Space
Solar Orbiter heads to the sun in mission to unravel its mysteries, takes first space measurements
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft is traveling through the cosmos. Its destination: the inner solar system. The 3,900-lb. (1,800-kg) spacecraft will work in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to unravel solar mysteries that have puzzled scientists for decades.
The probe will spend the next two years cruising towards the sun and using both Venus and the Earth to slingshot itself out of the ecliptic plane — the area of space where all planets orbit. This vantage point will allow the spacecraft to eventually look down upon the sun’s polar regions and snap the very first images of this crucial area.
“We believe this area holds the keys to unraveling the mysteries of the sun’s activity cycle,” Daniel Müller, the mission’s ESA project scientist, said in a prelaunch science briefing on Feb. 7.
The Solar Orbiter and its suite of 10 specialized instruments will act as a mobile laboratory in space, tracking eruptions of solar materials from their origin on the surface of the sun, out into space, and all the way down to Earth.
“Our entire solar system is governed by the activity that comes from the sun,” Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division said during the mission’s science briefing. “There’s a continually streaming kind of soup of energetic particles that moves away from the sun and bathes all the planets. We call that the solar wind.”
Together, the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field create a huge bubble known as the heliosphere, which shields the Earth from powerful interstellar radiation called cosmic rays.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are energetic eruptions of solar material and when they make it to Earth, the solar particles can interact with our planet’s magnetic field to produce powerful electromagnetic fluctuations. Known as geomagnetic storms, they are troublesome because they’re known to disrupt technologies like communications systems and even power grids.
Additionally, they can also be dangerous to astronauts and satellites in space. Solar Orbiter will help mitigate damages from these types of storms by helping scientists better predict when they might happen.
Solar Orbiter launched atop an Atlas V rocket on Feb. 9 at 11:03 p.m. EST (0403 GMT on Feb. 10). About an hour after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage as planned, extended its solar arrays and sent a signal back to Earth that it had power.
The spacecraft then spent the next several days deploying its communication antennas as well as its instrument boom.
Its first three months are what’s known as a commissioning phase, during which ground controllers will check out the onboard instruments to make sure everything is in working order. Two years from now, the spacecraft will be close enough to take its first detailed measurements of the sun, but we didn’t have to wait that long for the first bits of science data to come in.
Solar Orbiter carries ten scientific instruments, four in situ (meaning they measure the environment around the spacecraft) and six remote-sensing imagers (which will measure the sun’s properties). The majority of the in situ instruments are located on a 4.4-m-long extendable boom. They study the electromagnetic characteristics of the solar wind, as well as the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun.
“We measure magnetic fields thousands of times smaller than those we are familiar with on Earth,” Tim Horbury, principal investigator for the magnetometer (MAG) instrument on the Solar Orbiter, said in the statement. “Even currents in electrical wires make magnetic fields far larger than what we need to measure. That’s why our sensors are on a boom, to keep them away from all the electrical activity inside the spacecraft.”
Designed to measure the strength and direction of the magnetic field, the MAG (which is composed of two sensors) was the first instrument to send back data.
“The data we received shows how the magnetic field decreases from the vicinity of the spacecraft to where the instruments are actually deployed,” Horbury said in the same statement. “This is an independent confirmation that the boom actually deployed and that the instruments will, indeed, provide accurate scientific measurements in the future.”
The boom is a pole made constructed out of titanium and carbon-fiber that houses three instruments, which are so sensitive that they need to be kept away from the main body of the spacecraft to avoid potential electromagnetic disturbances.
“Measuring before, during, and after the boom deployment helps us to identify and characterize signals that are not linked to the solar wind, such as perturbations coming from the spacecraft platform and other instruments,” Matthieu Kretzschmar, lead co-investigator of the high-frequency magnetometer of the Radio and Plasma Waves instrument (RPW) instrument, which is also located on the boom and will study properties of the solar wind.
The team will continue to calibrate the spacecraft’s suite of instruments and will begin collecting official science data as early as May.
Elon Musk
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
Hegseth named Elon Musk to help lead Project Meridian, a Pentagon study of future warfare.
Elon Musk has a new role in the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on war.gov Wednesday that Musk will help lead Project Meridian, a new Pentagon study meant to identify the weapons and technologies the U.S. military will need to fight wars decades from now.
Hegseth unveiled the project during his State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Musk will direct the effort alongside Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, working under Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael. All three men were in attendance, and Hegseth said their first meeting would take place directly after the speech inside a secure compartmented facility, according to The Hill.
Hegseth said the group “will be focused on discovering, developing, and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes, without any creative limitations or restrictions, on any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.” He added that Meridian is not meant to produce new strategy or policy documents.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
A memo released after the announcement gives Michael until January 28, 2027, to deliver findings, a window of 120 days. It names artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology as the fields expected to change how wars are fought. The results will come as a public report with a classified annex. The memo says the study will run through a partner organization it does not name, and it does not mention Musk directly. His role comes from Hegseth’s speech and a Pentagon press release.’
Musk had not commented publicly on the appointment as of Wednesday evening. This will be Musk’s first official advisory role in the administration since he left DOGE last year.
The mandate overlaps heavily with Musk’s companies. SpaceX is one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, with 2026 defense awards topping $8 billion, much of it tied to launches and a suspected Starshield buildout out of Vandenberg. The Pentagon’s release says Meridian will examine domains “from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier,” which maps onto The Boring Company’s tunneling and Starship’s lunar plans. Tesla’s work on autonomy and Optimus falls within the fields the memo lists.
Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth announced Wednesday. Another is a new Autonomous Warfare Command, which the department wants operating as a four-star combatant command by October 1, 2027.
