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On today's signal, we lead with NASA pushes to move Blue Moon landers off New Glenn after LC-36 explosion and also cover The Exploration Company Quietly Reveals Heavy-Lift Rocket Concept Powered by New Storm Engine. You'll find more across Business, Science, Policy & Defense, and Global Roundup.

A week after New Glenn's catastrophic static fire explosion destroyed the rocket and heavily damaged Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman confirmed the agency wants both the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander launched on a different rocket entirely. The priority is keeping the Mark 2 on track for the Artemis 3 test mission, currently targeting mid-2027, and meeting a 2028 crewed lunar landing deadline. Blue Origin designed the landers specifically around New Glenn's payload envelope, so switching vehicles is a non-trivial engineering and logistics problem. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the pad's propellant tanks survived intact, the support tower can be repaired without replacement, and the company expects to fly again before year's end, but NASA is not waiting on that timeline to keep Artemis moving.

Source: Spaceflight Now

A new analysis of IceCube Neutrino Observatory data has turned up a 4.0-sigma clustering of high-energy neutrinos aligned with supernova SN 2021foa, one of the closest and brightest interacting supernovae observed in recent years. The neutrino burst coincided with the explosion's optical peak, roughly 16 to 22 days after discovery, with Monte Carlo simulations putting the chance probability at around 6.7 × 10⁻⁵. What makes the result harder to explain is energy: the inferred neutrino output exceeds the supernova's optical and kinetic energy by orders of magnitude, pointing toward a delayed central engine driving a jet that stalls inside the dense surrounding gas shell rather than escaping. SN 2021foa also repeatedly switched spectral type between hydrogen-rich and helium-rich phases within 50 days of peak brightness, suggesting an unusually chaotic pre-explosion mass-loss history that may have shaped the neutrino signal.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

SpaceX filed to offer 555,555,555 shares at $135 each, targeting a $1.8 trillion valuation that would make it the most valuable company ever to go public. The filing reveals a business that lost $4.9 billion last year on nearly $19 billion in revenue, with Starlink's 10.3 million subscribers providing the main cash flow for an otherwise capital-intensive operation. Analysts say the valuation reflects investor bets on Starship, orbital AI data centers, and a planned $55 billion semiconductor factory in Texas rather than current financials. Musk is expected to retain over 80% of voting power after the listing, and a SpaceX-Tesla merger is widely anticipated in 2027.

Source: Phys.org – Space

A website update from The Exploration Company briefly disclosed a reusable heavy-lift rocket called Yrene before references to it were pulled from the site. The design shows a first stage powered by nine Storm engines, each rated at 180 tonnes of thrust. A company spokesperson told European Spaceflight that Yrene is a "long-term concept" and that near-term priorities remain the Nyx cargo capsule and propulsion development. The Storm engine itself will be formally unveiled at the International Aerospace Exhibition on June 10, where the company plans to present what it calls a core European launch and transport capability.

Source: European Spaceflight

Clay deposits at Oxia Planum, where ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover is set to land, extend roughly 600 km across and connect to a second candidate site, Mawrth Vallis, about 300 km away, according to a new study in Icarus. The deposits, dating to around 4 billion years ago, may have been shaped by an ocean several kilometers deep or by massive groundwater flooding across the plains. Researchers also identified a paleosurface between the two clay-bearing units, marking an ancient pause in sedimentation followed by a shift in water chemistry, consistent with an intermittently wet early Mars. Once on the surface, Rosalind Franklin's drill and onboard spectrometers will test which formation scenario holds up.

Source: Phys.org – Space

Upcoming Launches

Vast has announced French astronaut Arnaud Prost will fly on the first crewed mission to Haven-1, the single-module commercial station the company plans to launch in early 2027. If that schedule holds, Haven-1 would become the first commercial space station to host a crew, ahead of competing efforts from Axiom Space and Blue Origin. Vast says its modular approach keeps per-module costs five to ten times lower than ISS hardware, which often exceeded a billion dollars each. The company is targeting four modules of its follow-on Haven-2 station in orbit by 2030, capable of supporting six-month missions.

Source: Phys.org – Space / AFP

A SpaceNews podcast episode features two investors and operators pushing the orbital data center concept toward credibility. Founders Fund's Delian Asparouhov explains his growing interest in the idea, while Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud, a startup building cloud computing infrastructure in orbit, outlines the operational case. The conversation is light on hard numbers but reflects a broader shift in how serious capital is starting to treat space-based compute as a near-term business rather than a long-range concept. Starcloud's progress and future funding rounds will be the clearest signal of whether that conviction translates into hardware.

Source: SpaceNews

A galaxy called AMORE6, observed at redshift z=5.7, contains less than 0.19% of the Sun's oxygen abundance, making it the most chemically pristine galaxy ever identified. JWST spectra detected hydrogen emission but no oxygen lines at all, placing a firm upper limit on its metal content. Cosmological models predict that early galaxies should form from nearly pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang, before stellar explosions seeded space with heavier elements, but no true zero-metallicity galaxy has been confirmed yet. AMORE6 comes closer than anything previously found, and its existence at a relatively late point in cosmic history suggests pockets of pristine gas can survive far longer than models typically assume.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

Astronomers have weighed a dormant black hole in galaxy MRG-M0138, more than 10 billion light-years away, pushing the previous distance record for this type of measurement out by a factor of 15. The black hole masses roughly 6 billion suns and existed when the universe was only about 3 billion years old. JWST's NIRSpec instrument tracked how fast stars orbit the otherwise invisible object, a technique called stellar dynamics previously limited to nearby galaxies. Gravitational lensing from a foreground cluster magnified the target 30 times, making the stellar motion detectable at all. The result, published in Science, gives researchers a direct mass measurement to test how black holes and their host galaxies grew together in the early universe.

Source: Phys.org – Space

The House Armed Services Committee's 2027 NDAA markup, approved 44-12 on June 4, authorizes $415 million to continue the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Polar program, a Northrop Grumman missile-warning satellite the Pentagon wants to terminate. The Defense Department argues newer LEO and MEO architectures make dedicated polar coverage redundant, but HASC members cited support from both U.S. Northern Command and Strategic Command. The committee also criticized the Space Force's Protected Tactical SATCOM-Global procurement, which awarded contracts to only two satellites despite the program being pitched as a proliferated constellation, and directed the Space Force to report on how it plans to meet the original resilience goals.

Source: SpaceNews

Two industry committees formed in 2026 are coordinating China's push to put computing infrastructure in orbit, with more than 100 organizations already enrolled across chips, hardware, power systems, and launch services. The effort is backed by the 15th Five-Year Plan and a CASC target for gigawatt-scale on-orbit computing by 2030. Several companies are already moving: ADA Space's Three-Body constellation aims for 1,000 satellites delivering one exaFLOP, while Orbital Chenguang secured $8.4 billion in credit lines in April. Thermal management and radiation-hardened hardware remain the main technical barriers between current ambition and actual deployed capability.

Source: SpaceNews

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