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A megawatt-class hybrid-electric engine developed jointly by NASA and GE Aerospace completed a demonstration flight on a modified Saab 340B aircraft at the Farnborough International Air Show in the United Kingdom. The engine, which integrates electric motors, a gas turbine, and energy storage, marks a public milestone for technology that recently achieved the first hybrid electric-powered flight above 30,000 feet. The system was designed to power regional-class aircraft while reducing fuel burn and operating costs without compromising performance. The achievement culminates more than 15 years of NASA research, beginning with preliminary work about a decade ago when hybrid propulsion for large aircraft remained largely theoretical. NASA spent seven years on foundational research before launching the Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration project with GE Aerospace and partner companies. The collaboration addressed major engineering barriers including battery technology, thermal management, power integration, and component miniaturization across multiple NASA centers and test facilities. Ground testing proved critical to the program's progress. In 2022, the team tested an integrated version of the propulsion system at NASA's Electric Aircraft Testbed in Sandusky, Ohio, simulating conditions at 45,000 feet -- the altitude range for commercial single-aisle aircraft. Subsequent testing added electric motors, power converters, propellers, and a GE Aerospace commercial engine before advancing to flight trials. The demonstration flight validates years of collaborative research supported through NASA's Subsonic Vehicle Technologies and Tools project and the Aeronautics Division. The engine's technology and designs are expected to inform development of future hybrid systems that could lower airline operating costs and reduce energy consumption across the commercial aviation sector.

NASA's newest Earth Venture Suborbital missions are mobilizing hundreds of scientists and pilots across six projects to study atmospheric and environmental phenomena using aircraft-mounted sensors. These missions bridge the gap between ground instruments and satellites, collecting data to improve weather forecasting, city planning, and hazard response. The first project launching this summer is INSPYRE, led by the Naval Research Laboratory, which will chase pyrocumulonimbus clouds -- towering fire storms generated by extreme wildfires. NASA's ER-2 aircraft will carry infrared wildfire trackers developed at JPL to measure and map these dangerous storms in real-time. The FarmFlux mission will deploy sensors across the Midwest and California's Central Valley to measure agricultural emissions including ozone, methane, and ammonia, which affect human health and climate. Led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with Colorado State University and Boston University, the mission addresses an understudied component of Earth's atmospheric systems. Meanwhile, the HAMAQ mission will investigate air quality in Atlanta and Mexico City using two aircraft at different altitudes -- NASA's P-3B flying near the surface and the newly acquired 777 science jet mapping pollution from above. Two Arctic-focused campaigns address rapid environmental change in the far north. Snow4Flow, led by the University of Arizona, will measure glacier retreat across Alaska, the Yukon, Arctic Canada, Greenland, and Svalbard using a modernized WWII-era aircraft equipped with a laser altimeter and custom radars. FORTE, led by NASA Goddard and the City College of New York, will track how rivers and coastal ecosystems on Alaska's North Slope interact with the Arctic Ocean using satellites, aircraft, vessels, and autonomous systems while collaborating with local and tribal communities. The LACCE project will combine airborne radar with ground sensors to track how California hillslopes respond to intensifying droughts and heavy precipitation, informed by the 2017 Mud Creek landslide that buried a coastal highway. The project also monitors accelerating slope movements in Alaska caused by rapidly retreating glaciers that could trigger mega-tsunamis. NASA's Earth Venture Suborbital program, established in 2007 following a National Research Council recommendation, has supported studies of blizzards, coral reefs, and ocean phenomena over the past two decades.

