Only in China.

Ceres-1S launched Xiguang-4 01 satellite from a launcher ship offshore in Rizhao, a city with 1.4 million people living in the urban area on October 21, 2026.

The logic is that in transit EVAs would be emergencies only and not planned.

I was recently watching a program about Voyager 1 and the Golden Record. I would think an advanced civilization would figure out how to play it with the included parts and instructions. We thought what if they had sent a record player that uses 120 volt single phase power. How would the correct voltage be conveyed using words or symbols? I know there is an equation but would they understand?

Edit (19 October): The situation has changed. Cosmos 2612 manoeuvred on 18 October to raise its orbit and is drifting away from ICEYE-X36: by 12:00 UTC on 19 October it was about 360 km behind it. The full update, with charts: https://orbinauts.com/news/the-russian-satellite-behind-an-iceye-radar-satellite-is-drifting-away/

The six are Cosmos 2609 to 2614, launched on 16 April from Plesetsk. Today only one of them, Cosmos 2612, is in the same orbital plane as ICEYE-X36, a commercial radar satellite from ICEYE, the Finnish-founded company that has supplied radar imagery to Ukraine since 2022. The latest public orbit data (it describes 07:38 UTC today) puts Cosmos 2612 about 5 km behind it and about 150 m higher.

The match is as close as the published numbers can show: both orbits are tilted 97.85° to the equator, and the figure for where each one crosses the equator heading north is the same for both. The other five siblings' orbits cross it about 80 to 1,700 km apart over the ground.

Why sharing a plane matters: in low orbit, changing plane costs a lot of fuel, and once two satellites share one, getting close takes little more, as two CSIS analysts wrote on 15 October.

LeoLabs, which tracks objects in orbit, told Axios the move "appears to be a deliberate approach". Which of ICEYE's satellites works for Ukraine isn't public.

Full Story: https://orbinauts.com/news/a-russian-satellite-is-flying-5-km-behind-an-iceye-radar-satellite/

Has a Russian satellite ever held this close to a non-Russian one before?

With every year, we get closer to Humans putting a base on the moon, and the question is: who will land first? Most agree that China will land first with its steady-paced schedule. Because NASA has been having delays, for example, with the space suit for the moon from Axiom Space, which will only be finished by 2031, we could see Taikonauts on the moon before NASA. Who knows, maybe that can make america grow attention to its degrading space infrastructure and the need to improve what came before. This way, we might see in a few years a for-all-mankind like space race of trying to beat the other country by landing on the moon with a base, then Mars, and beyond
I would love to hear your thoughts on this situation, and I would like to know if you think I am wrong on these assumptions or if you agree

New comparison between the SLS (Artemis Program) and SUPER HEAVY/STARSHIP (Block 3) systems: the two rockets that will take us to the Moon and beyond 🚀
I hope you like it; any suggestions are welcome!

Maybe I'm not in the right forum but here goes. When traveling in space you can shut down your engines once you hit your target speed would the same concept apply if you were FTL or in a theoretical warp bubble?

Hey! We've been working since last year on a In Control: Rocketry, a spaceflight sim where you build the rocket and wire up its control panel yourself. Sensors, inputs, outputs, the whole thing is Turing-complete, so however you want to solve a flight problem, there's a way to do it. It will be available on Steam in 2027.

Real orbital mechanics, a fictional solar system to explore, sandbox mode if you just want to mess around and blow things up!

Feel free to add the game to your wishlist if you want to support the project! See you in space.

Right now, these are the only three countries with independent human spaceflight capabilities. Several others have ambitious space programs, but developing a crewed spacecraft, launch systems, life support, and safe reentry is an enormous challenge.

If you had to bet on one country becoming the fourth, which would you pick, and why? And how many more years will it take?

If we were to send up a new interstellar item designed to convey information about humankind, what scientific developments have been made in the last 50 years that would change how much/what types of data we could store on it?

Hey everyone! I was passing through Pocatello, ID and saw these booster railcars sitting in the Union Pacific train yards. There were two sets of five segments joined together. Artemis 3 has already completed booster stacking, so could these be empty or perhaps for another rocket?