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● THE SPACE RACE // ISSUE 002 // TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2026
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Issue 002 · June 23, 2026
A plane is chasing a falling telescope
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Morning Crew. Things have calmed down since the SpaceX IPO, but space is never without news, so here's what's happening this week:
| ● | A Hail-Mary mission to catch a falling NASA telescope |
| ● | NASA's $4.3B Roman telescope lands in Florida, months early |
| ● | Europe's heaviest launch ever, a leak scare on the ISS, and our galaxy's black hole caught breathing |
Let's get into it.
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// CAN'T MISS
Five Must-Reads of the Week
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An illustration of NASA's Swift spacecraft · Credit: NASA / Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University
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A plane is flying a rocket across the Pacific to save a dying telescope
NASA · 4 MIN
NASA's Swift telescope has spent 21 years spotting gamma-ray bursts, the brightest explosions in the universe, and pointing other telescopes at them before they fade. The catch: Swift has no engine of its own, so it can't fight the faint drag of the upper atmosphere, and after 21 years it's slowly falling. Enter a startup called Katalyst. On June 18, a modified 1970s jetliner took off from Virginia with a small rescue craft called LINK tucked inside a Pegasus rocket, headed out over the Pacific. There the plane will drop the rocket in mid-air and light it (cheaper than launching from the ground), and LINK will chase Swift down, latch onto a telescope that was never designed to be grabbed, and nudge it back up to a safe altitude. If it works, it'll be the first time a private company has rescued a government satellite, a trick NASA will badly want again.
READ IT →
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Artist's concept of the Roman Space Telescope · Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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NASA's next great telescope just landed in Florida, early
SPACEFLIGHT NOW · 3 MIN
The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrived at Kennedy Space Center on June 21 for 70 days of launch prep, with liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket now set for no earlier than August 30, months ahead of its old schedule. Roman's trick is width: it takes pictures as sharp as the Hubble telescope's, but across a patch of sky 100 times bigger. That lets it photograph millions of galaxies at once to study dark energy (the still-unexplained force pushing the universe apart faster and faster), and turn up thousands of new planets almost by accident.
READ IT →
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An Ariane 6 with its P160C boosters · Credit: ESA / S. Corvaja, CC BY-SA
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Europe flew its heaviest payload ever
SPACEFLIGHT NOW · 3 MIN
On June 17, Europe's Ariane 6 rocket carried 36 of Amazon's Kuiper satellites to orbit from French Guiana, four more than any previous flight, thanks to bigger strap-on boosters that hold extra fuel. (Kuiper is Amazon's version of Starlink: a fleet of satellites that beams internet down to Earth.) The number is small, but the subtext isn't. After years of watching SpaceX dominate, Europe is finally scaling up a big rocket of its own, and lifting Amazon's challenger to Starlink while it's at it.
READ IT →
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A Crew Dragon approaching the ISS · Credit: NASA
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ISS astronauts had to shelter in their Dragon as a Russian leak worsened
SCIENCEDAILY · 3 MIN
In June, five crew members suited up and took shelter in their SpaceX Crew Dragon, the capsule that's both their ride home and an escape pod, after a long-running air leak in the station's Russian section jumped to about two pounds of air a day. The cosmonauts paused repairs to study it, and the crew waited it out before things went back to normal. The leak has nagged the station since 2019, a blunt reminder that the ISS is past 25 years old, even as plans for whatever replaces it stay fuzzy.
READ IT →
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A Falcon 9 booster returns to its droneship; the first Starfall flies on one this week · Credit: SpaceX
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SpaceX built a flying-saucer capsule to bring cargo back from space
SPACEX · 3 MIN
SpaceX just unveiled Starfall, an uncrewed spacecraft that looks less like a rocket than a flying saucer: a squat disk about 10 feet across and barely 2.5 feet tall. Its whole job is the part most missions treat as an afterthought, getting cargo back down. Where Cargo Dragon hauls supplies up to the space station, Starfall is built to bring up to a ton of cargo home from orbit cheaply and on demand. The point is two markets that suddenly look real: “orbital factories” making materials you can only make in zero gravity, and using space as a shortcut to deliver cargo anywhere on Earth in about an hour. The first test flight launches this week from Cape Canaveral on a Falcon 9.
READ IT →
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// QUICK HITS
Mission Log
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| ● | The Webb telescope detected methane on 3I/ATLAS, a comet from another star system passing through ours, the first time the gas has been spotted on one of these rare interstellar visitors. |
| ● | Webb also found a giant black hole that seems to have formed before the galaxy around it, the opposite of the usual order, and nobody's sure how. |
| ● | China launched another satellite on its 651st flight of the Long March rocket, the country's workhorse launcher, a low-key mission that keeps its steady pace ticking. |
| ● | New analysis of oddball orbits out past Neptune is making the long-hunted "Planet Nine" harder to explain away, and no easier to find. |
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// MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
Why saving one 21-year-old telescope is worth the trouble
Swift isn't just another aging satellite. When something violent happens in space, a giant star exploding, or two ultra-dense dead stars slamming together, Swift is the dispatcher: it catches the flash first and swings the world's other telescopes around to look before it fades. There's no replacement planned. So a roughly $30 million rescue buys two things at once. It keeps a one of a kind alarm system alive, and it tests whether a private company can catch and re-boost an old spacecraft at all, a skill NASA will need as hundreds more age out and start to fall.
