The FCC has approved (PDF) Amazon Leo's $11.5 billion acquisition of satellite operator Globalstar, giving the Starlink rival additional infrastructure and spectrum to expand into direct-to-device satellite connectivity. Engadget reports: You may not know Globalstar but have possibly used its services, as the company provides Apple's emergency satellite connectivity for compatible iPhones and Watches. Interestingly, Apple also held a 20 percent stake in Globalstar prior to its takeover. As part of the deal, Leo will power satellite services for supported iPhone and Apple Watch models.

Leo, a rival to SpaceX's Starlink, has been active of late. The company recently announced that it has 400 satellites in orbit and revealed last month that it had launched high-quality satellite internet service in Uzbekistan. It's teaming up with Delta to eventually bring satellite internet to flights, as well. Amazon recently added six new Arianespace launches and aims to have more than 3,000 low-earth orbit satellites up in the near future, still well short of SpaceX's 11,000 satellites.

Astronomers using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have discovered 2026 ED138, a large object beyond Neptune that could become the solar system's sixth recognized dwarf planet if further observations confirm it is massive enough to be round. Located about 46 times farther from the Sun than Earth, the object is estimated to be 600 to 1,500 kilometers wide and had remained hidden because it lies against a particularly crowded field of Milky Way stars. Scientific American reports: The discovery was made by running billions of pieces of data collected by the Rubin Observatory through a search code developed by Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian astronomers Matthew Holman and Kevin Napier. "My first reaction was one of excited disbelief," Holman said in a statement. "Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong."

When Holman and his colleague Mario Juric of the University of Washington went to double-check, they found 30 more observations of the object by Rubin that dated to between March and July 2026. Looking at other observation tools, the pair found even more sightings going back to 2016. Together, these data allowed the astronomers to begin mapping out 2026 ED138's orbit. The suspected dwarf planet is about 46 times as far from the sun as Earth, making it even more remote than Pluto, which is just 40 times as far. The object is also tilted off the solar system's plane by around 25 degrees, an arrangement that could be linked to disruptions caused by Neptune's gravitational pull.

Initial measurements indicate that 2026 ED138 has a diameter between 600 and 1,500 kilometers (373 and 932 miles), which makes it one of the largest dwarf planet candidates yet detected. But size isn't all that matters: further observations are required to determine if the object has enough mass to be pulled into a round shape, which is a key requirement for a dwarf planet. Despite its size, 2026 ED138 was able to avoid detection for all these years because it's located in a part of the night sky that's crowded with stars whose light drowned it out.

The CDC estimates that 19 drug-resistant pathogens cause 9.7 million infections and more than 50,000 deaths annually in the U.S., with resistance continuing to outpace development of new treatments. "The agency considers this problem to be one of our most urgent public health threats," reports NBC News. From the report: The report is the CDC's first comprehensive assessment of these drug-resistant pathogens in seven years. [...] The new report offers a detailed picture of these threats in the U.S., including a ranking of which are the most urgent concerns, based on the number and severity of infections they cause and how easily preventable or transmissible they are. The ranking also factors in how many treatment options exist and their costs. [...] The report estimates that 19 drug-resistant germs cause 9.7 million infections annually in the U.S. Of these, four pathogens are ranked as most worrisome, including the fungus Candida auris and the bacteria that causes gonorrhea, which has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics used to treat it.

The other two urgent threats, according to the CDC, are the bacteria Acinetobacter and Enterobacterales, both of which are resistant to a class of antibiotics widely considered a "last resort" for patients. In addition, the report adds a new bacteria to the list of "concerning" threats, which are considered less worrisome but still warrant monitoring: neisseria meningitidis, which causes meningococcal disease. The rare but life-threatening illness can be prevented through childhood vaccinations, but the bacteria that causes it is slowly developing a resistance to penicillin and another antibiotic called ciprofloxacin.

The report also offers some good news: The CDC determined that the bacteria Clostridioides difficile, or "C. diff," which causes diarrhea and inflammation of the colon and can be deadly, is causing fewer cases year over year. The agency downgraded it to a serious threat, whereas it was categorized as urgent in the prior version of the report, which came out in 2019.

