Space News & Blog Articles

1. Human Spaceflight Missions

Apollo Program (NASA, USA)

• Goal: Land humans on the Moon and return them safely

The space telescope spied three young stars in the nebula.

Video: 00:02:30

Two meteorological missions – Meteosat Third Generation Sounder-1 (MTG-S1) and the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission – have launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, US.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaks away from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during the Starlink 10-25 mission on July 2, 2025. This was SpaceX’s 500th Falcon 9 rocket launch to date. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

Update July 2, 3 a.m. EDT: SpaceX landed its first stage booster on the droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’

The second of the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellites and the first instrument for the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission lifted off at 23:04 CEST on Tuesday, 1 July. The satellite is now on its way to monitor Earth’s atmosphere from an altitude of 36 000 km. From this geostationary orbit, the missions can provide game-changing data for forecasting severe storms and air pollution over Europe.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the MTG-S1 weather satellite for EUMETSAT today (July 1), then came back down to Earth for a landing on a ship at sea.

Cosmic archeologists have used the James Webb Space Telescope to excavate ancient disk galaxies that tell the story of how the Milky Way and other modern galaxies evolved.

The phenomenon is created by the shifting play of light and shadow over the lunar surface.

The Australian company Gilmour Space is back at the launch pad with its Eris-1 rocket, preparing for the country's first orbital launch on July 2.

The Meteosat Third Generation Sounder (MTG-S1) satellite from the European Oganisation for the Exploration of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) is encapsulated in SpaceX Falcon 9 payload fairings ahead of launch. Image: SpaceX

A European satellite designed to augment both weather monitoring and assessments of air quality and pollution for Europe and North Africa is preparing to take flight from Florida on Tuesday evening.

American companies launched 21 commercial space missions in June 2025, which was a new record for a single month, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Mars rover captured images of low ridges called boxwork patterns, which appear like spiderwebs from space.

A distant cluster of galaxies is wrapped in a vast halo of high-energy particles that could be the work of supermassive black holes or a cosmic particle accelerator.

A new quantum recipe for black holes could be the first step toward a theory of "quantum gravity", the "holy grail" of physics.

Image: A powerful heatwave has been gripping large parts of southern Europe. This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer on 29 June 2025, reveals the temperature of the land surface.

"Its occurrence is like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice – indicating either an unexpected local environment or long-distance transport in the early solar system."