tanks Intact, Transporter-Erector Scrapped for Vertical Integration
6-02	China's Long March 12B Completes Maiden Flight: Qianfan Satellites Reach Orbit, No Advance Warning Issued
6-02	Impulse Space Raises $500 Million Series D: SpaceX's First Hire Tom Mueller Wants to Make 'Trucks in Space' Routine
6-02	SpaceX Files S-1 Prospectus, Will List as SPCX at Up to 2 Trillion Dollar Valuation
6-01	Astronomers Read Planetary 'Fingerprints' in Protoplanetary Disk Rings to Estimate Exoplanet Mass
6-01	Viewing the New Glenn Explosion from Space: Planet Labs Imagery Shows LC-36 Pad Scorched, Bezos Tours Site with NASA Chief Isaacman and Pledges 'Gradatim Ferociter'
6-01	What Blue Origin's New Glenn Explosion Means for NASA's Moon Plans: Analyst Calls It a 'Pretty Significant Setback'
6-01	Shenzhou-21 Crew Arrives in Beijing: 210-Day Mission Sets New Chinese Spaceflight Record
6-01	Beijing Space Intelligence Computing Research Institute Registered in Beijing Yizhuang
6-01	Xinghuo Kongjian Announces China's First Electric-Cycle Liquid Rocket Evolution-1
6-01	LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Release GWTC-5 Catalog: 161 New Black Hole Merger Signals, Clearest Verification Yet of Hawking's Area Theorem

Update Log

2026-06-06: Added 6/5 ISS air-leak sheltering event coverage (space.com 6/5 15:30 UTC + SFN 6/5 14:30 UTC): Out of an abundance of caution, NASA directed the four SpaceX Crew-12 crew members (Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot, Andrey Fedyaev) plus NASA astronaut Chris Williams to take shelter inside Dragon; Roscosmos is leading the seal work on the PrK transfer tunnel leading to the Zvezda service module. The leak rate had rebounded from 0.6 kg/day to 1.4 kg/day in April and the goal of the current repair is to bring it back below 0.3 kg/day
2026-06-06: Added MAVEN 50–100-year fall-to-Mars epilogue (space.com 6/4 15:00 UTC): two days after NASA officially ended the mission on 6/3, project manager Mike Moreau disclosed in a 6/5 briefing that MAVEN's current orbit is "very similar to what it would have been if the mission had ended nominally"; the original design called for 50 to 100 years of natural decay, with the exact timeline set by the 11-year solar cycle modulating the Martian upper atmosphere. MAVEN joins the "Mars morgue" of dead probes; NASA's active Mars orbiter fleet drops from three to two (Odyssey 2001 / MRO 2005)
2026-06-05: Added Starlink 10-43 June 4 make-up launch article (space.com 6/4 18:00 UTC combined retrospective): 31 hours after the June 3 7:24 a.m. EDT scrub caused by a cold front triggering cumulus cloud, thick-cloud, and surface electric field rules, Falcon 9 lifted off from SLC-40 at 6:26 a.m. EDT (10:26 UTC) on June 4 with 29 V2 Mini Optimized satellites; booster B1090 on its 12th flight landed on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship, marking ASOG's 153rd catch and SpaceX's 619th Falcon 9 first-stage recovery overall. Pairs with the June 3 OCISLY 200th / SpaceX 618th catch to deliver two recoveries in 19 hours across the two coasts
2026-06-05: Added NWA 12774 angrite meteorite study (CU Boulder, Aaron Bell et al., space.com 6/4 coverage): a 2019 Sahara-recovered sample carries clinopyroxene crystals exceptionally rich in aluminum — a geobarometer that pushes the angrite parent body from "asteroid-sized" up toward a near-lunar-mass protoplanet, following a planetary-formation pathway distinct from Earth and Mars. The first direct geochemical evidence of an "existed once, destroyed later" lost world in the early solar system
2026-06-05: Added ESA Euclid observation of a brightness gap in the H-R diagram of globular cluster NGC 6397 (STScI 6/4 release, space.com coverage): a specific red-dwarf brightness slot is almost completely empty, consistent with the structural transition from partially convective to fully convective stellar interiors. The gap was a serendipitous byproduct of a proper-motion survey, not a planned target
2026-06-05: Added NASA Administrator Isaacman June 4 FOX Business interview coverage (SFN 6/4 18:08 UTC): first public statement to "decouple the lander from the launch vehicle and the pad" — Blue Moon MK1 cargo and "potentially" MK2 crewed landers to shift off New Glenn onto another rocket, with Artemis 3 still targeted at a 2027 test mission and 2028 crewed lunar landing; paired with Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp's June 1 social-media statement that LC-36 propellant tanks are intact, the support tower can be repaired in place, and New Glenn will fly again before year-end. The NASA "swap the rocket" and Blue Origin "repair in place" threads now run in parallel alongside the June 1 industry-analyst piece (which framed the incident as a "pretty significant setback" for the Blue Moon program)
