Lee Jeong-Ho

A specialized space telescope designed to find large asteroids at least 140ｍ across, powerful enough to wipe out an entire city if they collided with Earth, has entered performance testing. Built not for star observation but solely to search for signs of ‘asteroid bombardment', this is the first space telescope of its kind, and it is slated for launch next September.

At the ‘Starbase launch site' in Texas operated by SpaceX, the U.S. private space company led by Elon Musk, one on-site worker fell and died. The Starbase launch site is a comprehensive facility where the largest launch vehicle built by humanity, ‘Starship', is manufactured, assembled, and launched. Because there have been previous accidents at Starbase that injured people, scrutiny of SpaceX safety management is likely to intensify.

The 12th test launch of Starship, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle developed by the U.S. private space company SpaceX, has been postponed. A mechanical anomaly was detected 40 seconds before liftoff, pushing the launch back by one day. Attention is focused on whether this launch will succeed, as Starship is slated to be used as a lunar lander in 2028.

#On a day in the near future, soldiers with a UN peacekeeping force, while on patrol, enter a village in a desert in Afghanistan and encounter a shocking sight. Hundreds of residents had frozen to death. In a desert where daytime temperatures easily exceed 40 degrees Celsius, a mass fatality from freezing had occurred.

The pan-government implementation framework ‘K-Moonshot Project' has been launched to secure world-class scientific capabilities, such as a tenfold acceleration in new drug development and the acquisition of space data center technologies.

The ‘Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope', whose field of view toward space is 100 times wider than that of existing flagship space telescopes currently in use by humanity, will launch in August this year. Using this telescope will, in effect, bring to space the wide-angle shooting function found on smartphone cameras. Because a wide observing field enables many celestial objects to be captured in a short time, there are expectations that it will become an important opportunity to rapidly expand human knowledge of space science.

Innospace, a domestic private space company, has succeeded in a ground firing test of a liquid-methane rocket engine that reduces weight compared with existing ones. Innospace plans to equip its small launch vehicle currently under development, ‘Hanbit-Micro', with the engine.

A European has been included on the astronaut roster for Artemis III, which will go up to Earth orbit next year to conduct a docking test with a lunar lander. This is the first time a European will ride on a spacecraft belonging to the US-led Artemis program for lunar exploration.

Portugal's football star Cristiano Ronaldo (41·Al-Nassr) struggled in the final warm-up match ahead of the 2026 World Cup in North and Central America.

With the initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX, the U.S. private space company led by Elon Musk, confirmed, a total of 2,314,815 shares were allocated to Mirae Asset Securities, which participated as part of the underwriting syndicate.