SpaceX rideshare deploys 45 satellites & Ireland joins Artemis Accords framework - Space News (May 4, 2026)

[0:36] SpaceX rideshare deploys 45 satellites

SpaceX kept its launch cadence roaring into early May. On May 3, 2026, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the CAS500-2 mission, carrying 45 total payloads. The primary satellite—Korea Aerospace Industries’ Compact Advanced Satellite 500-2—was deployed into a sun-synchronous orbit about an hour after liftoff, setting it up for multi-spectral Earth observation after a long delay from its original 2022 target.

One of the biggest scientific headlines in the report comes from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Even during early optimization with engineering-quality data, Rubin submitted more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center—an extraordinary single-year batch. The observatory also identified 33 new near-Earth objects, none of which appear to pose an impact risk in the foreseeable future, but all of which improve the completeness of planetary-defense catalogs.

Rubin’s dataset included about a million individual observations over roughly a month and a half, and it wasn’t just about new objects. The same precision astrometry helped recover “lost” asteroids whose orbits had become too uncertain to predict. The survey also flagged hundreds of trans-Neptunian objects, including a couple with unusually elongated or large orbits—clues that could point to different dynamical origins in the outer solar system.

In human spaceflight, NASA and international partners updated the ISS flight schedule for mid-2026 through 2027, balancing cargo, crew rotations, and station maintenance. A key near-term milestone is SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services-34, targeted for no earlier than May 12, 2026, to deliver more than 6,400 pounds of cargo and research. The plan also accelerates Crew-13 to mid-September 2026, listing NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney among the crew, reflecting a push to maintain robust staffing and science throughput.

The schedule also continues U.S.–Russia cross-transport cooperation, with Soyuz MS-29 targeted for July 14, 2026 to carry NASA astronaut Anil Menon with Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. Meanwhile, future cargo flights include Northrop Grumman CRS-25 in fall or winter 2026, delivering roughly 11,000 pounds including ISS Roll Out Solar Arrays—critical upgrades as older arrays age under radiation and thermal cycling. Boeing’s Starliner remains in a technical-review phase following issues identified during the 2024 Crew Flight Test, with future launch timing tied to readiness and safety closure.

Turning to cosmology, researchers described in the report combined recent dark-energy measurements—drawing on the Dark Energy Survey in Chile and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument in Arizona—to explore whether the cosmological constant might be negative rather than positive. In that scenario, expansion could continue for around 11 billion more years, then slow, stop, and reverse into a contraction lasting about 20 billion years, culminating in a “big crunch.” The report emphasizes this is not settled science: uncertainties remain, and competing interpretations are actively debated.

Finally, the report highlights exotic high-energy events seen by NASA’s observatories. One case, GRB 230906A, is interpreted as a neutron-star merger about 4.7 billion light-years away, in an unusually small galaxy embedded within an intergalactic gas stream—an environment that could reshape how astronomers think about where heavy-element-producing mergers can occur. Another event, GRB 250702B, lasted an unprecedented seven hours and appeared in multiple episodes; one leading hypothesis is a star being tidally disrupted by an intermediate-mass black hole, potentially offering rare insight into a black-hole class that is still poorly characterized.