Susanne Rust of the Los Angeles Times reports (paywalled) that industry executives knew for decades that microplastics were infiltrating the human body. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Scientists today say we're just beginning to understand the harm that the tiny bits of plastic we drink, eat and breathe are doing to the human body. Internal memos among company scientists and executives obtained by The Times reveal that for at least half a century, the plastics industry has been aware of and concerned about the potential for microplastic contamination in the human body. But recently discovered chemical company documents dating back several decades show that industry scientists have long been aware of -- and concerned about -- the way microplastic particles migrate beyond the gut in animals and humans, depositing in important organs. And the potential for that knowledge to affect the plastic food packaging industry.

Their concern goes back to 1974 and a scientific meeting at a New York City hotel, where a German gastroenterologist presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body. His presentation was largely overlooked by the government scientists in attendance but became a point of worried discussion among company scientists. Tracey Woodruff, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, who reviewed the documents, said they indicate scientists and executives at major chemical companies have known and remained silent even as microplastics accumulated in tissues. She likened it to other industries that knew about pollutants -- greenhouse gases, asbestos and tobacco -- but did not take action to make them safer.

A spokesperson with the chemical industry's largest trade group took issue with that characterization. "Scientific debate over what the evidence shows is not silence. It is how sound science and effective policy advance," said Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council. "Our industry is committed to advancing microplastics science by supporting independent research and policies that would do so."

"Scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older," reports ScienceAlert: Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type. The second method involves a "direct conversion," which skips the middle stage and directly transforms a cell into a different type. "Using this method, we have directly converted red blood cell precursors into neural stem cells," summarizes Oliver Brüstle, the director of the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology at the University Hospital of Bonn...

The researchers used a virus to deliver two transcription factors, or proteins that attach to DNA to regulate gene activity, to get the cells to change their types. Then they used two genome-bloodhounding methods — DNA methylation measures and RNA sequencing — to track the resultant anti-aging effects and genetic behavior. By the 12th day after the viral "infection," the cells started showing their new identity, ditching their blood-like proteins and replacing them with the expression of neural-like proteins instead. Initially, the epigenetic age (the DNA changes accumulated over time) of the EPCs was highly correlated with the chronological age of their donors [but] the neuronal stem cells kept getting younger as they got older... Over the following 50 to 100 days, they kept de-aging, eventually reaching about 5 percent of the donor age, with the majority of epigenetic age-related traits resetting by around 50 days of the conversion process...

In effect, the converted cells became 60 years younger in 50 days, the researchers note in their official statement.
The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell.

Researchers at the University of Tubingen found that crows can process visual information and make decisions roughly twice as fast as monkeys or humans without sacrificing accuracy. They suspect birds' densely packed neurons and higher body temperatures contribute to their faster processing, though the study involved only two crows. Ars Technica reports: [Andreas Nieder, a neurobiologist at the University of Tubingen and his colleague Philipp Schmidbauer] put two hand-raised crows in front of a touch-sensitive monitor showing a cloud of white dots on black, with some fraction of them drifting coherently left or right or up or down. The birds' job was to report the overall direction by pecking one of the targets that flanked the display. Correct answers earned them a mealworm. "We intentionally wanted to have exactly the same random-dot motion task," Nieder said. "The only difference was that the crows had to peck to indicate their decision, whereas monkeys were indicating by making an eye movement."

The researchers varied how many dots moved together, ranging from 81 percent of the dots coherently moving together, which is trivially easy to determine, down to 3 percent, which is barely distinguishable from noise. They also included a zero percent condition, in which there was no correct answer. Both birds scored better than chance, even when only three percent of the dots were moving. While the crows worked at the task, the team recorded from 248 neurons in the NCL (nidopallium caudolaterale) -- a region at the top of the avian processing hierarchy that is widely regarded as the functional counterpart of the primate prefrontal cortex, despite being built differently.

