New Space EconomyBusiness, Technology, and Trends

The literary history of Unidentified Flying Objects - now formally recognized as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) - is a sprawling archive of human curiosity, fear, and scientific inquiry. It is a body of work that has been built over nearly eighty years, evolving in lockstep with the geopolitical landscape and technological advancements of the 20th and 21st centuries. These texts do not merely recount sightings of strange lights in the sky; they serve as a chronicle of how humanity attempts to process the "other." The evolution of this genre mirrors the trajectory of the phenomenon itself, moving from the nuts-and-bolts flying saucers of the 1950s to the high strangeness of the 1970s, the terrifying intimacy of the abduction era, and finally, the rigorous, data-driven investigation of the modern disclosure movement.

In a dramatic escalation of tensions between Silicon Valley’s AI innovators and the U.S. government, President Donald Trump on February 27, 2026, ordered all federal agencies to immediately cease using technology from Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company known for its Claude AI model. This directive, issued just before a Pentagon-imposed deadline, marks a significant rift over the balance between AI safety protocols and national security needs. The dispute, which has unfolded publicly over the past weeks, pits Anthropic’s commitment to ethical guardrails against the Department of Defense’s (DoD) demand for unrestricted access to AI tools for military applications. As of 9 PM EST on February 27, 2026, the fallout continues to reverberate through the tech and defense sectors, with implications for AI policy, government contracts, and the broader tech industry.

The phrase "space logistics" entered mainstream aerospace vocabulary gradually, borrowed from terrestrial supply chain management and applied to the increasingly complex challenge of moving people, equipment, and cargo between different points in cislunar space. In 2026, commercial space logistics encompasses a wide range of activities that didn't exist as a commercial market a decade ago: routine cargo runs to the International Space Station, competitive lunar surface deliveries for NASA, and a growing ecosystem of vehicles designed to ferry satellites between orbital regimes or extend their operational lives.

On November 28, 2025, a single Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base carrying 140 payloads from more than 30 customers spread across 16 countries. Some of those payloads were satellites. Some of those satellites were themselves hosting smaller payloads from other operators. It was, in a very literal sense, a rocket carrying satellites carrying satellites, all of it bundled onto a reusable booster making its 30th flight. That was SpaceX Transporter-15, and it was not an anomaly. It was Tuesday in the new satellite economy.

The gap between when a rocket is announced and when it actually lifts off for the first time tells a story that the aerospace industry would often prefer to keep quiet. Nearly every medium lift launch vehicle developed since the 1990s has missed its original schedule by years, sometimes by nearly a decade, and the excuses change but the pattern holds with remarkable consistency across continents, contractor types, and budget sizes. What follows is an examination of that pattern through the specific histories of the most significant medium lift vehicles developed over the past four decades.

There are scientists who change a field, and then there are scientists who change how the field sees the universe. Vera Rubin was the second kind.

NASA has announced an increase in the cadence of its Artemis program, adding a new mission in 2027 and implementing an accelerated timeline for lunar exploration. The updates aim to establish an enduring presence on the Moon and improve mission reliability and safety.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has released its 2025 annual report assessing NASA's safety performance and highlighting significant challenges and recommendations for improvement.

Planned ‘megaconstellations’ of satellites could cause unforeseen harm to the ozone layer and climate systems. Global regulation is needed before it’s too late.

Astronomers captured the clearest example yet of one of these hidden explosions.

Rocket Lab’s present public baseline for Neutron is a Q4 2026 first-launch target, following a Stage 1 tank qualification-test rupture that forced a schedule re-baseline and a renewed emphasis on structural repeatability, acceptance testing discipline, and production-process maturity.

SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare Program is priced and packaged differently than a traditional “secondary payload” slot on a large primary mission. In practice, it operates as a repeatable, catalog-style service: customers buy a defined amount of mass to a defined orbit class, follow a standardized integration flow, and share a mission with many other spacecraft. By February 2026, SpaceX’s published pricing makes it possible to estimate launch cost from the earliest architecture trades, while still leaving meaningful “unknowns” in the parts of the bill that depend on mission-unique needs such as deployment hardware, propulsion handling, special testing, schedule moves, and orbit changes after separation.

The trajectory of human spaceflight is defined by two monumental efforts to place humans on the lunar surface: the historic Apollo 11 mission of 1969 and the upcoming Artemis III mission. While separated by over five decades, these endeavors share the fundamental goal of traversing the void between Earth and the Moon. However, the motivations, technologies, and operational paradigms driving them differ substantially. Apollo 11was a singular achievement driven by geopolitical competition, a sprint to demonstrate technological supremacy. In contrast, Artemis III represents the initiation of a sustained deep space exploration program, leveraging international alliances and commercial integration to establish a permanent foothold.

Phantom Space Corporation is a U.S. space transportation and manufacturing company founded in 2019 by Jim Cantrelland Michael D’Angelo . Publicly, the company has presented itself as a builder of repeatable systems: rockets designed for steady production, satellite buses sized across a wide mass range, and service concepts intended to reduce the friction between payload completion and on-orbit operations. The official corporate address shown on Phantom’s website is in Tucson, Arizona. Phantom Space .

Getting a satellite into orbit used to require building one large enough to justify the cost of its own rocket. That's not a metaphor for anything. It was simply the economic reality of spaceflight from the late 1950s through most of the 1990s. Launch vehicles were expensive, propellant was expensive, range time at Kennedy Space Center or Baikonur was expensive, and only nation-states or major telecommunications companies could play the game. The idea that a university research team in Denmark or a five-person startup in San Francisco could buy a seat on a rocket heading to sun-synchronous orbit for a few hundred thousand dollars would have sounded like science fiction to the engineers who built the early satellite industry.