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Today on Telemetry, we open with Space Force Awards SpaceX $4.16 Billion to Build Satellite Constellation for Airborne Tracking and dig into ngVLA Prototype Antenna Achieves First Light in New Mexico. There's fresh coverage too across Business, Science, Policy & Defense, and Global Roundup.

The U.S. Space Force has selected SpaceX for a $4.16 billion contract to develop a satellite constellation capable of tracking airborne targets anywhere on Earth, including in airspace too dangerous for military surveillance aircraft. The program, called Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator (SB-AMTI), is designed to complement existing aircraft-based tracking rather than replace it, giving the military persistent coverage in contested regions where adversaries deploy anti-access systems to threaten U.S. planes. Space Force is targeting a constellation in orbit by 2028 and says the satellites are also expected to support the Trump administration's Golden Dome missile defense initiative. SpaceX is the first of nine vendors disclosed for the SB-AMTI pool, with Space Force planning additional contract awards over the coming year.

Source: Space.com

With SpaceX's IPO targeting June 12 and a $1.75 trillion valuation, retail investors locked out of direct share purchases are routing money through ETFs, secondary markets, and loosely related stocks. The ERShares XVOR fund has grown assets under management fivefold and now holds roughly 15% of its portfolio in SpaceX through a legal holding structure. Spillover enthusiasm has pushed Rocket Lab's market cap nearly three times higher over two months, while AST SpaceMobile gained 78% in two weeks. Academics are skeptical of the valuation: Oxford's Ludovic Phalippou notes that most of the company's growth has already occurred, and University of Florida IPO specialist Jay Ritter warns that even a strong business becomes a poor investment if the entry price is too high. Kalshi has taken $29 million in wagers on SpaceX-related outcomes, from Elon Musk's net worth at year-end to the odds of a Mars landing before 2030.

Source: AFP via Phys.org

Cumulative global spending on Space Situational Awareness is forecast to reach $61 billion through 2034, according to a new market report from consulting firm Novaspace. The driver is a combination of rising orbital congestion, contested space activity, and geopolitical pressure pushing governments to treat SSA as a core national security capability rather than a niche tracking function. Government programs will account for the bulk of that investment, but the commercial SSA data and services segment is projected to reach $3.6 billion over the same period, fueled by public-sector demand for persistent monitoring and diversified sensing. Dedicated SSA satellites are expected to accelerate through 2034, with Space Surveillance and Tracking spacecraft alone making up nearly half of all planned SSA satellite launches.

Source: SpaceNews

A single prototype antenna for the next-generation Very Large Array completed its first astronomical observations at the NSF VLA site in New Mexico, tracking the Sun, the Crab Nebula, and several other sources before joining the existing 27-antenna VLA as a 28th element to observe Perseus A, a bright galactic nucleus 230 million light-years away. The milestone moves the project from construction into testing and calibration. The full ngVLA, if built, would span 244 antennas across more than 8,000 km of North America, offering ten times the collecting area and resolution of both the VLA and ALMA at comparable wavelengths.

Source: Universe Today

NASA has officially ended the MAVEN mission after an anomaly review board determined the spacecraft cannot be recovered following a loss of signal on December 6. Telemetry captured as MAVEN emerged from behind Mars showed it spinning at an abnormally high rate in safe mode, a condition that drained its batteries and cut power to its communications system. The root cause is still under investigation, with a final board report expected later this year. Launched in 2013 to study how solar wind strips away the Martian atmosphere, MAVEN operated for more than a decade past its original one-year mission and produced the primary dataset scientists use to understand Mars' climate history and plan radiation safety measures for future crewed missions.

Source: NASA Breaking News

Upcoming Launches

Muon Space has announced Condor-Ultra, a satellite bus three times the size of its existing Condor-XL platform, aimed at the emerging market for in-orbit computing infrastructure. The bus is designed to deliver 20 kW of power initially, scaling to 100 kW in later variants, with roughly 400 kg of payload capacity and 18 square meters of payload area. It integrates with NVIDIA's Space-1 AI module and supports 100 Gbps inter-satellite laser links via Starlink terminals. Muon is targeting a 2028 pathfinder launch, with the bus designed to fly on Starship, Falcon 9, or Rocket Lab's Neutron.

Source: Payload Space

New near-infrared spectroscopy from the James Webb Space Telescope shows that Nereid's surface composition does not match what would be expected from a Kuiper Belt object, undermining the long-held assumption that Neptune's third-largest moon was a captured body. Researchers also ran orbital simulations showing that a moon formed natively around Neptune could have been gravitationally perturbed into Nereid's current highly eccentric path after Triton's own capture disrupted the system. If the interpretation holds, Nereid would be the only intact survivor of Neptune's original satellite family, with the rest presumably ejected or destroyed by Triton's arrival. The findings were published in Science Advances in May 2026.

Source: arXiv / Science Advances

Using JWST's NIRSpec instrument, researchers observed quasar J1512+4422 at redshift 6.2 and found it already follows the same black hole mass-to-stellar velocity relationship seen in nearby galaxies today, despite existing less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The quasar's black hole, nearly 900 million solar masses, is driving a gas outflow at roughly 478 km/s that extends about 3.2 kiloparsecs into the host galaxy. That outflow is expelling mass at a rate around 100 times faster than the galaxy is forming new stars, and its kinetic energy output crosses the threshold simulations predict is needed to suppress star formation. The host galaxy's size and stellar properties also resemble quiescent galaxies seen at high redshift, suggesting this quasar is actively transforming its host into one.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

A white paper submitted to STScI's 2026 call argues that Hubble's STIS and COS spectrographs must keep operating through the coming decade to fill a critical gap that JWST, Euclid, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope cannot cover. Those missions excel at infrared and optical wavelengths but cannot directly probe the high-energy processes around young stars, including accretion, magnetospheric activity, and disk photoevaporation, that shape whether forming planets end up habitable. UV spectroscopy is currently the only way to measure those mechanisms, and the authors argue that without a continuous HST dataset, the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory will lack the physical baseline it needs to interpret its own observations.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

A December 2023 flare from blazar OP 313, a quasar nearly 8 billion light-years away, has been confirmed as the most distant source ever detected at very high-energy gamma rays above 100 GeV. The LST-1 prototype telescope at La Palma, Spain, caught the flare at roughly 50 times the object's average brightness in high-energy gamma rays. Researchers modeled the emission using a two-zone framework, finding that the gamma rays likely originate near the outer edge of the blazar's broad line region through a combination of synchrotron and external Compton scattering processes.

Source: Phys.org – Space

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