 Dinner Table Nugget: it can be cheaper to fly a rocket up and shove a telescope back into place than to build a new one. That math is new, and it changes what "end of life" means in orbit.
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// Markets Minute
SpaceX (SPCX) just wrapped its first full week as a public company, and Rocket Lab joined the Nasdaq-100. We track the whole space board, who's up, who's raising, and where the smart money's flowing, twice a month in Space Money. Get Space Money access on our site → |
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The crowded center of the Milky Way, home to Sagittarius A* · Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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// WILD SPACE OF THE WEEK
Our galaxy's giant black hole got caught exhaling
Sagittarius A*, the four-million-Sun black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has always seemed oddly quiet. This week astronomers found the exhaust: a cone-shaped cavity blown clear of cold gas, the fingerprint of a hot "wind" streaming off the black hole itself. It cracks a 50-year puzzle about why the galaxy's core is so empty, and it means the sleeping giant 26,000 light-years away has been breathing the whole time. Read it →
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// FROM ELON'S SIDE HUSTLE
Four posts worth your scroll this week.
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Zack Golden ✓
@CSI_Starbase |
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Billions of butterflies are invading Starbase right now! I'm surprised there aren't millions of birds following this migration. All the grackles must be in a food coma already or something
 ▶ Video
Jun 17, 2026 · View on X
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Polymarket ✓
@Polymarket |
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NEW: SpaceX discloses a $100,800,000,000.00 cash balance.
Jun 22, 2026 · View on X
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SpaceX ✓
@SpaceX |
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Falcon 9 launches 24 @Starlink satellites from California
Jun 21, 2026 · View on X
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NASA ✓
@NASA |
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Super! 💫 Data from @chandraxray has uncovered possible remains of a supernova in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy. If confirmed, this supernova piece would be one of the closest to our galaxy’s central black hole that we have ever found.
Jun 16, 2026 · View on X
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// THE ARTIFACT
Artist's rendering of Astrobotic's Griffin lunar lander · Credit: Astrobotic
The first chunk of Pennsylvania headed for the Moon
When Astrobotic showed off its Griffin-1 lunar lander in Pittsburgh this month, CEO John Thornton mentioned a detail that's easy to miss: about 99% of its parts were made inside Pennsylvania. Griffin is headed for the Moon's south pole later this year carrying a rover, and if it sticks the landing, a machine built almost entirely in one rust-belt state will be working a quarter-million miles away. There's something fitting about the place that once forged America's steel now building the things that leave the planet.
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// WHAT TO WATCH
The (actual) Space Race Calendar
This week
| THIS WK | Rocket Lab Electron “StriX-10” for Synspective · Launch Complex 1 (slipped from Jun 17/18) |
| ONGOING | More Starlink flights from Florida & California, the usual cadence |
On the horizon
| JUL | Tianwen-2 begins sampling Kamoʻoalewa |
| AUG 30 | Roman Space Telescope launch · Falcon Heavy, no earlier than this date |
| LATE 26 | New Glenn return to flight · pending pad rebuild |
| 2027 | Artemis III · crewed lunar-lander test in Earth orbit |
Look up · no telescope needed
| JUN 29 | The Strawberry Moon · 2026's smallest full moon (a “micromoon”) |
| JUL 10 | The Moon, Saturn & red Antares cluster together after dark |
| JUL 29–30 | Delta Aquariid meteor shower peaks · a steady southern show |
| AUG 12 | Total solar eclipse · totality over Greenland, Iceland & Spain; partial across much of N. America & W. Europe |
| AUG 12–13 | Perseid meteor shower · up to ~100/hr under a new-moon sky. The best in years. |
VIEW THE FULL CALENDAR →
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// THE SPACE STATION
Your turn, what do you want more of?
Hit reply and tell us what landed and what didn't, launches, the money side, the science, the weird stuff. We read every one, and it shapes next Tuesday.
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That's the week: a telescope rescue mid-flight, a flagship observatory landing early in Florida, and a black hole caught breathing. See you next Tuesday.
— Sean, Ted & The Space Race Crew
Gus thinks Starfall looks a lot like a flying saucer. Zorp says humans are finally catching on.
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The Tuesday weekly is free, forever. Go Pilot ($7/mo) for Space Money (our markets edition, twice a month) and the full searchable archive.
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