Birds and mammals parted evolutionary ways more than 360 million years ago, and bird brains evolved a different architecture. The mammalian cortex is arranged as stacked sheets of cells, while the equivalent tissue in a bird is organized into dense clusters, with no layering at all. This alternative architecture, Nieder's study found, proved faster. Measured from the moment that the dots appeared to the moment the bird's head started turning to peck at the button, the crows averaged 235 milliseconds. In closely matched versions of the task, monkeys took roughly 410, 490, and 600 milliseconds in three studies. The obvious question was whether the birds simply sacrificed accuracy for speed, but it turned out they did not. The research has been published in the journal Science.

NASA is accelerating its Artemis program with an Apollo-era sense of urgency, aiming to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028 and establish a permanent base near the moon's south pole. The Associated Press reports: Administrator Jared Isaacman said Friday that the space agency is still on track to launch Artemis III next summer on a docking exercise with Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos' lunar landers. The two-week mission featuring four astronauts will be confined to orbit around Earth -- no moon trip this time. The all-important Artemis IV -- NASA's first moon landing by astronauts since Apollo -- remains scheduled for 2028, Isaacman said. His update came six months after the successful Artemis II flight around the moon by four astronauts, humanity's first lunar trip in more than half a century.

NASA will keep its options open as long as possible before choosing between SpaceX and Blue Origin for the Artemis IV lunar lander, according to officials. Isaacman said the "new space race" to land astronauts on the moon -- racing against China now versus the Soviet Union during the Apollo era -- will be "much closer than it ever needed to be" because of slow going in past years. But the space agency is now accelerating its pace, he noted, eliminating endless meetings and bureaucratic inertia, as SpaceX, Blue Origin and other companies scramble around the clock to meet the deadlines and NASA bolsters its workforce.

Adopting Apollo's urgent and intense approach from 1968 through 1972, a period which saw 24 astronauts fly to the moon and 12 land on it, is not "tech industry pixie dust or some new management philosophy," Isaacman said. "It's about our own history. It's a playbook this agency knows really well, the same playbook that went from Apollo 7 splashdown to Apollo 11 in just nine months," he said during a news conference at Kennedy Space Center.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new startup launched today with the definitely not terrifying mission of creating genetically enhanced dogs for the United States military, law enforcement, and emergency first responders. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Colossal Biosciences cofounder Ben Lamm. The startup has raised $200 million to "rebuild America's domestic supply of elite working dogs" and reduce dependency on European dog breeders for military canines.

Lamm tells WIRED that Warhound is in the process of gene-editing its first batch of dogs. The startup has already collected blood samples from specific "top-performing" military, police, and first responder dogs in the United States, and its goal is to clone them. Breeds will be "mostly Belgian Malinois, some labs, and some shepherds," he says. The company anticipates the first round of puppies to be born in early 2027. The initial rounds of gene-editing will focus on eliminating common health conditions that impact these breeds, like hip dysplasia. Further down the line, Lamm envisions expanding to "really interesting things," such as incorporating olfactory receptor genes from wolves to "enhance" the military dogs. (Colossal Biosciences is perhaps best known for its work on gene-edited wolves for its so-called Dire Wolf De-Extinction Project.)

Warhound, based in Texas, will also equip its canines with "Anduril's advanced cybernetic Augments, software, and battlefield situational awareness," according to a press release. Asked if this means the dogs will be some kind of cyborgs, Lamm clarifies that the plan right now is to supply them with tools like "advanced body armor" rather than, say, embedding some sort of computer in their dog bodies. "So no dogs with lasers?" WIRED asked Lamm. "I can't comment on what Anduril plans," he says. "Dog safety and performance, and then helping continue helping to improve the human handler and dog bond, and working as a team -- that is what the mission is." [...] The company plans to operate under the guidance of the American Humane Society.