The news lands a day before SpaceX is scheduled to fly a classified National Reconnaissance Office payload on Falcon Heavy, one of three launches the company has planned for Thursday.
News
SpaceX set to launch astronauts and a classified Falcon Heavy mission on the same day
SpaceX plans three launches Thursday, including Crew-13 astronauts and Falcon Heavy’s first classified NRO mission.
SpaceX is lining up one of the busiest single days in its history, and the company offered a preview on Wednesday morning with a simple post on X: “Sunrise at pad 40.” The video and photos show Falcon 9 standing at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, roughly a day before it is scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.
That launch is only the first of three SpaceX missions planned for Thursday, October 1, across both coasts.
Sunrise at pad 40 pic.twitter.com/J7Qme4VvIX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 30, 2026
Crew-13 is targeting liftoff at 11:10 a.m. ET, with a backup opportunity Friday at 10:47 a.m. ET. NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins will command the mission, with NASA’s Luke Delaney as pilot and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov serving as mission specialists. According to NASA, Dragon is set to dock with the forward port of the station’s Harmony module around 8 p.m. ET, less than nine hours after launch. Watkins is the only member of the crew who has flown before, and Kutryk will become the first Canadian to reach orbit through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
The Falcon 9 booster is flying for the third time after supporting Crew-12 and a Starlink mission, and it will attempt a landing at Landing Zone 40 beside the pad. That site made its debut in February when the Crew-12 booster touched down there, as Teslarati reported at the time. Crew-13 will relieve the Crew-12 astronauts, who have been aboard the station since the middle of February.
On the West Coast, another Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in a window running from 2:18 to 3:16 p.m. ET, a flight NASASpaceflight lists as a Transporter rideshare mission.
The day is set to close at 11:53 p.m. ET, when Falcon Heavy launches from Launch Complex 39A with NROL-97, the first National Reconnaissance Office payload ever to fly on the rocket. SpaceX rolled the vehicle out to the pad Tuesday night. Its two side boosters, which previously flew GOES-U, ViaSat-3 F3 and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, will return to Landing Zones 1 and 2, while a new center core will be expended in the Atlantic. The Roman launch took place on August 30, so NROL-97 will come barely a month later as Falcon Heavy’s third flight of 2026 and 14th overall.
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
If all three Florida boosters land as planned, it would be the first time the Space Coast has seen landings at LZ-40, LZ-1 and LZ-2 on the same day, according to the Orlando Sentinel, which has warned residents in Brevard, Orange and Volusia counties that more than one sonic boom is possible.
The schedule arrives just three days after Starship reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14 from Starbase, Texas, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites. If Thursday’s missions stay on time, SpaceX will have flown Starship, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy from four different pads in about four days.
Crew-13 is also the start of a longer run for Dragon. NASA recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification, keeping Dragon as the agency’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner remains grounded.
Elon Musk
SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
Starship reached orbit despite losing an engine, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites on Flight 14.
SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday, and for a few nail-biting minutes it looked like it wouldn’t. During ascent on Flight 14, one of Ship 41’s six Raptor engines shut down early, and SpaceX’s livestream host Dan Huot told viewers the team had decided not to commit to orbit. Minutes later, after what Huot described as a lot of conversation in the control room, the final poll came back in favor, and a roughly 19 second burn of a single Raptor pushed the ship into orbit about 170 miles up.
The reversal matters because SpaceX had written the exit ramp into the mission plan. The company said it would only fire the orbital insertion burn if flight controllers confirmed enough backup hardware remained for the deorbit burn, a condition Teslarati laid out ahead of the flight. Losing an engine was exactly the scenario that rule was built for.
Pressing forward fits Elon Musk’s history. Falcon 1 failed three straight times before its fourth launch reached orbit in 2008, with SpaceX nearly out of money, and Starship was developed by flying prototypes until they broke. What changed this year SpaceX going public, and with $SPCX sliding below its IPO price in July when Flight 13 slipped, the short interest climbed significantly, as Teslarati reported at the time. A Starship potentially lost today with revenue generating next-gen Starlink satellites aboard would have landed directly on shareholders.
Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship! pic.twitter.com/urjmiwnvNl
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 28, 2026
That pressure showed up after orbit. SpaceX cut a flight planned to last nearly 10 hours to about three, moving splashdown from west of Chile to the North Pacific near Hawaii. SpaceX gave no reason, though Musk said this month the company was being extremely cautious about debris risk. The single Raptor for deorbit worked, and Ship 41 completed its flip and landing burn before breaking apart in the water, an outcome SpaceX expected. Musk has structured SpaceX’s governance to shield long term bets from market pressure.
The payload is the bigger business story. Musk posted that all 26 Starlink V3 satellites deployed and are “operating nominally.” Each V3 is rated for about 1 Tbps of downlink and 160 Gbps of uplink, so this single launch adds roughly 26 Tbps, about 10 times what a Falcon 9 load of V2 Mini satellites adds. The V3 is too large for Falcon 9, making Starship the only vehicle that can build out the planned 100,000 satellite constellation, at up to 60 per flight once it reaches routine service. Unlike the 20 V3 units on Flight 13, which reentered on a suborbital path, these will raise their orbits and could begin serving customers within weeks and bring in hundreds of millions of additional dollars in projected Starlink revenue.
SpaceX has already begun winding down Falcon 9 Starlink launches from Florida in favor of Starship. Reported targets put Flight 15 as early as October 19, leaving about three weeks to diagnose Monday’s engine shutdown before the next orbital attempt.
Starship’s 14th flight is set to launch on Monday, Sept 28. The 75-minute launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT. Live coverage of the mission starts ~35 minutes before launch → https://t.co/uQKQvgaTmJ
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 27, 2026
Tesla launches improved Model 3 in China with V2L, new interior option
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