LegendSpace, a six-month-old Beijing-based startup, raised $29.5 million in angel funding to develop liquid rocket engines using AI-driven design and simulation. Founded by Peking University aerospace engineer Chen Zhi, the company claims its "Prime" platform can compress engine development cycles from years to roughly two weeks by linking AI design generation, multiphysics simulation, additive manufacturing, and testing into a closed loop. The round reflects growing momentum in China's commercial space sector and follows the company's appearance in state media and a third-place finish at a global startup competition in July. The funding will support multiple liquid engines through approval and testing, upgrades to the Prime platform to enhance AI simulation and metal additive manufacturing capabilities, and buildout of production infrastructure. LegendSpace has completed one full validation loop from AI-assisted design through simulation to both cold-flow and hot-fire testing, though the company has not specified what hardware was used. A 2.5-ton-thrust engine is currently in 3D-printed trial production, and the company is constructing a rocket engine test facility for static fire tests across various thrust levels. The Prime platform builds on DeepFlame, an open-source GPU-native combustion simulation code from Peking University, and was launched in March as a collaboration between LegendSpace and the Beijing Institute for AI for Science. Chen's academic credentials include a Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Institute in 2020 and prior work at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Sandia National Laboratories, and the German Aerospace Center. Chinese media coverage has drawn comparisons to SpaceX's use of AI in Raptor engine development. LegendSpace enters a competitive market already occupied by dedicated commercial engine makers like Jiuzhou Yunjian and vertically integrated launch companies such as Landspace, Space Pioneer, and iSpace that develop propulsion in-house. Success will likely depend on demonstrating that AI-driven development can deliver measurably faster and cheaper engines at operationally relevant thrust levels. The company has not disclosed its engine's propellant combination, cycle, or prospective customers.

The James Webb Space Telescope has observed gas filaments feeding a supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4696, a galaxy 145 million light-years away in the Centaurus Cluster. The finding provides observational evidence for a long-proposed cycle in which black holes expel matter through jets, starving themselves, but then allow that gas to cool and fall back inward to restart feeding. This mechanism could explain how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early universe, a puzzle that has troubled astronomers because standard growth timescales should take at least 1 billion years -- far longer than the universe's age when JWST detects them. The JWST revealed a hook-shaped swirl of gas roughly 800 light-years wide moving at speeds around 1.3 million miles per hour near NGC 4696's central black hole. This structure appears connected to a vast filament of material flowing inward toward the black hole. Computer simulations matched the observed gas dynamics, supporting the theory that filaments funnel material down into an accretion disk that feeds the black hole. The proposed cycle operates as self-regulation: black holes release energy that heats their surroundings, but the same gas eventually cools into thin filaments spanning thousands of light-years. These filaments fall back toward the galactic center and reform an accretion disk, restarting the feeding phase. The jets then fire again, ejecting matter and halting accretion, completing the loop. The research, published July 16 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, marks the first direct observational confirmation of these filamentary gas flows feeding a supermassive black hole. Earlier Hubble observations had spotted the hook-shaped gas feature in NGC 4696, but JWST's infrared sensitivity provided the detailed mapping needed to trace the connection to the infall filament. The findings help explain how the universe's earliest supermassive black holes achieved such massive scales.

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft completed a risky close flyby of the near-Earth asteroid Torifune on July 5, returning high-resolution images that revealed the target to be a contact binary -- two rocky bodies held together by gravity. The flyby required months of tense negotiation between JAXA's science and engineering teams over how close the aging spacecraft could safely approach. The final decision to pass within 800 meters of the asteroid's center alarmed some scientists, but the mission succeeded and delivered data from all four of Hayabusa2's science instruments, making it a significant technology demonstration for planetary defense work. The spacecraft, which launched in 2014 and completed its primary mission collecting samples from asteroid Ryugu in 2020, was not originally designed for high-speed flybys. Standard asteroid flybys occur at distances of 100 kilometers, but at that range Hayabusa2's cameras could barely resolve Torifune's shape. Engineers initially proposed 10 kilometers, then confirmed they could reach 1 kilometer. One month before the flyby, mission leader Yuya Mimasu proposed going to 800 meters, triggering heated debate over the unknown size of the target and the risk to the spacecraft. Hayabusa2's navigation team accounted for substantial uncertainties: ground-based observations suggested a worst-case asteroid size of 1,400 by 400 meters, and the spacecraft's targeting error margin was around 200 meters. The spacecraft's optics had also degraded from dust acquired during sampling at Ryugu. To manage these risks, the team developed new onboard guidance software and switched from ground-based navigation to autonomous targeting in the final three hours before closest approach. The Thermal Infrared Imager captured nine seconds of thermal data just before closest approach, confirming the contact binary structure independently of the optical images. Most of the 300 megabytes of science data collected during the flyby remains aboard Hayabusa2 and will not reach Earth for months. The spacecraft restarted its ion engines on July 9 and will fire them for roughly four months to begin the cruise toward Earth flybys scheduled for 2027 and 2028. Beyond this extended mission, Hayabusa2 is headed toward a rendezvous with the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26 in