Physicists at Northwestern University have successfully trapped a single positron for an entire month, allowing researchers to study its quantum properties with unprecedented precision. "Further investigations using the trap might reveal the secret of why the world around us is made of matter and not antimatter, when things could have presumably gone either way," reports Scientific American. From the report: Every normal particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart with equal mass but opposite charge. To build their trap, physicists started with atoms of sodium 22, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about two and a half years. When one of these atoms decays, it emits a positron -- the antimatter counterpart of the electron. "The big challenge is to persuade these positrons to slow down and then capture them," says Gerald Gabrielse, a physicist at Northwestern University, who oversaw the project. The team reported its achievement on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters (PDF).

The first step is to send the positrons through the crystal lattice of a sliver of cold tungsten. As the particles go pinballing through the material, they slow down and lose energy. "Every time they bang into something, there's a chance of annihilation, but it doesn't always happen," Gabrielse says. "If they make it to the end, they get popped out." Next, the physicists steer the positrons along a channel using electromagnetic fields. Eventually the particles end up in a vacuum, just three tenths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero, trapped by an electric field on top and bottom and a magnetic field on the sides. "If you want to hold on to antimatter, you have to hold it in a container without walls," Gabrielse says. This method allowed the researchers to isolate and study a solitary, lone positron for a monthâ"and could let them do so indefinitely.

The researchers intend to use their trap to make precise measurements of the positron's magnetic moment -- basically the strength and orientation of its magnetic field. To do this, they must determine two things: the energy needed to flip the direction of the positron's spin and the energy needed to make it jump from its ground state to its first excited state. Using a similar trap setup, Gabrielse and his team have already measured the magnetic moment of an electron to a precision of one part in 10 trillion. Taking the equivalent measurement for a positron will allow them to make a crucial comparison. "We're looking to see if they have an exactly opposite magnetic moment," Gabrielse says. That's the prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics. If the two have different values, however, this could help explain why our universe is made of matter instead of antimatter.

For the first time, the UN has declared that exceeding the Paris Agreement's 1.5C warming limit is "imminent and unavoidable." "We are now saying this window has closed, but we can open it again by making the overshoot as brief as possible," UN Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen said on a call with reporters. "This is about how to find a way back as shortly and as quickly as possible with as limited an overshoot as possible." CNN reports: Past reports have examined the distance between countries' emissions reduction commitments and what it would take to limit global warming to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels. However, this year's report redefines the gap. Instead, it examines new emissions overshoot scenarios, and what it would take to limit peak warming to just 1.7 to 1.8 degrees C before bringing temperatures back down to 1.5 C through emissions cuts and the use of carbon removal technologies.

The report makes clear that every additional fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5 C "raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation, and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts." Each added fraction of a degree of warming can have an "immense" impact "as measured in terms of damage, cost and loss of lives," said climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. Mann was not involved in producing the UNEP report.

According to the UNEP, which is based in Nairobi, the lowest overshoot scenario would keep peak warming to between 1.7 and 1.8 degrees C and return global average temperatures to at or below 1.5 C by 2100. However, to follow such a pathway, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to be slashed by far more than anything currently on the table at the upcoming COP31 talks. This would require an 18% cut by 2030, 45% by 2035, and 69% by 2040, relative to 2025 levels.

Meeting this lowest-possible overshoot scenario would require a tripling of renewable electricity capacity by 2035, and dramatic cuts to fossil fuels, including the phaseout of coal by 2040, the report states. In addition, there would need to be a major scaling up of carbon removal technologies, which so far have not been proven to work at such a large scale. In stark contrast to these figures, the fulfillment of existing emissions reduction pledges would only yield a 5-to-8% emissions cut by 2030 and an 11-to-15% reduction by 2035, the report found. This would be associated with a peak warming of about 2.6 degrees C.

