It is not difficult to understand the unease on the European continent about the rise of SpaceX and its controversial founder, Elon Musk.

SpaceX has surpassed the European Space Agency and its institutional partners in almost every way when it comes to accessing space and providing secure communications. Last year, for example, SpaceX launched 134 orbital missions. Combined, Europe had three. SpaceX operates a massive constellation of more than 7,000 satellites, delivering broadband Internet around the world. Europe hopes to have a much more modest capability online by 2030 serving the continent at a cost of $11 billion.

And Europe has good reasons for being wary about working directly with SpaceX. First, Europe wants to maintain sovereign access to space, as well as a space-based communication network. Second, buying services from SpaceX undermines European space businesses. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Musk has recently begun attacking governments in European capitals such as Berlin and London, taking up the "Make Europe Great Again" slogan. This seems to entail throwing out the moderate coalitions governing European nations and replacing them with authoritarian, hard-right leaders.

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Boeing announced Monday it lost $523 million on the Starliner crew capsule program last year, putting the aerospace company $2 billion in the red on its NASA commercial crew contract since late 2019.

The updated numbers are included in a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods," Boeing wrote in the filing.

In 2014, NASA picked Boeing and SpaceX to develop and certify two commercial crew transporter vehicles. Like SpaceX, Boeing's contract, now worth up to $4.6 billion, is structured as a fixed-price deal, meaning the contractor is on the hook to pay for cost overruns that go over NASA's financial commitment.

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Like a lot of the rest of the federal government right now, NASA is reeling during the first turbulent days of the Trump administration.

The last two weeks have brought a change in leadership in the form of interim administrator Janet Petro, whose ascension was a surprise. Her first act was to tell agency employees to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility contracts and to "report" on anyone who did not carry out this order. Soon, civil servants began receiving emails from the US Office of Personnel Management that some perceived as an effort to push them to resign.

Then there are the actions of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Last week he sowed doubt by claiming NASA had "stranded" astronauts on the space station. (The astronauts are perfectly safe and have a ride home.) Perhaps more importantly, he owns the space agency's most important contractor and, in recent weeks, has become deeply enmeshed in operating the US government through his Department of Government Efficiency. For some NASA employees, whether or not it is true, there is now an uncomfortable sense that they are working for Musk and to dole out contracts to SpaceX.

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Two new independent estimates of revenue from SpaceX's Starlink Internet service suggest it is rapidly growing, having nearly tripled in just two years.

An updated projection from the analysts at Quilty Space estimates that the service produced $7.8 billion in revenue in 2024, with about 60 percent of that coming from consumers who subscribe to the service. Similarly, the media publication Payload estimated that Starlink generated $8.2 billion in revenue last year.

These estimates indicate that Starlink produced a few hundred million dollars in free cash flow for SpaceX in 2024. However, with revenues expected to leap in 2025 to above $12 billion, Quilty Space estimates that free cash flow will grow to about $2 billion. SpaceX is privately held, so its financial numbers are not public.

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The seventh test flight of SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket came to a disappointing end a little more than two weeks ago. The in-flight failure of the rocket's upper stage, or ship, about eight minutes after launch on January 16 rained debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean.

Amateur videos recorded from land, sea, and air showed fiery debris trails streaming overhead at twilight, appearing like a fireworks display gone wrong. Within hours, posts on social media showed small pieces of debris recovered by residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos. Most of these items were modest in size, and many appeared to be chunks of tiles from Starship's heat shield.

Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Elon Musk's close relationship with Trump, coupled with the new administration's appetite for cutting regulations and reducing the size of government, led some industry watchers to question whether Musk's influence might change the FAA's stance on SpaceX.

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Parker solar spacecraft successfully completes closest flyby of any human-made object

Nasa’s Parker solar probe is safe and operating normally after successfully completing the closest-ever approach to the sun by any human-made object, the space agency has said.

The spacecraft passed just 3.8m miles (6.1m km) from the solar surface on 24 December, flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere – the corona – on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s closest star.

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Mission teams will lose direct contact with Parker probe while it passes 3.8 million miles from sun’s surface

Nasa’s pioneering Parker solar probe is poised to make its closest ever approach of the sun on Christmas Eve, a record-setting 3.8m miles (6.2m km) from the surface.

Launched in August 2018 , the spaceship is on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of our star and help forecast space weather events that can affect life on Earth.

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Return pushed back to late March, stretching mission that was supposed to last eight days to more than nine months

The two Nasa astronauts who have been stuck in space since June because of technical issues will have to remain at the International Space Station even longer – stretching a mission that was originally supposed to last only eight days to more than nine months.

On Tuesday, Nasa announced that its astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, along with Russia’s cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, will return to Earth following the arrival of Crew-10 next year. Originally scheduled for a February launch, the space agency has pushed back the Crew-10 mission’s launch date to no earlier than late March of 2025.

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For the past 10 years cosmologists have been left scratching their heads over why two methods for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion provide totally different results. There are two possible solutions to the puzzle, known as the Hubble tension: either something is wrong with the measurements or something is wrong with our model of the universe. It was hoped that observations from the James Webb space telescope might shed some light on the problem, but instead results published last week have continued to muddy the waters. To understand why the expansion rate of the universe remains a mystery, and what might be needed to finally pin it down, Madeleine Finlay speaks to Catherine Heymans, the astronomer royal for Scotland and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh

The Hubble constant: a mystery that keeps getting bigger

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