The U.S. Space Force raised the spending ceiling for its National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 contract from $5.6 billion to $17 billion, more than tripling the original limit through fiscal 2029. The increase reflects surging demand for military satellite launches and expands the pool of companies eligible to compete for national security missions. Seven providers -- SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space -- can now bid on individual task orders within the higher contract ceiling. Lane 1 handles missions that don't require full certification, creating a pathway for newer launch providers to enter the national security market once their vehicles reach sufficient readiness. The higher ceiling follows a separate April announcement that the Space Force identified 25 additional high-priority Lane 2 missions beyond the 54 launches originally planned over five years, indicating the military's overall launch requirements have expanded substantially since the Phase 3 strategy was finalized in 2024.

Japan completed the first flight test of its RV-X experimental reusable rocket prototype on July 11 at JAXA's Noshiro facility. The 24-foot-tall vehicle, developed jointly by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, rose about 33 feet and traveled roughly 50 feet horizontally before landing softly on its concrete pad in a 40-second test. The success marks progress toward a capability only a handful of orbital rockets have demonstrated: vertical launch and landing for reuse. RV-X serves as a pathfinder for CALLISTO, a three-nation project involving JAXA, France's CNES, and Germany's DLR to build a single-stage reusable rocket. Japan's current flagship H3, introduced in 2023, lacks reusability and lags in cost-effectiveness compared to advanced reusable stages, making RV-X's development critical to JAXA's long-term launch service goals. The next test flight will push the vehicle to 330 feet in altitude while adding a lateral crossover and hover maneuver, following a development path similar to SpaceX's early Starship hopper tests.

The Pentagon awarded $7.1 million to Martin Materials Solutions under the Defense Production Act to expand U.S. manufacturing of cover glass for satellite solar cells. Cover glass is a specialized radiation-resistant material that protects photovoltaic cells on spacecraft, filtering damaging light and shielding against radiation and micrometeorites. The investment reflects Pentagon concern about supply vulnerabilities in components needed for military and commercial spacecraft, with Martin Materials being one of a limited number of U.S.-based companies supplying this material. The funding will establish and scale production at Martin Materials' facility in Twinsburg, Ohio. The award comes under Title III of the Defense Production Act, which allows direct federal investment in domestic production capacity for materials deemed essential to national defense. The company also produces thermal-control mirror glass for satellites, and the expansion appears aimed at reducing reliance on a constrained group of domestic and foreign suppliers.

NASA and Draper have terminated a Commercial Lunar Payload Services task order valued at $73 million after repeated delays pushed the mission's landing date to 2030 or 2031. The CP-12 mission was to deliver three science instruments to the moon's far side, including seismometers for the Farside Seismic Suite and thermal and electromagnetic measurement equipment. ispace-U.S., the American subsidiary of Japanese lunar lander developer ispace, was the primary contractor building the lander and confirmed the cancellation after NASA ended the task order due to lander redesign delays. NASA awarded the task order in July 2022 with an original 2025 launch target, but the date slipped repeatedly as ispace-U.S. revised the lander design to fit NASA's payloads and changed engines twice -- most recently in May 2025. The agency paid $43 million of the $73 million contract value to Draper before termination. NASA stated it remains committed to flying the three science instruments on future CLPS landings through its Moon Base and Artemis programs. ispace said it plans to pursue business under the newer CLPS 2.0 contract vehicle for advanced lander missions.