If countries simply follow their current policies, then warming could reach a peak of about 2.8 C. That estimate has increased since last year, in part because of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement and retraction of its emissions reduction commitments, the report states. Even the scenario that assumes countries meet their existing reduction commitments, and nations with net-zero pledges succeed in fulfilling them, still brings warming to a peak of 2.1 C.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For the first time, scientists say they have used viruses designed by artificial intelligence to treat a human patient. Researchers announced on Tuesday that they had administered the virus, known as a phage, to a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection. Phages attack bacteria, and the hope is that this one will kill the microbes causing the infection. Radical Numerics, the start-up that created the viruses, posted a technical report about them on its website. But the company declined to provide information about the patient or the doctors running the trial, citing confidentiality requirements.

[...] In 2025, researchers at the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., created an A.I. model called Evo 2, which they trained on millions of DNA sequences, including phage genes. They prompted Evo 2 to make new genomes similar to those in a group of phage species. The A.I. generated 700,000 virus genomes. The team synthesized DNA molecules from 285 genomes and inserted them into bacteria. The researchers found that 16 of the genomes gave rise to viable viruses. Three members of the Evo team, including Dr. Nguyen, left to found Radical Numerics. In June, the company unveiled a new A.I. model, called Omnii, based on some of the same principles as Evo.

Omnii can be trained not just on DNA but also on other aspects of biology, such as the structures of proteins and molecules that keep genes turned on or off. The company is now using Omnii to tackle a range of challenges, including designing cancer vaccines and recognizing the risk that a virus may cause a pandemic. Among these efforts is the first trial of A.I.-designed phage therapy. The researchers created variations of a phage called T7. The virus, which only infects E. coli, looks like a microscopic Apollo lunar lander: a ball-shaped protein shell that holds its DNA atop six leglike protrusions. To infect a bacterium, T7 lands on its surface, using its legs to anchor in place. It then injects its DNA into the cell.

Omnii generated new viral genes altering the shapes of T7's legs, according to Dr. Nguyen and his colleagues. While some of the new legs were significantly different from natural ones, Omnii's phages could still infect bacteria. Once the researchers were confident their strategy had worked, they partnered with doctors treating a patient with a stubborn E. coli infection. The bacteria had resisted not just antibiotics but all the available phages. The researchers said they had trained Omnii with information about the resistant strain and told it to design T7 phages with legs that could grab onto the bacteria. Once the A.I. generated genomes for new viruses, the scientists said they produced the corresponding DNA molecules and inserted them in bacteria. The bacteria became infected and produced T7 phages that could successfully infect, and kill, other microbes. After running tests to make sure the phages were safe, Radical Numerics presented them to the doctors. The F.D.A. authorized a trial. While the trial was authorized by the FDA, it's worth noting that the research has not yet been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal and there's no guarantee the AI-designed phages will work.

However, if it does prove successful, it could help speed phage therapy by cutting down the time it takes to create a new virus tailored to each patient's infection. "We think we can get it done in days," said Dr. Eric Nguyen, the chief executive officer of Radical Numerics.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from TWZ: A Russian satellite, Kosmos 2612, may have passed within approximately 85 feet (26 meters) of a U.S.-registered satellite belonging to commercial imagery provider ICEYE. This would be an extraordinarily close and potentially dangerous pass-by for two objects in space traveling at thousands of miles per hour. For weeks beforehand, ICEYE-X36, which would be of special interest to Russia, had already found itself in increasingly close orbital alignment with its pursuer. The two satellites now look to be drifting further and further apart, but the episode has been a clear sign of what is to come as the potential for conflict in space only continues to grow.

Publicly available space tracking data from the satellitemap.space and orbitalradar.com websites show that Kosmos 2612 (also written sometimes Cosmos 2612 and abbreviated K2612) and ICEYE X36 had their especially close encounter at approximately 16:07 UTC today. Private space services company LeoLabs also told TWZ today that it could not "confirm or contradict what other data sources have stated publicly," but that it has "high-confidence that the objects came within approximately [emphasis in the original] 500 meters [1,640 feet] of each other." Kosmos 2612 had been making progressively closer passes by ICEYE X36 in recent days. "This is the most advanced and potentially dangerous uncooperative RPO we've observed," Adam Marsh, LeoLabs vice president for technical solutions, separately told Breaking Defense.

