Spaceflight Daily Report, Tuesday 1st September 2026

Image credit: NASA

US Spacewalk 99

American astronaut Jessica Meir and French astronaut Sophie Adenot performed a spacewalk today from the International Space Station, supported from inside the station by fellow astronauts Jack Hathaway and Anil Menon, and supported from the ground by Tess Caswell and Mark Vande Hei. The spacewalk began at 1240 UTC and concluded at 1929 UTC, lasting 6 hours 49 minutes. The procedure was nicknamed "triple-jump" by the astronauts, as it consisted of three main maintenance tasks on three different parts of the station. First, they installed a new retroreflector on the forward port of the Harmony module to support spacecraft navigation during rendezvous and docking. Second, they replaced a camera on the truss segment. And third, they prepared for the replacement of the radiator on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a science experiment for detecting antimatter in cosmic rays. Additionally, they swabbed various parts of the outside of the station to check for microbial leaks and installed jumper cables. It was a packed schedule and Adenot was having trouble with one of the arms on her spacesuit, so some of the radiator preparation and jumper cables have been deferred to a later spacewalk. This was Jessica Meir's 7th spacewalk, bringing her up to 49 hours 22 minutes of EVA time. It was Sophie Adenot's 3rd spacewalk, bringing her up to 19 hours 42 minutes of EVA time. It was the 4th spacewalk of Expedition 75 and overall the 284th spacewalk from the International Space Station. [Source: NASA]

Debut Launch of Pallas-1

Galactic Energy launched a Pallas-1 (Zhishenxing-1) from Jiuquan in Gansu at 0200 UTC, or 1000 local time (CST). This was the maiden flight of the rocket, a medium-lift two-stage launch vehicle which successfully delivered a dummy payload to orbit. The rocket's first stage is designed to be reusable, but no recovery was attempted during this debut flight, with the company stating it is taking a phased approach to reusability. The company has plans for a triple-core configuration of the rocket with a much greater payload capacity, like a scaled-down Falcon Heavy, and also intends to develop a heavy-lift launch vehicle called Pallas-2. [Source: Galactic Energy]

UPDATE: Satellite tracking catalogues are not tracking this mission's upper stage or payload, meaning the mission's success is not confirmed. See 3rd September for more details.

Roman Space Telescope Commissioning

Two days after the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA have released its aperture cover, deployed its main antenna, and powered up its Coronagraph Instrument. Its instruments will undergo a series of tests and calibrations while the spacecraft spends the next three months coasting to the Sun-Earth L2 point. [Source: NASA]

Blue Origin Awarded Mars Mission Contract

NASA have awarded Blue Origin up to $700 million USD to build, launch, and operate the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO), a relay satellite for communicating with future Mars missions, beating out rival proposals from Rocket Lab and Lockheed Martin. Blue Origin will base the spacecraft on their Blue Ring satellite bus. It is currently aiming to launch in 2028 and enter service around Mars in 2030. [Source: NASA]

Starcloud CEO Proposes Alpha Centauri Mission

A handful of space and AI entrepeneurs, including Starcloud co-founder Philip Johnston, have founded a new company aiming to launch a probe called Fermi Explorer towards the Alpha Centauri system. The probe will rely on existing technology and aim to get there within 80,000 years, with the philosophical goal of disproving the difficulty of interstellar travel as an explanation for the Fermi paradox, hence the name. It is described as a "minimum viable product" of an insterstellar mission, though it lacks the critical capability to return data back to Earth so it is scientifically worthless and doesn't actually prove its philosophical point. The mission is aiming to launch in 2029 with a budget of $15 million USD. [Source: Fermi Explorer]

Death of Toyohiro Akiyama

Japanese cosmonaut Toyohiro Akiyama passed away today at the age of 84. He spent seven days aboard the Soviet Union's Mir space station in 1990 as part of the Soyuz TM-11 mission, becoming the first Japanese person in space and overall the 238th human to orbit the Earth (239th above 100km, 245th above 50mi). Akiyama was a journalist with Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), who sponsored his trip. This also made him the first journalist to report from space and the second commercially sponsored space traveller. [Source: JAXA]