2026-06-04: Added China's reusable-rocket dense-test-window feature (CLS 6/3 pre-market note + LandSpace 5/13 Y2 factory-departure announcement + 220-tonne Lanyan methalox full-flow staged-combustion engine long-duration test-fire completed 2/2026 + 6/1 Long March 12B maiden flight which validated the return-leg aerodynamic shape): Zhuque-3 Y2 targeting first-half recovery + Q4 first-reuse flight; Deep Blue Aerospace Xingyun-1, CAS Space Lijian-family derivatives and CASC Commercial Long March 10B also queued
2026-06-04: Added Beijing Yizhuang 6/3 space-computing industry symposium coverage (Pengpai / CLS 6/3): BOE, Galaxy Space, LandSpace, Galactic Energy, Guanyu Xinsuan, CXMT and other heads of supply chain aligned on the construction of the Beijing Space Computing Innovation Center, paired with the 5/31 Xinhua Economic Information Daily disclosure of the Beijing Space Intelligent Computing Research Institute and the 6/1 Haidian Beijing Space Computing Industry Innovation Center (BUPT + Tsinghua + Galaxy Space). The two-week sequence establishes the "Haidian writes the algorithms, Yizhuang builds the satellites" pattern
2026-06-04: Added Penn State Eberly College of Science physicist Daniel Paraizo and colleagues' primordial-black-hole-to-white-hole theory paper (arXiv preprint, space.com 6/3 coverage): semi-classical model of Hawking-radiation lifetimes shows PBHs reaching the Planck mass enter a stable end-state "indistinguishable from a white hole" when viewed from afar
2026-06-03: Added live coverage of the Starlink 10-43 weather scrub on June 3 (Cape SLC-40 launch called off at 7:24 a.m. EDT; 45th Weather Squadron pegged acceptable weather at only 30%, with two of three launch-weather rules violated; next window opens 4:00 a.m. EDT on June 4, B1090 on its 12th flight targeting the ASOG drone ship; SFN 6/3)
2026-06-03: Added policy paper published online first in Springer Ambio on May 28, 2026: STAR Laboratories director Frederick Moxley and McGill University invasion biologist Anthony Ricciardi propose a dedicated extraterrestrial biocontainment facility on the lunar surface, with all samples from Mars, asteroids, and icy moons required to pass through robotic handling and certification on the moon before being allowed to enter Earth's biosphere; the paper calls out the lack of explicit planetary protection procedures in both NASA's Artemis lunar base architecture and the China-Russia led ILRS, and uses the documented mutation of Enterobacter bugandensis strains aboard the ISS as a real-world case (space.com 6/3 coverage)
2026-06-03: Added Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp June 2 X post with LC-36 damage assessment (propellant tanks + water tower intact, support tower repairable in place, transporter-erector scrapped for vertical integration), targeting year-end 2026 return to flight (SFN 6/3)
2026-06-03: Added China's Long March 12B (CZ-12B) maiden launch coverage (4:40 AM EDT 6/1 liftoff, no advance airspace/maritime notice per ICAO/IMO standard, Qianfan constellation satellites to orbit; Scientific American / People's Daily / Xinhua / Ars Technica / Live Science / Space.com June 1-2); added Impulse Space $500M Series D coverage (June 2 announcement, 137 Ventures + Banner VC co-led, cumulative funding >$1B; founded by SpaceX's first engineer Tom Mueller; Mira has flown 3 times, Helios kick stage scheduled for 2027 debut)
2026-06-02: Added SpaceX S-1 IPO filing, ticker SPCX, 1.75–2 trillion dollar valuation, potentially the largest IPO in history (space.com 6/2)
2026-06-02: Added Warwick-MIT PDS 70 protoplanetary disk "planetary fingerprints" research (The Astrophysical Journal 5/28 publication, space.com 6/1 coverage)
2026-06-01: Added LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA GWTC-5 gravitational-wave catalog release (Guangming Online 5/29 + space.com 6/1); Blue Origin New Glenn explosion impact on NASA Moon plans (Space.com June 1 follow-up); Shenzhou-21 crew Beijing arrival; Beijing Space Intelligence Computing Research Institute established; Xinghuo Kongjian Evolution-1 electric-cycle liquid rocket announcement; Planet Labs SkySat-C9 imagery of LC-36 blast damage and Bezos's LC-36 tour with NASA Administrator Isaacman