"It's important to note that 'red' on 'blue' engagements, such as this, are relatively uncommon in Low Earth Orbit (LEO)," LeoLabs' report points out. At the same time, "this was not a routine conjunction or 'fly by.' The sequence included a controlled approach, changes in relative position, close-proximity loitering, additional small maneuvers, and a controlled departure. The behavior is consistent with sophisticated rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO)."

"We can only speculate about the operation's goal, but it could have been anything from simply intimidation to outright destruction or sabotage of a U.S.-registered satellite," CSIS' Clayton Swope told TWZ. "Perhaps the operation is on hold. There are, however, several other satellites that shadowed ICEYE X36 back in May that could be brought in[to] action too."

Japan has successfully launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to study Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Scheduled to arrive in August 2027, "MMX will become the first spacecraft to land on and return samples from Phobos for study back on Earth, which scientists think could shed light on a decades-old mystery about the moons' origins" and resolve whether they were formed from a giant impact or were captured asteroids, reports Space.com. From the report: It was the 10th liftoff of Japan's expendable, two-stage H3 rocket, which was jointly developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. After clearing its launch pad today, the 207-foot-tall (63 meters) launch vehicle flew a nominal trajectory through its ascent corridor over the Pacific Ocean, jettisoning its four solid boosters in pairs just before the flight clock reached two minutes. The rocket shed its payload fairings about one minute and 20 seconds later, exposing MMX to the vacuum of space for the first time. [...] MMX is now under its own power, and on course for Mars.

The interplanetary transit will last about 10 months, with the spacecraft scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in August 2027. When it does, MMX's propulsion module will execute an orbital insertion burn to place itself in a quasi-satellite orbit (QSO) around Phobos, which places MMX within the space around the moon as both circle Mars. MMX will spend about three years in the Martian system, devoting much of that time to studying the 14-mile-wide (22 km) Phobos with its science instruments. The spacecraft also carries the IDEFIX rover, a joint effort of the space agencies of France and Germany, which is scheduled to deploy to the surface of Phobos in late 2028 or early 2029.

After a mapping campaign to select suitable landing sites, MMX will perform two separate touchdowns on Phobos to collect and stow samples in the spacecraft's return capsule. Following its second landing and sample collection, MMX will briefly return to QSO with Phobos before transferring to a more elongated orbit around Mars that intersects with the planet's smaller moon, Deimos, which is just 8 miles (14 km) in diameter. During the last several months of its time around Mars, MMX will perform a series of Deimos flybys before departing for Earth in November 2030. If all goes according to plan, the MMX sample-return capsule will land in Australia in 2031. You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube.

Gizmodo reports: Roughly 84.4% of the world's coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s... But there's some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers.

"This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable," [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]... Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks... [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities," reports CNBC, "with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade."

"The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket." A $330 million expansion to its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, expected to be complete in the summer of 2027, will enable it to produce up to 150 upper stages of its New Glenn rocket annually, Blue Origin said in a blog post. "These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently," Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the post. "As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade...."

Blue Origin said it's building a new customer integration facility with the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station that will enable it to "prepare multiple missions at once" when it's up and running. Blue Origin has invested more than $3 billion in its infrastructure and facilities in Florida, which now spans more than 20 sites across the state's Brevard and Orange counties, with more than 5,000 employees, [Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the blog post].
The article notes it's part of "a flurry of investment" as SpaceX stops offering commercial rides on its Falcon 9, "with $92.5 billion invested in the commercial space sector in the first three quarters of 2026, according to a report this week by venture capital firm Space Capital." And it happens as Blue Origin, SpaceX and other rocket providers "are seeing increasing demand from companies and governments trying to deploy satellites into orbit."

"Launching at a high cadence requires a connected system," says Blue Origin's blog post, "one that manufactures vehicles at scale, prepares customer payloads efficiently, supports reliable launch operations, and quickly returns reusable boosters to service. We are building that system here in Florida," and "laying the foundation for a future where access to space is more frequent, more reliable, and more affordable, for the benefit of Earth."