By Nick Butler Fox News Published May 22, 2025 6:42pm EDT close New space capsule just changed the game for bringing stuff back from orbit A European startup successfully completed the first orbital test flight of its Phoenix 1 re-entry space capsule. NASA revived roll thrusters on the 47-year-old Voyager 1 that were thought to be dead for two decades.According to the space agency, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, located in Southern California, have reactivated a set of thrusters on the spacecraft.The roll thrusters have not worked since 2004 and are long believed to have been out of commission.These thrusters are important because Voyager's main thrusters appear to have some residue forming that could cause them to clog. Scientists estimate those thrusters could fail as early as Fall 2025.NASA ASTRONAUT REVEALS THEY NEARLY FAILED TO DOCK BOEING STARLINER TO INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION Voyager 1 had its thrusters revived after nearly two decades of being thought dead and out of commission. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)The antenna on Earth responsible for sending commands to both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will be offline for several months.Deep Space Station 43, a 230-foot-wide antenna in Australia, will be offline until February 2026 due to needed upgrades.While that antenna is being upgraded, the team at NASA will not be able to communicate with the twin space probes.NASA FINALIZES STRATEGY FOR HUMAN PRESENCE IN SPACE The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The JPL has been working on restoring the thrusters on the Voyager 1. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager and director of the Interplanetary Network at JPL, said these upgrades are important for future Moon missions."These antenna upgrades are important for future crewed lunar landings, and they also increase communications capacity for our science missions in deep space, some of which are building on the discoveries Voyager made," Dodd said in a press release.Each Voyager has a set of primary thrusters that control movement in all directions as well as smaller thrusters for what is called roll control.Using the smaller thrusters allows the Voyager’s antenna to stay aligned with Earth, so the scientists can communicate with it. NASA's deep space antenna in Australia is currently going through upgrades causing any communication with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to go dark until 2026, when the Antenna is reactivated. (STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)While there is a third set of thrusters, which were brought back online in 2018 and 2019, Voyager does not have the capability to perform the roll adjustments needed to keep a connection with Earth.If Earth happened to lose connection with Voyager 1, it would be nearly impossible to restore communication.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPVoyager 1 was launched in 1977 and has traveled nearly 15 billion miles away and is currently exploring interstellar space, which is beyond our Solar System.Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled farther than any other human-made objects. Voyager 1's notable discoveries include finding a thin ring around Jupiter, along with 2 moons orbiting the Solar System's largest planet that had not been seen before. It also discovered five moons orbiting Saturn, along with a previously unknown ring around the gas giant.  Nick Butler is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Do you have any tips? Reach out to Nick.Butler@Fox.com. Nick Butler is a Breaking and Trending News Writer for Fox News Digital.

Starfish Space plans to perform the first commercial satellite docking in orbit with its Otter Pup 2 mission, aiming to connect to an unprepared D-Orbit ION spacecraft using an electrostatic capture mechanism and autonomous navigation software. NASASpaceFlight.com reports: This follows the company's first attempt, which saw the Otter Pup 1 mission unable to dock with its target due to a thruster failure. The Otter Pup 2 spacecraft will be deployed from a quarter plate on the upper stage adapter of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, placing it into a sun synchronous orbit altitude of 510 km inclined 97.4 degrees. The target will be a D-Orbit ION spacecraft which will simulate a client payload, which is not equipped with a traditional docking adapter or capture plate as you might see aboard a space station or other rendezvous target. Instead, Starfish Space's Nautilus capture mechanism will feature a special end effector connected to the end of the capture mechanism. This end effector will enable Otter Pup 2 to dock with the ION through electrostatic adhesion. "An electromagnet will be integrated into the end effector and will be used as a backup option to the electrostatic end effector, to dock with the ION through magnetic attraction," the company notes. The goal is to eventually commission its Otter satellite servicing vehicle to allow for servicing of previously launched satellites. The company's first Otter missions include customers such as NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and Intelsat, with the goal of flying those missions as soon as 2026. [...] Following the thruster issues on the first mission, this flight will feature two ThrustMe thrusters, which use an electric propulsion system based on gridded ion thruster technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA Engineers Revive Long-Dormant Thrusters on Voyager 1, the Farthest Spacecraft From Earth, in a ‘Miracle Save’ In the nick of time, NASA teams addressed clogging issues in the probe’s backup roll thrusters, before the only antenna capable of sending commands to it went offline An artistic rendering of one of the Voyager probes. NASA/JPL-Caltech In a nail-biting mission to secure Voyager 1 before the only antenna that can send commands to the spacecraft goes offline for upgrades, NASA engineers revived thrusters aboard the probe that have been considered dead for more than two decades. “It was such a glorious moment,” Todd Barber, the mission’s propulsion lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), says in a statement. “Team morale was very high that day.” Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn as well as examine some of the planets’ moons. Since then, however, their mission has been repeatedly extended. The pair of probes also investigated Uranus and Neptune, 48 moons in the solar system and achieved what no human-made object had ever done before: They entered interstellar space. Voyager 1 first left our solar system in 2012, and Voyager 2 followed in 2018. Needless to say, the probes have transcended their mission, which was originally intended to last just five years, per Mashable’s Elisha Sauers. The aging Voyagers have hit several hiccups in recent years, and the latest involved Voyager 1’s roll thrusters. Among various propulsion devices, the roll thrusters rotate the probes, keeping the antennas facing toward Earth for communication and the spacecraft pointed at a guide star, which is used for orientation. Each has a primary and backup set of roll thrusters, which NASA engineers toggle between using to avoid clogging their fuel tubes from overuse. In 2004, however, Voyager 1’s primary roll thrusters stopped working after two internal heaters lost power, according to NASA’s statement. The team concluded that the heaters were as good as dead and continued the mission with only the backup roll thrusters. “I think at that time, the team was OK with accepting that the primary roll thrusters didn’t work, because they had a perfectly good backup,” Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL, explains in the statement. “And frankly, they probably didn’t think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years.” After all, “it’s amazing that the two spacecraft are still working,” as former Voyager project scientist Ed Stone toldSpace.com’s Mike Wall in 2017, four decades after the mission’s launch.Now, the backup roll thrusters’ fuel tubes have accumulated enough buildup residue to likely cause serious problems later this year, so the team decided to re-evaluate the situation. Their work was even more time-sensitive given that Australia’s Deep Space Station 43—the only antenna in NASA’s Deep Space Network powerful enough to send commands to Voyager 1 and 2—was about to go offline. Planned upgrades between May 4, 2025, and February of next year are making it unusable, with only brief windows of operation in August and December. Without the antenna, the team can’t send instructions to either probe. And if the backup roll thruster were to become totally clogged while the antenna is offline, it might be impossible for engineers to fix the issue. The team suggested the thrusters’ heaters had stopped working because their circuits had unexpectedly flipped a switch back in 2004. If engineers could get the probe to flip the switch back, that might fix the problem. Testing out this solution, however, was risky, because it first required turning the primary thrusters on, then flipping the switch and restarting the heaters. With the long-dormant thrusters operating, they were at risk of automatically firing if Voyager 1 moved too far from its guiding star. If this happened while the heaters were still off, it could result in an explosion. In other words, the engineers needed to keep the star tracker pointed as closely as possible to the guiding star while working. As if that wasn’t dramatic enough, it currently takes around 23 hours for scientists’ command to reach Voyager 1, and then another 23 hours for the probe’s response to return to Earth. The team thus had to wait around two days to see if their approach had worked. If it hadn’t, they wouldn’t receive that message until 23 hours after their command might have already caused serious damage. Fortunately, after the team sent their command in March, Voyager 1 reported a strong rise in the thruster heaters’ temperatures—a sign of success. “These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. It’s just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause, and it was fixable,” Barber says in the statement. “It was yet another miracle save for Voyager.” This isn’t the first time a team has had to scramble to keep a Voyager spacecraft alive. Given the mission’s unexpected longevity, NASA scientists and engineers must continuously mitigate age-related maintenance problems on the probes, per Space.com’s Samantha Mathewson. Last fall, for instance, engineers briefly lost touch with Voyager 1 when it turned off its primary radio transmitter to save power. Instead, the probe reconnected with NASA using a backup transmitter that hadn’t been used in more than four decades. Voyager 1 also spent months sending incomprehensible data back to Earth, until NASA teams figured out a fix. Voyager 2 is not immune from these issues—it also dropped communication with NASA for some time in 2023. Teams have begun shutting off certain instruments on the probes to preserve power. By doing so, NASA suggests the two spacecraft will be able to operate with at least one instrument into the next decade. Even once they lose power and the ability to communicate with scientists back on Earth, however, the probes will continue to silently travel away from our planet. “In the absence of sun or wind or anything that’s going to wear them down, they could easily outlast us—our entire civilization, outlast our planet,” Jim Bell, an Arizona State University planetary scientist and author of the book, The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission, told Scientific American’s Clara Moskowitz in 2015. “The Earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun and the Voyagers could still be out there.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

NASA's Voyager 1, the furthest spacecraft from Earth, simply refuses to die.In a recent update, the space agency revealed that the little probe that could has once again sputtered back to life thanks to some remote magic done on its thrusters from 15 billion miles away.Launched nearly 50 years ago, just after its twin craft Voyager 2, the probe has been plummeting through interstellar space for decades at speeds of more than 38,000 miles per hour. Along with discovering new moons and rings on Saturn and Jupiter, Voyager 1 has also been slowly going mad and dying — but NASA is not letting it go down without a fight.The spacecraft's mission team decided to see if they could fix its thrusters, which have been "deemed unusable" since 2004 and have been relatively dormant ever since.Notably, the craft does have a second pair of thrusters that were revived in 2018 and 2019, but they're unable to induce the roll motion that "rotates [Voyager 1's] antenna like a vinyl record to keep each Voyager pointed at a guide star it uses to orient itself," per NASA.When those primary roll thrusters first began to peter out, it wasn't seen as the end of the world."I think at that time, the team was OK with accepting that the primary roll thrusters didn’t work, because they had a perfectly good backup," explained Kareem Badaruddin, the Voyager mission manager at NASA, in the agency's update. "And, frankly, they probably didn't think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years."As the years went by and it became clear that the thrusters could be fixed, NASA began to investigate the issue and found that those primary thrusters could be fired with the help of some very sensitive instructional programming from Earth.It took nearly a full day for NASA to send its instructions to the probe, so the mission team was mostly left in the dark, so to speak, trying to figure out whether it had worked.Despite the communication blackout, the Earth-bound Voyager team saw within 20 minutes that the probe's thruster temperature had risen just enough to have been successful — an indication that the gambit paid off."It was such a glorious moment," enthused Voyager propulsion lead Todd Barber. "Team morale was very high that day.""These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion," he continued. "It’s just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause and it was fixable.""It was," Barber said, "yet another miracle save for Voyager."More on unlikely space: Scientists Just Moved Up the Death Date of the UniverseShare This Article