Issue 003

A meteorite turned out to be a piece of a lost planet

A rough rock found in the Sahara, named NWA 12774, just turned out to be a fragment of a whole world that no longer exists. It's an "angrite," one of the oldest kinds of volcanic rock in the solar system, and only about 68 have ever been found. What gave it away is a mineral inside it that could only form under crushing pressure, at least 17 times what you'd feel at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench, far more than a small asteroid could ever squeeze out. So its parent had to be big (somewhere between Moon and Mars sized) planet that formed early and then got shattered in a collision during the solar system's violent youth. We're holding a leftover shard of a world that's been gone for more than four billion years. How they manage to do all these tests, we don't exactly know, but we're happy they can.

SpaceX flew a capsule built to bring cargo back to Earth

Plenty of spacecrafts go up. Starfall, SpaceX's new uncrewed capsule, is built for the harder half of the trip, coming back down. The disk-shaped craft (picture a hockey puck about 10 feet wide) launched on a Falcon 9 on June 23, reached orbit, then deorbited and splashed down in the Pacific just hours later. SpaceX is betting on two businesses that are finally becoming real. One is "orbital factories" that make materials you can only make in zero gravity. The other is delivering urgent cargo anywhere on Earth in about an hour. For Starfall, getting safely back to the ground is the entire point.

Rocket Lab just bought a phone network in space

Rocket Lab, best known for its small Electron rockets, agreed to buy Iridium, the company behind the satellite phones that work where cell signal doesn't, for $8 billion. It's a serious land grab. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, Rocket Lab would own the rockets, the satellites, and millions of paying subscribers all at once. That "do everything in-house" approach is exactly how SpaceX got so hard to compete with. More on why this matters below in Make It Make Sense.

A black hole got caught shredding a dead star

China's Einstein Probe, a telescope built to catch sudden flashes of X-rays, spotted a mid-sized black hole tearing apart a white dwarf (the dense, burned-out core left behind when a Sun-like star dies). Thoughts and prayers for the white dwarf. Astronomers have hunted for clean examples of "medium" black holes for years, since most we know of are either small or absolutely enormous, with surprisingly little in between. Catching one in the act of eating is the best evidence yet that the in-between kind is really out there. 

Astronauts go outside this week to fix a 25-year-old robot arm

Canadarm2, the big robotic arm that's helped build and maintain the space station since 2001, has a seized wrist joint (part of aging ya know). Astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams get about 6.5 hours outside to swap the part, while their crewmates use the arm to hold itself steady for the operation. It's delicate work, and a reminder that the 25-year-old station increasingly runs on careful repairs while everyone argues about what replaces it.

Mission Log

Why Rocket Lab buying a phone company is bigger than $8 billion

For years, most space companies stuck to one job: building rockets, or building satellites, or selling the service on top. SpaceX broke that mold by doing all three. It launches its own Starlink satellites on its own rockets and sells the internet straight to customers, so it pockets the money at every step instead of paying someone else. Rocket Lab doesn't want to let them have all the fun. Buying Iridium puts Rocket Lab on the same path, its own rockets carrying its own satellites to its own subscribers. Jeff Bezos is quietly in the same race, just spread across companies he owns separately rather than under one roof, Amazon's Kuiper for the satellites and internet, Blue Origin for the rockets. So it's becoming a three-way contest to own the whole chain instead of selling one piece of it. Competition is always a good thing for the consumer.

Dinner Table Nugget: the real money is in owning the whole pipeline and not having to rely on a competitor for anything. It's also a great sell to investors for the amount of money that needs to be raised to do it.

Rocket Lab ✓ @RocketLab

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Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications Inc – one of the most transformative deals in the space industry. By combining our launch capability and satellite manufacturing with @IridiumComm's global network and rare spectrum, Rocket Lab becomes a full-stack space company.

Jun 29, 2026 · View on X

SpaceX ✓ @SpaceX

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Today's mission includes a demo of a new vehicle that will enable affordable, routine access to the microgravity environment for scientific research and in-space manufacturing. After demonstrating controlled flight, the spacecraft will splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

Jun 23, 2026 · View on X

Eric Berger ✓ @SciGuySpace

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Someone finally came along and wrested the crown for worst space acronym away from the OSIRIS-REx mission. Congratulations to the Space Force and Boeing!

Jun 25, 2026 · View on X