Firefly Aerospace made history in March as the first commercial firm to land a spacecraft upright on the moon. Now, the company is going public.
Category: space travel – Page 5
The Winners of the Project Hyperion Generation Ship Competition have been Announced!
On November 1st, 2024, Project Hyperion — an international, interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, anthropologists, and urban planners — launched a design competition for crewed interstellar travel. The event was hosted by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), a UK-based non-profit organization dedicated to the robotic and human exploration of exoplanets around nearby stars, and eventually settlement. With a prize purse of $10,000, competitors were tasked with producing concepts for a Generation Ship (aka. Worldships) using current technologies and those that could be realized in the near future.
On July 23rd, 2025, the organization announced the top three competition winners, which were selected from hundreds of ideas submitted by teams worldwide. The winning entries were selected based on how they met all the competition criteria, provided a depth of detail, and integrated the design aspects of architecture, engineering, and social sciences. In short, the top three prizes were awarded to proposals that would allow a society to sustain itself and flourish in a highly resource-constrained environment as they made a centuries-long journey to another habitable planet.
The challenges and hazards of space exploration are well-known and well-documented, ranging from long-duration transits, exposure to radiation, the amount of supplies needed, and the dangers of being cooped up inside a pressurized ship in close quarters with other crew members. As the saying goes, “space is hard,” but interstellar travel is especially difficult and dangerous. Not only are resupply missions not an option for missions venturing so far beyond Earth, but the time and energy it would take for spacecraft to travel to even the nearest star is prohibitive.
Observatory in Greece Achieves Deep-Space Laser Link With NASA’s ‘Psyche’
A milestone in space communication was celebrated in Athens, the capital of Greece, on Wednesday, as the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) was formally recognized by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its pivotal role in the first-ever optical communication link with a spacecraft in deep space, a landmark achievement in international space collaboration.
The groundbreaking laser communication link between NASA’s “Psyche” spacecraft—currently en route to Mars —and Greece’s Kryoneri Observatory in Corinth was established on July 7, 2025. The project, a joint effort by NASA and ESA, involved transmitting a laser message across nearly 300 million kilometers (about 186.4 million miles). The message, sent from Kryoneri, was received shortly afterward at the Helmos Observatory’s Aristarchos Telescope in Achaia, northern Peloponnese, just 37 kilometers (23 miles) away.
This experiment marked the deepest wideband optical communication link ever recorded in space.
SOSV bets plasma will change everything from semiconductors to spacecraft
It sees so much potential that it plans on investing in more than 25 plasma-related startups over the next five years. It is also opening a new Hax lab space in partnership with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Nuclear fusion is an obvious place to seed plasma startups. The potential power source works by compressing fuel until it turns into a dense plasma, so dense that atoms begin fusing, releasing energy in the process.
“There’s so much here. The best ideas have yet to come to unlock a lot of potential in the fusion space,” Duncan Turner, general partner at SOSV, told TechCrunch.
