SpaceX Starlink 10-38 launch & CAS500-2 rideshare to SSO - Space News (May 3, 2026)

SpaceX opened May with the Starlink 10-38 mission on May 1, launching 29 Starlink V2 Mini satellites from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. Liftoff came at 2:06 p.m. Eastern, and the flight continued the rapid buildout of a Starlink constellation now described as having more than 10,000 operational satellites delivering broadband service worldwide. The mission also underlined how routine reusability has become for Falcon 9: booster B1069 flew for the 31st time and landed about eight and a half minutes after launch on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas—counted as the 607th overall booster landing for SpaceX.

Just two days later, SpaceX flew another Falcon 9—this time from Vandenberg—on the CAS500-2 mission, placing South Korea’s Compact Advanced Satellite 500-2 into a sun-synchronous orbit for high-resolution Earth imaging in panchromatic and multispectral modes. The headline, though, was scale: the launch carried 45 payloads in total, a showcase for rideshare economics and deployment logistics. Exolaunch managed multiple deployment sequences, with batches released roughly one hour and sixteen minutes after liftoff and again around two hours and twenty-two minutes in, while booster B1071 completed its 34th flight and returned to Landing Zone 4 for SpaceX landing number 608.

In low Earth orbit operations, NASA and international partners updated the International Space Station flight schedule. SpaceX CRS-34 was targeted for no earlier than May 12, carrying more than 6,400 pounds of cargo and science to the station from the same Cape Canaveral pad used for Starlink 10-38. Looking ahead, Soyuz MS-29 is slated for July with NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, and NASA and SpaceX moved Crew-13 up from November to mid-September to tighten the cadence of U.S. crew rotations. The schedule also points to more cargo later in the year, including a Northrop Grumman resupply flight bringing roughly 11,000 pounds and additional ISS Roll Out Solar Arrays, while Boeing’s Starliner remains under ongoing technical review following issues tied to the 2024 crew flight test.

For skywatchers, May brings the Eta Aquariid meteor shower, peaking around May 5 and 6 as Earth crosses debris shed by Halley’s Comet. These are fast meteors—about 40 to 41 miles per second—with bright streaks and lingering trains, and under ideal dark skies the shower can push toward 50 to 60 meteors per hour. In 2026, a waning gibbous moon is expected to wash out many faint meteors, with northern observers more likely to see something like 10 to 30 per hour, while the Southern Hemisphere typically gets the best view. The best advice remains classic: watch in the hours before dawn, when Aquarius climbs higher and the radiant is best placed.

May 2026 also features a calendar rarity: two full moons in one month, making the second one—peaking at 8:45 UTC on May 31—a Blue Moon in the modern definition. The earlier full moon on May 1 is the Flower Moon, appearing near bright stars like Spica and Arcturus, while the late-month Blue Moon is a micromoon, occurring near the Moon’s farthest point from Earth and appearing slightly smaller than average. Despite the name, it won’t be blue; it’s a quirk of the calendar. Observers can also look for the Moon near Antares around this time, adding a vivid red star to the scene.

Planet viewing is another May highlight: Venus dominates the western sky after sunset at around magnitude minus 4, while Jupiter still shines brightly but is slipping deeper into twilight, making this one of the last good months for crisp evening telescopic views before it becomes too low. Mercury is the dramatic mover—after superior conjunction on May 14, it climbs rapidly into the evening sky, helped by a lucky alignment of orbital factors, reaching about magnitude minus 1.6 around May 20 and becoming more comfortably visible after sunset by late May. A standout pairing arrives May 18, when a young crescent Moon sits just a few degrees from Venus, and on May 19 the Moon climbs between Venus and Jupiter for a striking naked-eye lineup.

On Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover added new weight to the story of ancient Martian habitability by detecting a diverse suite of organic molecules in a chemistry experiment first run in 2020 and only now fully analyzed. Using TMAH—tetramethylammonium hydroxide—to help break down complex organics, the rover identified more than 20 molecules, including ones not previously confirmed on Mars, such as benzothiophene, along with nitrogen-bearing organics that matter because nitrogen chemistry is central to biology as we know it. Researchers stress this is not proof of life—organics can form without biology and can arrive via meteorites—but it is strong evidence Mars preserved complex chemistry for billions of years.

In multi-messenger astronomy, scientists revisited an unusual gravitational-wave event detected in November 2024 by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network, labeled S241125n, because it may line up with a short gamma-ray burst—something typically associated with neutron-star mergers, not black-hole collisions. NASA’s Swift reportedly saw a gamma-ray burst about 11 seconds after the gravitational-wave signal, and China’s Einstein Probe identified an X-ray afterglow in the same region. The source is described as extremely distant—around 4.2 billion light-years—and unusually massive, on the order of 100 solar masses or more, and one proposed explanation is that the merger occurred inside a gas-rich environment such as an active galactic nucleus disk. If future events confirm this kind of pairing, it could expand how often black-hole mergers become visible beyond gravitational waves alone.

NICER results added another intriguing piece to neutron-star physics, with researchers examining a 3.8 keV absorption feature seen in the binary system 4U 1820-30 after a rare carbon superburst. The line persisted for nearly 17 hours and is interpreted—tentatively—as a gravitationally redshifted iron feature originating near the neutron-star surface, which would allow compactness, and thus mass-radius constraints, to be inferred. The team’s reported redshift estimate implies very small radii for typical neutron-star masses, but they emphasize the need for more observations and that future X-ray observatories like Athena and eXTP could test and refine the method.

Finally, cosmology delivered big, controversial ideas. A reanalysis of dark-energy data—drawing on results from the Dark Energy Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument—suggested the cosmological constant might be negative, which would imply expansion eventually halts and reverses into a future Big Crunch, with a rough timeline of continued expansion for about 11 billion years and a collapse roughly 20 billion years from now. In parallel, another team explored evolving dark energy in The Astrophysical Journal, finding the Hubble tension remains stubborn across models, no alternative beats standard ΛCDM decisively with current data, but there are hints that dark energy may evolve over time and might even interact with dark matter—ideas that, if confirmed, would reshape the foundations of modern cosmology. And closer to home, astronomers mapped a clearer edge to the Milky Way’s active star-forming disk, finding a sharp change in stellar age patterns around 35,000 to 40,000 light-years from the galactic center, likely tied to declining star-formation efficiency and long-term outward migration of older stars.