🚀 Russia Eyes Starlink Weapon

🛰️ Russia's Starlink weapon suspicions

🌌 Black holes' selective feeding

💥 Faint supernova surprises scientists

🚀 ULA leadership addresses future

🤖 Innospace launch attempt fails

Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon, aiming to counter Western space superiority by targeting large commercial constellations like SpaceX's Starlink service for disruption.

The proposed "zone-effect" weapon would release destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, flooding specific orbits with thousands of high-density pellets to disable multiple satellites in a single, widespread attack.

Security specialists warn this could cause uncontrollable orbital chaos, risking catastrophic collateral damage to all space-faring nations, including Russia and its allies, according to analysts at the Secure World Foundation.

Astronomers from the University of Virginia and CATA (Center for Astrophysics and Associated Technologies) studied seven merging galaxies to understand the selective feeding habits of their central supermassive black holes.

Using the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescope, the team achieved exceptional angular resolution to track the chaotic dynamics of cold gas through dense, obscuring dust clouds near the event horizon.

Principal investigator Ezequiel Treister explains this shows accretion is episodic, depending on complex factors like gas angular momentum loss rather than just the simple presence of abundant fuel for the black hole.

An international team of astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility has identified a peculiar Type IIb supernova, designated SN 2023xyz, that challenges current models of massive stellar explosions.

The supernova exhibited an unusually slow evolution, with a rise time to peak brightness of over 40 days and an exceptionally faint absolute magnitude of -15.5, much dimmer than typical Type IIb events.

This faint, protracted explosion suggests a progenitor star with a low-mass hydrogen envelope, providing critical new data for refining simulations of the final stages of massive star core-collapse events.

ULA (United Launch Alliance) board chairs announced that after nearly 12 years, President and CEO Tory Bruno has resigned from the company to pursue another opportunity, effective immediately.

Veteran aerospace executive John Elbon was named Interim CEO, tasked with guiding the company alongside new COO Mark Peller to achieve key upcoming Vulcan milestones for national security launches.

The sudden leadership change introduces significant uncertainty for the aerospace giant as it navigates the critical certification phase for its next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket against intense commercial competition from SpaceX.

South Korean startup Innospace attempted its first-ever orbital launch from the Alcantara Space Center in Brazil, representing a historic bid for the nation's private commercial spaceflight sector.

The 17.3-meter Hanbit-Nano rocket, using a hybrid first stage with liquid oxygen and paraffin propellant, suffered a catastrophic anomaly approximately 50 seconds after liftoff, crashing back to Earth.

While a setback, the failure provides invaluable engineering data for the company's in-house technology development as it works to improve its larger, planned Hanbit-Micro and Hanbit-Mini launch vehicles.